← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
A
Well, good morning, everyone. Here we are on Friday, December 12th at Crypto Town hall. And. Oh, well, I guess bitcoin just lost 92,000. Is it time to panic? I don't know. I mean, you know, it's, it's the first day of, of the, of the next round of qe. Although it's a little bit QE light, I guess we could call it Robert and others, you know, but, you know, I think the more interesting market that has been going on has been silver, which is it still? Yeah, it's, it's flat now today, but it's been all over the place this morning, as high, you know, well over 64, getting towards 65 now it's in the 63s. You know, it's actually trading the same way all coins used to trade. And I don't think that is an accident. We'll, you know, we'll, we'll see. What, what, what do you all think? But hey, you know, it's, it's an interesting world. I mean, it seems like there's hot money that wants to chase stuff all over the place and, and we're in it and you know, crypto is, it will be there in the sun again. Right now it's like, you know, what's going on. The only thing that's happening is pretty much everything that the industry wanted, you know, two years ago is actually coming to fruition. But, you know, maybe it's like that Chinese proverb, you know, be careful what you ask for, for if you are not, you shall receive it. When the head of the SEC is basically pushing tokenization and use of crypto rails for everything and no altcoin reacts. It's kind of funny stuff. I mean, Scott, are you actually there behind the mic now?
- [01:35]
B
Yeah, I'm here, I'm here. My sound's probably not great. I'm driving on the highway, but like, I kind of, you know, I did my show this morning without NLW sort of last minute. There's a lot of stories that are aligning with what you're saying, including the DTC news. I don't know if you saw that, but the DTCC got a no action letter from the SEC allowing them to move forward, forward with tokenization. And there's a video on the DTCC Twitter that is just astounding. I mean, they're basically saying exactly what Atkins is that they're moving to tokenization. They're planning to tokenize, you know, ETFs, indexes everything and move everything to blockchain rails like Imminently by the end of 26.
- [02:14]
A
Well, I mean, I'm not horribly surprised because, you know, I think I told you and told people that I sat on a panel in the fall with one of the guys from DTCC talking about collateral and their vision is to become one of the global players, if not the global player in being able to host collateral of tokenized assets. And they put this out as a vision paper, but this fits with their vision. If you think about how much value people attribute to Coinbase for being the custodian for most of the ETFs. If you think about what DTCC is ultimately they are the custodian for stocks and for assets. And you know, from their perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Now, from our perspective or from my perspective, if the system only allows them to be the only one who's holding these tokenized assets, then it will have failed. But as long as there is the ability to move, to move assets in and out of DTCC on demand, or at least with some process that's not as janky as the wire process, I think that will open up a lot in the realm of, well, not just defi, but really just in the realm of global 24. 7 trading and multi asset swaps. And that's kind of a big deal for people. And I don't know, we got a bunch of speakers up here now, so I'm curious how many people care about, you know, whether or not we end up in a world where you, in your bank account, in your Coinbase account, in your brokerage account can swap from, you know, some short term yield instrument to Bitcoin to Tesla stock or whatever. And, and all of a sudden the, you know, your geography is less important. You know, as long as you have a pathway or conduit into the system, you know, to me that's kind of a big deal. And I think that that is a lot of what's going to happen. I'm curious. Anybody have any thoughts on this? I mean, Matt, you know, you've been talking about, you know, how people have been asleep at the switch for what's going on in the news for a while now. What do you think?
- [04:25]
C
Yeah, I think, yeah, no, it's great, Dave. It's great to be here with you guys. You guys probably won one of the best spaces out here for all of this. I think you absolutely nailed it on the head. I think that that's really going to ease the friction for those of us who are looking to do that. So. And I think that you Know like what Scott just said earlier, that they want this done by the end of 2026 and none of us, even those of us who are in these spaces daily and I'm still on the periphery, I don't think I even really understand how fast all of this is going to happen here in the next year. And the one piece of news that I'm still trying to even get my head around and even I don't know if it's fact or fud, but apparently now bank of America just launching a new credit backed loans. Apparently this is something new across my timeline I'm seeing this morning. So again this is all moving so fast it's kind of hard. It feels like I'm drinking from a fire hose.
- [05:09]
A
Dave? Yeah, I mean look, the, the value in the space and the value in the technology is going to start to come to fruition. Adoption is going to increase and at the same time we're going to see which, you know, which tokens that people have hyped, which communities are kind of left, left, left hanging, you know, where, where there just might not be anything there, there and you know, we'll see it. I mean that's the thing that's going to be interesting. Now all of that said, what the hell does it really matter? You know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be beauties in the eye of the beholder. I mean, you know, I see Bruce up here and it's always, always good for, for you know, entertainment, he and I, you know, going at it. But the truth is, is if it works out, there's two versions of this and it's probably not quite so black and white but really there are two versions. There's take the current system and use technology underneath it, but keep it as completely controlled as the current system where individual sovereignty isn't supported. And there's a version of the system where people, as the technology is adopted, have the option to opt out. So you know, the second one is the Hester Purse and basic, you know, allowing for financial privacy, allowing for people to opt out, but allowing those who want to be in the system to stay in the system. And I guess we'll see it. I mean Bruce, you've been pretty vocal lately about how you think that this is being co opted to the point where people are going to be herded like sheep into the pen. I mean, is that still your thought or do you see any possibility that any of this stuff will allow for people to opt out and to hold onto their own assets.
