← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
BTC hits 4-month low, taps $76k before rebound | Crypto Town Hall
01:08:57
BTC hits 4-month low, taps $76k before rebound | Crypto Town Hall
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Dave
Can anybody out there hear me loud and clear? Yes. Oh, okay, cool. I'm sorry, is Dave in charge today? Yeah. Sorry, Alex. Oh, man. Oh, well, here's the funny part. I actually expect I'll talk less now I have to host and have all you guys talk. So, you know, moderating is equals responsibility. But an interesting morning, obviously yesterday would have been even more interesting, but we had a cyber attack to deal with, so so be it. In any case, let's get started. There's a lot to talk about. Obviously, we saw bitcoin drop as low as 76,000 ish yesterday. Briefly, some of us rallied our own sightings to buy in a little bit more in the 77 range. And here we are trading between 80 and 81 for most of the morning. NASDAQ is essentially flat. The S and P is slightly down. Look like there's a bit of a dead cat bounce going on in equities, but we'll see. Curious. Anybody want to raise their hand and talk about what they actually think is going on, or do you want me to call on people? Okay, Carla, you go. Sure. Throw your lifeline. First of all, good morning. And here we go again. Well, I think we're definitely seeing a continued choppy season. My take is if you are in a position where you can hold at these levels and you don't need to sell, good for you. If you're in a better position where you can not only hold, but you can accumulate at these levels, even better for you. And I think if we zoom out, it appears that Trump is executing on what appears to be a plan to nuke the markets and the economy to force rate cuts, all in advance of the midterm elections. We've talked about this previously. There's a lot of instability in the markets right now, and of course, the equity markets are not responding well to all this. But just a friendly reminder that we could not be better positioned on a regulatory and legal front. Every day we continue to get better and better news. SEC just announced even more good news that they're considering rolling back certain aspects of the broker dealer requirements that normally would apply to sector participants in crypto who are launching. Potentially this would impact ICOs. This has to do with their proposal, a proposal to roll back the. And I'm kind of just skimming through my post this morning, the ats, the alternative trading systems, this would relax a lot of requirements that potentially would impact forthcoming ICOs. Gary Gensler tried to make this apply more to crypto, and the acting chair believes we should pull Back on that. So that's something to put on your radar. And look man, I think that we just are experiencing a little bit of disappointment that the summit and the crypto executive orders that Trump issued did not result in a buying spree on crypto. And I think that those expectations were a little bit unreasonable and the market needs to absorb that disappointment and carry on forward. I mean that's my, that's my truncated take. Cool. I think Mark had his hand up next. Great, thanks Dave. Yeah, I listened to your post. Was that done this morning or, or last night? The nine minute you said you wanted to do it a little longer because of all that happened. Yeah, it was, it was last night at yesterday at like 4:30. I, I, I taped it right after I, I twap bought you know using our coin routes algo, you know some more bitcoin for myself and then I it so you know following up on what was it not Alex, who was it? Oh Carl. Saying that the regulatory environment is very different and constructive. Absolutely. If I had to look at answer the question for folks who are more active traders, I'm not, I'm more dealing with institutions and RIAs, trying to just get them to inject a little bit of bitcoin. And that's my, you know, that's my business plan. And so to start with the bigger levers that I think were pulled in this last week, it would have to be Germany's decision to fund themselves and do a military. I don't know if it was Carl Menger or someone said in a meme, let me get this straight, being Germany, you want us to get a military march through Poland and take on Russia, is that right? It didn't go that well the first time for you guys. So I think that that was the biggest lever because it can't be rolled back. It's inflationary. We're seeing that in the DAX up 20% this year. It's kind of like what Argentina's equity market did offsetting inflation. It's not a growth indication. It's inflation. So I think the structural, the structural case for inflation and prices higher are here because of that. So that's the first one. And then the second one would just have to be what happened with the Atlanta Fed now casting the GDP which was all trade related. I don't know if you guys saw that the down 2.8 on March 3rd. Still down 2.4. And it was all because of consumer and net exports rising as people just hoarded materials ahead of tariffs. So very destabilizing I think we have at least, you know, three to six weeks, even if everything gets reversed, which I don't think it can because of the permanent inflection point in fiscal spending by Germany. So I do think this is big stuff. This is kind of along the lines of Bretton woods and the Petrodollar. I know that's a bold statement and we don't do it often, but I do think this is a locked in and loaded different market going forward. You know, it's interesting that you say that because when you have major secular, not cyclical changes, you end up having to look back at the time period that it was happening, because these things don't happen like instantly. Right. They happen over weeks, months, you know, etc. You know, the real question in the world of bitcoin vis a vis, you know, tech investing even, and bitcoin has been exceedingly correlated to the NASDAQ for the last two days and in particular to, you know, some of the high flyers, you know, in the Nasdaq. You know, the question is, is will bitcoin delink this cycle? Who knows? That that's, that's a large ticket question. Anyway, Alex, you had your hand up next. Yeah, I mean, I think, I'm not sure I have a ton to add over what I think folks have said so far. I think it's all pretty much on track. I don't think we're going to see much improvement bigger than the crypto markets in the short or even probably medium term because at the end of the day, macro drives everything. People are freaked the fuck out because they don't know what is going to happen with the markets or exactly what Trump's doing, or I should say we know what Trump's doing in that he is making a very big bet that to bring down interest rates by trying to force the Fed's hands. But it's, you know, a recession is not the worst case scenario here. Right. Stagflation is the worst case scenario here and there's a little bit of playing with fire on it. Some people are very pro it because they think the risk is worth the trade off, given how it might reset the economy and move us back onto a different track. Obviously plenty of people do not think it's worth the risk and we're just going to kind of, to a degree have to see how it plays out. But yeah, crypto is still very heavily macro correlated and so I don't think you're going to see some like, great divergence in the short term between what it does versus what say, Nasdaq does. David, I think you were next. And then Louis. Yeah. So I'm going to be honest, I don't know what Trump is doing and I don't know what the strategy is, you know, based on the moves. There's certainly a bunch of theories going around in terms of what his end goal is. There's a lot