← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin Supply Shock Intensifies As Banks Prepare To Sue The U.S. Gov Over Crypto!
00:55:29
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- [00:02]
A
Bitcoin has seen 20 million coins mined. Only 1 million to go. And apparently that's going to take 7,493 more years to be done. Yes, the bitcoin supply exceptionally limited and only going to become more so with times. Meanwhile, it turns out that banks don't really like crypto and not only are they jabbering off at the mouth and complaining about the Clarity act, but actually willing to take some legal action against the industry. We're going to talk about all of that and more today of course with Andrew and tman, but more importantly, someone we like more, Alex Miller. You guys don't want to miss it. Let's go.
- [00:44]
B
Let's do.
- [00:59]
A
Good morning everybody and welcome to the show. I hope that you've had an absolutely wonderful day. I went down to Miami for what was supposed to be a three hour trip yesterday to shoot a podcast with Hyder from OkX. Flight delayed midnight arrival. Feeling good, Feeling very good this morning. And I. It'll probably, you'll probably notice it because I've chosen a stranger flavor of Lacroix in my tiredness. Say, I've got lemon cello. Have you guys ever smelled industrial floor cleaner? That's what I'm drinking. That's what I'm drinking. It tastes just like it. It's disgusting. Lacroix. I'm sorry. We're gonna need a new sponsor. Good morning, gentlemen.
- [01:37]
C
I want to know when you've tasted industrial floor cleaner. I want to know how you're making that comparison.
- [01:42]
A
You know, Andrew, Andrew, the first step in recovery is admitting your problem. I've been going to industrial floor cleaner AA for the last decade.
- [01:55]
C
Never ran.
- [01:56]
A
This is my meeting. Gets weird around here, guys. Bitcoin looking pretty decent today. Where are we looking at? We got bitcoin at almost 71,000American dollars. Altcoins not looking terrible. Decent market and all of this. Alex, kind of as you pointed out right before we went on in context of a very calm and easy to understand market and world. Right. I mean oil trade trading, as it should. No, I mean what's going on here, man?
- [02:22]
D
I, I would say I just, I'm amused by Bitcoin being the lower volatility asset in the market for once. That's a, that's a nice change in things. I don't know, man. Like the. I, you know, I think for months now we've been in a place where the market just has absolutely no idea how to price things. Right. My favorite thing is like, you know, you look at like the AI companies and Things and they make one like tweet or something and it tanks major trillion dollar company stocks by 10%. Because even though those companies are actually very well insulated from AI and things and well set up, nobody, nobody knows what things are going to look like in six or 12 months. And so it just is really undermining the idea of the efficient markets hypothesis right now I think.
- [03:07]
A
Yeah, I think, I think we all agree on that. When you see oil go for 120 to the 80s in a matter of hours, pretty clear that markets aren't functionally functioning as you would have intended. I mean we saw it in silver only a few weeks ago as well. Right? I mean kind of this massive blow off top and what, 47% retrace in silver in a week and a half.
- [03:31]
D
Where is silver now? Like I know it went up, I know it went down.
- [03:34]
B
I actually bucks this morning.
- [03:37]
A
That's pretty good.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, it's bounced back since it's low. I think it's lows in the 60s or maybe low 70s.
- [03:44]
A
Yeah. And now I see all the crypto traders are like apparently professional oil traders. Amazing.
- [03:50]
D
I mean just like all the VCs are professional or you know, geopolitical risk analysts too. So.
- [03:56]
A
Oh, I, I literally don't even have an opinion on the war until I watch the OLED podcast. I don't know what to think until Chamath tells me or Jason. But yeah, okay, so going back to the title here we have bitcoin obviously and this is, you know, you've been building on bitcoin for a long time, Alex. No surprises here, but I think it's a pretty big milestone that bitcoin's total supply has now reached 20 million. Let's take another 114 years. I was hyperbolic in the intro before the final 1 million bitcoin are fully mined. Another kind of big day was yesterday. Sailor made his 101st Bitcoin buy. So he got over the century mark. A lot of people cheering for that and was able to buy 1.2 billion. I mean Alex, you're here building on bitcoin constantly. Do we by the way, do you still have to answer questions on what happens to Bitcoin in 114 years when there's no mining fees?
- [04:46]
D
Yes, but actually we kind of have a problem a lot longer before that where you know what. So we'll have another having obviously in 2028, 2032. By the time you get to even 2032, you're dropping down below 1:1 BTC per block as emissions. And so we do actually that really is a longer term problem that we're going to face and have to do. And you know, some people, I think their plan is basically, well, if the price just keeps going up, that's good. But at some point we are going to have to start transitioning into block fees, sorry, transaction fees instead of just block rewards or you know, I think option number two is that a bunch of big companies like BlackRock and Coinbase, just out of the goodness of their heart will start running miners competitively since they make enough money by people using Bitcoin on their things that they want to make sure the network doesn't go away. And so I, I personally look very forward to the day where Bitcoin is simply mined by like five giant corporations and nobody else.
- [05:52]
A
That's sarcasm.
- [05:54]
D
Yes, a little bit.