- [06:52]
D
There's always the possibility, I think the direction that we're going is the wrong direction in that we're taking this decentralized asset and putting it in centralized wrappers that make it lose all of its good properties. You know, the properties of bitcoin being decentralized, permissionless, no trusted parties needed, you know, those are erased when you put it in BlackRock and you end up with, you know, kind of BlackRock coin. And so I think that's a step in the wrong direction. And I don't really buy the, you know, a lot of folks and I used to maybe be in this camp, you know, where I said, well, it's, you know, bitcoin is bitcoin and know, even though it's an underlying asset and you know, technically it's a claim on a claim on a claim of an asset, but, you know, whatever, it still has Bitcoin in the name. And I thought that's sort of an indirect way to onboard people, but I don't really think so now. Now that I've seen it start to, to evolve and unfold, I don't think that, I think it's just so far from real bitcoin. I don't think you're onboarding. And I see the people that, and occasionally they'll even come on these spaces, the people that are, you know, buying these things, they don't really get bitcoin. They've never held bitcoin. They've never experienced that simple. A lot of people had when they got their first $10 on Bitcoin, on a real wallet that they controlled without AML kyc And when you have these paper claims, you know, with BlackRock Coin, you just don't have the power that bitcoin has. You don't have that sovereignty. You know, somebody with $10 on their, you know, blockchain.info wallet has more sovereignty than somebody with. Apparently there's people with a billion dollars in the etf, you know, which is, is just crazy because you're, you know, you don't have bitcoin. You have a claim on it and work until it doesn't. You know, even the big banks had many people that they, you know, left holding the bag. You know, bank of America, you know, just took the money of anybody in Argentina when Argentina's system collapsed. And that's the whole point of this is, was to get away from that and so to be back in a captive system. And then from a personal note, you know, I started in that world and I I was so excited to get out of that world and get into this world of decentralized finance and changing the world. And so for me particularly, it's like, it feels like an extra defeat. You know, I, I could not be less interested in dealing with a bunch of banks. If I would have wanted to do that. I would have just stayed in the career I had when I was 30 years old. So, so I think it's, I think it's a step backwards. I'm not excited about these things. You know, they may be neutral. I mean anybody holding Bitcoin is, is great. I certainly wouldn't, wouldn't short these companies.
- [09:24]
E
Yeah.
- [09:26]
B
Can I like. I think there's an interesting maybe nuance. I think you're 1000% correct that we're not onboarding people to Bitcoin in the way that we obviously view bitcoin. But I think you can differentiate and say that for better or for worse, they're being onboarded as like investors, like as bitcoin as an investable asset in a normal portfolio. That's not the reason that necessarily we want it, but obviously this is drawing attention to it as something to have in your portfolio. I'm not saying that's the right reason, but maybe it's just a different version of onboarding than we initially discussed.
- [10:02]
A
I mean, think of it this way. If everything goes the way that we are seeing it, people can buy bitcoin held, you know, buy ETFs and buy MicroStrategy or buy whatever the hell they're going to buy in their brokerage account. And when their children take over, they can swap it for, for Bitcoin or whatever the hell else they want to swap it for. And that is what's interesting. If the rails are built that way, then the next generation can hold it the way they want to hold it and the current generation will hold it the way they want to hold it. And it's not necessarily an age thing because look, I'm more into, well, my son and I are more into bitcoin and self sovereignty than my two younger daughters. So in our family it's sort of inverted but it's really about know, tech savviness versus not and caring about it. And you know, there's a lot. Anyway, I think I saw Tony, then Amateo, then Ryan. So why don't we go in that, in that order. Thanks, Dave. I think it was Bruce that was talking about the banks and so forth. And I definitely echo those statements. You know, it's a double edged sword you have Blackrock and use TradFi institutions coming in, they're building incredible on ramps for the masses to be able to access the asset. However, if you see the letter that Citadel is sending the IC and the banks lobbying to try to kill stablecoin yield on crypto exchanges, you know, they're trying to steal some of the ethos of crypto and I think we still have, we got to find that balance. And I think a lot of that is happening. I saw a lot of dialogue and threads on X about the bank lobbying and you know, our Senator Tim Scott and Senator Elizabeth Warren going to be able to, you know, push back on Elizabeth Warren and some of the Democrats. So it's funny to balance because it looks like tradfi. They would love to take it all over and, you know, customize it the way they want it and forget about the ethos of Bitcoin. I mean, to be. Sorry, I just want to be specific here because I understand this process well. I mean Citadel quite literally has written comment letters about every possible disruptive technology that threatens their existing model. Keep in mind they spend absolute fortunes to have maintained the highest speed connections and the highest speed, you know, data center access in Aurora, which is where the CME is in northern New Jersey and all three data centers where nyse, NASDAQ and the CME are based and they like the closed system that creates barriers to entry to them for obvious reasons. It's ironic because citadel was nowhere 20 years ago in equity trading or in bond trading and the fact fact that technology allowed them to become bigger than all the big banks who were asleep at the switch. And now Citadel is saying, well, screw it. We don't want to see an egalitarian system that deprioritizes speed and makes it so that the barriers to entry are much, much less. So we're going to fight against it. I mean, look, I know the, I know a lot of the people. I, I'm not going to say I know Ken Griffin, I met him once. But I do know one level down from him and actually I'm friends with several of them. You need to understand that's how the game is played. I don't like the game. I wish the game didn't exist. I mean, I, I, you know, you could say whatever the hell you want, but understanding how the SEC and comment letters work, understanding how lobbying works, I mean, so many industries have been perverted by the dollars from lobbying in this country. It's, it's, it's actually sickening. Financial, the financial Industry is perverted. Less than, than food, for example, or pharma, or insurance, health care. But, you know, that's the game. Now in this particular game, Citadel is basically pushing for that. Their letter is, is ridiculous on many levels. I actually was texting back and forth with one of the people who was on that panel when they were talking about it, would love to rip it to pieces, but frankly, the SEC only cares about people who are sitting in current firms. And so I'm not spending my time debunking it, but the truth is that there is a, that this is how the game is played. This is the then they fight you phase. In reality, we all have been focused on that. Then they fight you publicly. But what's really going to matter is when the rules get written is how much influence the existing players can tweak them in a way that pushes them badly. Yeah, I agreed. I mean, this is par for the course. The incumbents, they're going to want to keep things under their control as much as possible, but I think, I think like I said, we got to find a balance and I think the industry has some fighting to do here. To your point. Yeah, no, I, I completely agree. I think that, that you're right. Not a th percent because that's, that doesn't exist, but you know, 100%, I, I agree with you. Sorry, Scott, couldn't help the tweak. Amateo, I think you were next.