of moving parts here. I think, you know, when you get market flushes on a single day basis, as we had yesterday, there are usually a lot of elements that play into this. And there are certainly also technical elements that are playing into this as well. Certainly there is leverage and there is margin that is getting called in places. I don't think we're necessarily in the clear in terms of there not being additional forced selling that has to go ahead and happen. I certainly agree with the sentiment that in terms of the fundamental story, the crypto story has, has only gotten better over the last 72 hours. Even, you know, even Lummis coming out today with revised, you know, Bitcoin Strategic reserve. Bill, you know, I think in the crypto space, things seem to be chugging along as best as they can. That said, you know, technical selling is certainly happening, you know, in, in the crypto space as well. The one thing that's great about the crypto space is, you know about it more, you get more information, it's more real time, it's more transparent than what's going on, you know, in stocks and other, you know, I'd say risk assets that are traded in markets. We won't find out, you know, about those stories maybe until the end of the month. And PMs are required to go ahead and show their results for the month. We may not find out about them, but, you know, we will, you know, we should, we, we should certainly be looking for, if, if you have the opportunity, like Carlos said before, if you, if you do have the opportunity to go ahead and double down dollar cost average, whatever it is, into your, you know, favorite assets that are going to be, because of your conviction, held long term, you know, this is the right time to go ahead and do that, there is no promise that we've hit bottom. I don't think that there's, you know, any way of knowing until there's a couple of days in the clear. But I, you know, more than anything right now, the macro story is really, really important and I, for one, do not know exactly where we're going. The fact that Trump went ahead and responded to Ontario's you know, 25% hike on electricity to US states that take from Ontario with a, an increase in steel and aluminum tariffs from 25 to 50% seems to indicate to me that we're far from over here in terms of the back and forth, you know, punching that we're, we're seeing. Lou, you, you were next. Your mic working? Sure. Can you. Like usual, I disagree with much of what's been said. Think, you know, Trump may be playing 4D chess here, but yeah, I defer to Occam's razor. And the simplest, most likely thing happening is he's crashed in the market as a result of incompetence. You know, people saying that the market is wrong and you know, that we've had all of this good news. I think by definition the market is smarter than you. The market I think, expected Trump to actually do something with regards to the bitcoin strategic reserve. And in fact, he did absolutely nothing but use his pen, which he does hundreds of times a day, to sign something. They did nothing. There was no buying. There is a plan to buy, just like there's a plan to have a health care plan. But most of the time, most of their plans don't come to anything. And I think that's what the market sees and that's why the markets reacted. Obviously, you know, the markets, obviously, you know, I agree that macro is driving everything in the short run, but bitcoin delinks in the long run. It doesn't delink day to day, but in the long run it's gone up dramatically higher than the market has and it will continue to. And you know, I've got a ten year million dollar price target on Bitcoin for 2031 and we're tracking very well against that. You know, the world is crashing. The only thing that people can believe in and trust is bitcoin. Well, I mean, I think that we always overuse the word market, right? You know, we saw post over the weekend, we saw bitcoin drop significantly. Then we saw on Monday a route in financial assets, particularly momentum based financial assets. Now there are some who would say bitcoin led that. There are others who will say that there's totally different things going on. And some of what happened with bitcoin is what you said, hot money, basically saying, well, okay, we didn't get what we wanted, so the hot money bailed. The long term buyers are like, great, this doesn't really matter because do we really want the US government buying anyway? But there is a very big thing that happened and We've talked about this. I've talked about it extensively, which is in something that I think it was Mark was talking about from the RIA perspective, being able to convince people in the larger piles of money that are significantly that dwarf the crypto market to be willing to invest in Bitcoin. Having the United States government declaring it a strategic reserve asset is actually a very big deal. It is not a big deal that means anything in terms of liquidity in the short run. So, I mean, you know, I'm sorry, David, to add to that and to what Lou was saying. I'm curious to know from Lou, and I'm not discounting anything you're saying. You're making very good points. But Trump has also surrounded himself with some of the brightest minds in trad fi with respect to his key positions he's put in place. And are they just sitting back aghast at what's going on here, or is this part of a plan that they're well aware of and that they're executing, albeit Trump does go off the reservation. Is this a broader plan? I've been thinking about that a lot, Dave, and I'm just wondering from the panel, this can't just be all madness. There has to be some plan here behind the curtain. And it seems to me that that plan is to accelerate the economy tanking so that he can avoid losing the midterms, which would disrupt his plans for his agenda. Look, there's two, there's two things that are clear. I want to go around the horn, but there's two things that are clear. Scott Bessant, who's the treasury secretary, has been pretty active out there giving interviews. And he basically said short term pain for long term gain, not once, but twice. He also said changing from a focus on short rates to the focus of the long bond and trying to get that down. And that matters. And that's indicative of a plan. Then we have Howard Glutnik with a lot of bluster, to be honest, on the whole tariff situation. And one wonders if he's the agent of communicating that bluster or if that's what he actually believes. I have no idea and I don't know anyone up here who knows it. But I'm curious. So who was next? I think it was Douglas who's had his hand up for a while. Great. Can you hear me? Yeah, I think that this is planned. So I disagree with Lou there. I think that the macro strategists that I, that I, that I talk to all day long in, in other Chats have kind of been foreseeing this, I guess, for the last couple of weeks. I think that bitcoin specifically there was a huge, huge trade that was obviously long Bitcoin through the ETFs and short microstrategy because Microstrategy had such a large premium. Obviously that premium's come off significantly. That's now being unwound, that trade, which meant selling of Bitcoin ETFs obviously, and then the buying back of microstrategy. So that's obviously why we've seen a good amount of the weakness in Bitcoin. I think it's been the unwind of that trade, specifically in terms of the V shaped recovery. I think that we're going to absolutely get that. This really is about getting short term pain as much as possible. A restructure of the markets and the economy that were very, very fluffy. But for the first three months of a new administration, you can blame it on the old administration. What I think Trump's trying