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Eric Trump Predicts BTC To $1M, Marathon Buys $1B BTC | Crypto Town Hall
00:58:46
Eric Trump Predicts BTC To $1M, Marathon Buys $1B BTC | Crypto Town Hall
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- [00:01]
Scott
Morning everybody. Happy Wednesday and congratulations on surviving the great bitcoin bear market of the past two days. Takes a lot of resilience. We all deserve a T shirt or a mug. We had bitcoin drop from over 100,000 down to 94,000 basically two days in a row. And here we are back at $100,000. Bitcoin. Interesting how fast sentiment turns. Yesterday was doom and gloom back to 74,000 here on the show. I have a feeling that now today that we're sitting at 100, it's straight to 150, right? Isn't that how this works? So we do have bitcoin now trading at $100,000 literally exactly as we speak. Bitcoin dominance had a pretty sizable move to the upside. I'm looking at the chart really quick, which gives us obviously an indicator of how all coins are performing. Two days ago it went from basically know the low 55s even below 55 up to 58 now back to 56, which tells us all coins as it's kind of dropping today are performing well as bitcoin goes up, giving the market confidence. I think it's hard to be particularly bearish or depressed when bitcoin is anywhere near $100,000 anywhere even in the 90s, even if it's in the 80s and you were looking at this a few months ago, you would be astounded and should be exceptionally bullish. So I think things looking generally good for the entire market all the way around. We have the title here. Eric Trump predicts Bitcoin to 1 million. He's speaking, I believe, in Abu Dhabi at the bitcoin conference. I personally did not listen to the speech. Did anyone here listen to his actual comments to see why he predicted Bitcoin to 1 million? If you do, you can raise your hand. If not, then you're like me and saw the headline and moved on with your life. Anyone? Anyone? So I'm guessing nobody saw it, but I do think it is worth note when the president's son, who or future and past president's son who might know a little bit about the plans for bitcoin makes a prediction like that. And I do think we all agree that there are things that could send bitcoin to a million dollars that the government could do, like creating a strategic reserve. I haven't looked of late. Poly Market did not have the odds of that happening as very high as of right now. But there's definitely a non zero chance, I think that bitcoin becomes a reserve asset in the United States in the coming months. Right. Or that that's passed? I mean, Simon, you. What do you handicap that at right now? What do you think the odds that that happens are? We have Russia talking about it as well, of course.
- [02:42]
Simon
Sorry, Scott. I just joined and I was listening to something else. What was the question?
- [02:45]
Scott
Yeah. How would you handicap the odds of a bitcoin strategic reserve in the US in the coming months? We have Eric Trump predicting bitcoin to a million dollars here. Obviously, one reason he would be saying something like of knowledge of what's likely to happen, you know, in the upcoming administration.
- [03:02]
Craig
Yeah.
- [03:03]
Simon
It seems increasingly more likely. So we're getting a lot of rumors. I, for one, I don't know if other people agree, but I found Dennis Porter. When he says something, it normally leads to an announcement, and he has been hinting at that this is going to happen, and he set a space to make an announcement. Last time he did that, there was a bill introduced for Pennsylvania State. There was. Yeah. Comments around Russia, you know, so there's. There's a lot of comments around it. So I think the desire to be first to do this or make a formal announcement, what I'm not quite sure, and maybe others have expertise on this, is that if Cynthia Linus has the bill out there, maybe they found a way where it doesn't require congressional approval and they can just start buying bitcoin. Or does this require the bill to be approved? Yeah, sorry.
- [04:03]
Scott
To my understanding from when it was originally announced, Trump himself, obviously, at the bitcoin conference did not say he kind of came short of talking about buying bitcoin or specifically a strategic reserve, but he did promise to stop selling it, which is effectively the same thing. Right. Even though we see that some of that might be being sold off right now. Lummis's bill specifically, I think to buy that much bitcoin would require congressional approval, but to stop selling it and move that into basically be effectively a reserve would not require, I don't think, for that to happen.
- [04:35]
Simon
Okay.
- [04:35]
Scott
Yeah.
- [04:35]
Simon
So, I mean, that sounds like we might be getting an imminent announcement that they're not selling it, but then even then, we're still under the Biden administration, so who would be making that announcement and that decision? So it feels like there's definitely something coming. So I do expect an announcement, and I reckon, you know, people are trying to get ahead of that announcement, and that really feels like what's happening right now. And I think we're going to know specifically what that looks like in the next week or so and although they did sell some coins to Coinbase, I don't think we've got confirmation around whether there's a lot of movements like BlackRock's coins have been on the move about 100k Bitcoin is that they're moving them from Coinbase to Bank of New York Melon, you know, or is the coins that are being sent from the strategic, what would be a strategic reserve is that Coinbase Prime Trust, Coinbase custody? So there's an element of speculation and I don't think anyone's going to fully know until these announcements come out.
- [05:42]
Scott
Yeah, I love Coinbase, but regardless of the company, I think it shouldn't sit particularly well with anyone that almost all of the ETF assets across all of the issuers are sitting with one custodian. Right. So like I don't think anybody should be upset if that is actually a move to be in my melon, which has gotten the exemption to SAB121 to be able to custody Bitcoin. I think having that spread around to some degree would be a good thing and I don't think anyone would be surprised if BlackRock did that. Dave, you had your hand up.
- [06:12]
Dave
Yeah, I mean, I hate to be contrarian, especially when I agree with the ultimate, with the directionality of the message, but I don't think we're going to find out a damn thing about the US for months. Because first of all, no one can. The current administration is, if anything they're going to sell. I mean, it was funny to watch Peter Schiff encourage them to sell. But whatever the new administration, there's two things to know.
- [06:40]
Craig
First.
- [06:41]
Scott
Hey, Dave, I hate to cut you off, but the elliptical machine that you're riding is just too loud.
- [06:45]
Dave
Okay, sorry. How about now? That better?