- [15:00]
F
Hey, Dave.
- [15:01]
G
Yeah, I mean, the, the pushback is interesting because aside from the tension around this legislation, it's pretty clear that we're starting to get a full embracing of the actual just rails and promise of blockchain as a whole starting to materialize. And I think that that's. I, I would, I empathize and also feel very similarly, as a lot of bitcoiners do, of like, you know, what do they, what do they do to our boy? You know, BlackRock Bitcoin ETF is like their number one ETF based profit engine. This was clearly a very calculated move, although it opens these things up. However, what I'm sort of seeing is that there's all of these actual blockchain rails get built, get established, and that the US Government has decided that this is a technology that wants to be embraced. And I think that, that the thing that's sort of remarkable about that is I think we would have all thought that that would have accrued to this massive surge within the industry itself for, for a multitude of projects. And we've seen some perform and obviously bitcoin has done quite solidly, but I mean like more, more out of an extensive uplift as a whole. When we're seeing all of this progress happening yet VCs can't raise, hedge funds, aren't deploying into early stage. There's just a lot of changes that have happened in the actual liquidity and landscape. So I think that what we're going to see here ultimately to the point that I'm trying to make, is that we're going to have a lot of these rails actually be built to tested and maybe enabled while we get some weird sideways action, sort of wait till liquidity sort of arrives within the market and all of a sudden everyone wakes up to everything that's actually been done and that the fact that like all of this progress isn't priced in yet is pretty shocking. We do keep sleeping on it. I don't know how or when exactly this catches up, but it's going to be a shock to the system I think when all of this renewed interest comes back into a much wider range of the industry and these tokens as a whole and people actually start to see all the progress that was done while they were asleep at the wheel.
- [17:31]
A
Well, look, I hate to say it, but I think that we're seeing a rotation from crypto native folks in general to people who look more like me as bitcoin's being put into people's portfolios as Ethereum is being touted by Tom lee, as there's Dats for Solana and ETFs for XRP. And I think you're seeing that. I think it's pretty clear you're seeing it. And what's really fascinating, what people in crypto literally don't understand, there's an enumeracy that's going on is that the people who are now starting to, are actually the buyers, you know, over the last, you know, four months, certainly since October and, and really arguably this, most of this year are, are literally putting the, their pinky toe, you know, dipped in the water. It's just such a small amount and a small percentage and so it's, it's really fascinating. That's why I, I wonder, I mean, you know, I think people are going to look back, I genuinely believe it. I don't know, I hope that everyone here disagrees with me because I want to be in the minority. But I think people are going to look back a year from now and say what the hell were we thinking about this four year cycle telling us that bitcoin really needed to drop to 50,000. I think it's funny, but I think that it's a dominant narrative among most of the, you know, KOLs. God, I hate that term. You know, in crypto, most of which have never traded a financial market before they got into crypto. So you know, we'll see. I mean that, that, that is what I genuinely believe is, is happening here. But you know, the thing that, that I, I would say to both of you guys and it's, and it's really to Bruce as well, is if in fact the re. Everything ends up tokenized faster than we think. Than the ability of banks to keep people in deposits paying no interest when they can easily swap back and forth and have payment rails from competition to into Bitcoin into Ethereum into whatever and actually take self custody of, of those things if they wish. Is, is a much bigger genie out of the bottle moment than I think people are realizing.
- [19:50]
E
Yeah, dis. We disintermediated the banks before with Reg q, you know, 50 years ago, what, 60 years ago and it didn'. And like we're at a point with the fiscal situation where we can't afford the rolling recessions of the 1960s. Normal plain vanilla recession would take the deficit to 15% of GDP, if not arguably 16. You probably have rates rising in the face of that amount of bond supply. So if that's really, you know, if that's. I, I'm not plugged into all the, the lingo and the kind of finer details of that, that world or that theme. But if that's really the direction things are going, then the credit contraction that we could see in the, and the subsequent or consequent, you know, decrease in terms of economic output could cause some really big problems in terms of being a margin claw on the debt.
- [20:44]
A
Yeah, I don't think people are, are. It's, it's, it's fascinating because you know, every time bitcoiners talk about sound money, and by the way, I am an Austrian monetarist and that's how I got into Bitcoin in the first place. People make this statement like there's two choices. Totally sound money, gold standard like with bitcoin with fixed supply or Fiat Ponzi with ultimate credit creation, there is a middle ground. And it's kind of what you're alluding to, Robert, which is you can have credit as long as it's, you know, there's consequence to not paying it back and you can, you can have credit in a sound money system. It's simply that it has to get paid back. It's like if you think of Game of Thrones, you know, you got to pay back the bank of Braavos or else. Well, yeah, it's. What's been missing in the Fiat system is URLs, because governments are the ones borrowing like absolute crazy and they don't have to pay anyone back. They could just print more money. So it is, it is interesting, but, you know, whatever. Anyway, I can go down those rails forever anyway. Ryan, you've been very patient.
- [21:48]
B
Yeah.