to do here is cut a lot of spending fat and he needs to cut that fat and at the same time get it so that it's muddled up in with sort of, you can call it. Well, AI is getting repriced and Bitcoin's getting repriced. But the reality is there's a lot of government spending that's going to disappear from this, from the U.S. economy. And so you want to sort of get that over as fast as possible and as quickly as possible, which obviously is Doge's job right now. So I think that this is about cutting fat so we can have a much leaner, more private sector economy than public sector economy. And I'm all for it. I think that the expectation that we'd see more growth in Europe for defense spending makes a lot of sense as well. You know, we constantly are threatening leaving NATO and I've done a couple of studies on this in the last couple of weeks. But the net of it is there are so many countries in Europe that haven't been spending as much as they should have for spending. There's been a free rider problem and the US has called them out on that. And now they're sort of. But you have to shock them into believing that now they need to start spending money. And obviously Germany has realized that and has put together a $500 billion package. But Spain and Italy are doing the same sort of thing. Italy, I don't know if everyone knows this, but Italy's been spending a heck of a lot of money on Russian oil and gas during this whole period. So on the one hand we get from Europe, from NATO allies, hey, you know what, we're all against Russia. But on the other hand, they're paying Russia for oil and gas. And I think that what Trump wanted to do was really to bring this out to the fore, to make everyone realize that it's not black and white and also that, you know, to get rid of some of this, this froth in the economy. So I'm all for it. I think it's going to be a V shaped recovery. I agree with the first speaker in that this is the type of opportunity where we should be buying if we can, holding if we can't buy more. But I think you have to look again and again as bitcoin as being just like real estate. I don't go on Zillow every single day and check what's the price of my house. I just don't. And bitcoin is that sort of very, very long term horizon where we all know it's going to rise in price over the long term. There's going to be some mismark along the way, there's going to be some trip ups, but we all know it's going to go from A to B. And I think we've all seen the memes. They're constant. It's sort of like, you know, everyone says, oh, it was so easy for you to make money in bitcoin. It's not easy. You lose a lot of hair, you go gray very, very quickly. But it is something that when you believe in it, you know it's going to go much higher. Yes. Speak for yourself. I've managed to keep the gray off somehow. I'm not sure how infra, you know, you've been bouncing up and down. Is your mic working now? Everything okay? Hopefully you can hear me. Yeah, perfect. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I would agree with a lot of what Mark was saying and you know, the Douglas as well with the restructuring of the economy and I, and I do think that's a good thing. But I want to bring up something that not many people are talking about, which is this dollar carry trade concept. So historically surplus countries have used the dollar and dollar based assets, dollar denominated assets as a positive carry trade. So their trade surpluses get invested into US equities, corporate bonds, real estate just kind of go down the list. And because the dollar has been steadily appreciating versus their local currency and those assets kind of go up in dollar terms, they are getting this positive carry. Well, this is a kind of a result of being the reserve currency issuer of the world. We run these huge trade deficits as a means of providing the kind of dollar liquidity that everyone wants. They reinvest those dollars into our capital markets. Right. Everyone gets rich. It's great. Well, Steven Maran, who is the chair of the CEA as well as like J.D. vance even, and certainly Scott Besant, they understand that this dynamic leads to a lot of the second and third order societal effects. We're seeing historic wealth inequality, suicide rate, drug overdose, death rate, hollowing out of the middle class. They understand kind of the more complicated dynamics that it's not the reserve currency issuer of the world ends up hollowing out their industrial base to the point that it becomes a national security issue. I would also point out foreigners own over $31 trillion of U.S. assets and our net international investment position, the gap between what foreigners own of us and what we own of them is 80% of GDP. So I think that they understand that all these issues, I don't think Trump necessarily does. But if we see a world where that dynamic starts to be addressed and you start to disincentivize foreigner holding of dollars and dollar denominated assets, you would get a much more fairly valued dollar which would re industrialize America, make American exports more competitive again. On and on and on. It would break the kind of hyper financialized economy that has led to the K shaped economy. It would have numerous positive benefits, it would be very volatile, but it would be monetary reordering that you only see once in a generation. And we're starting to see that. So like, you know, the futures ES and NQ will be down, right? During Europe, Asia dollar down. And I would point out last week and a bit recently, you see bonds down too. So equities down, bonds down, dollar down. That is textbook capital rotation. And I would agree that the German stimulus story, that's a higher nominal growth story. But on a currency, from a fundamental valuation of a currency, it doesn't really matter if there's higher nominal growth, the interest rate differential, just that that currency will strengthen and capital will flow towards those higher nominal growth environments. For right or wrong, I don't think war is a good reason. But if we start to see this kind of dollar flywheel that has work so well, been a virtuous cycle, if we see this dollar flywheel start to reverse, it would be 6, 7% on S& P is going to be barely a blip on the overall longer term timeframe. Well, a lot of people, I mean, look, J.D. vance has talked about this extensively and yes, there's no question about the pathologies that you mentioned. But doesn't it boil down to accept more expensive consumer goods or less consumerism, not being able to import that nearly as much in favor of more production? Right. I mean it's really about consumption versus production. But that's a very large reordering with lots of second, you know, probably even first order effects. Yeah, but China, totally. But I would also point out like China, you know, kind of, they need to, to reorient their economy towards more domestic consumption. Right. This is something that Michael Pettis and China experts have been talking about for a while. So a mar a lago accord becomes kind of much more beneficial for all parties involved too, you know, and in that, just to bring it back for the audience because you know, what we really care about here in that one would expect rather dramatic reversal, breaking of some of the correlations in the markets. Right. Certain assets would do extremely well because obviously they're oriented toward domestic production. Certain assets would get crushed because domestic consumption would decrease and they're relying upon the American consumer. Meanwhile, Bitcoin in a world in dollar terms at least becomes that hard currency, which is extremely relevant. One would think that would be very good for Bitcoin, but maybe not as