- [05:56]
A
But like you're building on Bitcoin, right? These are more than just like existential threats or ideas to you, right? I mean this is so, I mean,
- [06:05]
D
but that's the reason I think that, that we do it is that it's the, the more, the more value, the more systems. You know, in the case I work on stacks where we're a layer two for Bitcoin and the goal is about making it programmable and cheaper and easier to use for people. But the whole idea there is that instead of people trading bit on, you know, through derivative instruments, whether that's like an ETF or something else, where the volume and the transactions happening off the network and therefore no values accruing directly to Bitcoin for it, we want those things happening on top of Bitcoin so that the network has that sustainability and like there's actually enough transaction volume and action going on on it that it is sustainable for the long term.
- [06:45]
A
Yeah, I mean Tillman, you've been, you've been at this for a while.
- [06:48]
B
Yeah, I have some probably, you know, controversial opinions here. Maybe. I, I don't necessarily think that the proof of work network that Bitcoin used to get to this point in time is needed maybe going forward as badly as other people do. I, I think the, the most valuable contribution that proof of work has shown us is the fair and equitable distribution of, on the supply curve like the inflation rate is true. It's true. Based upon real world dynamics, scarcity of electricity, real world application of power, all of those things that we hold as our mantras as it pertains to Bitcoin's true value going forward. Nothing can change that. In my opinion. The bitcoin that have been created have been done so no different than a silver bar being mined. It took exceptional work to get that product to a reality, to a place where everyone can identify it and use it as, as its primary, you know, mode of transport. I think we're there. I think, you know, the, the fact that there's so little left to be mined really should show us that the future, of course, quote, mining Bitcoin to me is really getting real world capital applied to the purchase of Bitcoin through Treasury applications and through corporate balance sheets as a savings tool that provides a floor no different than, you know, a large group of miners would as it pertains to buying pressure. And whether it's on that chain or whether it's off that chain. I think the scarcity that Bitcoin provides will always hold its place as an incredible indicator of global inflation. And I think that's what ultimately you're buying. At the end of the day, you're buying a very volatile asset that is the best indicator to where we stand from a macro fiat perspective. And it can't be manipulated like a lot of the other currencies or a lot of the other, you know, speculative, you know, risk on assets can be like silver, for example, and, and oil. Both those commodities are highly manipulated. If you don'. Believe me, just go look at the court cases about it. And you know, it's one of those things where Bitcoin has an incredible resistance to that manipulation in the fact that it does have a real settlement layer apart from the paper. I don't see that lasting very long. Forgive me, but I think the Wall street guys don't want that accountability and they probably are going to, you know, create a world where the paper drives the, the product, not, not vice versa.
- [09:37]
D
But
- [09:39]
A
Andrew, any hot takes on, on mining?
- [09:43]
C
No, that's not really mining.
- [09:45]
A
Mining and all the things you're deeply passionate about. Or should I bring up Larry Vibe?
- [09:52]
C
I what I'm passionate about is I do find it funny slash interesting. More funny than anything else. You, the hyperbolicness of, of, you know, headlines slash markets slash panic. It's, it's all been done before. You know, we're about 2.4% from another new all time high on the S P 500. You know, and while at the same time the world's coming to an end about every other day in, in the world of media, I find that in
- [10:29]
A
the actual world, yeah, I mean, I,
- [10:31]
C
I find it all comical and, and again, the way that, that I had this thought the Other day, and I came this close to sharing it on Twitter. But I'm like, this. Somehow this take will end up being a terrible take at some point in the future, because on a long enough timeline, we're all right. On a long enough timeline, we're all wrong about something. And I just thought to myself, you know, the idea of, you know, a, A bear market, the way that markets now work with, generally speaking, this huge, huge, huge swath of investors who are dyed in the wool, anytime anything they own goes down, they just buy more of it. I mean, that is literally the way that we watch markets work. Daily, weekly, monthly. Like, that's how it works right now. And so I think to myself, how are we gonna have. What is it going to take? What is it literally going to take in traditional markets to be down 20 to 25%? I don't know anymore. Like, I, I mean, we're at war with Iran and we go down.
- [11:42]
D
Yeah, we're not at war.
- [11:43]
A
Not a war in operation.
- [11:47]
B
Yeah.
- [11:49]
A
Accomplished on the air.
- [11:51]
C
We didn't know that and we didn't think that, and we weren't sure. Like, five days ago, right? Five days ago, we're at war with Iran. Those are all the headlines. And we moved down, like, this much. I don't know. Can you see it? So markets are a very, very, very interesting psychological playing field. And the panic process has proved to be wrong now for a very, very long time. A very long time.
- [12:26]
A
Well, I mean, you talk about them propping up markets, right? I don't know if you guys saw this, but the government's, like, casually just acting as the market maker in its own $27 trillion debt market here, Dustin. U.S. treasury projected to buy back 15 billion of their own debt today. Largest treasury buyback in history. That's generally a sign of a very healthy bond market, I think.
- [12:49]
C
You know, again, that's a headline that for somebody like Zero Hedge, he would grab that headline and be like, see something structurally broken, blah, blah, blah. There's a recession or a downturn, something bad is going to happen. And nothing bad ever happened happens. Like, I mean, that, that, that is, that. That headline is emblematic of what I just said, is that, you know, we, we, we can get 2, 3, 4, I mean, heaven forbid, 5% down in, you know, the S and P, but it's going to be gobbled up by boomers shoveling more money into the markets like, like every time. Every single time. I mean, well, there's.
- [13:35]
B
I saw an article that said there was over $8 trillion of capital sitting in. I mean, that's kind of to your point.
- [13:42]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's. That speaks to one, the wealth. Wealth effect. Two, the, the ability for boomers to extract capital from current assets. Right. So you extract capital with, you know, securities based lending, put it in your money market account. It's been sitting there at, you know, 4, 5, 3% for a couple of years. And that in and of itself grows in a meaningful way. And so you have almost infinite dry powder. And so you just, you just shoveling money into your ETFs. Oh, look, it's down 4%. Hey, Barbara, should we buy more?
- [14:24]
A
Yeah, go ahead.
- [14:25]
C
Click.
- [14:27]
A
That's the name of the woman you kept in your basement that we know. It's Barbara. Alex. You haven't been privy to it, but there's a lot of noises that come from Alex. Andrew's basement.
- [14:36]
D
Okay, good. That's, that's not terrifying. Disturbing.
- [14:41]
A
We finally found out her name after all.
- [14:43]
C
Almost done. Almost finished over here. Almost finished.
- [14:48]
A
Sorry for Barbara then. All right, the next sort of story is the state of legislation, right? So market structure, state of place, state of crypto. Apparently we're getting closer. I'm not buying it. I mean, Alex, are you even tracking this at this point or is it completely like on your. What, what is.
- [15:09]
D
I'm just, I'm just waiting for a message in, in the, in the ba. Group chat for when there's substantial movement forward on it. I mean, I think there's like, there's still a lot of people who want to see it happen. There's a lot of people who I think are being too purist or their business models are dependent on certain things being included that aren't included right now. And some of those people are very heavyweight. And so I think it's not.
- [15:31]
A
You can name names here. It's okay.
- [15:34]
D
Coinbase. Yeah. But I mean, you know, the other problem is though, like, just Congress in general can't really move anything right now. Also, apparently Trump's now saying he won't sign any bills until. Yeah, thank you. The thing I'm not clear about is if he's going to actively veto bills or if he's just going to stick them in a pocket and let him pass.
- [16:01]
A
After you stick him in a pocket, I think you have like two weeks and then they become law. So do something. If Congress or the President does have to make a decision, I will say
- [16:11]
D
it would be a very Trump thing to like, make a big deal about not signing any laws and then do it in a way that it just means everything becomes a law. But maybe he's planning to veto. I don't know. It's right.
- [16:24]
A
But it is yet another sort of to your point obstacle potentially for all of this getting done because we're on the clock with midterms. I mean, that's just a fact.
- [16:31]
D
Look, I know, you know, I know it's a big deal to us. Like again, I run a company where we like literally did the only SEC approved or qualified reggae offering for tokens that works. So like, trust me, I know regulatory issues and where clarity had helped. But like, it's just not that big a deal right now in the grand scheme of things to like the country as a whole. All the more so because, you know, it's not like anyone's coming out and dropping like serious new projects for the most part right now. Right. Like, we're very much in a pulled back market right now. No one knows when it's gonna turn out. I mean, you know, because you can go gamble elsewhere too right now. So like, it's just not, I think, that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I think there are plenty of people in Congress who still want to see it get done. I think a lot of the folks on both ag and financial services that started working this in the first place are still very serious about it and want to see it happen. But like, again, we can't even like pass the fundamental appropriations bills. And so this is just not going to be top of the list for people to blow all their political capital on or be able to get enough attention on, I think to fully move it. Especially when you have, you know, real tensions and fight over it on both sides.
- [17:44]
B
I just see the whole stage building to the Crescendo event, quite honestly. It's like more doom and gloom, more uncertainty, more fud, more fear, more. Everything that forces selling is, you know, every card's been played over the last couple of months and I just think there's going to be a time where it ends and I think there's. Whether that's strategic or whether it's accidental or whether it's coincidental, I don't know. I have my suspicions, but I think that there's a play that's literally being, you know, we're watching on center stage right now and the, the entire global markets are going to respond, you know, to what's going to be the Crescendo event. And so we're just all kind of waiting on pins and needles for that you know, just like a good audience would and we don't know what the outcome's going to be, but it's a play. They have so many levers, they have so many pulleys and know the, the, this notion that the world uses the US dollar because it's the best is, is, it's not, it's, it's by force. And guess what? We still have the force. So I don't see the rules changing like he who has the gold makes the rules. Well, you know, he who has the guns makes the rules really. And so as you look at kind of the shifts that are taking place, I don't see any major stance being taken by China or Russia against going on. I see them being short term problems as I guess the, the punchline. And so, you know, I don't know how short term it is. I don't know what that looks like. But I do hear the printing presses starting to come on and you know, 15 trillion dollar buyback, you know, that's, that's just all the signs that I'm looking for as it pertains to when we could find the bottom and start to, you know, really see some action from here. And if you look at the silver market, if you look at the gold market, if you look at the oil market, if you look at the, look at, if you look at all the markets basically that, you know, the ones that have been the most boring markets to watch over the last 30 years are now, besides oil, are now just going crazy, right? Well, wait until Bitcoin goes crazy. And that's the, that's the age old, you know, problem with humans is like we're impatient people. But the best strategy with an asset that isn't going to zero or you believe is not going to zero is just to keep dcaing into it and wait, wait until you don't have to be patient anymore and then be prudent and smart about taking profits off the table so that you can buy cheaper at the pullback. Managing a healthy cash position ratio is, is more important now than ever and it doesn't pay dividends to you if you start now. You have to start prior to the pull down and, and a lot of people didn't. And that's just the facts. And so I think, you know, as our market matures, as our, you know, community matures, as Wall street continues to kind of drive the price through ETF inflows, all of those things are going to teach everyone those hard lessons which is like, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket and that includes pricing zones like you know, if you have your concentrated risk above a hundred thousand right now, well, good luck. I don't know when it's going to go back up, but you may be waiting a while, you may be waiting a week. It does. But the psychological effects of the waiting is what, what we're dealing with in Twitter and everything else.
- [21:26]
C
Right.
- [21:26]
A
It does feel like to your point though that something shifted as far as the selling pressure. Everybody got a conspiracy theory whether it was like the likely non existent jane street 10am sell off mechanic or whether it was just that all these kind of whale wallets that wanted to sell finally exhausted. You can look at on chain data or even just anecdotally at price action and see that sellers got exhausted in the 60s.
- [21:53]
D
Right.
- [21:54]
A
And so I think that's the case. I mean Alex, you obviously track all this to some degree just because you are looking at the actual blockchain and things like that. Does that align with kind of what you're thinking? And I'm not asking price predictions. It just feels like there's no huge sellers in the market.
- [22:11]
D
Yeah, exactly. I think the, I mean I will definitely agree with Tim and Lee. Don't try and you know, no one should try and time the market on it. You have less information than people who have far, far bigger bags and far, far more experience than this. So like DCing's really the only way to go on things. But yeah, I think you keep finding resistance to the bottom in the mid-60s and to the top in the low to mid-70s on it. And I think, you know, at some point something may happen that breaks it out one way or the other. I think certainly I hope it breaks it out to the top, not the bottom on it. But yeah, no, I think it's pretty clear that like I think you have a lot of folks who are both trying to put liquidity in the market and like make some money as it bounces back and forth. Right. Like volatility in a range like that is really, really good for market makers and directional firms who just want to pick up pennies for a while. So I think you're seeing a lot of that there. The biggest risk as always I think is some kind of, I won't even call it a black swan event because black swan implies like a giant thing, but someone doing some kind of weird over leveraged trade in a foreign country with bitcoin on one side and I don't know, oil or stock indices on the Other and getting blown out and liquidated for $10 billion and that hitting the market and then cascading and hitting a bunch of more. Because I think, you know, one thing I think we've certainly seen is that the market's had a really hard time recovering from those as of late. Right. Like, it's the, over the last six months to a year, every time we hit one of those, it legs down and it doesn't really come back up. Right. It'll, it'll come back up some, but it kind of hits a new low level. And I think, again, that shows that, like, there's not huge movers on either side of the market right now. There's a lot of people keeping it in a 5 to 10% range, but there's no one pushing big moves on one way or the other, except for when it happens unintentionally.
- [24:11]
A
Except for Sailor FCCC for like 1.2 billion.
- [24:13]
B
Yeah.
- [24:14]
D
But even there, he's not moving the market a lot. Right. His entire, you know, you don't buy a billion dollars. You're not like that. And you're not doing buys that move the market. You're doing very sophisticated, much smaller acquisitions that do not move the market.
- [24:27]
A
That'd be much cooler if he would just, like, market by 1.2 billion.
- [24:30]
D
Yeah, that would be great.
- [24:31]
A
On Bitstamp at like, Sunday at noon. Tell us all Bitcoin's, like 94,000. Like, what are we doing here?
- [24:40]
D
Yeah, Coinbase. Can you, can you bump the limits on my account a little bit? I'm only at $100,000 right now that I'm allowed to trade
- [24:49]
B
against what time he does it. And then he could use that as another hedging tool. Mean, it's, I, I, I totally agree with you, Alex. I think that the market is waiting for direction. The big players, the people who are, are placing. I, I, I think a lot of folks don't understand that. You know, all of us, we were in Bitcoin early enough to where we count our holdings as a percentage of our net worth. And, you know, we are Hodlers. Right. And the people who are getting in now have a completely different mindset. They're getting in for exposure. They're getting in to a level of exposure that they are predetermined to get to. 3%, 5%, 7%, whatever it is. And so they're going to continue to buy on all the dips until they get to that number. They're not doing it emotionally like we all did in the beginning, where we Were like, bitcoin's going to change the world. We're buying all that we can. It's not like that for them. They're very unemotional about these purchases and it's, it's very systematic and it's very routine based and it's, it's not what, you know, the retail market is, it's complete opposite of that. And so they don't, when bitcoin crashes by 10,000, they don't just go, well throw it all in there now. The same allocation they were going to put in the 60s, now they just put in the 50s. They just want exposure to the time curve. And so, you know, all of those dollars being placed systematically through ETF exposure, through spot exposure, whatever it may be, it is a rising tide. And to Andrew's point earlier, I just want to point out, like it's hard for perspective for us to see, you know, kind of the force for the tree sometimes. If you told me three years ago, Bitcoin's going to go up to 126, it's going to crash back down to 65 on. And we're going to be in wars, we're going to all the bad things that are in the headlines right now and we're going to find a floor at 60. I'd be going, that's the greatest story you've ever told. Like, thank you. I'm gonna, that's my nursery rhyme. I'm going to bed now and having sweet dreams. Like that sounds incredible. And yet here we are and we're going, it's dead. Like, what, what, what? Like we've gone down from, to 3,500, we've gone down to 300, we've gone down to $80.
- [27:13]
A
Frequency bias is a. And we, we've talked about it a million times. I mean, how many times have we heard already in the last few months that this is the worst bear market ever? It's is the worst it's ever been. And by the way, I guess the crypto fear and green index somewhat confirms that. But like, give me a break, man. Voyager Block by Celsius ftx. Back to back to back Luna. Like are we going to literally get legislated out of existence now? It's like price is down, but we don't know why. But it hurts.
- [27:41]
D
Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, I've never. Humans in general have the issue of recency bias, especially on pricing of financial assets. But with crypto, it's, I mean it's absolutely insane. Right? Literally you will, you will go, you know, you'll move 10% in one direction, three days, two days, 24 hours later, you'll move 5% in the other, and people forget the 10% move from the 24 hours. It's absolutely crazy. But, like, I think what you're talking about on the sentiment side is just a larger. Is just a microcosm of the larger issue I was talking about before, where it's not just that the market doesn't know how to price things, that nobody knows what the fuck is going on, and just feels so unstable and unsure on things. And that's why, you know, if you rewind three or six months even, you'll remember we were all referring to this. At least five. I don't know, a lot of people were as, like, the most glum bull market that people had ever seen, right? Where it was like, it kept going up, but, like, nobody was excited about it, nobody felt good about it. Obviously, a lot of that was very, like, institutional demand buying or people, you know, buying through assets, through vehicles like the ETFs. So it's kind of, you know, not the same. And especially if you're, like, sitting. Yeah, that. That was definitely part of it.
- [28:56]
B
The.
- [28:57]
D
Yeah, I mean, altcoins have been in decline since December of 2024. Basically, it's just 2021. Well, yeah, we had. We had a good run for a little bit in there in, like, in late.
- [29:09]
B
Depends on which ones you have.
- [29:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, seven of them did.
- [29:13]
D
But again, like, this is just.
- [29:15]
B
It's.
- [29:15]
D
It just reflects what's going on everywhere else. You know, one of my. I was talking to people about it, you guys. Someone brought up the S and P earlier. We've all. Again, I'll just say we all. I'll do a group thing. Since, like, mid 2023, at least, we've been looking at the fact, you know, basically once printing stopped and pulled back and rates started going up, everyone's like, all right, a correction is coming at some point. Right. If you got short on the S and P in the fall of 2023. Right. The point at which we all knew a correction is coming at some point, you have missed out 70, 80%, maybe increases in the S&P in two years. That's insane in normal times. But again, it's the same problem in the traditional market where on one hand you've had all this appreciation, you've had this incredible bull market, but everyone is, like, fucking on edge, just waiting for the bottom to fall out. And, you know, again, that you see with Consumer spending, right? Consumer spending still through the roof. Now that's also very skewed where like 50% of that spending is coming from like the top 10%. But the point is like, yeah, it's, I don't know. We called it back during Biden, we called it the vibe session, right? Where it's just like the numbers are there but everyone's like freaked and bummed the fuck out. And I think it all just kind of goes back to. At the end of the day people just want it to be like 2019 again and pre covered and like, you know, yeah, we're not going back.
- [30:40]
B
If I was going to pick a year, it wouldn't be 19, but, but I agree with what you're saying. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a hard, it's a hard market to, to exist in. There's you, you get punished for the negative more than you get rewarded for the positive. But I do think I, you know, I would love Yalls opinion about this, but every cycle like 2017, I was saying this one's about utility. Finally the utility tokens are going to start shining. I truly think what we're experiencing right now is a true utility renaissance in the crypto space. I don't think you're going to ever have the altcoin surges that we saw in the past unless adoption is causing it. Real world value is being injected. Depth of liquidity is present, transactional throughput is present. All the things that we kind of, we abandoned during the hype of crypto mania now are kind of, I think, coming back to roost and we're looking at projects in a different way and it's, it's, it's going to change everything. And how many times did we say through every cycle, man, the top 10 list looks a lot different. Man, the top 100 list looks a lot different. Man, the top, like the crypto top 50 list has been just a game of musical chairs because all of it's been vaporware. Not all of it, but most of it's been vaporware. If you now are looking at the projects that are coming to, to, to fruition, they're being handled by some of the largest tradfi firms like that. We, we've seen the shift. You remember when Napster, limewire and the 500 other torrent services existed when we were in, when I was in college, we, I'd leave my dorm and I'd leave my, my dorm fiber line just running 24 7, downloading movies and stuff like that. If you think about that, all those companies got extinct by real world legislation, real world adoption rules, legal like the law. And what, who took their place? Amazon, Apple, all the big companies. That's exactly what we're seeing in our space right now. It's like the technology is too good for them to pass up and they're going to, to literally publicly scrutinize it until the day they have their entire system set up and they can sell it themselves. And that's, I think we're in that transition period right, right now as we speak.
- [33:13]
A
Andrew, I'm old enough to remember when you talked.
- [33:20]
C
I, I'm just, it's funny to me that we find ourselves in like Alex was just talking about, you know, everybody was concerned that there was going to be a drawdown. There's, there's, there's going to be an event, there's going to be a move to the downside and, and talking about it since 23. So coming from a wealth management background, you know, and I, and I still engage in that content. I still listen to guys like, you know, Josh Brown and it's, it's, you know, the guys that are smart in the space, they are, they're knowledgeable about the goings on of daily, daily conversations. Right. And, and often the, you know, blood cells. Right. So negativity in media sells. But on a day to day basis what the smartest guys in the business are telling their clients is most of it is not going to matter. Asset prices are going to go up and if you, you think you're smarter than that, those two sentences, good, go for it, go work with somebody else because it's not going to work here. This is how we do things. Keep allocating money into, in assets that you believe in. And that's why since 23 nothing meaningful has happened. That's why again, even in the bitcoin space, you know, we've, we've effectively capped out at 50 down when before it'd be 80 to 85 because we have a new investor class in the bitcoin space that every time their IBIT shares are down they just put more money into it. It same thing with their bitwise shares. They just put more money into it and a case could be made. And you know, I've said this several times on this show and it probably makes the show somewhat boring. The ETFs, they, they are the showrunners with bitcoin right now and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. When you see meaningful inflows generally speaking, the price goes higher. When you see meaningful outflows, generally speaking, the price goes lower. And so you know, that may be boring, but over time, when bitcoin gets meaningful outflows quarter by quarter by quarter by quarter and then we're back at a hundred and sixteen thousand. That's not boring. Ride may be boring, the ride may be not as fun as it used to be, but the price appreciation is, is not boring. And, and by the way, you know, there was a, there was a meme slash movement maybe a couple years ago. Maybe it was during COVID or whatever. It's. It was the two online. Right? I'm too online, right. I, I think that's become the norm almost with everybody's lives, especially people associated or plugged into the markets like we are, we are so online all the time that we see and hear everything. Everything. And so that, that intentionally or unintentionally, that moves our brains and our thought processes and our commentary into a space where again, we're expecting something bad to happen. Because most of what we hear or see is something bad is about to happen. I promise. Prepare yourself. And then again, most of the time,
- [37:12]
B
well, the yen carry trade's about to fall. Remember, the hammer is about to fall at anything there.
- [37:17]
A
Five minutes of downside.
- [37:19]
B
Well, something hit me as you were talking, Andrew. If you think about it, some of the best stories I've read are like when Jeff Bezos's Amazon stock was as low as it was at the, the very bottom and he was going like, network traffic's up. All of, all my metrics are rising and yet my price is at the worst it's ever been. What did he do? He bought a bunch of shares, right? So, you know, if that's the indicator of whether people are buying into the fear at a big money or corporate level. I just asked Grok, while we're on this, you know, how many buybacks are there significant buybacks going on right now? Now exceptional buybacks are happening right now. Salesforce, Walmart, Pepsi, Cheyenne Energy, Broadcom, Omnicom, General Motors, Travelers, Fair, Isaac, United there. I mean, just the list goes on and on. Above, way above normal. So what does it tell you? Well, it tells you that in those circumstances where prices are moving directionally against all of your metrics, what should you be doing? You should be buying back your own stock. Well, people don't have publicly traded companies to buy their own stock back. Bitcoin, is that for us? If you're buying bitcoin at those prices, you're doing exactly what I just said all those big boys are doing. They're buying equity at cheap prices so that they can experience the potential upside of when it goes.
- [38:50]
A
Gary on my podcast months ago, and he, you know, the whole premise was bitcoin as a business, and he kind of broke down that. That entire mentality. Alex, I know you got to go in a couple minutes, but can you just give us the TLDR right now on what you're building and actually working on? Because we had this massive moment there where the building on bitcoin thing was the. The hugest narrative that we had. Obviously, everybody was kind of launching things. And as with everything in crypto, you know, things or in the world, I should say, we have the memories of goldfish, so people forget that it's happening.
- [39:22]
D
Yeah, well, the. The also, anytime something gets hot in crypto, right, a bunch of people who just want to glom onto the side will pour in and do it. So I'm very proud to say that we're not dead, which, honestly, in this market is a. Is a real accomplishment. I think we'll have some stuff coming out very soon, but I'll choose. What I'll say is, like, I think the thing that's very clear is we were talking, Tim Tillman was talking about, like, product market fits, or, you know, what people do. I'll call it product market fit. And there's two things, I think, in all of crypto that have found product market fit. And this is the reason that you do see so many sites, right, Is that most people are just chasing things start. But there's two things that. One is holding bitcoin and, you know, hoping. Hoping it goes up. Right. And the second one is stablecoins, which of course just ties back to that whole thing, why the banks don't like it. Right. Those are. Those are really the only two things, I guess, outside of like generic gambling and speculation. But that's pretty undifferentiated on, I think, as bitcoin embeds more and more like the third thing that it's going to be and that, you know, everyone's been talking about for a while, but hasn't really found a particularly good way to do is yield on the bitcoin. Right. And especially in a way that is. That is safe, you know, protects the. The underlying asset without the risk of losing it. And so I think ultimately, you know, our goal with stacks is building, you know, the bitcoin economy, as we call it. Right. Like, ultimately, I'm. I'm A big free marketer. I'm a big like global trade person. I want everyone having every entrepreneur in the world to have access to like the entire market on things. And so the way you get there obviously though is you need a lot of people in it. And so I think the path through that is now, now that we've solved like the holding problem, mostly solved, we could still make it more user friendly now that stablecoins are out there. I think the third thing is how do we provide people like the ability to grow, to stack their sats, to grow their base for it. So that's where a lot of our attention is right now. And I'll come back on in a month or two and share a lot more on that.
- [41:12]
A
Awesome man. Can't wait. Thank you Alex. Everybody. Give Alex a follow and have a wonderful, have a wonderful afternoon and hopefully, you know, we won't have any more wars to talk about or huge news stories to be fearful tomorrow.
- [41:27]
D
I hope you didn't just jinx it. That's all. I'll say so. Thanks very much guys. Good to see you, Alex.
- [41:32]
A
I can't believe I jinxed that. That was terrible. All right, well our heads just got really big.
- [41:37]
D
Look at it.
- [41:39]
A
I did that. I'm drunk with power to be honest with you guys. This is disgusting. I'm 90% of the way there anyways. So listen, we always do the whole thing but we have a different thing which is that we're doing something I've never done before, which is a webinar today at 12:15pm Eastern Standard Time. And so instead of doing it here, you guys can literally go sign up. It's down in the description. Hey, are you guys gonna be on this with me or am I just gonna be there? Like.
- [42:18]
C
Anybody joining me?
- [42:20]
B
Well, yes, 500 pre registered people so far. So.
- [42:25]
A
Yeah, no, but I mean like talking.
- [42:27]
B
Yeah, of course. Yeah, we're gonna be there the whole time. We're gonna. It's gonna be a deep dive. You know, if, if you're really interested in learning more and not doing it in a cursory or you know, a 50000 foot level, this is the call for you.
- [42:42]
A
This.
- [42:42]
B
We're going to dig into the algos each one and the settings and go through all the triggers and the trades and you know, kind of really, really pull back the, the curtain on your trade specifically.
- [42:56]
C
I mean listen, you, you find out in a bear market if works, I mean that, that that's the best way to look at it, right? Like if you think You've got a leg up and you've got a product or you've got a system or whatever it happens to be. You're going to find out if that's worth anything in a bear market because it's going to strip it down to bare bones. And so you're going to talk about the fact that in a bear market you're able to make decisions based on the strategies that you've set up with us, that you wouldn't have made those same decisions. You just wouldn't have. And that bears itself out in a bear market in a way that affects performance in a meaningful way.
- [43:40]
B
Well, there's a psychological thing that you just touched on that we've been very cognizant of as we've built the software, which is I would rather have 85% of the upside and 15% of the downside than vice versa. And so a lot of people, even though they'll say that their actions aren't proving that right. And so what does it mean? It means that you have to be counter intuitive. You have to move against the markets, you have to buy when there's blood in the streets and during bear markets and specifically this one that we've seen, it's, it's been a very difficult, difficult task for people to find out when they should buy or when they should start accumulating again. And Scott has done a really brilliant job of doing it with, with the team and setting up so many instances that he's capitalized on that. And so what, what better time to have a show and tell during a bear market than during a bear market? So it's a good, it's going to be great. It's going to be a really fantastic, very information rich time. So I'm excited for it.
- [44:46]
A
Yeah, it seemed like an opportunity to also do it privately rather than sit here for an hour, you know, and break it down one by one. And so I think it's going to be great. I'm really excited about it because I've obviously been a huge cheerleader for it. And listen, part of it is I could have, you know, like I could have started not at the dead top and it may look a little better. Right. But I think what's compelling is that, you know, I'm less, you know, I think I haven't even looked, but I think total portfolio is maybe 15% down in a market that's down 45%.
- [45:18]
B
Yeah.
- [45:20]
A
If you were an actual hedge fund, we call this a hedge fund in your pocket kind of as A joke. But people forget the days when hedge funds job was to outperform the market when there's downside. Not actually to make a shit ton of money on the upside and outperform, but hedge funds, traditionally you performed a bit worse in a bull market but wildly better in a bear market and save people money. That's why you invested in a hedge fund, that's why you started one. That's what we've accomplished here in my mind. Now listen, if bitcoin never goes up again, okay, that I lost money. But nobody here believes that, that.
- [45:53]
B
Well, it's risk adjusted returns, right. You want to have exposure to as healthy of a cost curve as you can get. And you know what Alex said is true. Dollar cost averaging in its simplest form is been the most time tested method for dealing with volatility risk of any market. Forget just crypto. And so when you take that approach, when you, when you start with the premise of that no one can time the market and you build a strategy based upon that foundation, you get better outcomes, you get better risk adjusted returns, you're taking off a little bit of the upside. No one will argue that if you're the perfect market timer and you can pick the bottoms and you 10x leverage at the bottoms, there is nothing that will make you more money than that if you're right. The problem is, is that you're right very very low percentage of the time. So building a strategy around a low percentage hit rate is not a good thing to do. You want to build a strategy over a high hit rate is something that gives you the least amount of risk with the most amount of potential returns or asymmetric upside. So Scott's portfolio is a perfect example of that. And when prices do rebound and he will have greater earning potential than people who have a worse off cost exposure curve, like someone who's gotten in at 100 plus, which most of these firms are, their cost average are 100100 plus dollars or $100,000 plus a coin if you think about that. You know, unless you have a new means to come up with a lot of dry powder to come bring your cost basis down, you're kind of stuck up there. And that's a decision that was made that was most of the time anchored in emotion and, and not in a prudent execution strategy.
- [47:52]
A
Yeah. So I think we should just encourage everybody to join. Well, we have a recording of it.
- [47:57]
B
We will, yeah.
- [47:58]
A
I like to ask these things in real time.
- [48:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, we will. And yeah, I, I did want to Touch on it in my brain. Alex said something at the the end of his call that I want to applaud him about, which is, you know, helping people get into the bitcoin economy and making it simple. And the yield component of what he mentioned is, is a, it's very similar and near to near, near and dear to our hearts and why we developed the software. The software's intention is to get people into bitcoin with less risk so that there's more happy outcomes. So there's more people that say, you know, there's a positive outcome. When I experience bitcoin for the first time. Ver, if you got into pump Fun and you got into some of these other, like there's a lot of people that are just out absolutely have gotten burned or are getting burned. And the prudent way to address that is to go right behind Larry Fink, as Andrew says, and start accumulating what they believe is, is one of the hardest assets that has ever been created.
- [49:03]
C
Yeah, Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a, you know, Scott's strategies have proven to again, change the way that he's looked at, let's call just trading. Right. I mean, he mentioned several months ago he'll never manually trade ever again. Like, like what these strategies do for him has changed the way that, that he thinks about the process. And by the way, you know, he talks about, well, it would be great if I didn't start at the top. Like, I don't know if everybody knows this, but most of retail in any movement starts at a top or the top somewhere. Like if we had a dollar for every one of our customers, that said, well, I kind of bought in at the top in 21 and I've been working through it, or I bought at the top in 2017. You know, work through it. That's how economies of scale grow. They have to grab attention first and they grab attention at the top also. You know, we're, we're currently sitting at last cycles top, which is how bitcoin quote unquote cycles go. Like right now, the low and it feels terrible. What a bear market. Oh, I never thought this would happen again. And yet that we're at the top of last cycle. So again, all of that commentary can be mitigated with having strategies that work on your behalf while you sleep.
- [50:36]
D
Very simple.
- [50:37]
C
Just got to do it. Just got to choose to do it. Scott, talk about and our team talk about what it is that we do and how we set it up. And more importantly than anything else, what have the outcomes been versus 50 drawdown. Like what. What portion of that has been, you know, have. Has Scott not taken part in that? They're in.
- [51:00]
A
I'm also setting up a new portfolio. Not that we're doing that live, but I like it so much. And I'm switching over to OKX and gonna run up portfolio there.
- [51:12]
C
Sure.
- [51:16]
B
I will say add this note just for anybody who's out there going, you know what? I don't know if I want to come to the call. Here's the great thing about coming to the call. There is zero pressure. It's a free product for you to download. It's not watered down. You can download the product and you can set up the exact instances that Scott's running, with the exception of the amount of money he's trading, but you can do it on a smaller basis and run those instances exactly like he's running it. And see, see what we're talking about for. For absolutely no cost. And be educated along the way. Our staff is incredible about really bringing people into the process. These are your tools. They will operate the way you tell them to. And it's our job to just show you how to use them and get you set.
- [52:00]
A
I don't know if this is the appropriate time today because we don't have enough time, but, like, we could actually do this. Also for me, setting up my next.
- [52:07]
B
Yeah, for your new. Your new one. Yeah, that would be a great one. That'd be a great.
- [52:11]
C
By the way, there's going to be a Q and A session as part of this webinar. So instead of just listening to our faces talk, you're going to be able to interact with us.
- [52:20]
A
Actually, we were trying to pitch it as one more hour of this show for all of you who are dying. My idea actually is we just run this show till 12:15. You imagine the numbers?
- [52:41]
C
Yeah, I can. To the downside, I can imagine.
- [52:43]
B
Honestly, I can't. I can't believe some of the numbers that these spaces do. I get in some of these spaces. And it's just the same conversation over and over.
- [52:54]
A
Not because I don't think it's good content, but we cut Crypto Town hall down to Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Yeah, it was daily and it was just like, too redundant. You could tell that people were, you know, getting fatigue and, you know, let's talk about stuff when there's stuff to talk about. And there you go a little bit. So, yeah, I agree with that as well. So the link is down below. We'll obviously get more deeper in the weeds on everything. And like you said, no pressure. It's just literally not.
- [53:21]
B
I just will tell you, We've had over 500 people sign up so far, and we haven't even announced it until now. There's only a thousand spots I think that Zoom will let us do. So if you're interested, go ahead and sign up.
- [53:32]
A
So you don't basically just said we're too cheap to upgrade our Zoom?
- [53:36]
D
I think.
- [53:37]
B
I don't. I think we've got the top model. I don't think you can have more than a thousand people on a call at once.
- [53:42]
A
47 more dollars. It's not happening. Alex.
- [53:49]
B
He's calling us out. Upgrade that plan now.
- [53:53]
A
All right, well, we're out of time here, so thank you. Guys, please. Seriously. It's down in the description. There's a Zoom link there. I even checked to make sure it works. There it is right there. Beating the bear market with Scott Melker and Arch public. Just your name and email address. That's all we need. So that we can fish you. We can sell it all. All your data on the black market. Yeah, and. And send you Coinbase emails all day. No, we won't do any of that. Okay, guys, we'll see you at 12:15. Appreciate it.
- [54:25]
C
See you.
- [54:27]
B
That's dope.