- [21:50]
H
Thanks guys. Man. So, so many things here. My thoughts just kept piling up ever since Dave, your opener. And then Bruce came in, which is always great. Dave, like you, you kind of opened up with, with be careful what you ask for. And then Bruce kind of came in with what I would generally agree with, which is I'm highly skeptical. The problem is I've spent the majority of my adult life being highly skeptical of the government getting involved in systems and in crypto. We've spent the last decade getting things to work in spite of the government, not with the government. We've been trying to build rails to keep the government from tampering with things. We've been trying to build rails from keeping the banks from tampering with things because we've never viewed the government involvement or the bank involvement as a good thing. And now we're kind of being sold this story of the government's getting involved, Wall Street's getting involved, the banks are getting involved, everyone's rah rah for this technology. And a lot of us are kind of sitting back looking at this, going, I don't know if I trust this. And then we look at a lot of the treasury companies which were supposed to be the rah rah. Like, look, we're taking Bitcoin mainstream and they're selling off in parts of their holdings in November as though we're going into another four year cycle. And it's looking like the people that have been entrenched in Bitcoin are trying to hand the bag off to the general investor, saying, here, you hold this. Over the next four year cycle, we're going to jump in when we know it's safe in another three years. I'm looking at all these indicators just thinking like, wow, this looks exactly like the other cycles that I've seen. Towards the end of the year we pump the narrative a lot and try to hand it off to someone else while we all go, so we don't all go down with the ship over the next three or Four years. And then I hear the banks saying these things about tokenization and the government saying that they're going to come in with better regulations and they're looking to partner with crypto projects. And I'm just incredibly, incredibly wary of all of this. So is it the sheep being herded into a pen? Possibly. I really hope it's not like the government is made of people. Right. And we're all kind of in this together, if you want to think of it that regard. But that hasn't been the mentality of the crypto community for the last 10 years. So it's very, very suspicious of this.
- [24:28]
A
Yeah, that I think you encompassed it well and I think that's why prices are kind of, you know, stuck here, you know, probably between the mid-80s and low-90s until this resolves itself. And I think that's exactly what's going on from a market point of view, from a adoption point of view. I think that underestimating how important it is to get and distribute the biggest bitcoin in particular is a problem. I mean, to me you can't have hyper bitcoinization. You can't have the notion of bitcoin becoming money unless it is literally held by 100% of the people who are going to use it. And when you're at like 2% or 1% or less in substantive size, it's just not going to get there.
- [25:21]
H
But the gotcha is for who's going to use it. Nobody's using it, Nobody even knows how to use it. I mean, if you accidentally use bitcoin for a purchase, it's like, oh, that was really easy, that was cool. And you think, oh man, did I just make a really big mistake by spending my bitcoin?
- [25:39]
A
Right. Well, but that's just it. I mean, you know, it's, it, it's a double edged sword when it's, when it's undervalued. I always make the statement Scott's going to as, don't crash and roll your eyes too much, you know, whatever. I always say that for the foreseeable future, Bitcoin trades like an option on its future adoption. And so, you know, you don't spend options, you spend it when you think the option has been exercised and it hasn't happened yet. And you know, it's, it's still, even at these prices, is not close to where, you know, people believe it is. When you look at gold and silver, you understand, I mean, you know, this ludicrous conversation about gold with Peter Schiff. Well, Tokenized gold will be easy because you don't have to trust it. It's like what you know, it's like you, you, it, you literally have to trust that. And in this particular case, it's clear that men with guns are guarding a vault, that auditors have made sure have nothing counterfeit in a vault, and that you have tokenized representation of that. Being tokenized doesn't change the fact that you have to have men with guns surrounding a vault, that you have to make sure there's no inside job swapping for tungsten planted or painted lead or whatever. It's a very different thing. Right. Bitcoin is different. And people who understand, funny enough, it's.
- [26:56]
H
Not actually we're seeing the same cold storage implementations around Bitcoin private keys as we are seeing around gold vaults now.
- [27:03]
A
No, but you still know what Bitcoin is there. And when you go to spend it, it's verifiable and being checked. When you go to spend tokenized gold, the only thing you're verifying is that the particular token is claimed on something that used to be there, but you don't know that it's still there. Right. It is different.
- [27:24]
B
Yeah. Mark, I think you're an ex.
- [27:27]
F
Yeah. It is not a fun time to go look at the whole plumbing and try to parse the language about qe, not QE and what it really means. And it's, it's just a weak hand that the Fed has. And if I, I came in a little late, but if I glean the, the tilt of the conversation, is it that if it gets really bad and people, the banks are not doing well and tokenization is a risk that they're just going to make a land grab for everything. And that you as a Bitcoin holder, you don't want to be really bad because then Bitcoin's a threat. And is that, was that the direction of the conversation or did I.
- [28:09]
A
Well, that's part of it. I mean, we're getting in a more philosophical in terms of long term, what needs to happen sorts of stuff. But you're right what Robert was saying, and from a price action point of view, yeah, there's a lot going on. And if you had asked two years ago, what did you want to happen? Pretty much this is what you wanted to happen. And then you look at it, well, wait a minute, the price didn't move.
- [28:35]
H
Right.
- [28:35]
B
But there's no reason rationally that most of these, these news stories that we're discussing should move the price of crypto assets. If anything, I can see why they would languish because these systems are not going to use coin number 73 on coin market cap to settle on DTCC. Right. I mean, listen, chainlink, for what it's worth, and you can debate it like is it seemingly in every single announcement that coin still doesn't move on those because we don't know if the value accrues to it. Totally separate conversation.
- [29:02]
A
But like this space with was downloaded.
- [29:04]
I
Via spaces down.com visit to download your spaces today.
- [29:07]
B
Why would Bitcoin move? Because the DCC is going to use tokenization and blockchain rails probably on a private blockchain. I mean, who is this really benefiting all this news? It's benefiting the banks because they get faster and cheaper and giving them more control. But it's not investable or particularly beneficial to like your average crypto holder. In fact, I think you can make an argument that it's making most of the things that people have believed in obsolete.
- [29:34]
A
Yeah, I'll push back a bit. Yeah, you want to answer that one? Because I do have the answer, but why don't you go?