good for consumer oriented platform, etc. I mean, are you thinking about it the same way? Yeah. Sorry to kind of put a bow on it and bring it to Bitcoin. All of what I just described is immensely bullish for Bitcoin. Escalating trade tensions, de globalization, a move away from kind of dollar based assets. Right. Like all of these things, Bitcoin is neutral. No, you know, there's no politics, there's no leader, there's no right. It's a protocol, it's neutral, it freely floats in all currencies. Right. So currencies can start to be kind of fairly fundamentally valued. Again, like there are, there are so many positives for bitcoin in this. If this is kind of the direction things are headed, it is like immensely bullish for Bitcoin. Now, short term, you know, there will be volatility, but like I'm talking, you know, a year, two year, five years out, this world would be insanely bullish for Bitcoin, which is a large part of my thesis, obviously. But that implies a de link between Bitcoin and consumer NASDAQ stocks, for example. Anyway, Mark, you've had your hand up again for a while and then Austin and then Lou. Yeah, you bet. Two things I think it was in for talking about the K shape recovery and basically the impact on our culture and people. It's palpable as far as what it does to mental health. So the fact that we want a soft landing has made us, I think, soft. I think that a recession is that near term pain. Like Besson said, long term gain. Since 1981, we've had recessions 7% of the time. And prior to 1981, between 1900 and 1981, we had them 30% of the time. So if you look at those gray bars on those Fed St. Louis Fed charts everyone uses, we don't have them anymore because we can't afford them because of the debt. So even though we're inviting recession, I'd love to get thoughts from people about can we really afford it because credit spreads are still tight. If we allow recession, do we really control consumer behavior or will we just have another BTFP and everything else roll in and we're back to flooding the market with liquidity? So that's the game of chicken that I think right now with Trump in there, I don't know if that's the part that I would say we don't know what's going to happen. Someone said that earlier with Trump. And the only thing I'm looking at is the move index in bonds because if that gets up to like 130, 140 again, I think that's when everyone runs down to Maiden Lane and has a meeting about tariffs are fine, but we got to shore up the banks that we still need to sell Treasuries. So I think that's the interim part that isn't yet priced in, isn't contemplated and gets in the way of Besson's plan about having that pain because I don't know if we can afford it. A full blown recession and that, that's all I want to share. Cool. Is it me? Dave? Sorry, yeah. Can you guys hear me now? Yep. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Why don't you go ahead and I'll tell my story after. Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. So I, I agree with a lot of what's being said about the paradigm shift that we're dealing with here. And it brings up, as somebody who's poked around in markets for a while, two things for me. One is it's a very basic principle, but I think understated in a world where we're trying to restructure how people utilize the dollar and have access to American markets. Is that in very simple terms, if you reduce the demand for an asset, you would expect prices to decline. And so part of what I think we're going to be experiencing in capital markets is a little bit of a reversion of the labor versus capital paradigm. And asset prices probably take that on the chin for a while. I think people need to understand that that is a feature, not a bug, of what the administration is trying to do and not try to look for, call it market shifts in the short term that are going to be supportive here because they pretty much clearly told you their medium term goal is hammering down asset prices to some extent. Now their belief, right or wrong, is in the long run this will lead to a much better setup and growth for America. But you've got to understand what the goal is. The second part, this is a behavioral thing that I think is driving some of the violence of these moves is how many people are left, either retail traders or more so even on trading desks on the street who have actually traded through truly painful regimes. Right? Like unless you're around for the tech bubble bursting or 08. Right. Which I will remind people is 17 years ago now, even though it feels like yesterday for some of us. Nobody's actually traded through serious bear markets in the past. And a lot of people have been conditioned to always buy the dip, always buy the dip, always buy the dip. Even right now, if you like go on Twitter or you talk to people, they're trying to figure out, okay, where do I start buying? And as somebody who lived through 2008, the answer might be you just don't. Right? Or at least not until much longer, until everybody is like crying and giving up and you're getting all the posts about I'm never investing again, like all of this is hell. And so I would just caution people, if you haven't been around in markets for a while, if you're entering a real bear market regime without some sort of fiscal or monetary put behind what's going on with price action, things can get more violent and uglier than you have ever seen. Right? And be prepared. Austin, just real quick, how much, you know, downside, if that dollar flywheel carry trade starts to unwind like we were talking about, how much more like what sort of downside do you see on S and P? So the hard part about pricing, that is you're essentially asking how much implicit leverage is there in the shadow banking system, which is a hard thing to wrap your arms around. But I would remind people that, you know, back to sort of 08 or previous recession vibes, you could easily have like well into double digit downs from here. Right. Like if we go from here to another 20 to 40% down, it's not totally off the table. I'm not predicting that, I want to be clear. But leverage is very, very important to understand and will accelerate some of these moves violently. Down. Trying to remember who had their. I think it was Lou. You still have your hand up. Yeah, yeah. I just want to say again, the simplest explanation for what's going on, you know, with the tariffs. This is Trump's Brexit. You know, Trump just wants us to be self reliant and he wants us to build stuff ourselves. And you know, how did that work out for the uk? Not well. You know, there was a book written in 1776 called wealth of the nations and that is the fundamentals of economics, you know, that now 250 years later still stand. If one country's better at producing something than you and they can do it cheaper, let them do that and put your resources elsewhere. If you try and build everything yourself, the net is you're going to have a lot less stuff. And that is the direction that we're going. And that is, I think, going to be extraordinarily painful for many, many years if we continue on this path. Douglas? Yeah, I was going to say, you know, the wealth of Nations. Correct. I mean, it's a great book, but you know, the Europeans can't produce energy and so they need to import it from Russia. That doesn't obviously work if Russia becomes your adversary. So where the wealth of nations failed in somewhat was thinking about strategic importance of certain manufacturing, certain industries, certain things. And I think that Trump grasps that and so that's why he's rejiggering the economy so that we're not reliant upon other countries like Europe is towards Russia for things like, let's say rare earths. I mean, rare