- [06:47]
Scott
That's better. I know exactly what you're doing. I know exactly what you're doing. Exactly.
- [06:52]
Brian
Busted.
- [06:54]
Dave
Busted. Yeah, the. There's two possible avenues. One is a bill, the Lumis bill and the Limits bill is going to take months to work its way through. You know, the set of the House and watch Schoolhouse Rock to know, you know, when a bill becomes a law, that just takes time. So that's, that's, you know, we're not, certainly not going to know that in the next, next two or three months. The second is what the treasury can do. Now. I think they have pretty broad powers to buy crap given the fact that they put on their balance sheet all sorts of stuff between them and the Fed, from mortgage backed securities to whatever they can do that. But Scott Bessent, if that's how he pronounces his name, I'm not 100% sure, is a smart dude and he's not likely to signal what he's going to do. He's going to simply do it and then afterwards maybe talk about it. So I don't think we're going to know at any time soon in terms of what the US Federal government's going to do. But the indications are that they know this. I mean, keep in mind, bitcoin in their mind is undervalued by 10x. Well, if you have a chance to buy something undervalued at 10x, you don't tell everybody else to do it before you do it. You do it and then you tell people. So just keep that in mind. I think that's really important. And the only snarky comment I was going to make is Eric Trump is good. But the day that Nancy Pelosi publicly buys bitcoin, that's the time that you want to jump in.
- [08:17]
Scott
Well, you'll know that she already had publicly bought a lot of it and has front run us all for sure. Anyone else with any particular take? So I had, I mean, speaking of the million dollar prediction, I had plan B on my podcast on Sunday. And his cycle predictions using stock to flow and based on all these other things was 252 million. That's obviously a huge gap in potential prices. You know, a million is on the radar for some people for 2025. I think that's very high unless we get something like the reserve. But I think that anything is possible when you're looking at bitcoin. Anybody have another thought on these price predictions for this cycle?
- [09:01]
Lou
Well, I. Hey, Scott, it's Brian here. I had a thought too. Just about the conversation we were having before is sort of long term. What do we really want in terms of the bitcoin strategic reserve or strategic bitcoin reserve? I think if we have executive orders and the treasury kind of doing things unilaterally, it makes for a potentially bumpier ride. Whereas the legislation itself, if, I don't know if any of you all have read that, but it actually, if it were to be passed, it has a, what I'm calling like a statutory hodl period of 20 years. So you get much more, much more regularity and much more predictability if we can get that legislation passed as opposed to having the treasury decide or the president decide unilaterally, oh, I want to buy this amount of bitcoin. I want to hold this amount of bitcoin, because as soon as a new president comes in or there's an administration change, that can go out the window. And so as a bitcoiner who was looking for the American who is looking for long term stability, I think the important thing that we do is ensure that the Lummis bill gets through, gets the attention that it needs and gets through, because that's what's going to give us that long term stability and predictability. And even actually has a provision in it that says if there is for some reason a future fork of bitcoin, that even the forks themselves cannot be held. So that ensures that if you acquire a million bitcoin, that you can't unduly influence the trajectory of the fork by dumping one and holding the other, or vice versa. So I think you definitely want the Lummis Bill. I think that's the best way to go. That's the long term vision. If we, if we're a little. If we want something done in three months, you know, that's great and that's great for markets periodically. But I would certainly want to see the Lumis bill, given its due attention and pass Congress because you get a lot more stability that way.
- [10:47]
Scott
Right. I mean, there's a fear obviously for those who are either Republican or in this industry to some degree, is that you only really have two years here to legislate. Right. Because traditionally, I'm not saying it will or won't happen, but usually you have an election, if it goes all in one direction, two years later, you know, the other side freaks out and at least one of the houses flips or something. Whether that does happen or does not, it becomes much more difficult. So this is an imminent issue for bitcoiners, maybe not for the government, but they want to see this happen imminently and be passed into law. So it's much more difficult to reverse to your point.
- [11:23]
Dave
Yeah.
- [11:23]
Lou
And a perfect analogy is the healthcare debate of 0908, when it was uniquely unpopular amongst one partisan side and it led to the Republic. You know, after Obama was elected in 08, you had the 2010 kind of Republican red wave following the passage of the aca. And it was their mission to repeal that law for years and years, and it was never able to be done because it was passed what some would say is the right way. Giving that stability of having the law passed in Congress makes it very difficult to overturn down the road, even when things are deeply unpopular from one partisan side. So I think it's definitely worthwhile to focus up on the, on the, on the Lummis bill as opposed to kind of taking the instant gratification of having, you know, President Trump issue an executive order, assuming that we're, that's legal to do in the first place. So, yeah, there's definitely parallels and precedent for this and I'd feel much more comfortable if we had a law passed rather than using a Treasury trick or a regulatory trick.
- [12:24]
Scott
Are there any other narratives on anyone's radar that could be a catalyst for. It doesn't have to be a million, but much higher, you know, half a million dollar to a million dollar prices this cycle outside of the bitcoin reserve. Craig, go ahead.
- [12:41]
Craig
Yeah, my thought is I'm just watching people playing with all these different cryptos getting into, getting into this, getting out. And then I'm seeing a lot of the normies, my friends, who are not involved in this space, being like, Craig, is now a good time to buy. I' I'm not going to be the one to tell you that because we could see a retrace.
- [13:00]
Scott
I mean, look, during COVID what do we see?
- [13:02]
Craig
A three or $4,000 Bitcoin and here we are talking at 100,000 at just.
- [13:07]
Scott
Probably, I don't know, probably in the.
- [13:09]
Craig
Past hour and now we're talking to go to 250 and possibly a million. It's kind of funny money at this point.
- [13:17]
Scott
And at a certain point I can't.
- [13:18]
Craig
Wait for it to really stabilize and maybe that's where it comes in. It becomes a part of our currency and a savings mechanism. I kind of look at it as.
- [13:28]
Scott
Long term, separate, you know, that, that.
- [13:30]
Craig
IRA that you have for long term wealth building. And that's at least been my mindset. And I have such a better appreciation.
- [13:37]
Scott
This cycle for what bitcoin means, what.
- [13:39]
Craig
It represents and what it will do long term for families and those looking to retire, you know, over the coming years.
- [13:46]
Dwayne
Dwayne, hey, good morning. Yeah, I think there's a lot of other issues as well here. Like even the overall. Well, well, number one, it's politics, right? If Loomis can reach across the aisle, you know, in, in a better way and get more of the Rocanas on board to see if they can get this legislation passed because obviously that's a major catalyst and people on the outside looking in will definitely be looking towards that to see what will happen. And just the overall macro environment is a good catalyst for bitcoin as well. We're seeing inflation come in at least CPI in line with expectations, shelter is also coming down. Shelter is a major component of core right now. It's moved to 50% from around 70% last month. So if that continues to go, that's a major piece to the puzzle for the Fed in terms of their plans of getting to 2%. That's going to be a bumpy road to get there. We might get there at the fourth quarter, 2025, maybe 2026. But if those conditions continue, if we get a little bit more geopolitical risk into the mix as well, then it looks very good for bitcoin when, you know, not necessarily a moon to a million dollars, but we should see those kind of strategic assets like gold, like bitcoin, rise over the next, say, six months to 12 months.
- [15:11]
Scott
Yeah. The main topic of my YouTube show this morning was that Ray Dalio has switched his tune in February of 2023. Dalio, obviously billionaire, yet another billionaire now on board. He was dismissive of bitcoin, said it wasn't a store of value, wasn't good for transactions. And this week at Abu Dhabi Finance Week gave a speech saying, don't buy bonds and debt, buy bitcoin and gold. Right. So it's pretty astounding to have yet another brilliant mind like that on board. Andre, you had your hand up. And then Simon.
- [15:43]
Brian
Yes, exactly. Thank you. Good morning. So I think we talk a lot about sovereign adoption of bitcoin. We talk a lot about ETF adoption, right, ETF purchases, but we don't talk so much about corporate adoption of bitcoin outside of microstrategy, of course. But if you look at the data, they're really amazing, really stunning. So if you look at the change in corporate BTC holdings, in 2024 alone, corporate BTC holdings have increased by almost 300,000 bitcoins, right? So that's more than half of what global Bitcoin ETPs had a net inflows in 2024. So it's quite amazing, quite stunning. And it's been accelerating, right? It's been growing at a rate of more than 100% this year, right. And we know supply has only grown slightly less than 1%. So I think that's also exacerbating the supply chains. Also, I think one of the key drivers that could push Bitcoin towards 1 million, but I think $1 million per coin is probably more story for the end of the decade rather than next year. Except we have some kind of super cycle, right, where you have like the game theory playing out between, I don't know, major nations like Russia and U.S. right. And all these things. And then I think there's a real possibility, especially if you have an acceleration and adoption rates globally that you don't follow this kind of power law kind of price prediction. Right. You start to diverge from, from this kind of power law pattern. And this, I think this kind of scenario is increasing. I think the probability of this kind of scenario is definitely increasing.
- [17:37]
Scott
Lou Simon and Lou. Sorry, Simon and Louisiana.
- [17:42]
Simon
Yeah, So a lot of the, if you look at like the famous investor, billionaire Ray Dalio type of person or like a Jim Rogers, that type of thing, the number one reason why they would have the whole bitcoins go into zero narrative at some point was because they believed that the government wouldn't allow Bitcoin to succeed and then it would be outlawed. That was like the number one narrative. I think that narrative is gone now. So, you know, the opportunity to have that objection that the governments are just going to make this illegal. More likely is that they would do a confiscation or they would embrace tax. But you know, those aren't the same as making it illegal, which doesn't really impact price. So that's why I think you're getting a shift from like the famous billionaire investor type narrative. The other, the other thing, if we're thinking of a narrative that would drive to $1 million, it's like, for example, the bank of England just announced that they're updating their policies. So the pensions, hedge funds and very large banks and financial institutions, if they require a bailout, they're making it where it's completely confidential so that they don't have a cascading effect like a global financial crisis. Now for the bank of England to choose this moment to change the rules in order to have more secrecy in terms of who requires a bailout means that the central banking system is now just giving bailouts with no accountability and trying to prevent contagion. And so if we are moving to one of these systemic risk events and the fact that you've now got BlackRock trying to push to their clients that bitcoin is a risk, you know, a risk off asset rather than a risk on asset, the one that would drive it to a million is if you had a major event in the financial system, whether it be as big as a Global Financial Crisis, 2008 event, then, oh, I think someone's got a hot micro and bitcoin went up and you ended up with something like imagine you're trying to liquidate your stocks and you can go easily from your stock to Bitcoin etf. Bitcoin is the price that's rising because there is problems in banking. And if there was a bullish cycle in Bitcoin at the same time as a very large systemic risk event, then that would classify it as, this is no longer a risk on asset, this is a risk off asset. And if Bitcoin was a risk off asset, I don't think that's factored into the price at all. We believe it's a risk off asset as well as a risk on asset, but traditional finance may not. And imagine a scenario where people are selling stocks and going into the Bitcoin etf, and the underlying asset of the bitcoin ETF is going up when everything else is going down. That would be a million dollar narrative in this cycle, I believe.
- [20:54]
Scott
Lou, you had your hand up before.
- [20:59]
Brian
Yeah.
- [21:01]
Dwayne
I just want to think. I think that Trump wants to be the guy to make the bitcoin reserve happen rather than have a bill with someone else's name attached to it.
- [21:09]
Dave
And I think that he's already signaled.
- [21:11]
Dwayne
That he wants the price of bitcoin to be reflective of the success of his presidency, just like he talks about the stock market being reflective of the success of his presidency. So I'd really expect something to happen quickly. Even regardless of the legality of having the treasury buy bitcoin, I think the administration is going to disregard a lot of rules so that they can get done what they believe they have a mandate to do.
- [21:34]
Craig
And I think there's actually very little.
- [21:36]
Dwayne
The Democrats can do in the face of an onslaught of questionable presidential actions. And so if we're thinking about how we get to a million, I mean, obviously I think this is the biggest potential catalyst. But there, I think, are so many roads to a million. It's everyone that's going to drive this higher. At sovereign wealth funds, it's corporates, it's trad.
- [21:56]
Dave
And the largest opportunity is simply the.
- [21:58]
Dwayne
Billions and billions of individuals who don't own bitcoin yet.
- [22:01]
Craig
And we know that they come in.
- [22:02]
Dwayne
Fits and starts, but when they come, watch out.
- [22:06]
Scott
Tom.
- [22:08]
Lou
Hey, guys, just a few more data points. So we're really focused on the US which is fantastic because I think it's a signaling, and I put a pretty high likelihood of a strategic reserve in some form or fashion being approved in year one. But the total supply of gold for.
- [22:23]
Scott
All sovereigns worldwide is about 3 trillion.
- [22:25]
Lou
And if you convert that naively to 100k Bitcoin, that's 30 million Bitcoin which is not possible to purchase. But if we just assume broadly, corporates try to get to 5% or sorry sovereigns get to 5% of gold supply worldwide with their Bitcoin purchases, that's 1.5 million Bitcoin. The exchange traded volumes of bitcoin monthly are somewhere in the 4 to 500k range on the both buy and sell side. So you can imagine what 1.5 million in Bitcoin over a year or two.
- [22:56]
Scott
Really does on the buy side.
- [22:57]
Lou
For the order books it's really even hard to handicap what it could be. It could be 200, it could be a million. But when you start having these nation state purchases in even any percentage of gold, it becomes crazy numbers.
- [23:09]
Scott
Do we think that that's happening already and we just haven't heard about it? I mean do we have any, We've had seen conjecture about Qatar, Qatar, Qatar, however you guys want to pronounce it, potentially Saudi Arabia, obviously Russia is talking about it. We know that they do some mining. A lot of these countries do mining, smaller countries.
- [23:29]
Lou
Dave would be a good person here in terms of what it means, what would happen in the order books if you saw that. But I think you would see a lot more price action if you have a big T wap from one of these nation states actually logging in. Unless they're doing it over a very, very large, you know, period of time. And we could see very clearly on chain what the microstrategy purchases due to the price. So I'd be, I'd be pretty surprised if a lot of these programs already in place.
- [23:52]
Brian
Yeah.
- [23:53]
Dave
Keep in mind two things. I mean, first of all, it would be spread out as you say, and you know, to be dip buying, yada yada. It could very well explain why liquidation cascades in bitcoin other than that one day really have been incredibly mild by historical standards while everything else was getting crushed a couple days ago. The other thing is there are a lot of countries like Bhutan who are using mining. And frankly my conspiracy theory all along has been that's how China is accumulating bitcoin is by mining. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is doing the same thing. So we don't really know. Obviously that's even slower over a longer term, but it's still, you know, it's still part of the equation.
- [24:36]
Scott
Makes perfect sense. So the other story here obviously, besides how we can get to a million dollars is marathon buys a billion in bitcoin. We're now seeing a few miners specifically. I don't Think we've seen other companies, the United States of late, really outside of miners, trying to follow the MicroStrategy playbook. But we do have marathon raising, I think their second convertible note. Someone can, can correct me if I'm wrong to do exactly what Sailor MicroStrategy been doing. It was announced, I think on Monday that Riot platforms is doing the same. And I think I saw that core scientific as well. What does it mean to see some of these bitcoin miners and other companies starting to follow the Saylor playbook? I think Sailor has bought over a billion dollars worth of bitcoin or announced the purchases four Mondays in a row. I think I saw a stat that said it took basically a year of microstrategy buying when prices were much lower obviously to get to their first hundred thousand bitcoin. They went from 300 to 400, I believe it was in two weeks. Right. So major acceleration here in their bitcoin buying and now we have multiple other companies looking to do it tomorrow.
- [25:48]
Lou
Spaces is really giving me trouble this morning. My hand is not actually up, but.
- [25:51]
Scott
I will say that I saw your hand up. So now you have to have an opinion.
- [25:56]
Lou
Now I have to have an opinion. No, I do. I think as we saw with Microsoft.
- [25:59]
Scott
It'S really hard to get these things.
- [26:00]
Lou
Pushed through in public companies when you have boards that have to vote on them. Sailor has a unique level of control right now. So I think it's going to take a bit more though. I do think we're going to see it at the smaller level like we saw with Blockchain Iced Tea company or.
- [26:16]
Scott
Whatever it was for the last cycle.
- [26:19]
Lou
Like, I don't think there's any downside to these smaller companies just putting blockchain or bitcoin on their balance sheet or in their name and saying, hey, if you want a little bit exposure to us, here's some attention, free marketing, et cetera. I think we're going to see a lot of that.
- [26:35]
Scott
Anybody else an opinion on seeing other companies follow the microstrategy playbook? I guess we can also discuss what risk there is to the microstrategy playbook. If anybody has concerns there. Dwayne, you're looking at this, obviously I always say this, but kind of from a grander perspective than just from the bitcoin echo chamber. Does we have MicroStrategy going into the NASDAQ 100? The queues probably as soon as this weekend. We've seen, obviously they've accelerated their buying. Does anything about what you're seeing with MicroStrategy concern you?
- [27:08]
Dwayne
The only major concern with Micro Strategy is really just the rapid. Just, you know, they're just being a victim of their overall success. Just the rapid rise of MicroStrategy has, you know, does have some people dubious about their success when you look at the, the model of just, you know, basically being a leveraged Bitcoin play. So there are people who are worried about seeing leverage on leverage on leverage kind of stacking hands to the ceiling because, you know, we have seen the outset of, you know, 2x microstrategy ETFs, 2x or 3x bitco strategy ETFs and then also the opposite of looking at shorts on the ETF side as well. So I think that's just the overall concern. However, at least within the, as we were saying earlier, within the macro environment right now, I think it's so far so good. It's just really a danger of them being overstretched, so to say, on the charts and us.
- [28:15]
Simon
Yeah. What is it now is that Micro Strategy owns. Is it 2% of the entire Bitcoin supply?
- [28:22]
Craig
Is it something.
- [28:22]
Scott
Yeah, I think they surpassed 2%. Yeah.
- [28:25]
Dwayne
Yeah.
- [28:25]
Dave
So I mean my question.
- [28:27]
Lou
And maybe someone in the audience.
- [28:28]
Scott
And by the way, that's not counting lost coins. Right, right, right.
- [28:32]
Dave
So my question is, what happens if.
- [28:35]
Simon
All These corporations like BlackRock and Micro.
- [28:39]
Lou
Strategy and then maybe Microsoft end up.
- [28:42]
Simon
Starting to do this and whatever, and then we've got a very large percentage of the supply of BTC owned by a bunch of corporations. What kind of risk are we looking.
- [28:54]
Lou
At if something like that happens?
- [28:59]
Scott
It's a valid question. I mean, technically, and I'm not saying this to you, but we see it all the time. Like we don't know. BlackRock probably does own some Bitcoin, but the ETFs themselves, I mean, in theory that Bitcoin is owned by the customers that purchase the Bitcoin and BlackRock buys on their behalf and custody, obviously. So I think MicroStrategy and the ETFs are different. But yeah, I mean, I think that that's always been a concern is be careful what you wish for. Right. You know, Bitcoin was created with a. By a bunch of cypherpunks who are trying to rage against the machine governments and Wall street. And now, you know, we cheer, obviously, Wall street adoption, but there has to be some risk there. Anybody have some particular thoughts on that?
- [29:41]
Dave
Yeah, I think I said this yesterday, Scott, but it bears repeating. 24% of the entire equity market are owned by index funds and nobody really talks. And people every once in a while have articles about cross ownership. Whereas by the way, ownership in equities confers far more rights than ownership of Bitcoin. The miners are, you know, you know, node operators and the miners have more rights than the holders. But that's besides the point. At 24% it hasn't impeded the functioning of the, of the system per se. And we're not even close to that. That's point one. Point two is MicroStrategy isn't very different than ETFs in a very important respect. MicroStrategy owns that Bitcoin pursuant to covenants that they've signed with their bondholders for what they're going to do with the bonds and therefore can't make determinations about selling it, forking it or other stuff and all that. And probably there's nothing about forks covenants, I don't know. But there certainly is something about selling it. So it really is the investors who ultimately have a lot of say there. And it's just worth understanding that. And same thing is going to be true with a lot of these public companies. I mean, public companies that buy Bitcoin as a Treasury asset may not even tell people about it until they've accumulated enough that they think it might boost their stock price. So companies like to manage their stock price and so predict when you have a bad quarter. Oh, by the way, we also, you know, we put our cash into Bitcoin, you know, it'll cover it up. I know that's very cynical, but you know, having watched the markets for years, you do tend to see that. So there's multiple things at play here. But at the end of the day, the most important point is if you want mass adoption of Bitcoin to be the denominator of first of all, start with digital gold and then go to everything. Mass adoption looks like this mass adoption is everyone who is holding cash as a Treasury asset wants to own Bitcoin instead. And there's just no way to get from here to there without this sort of adoption. So you can rail about as much as you want, but it's the only way.
- [31:41]
Scott
Can't be for everyone unless it's literally for everyone. Go ahead, Brian.
- [31:44]
Lou
Yeah, sorry, that's essentially exactly what I was going to say. I mean, number one, you have to assume that these corporations that are acquiring Bitcoin in large amounts are going to act in a self interested way. In the same way that Joe Pleb, when he acquires a Little bit of bitcoin acts in a self interested way. I don't think that game theory plays out any differently when it's scale. And I think, you know, to the point of view this was invented by cypherpunks raging against the machine. You know, the nature of something that you cannot control means that people can try to acquire as much of it as they want. And you know us, you know, nobody gets a special say in denying them that. So this is bitcoin working and it's uniquely positioned to survive in sort of nefarious actors, even large ones, because nobody controls it and because the owners of it are incentivized to maintain its credibility and its reliability over time. So I mean conceptually is it concerning that it's getting allocated into small, smaller amount of hands? Maybe. But I don't think that in the end that that really harms bitcoin. I think in the end it survives just as it has at the lower levels.
- [32:51]
Scott
Sign?
- [32:53]
Simon
Yeah, I'd say the first thing to consider is this is why bitcoin being proof of work is different from Ethereum or something else being proof of stake. It doesn't necessarily matter who owns it in terms of the govern where it definitely doesn't matter who owns it in terms of the government, of the governance of the network. And that is a downfall of proof of stake. So this was invisible and it is an important feature of bitcoin. Having said that, you know, price manipulation is short term, is something that those that own vast quantities of Bitcoin are able to do. The custody relationship in the case of ETF definitely matters and the terms and conditions around that custody relationship and whether, you know, the who can actually use those Bitcoin. And the whole point of custody is that if the financial disclosure and system is working well, they shouldn't be able to use those because it's not their property. And that's the whole point of it. But I do think as bitcoiners we should continue to advocate for this true strength of bitcoin. Look, if you've got a pension, I've got a pension. It got locked up from my corporate days and you'll need some bitcoin ETF or something in there if it's part of your strategy. But the true power of bitcoin and the way you protect yourself from confiscation, the way you don't allow coins to be used for market manipulation and the way you don't allow paper bitcoins to be created by leaving them at an exchange like FTX or anywhere else is you owning your own Bitcoin. And that is a huge part of the utility. And I do think it's important to watch that ratio between ETF to self custody. We have a very healthy ratio at the moment because ETFs are catching up. But it is growing. And I do think it's something we should, should keep an eye out. And as a community, we should always be supporting people in understanding you can have some in custody, but please don't have all in custody because you're not harnessing the true power of what Bitcoin brings to the market. And my prediction is that one day everyone will need bitcoin in self custody whether you realize it now or not.
- [35:16]
Scott
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Buzz, I don't know if you were ready yet. I know we're coming up on the time you need, but maybe we need a couple more minutes to get things going.
- [35:26]
Brian
Yeah, keep it going. I'll make sure that we get vitreous up here which is going to be the sponsor of today's show, but keep it going.
- [35:34]
Scott
Awesome. The last thing I actually wanted to talk about, if we had time in advance of that, was the CPI print today. I don't know if you guys were paying attention to it. It hasn't seemed to tremendously move markets. Maybe I haven't been watching stocks too closely today because I've been busy, but we had November CPI inflation rising to 2.7% in line with expectations of 2.7 core CPI inflation 3.3% in line with the expectations headline CPI at its highest level since July 2024. And inflation has obviously leveled off above the Fed's 2.2% target has been kind of rising. Dwayne, any thoughts on this?
- [36:13]
Dwayne
Well, yeah, sure. So, okay, so we've seen CPI basically move in line with expectations. So, you know, that's basically expected. I think overall sentiment is still pushing us towards another rate cut of about 25 basis points, which, you know, makes sense if these are the numbers that we're seeing if we want to look at inflation overall. Shelter is a big portion of inflation. I believe I probably said this earlier, but you know, shelter is a big portion of core inflation right now and that's coming down as well. But we have to see what happens when some of those leases and some of those rents turn over. So the expectation is for that to come down as well. So we'll basically have to see how it goes. It's not going to really do much in the markets today because everything is going according to plan thus far. So we have to see what things are going to look like really in 2025. But so far so good that expectations if the rates are continuing to come down, because I believe that they will come down. If you look at the rest of the world here, Canada, Sweden, et cetera, we're all within rate cutting cycles. If the US Wants to maintain dominance, they're going to continue with the rate cutting cycle. And that's great for gold, that's very good for bitcoin, that's very good for small businesses, small caps. So I think that things are holding steady right now, but we shouldn't really expect to get down to the Fed's target until maybe, I don't know, 12 months or even 18 months.
- [37:49]
Simon
Simon yeah, to me this is an indication that the target is no longer the target. I don't think we live in a 2% inflation target world anymore. I think it's more that we've just decided to move the bar to 3%. You know, we had the last few prints, we had 2.4% when we're meant to be moving to 2%, then it's 2.6%, when we're meant to be moving To 2%. Now it's 2.7% when we may be moving to 2%. To me, whatever the market is expecting, the reality is that we've got tariffs coming. That's an inflationary strategy, depending on how it's executed. We have replacing illegal immigration with legal immigration, that's an inflationary strategy. We have the Fed cutting rates, that's an inflationary strategy. And we've got all of the geopolitical uncertainty that can cause a lot of inflation. So while it may be in line with market expectations, I think we have fundamentally shifted what inflation targeting actually means. And I think everyone, a massive percentage of those on the wrong side of inflation, they just can't handle any more inflation. So I just, just, I think structurally this is very, you know, very concerning whether the market expectations, whether these numbers are meaningful to the market. Right now the trend is clear to me. The Federal Reserve has broken the dollar and that will have implications at some stage.
- [39:25]
Scott
That's what Dalio was saying in his Bitcoin kind of speech. That's effectively what he was saying, was that, you know that the dollar and currencies around the world are going to be broken. That's why you don't want to own interest in debt and you do want to bitcoin. So it's nice to have Ray Dalio on this Side of your argument, Simon. Buzz, you want to go ahead?
- [39:47]
Brian
Yeah. Do we have Vitreous up here now? I. I'm having some issues with.
- [39:51]
Scott
Yep, they're there.
- [39:53]
Brian
Okay, cool. Well, before we we get started, I just want to do a disclaimer. So Mario's company, ibc does marketing, incubation and investing. Sponsors on the show are not our sponsors working with IBC and not necessarily Crypto Town hall and Scott specifically IBC is hiring for writers, journalists and moderators. So if you're looking to either join a great team or you're a project wanting to work with Mary over IBC just DM his account. So Vitreous. I can't actually see the speakers here right now just due to the UI issue on Spaces, but love to start it off with just an elevator pitch of what Vitreous is.
- [40:31]
Craig
Yeah. Hey, thanks for having us guys.
- [40:32]
Brian
Hey Taylor.
- [40:34]
Craig
Vitris is a layer 0 blockchain, which is an evolution from what started with bitcoin. Right. Crypto is just the surface without the blockchain architecture driving it. It's all just hype with no foundation. Right. This DAG based technology that is the foundation of bitcoin has evolved so much since that fundamental proof of work concept that was delivered by these cypher punks that are raging against the machine, as you guys said. And we've evolved into this state of using blockchain as an under the hood layer to base a lot of verification from. Right. So vitreous, what Vitreous is, is a layer 0 blockchain ecosystem that is designed to connect other layer, layer 1, layer 2 blockchains together into an interoperability, an interoperable ecosystem as a whole. We do this uniquely from counterparts through the use of a very contrarian form of economics in the blockchain itself where we have demand for the use of blockchain, the use of our blog space, the transactions, et cetera, actually decrease the cost therein of that, which perpetuates a loop of affordability and usability. So let's start there.
- [41:56]
Brian
I have some more specific questions just about basically the architecture of the protocol, but I also noticed in your bio that you're from Canada and I've noticed this interesting parallel this week with a lot of builders and founders that I've been speaking with. It's been the Project 89 team Barrichain team, now yourself and of course Ethereum was born in Canada as well. What do you think? Just on that topic of the macro discussion, what's in the water in Canada?
- [42:31]
Craig
Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe we're, I don't know, you know, I think we're just built to innovate up here and I think we're, you know, we're doing cool things across the board. There's a lot of, a lot of interesting things that are, that come out of Canada. And yet we only get praise for being nice.
- [42:52]
Brian
Yeah, no, it was just an interesting parallel and it's seeming like a lot of really great up and coming projects are domiciled in Canada. But I digress on that. Didn't make the mean to put you on the spot.
- [43:07]
Craig
No problem.
- [43:08]
Brian
But I know when people think of layer zeros, I think their mind often goes to Polkadot. How does this differ from Polkadot?
- [43:18]
Craig
Yeah, Polkadot Cosmos. Probably your two staple layer zeros in the market. Right. So we are based on the substrate framework, which did build Polkadot, but we have a very key difference, right? And that's our economic structure. While the technical architecture may be similar, the economics are very different. Polkadot runs off this inflationary tokenomics structure where they inflate until recently, 10% governance just changed it to under 8, I believe, 7.8%. So vitreous itself runs off of a static token supply, which means we will not mint any more VTRS tokens itself. Those. The VTRS token is just one of the three assets that actually run our ecosystem. And while that may sound complex, it actually increases usability through the mathematical proof associated with the economics associated with it. Polkadot's also rife with complexity and isn't natively EVM compatible, which creates a significant barrier from people coming from Ethereum or, you know, and Ethereum being that entrance to Web3 development until this point. Right. While substrate devs are the second largest developer community around perhaps, you know, the complexity of Polkadot might, might be seen as a, as a barrier. So Vitreous attempts to address the complexity and native EV compatibility within the same kind of architecture of Polkadot.
- [44:50]
Brian
Cool. That's a great answer. I'm also interested that I was kind of reviewing your documentation. How are you guys onboarding new projects without those parachain auctions? Like maybe talk a little bit more what's under the hood there?
- [45:05]
Craig
Yeah, so that's interesting, right? One of the core business models of Polkadot is crowdsourcing the dots out to all of these projects that are going to deploy or earn a pair ID for their parachain. Right. So Vitreous itself, you know, we abstract that away by hosting as a foundation or as a DAO itself. These collected set of environments that will replace the need for absolutely everybody to spool up a parachain or parathread, which means we create permissionless environments that are connected to the totality of the ecosystem natively. Right. So I think we could actually correlate that to a native L2 kind of solution. Right. Or a native parachain that Polkadot might deploy where we have a defi hub that's maybe similar to the plaza concept where defi activities are supposed to be kind of collated into this in this environment. And you will have the tools you could work with out of the box in this environment. And we just offer that in a permissionless basis which couples into the V Energy system and driving down demand based on or driving down cost based on demand. So we have a welcoming open door policy into these specific buckets that interoperate with other buckets. And we also say the more people that are here, the cheaper it gets for everybody.
- [46:30]
Brian
So that's a good segue because there's V Energy and there's V Forge. So can you explain the difference of both and how they each fit in?
- [46:40]
Craig
Yeah. So V Energy or vitreous energy is our hyperinflationary network usage utility kind of aspect. Right. And that was a lot of words, but V Energy works.
- [46:51]
Brian
Say that three times fast.
- [46:53]
Craig
Yeah. Good luck. Vtrs. Right, let's. Let's start there. VTRS is the governance and network security based token. Right. This is what you stake, this is what you delegate to validators, and this is what you use to vote within the network.
- [47:08]
Brian
This is vtrs, correct?
- [47:12]
Craig
No different. Yes. V Energy is adjacent to VTRS when you stake, instead of earning block rewards or VTRs itself, you actually earn V Energy in a denomination like GUI called G Volts. These G Volts will flex in capacity or in supply to always meet the demand of the network. Which means the staked value will always produce the amount of usage that the network will require based on a dynamic formula. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'm here.
- [47:52]
Dave
I hear you.
- [47:53]
Craig
Okay, I guess we lost Buzz, so I'll continue. So V Energy is earned by staking, right? So we stake, we contribute in the security of the network. Great. We earn this GVAult asset. And this gvault asset is what users or transactions actually consume on the network. Which means we've decoupled governance and security from usage explicitly. Which means any speculative or correlated market trends that collapse into VTRS itself are adjacent to a hyperinflationary usage based asset that is V Energy, which means everything. Even if we wanted to correlate the effective price between VTRs and the G volts you would earn as the amount of G volts scale up to reach usage, the effective cost of each G volt is dragged down by the amount of transactions that are being generated because the same quantity of VTRs is generating all of those G volts. So Vforge comes in as a different platform and product altogether. That isn't a token. So we can get into vforge as a separate topic hereafter.
- [49:07]
Brian
I'm back now, Taylor. For some reason I could hear everything that you said, but I got put down into a listener position. But I'm back now. Know it's just the trials and tribulations sometimes of of using spaces, but that was a really good explanation. And I know that in a lot of your documentation and specifically also the PIN tweet on the Vitreous account, which is also up here in a speaker spot, you talk about Vitreous going builder ready. What's the definition really of builder ready?
- [49:37]
Craig
So builder ready means that you know, if you're familiar with Substrate, great. If you're familiar with Polkadot or Kusama or any of those adjacent environments and you want to come and build on Vitreous, you're welcome. You're able and our code is open for you to engage with, which means all you have to do is go to our GitHub Vitreous foundation and pull down that repository and get building you can back into our public test.
- [50:07]
Brian
Net.
- [50:07]
Craig
RPCs are available. You can even interface with us on Discord at Discord, gg Vitreous, and you can get really get involved with that.
- [50:19]
Brian
Cool. And there's maybe I missed this in the process of me going up and down because sometimes there's a lag between becoming a listener to a speaker. But did you mention at all the AI agent platform?
- [50:34]
Craig
Yeah, no, we didn't touch on that yet.
- [50:37]
Brian
I'd love to know more about it because AI agents are something that of course has been a huge topic within the meme coin industry right now. We talk a lot about the famous bell curve, like early adopters and laggards. It's almost like with AI agents it's starting to kind of hit another area of that bell curve where more people are starting to understand them, realize what they could be in their day to day lives. They're seeing Twitter accounts become autonomous and now trying to think, oh wow, like maybe I could have an agent do X, Y or Z for me. So my question is really how does your AI agent platform work and maybe how does it differ from some of these competitors in the space?
- [51:18]
Craig
So one thing we have to understand is that agentic AI needs one key thing to differ it from traditional AI, right? Agency. It needs to do its own thing on its own schedule for its own reason, based on the goal that it was commanded to execute on. Right. So a lot of these competitors may not even have agency, but they may have just endpoints that run a fine tuned model. So there's a distinct difference. Let's not get caught up in that. Vforge is a agentic AI platform, right? It supports agentic AI by allowing people to deploy these agents or bring an agent in and register it as an on chain asset. So that on chain asset can orchestrate from Vitreous based on V energy to the autonomous tasks through scheduling on chain, which means it's all auditable through hey, my agent's doing this today. My agent's doing this today. And now it can talk to your agent. So my agent and your agent can team up and do tasks together. We create an agentic mesh at that point, which is what the network type is called. So vforge enables AI agents to use the blockchain as their orchestration layer along with others, enabling them to collaborately or to work collaboratively with other agents in the network. They have their own sovereign wallets and are ultimately NFTs that are owned by holding a wallet, which means you can sell your agents, your agents can earn revenue based on their, their activities. There's no code required to deploy one of these agents and we're currently working in a kind of closed testnet environment on getting this, this up and ready. But the, the potential for a platform like this differs from, you know, bases AI that just kind of does a crypto trading bot kind of stuff for you, or you know, the social element of it. It's literally meant to be a foundational platform for binding and incorporating AI agents into a wider Web3 based, Web3 and non Web3 based scenarios. You could do on chain or off chain compute when Vitreous is meeting its full potential.
- [53:25]
Brian
I want to dig into that one specific point you made about the agents having sovereign wallets, wallets that they actually own. Because I think a piece of misinformation in the market right now, when you look at some of these AI agent coins that have really taken off, is that the market actually thinks that these agents hold the wallet themselves, when the reality is there's a person behind this who set them Up a wallet, probably has the private key to that wallet and maybe dive even deeper in what that means, that the agent actually has a sovereign wallet and why that's such a breakthrough.
- [54:01]
Craig
So when somebody goes to mint or create an agent in vforge, what happens is that we programmatically establish a private key for them and encrypt it within their own data so only they have the ability to access this wallet from a seed phrase level, which is great. And now there's still some logistics in sorting out the totality of security there, which is cool. We're very early in our implementation. But this provides just that agent in concept, just that agent, the ability to fundamentally use and access their wallet, which as you said, is something missing. It's easy for a, an AI agent platform to say, hey yeah, all the agents use this wallet, but I have the keys to it. So you know, that's, that's kind of a downfall there. So the idea here is to programmatically create an a seed phrase based access for this agent to hold and that wallet will travel with the agent wherever that agent is. So we take NFTs, elevate them in a nice little way and create them into this true digital asset embodiment of a new technology, if you will.
- [55:11]
Brian
Yeah, and security wise, like if you guys can nail that down, as I'm sure that's not a trivial problem to be solving. But there's just so many use cases across the industry for an agent that actually has a sovereign wallet where only they have access to the private key. Like I see use cases with daos payroll, even some of these investing DAOs like AI16Z, like I'm sure that that is a really great use case for what they're doing over there. I think that's genius.
- [55:45]
Craig
Yeah, absolutely. Being able to fund your agent, your agent actually use funds that it controls is very important for the progression of agentic AI and blockchain.
- [55:56]
Brian
That's always for me been the dichotomy between Web3 and AI. There's this tinkering around right now and really great experiments going on. But there's that clear divide where these agents are not web3 enabled, they're not natively web3 enabled.
- [56:17]
Craig
Yeah, that's what vforge built on vitreous aims to accomplish here. A very holistic binding between these two.
- [56:25]
Brian
That's amazing. And just a last question as we're starting to wrap up here, we do have a lot of listeners. There's over 358 comments in the space. Our audience is typically a mixture of people who are looking to buy tokens. There's builders, there's marketers. What would your call to action be for people who are tuning in on different ways that they can get involved Right now? I think you did a great job of saying if you're a builder, this is builder ready. You can go to the Discord. There's great documentation, even documentation in the form of a flowchart in your header. But where else do you want to direct people to get involved?
- [57:05]
Craig
So Discord is our home base, right? Discord, GG Vitreous is where you can come and engage with us on multiple levels, whether you're a marketer, you know, somebody interested in getting, somebody interested in getting involved with Vitreous as a holder, as a validator, as a, as a builder. That's where you want to be, right? We're in the process of redeploying our website to be builder friendly. So that will also be if you come to the Discord, that's the place to be wholly and truly. Vitreous is a layer 0 blockchain platform. It has a very disruptive economic system that will fundamentally change how people value the on chain addressable compute and the functionality underneath of it, which empowers builders to have new, different and new and different business models that use blockchain as their fundamental at. So I would encourage everybody to come to our Discord, dive into some documentation, ask us some questions and get involved again. That's Discord GG Vitreous and and for.
- [58:10]
Brian
Those in the audience who are maybe not typing in the the URL themselves, click on the Vitreous page. They're in a speaker spot here has the nice green logo if you need it in color coordinated directions. If you click on their profile. They do have their, their links in bio and Discord is on there as well. So Taylor, really appreciate you joining today, Scott, appreciate you putting on another great show yet again as you do most days and with that happy about the market. On with our Wednesday. Happy Wednesday everybody.