- [29:47]
G
Yeah, I mean I think that we all, it's natural that everyone should be skeptical about what's going on because this whole ecosystem was built with government and centralized institutional intervention in our lives. And not wanting it was the reason we did. Bitcoin was created to go against the banks and now banks are embracing these technologies. I think the skepticism is real. I kind of the sentiment that I gather around crypto is reminiscent to me of when there was this call from Ilya and many of the other godfathers of AI to just put a pause and just slow down, let's reevaluate, let's take a breather and let's just take a pause that we can see where we're going and try to do this safely. And there was no stopping it. And eventually deep seek dropped in China and then everything was went crazy because there was no slowing down, there was no taking a pause. And so I just wonder that if the situation that we're in is the fact that this is, this, this has become a trend that we're not able to stop. And this isn't why a lot of people signed up for this industry or started investing into it. And I think that there's a huge sentiment crash going on as a result of the evolution, but I don't think that the, the trend and the evolution is going to be stopped at this point. I think we have to now reorient and say, okay, where is this headed? What is the next stage of this and how do projects build and support this? Because it's the other side of the train and there's no stopping it.
- [31:38]
A
Eric, I think you are next and you've been very patient.
- [31:42]
I
Yeah, I was just going to answer what the previous speaker has said about, about the Fed and what's happening over there. And the answer here is that Fed will inject liquidity. They will stop any banks from going completely underwater. That's why they have done what they've done in the past few weeks and announced for the next three months or four months that they will print money a little bit, but they can easily print 3 times 4, 5, 10 times that if they want. They will not let the financial system go underwater. But if you look at the magnitude of it compared to what the Congress has passed, the big beautiful bill, which is like two or three trillion dollars underwater, that's huge. The Fed probably won't even reach that, although eventually over the long run we know they will. But for the moment, no. And it says that the treasury and all that is massive liquidity into the system, massive inflation. So I wouldn't be too much worried about like in 2009, a whole big price test affecting the whole system because when, if and when the cracks go bigger, the Fed will just intervene. So if, if you look at, at it from a crypto investment point of view. Well, if you have a big takeout at that time, use it as a gift to get in back to you.
- [32:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that, that the only thing I would disagree with you on is that is what type of influence inflation. Yes, it will definitely spur inflation, but I think most of it will be guided towards assets rather than consumer goods. Especially when you look at what's going on in oil and natural gas, you know, with energy inputs dropping, it is, it's it consumer inflation is, is restrained. And while it's not good societally, and I know I'm going to get Robert, you know, get all fired up, but when wages don't keep up, then what you end up with is prioritizing capital over labor, which by the way, has been the policy for decades. And so you end up in this sort of situation where the only question, the only way you get consumer inflation is if there's more demand for the consumer goods that actually feed it, AKA you know, food, you know, et cetera. The, you know, medical care is a big part of it and that who the hell knows how that's going to, you Know, going to, going to resolve. But people are not pricing in the magnitude of tax refunds that are going to get processed in the next, you know, four months. They're not. It's just the markets or maybe the stock market is where it is because of that. But certainly crypto is not pricing that yet. But I want to answer things Scott said before, before we go to I think Mark then Amateo again. The answer of why the Rails matter for Bitcoin and matter for tokens that have potential value is because what people need to understand is when these Rails are there then access, and I mean real access, not difficult, you know, simple on an app, on your phone, one click for the average human being to be able to invest in Bitcoin and move back into saving Bitcoin and, and you know, and spend in fiat becomes a reality. The ability to move into different tokens, in and out becomes a reality. Whereas right now people are the average person's terrified. You know, young people or people who understand it aren't. But that's the difference.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah, but at this point who that wants access to something specific doesn't have it. I do understand that there's like a level of opening the doors to more people. But like are we still having the conversation where like I really wanted to buy Ethereum but I can't find a way?
- [35:18]
A
No, we don't have that. But we do have the. I don't. This isn't mainstream. I'm trusting this. It's it, it does matter. You know, it's like for example, I.
- [35:27]
B
Think we're just kind of talking about two different things. I think that we're just going to have maybe the things that win are not invented yet or I just think like the use cases for a lot of the deadish tokens that people are praying and thinking that why isn't all of this moving my Altcoin bags or is pretty much.
- [35:44]
A
Oh that's I. But I've been saying that for a year. I said this year would be. And I thought it would be at higher levels but I thought this year was the story.
- [35:54]
B
I mean just think about. We are literally having every institution like that's meaningful in the world. Governments talking about the adoption that we dreamed of and it's not moving anything.
- [36:06]
A
Right.
- [36:07]
B
Like I can understand why it's not moving Bitcoin, Bitcoin. But so like you know, like if this isn't doing it, DTCC is probably going to be on DTCC chain, right?
- [36:17]
A
Well, so probably not, but it doesn't matter. I mean, the thing is, is there's, if you narrowly look at layer ones, yes, that's a separate conversation. But the truth is the, the only tokens that have clear value, you know, that you understand the value because of the fee model and staking model and, and burning model are ones that are that, that are participating. Like things like whether you like it or not, hype or pump fun or BNB are all tokens that you at least understand their value model. You have no idea to this day. And, and you know, like I own some chainlink. The reason I don't never made it a huge position is because Sergey would never answer the question. Mostly because he was afraid of regulation. Which is, which is. Okay, let's say everything goes and you get your most optimistic case. Please show me how this accrues to the token holder and he or nobody does that. And then when you get to other coins, there literally isn't one. Right. There's like no path for the token holder. Like, you know, I fight with the XRP army all the time. I mean, you know, I think yesterday I saw the single dumbest post I've ever seen on this platform. Someone posted a poll.
- [37:31]
B
Too, and then.
- [37:31]
F
I saw your response.
- [37:33]
A
Yeah.
- [37:36]
B
Five bucks or something.
- [37:37]
A
I mean, I mean, yeah, that was the, the low scenario was, was 5 to 25 with. I don't care if that was a 2026, you know, poll, it would be really, really stupid.
- [37:46]
B
Yeah, guys, for those who missed it, it was a poll saying what will the price of XRPB by the end of the year? And the lowest option in the poll was like a 2 1/2x from current price in the next two weeks.