earths are obviously extremely central to the war that's going on over there since those two countries both have some of the bigger supplies. And right now we have a national security issue because our access to rare earths is going through all roads lead through China and people who will. Twenty years from now, when people look back at this war and look back at what happened, they're going to say similar things to what we say about things in the Middle east with regard to oil because rare earths are that important and weirdly doesn't get the press coverage. David. Yeah. While we're talking, Trump has said that he will shortly declare a national emergency on electricity and he's threatened to go ahead and permanently shut down Canada's car industry. I mean, I, I just, you know, the, these, these words may just be words, but, you know, the tensions continue to ratchet up and, you know, I think we're kind of just most of us who have a portfolio, unless you're a zero or you're, you know, neutral, you know, we're just kites in the wind right now. I frankly, you know, and this is, I don't even think the Canada issue is the biggest issue out there. But, you know, if Trump is going to continuously double down no matter what, no matter what the end game is, you know, until there's capitulation on the other side, you know, he's undoubtedly, if he's going to pick fights with lots of different people, he's going to run into at least one, if not numerous, that for either fundamental reasons or ego and personal reasons are not going to go ahead and back down very easily. So would you back down? It's, that's irrelevant. I, I just care about, I just care about my portfolio. You can't back down. You cannot back down. If you back down, you know what's going to happen. He'll want more. I listen, we have a deal. What he has shown is he doesn't care about deals. There is no deal, there is no agreement. There's only what he wants. And if you don't give it to him, he's going to be upset. And if you do give it to him, he's going to want more. Okay, so if we take 100% of the time, if we take that to its logical conclusion, then, right, we're going to get the full on nuclear war joust. Right, because you're saying that he doesn't have an off ramp at all and the other side certainly doesn't have an off ramp because if they capitulate, they'll have to capitulate for forever. They'll become his slave. They'll be the next Marco Rubio. Look, other than south park, which is looking awfully prescient here for those who've watched it understand how they treat U S Canada wars over the years. It's been rather amusing. I mean, come on, I mean, Doug Ford and Trump, if you put the two of them in a room, there's no room for anybody else's ego. I mean, let's just go right there. Mark Carney will be different. But this is coming out of Ontario and we should understand that, but to say that the histrionics. Look, there are certain inequalities in the relationship and that's the facts. I mean, you just look at some of the way the tariffs work between the two, and that's true. And Trump looks at this and says, f this, we shouldn't have it. And Doug Ford said, well, it's been that way forever. So you guys are being bullied. These were deals that he made. He made these deals and when he made them, he said they were the greatest ever. So why were they the greatest ever then and not now? Because when he says something is the greatest ever, the attention and the detail is, shall we say, lacking. And you know, now he has a new set of, I mean, people have made the point and it's, it's, it's fair, it's, it's, it's just factual that he has a completely different inner circle now than he did when he made that deal. So understand that, that, that, that this is, this is a direct result of that. I mean, I think it was Mark and, and, and Austin both made very, very clear, concise description of what the new set of advisors thinks. And that's very different than the old set of advisors, which are more typical neocon or neoliberal. And yes, the usmca, if I'm getting it right, was better than NAFTA from our perspective. So to that degree it was an improvement. But it still had features that the Trump core constituency, the new one, doesn't want. I mean, we haven't even talked about Mexico yet. I mean, USMCA still allows Mexican production of things, and Trump's changing that. And yeah, he used fentanyl as his excuse, but there's going to be some flak there. But anyway, all of this may be true, but the question is, is there anyone who ties any of this to the fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin? And then the second question is, what does it do to the market for crypto infrastructure which is much more aligned with the tech stocks? Anyone want to take that? Mark, go ahead. Yeah. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Oh, perfect. Yeah. So bringing it back, bringing it back to Bitcoin. Absolutely. If you have trade agreements being written up and then you have this, you know, sub rosa network that is outside of the existing system that can be built on in store value, et cetera, then yes, this is a huge win for Bitcoin. There's near term pain, though. So we're talking about people who have portfolios, liquidity. Bitcoin is sensitive. Dave, you said it's connected to Nasdaq and it is over the short term. But speaking to adoption, the reason BlackRock and Fidelity and I've done some calls with them, the reason they got in early years ago is because they saw that over periods of months and quarters, it still is a tremendous diversifier. So I'm not going to get into it. They've written about it. It's not understood by most any RIA yet I've spoken to, it's just not in their consciousness. So the decoupling that we're seeing in agreements that Trump is initiating, I forgot who said it just about electricity strikes. So all of that is very constructive for Bitcoin because it will only make it, I think, less correlated as people are forced to look to new options outside of liquidity driven equities. Yeah, I mean, look, my view for what it's worth is all of this is crazy positive for Bitcoin. And the other thing we've seen, and you can see it today in the market, for those who aren't paying attention, the volatility second to second is dramatically higher. I don't mean in terms of directionally because it's still more or less just under 80,000 right now. But the fact is that there's much less order book depth right now than there was a few days ago. And that's probably because a lot of the leverage has been washed out of the system on the long side. And people are in the crypto world have pretty long memories of what happens when you short this thing and someone decides to buy at the same time. We've had a rotation from crypto native holders to Tradfi kind of put in the vault kind of people for the small percentage of RIAs and small percentage of funds that are investing in Bitcoin, they're not doing it for days. They're like your example, Mark of Zillow. I mean it's like, yeah, okay, you know, whatever. This is a diversifier. These are people who make decisions on a quarterly basis are the ones who are buying. So you got that in Bitcoin. But there's something else that's going on in the market that has to be talked about, which is Ethereum, which you can look at Bitcoin's weakness, but the relative strength to Ethereum, we're plumbing levels that we haven't seen in a While. Ethereum below 1900 and there's all sorts of talk about the Ethereum Foundation. Is there anybody want to comment about what's going on there? I mean, my Opinions on this are, you know I'm, I'm far from an expert but have definite have thoughts. Dave, I'm actually here now. Yeah, ghost, sure sure. I, I