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- [00:00]
A
Good morning everybody.
- [00:01]
B
Welcome to Crypto Town hall every weekday here on X at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time. This will be the last show of the week since we do not show up on weekends. So we'll dive right into covering all of the stories driving crypto today. Before we do that, we do have an awesome sponsor, Zero G. Tell you a bit about them. AI is reshaping the world, but right now it's stuck in the hands of just a few big players. But what if AI could run openly, verifiably and on chain? That's what Zero G is building. The world's first decentralized AI operating system open to everyone. Imagine a network where you don't just trade tokens, you train, store and run independent AI models at scale. No lock ins, no black boxes, no single point of failure. Just quick, cost effective, auditable AI that anyone can build. If you believe the future of AI should be a public good, not another corporate monopoly, join us at 0g.AI. That's the number. 0 letter G.AI. so smelting town hall continues today. Dave, we've got gold at 5k, silver at 100. Bitcoin lags. Give up. I think we've even given up on the titles.
- [01:04]
C
I mean, you know, it's funny, I was watching your show this morning and it's almost like watching a person without anyone else to talk to, talking into a microphone, trying to do self therapy.
- [01:17]
B
Yes, that's accurate. I said to my team, I was like, can we just not.
- [01:21]
C
I mean, you know, but, but the thing that's interesting is, and you know, I posted something this morning and, and you know, people don't get it. You know, if you actually talk to, and you do, you talk to some of the best investors with track records who understand what the hell they're doing. People like Mike Alfred. But if you go back even to, you know, Warren Buffett, what you'll find is almost every investor that is, is considered, you know, deified later in life. I'm not talking about traders, I'm an investor. You'll find people who bought when they were uncomfortable and didn't care and sold when they thought that it, that, you know, when, when they thought the hype was, was, was huge. And we're in a period of time when the entire market is just dead. Right? You know, it's like at the same exact time as Price Action is saying crypto is dead. You have an enormous number of people who are pretty damn smart understanding that the technology that's being built and some of the value that's being created is going to be enduring, and that cognitive dissonance is really, really matters. But there's one other piece, and the other piece is something I've been saying for a long time, and people have got mad at me when I used to say it, which is that a lot of the characteristics that drove people into crypto in the first place were bullshit. And namely the ability to get immediate liquidity before you prove that there's actually value. Right. You know, it effectively opened up the notion of venture investing to individuals. Except unlike venture investing, where even the dumbest venture capitalists insist that if the, if the firm they're investing in makes money, that they have a way to make money from it, in the world of crypto, they gave money to founders without absolutely any notion of how those tokens are going to relate to the value that those founders are creating.
- [03:20]
B
And the founders actually just got the money right.
- [03:25]
C
And I said it in 2017. So this is, you know, and the quote at the time was the three words that expose why crypto in this instantiation is going to fail is non dilutive capital. Because essentially, if you are able to raise capital without diluting your equity stake or taking on an obligation in the form of debt, then that's a magic genie to the founder, but it's absolutely a disaster to the investor. And the reason investors didn't care was because the investors who did the money in the first place generally made money because they got to sell to the greater fools in the public. And so that is a large part of what we're dealing with in crypto. And the one place where Mike McGlone and I agree is that there are a absolute ton of tokens out there that have valuations in the hundreds of millions or more that shouldn't be worth $1.50 or shouldn't be able to buy you a subway ticket. Right? A swipe to take a ride. I mean, they literally have no value whatsoever. And until that is purged, there's always going to be a bad taste in people's minds. And that is true. But none of that applies to Bitcoin. I don't really think it applies to Ethereum. I don't think it applies to any of the top tokens, in a sense, because that's not what's going on there. And so you have this sort of bifurcated thing where all those top tokens are sitting there and there's no excitement, but they're not getting crushed either. They're just kind of languishing and the things that have no path to money, like you were talking about chainlink this morning. I mean, I've said it many times. I own Chainlink for exactly the reasons you were talking about. But the reason it's been in the low teens, actually at 12 right now, is because there's no path. You have no idea. If, if you answer the following question about chainlink, and here's a question I'll ask you, Scott, if chainlink becomes the dominant protocol and ends up generating $2 billion a year in revenue, what's the token worth? And if you can't answer that question, how the hell do you expect people to invest in it? But they did. No, I understand that, but I'm talking about you. Why, why would you expect it to rally? And that's.
- [05:46]
B
Yeah, and, and, and if you want to take that logic a step further, why would you buy anything that was launched under that structure now, even if you believe it has fundamental utility or value? Well, there's a reason, because it's wildly overpriced.
- [05:58]
C
Now, here's, here's the bull case here. So I'm going to give you the bull case the day that Sergey could go on your show and not tell you I can't answer questions about what the token economics are going to be, which is what he does. And he does that with every interviewer. And they do the same. The same thing is true with Ondo. The same thing is true with all of them. The day that that changes is the day that governance tokens can have the power to vote themselves shares of revenue. Right? That's the day that tokens all of a sudden will get a. That's when the new, the, the massive new bill bull market would start. And the good news is that, that there are people in our government, they only have three more years, but there are people in our government that are getting together next Tuesday, quite literally, to talk about how the hell they can allow that to happen. And so, and because for those who don't know, what I'm referring to is there's a joint CFTC with Selig and Atkins SEC meeting next week to talk about how they want to coordinate regulations in the world of crypto. And this is the thing that has needed to happen from the beginning, you shouldn't care. The day a crypto founder doesn't give a flying F whether or not it's a security or is a commodity, and they can just offer the token economics and get things listed, get things trading easily with low friction as crypto, that's when the market takes off again on projects that actually can derive value. Until that point, it's all, it's all investor. It's basically masturbatory finance. It's the only way I can describe it. It's all one big circle jerk in the entire ecosystem outside of a couple of large tokens which have their own issues in terms of the public's perception. But the truth is that, you know, they're, they're being kind of dragged down with the, with the whole thing. And so that, that's sort of, that's been, that was my sort of thought process this morning. But I think that that's the cognitive dissonance that has to resolve if we really believe crypto rails are going to run the future. Okay, good. We got, we got at least our firsthand. Then, then there has to be a way to get value out there. So. Okay, let's get the other old guy talk. What's up, Mark?
- [08:15]
D
All right. Yeah, I used that term old head on our podcast earlier this week. I. Yeah, I, I feel like one of the guys who just like in Pitch Perfect to run in to try to challenge you on that, on that next riff. Yeah, I watch Pitch Perfect, guys. I'm a fully evolved man. I want to start with your chain link point. That should be crypto 102 or 201. If it gets adopted, if it has economic value and people want to use it as opposed to swift, as opposed to xrp, and it's a cross chain. How does the chainlink token accrue value? Who chooses it? Is it systematically done? And I agree with you, if you can't name that tune in three notes, then move on. And I'm just writing something right now for an outfit about why bitcoin is languishing. And the journalist said, and don't tell me zoom out. And I said, great. I'm going to start the article with don't zoom out, zoom in. And where I think I won't go into my point about why bitcoin's languishing. I'll stick with yours. It's related to bitcoin. People are not looking at bitcoin as money right now. Everything's about AI. And people can say, I like what's going on there is adoption. The whole Claude cowork thing is blowing up like bananas, putting Microsoft's, you know, copilot to bed. And that's what all the stocks are rallying. If you look at all the small caps, you know, from iron to storage tech, you know even some of the chips. It's all about infrastructure and commodities now. And that's what people want to understand. They want the simple sentence, oh, there's going to be a three year moratorium on taxes and you get to expense everything. Great. What assets are company. Oh, Alcoa, they'll benefit. Let's have Alcoa up 20% in the first four weeks of the year. So people want to know things in those three notes and that's what's happening in the markets and that's why chain links not up and I believe that's why bitcoin's not up. So I'll stop there.
- [10:36]
B
I didn't even see Mark on stage Dave, so I didn't see his hand. Are there any other hands I might be missing here?
- [10:41]
C
No, I don't see any hands. But if someone to pick on people, it's going to be, oh, there we go, Andre. You see safe me picking Andre.
- [10:53]
E
All right, all right. Happy Friday guys. So I think the, the reason why bitcoin has been languishing is, is due to like idiosyncratic factors, not so much macro because what we saw especially in Q4, I mean we saw this long term holder selling, long term holder distribution, right? Plus 10, 10 liquidation cascade which exacerbated this kind of sell off, right? So these were only like idiosyncratic factors. And in fact like our own quantitative studies show that like over the past six months, like non macro factors, these idiosyncratic factors have explained more than 50% of Bitcoin's performance variation. So that may explain this kind of divergence between bitcoin crypto assets in general and everything else, right? So equities, precious metals and so on. And I mean the good news about this, on the bright side, you can actually see that there's a massive kind of valuation gap any way you look at it. I mean like Julian Biddle has posted this chart where he showed macro sensitive assets like equities, yields, DXY and so on, right. Versus Bitcoin. So massive valuation gap. If you look at bitcoin versus gold, massive valuation gap, right. Anywhere you look it, it doesn't really fit because I do think it's due to idiosyncratic factors like this kind of long term holder supply distribution. But this is also like fading, right? We're seeing like that the selling is losing momentum and at the same time I think the moment we see like return and risk appetite, I think bitcoin will catch a bit. But I mean the elephant in the room is of course, like the precious metals complex nobody's interested in, or there's not much attention on crypto assets because, like, precious metals are railing like crazy, right? You can see it in like, Google Trends. I've just posted the chart this morning, right? You can see, like, Google Trends on gold and silver are like, at max attention, right? While bitcoin and crypto is like, at minimal attention, right? So there's like huge asymmetry, right, in terms of attention. Right, on. On these assets. And also, if you look at it quantitatively, right, it's like, I think the fair value between bitcoin and gold right now based on global money supply, is probably like 50 ounces per bitcoin. We're trading at right around 20 ounces, right? So that's like a massive undervaluation. The risk is, of course, that these models are broken, right. That there's some kind of structural shift happening. Right. But I haven't. I don't have the answer to this, you know.
- [13:55]
C
Yeah, well, I mean, I hate the word fair value within. In that sentence, but I understand what you're. Oh, no, because it's a question.
- [14:02]
E
It's a model value, right?
- [14:04]
C
No, no, no, I understand that. I mean, look, central banks can buy gold. They're not buying bitcoin until they're forced by gunpoint to do so. The potential banks that are buying gold are not the G7. They're the others, who basically are rejecting US treasuries as their reserve asset. And we all know that that's going on. I mean, that's true. Silver has its own thing, which is, frankly, it's massively underpriced relative to its rarity in the earth's crust compared to gold. And so that's what's playing out there. And bitcoin right now. I mean, look, it would be really hard to look back if someone says to you crypto winter started on October 10th, and you could expect it to play out like it's done before, which is a minimum of six months or so, because that's been more or less like from Luna to the bottom, it was about six months. It was made in November. So if you look at that and say, okay, well, we had a similar size destruction in the crypto space on October 10th. People getting wrecked, many false rallies or people getting wrecked. I mean, Scott publicizes it every time. Every time you get a failed breakout, people get wrecked. And the numbers are not small. I mean, hundreds of millions to billions.
- [15:28]
E
It was 800 billion right in value.
- [15:32]
C
So if you, if you Make a, have a very simple mental model which says we are in crypto winter. Crypto winter started on October 10th. And that was the crescendo, that was the, the, the lightning strike. Then you'd make the argument that, well, okay, cool. That means sometime around March, you know, we might see some green shoots. Okay. The reason people don't say that is because the bitcoin price is sitting at almost $90,000. They go, well, wait a minute, crypto winter. Bitcoin should be trading at, at 40, 50, 60. And what they're not understanding is that inside of crypto, it may be crypto winter, but people are slowly putting money in on the traditional financial side while the crypto, the general crypto cycle is selling to them. It's a, it's a rotation is what's going on. And it's caused by people, by two things. Caused by the traders who say, well, we're in crypto winter, it's going to go down that much, I may as well get my money out now. And it's caused by disgust from OG bitcoiners. Bruce is on stage and I don't know if he's selling or not, but I do know that the disgust that two firms, and by the way, they both have investors, so it's not really two firms, but between BlackRock and MicroStrategy they are becoming the dominant players in terms of concentrated holdings is the exact opposite of what they signed up for from bitcoin. Now we could debate whether that's an accurate assessment or not. I personally think that to get to long term adoption that actually needs to happen. But it doesn't matter because that is a very real sentiment. And so those things happen. Right. And so it's like if I'm right, then this, what we see as tremendous undervaluation will have a rally like we've seen in previous times in that order of magnitude. But it's not going to start, it's not going to start until it's. The despondency has run its course. And that, and that's the issue. Mark, is that a new.
- [17:38]
E
To be honest, I don't believe we're in the crypto inter. You know why? Because if you look at previous bear markets, you had at least like 50% plus drawdown, right? We now have like 35% peak to drop, right?
- [17:52]
C
Yeah, but you're missing a point. You're missing the divergence of bitcoin and alts and ether and alts. So it's not just pure bitcoin dominance, but Bitcoin and Ether both have massive tradfi sponsors that have brought bought huge amounts of supply mitigating the fall. Look at, I mean look, I don't really care which one. Look at Tao. It's a good example because I watched that one, you know Tao was pushing for. It was over 400. It's at 230. Okay, right. You know it's actually was over 4. It's almost a 50% drop. And there are lots of tokens like that. If you go.
- [18:25]
E
That's true, yeah.
- [18:26]
C
And the altcoins go into the smaller altcoins coins. There are tons of them. I mean Scott, I mean how many all coins that are in your portfolio are down? North of 50.
- [18:34]
B
Hundreds.
- [18:35]
C
And how many are down?
- [18:37]
D
What do you mean? What do you mean hundreds? You have hundreds.
- [18:41]
B
What do you mean hundreds? Mark, I don't like your tone.
- [18:45]
D
Yeah, it was.
- [18:47]
C
And so you know, I mean I've.
- [18:49]
B
Been, you know there's like dusty bags since 2016 in there that you know, at some point they were down so bad I forgot they existed. They, whatever, I mean they come rounding yours.
- [18:59]
D
That's just legacy of an og, that's all. I'm just jealous.
- [19:02]
B
No, they're just going to go back up eventually, right? I'm just holding them because they obviously are all just going to resurrect.
- [19:07]
E
But you know, I actually agree Dave. Like my counterfactual argument is we would have entered like a classical bear market based based on like the degree and level of like long term holders selling alone if we didn't have this amount of institutional demand.
- [19:26]
C
Right.
- [19:26]
E
Because if you just compare the numbers, right, if you like compare what ETFs have been buying in 2025, what treasury companies have been buying, it's around 700,000 bitcoins, right. And long term holders sold, I think an equal amount of bitcoins. So that's why we are essentially flat in 2025. But I agree like we probably would have entered this kind of cloud classical bear market if it wasn't for like institutional buying, you know, I mean I.
- [19:53]
C
I, I, I, I, I, I think it's stronger. Everyone who says, well I can't believe MicroStrategy's bought that much and the price hasn't gone up. Well the answer is that the price would be a lot lower.
- [20:03]
E
Exactly. Yeah, that's the point. Yeah.
- [20:04]
C
But now you have to ask yourself the question what is a stronger foundation for a market? A market where people who bought at $1 or less own the majority of Bitcoin or a market where people are buying in at these levels, expecting it to eventually rival gold. What's a stronger market? And then look at gold's price and say, well, wait a minute. Every time gold goes up, that increases the. I'm not going to say ceiling, but increases the target for what people think is where Bitcoin's valuation should go. And the answer is, if Bitcoin is to. If safety Mimosa's Bitcoin standard is ever to happen, it cannot happen without people, without Ibit and without MicroStrategy and without BitGo being public, which was another very big deal, without more public companies offering intermediated solutions for people who simply don't want to take risk with their financial assets. There's a reason you don't have to put dollar bills in a bank account earning no interest. You can hold it in your own house. You can. And arguably, if you're not getting interest, why the hell would you give it to a bank who does things to you like what they did to Scott yesterday in terms of trying to get a wire set? I mean, the reason you do it is something that people do. I mean, we may say they're sheep. We could make fun of people all we want. But the truth is there's a lot of reason people want that security. Once it's ubiquitous, then that asset can become the measuring stick of which all financial assets are measured. It can't happen without that. I mean, there have to be people who disagree with me on this one.
- [21:48]
E
No, no. 100% agree. I mean, the good thing about this, like, Even if, like, MicroStrategy owns like 20% of the supply, right. They can't control the protocol. Right. That's the beauty of Bitcoin.
- [22:01]
C
I mean, my view of MicroStrategy is different than most. I actually hate the fact that they're paying such ridiculous interest for strc. I really do. I think in the end it'll probably work because I think they're buying, they're finally not smashing top smashing, they're finally upping their game at a time when I think it's actually an opportune time to be. Because if they sit there and they're the buyer of last resort and they absorb all the supply when the supply stops and Bitcoin inevitably does what I expect it to do, they're going to look like gold, they're going to look golden, they're going to look great. But why should they have to pay exorbitant interest rates in order to buy it? The answer is because they have to. That's what the market's telling them. And that is not a great sign. That is telling you a lot about where the market is pricing this right now. It'll change. It'll change if Bitcoin starts rallying. It's perverse, but if Bitcoin starts rallying tremendously justifying the fact that a lot of billions have gone into this product, they won't have to pay that high of an interest rate. The market will take the price of the stock up so that the interest rate that they're effectively paying for new buyers is down. I mean, that's just the way markets work. But it is an interesting sign anyway. Anybody else want to talk about something else? So I see jw, I got rugged.
- [23:29]
B
There for like three minutes, so I missed the tail end. Contribute.
- [23:34]
C
Yeah, you know, it's.
- [23:35]
B
Maybe JW can give us, you know, a sweeping overview of what's happening with either zcash or Clarity Act.
- [23:42]
C
Oh please, dear God.
- [23:44]
F
Oh, you got, you got an hour or two.
- [23:47]
B
Yeah, exactly. I was trying, you know, got to kind of get juice of that.
- [23:52]
C
Do you think.
- [23:53]
F
Yeah.
- [23:53]
C
Do you think that. That Selig and Atkins can pull something off in terms of this space was.
- [23:58]
A
Downloaded via spacesdown.com visit to download your.
- [24:02]
C
Spaces today actually getting real rule proposals that go through the full public comment process and get implemented at the CFTC and SEC to clean up this mess in it without a congressional. Without congressional delegation.
- [24:18]
F
Well, so start off. I've always been a skeptic of major. My prediction 2, 3 years ago it was we'll get stable coins through. We won't get anything else major through. That was my prediction. Pessimistic. Hopeful. Hopeful certainly. And helpful if I could help with drafts and stuff. But some time on the Hill post dot Frank, I became a real skeptic. We never could pass anything as Republicans because the Dems kind of view was, you know, we got, we got once in a century legislation with the Dodd Frank Act. Let's just protect that and not do anything. So I'm a skeptic just based on that history. So directly to your question, you know, I've always been a little concerned about, about the ability of SEC and CFTC to work together, especially with crypto, given that crypto needs more of. Of crypto to be housed at CFTC than sec. Will SEC give up jurisdiction? Jurisdictional fights between the agencies, stuff like that. And it is a. The last time they did anything major together was a joint memorandum of understanding with respect to swaps securities Based swaps versus commodity swaps. And that took years to do. And it was a small thing achieved over years of fighting and backbiting and all kind of stuff. But, but what is it, what is amazing here is Sellig came right from the SEC straight to the cftc. So he's got CFTC experience and SEC experience and he just recently worked for Atkins. He's a crypto native. Dude, the first time that guy, I met that guy, it was at consensus and he walks up to me at a little cocktail party of like 20 crypto lawyers, DeFi lawyers. And he says, hey, I'm starting a forecaster channel for crypto lawyers. And he was just working at a law firm. You want to join? I was like, this guy is based. Man, this guy's cool. So it's been great to see him get in there. So he's crypto native. He was just working with Atkins, you know, a hot minute ago. So that's going to change the dynamic.
- [26:14]
B
In a very positive way.
- [26:15]
F
I think for SEC and CFTC to work together on their own, using their own executive authority, working in tandem, they might write it down in a memorandum of understanding between the agencies. So they might just do their thing. But I think this is going to be real in terms of the agencies, I think probably they'll have to do it on their own, but that's okay because they both have pretty extensive statutory exemptive authority. And I think they'll actually work well together. And you know, if you're career staff, you might be like, oh, we need to protect our jurisdiction. I think the two chairmen are going to say, no, that's not going to work. You're not going to be on the team writing this stuff if that's your view. So I have a lot of hope for that, working out that joint exemptive process between those agencies.
- [26:53]
C
Well, if that's true, that could be. Look, my working theory and it's not theory I've been saying for eight years that I've never understood. I actually wrote about this years and years ago. Often talk to people at the sec, talk to people outside the sec. Actually, one of the people I had the longest conversations about this with is now head of Trading and Markets at the sec, Jamie Selway, is that there should be a new part of the capital stack that right now has zero ability through law to be utilized, which is companies should be able to sell future forms of identified revenue which based on something that we might call a commodity, but is a corporate fundraising tactic. So think of it as Amazon Selling prime before or Tesla selling transferable full self driving. Now those companies don't need to do that. So it's a bad example. But you understand the point a lot of if you're chainlink as a company and you're going to earn revenue, sell a discrete form, a piece of that revenue that doesn't confer equity ownership, all of a sudden that becomes probably a security. But should it matter? The issue is securities right now have, have a couple of things that about them, more than two but a bunch of things about them that are incredibly over regulated that you know, you have the accredited investor rule meaning that startups basically can't source from the public which is a horrible rule for so many different reasons. They have seasoning requirements which require mean when you, you, you create a token, you got to wait a year before it could be public and not. And you know, in that. So you put all these together and you also have lots of minute rules that you know very well. Things like transfer agents, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many rules that they strangle the innovation. There's so many rules that would not exist had the Internet and had the technology that we have today been available in the 1930s and 40s when the rules were written or the 70s when they got rewritten or hell in 2005 when Reg NMS was written and the current sitting SEC had wrote a brilliant reason why it was a terrible law as a dissent. You know, so we have this and the real question is, is, you know, how do you, how do you allow for that innovation? And if the CFTC and the SEC get together exemptively or otherwise, you could get that. That's the long question. But that to me is the issue. Agree? Yes. Not yes, no, I agree.
- [29:35]
F
Yeah, no, that I think that makes.
- [29:36]
C
Total sense and to me that matters. I mean, you know, it's, it's. The problem is, is that while they won't go as far as you will Bruce, honestly, you know, I am sure there are a lot of people both at the people running both agencies right now understand that the vast majority of the rules that they have, the minutia are bullshit. They actually do understand that the question is can you figure out a way to allow for innovation? And that's the question. I mean you were regulated so you know, you understand what FINRA does and how it works and all that stuff. And it's just, it's hard, right? I mean, you know, that's really the question. What would happen if they allowed for innovation? And to me that would be, that could be the next big spark. I don't know. What do you think?
- [30:26]
A
Can you hear me?
- [30:27]
C
Yeah, we can hear you. There you go.
- [30:29]
A
Yeah, I think, you know, tyrant's going to tyrant. Pinhead's going to pinhead. I'm not optimistic about a gaggle of pinheads being any more effective than half as many pinheads. You know, it's all pinheads. Sec, cftc, you know, it's just a bunch of status tyrants. And yeah, some of them know that it's broken, but their idea of fixing it is baby steps. You know, go, go and tell them that you want to get rid of AML kyc. See what they say. Oh my gosh, no. You know, tell them you want to scrap accredited rules entirely.
- [30:59]
C
Dive in on that a bit, Bruce, because I want it. First of all, AML kyc. I hate that. I hate the fact that we link them together. Just for those who don't understand, because we, we bring them together. AML is anti money laundering and KYC is know your customer. There is a link, obviously, because if you don't know who your customer is, how the hell do you know if they're laundering money? But KYC rules started long before AML KYC was brokers. And you, you ran this, you know, this had a, a responsibility to. Before they recommended investments to people to know whether they were appropriate. Now, you could make a really strong argument that that's complete and unadulterated, that that's nanny state crap. And by the way, I would agree with you on that. But that's what it was for. It had nothing to do with anything else. And AML money laundering has to do with the government's overarching desire to block bad guys from getting access to capital. And they have failed beyond miserably. In fact, most people who've looked at this in any reasonable sense would say that the current AML regime effectively has not just failed, it's probably facilitated money laundering. And you can just tell that by the amount of fines that have been paid by the largest banks, because people can get things done. And so the real fight in terms of. Well, the real fight is on ethics and yield. But a lot of people worry about defi allowing for money laundering. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to get dollars into the system. If you want to get dollars out of the system. They can do it much simpler, right? There are simpler ways of doing it, but most money laundering training that you get at broker dealers is just obvious stupid shit. Don't let someone come in with a briefcase full of cash. I mean, seriously.
- [32:40]
A
But that, but that's just because that's also status nanny state nonsense. It shouldn't be anybody's flipping business if somebody wants to use cash, people did for thousands of years. They used some variation of cash. And every single ancestor that every single one of us had had far, far, far freer ability, you know, yet you had people who would do the, the original actual Silk Road, you know, they would, they would, they would go on caravans for six months and bring their spices and, and trade it for silks. And you didn't have some pinheaded nitwit tyrants say, oh, not so fast. Where'd you get your money? Like that's just a nanny state nonsensical thing that pinheaded tyrants have invented. It's not legitimate. The government has absolutely no flipping business knowing any of this. You want to go chase terrorists and child traffickers and whatever else you want to blame this on, go chase them. It's none of your flipping business to treat a billion people in the world as if we're all criminals and ask somebody where, you know, oh, where'd your money come from? None of your friends fricking business where your money came from. The entire thing is totally illegitimate. And that's only one example. I just said that as an example. Because if you say that to these pinheaded tyrants, they're going to freak out and act like, act like you're taking out some, you know, cornerstone of the global economy, that the whole system isn't going to work if you don't let them get up in everybody's business, which is a relatively new thing, by the way. I mean, even in my career, you used to be able to open brokerage accounts without an ID. You know, that's a, that's something in the last 30 years, you know, the, a lot of this, this current tyrannical, ridiculous regime where they, they want to know where, you know, you can't buy a motorcycle on ebay without some pinheaded tyrant. Oh, where'd you get your money? Where'd that come from? What's your source of funds? That's all nonsense. And that's not the way that the economy has ever worked in the history of humanity. It's a brand new and really, really, really stupid idea created by pinheads. And that's just one example of many accredited investor same thing. None of this stuff is legitimate. It's all ridiculous. None of them have the slightest clue it does nothing but gets in the way of people who are actually out there building, actually out there creating jobs and solving things.
- [34:44]
C
But here's, here's the thing. So, so there's, so let's, let's, let's, let's put some shape on this. I completely agree. Accredited investor is a pure, a pure subsidy. One of my favorite. I, I always, I've used Monty Python a bunch this week, so we'll do another one. Monty Python had a great skit. John Cleese plays Dennis Moore and it starts with Dennis Moore. Dennis Moore running through the night. He robs from the, the rich and gives the poor. Dennis Moore, by the end he's robbing from the poor to give to the rich. And the accredited investor rule is robbing from the poor to give to the rich. It is literally creating, it has created a VC industry. It has created. People who call will call me up and tell me, you know, whether or not it was a cold call. But I just was curious, you know, it was just saying, well, you're not an accredited investor and I didn't say anything, of course I am, but it doesn't matter. He was telling me how he could get me access to SpaceX and charge only 20, 25. Between 20 and 25% for the privilege. More than if I were a rich person. Now think about that. Think about what, what I just said. And by the way, that is a legitimate business allowed by the rules.
- [35:53]
A
Yeah, caused by the rules.
- [35:55]
C
You can do that. It is, it is the most unjustifiable rule that exists in dc. There is, it is no doubt. And, and there are a lot of people who know that. Think of another one. You know Warren Davidson, you know Congressman Davidson, he's been on this show before. He put out a keep your coins and you know, ability to have self custody wallets. You know, some very simple rules that everyone says, oh no, no, we're going to get that all done in clarity. Well, the reality is, fuck that. I mean what the Republicans that actually care should do is instead of one big bill, do things such as the keep your coins act. Do things such as a taxonomy act. Get those things done.
- [36:32]
A
Yeah, but you can't co opt little bills. If you want to play the Washington game, you can't slimy, slimy banking stuff. Unless it's some big dumb bill like the genius act or clarity or you know, Loomis Gillibrand or any of the other, you know, big giant boondo rifles.
- [36:51]
C
Look at what happened yesterday in the House of Representatives. 86 Republicans voted with 100% of the Democrats on a spending bill because it had billions, and I mean many, many billions of what's called earmarks and including things such as funding organizations. Literally, Literally funding organizations do political advocacy. I mean, is there a. Yeah. This is why, by the way, Bitcoin is going to run one of these days again, because all the people who think, oh, well, Trump's going to get the budget deficit under control are completely ignoring the fact that we are, we have a systematically structural reason for, for overspending in this country that unless there was. Unless Desantis is capable of getting, and he's gotten 20 states so far, unless they can actually get a Constitutional Convention of the states together, this is going to continue, and frankly, you know it. Good luck. That would be a great. It would be a great.
- [37:51]
D
If Desantis does that, it's going to be a show for Florida. There's going to be no housing, no schooling, because whatever's going to. Because if, if the government can't fund all the blue states with deficit spending, New York's going to just eat itself, and people are going to be running to the states that have balanced budgets. So that's, That's. I'm surprised that, that, that he would be pushing for.
- [38:15]
C
That he's pushing for at the federal level. He wants the Constitutional Convention.
- [38:20]
D
He should. I think it's admirable. I don't disagree.
- [38:22]
C
Balance budget for term limits. And there's one other, one other thing that's, that's also.
- [38:29]
B
Desantis is also trying to get rid.
- [38:31]
C
Of property taxes in, in Florida. No, he's tried to get rid of property taxes for primary residents.
- [38:37]
B
Homestead.
- [38:38]
C
Homestead. I am a proud homesteader in Florida.
- [38:41]
B
So, yeah, you and me both, bro. Let's get rid of them. I don't care. My kids don't go to public school. I guess we can stop funding those, but fine.
- [38:48]
C
No, it's, it's not about funding the public schools. There. You, you actually could look at the budgets, but we don't want to talk about Florida politics, but we should. We could do it, but it's a model.
- [38:58]
D
Yeah, he's doing a good job. I'm going to.
- [39:01]
C
The point that I was trying to make is there are people, believe it or not, I have heard people say, well, I don't see that if you're, if you're in the Trump orbit, you say, well, you know, you're not going to need Bitcoin anymore because they're going to balance the budget. Those people are on serious, very High quality drugs. That's just the truth. The only way you're going to balance the budget is by running the economy incredibly hot and causing financial inflation. There was a point in his WEF speech which I thought was him saying the quiet part out loud. Everyone who thinks that he's going to focus on affordability, he made it very clear. He said, listen, we want to help people buy houses but we can't afford to have housing prices drop. He was very clear about that. Right. I mean it's like he said the quiet part out loud. I mean there is no doubt they're going to run the economy as hot as possible. And there no doubt they're not going to keep prioritizing asset prices. So anyone who thinks that that's not going to happen, well, good luck with that. No one else saw that.
- [40:03]
D
No, I agree. I want to touch on the legislative morass and the sclerotic system that you guys been talking about for five minutes as a huge problem. Why the deficit structural among other things. And go to what happened at wef. Look who's running Davos now, Larry Fink. So we've gone from a political to a financial engineer because that's the only way out. So he's going to provide this, the glue or the connections to make the economies run hot, the faculty financialization because legislatively we're just for cotched. So I, I thought that was also a under discussed signal. And he's going to be, you know, he's the emperor now in my opinion.
- [40:50]
C
And now ask yourself the question, does the emperor whose most profitable project product is a Bitcoin etf, you know, how is he going to steer things? I mean, just ask yourself that question. I mean, you know, you could sell it if you want but I think that people are going to be really surprised as the policies that start coming out of this move forward.
- [41:12]
D
Absolutely.
- [41:14]
C
I mean, Bruce Satoshi roundtable is this is. You made a big point of saying how different it is. I mean is that, is that starting, is that next week?
- [41:22]
A
Yeah, it's coming right up a week from today, so. Or a week from Yesterday, whatever. The 29th I'm here.
- [41:29]
C
What do you expect is the big topic of conversation there?
- [41:32]
A
I hope it's not a bunch of status nonsense. I mean I made a video like a month or two ago saying that. You know, I just, I'm just personally troubled by the way our industry is going. You know, I don't want to just have this thing where we shill for Larry Fink for number go up in this captive, you know, dead frozen fish of an asset that sits there and we think it's going to go up. So that's why we buy it, because we hope it goes up. That's not interesting. And I don't think that the long term investment thesis on that is sustainable. Nothing ever goes up because people think it's going to go up. It has to have some reason. Limited supply. Yeah, that's kind of cool. In a world where idiots keep printing money from thin air, sure. But that I don't think is enough either. There's a lot of things with limited supply. I think it has to be real money and it has to be used. And unfortunately, you know, you're right. Larry Fink's most profitable product is I bet, so he is not incentivized to have it be used the way that we envisioned it in the early days. And hopefully maybe there's people who are so smart that they'll say, gee, this is just a dead fish of an asset if it's not actually used as real money. But we've got to move to that. Otherwise I don't think Bitcoin's going to have value. I've never been so bearish on bitcoin in my life. You know, Scott mentioned, you know, our OG selling, you know, if I could find something better, I'm out. You know, I'm just not interested in it. It's flipping boring now. Who cares? We came here to change the world. We didn't come here for some stupid ass centralized asset that sits on your Merrill lynch account next to your meme stocks. And we hope it goes up because a bunch of people just constantly shill it. That's ridiculous. It's a joke. It's the kind of thing people made fun of us for for doing. This is an asset that has unique properties that make it different from anything else in the world. That's what made it valuable. That's what made it interesting.
- [43:18]
C
Isn't one of its most unique properties the fact that it can in fact be used both peer to peer as well as being held as an aggregator, as an asset, as a hedge against currency risk?
- [43:29]
A
Yeah, not really. That's not that interesting of a property. Anything can. Blackhawk can hold anything. They could hold real estate. They can hold junk. You know, the, the, the Byzantine general's.
- [43:38]
C
Dilemma, solving that as long as people can. And the big reason why, and let's call it what it is, the big reason Bitcoin isn't being used as money in the United States for sure is taxes. And the reality is inflation and debasement of the currency is the stealthiest tax out there. But it is an absolutely is a tax. Right. So if you spend bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee and you want to replace and you want to keep your savings in bitcoin, so then you have to buy more to do it and you can do that friction. Frictionlessly you owe, if you bought it at whatever you owe 40% of the or whatever you owe some percentage that's non trivial on that. Change that and then all of a sudden people start using it. Ensure that wallets will be that you could at any place you buy Bitcoin has the ability. You can not an ibit but you buy it on an exchange buy it wherever that you can take response, take hold of it and you can use it. It's fine. The biggest problems we have is you have taxes and you have some notion. People are afraid. And I've had multiple people say this to me. So this isn't, this isn't bullshit that well, if you're not allowed to leave the country with more than $10,000 in currency, if you walk, if all of a sudden are they going to start patting you down for ledgers or frankly are they going to interrogate you to see if you have a seed phrase? I mean arguably, you know, people. There are people who think that if you are able to self custody and you leave the country with it that you're violating the law and that they're going to come after you. Which is absolutely ridiculous. But you know, that's why something that congressman Davidson said, you know, the keep your coins act will be so important. You know. But if those things are true and you could have those two things side by side, I don't see how that's a betrayal. That's the difference. But you're right.
- [45:28]
A
Yeah, I mean it's just the direction we're moving. You know, if we move more towards more centralization. You know, I feel like we've regressed a lot in the last 12 years or so. We, you know, used to go to bitcoin conferences. Everybody was buying and buying stuff with bitcoin. I mean you had local bitcoins, you could go and grab cash and buy. Meet somebody at McDonald's and buy Bitcoin from them. You know, little by little these things have been made illegal. The taxes is significant. In the early days everybody said here's a new system that's just going to disrupt it so bad. Nobody's going to pay taxes. Everybody's going to be underground, this entire underground economy, and it's going to become so huge that they won't be able to do anything about it. You can barely even say that out loud right now without getting audited. You know, and certainly nobody at blackrock is going to say that. And nobody at any of these big centralized, publicly traded companies, even if they secretly believe it because they're a closet libertarian. Nobody's going to, nobody's going to say that out loud. So that narrative is kind of dead. And so taxes is a big problem. I wish that you, you know, all this regulatory effort, all this wheel spinning for all these, you know, two steps forward, two steps back regulations with genius act and everything else. I wish that the efforts would have been put towards at least making a diminish exemption saying, you know, under 500 bucks or, you know, under 5,000 a year or something like that. I wouldn't have been jumping for joy over that. But it would be, you know, a significant improvement over, over this because if you're not using it to buy coffee and I, I agree with you. The reason is, I mean, I, I don't, I'm sad about myself. I used it all the time in 2012, 13, 14, 15, a little bit in 16, 17, but, but you know, I never use it now. I just sit there and look at it like some stupid piece of, you know, a fancy nft.
- [47:08]
F
Oh boy.
- [47:09]
A
Number go up, number go down. It's, it's ridiculous, it's boring, it's not cool. And so, you know, I wish we were using it. But yeah, I'm terrified of the taxes. You know, I, I, I, I go out of my way to not have. As you can imagine, I get hassled. I had this massive, massive, massive pain, which my lawyer was convinced it was at least partly because of my big mouth. But I won, thank goodness. I got absolutely no trouble. But, but they put me through a big ringer, you know, they really, they really scrutinized. We gave them 40,000 pages of documentation, you know, and so I'm terrified. So, so, yeah, great. Lesson learned. I'm, I'm the slave and you know, I just won't use it. I'll just sit it there. I'll do three, four transactions a year and I'll triple, quadruple document them. I CC them to, you know, six different people on my team to make sure like, oh, I used my own money, I better triple, quadruple, make sure that we declare it and have the basis and everything. And now it's even harder. There's this new law where you can't, you can't even make it fungible between wallets. So, yeah, I mean the taxes is a big, is a big hassle, but this isn't the way the. I thought, I mean, I didn't think this was how it's going to go. You know, I'm just disappointed and it makes me uninterested in it as an asset. And both as a activist and as an investor, as an activist, I say forget this, this is trash. It's just a bunch of centralized nonsense. I don't care about it, I'm not interested in it. I don't see a path to change the world through BlackRock. But as an investor, I say, yeah, you know, what number go up because of limited supply in a, in a world where there's unlimited fiat is somewhat interesting, but it's not interesting enough to onboard the next 10 million people, particularly if they're being onboarded through this centralized sludge that has zero properties and isn't usable and they can't buy it and hold it and they don't custody it. And those real, truly valuable properties that I started to mention, you know, this Byzantine general's dilemma, the truce decentralization, where you have total control, those are erased. And, and that to me makes it not an interesting asset if, if that's the way it goes. I think it has to have those principles to be unique and interesting. And that was the, you know, the value prop that it was sold on in the early days because it was unique and interesting. Now it's just being sold as, you know, yet another type of etf. So I hope we reverse course. And there is, you know, to put a silver lining on it that, you know, there is some aspects of this, you know, people working on privacy, there's, you know, movement in, in El Salvador where people really are using Bitcoin. And you know, there's, there's glimmers of hope, but I think overall we need a big reset and a big change of direction for most of the industry.
- [49:51]
C
Well, I mean, yeah, as I said, if you want to get adoption, there's all sorts of things have to happen. But the one place where you and I are totally in agreement for, I mean, there's a reason people ask me why I don't trade. And the answer is because, you know, God knows if I sell any Bitcoin, I'm going to document the living crap out of it and make sure the taxes are paid. And you know, it's, it really is. It really is that simple. I mean, there are certain things you don't screw with. Al Capone found out. I'm far from Al Capone. I don't do anything illegal. But the truth is, is that it's the easiest way to get yourself screwed. But the. We're in this, this, this is a Friday and I think it's a good time to wrap. I mean, you know, we are here. We are, you know, the same price, the low volatility and you know, I was, I was checking. I haven't looked. Yeah, silver is now officially over 100. $100 and two, you know, and a quarter. And gold is at 4,973. And so we're going to be hearing all sorts the headlines this weekend. That's what it's going to be about. Anybody who thinks that that's bearish for bitcoin is not paying attention. And that's all I'll say. Anybody else have any final thoughts or should we wrap it up? Scott, you've been glitching in and out.
- [50:59]
B
I think I'm here, but I think we should wrap.
- [51:02]
C
Well, have a great weekend, everyone. We'll see you Monday morning.
- [51:07]
B
Thanks, everyone.
- [51:08]
D
Take care, everybody.
- [51:10]
A
Thanks.
- [51:11]
E
Happy Friday. Nice weekend.