- [37:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's just, I, I, you know, you see stuff like that and you wonder why people in traditional finance think that people in crypto are lunatics. You see it and there's some truth there, right? You know, there's some truth. But anyway, I, you know, I've seen a bunch of, a bunch of hands. I mean, Mark, I think yours was up the longest. So you, then Eric, then Ryan and Robert.
- [38:19]
F
Thanks. Yeah, I like that hand slap, I'll call it, that you gave the XRP person because at a point in time, yes, any is possible, folks, but that's not healthy for the system. You know, put your opinion back in your, in your fingers and off the board.
- [38:33]
A
You realize over almost 5, 000 people voted in this poll. I mean, if it was, if it was ignored, I wouldn't have cared. But I looked at it. It's like, are you kidding me?
- [38:42]
F
Crazy, Insane. I was going back to the, back to the Fed point and the gentleman after Amateo spoke was, you know, talking about the one big beautiful bill and fully agree with you. 40 billion is nothing compared to the, you know, 15 annualized debt increase. I still think that's the most underreported point. And the, the language and the language that they've used about why it's not QE doesn't really matter because what it does allow the Fed to do is simply buy bonds from Treasury. That's it, that's the main goal. And they say there's no duration risk. So we're not reducing the price of mortgages because we're not buying 10 year bonds. So that's their out. It's true, they're not. So the mortgages doesn't really have an impact on it but it allows the Fed, the Treasury to issue bills and they're only at 20% of bills to total debt right now. And after 08 they went to 35%. And I think the print is coming. And the reason why the tokenization of deposits can't happen is because reserve management allows the Fed to do this. It allows them to play with the bank's reserves. They can't have that shit tokenized flying around the globe because then it takes away the Treasury's ability to issue debt safely. So that is the link that finally went off in my head about why this whole tokenization of deposits tokenize anything you want. Fucking deposits are mother's milk. It's the last thing and the government will starve without it.
- [40:27]
A
Well, yeah, okay, what did I say was next? I'm trying to remember. I think it was Eric was next. And then, and then Robert wants to respond.
- [40:37]
I
Just a quick thing regarding energy prices because I think you were saying that energy prices would be low and inflation would not be high because of that energy prices will remain high because of all the data centers being produced. You just have no choice. So if there's a little spike down, it's very temporary, it's going to be back up. And in fact for the consumer what will happen is a lot of these data centers will get the deals with the utility company to pay a little bit less, which then the balance of it will be have to be put on the consumer to go back to a balanced, you know, cash flow for the utility company which means energy inflation is here to stay as well. So energy, the real energy for the consumer and I'm sure infra will fully agree with that it's more around like 10 a year, 8 to 10% a year and it's not stopping.
- [41:29]
A
Back to you Robert, before you answer, I, I'm very curious. What percentage of consumer production, demand etc is electricity versus oil for transportation, heating, etc. That's really the question because oil is moving in one direction and electricity for the reason Eric just mentioned is moving higher.
- [41:52]
I
I think that's a question for Anna.
- [41:54]
A
Yeah, it would be great if you were here. Yeah, you're right.
- [41:57]
E
In the past on that note, first over the past five years electricity costs for the CPI index are up 40% for zero. So yeah, I think that Eric's right. I also think that commodities are probably going to break out here. A lot of, you know, kind of, I've been saying this for months now but a lot of you're starting to hear that start to be discussed from some of the bigger macro, macro guys, they're starting to get bullish on commodities and look, look at what the dollar did yesterday and the day before really ever since the rate decision and especially after Powell started talking, it went down and you know, for the DXY to fall by half of the percent but that's not nothing, that's a move worth paying attention to. And I think that in a weaker dollar environment where you have the Fed printing money again by the way, it's not to directly monetize the debt, it is to buy off the run secondary market U.S. treasury. So they're not directly monetizing the debt because they're not bidding at auctions with the US treasury, but they are effectively suppressing interest rates through the creation of new bank reserves which you know, I mean you can say that it's not QE because it's not duration but like it's a, you're, you know, you're missing the forest for the trees, especially the effect for Bitcoin. So we're entering kind of this like reflation sort of environment. Commodities, weaker dollar, you have high beta consumer cyclicals just going nuts over the past couple days. So you know, I think that that in that world, in that regime over the next, I don't know, two years at least over the next year especially once you add in the fiscal impulse that is going to be coming from one big beautiful bill, tax refunds, yada yada yada. I, I think it's setting up for super bullish outlook for, for Bitcoin. I, you know, obviously don't subscribe to the four year cycle. Sort of we're going to 50K I, I, I am, am buying any dips here. Below 90k, you know, you just got one.
- [44:06]
A
So you know, it's like as NASDAQ has just sold off a percent or so, you know.
- [44:10]
F
Yeah.
- [44:10]
A
And below 90, well now it's back. Okay, it's back above 90, so. And it's gone.
- [44:16]
E
And just one, one, one last point, unfortunately. Right. We all, as much as we might not like it, we have to admit that bitcoin trades is like a high beta NASDAQ back. So you know, if you have tech rotation out of tech, which is what we've seen over the past week, two week or two, maybe even three, we've seen kind of a rotation out of the AI trade, out of the mag, seven out of tech. If you have kind of relative tech weakness, unfortunately that's going to lead to bitcoin weakness until we break that correlation. So I think you, if you have a view on bitcoin, you have to number one, have a view on the dollar. Number two, you have to have a view on liquidity and number three, you have to have a view unfortunately on kind of broader economic conditions for the US and what big tech specifically, you have to have a view on AI and the AI trade.
- [45:13]
A
Someone just pointed out something about that the 5,000 accounts are probably mostly bots that voted in that poll. I guess that's probably true. Who the hell knows what that hell is going on out there. But anyway, I, I lost all hands. Oh, Matt, I see your hand up.