joined that was a, a rare moment where I had something counter scheduled. I actually just interviewed the Richard Tang, the CEO of Binance, which was awesome for the for the first time. But yeah Dave, just to to follow up on that, has anybody been able to confirm that the Ethereum foundation is in fact leveraging long on Ethereum right now? Because that is not something I had seen before and I've seen that going around X. I don't know if Carla, if that was something you were going to jump in on, but pretty curious if that's something that's actually happening because that would be a real eye opener. Yeah, same. I don't know that there's been any confirmation from the foundation itself about it outside of the speculative post that we've all seen. I think the down trend in Ethereum is obviously related to the overall downtrend of all altcoins because there simply is no use case scenario that anyone wants to adopt right now because everyone's jumping out of windows metaphorically. So do I think long term Ethereum still has a place in the market and it will be used as the rails for defi. Absolutely. But I think we just have to clear this short term pain before people wake up to that again very often. Yeah. So all right, I'll, I'll be maybe a little bit more dire on this one. Having written something and talking to a lot of people and regulators in this space. I think one of the things that we're experiencing now that we have an admin in the US that is not hysterically crypto negative, where they think even saying the word Bitcoin is a crime, is that things actually need to work properly and be usable. And one of the problems Ethereum has had for a while is you sort of created this V1 of it and it worked in theory. But security's always been a problem and scaling's always been a problem and scaling continues to maybe sort of kind of happen. But I think people have really underplayed the security part and the Bybit hack was a good example of this. Because if your value proposals for Ethereum to the average two legged normal human being is that your infosec on an individual basis needs to be good enough to withstand the North Koreans, then most people are rationally going to look at that and be like well I can't do that. And then the answer becomes okay, don't use it. I think there is a much deeper, more existential question for a lot of blockchain design and the security models around them than people are acknowledging here. And I think a lot of the bearishness around Ethereum is as you would go pitch it to institutional people or try to get people on chain. The more sophisticated ones, I've found, have very deep questions about the architecture of the space and are basically not sold on anything other than bitcoin and to some extent stablecoins. But tbd, where. Well, that brings up a bunch of questions, but you know, from a security point of view vis a vis other chains. But you started this with a very interesting point which I've. Which we haven't used the word meme in this space. And this maybe would have been the first crypto town hall I've ever heard without it getting mentioned. My thesis from November has been that there will be a rotation out of memes and into, well, not out of memes, out of pure means and into assets that can provide some economic benefit to the holders. And that is a secular change, which I don't think people were, you know, were expecting to happen so quickly. Of course they also weren't expecting the President of the United States family to put out coins that were effectively rug pulls and then the same thing that happened a couple days later to the President of Argentina. So, you know, it sort of accelerated it. But that trend is, I think most people would say is a healthy one. You know, actually. Did he leave? Yeah, yeah, no, no, actually, yeah, Dave. I would say, I mean if you look at the transaction or the earnings on pump fund, I mean it's cratered to back to where they started basically before any of the hype cycle happened. I mean, you can see the price action on Solana obviously coincides with the Trump launch. Right? I mean, Solana basically peaked all time high at the high of the Trump volume the Sunday after the launch and has gone down what, 55, 56, 57 since then. And pump fun is almost non existent. Not from a perspective of people trying, but from actual fees generated and tokens getting adopted. I don't know if that's a perfect permanent washout, but it does look right now like at least for now, the meme coin phrase is effectively done. I literally just asked Richard Tang about that and what he was seeing on Binance, since they obviously operate the largest centralized exchange and huge in the decentralized space. And his thinking also was aligning with what you were saying, which is that we should See, a return to utility and actual use cases and building things from here. Not to say that memes die, but you don't get a more gratuitous ceiling for a bubble in crypto than the United States President launching something. Right. You're not going higher than whatever Trump did. That's it. No, no doubt. I mean, look, as I said, it's an enduring thesis to the extent that you can build a meme, a community that actually has something with it. Well, we'll see. Now, remember, you might remember what happened with Shiba Inu when they announced Shibarium. Of course, you and I took a ton of crap from various sundry bot armies on X for kind of laughing at it. But that actually was a short term, not a short term, it was a long term price top for Shiba Inu when they try to convert it to something. So, you know, who knows what the conversions will be? But that is, that is certainly a trend and we'll see how it all develops. Mark, you had your hand up? Yeah, great, thanks. I think the barbell approach here is memes versus Stablecoins. Because you, Dave, want to bring it back to Bitcoin stablecoins. But since we brought up memes, I'll touch on that. I think memes just reflect what we talked about in that K recovery we had in 2020, where so many people got left behind. You know, there's a scattering, there's no work from home. People did the great resignation. So I think means are a reflection of where we are. And then some people took advantage of and do rug pulls. Mammography is here to stay. Its economics will change. But I think that, I think that bringing that to Ethereum, you need integrity, so you need to be around. If you grow too big, you can grow outside your community and it's going to fail. Trump did that. Basically, we saw that by trying to bring everybody into his coin, in a matter of days, it blew up and fell. So Solana and Ethereum don't have the same integrity. Bitcoin will be the layer. And now moving into Stablecoins. This is where the banks live. They need new payment systems. JP Morgan, I think, changed the name of their process, their program that they've been running on Ethereum for six years to. I think it's Onyx now. I forgot what it used to be called. But they're invested and then obviously the treasury needs new buyers of their Treasuries. And if you think that the economy is going to be more digital than analog, then you want to be involved in the stable coin and be the reserve currency on the digital asset platform that's going forward. So it's not going to be easy. You have this thing called the ucc, I think Uniform Commercial Code that takes years to roll out before you can have legal precedent for banks to operate interstate. It's not going to happen overnight. But yes, if I was at a bank right now, I would want to be running our stable coin program for sure. Well, of course, that brings up the most, what maybe the most contentious, you know, coin in crypto, which is, you know, XRP trying to be the, you know, into stable coins. And we've seen, you know, I haven't heard a lot from what's going on there, but it always, it always tends to inspire strong opinions one way or the other. Austin. Yeah, so one point of clarification is somebody who's been involved with it, Onyx, which they rebranded to something like Kinetics or whatever the heck they're calling it now, it is an Ethereum clone, but it's a private blockchain. It does not run on Ethereum. Before anybody walks away with that impression, I think the problem you're going to have right now with institutional adoption and even with some of the pathways clearing for regulators is sort of what I raised before, which is I have been in seats at a bank running digital asset groups. And the issue you run into using a public blockchain is you have all of the infosec concerns that lead to you having to hold huge amounts of capital against any of the assets you're handling that are native crypto assets. Less so for things where you have freeze and seize and control of the smart coins. But fine. And then number two, you also have all sorts of OFAC concerns that I think we've kind of forgotten about because we were so busy fighting the sec. But guys, technically if I pay a fee to an anonymous validator set, and I can't prove that none of those validators are in like North Korea, Iran, etc, in terms of sanctioned jurisdictions, that's an OFAC violation just de facto. And this is going to be a huge problem for the banks getting into this space. I think that's what leads people to talking about things like Ripple. But Dave, being fully transparent with you, I've never seen any of the banks doing anything material with, with Ripple either. I know that rumor is out there, but like it is factually false that the large banks of the United States are using Ripple as their back end or like running large amounts of transactions through it. I would tell everybody on the institutional finance front, we're still very, very early. Like the transition just from firing paper tickets and pneumatic tubes around to clear FX versus actually doing it electronically was a multi decade thing. So let's not get out over our scheme. Oh my God. I'm actually writing a book charting that from 1984 and five through to probably 2010. In the first book I'm calling it Million Dollar Frat Boys for those who Care. But talking about the paper tickets and the spreads and the way all the rollicking crap was happening back then. So you make me laugh. But yeah, there's a lot going on. But what that leads to is a question of what's the value of these rails. And the answer is there are massive markets for them but very unknown product market fit which is, which is in my mind it's a perfect situation for markets to be talking about, but not when things are flying all over the place. Although looks like things are stabilizing here. So Dips, you're new to the stage. What do you got to say? Hello, thank you for having me. I hope I can be heard enough because of my make. I'm from Argentina, very fond of your all the crypto town hall since ever. I want to say something about the geopolitics and the macro stance of Bitcoin but referring since from my point of view from Argentina, we are seeing that this supercharged Doge chainsaw fiscal spending spree that we are having here is profoundly productive. We are having a growth in our GDP in Argentina while we are slashing inflation and we are lifting almost 10 million people from poverty all besides the Libra scandal and all that nonsense. We are seeing that the, the, the, the products and the results of being very orthodox in the fiscal spending cuts. So I think the Doge obviously Elon Musk is very fond of Javier Milei and Doge is Doge's chainsaw is being perpetuated I hope in the U.S. i know that $2 trillion of, of deficit is not going to be cut easily, but it's the right path. I also think the tariffs, tariffs and all this from Donald Trump is just a power play, a geopolitical power play to maybe pull some levers. And definitely we know that any kind of protectionism in economy ultimately leads into inflation for the consumer. So there is more free market than protectionism in the path for us to continue to be a superpower. That is my thought and I think it's, it's, it's very natural to understand that There, there is no level of protectionism that can protect you from other competitors doing best good and services that you better goods and services than you. Regarding bitcoin, I think this is so obvious. Two or three years ago no one would have thought that we are going to have the president of the most powerful superpower in history with a lot of power in the judicial system. He appointed three of them and the House of Representatives and the Senate with the amount of votes that he had doing an spr, a strategic bitcoin reserve. The stockpile is just to make a balance neutral sell off of crypto, blah blah blah to get some more bitcoin and have a, like a gold standard. We are going to have a little brother with a bitcoin standard that is very, very big in history. So we are having an administration in us that is leading the way. Everybody's going to follow through this domino of the power play. We are going to see that this may be in the future, was going to be a very good deep opportunity. So I think everybody has to connecting to bitcoin and understand that although we are going to have probably some fiscal spending delusion regarding the tax rates and all that, the, the big print, maybe it's coming but always the, the hard money, the hard sound money assets are going to, to come through. So that is my take. I, I'm very grateful that you had my, my take. Thank you very much Dave, Scott and Mario. I think it's great to get that international perspective. I mean Argentina is very relevant here because we, the media has polarized melee, you know, pretty significantly. People, you know, various people, you know, say different things. But what is amazing is how the media has portrayed, you know, and what is going on with you know, Musk and Doge here and people are saying oh my God, it's going to be horrible. They're going to cut all these government workers. And it's like well. And then others are saying well but let's look at what really matters and this stuff is going to shake out. And as it's happening, you know, all I can say, and I've said this and I don't didn't really want to get political but I want to get some more hands up is I think that the level of histrionics, the incredible scripts that are being written every day by someone in the Democratic Party in the back room, probably the people who are running the last administration are all saying things, in most cases monstrously false things, but you know, still saying things, defending this whole NGO flywheel that's being exposed. I mean, you know, to me it's, it's almost indefensible. But, you know, other than Ro Khanna, I haven't seen any Democrats starting to talk about the actual corruption that's going on in D.C. none of this is going to matter from a Bitcoin perspective. It's just not going to move the needle. What is going to matter is liquidity. If Elon's Doge does actually take out a significant amount of the workforce, make no mistake, your employment numbers are going to go down, your spending is going to go down. And the real question is, is that going to force the Fed's hand? Anybody have a comment about that? I mean, Reggie, I think you lifted your, your, your mute button. Yeah, I wanted to address a couple of the issues, not the political issue. I'm not touching politics on Twitter. I would prefer not to as well, my man. But just, you know, I've been listening for the last 30 or 40 minutes. And as for