- [45:26]
C
Yeah, I just wanted to jump on. You mentioned the power and infra, I know you've talked about that before and some of the numbers that we looked at, Dave, when you were talking about electricity, I think that's really key that you break that out away from oil. But some of the data that we've looked at here, that electricity prices in multiple regions across the U.S. we're looking at about 20 to 40% increases here into 2026. And that's a big, that's a big increase right there. So I think that really, you know, from, from the standpoint that compute is really becoming the commodity and power is the scarcity and more data that we've seen come across our desk is that AI training is continuing to climb. We're going to need at least 20 to 25 gigawatts by 2030 and we have a huge gap here. I think we just added, what was it, like 2.6 gigawatts last year. So yeah, and I think that the advancements of batteries, that's going to Be a big thing next year. Batteries are going to be able to help power so much. I think there's a big investment opportunity in those companies in that sector. When it comes to energy, we're going to be creating these batteries. So. Yeah, good.
- [46:22]
A
Well, also small, small modular reactors. Well, the, the biggest difference between AI and many other power and home power use is home power use is dependent on. On local grids and a distributed grid. You can build, do AI training in data centers that are off grid if you have to. You and you could potentially. And that's a big difference. Right. You can locate data centers near power or locate power near data centers. You can't. Same as with Bitcoin. And by the way, it's one of the reasons why it will support ultimately bitcoin mining for very strategic reasons, both in terms of putting the grid power onto the grid as AI gets more integrated, because that only lasts for some period of time, but it's a very complicated process point. If you listen to Mike Alfred talk about where the future has to go and where the power has to go, where the data center capacity has to go and the infrastructure, I think people are missing the forest for the trees there. But that's a, that's a totally different story. Anyway, Ryan, we just like that subject.
- [47:26]
H
That I've been talking about for years.
- [47:29]
A
Go for it, man.
- [47:30]
G
Yeah.
- [47:31]
E
Geez.
- [47:32]
H
Where do we start? We are, you know, we had a war on nuclear in this country for so long where it was not in my backyard. We've been trying to decommission plants and we are turning a corner where energy is now the new frontier, where it's every single decommissioned plant. You know, California wants to be this leader in technology and their grid is an absolute mess and they've been decommissioning their power plants. So San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, Southern California. I'm just waiting for an AI company to come along and reignite those reactors and say they're building an AI data center like right off the coast of Southern California there. Every single decommissioned plant is going to be coming back online. Everyone's going to be just on a hunt for the resurgence of electricity generation in this country. And the great thing about bitcoin miners is we've spent the last decade looking for cheap electricity, stable infrastructure, and favorable governments. Like, we've been hunting this for over a decade now. So every single bitcoin miner on the face of the earth is now sitting on some of the best commodity on the face of the Earth because they're now in competition with AI. The problem is, and this is why I always circle back around to is bitcoin historically was the only player in town for. For properly monetizing electricity. Obviously there's other uses, but bitcoin was always that, hey, you have stranded electricity. Monetize it with bitcoin. Now there's competition where people are saying, monetize it with hpc. HPC historically has been three times the cost to build out than bitcoin mining. So for every $1 million Bitcoin mining, you're spending $3 million to build it out with HPC. And a lot of bitcoin miners that tried to switch into HPC have gotten completely wrecked because they just didn't know what they were doing. And before, when you could just shove bitcoin mining toasters in any random garage or shed around the world that had a power connection, it's not the same with hpc. It's very, very different to run a proper data center. And they're learning these hard lessons. And that's why we've seen a lot of bitcoin miners that try to make the switch fold up. But over the near term, we're going to see a lot of bitcoin miners realizing that they're going to make more money as hpc. So they're either just going to be selling out to these larger data center players because they already have the power contracts. That's most likely what's going to start happening. They're going to start selling off all their bitcoin mining stuff. We're going to see a drop in network difficulty because of it. We're going to see a scattering of bitcoin miners to more abroad countries that can have cheap electricity, but not stable enough infrastructure for AI Compute. So over the next five years, I think we could really see bitcoin mining actually pushing out of the US because AI is taking up all the load. And then we're going to start seeing the bitcoin mining jumping more into South America and more into the Middle East.
- [50:51]
A
Sorry, I was muted. I was asking you a question, Ryan, because, you know, training of AI. Yeah, I get that, Whatever. But AI use in. In the US in particular, or any place is going to be very peaky. Right. You know, it's. You're gonna have. It's gonna be bursty like market data does, and it's obviously going to tail off at night when people are sleeping for lots of.
- [51:17]
H
So yes and no. So what's interesting is AI training is what uses the majority of the power Right. Because you're basically having to rewrite the vector field every single time you want to add new data to it. When it comes to inference, what we're getting to is we're actually pruning down these models and we're making them smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where you can run them on your personal devices. And as we keep pruning these models, where once we had 300, 500, a trillion billion or trillion parameter models, now we're dropping them into the millions of parameters and they're going to get small enough to where we can actually make integrated circuits. It's essentially the equivalent to a bitcoin mining asic. We're going to have that with AI models where we're going to be able to actually turn an AI model into an asic. And now your inference is going to happen at the speed of light and that's really going to be the unlocking of the robotic revolution. And it's going to make inference so dang cheap. It's not going to be tied to the electricity grid, it's not going to be tied to these data centers anymore because it's going to be essentially the ASIC of AI compute. That's like the holy grail that a lot of people are working towards right now. Long term, it's really the model training and making these models smarter and smarter and smarter and then they're going to prune them down into what we'll see as chip manufacturing. That's what everyone's pushing for. So it's a lot of electricity, mainly just for training and for making the models bigger.
- [52:50]
A
Okay, well that's interesting. I want to process that, but that's interesting. I had never really heard that before, but that makes a lot of sense. Matt, I see your hand is up.
- [53:01]
C
Yeah. Brian, it's great to have you in the space, man. It's great to connect with you. You bring some really great insights. My question then would be the next thing is we've seen a lot of data centers already sitting basically empty. They're not energized. We've got a big problem with the power providers. How do we upgrade the power providers so that they can get the power to the data centers or the folks who need it? Because that to me seems to be almost one of the other biggest links that nobody's talking about right now.
- [53:24]
H
A lot of that infrastructure is coming from China. We have a huge bottleneck with transformers and a lot of the power infrastructure where we've been on this all out terror to find cheap electricity and buying up land around data center centers and building out infrastructure. And now we're pushing our limits on, on shipping logistics.
- [53:52]
A
So yeah, all of this matters, you know, and, and I guess we'll see it. We kind of, you know, you know, veered into, you know, into some really interesting stuff. But we're getting close to time. So if there anybody else has any other comments about what's going on here, I mean, you know, Gary, I saw you jump up, you know, any particular care about, you know, this level? I mean, I, I've been making fun of people for calling, you know, I guess what's his name, James Wynn came on and said, oh my God, look, you see I'm right. It crashed from 92 to just below 90. It's like, I, I don't know what you think. I think that we are. It's just in that kind of period where this is, this is noise. But what do you think? You there, behind the mic there. Anybody?
- [54:42]
H
Yeah, I'll jump in. I've been like, once again, Dave, I've been like studying this whole like trading range thing that you keep talking about. And it just seems like we're in this sideways range and, and for whatever reason, when I see the, like historically, when I've seen the price of bitcoin go down sideways like this, it's, you know, people are twiddling their thumbs waiting for something to happen. They get bored and they're like, bitcoin's too risky. I'm just gonna sell.
- [55:06]
E
So.
- [55:07]
H
And especially going into a weekend, so it's, it's kind of like we're going into a holiday, we're going into a weekend. We might get another boost on Monday, but people are going to de risk and sell off before they get locked in for the Christmas break.
- [55:23]
A
Dwayne.
- [55:26]
E
Oh, thanks. Well, you know, at least the way I'm looking at it, when you have an asset or even like an equity, and you have a series of tailwinds here, right? So you have a series of long term tailwinds, cascading tailwinds, but in the interim, you need some sort of catalyst to, you know, perk people's interest, so to speak. So even though you have, you know, the US government, they're saying, okay, we're no longer looking at bitcoin and crypto as a strategic risk, it's no longer a systemic risk, et cetera, we have all of these tailwinds and all this positive news. There isn't enough. There isn't enough. I guess sentiment Changing catalysts on the interim to really move prices. So even with a rate cut and the prospects of going into a new cutting cycle, that's not necessarily enough. Right. When you contrast that with say, gold and silver, everyone was talking about that today as well. There's some fundamental reasons in regards to why that's moving as well, notwithstanding any of the geopolitical risks and the geopolitical interests and dollarization, etc. But there's some real reasons behind that. So I think in some ways there isn't really a big reason to panic here. With bitcoin going sideways, that can kind of be expected since we're in this sort of, you know, we're in this sort of status or this interim time right now where we don't have any near term real catalysts to push things up.
- [57:09]
A
Yeah. I mean, I will say one thing. What tends to happen in markets, people always obsess about catalysts. Very, very rarely are the catalyst is it catalyst happens and should happen. That's only when there's major news events. What generally happens are. And the technical technicians will say this to you or tell you that their version of it, My version is different, is markets tend to move based off price, action and sentiment. And then they move slowly, slowly, slowly and then fast. And then people try to invent catalyst to describe it. That happens so much more often than the other way around. So I'd be very careful about that. I mean, if behind the scenes there's a lot of money being infused, like for example, tax refunds start filtering in, but it won't be one day. You know, it's not like April 15, people start, you know, start pushing it earlier. If all of a sudden, you know, we wake up one day in February and we're. And Bitcoin's trading at 170,000 and it's been, you know, straight up for like three weeks. People may say, you'll see stories saying, well, bitcoin up significantly on increase on big beautiful bill, tax refunds, you know, whatever. I mean, people will start inventing it. But I'm not saying it's going to happen. I mean, it could. What I'm saying is that expecting some massive catalyst, I mean, frankly, we have enough news stories over the last three months that you could pick any one of them as catalysts. I mean, the bitcoin being allowed as collateral inside banking is absolutely massive for bitcoin adoption. Massive. And it didn't move. So is that because it's not massive or is it because people don't care about it now, but will once the price starts moving. I think it's a chicken and egg problem, and I think we see it a lot. Amateo.
- [58:56]
G
Yeah. I was just gonna say, I mean, if everything that's happened isn't a catalyst, and I don't know what is, you.
- [59:02]
A
Know, but the point is, is that we. We as humans like to know. After we see observed events, sense, we then want to explain it. That tends to be the. Our. That's our default wiring as opposed to, oh, this thing happened. Okay, well, that must happen. Boom. Jump in. I mean, I. I keep talking about 2020, you know, when Paul Tudor Jones in May came out and said that bitcoin's the fastest horse in the race, I took that as, okay, this is crazy. And I moved heaven and earth to. Because back then, it was really hard to be able to buy bitcoin in my 401ks, right? And. And. And it was the right thing to do, but I was like, after I moved heaven and earth and got it done in June, bitcoin didn't move at all. I mean, literally nothing, you know, for four months. And then it started. But, you know, it's like, this happens all the time anyway. Dwayne, you still up there or I still see your hand.
- [60:05]
E
Oh, my hand was enough, actually. I think something's glitching.
- [60:07]
A
I don't know if you can hear it does. No, we hear you fine. But okay, so anyway, it is. I'm gonna call it here because it's 1120 and I gotta go. Do you know something that I. Previous commitment. So I'm happy for all you guys. Thank you so much for participating, everyone. Follow all the speakers who give their time on Crypto Town Hall. We will see you on Monday morning at. At 10:15, and let's see what happens over the weekend. You know, it could be more of the same, but who knows? Fireworks always seems to happen on weekends these days, so who knows where we'll be? But in any case, have a great weekend. Everybody touch some grass. Enjoy the sun. We have plenty of that down here in Florida, so enjoy.
- [61:12]
I
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