the, the mantra of bringing industry back to the US I'm a believer in getting where you fit in. The industries that have left the US have been the lower value added, lower margin industries, the higher value added, higher margin industries. The US leads in. Look at AI cloud centers and systems. The IP behind all this crypto elts. The United States leads in this, the industrial, the industries where a lot of the working class flourished back in the 30s and 40s, etc. In the 30s and 40s, those were the high value added industries. Okay? As they were supplanted by the higher margin industries, they tend to go offshore where labor is cheaper. If you are able to get your way and bring those industries back, the US would be worth less, not more. Which is why these entities have allowed those to go offshore. The things that are very high margin will never go offshore voluntarily. Notice Nobody's doing their AI research offshore. Okay? Nobody's doing an IP, R&D offshore. It all stays onshore. Just want to give perspective from that. Now, you can't say that politically because that doesn't make the working class and the middle class voter happy. But that's what happens in the macroeconomic reality. Now, as for Bitcoin, I don't hear too many bad cases on Bitcoin or Ethereum and everything else. And everybody is. Not everybody. Let me be more accurate. Many, particularly in the media and the pundits, are discussing Bitcoin as if it's a financial asset. Bitcoin is a technology and it has all the pros and cons. Of technology. You know, parts of Bitcoin are patented and a lot of the institutions act as if it doesn't happen. Nobody's even checked, nobody's done a FTO freedom operate analysis on any of these. And as a technology you should look at as a technology first and then you can look at the units of account. Right. That allow for the accounting of the technology, which is Bitcoin below ksp. And that could be an investment in a financial asset. But if you put the financial asset portion ahead of the technology portion, you're going to get hurt because you don't know what you're investing in. Land my plane right there. But happy to discuss it if anybody's interested. Yeah, I think that's a long conversation. I think I am someone on the other side of that one. But I think that we'll, we'll deal with that another day. You know my point and the reason that the real quick one is that I think that I've seen too many technologies that were inferior become game network effects and stay. And I think that you know, I'm not going to say Bitcoin is infinite inferior because I don't want to get into that, that hornet's nest but I think those two things are whatever. So we're going to wrap soon. Andre, I see you have your hand up. So when you haven't spoken. Sorry, let me just because I think might missed the point. I'm not opining upon whether Bitcoin is inferior or superior. I'm opining on the fact that it's a technology, not a financial asset. First, the unit of account that runs through the bitcoin technology can be used as a financial asset. Let's suppose the patient, suppose the patent holder of Bitcoin decides to start enforcing it. Okay, what happens Bitcoin's fungibility. What happens to its financial asset price? I'll be honest, it's. It's not a topic that I have actually researched. I would love to get some of our, our legal guys to talk about it. It might be something we should talk about in the future though. I'll leave that one. You're definitely not by yourself apparently blackrock infidelity and Goldman Sachs is Citibank and nobody's looked into it. This is just one aspect of many. When you go into a technology without being familiar with. Yeah. Just to give. Let me give you a perspective and I'll, I'll jump off you. You buy a semi conductor fab intel or Nvidia decides let's put a 10 $15 billion into effect and they build it out and they start selling the chips as an investment. Nobody bothers to look. If whoever they bought that from the technology, what happens if they come and claim their rights? A collapse. But nobody would ever put $15 billion into something without finding out what they bought. But they've done this in the dot industry. Just perspective, you know. Have a good day y'all. Okay, Andre and I think we're gonna wrap after that. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry for joining late because I just want to provide some macro perspective on Doge because you asked the question like how could these DOGE redundancies affect the US economy? So I think what we've seen already is we've seen this significant increase in job cut announcements, right? In February it was mostly government related, right? And this tends to lead initial jobless claims by around two months. And we've already seen this increase initial initial unemployment claims, right. It was mostly federal employees, right. So I don't, I, I think unemployment, the unemployment rate will increase. I mean we've just seen the job openings rate ticking up, right today the jolts numbers. But these numbers are significantly lagging. If you look at high frequency indicators like the daily link up 10,000 index, right. It still means job openings are being reduced. So that means redundancies are not as quickly, are not as, are not absorbed as quickly as, as they used to be. You know, so that will lead to an increase in the unemployment rate. What does it mean for btc? I mean recession is, is definitely negative because we've seen that global growth expectations are being priced out, right? That's what, what has brought equities down, right? And I mean the biggest macro factor for Bitcoin right now is global growth expectations from a quantitative perspective. But I mean if the unemployment rate increases and the CPI inflation numbers are coming down, right? As implied by the truflation index, right. That means the Fed will, I mean they will have an montreasing bias, right? And that's why the market have that fund futures. They've been pricing out, they've been pricing in more rate cuts, right? We, we're now pricing in three rate cuts in 2025 again. So that's bullish, right? And you've seen the increase in gold money supply because of dollar depreciation because of these renewed Fed rate cut cut expectations. I, I think that is generally bullish, right? Well, I think that a lot of people look at it that way but you know, when there's panic selling. But the one point that I tried to make in My recap video yesterday is when you have a momentum driven market and everyone's buying a momentum and the momentum stops, they sell. The one other point that I made, which no one in this, this call talks about, but I just have to say it is March, the year after a big year from a profit perspective from traders is always dicey because people have to pay taxes in April and they generally start getting their cash available a month before. Well, we're a month before. And you know, in the US that's what was approximate cause for a ma the first, the shadow, you know, pricking of the dot com bubble in, in March of 2000. So it feels similar to that to me. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. Obviously we do this every day. You know, this is my first time hosting. You know, Scott asked me so he know, hopefully I didn't talk too much, guys. But I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna wrap it here or we'll be back. I'm getting rave reviews, Dave. I mean, rave reviews in the background. And I think you might have taken my job, which is taking unpaid jobs, is probably not in the offing, but I'm happy to do it once in a while. But anyway, we'll, we'll see you all back here tomorrow at 10:15. So thanks a lot. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave.