← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:00]
A
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town hall here on X 10:15am every other day. Maybe not this Friday, Dave.
- [00:10]
B
Right.
- [00:12]
A
I know that I'll be traveling.
- [00:13]
B
I think you might be. Yeah, me, me, me too. So, yeah, it's. I might be able to dial in, but we're gonna have.
- [00:19]
A
I. I think it's time that we find even a third useful person who can do this in our stead.
- [00:25]
B
Yeah. But hey, that'd be good. Hey. Hey, Jamie, you want to volunteer?
- [00:30]
C
Sign me up, brother. I'm here for you. I love this. Let's go.
- [00:35]
A
Yeah. So today, MicroStrategy's drive buying Bitcoin as price stalls near 70k. It's hilarious. I was mocking myself earlier, Dave, that it's just like every title, YouTube or things you see here, it's like, Bitcoin breaks 70k, Bitcoin loses 70k. Bitcoin breaks 70k. Bitcoin loses 70k. We're like doing this endless carousel.
- [00:55]
B
Those old people in the audience don't. Duck season. Rabbit season. Duck season. Exactly.
- [01:00]
A
Right.
- [01:01]
B
Yeah. If you remember. If you remember Bugs Bunny.
- [01:03]
A
Bugs Bunny, of course.
- [01:05]
B
Yeah. You got, you know, it's like the real title. The real thing is, is the ongoing, you know, flat out lying around, you know, by the, you know, by the. The banking lobby is. Is probably the real, the real thing. And you know, the uncertainty this creates. I mean, I know Carlo will get. We juiced on that one. I mean, look, markets are not going to do. No, no, no offense people, but markets aren't going to do all until people really know what's happening in the Middle east and we see exactly what goes on here. Because, you know, markets are frozen. And it's like you go down and you look. I mean, crude oil is around, is 85. Okay, it's. It, whatever. You know, it's been in the mid-80s now for a couple days ever since it went from, you know, 70s up to 120 and then round trip back into the 80s. That was the fireworks and now it's sitting here and people are like, okay, elevated risk, but what's going on? You know, you look at gold, gold is. Where are we now? Let's just get it right. So gold's a little bit below 5200, which is more or less almost bog in the middle of its. Of its recent range of where it's been trading. Silver's trading around 85. Same difference. Silver being exposed to the real economy, gold being exposed to store of value. They're operating together more or less the Same. Look at, look at the indices and you go through every one of them. Or, you know, you would look and say, oh, well, there's not that much volatility right now. There's nothing going on. Well, that's not because there's no potential volatility. It's because the markets don't. People don't know how to price. They don't know where things are going to go. You get, you know, misinformation. You know, it's like, funny how many times I see, hey, Grok, is this true? Is. Is one of the craziest things not. And how the hell is a large language model going to know other than by what's posted? And nothing's getting posted. So that's the situation we're in, right? I mean, I, you know, I was watching you and Josh had actually a really good conversations this morning about, you know, tokens and value. And I think that's what we should really talk about because, honestly, no one's gonna have a freaking clue what's gonna go on the market until the market establishes a direction. You agree, Ryan?
- [03:12]
A
I entirely agree, yes. Go ahead, Ryan.
- [03:14]
D
Yeah, I'll jump in on that,
- [03:18]
A
man.
- [03:18]
D
You know, I always say in 2020, April, May, I wish I would have bought more bitcoin. Like, everyone is so concerned about COVID and the pandemic, and the markets were tanking and bitcoin bottomed out back in the 3000s. And I kept thinking, man, I should have just thrown more into bitcoin. I should have thrown more into bitcoin when the world was distracted and worried about that we knew was going to blow over eventually. I should have just bought more bitcoin. And now I'm looking at bitcoin in the 60s, 70s, back to 60s, back 70s, back to 60s. I can't help but think that we're in the exact same situation where the world is distracted and looking at stuff, oh, quantum this or, you know, tariffs that. And eventually this stuff's going to settle out in another year or two. And I'm going to think, man, that was the, that was the low part. I should have bought more. And then to the point about tokens and utility, it seems like we're getting to the. Just now, after 15 years or 16 years, we're just now getting to the point where people actually care about utility. Before, it was just a narrative and a pitch deck, but with the advent of these compute tokens and these AI tied in projects, we're actually seeing real utility around people needing massive amounts of Inference and them using tokens to acquire it.
- [04:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, and that brings you to, you know, the point that, you know, Josh was making a couple of points with Scott this morning that, you know, one is near and dear to my heart, which is that finding real value in an ecosystem, not with the marketing bullshit, you know, he's talking about post airdrop. What's the things are going should get valued normally and as long as there's a path for the, the token holders to get that value. And we talk about this all the time. And yet, you know, the market, you know, in crypto is still more of a casino, more based on narrative and really hasn't gotten there yet. I mean, I think that a few more cycles of bitcoin goes up, altcoins kind of bitcoin drops a little, altcoins get hammered. Know, maybe it'll flush everything out, but you know, it's, it, it is. I think that right now babies are getting thrown out with the bathwater. I mean, that, that's what it feels like to me. Yeah, I, I, you know, I don't know what other people think, but I think that there's a lot of things being built. You know, this whole narrative about AI agents and agentic economies wanting to use crypto. Well, I mean, yes, they're going to want to use stable coins if they're trading in dollars. Why? Because they need digital dollars. They can't use, you know, conventional dollars, and they're not going to want to rely on banking rails that they can't get. That's obvious. It's also obvious that if you're building a business like we talk about, you know, Saylor, making pitches to corporations as treasuries to save their, their profits in bitcoin as a wealth preservation vehicles. I mean, just ask any AI which is more likely to hold its value dollars or bitcoin, and you're going to get bitcoin almost every time. So obviously the agents are going to choose to save and keep treasury. That is not needed for, you know, not needed for operations in bitcoin. And so those two things are true. The real question is what networks will actually evolve that will, you know, do things that will create value outside of bitcoin. That to me is the real question. And honestly, I think that that is a very, you know, the people who figure that out will make, will get very, very rich. And the people who try and fail will just see, you know, see themselves rugged. I mean, that's sort of where I, where I think we're at. Right now.
- [06:58]
D
Or they get rich also. They just rug before everyone else does.
- [07:02]
B
Well, yeah, well, that happens too, right? But, you know, we're in this. This uncertainty period and. Look, I don't know, you know, all I know is I just. I just published an article. You'll love it. Carlo, that just pisses me off. I just gave a little history lesson. You know, the ultimate irony of the banking lobby, the money center banking lobby, who effectively, you know, eight years after their last major successful lobbying push, which was to bring down glass, steag literally almost destroyed the entire economy and made themselves all bankrupt. But of course, they got bailed out. Them arguing about risk by allowing crypto firms to have banking licenses when the crypto firms are fully reserved institutions is just. I mean, it's mind boggling, really. You know, it's just mind boggling. I mean, the amount of. I'm stumbling over words because I'm not trying to be that insulting, but honestly, the politicians who are listening and buying these arguments are either unbelievably stupid. I mean, as in, you can't pass. You know, forget algebra, you can't pass math, so you're talking about 8th grade, 7th grade sort of stuff. You know, just basic math. Or they're so corrupt, which is probably the more likely scenario that they don't care. They'll just take the money. I mean, it is. It is beyond belief. You know how dumb this argument is that corporate Kraken, because they're going to use stable coins and in a fully reserved basis, is more risky than a. Than companies that have 95% of their. Their assets loaned out.
- [08:41]
D
You don't have to mix words, Dave. They're just stupid.
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, well, I. I don't think they're that stupid. I'm sorry? I mean, we're talking walk and chew gum at the same time stupid here.
- [08:50]
D
You'd be surprised.
- [08:53]
B
I mean, you know, we're literally talking words that you're not allowed to use. If it was a Jeopardy category, Words I'm not. Starts with N's and D. Can't use that word to describe them. But those are the people who are running our country. That's sad.
- [09:06]
E
Ryan.
- [09:09]
B
Carlo, good morning.
- [09:11]
F
Good morning. Yeah, watching that ABA conference footage yesterday had me screaming into my phone, infuriated at just how ridiculous the narrative has become. You know, this. The opening remarks by the president of that association where he got everyone to raise their hand. If you're in a community bank and you're worried about stablecoins taking away depositors, and of course, in lockstep everyone raises their hand. Just the narrative that they're floating is ridiculous. And what's concerning about it, Dave, is they're so threatened. And I kind of liken it to what Tesla did to the auto sector. Remember how furious all the auto manufacturers were that Tesla was had the audacity to sell vehicles online and completely disrupt the dealership model. And it kind of reminds me of that, that you just have this disruptive technology, this new way of doing, doing things and a legacy dinosaur who wants desperately to cling to their monopoly and getting this audience of bankers lathered up and then telling them all, okay, now we're going to walk over to D.C. and we're going to meet with lawmakers so you can tell them just how scared you are that we're about to lose our monopoly on moving money. But the thing that really troubled me the most about yesterday's remarks was one of the speakers and I put it up in the nest. There's a segment where they talk about the yield problem and the concern, but then they pivot to defy and how we shouldn't have defy either. That's not a good thing either for the banks because the banks don't just want to stop at limiting what consumers can get on stablecoin yield. They also want to destroy what consumers can do in DeFi with stablecoins because they know that there are potentially more attractive, more user friendly lending protocols available out there that also disrupt. And the bottom line is this is not about protecting community banks. This is about protecting profit margins for big banks. Community banks have an opening to come out on, on this and actually take business away from big banks if they would just wake up and listen. And I'm putting together a piece that's going to talk about those opportunities for community banks where they actually can have a competitive moat against the big banks if they adopt stable coins. And the ones that fail to do that are going to lose because they are, they, they could throw all the lobbying money they want at this, but they're going to lose in the end end because they're fighting a horse and buggy defense of a, of an industry in the age of automobiles. And I just don't see them winning this.
- [12:12]
B
Yeah, I mean I, I, I vented my spleen already. So I mean I, I, I think that it, you know, there, the reason we put the topic up here is we saw, I, I, I will, let me just say something, we'll see if I can trigger people. I am not worried per se, but strategies strc paying that high of a percent of interest. There is a number where STRC becomes too big and creates too much leverage inside of bitcoin itself from people who are buying it. Because we know that. I don't think we're anything close to that level yet. In fact, grain of salt is that's his moniker on X. You know, he goes through the math and basically explains, you know, where things are because it has a very unique thing that the higher the price of bitcoin goes, the lower the leverage that microstrategy actually has within their, within what they're doing. And that absolutely, you know, does change that. But it also means that if bitcoin falls that their leverage goes up and you'll end up hearing all of this stuff. I mean, the fact that a lot of other DATs or at least, you know, the Vex, you know, strive actually are buying SDRC along with buying bitcoin, I, which, which is, I find that fascinating and I find, you know, what's going on very interesting. But it's kind of resurrecting that digital asset treasury narrative in a different way. Maybe not in the stupid way of people paying stupid premiums to get exposure, but in terms of managing money built around a bitcoin ecosystem. Seems like that's going on. And, and I think that, that that's creating just, just the math, more buying than is being mined. And so we are now in a situation where, and this is hard for people to get their heads around, but basically in every other epoch of bitcoin, the equilibrium price of bitcoin would be lower. If new money doesn't come into bitcoin. Why? Because it's being mined. Right? You're getting more supply. Well, now there are buyers that are not buying bitcoin directly that are buying a yield product that effectively means that the equilibrium price is higher because there's more demand. And I'm curious what people think about that. I personally think that that is interesting, but it is increasing leverage in the system. Nobody.
- [14:33]
A
I see Ryan Tandap, but I don't know if it's old.
- [14:36]
D
No, I mean I could talk to that. I wanted to respond to Carlos real fast before we jump into microstrategy stuff.
- [14:43]
B
Cool.
- [14:43]
D
If you don't mind. So one comment, Dave, real fast, just on stupidity of politicians. Just look at Washington state. I can't even believe what they're doing. But on Carlos's point with Stablecoins, once again, the critical thinking ability in this country at this point in history is just astonishing to me because all the banks want to be up in arms about stablecoins, they want to be up in arms about crypto. And yet no one's actually sat down and critically thought through what you can actually do on a blockchain and what you can't do on a blockchain. There's a huge difference between credit and lending in defi, you can lend, but you have to be fully collateralized or over collateralized to do so because there's no such thing as credit and anonymity. They're like an antithesis to each other. If you have credit, you cannot have someone be anonymous because you cannot threaten their person or assets. And that is the basis of credit. Banks still hold the keys to credit. And if the banks were smart, they would look at ways of setting up centralized issuances on the blockchain with fully vetted credit systems. And yet they're not doing that. They're looking at stablecoin, they're looking at these lending markets, they're looking at all these blockchains things and their eyes go crossed and they think that it's a threat to them. And it's not. It's opening them up to a huge customer base in a completely asynchronous system. And if they were smart, they would look at leveraging that. It was like Vietnam back in 2014 when everyone was thinking, oh, communist governments will hate crypto because people could freely move money. And then the Vietnamese government looked at it and said, wait a minute, we can see everything on chain and we can track it. This works great for us. We're going to allow it because they thought about it critically and they realized that it was a completely open ledger and they can track every single cent that goes through it. Eventually banks will come around to realize this, but it's going to be a little while.
- [16:48]
A
Carlo, did you have any response there or thoughts?
- [16:52]
F
No, I mean that is absolutely on point. And I think banks ultimately, by resisting the way they are yield and trying to limit, potentially defy in the Clarity act, are ultimately doing themselves a disservice. Because I think this is going to accelerate their undoing. They're going to be massively disrupted by the very thing that they are fighting to kill. And that's, you know, history has many examples of this. And the fact that they're not being advised by people who understand the very things that you just talked about is what's killing them. They are still getting their advice from people who don't understand the technology.
- [17:34]
D
And even more so as we move into A.I. i mean, we're building humanoid robots, we have A.I. agents, they're getting wallets, they're using credit card numbers for online shopping. OpenAI is rolling out shopping interfaces. We are moving so fast towards agentic systems where people are not actually doing things themselves, where you're going to have this second layer borrowing system, you're going to have the second layer credit system and we're going to have to have eventually a registration. I know it sucks. And everyone realizes that eventually we're going to move into the same type of DMV system where you have to register your car and license plate and all that stuff. You have to do the same thing with these robots, you have to do the same thing with online agentix systems and eventually there's going to be a whole automated credit market built on top of this. Now we're talking maybe five, six, seven years in the future, but the smart players already putting infrastructure in place for it.
- [18:30]
F
Now look, when you have the CEOs of Binance and Coinbase coming out and talking about the explosion that's about to happen in agent to agent transactions and it will all be over. Crypto Rails, I coined it the M to M economy. The machine to machine economy is something that I commented about the other day that I think is also not being taken serious by traditional finance, especially banks. You know, you have Amazon now from what I learned, trying to shut down the opportunity for agents to buy from their platform again, doubling down on their legacy model and failing to adapt to what's coming. And there is no stopping this. Yes, there are issues, there are going to be friction points as far as know your customer and the fact that these agents don't have identities in the sense of taxpayer IDs, these are all things we're going to have to resolve. But Meta just bought the MALT social network. Think about that for a second, folks. This was an open source thing that was spun up by bots. A bot to bot social network that just got acquired by Meta.
- [19:46]
D
It spun up a month and a half ago. A month and a half ago, it's
- [19:50]
F
funny, a month and a half ago. Think about that exit, guys. Think about that. That is just wildly insane.
- [20:03]
B
Jamie and Sasha.
- [20:05]
C
Yeah, I'll just add, you know, I just think, you know, I agree with what, you know, the, you know, Carlos is saying. I mean, I just think that they need to step back. I mean banks, if they just accepted this new world that's going to be here for everybody, I mean, they get the best of both worlds, they create new, they still get to create the new money supply without reserve requirements, but then they add the stablecoin deposits with the fully banked reserves. I mean, you know, they maintain their competitive edge over neobanks that can't create money, but then they can also match or you know, any rewards that could potentially cause deposits to leave the system. So I think that there's just no downside. I think that I agree with Carlo again that this is something that's going to happen and rather than try to fight the system to embrace it and to, you know, continue to use their edge and their advantage and their political capital to continue to make sure that they stay, you know, maintain their position of power that they have in this traditional financial system.
- [21:12]
B
Sasha.
- [21:13]
G
Sasha yeah, and I was also going to bring up the Meta acquisition both because I mean one, the rate of change of building applications that we see is just mind boggling. A friend of mine recently, he got into a challenge of building Slack in an open source way just using agents. In nine days he had a version of he called SLOC S L A W K and it's Open source on GitHub. He got the app running, he got a mobile app running like he's not even at the end of the 14 days and he has this running. And anyone can deploy their own instance of their Slack. And where that's important is I think one Meta has tried to do stablecoins they've tried to get in finance before. I think that's another shot they get at without the threats that they had previously from a regulatory perspective. And the difference is everything is going to change so fast. But in finance I think trust is the most important thing and building that trust is going to be a sticky note for people trying to build applications in that realm. And when you add the ability to push products very fast, the game is really going to be building that trust, building the liquidity around your product. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those things coming out of the metas and the big corporations that have trust. I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing for OG Bitcoiners or more like cyberpunk type of of ethos, but I think they're going to be different fundamentally in what you see in fintech from what you see in just general SaaS products.
- [23:07]
D
Yeah, I can jump in on that Sasha also because I mean I've been a software Engineer for over 20 years and I thought my job is gone. Basically anyone can be a software engineer now by just spinning up one of these IDEs, and the rate at which I can build things is just. It's like godlike at this point. I'm just like, holy cow, if I can do this, then it's like game over. So I actually automated the whole system. I built out a website called tabhr.com and I can spin up entire fleets of AI employees. Now. I can give them all different assignments, and I can just run an entire virtual company of fake people. And it's all running on open claw instances inside encrypted dockerized containers.
- [24:01]
H
And
- [24:03]
D
the rate at which you can build things and produce things and scale things is just unreal. And so when it comes to bitcoin, software is going to very, very quickly become disposable over the next several years. But bitcoin and crypto, because of an immutable ledger, is going to be very, very slow and boring and stationary compared to the metamorphosis that software is going to go through. The interesting thing with all of this is we've had a user issue, a usability issue of crypto for well over a decade that basically, since the beginning is people. It's too complicated, it's confusing. People don't know how to use it. But now we're getting to the point where you have disposable interfaces, customizable interfaces. Anyone can code, anyone can create an app. And if someone wants to figure out how to use bitcoin, now they just have to ask and they say, I don't know how to use this wallet. Can you create a wallet for me? This doesn't make sense to me. Can you change it and make it look like this? People can create their own on ramps now. And it's going to become faster and faster and faster of people onboarding into cryptocurrency and because they're curious and they can do it themselves.
- [25:19]
A
Ryan, I have to ask. I've been playing with all of this a lot as well. I mean, how do you deal with allowing it into the wild and trusting it? Because it makes a lot of mistakes.
- [25:31]
D
It does make mistakes. But you can pre prompt the Personas for tab hr. I have all of the Personas of the employees so locked down that they ask and gatekeep everything. Even if you give them an API key, they'll tell you, hey, you just gave me a sensitive piece of information. What do you want me to do with it when I'm done with it? You need to reroll this and make sure that I don't have access to this anymore. There's ways of prompting these engines to make sure that there's a lot of security gates. Then you can also have these AI agents manage each other so they can filter each other so if one goes awry, another one can catch it. But this is no different than in a company where you don't give the janitor keys without having a security officer make sure they know that that janitor has access to those areas. You always have layers of security even in a corporation. And we have to do the same thing with agents. It's not going to be just a one off agent that can do everything because there are inherent security risks in that.
- [26:42]
A
Yeah, that all makes perfect sense. Dave. We never got to microstrategy.
- [26:45]
I
We were starting before you got there. Can I ask another question? Like follow up question? Thank you Carlos. But security was one question. I think Scott was referring to the capabilities in his question. He said it makes a lot of mistakes. And I know there are a of lot a zillion and ten training videos and claims over the Internet that you know all these open claw and agents are just magical and they solve your life and whatnot. But for some reasons it's either me and Scott being probably not as good as everyone else, but like my agents are really not solving everything.
- [27:30]
E
It's.
- [27:32]
I
It's almost tiresome to deal with them to get to the quality we expect or probably we are just people who over expect things from everybody, including AI. And that expectation is not even 50% of what these large language models do. I'm just talking about all the claims. So what was your experience? Was it like oh shit, this is so much better than my average employees. Or was it like okay well I am, I often deal with shit given how shitty my employees are. And this is just like probably the same.
- [28:10]
D
I'll give you a great example. So I have an executive assistant, Lex. She's fully AI. She works in our Slack, she has her own Gmail account. She is actually running on one of our web servers. I gave her. Oh yeah, I gave her a headshot and everything. I, you know, I have to make all the agents somewhere between a six and a seven because you don't want employees that are like modelish and don't want employees anyways. So
- [28:39]
B
I mean I'm so glad my
- [28:41]
A
mic is off at the reaction today.
- [28:44]
D
I'm gonna get in trouble. Go to tab hr, spin up an employee, you'll see what I mean. All right, so these are recorded. I know I'm in trouble.
- [28:52]
B
These guys.
- [28:52]
D
What are you doing to me?
- [28:53]
A
Here, program twos, man, just.
- [28:58]
D
Anyways, all right, so I gave Lex an empty Linux box and I said, hey, I need a web, I need a mail server. I said, can you, can you research an open source mail server? That would be good. And then if, when you find one, go ahead and deploy it on this Linux box. I gave her root access, set it up, configure it, and then give me the DNS settings I need to update on the domain she had created. Or she had basically set up all the security on the mail server, deployed the software, configured it, did everything in three minutes. Now, if I had a DevOps engineer doing that, it'd be like a week and then they would have to research and configure and all this stuff. She had the server completely hardened and set up within three minutes. Within the next 10 minutes, I had the DNS set up and we had a mail server live. When I want to Deploy applications from GitHub, I can literally text her on Slack and say, hey, pull down the latest repo from Main, deploy it out on the server and debug any conflicts in the deploy. Engineers will spend weeks trying to troubleshoot deploy conflicts. Sometimes there's bugs in different environments. She won't stop until the software is compiled and gets fully deployed. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes, but she makes sure. And then I have her push whatever changes she made back up to the repo and then we merge it back into Main. So we have it documented. But as a server admin, OpenClaw already has replaced the $200,000 a year job that was just on my first deploy. Now I have these open Claw Systems tied into QuickBooks, into Google Workspace. We're tying them into Office 365. They can make phone calls now. We assign them a phone number and they'll call you and you can call them and talk to them. I mean, this is escalating very, very quickly. But once again you have.
- [31:01]
I
I mean, he's saying that politely and indirectly, but we are the ones who are stupid enough to not be able to use it. That's what he means.
- [31:12]
A
I hear. I can read between lines as well, unfortunately.
- [31:16]
H
Yeah.
- [31:17]
E
Cool.
- [31:18]
I
Okay, we can go to MSRT now.
- [31:23]
A
Does Michael Saylor, is he an AI bot yet?
- [31:26]
I
Ryan, by the way, thank you so much. It was like you're the first human that I'm talking to that is sort of conferring to that. I'm not sure yet if it's like you having a bot called Alex or Alex having a bot called Ryan, but Whatever.
- [31:44]
F
Hey Scott. The perfect pivot to the MSTR conversation actually weaves in AI because Sailor's been pretty open that he built STRC over AI. He used AI to solve the problem of how to launch this digital credit infrastructure that he built over STRC.
- [32:04]
B
So yeah, he's using it, yeah, 100%.
- [32:08]
A
I mean, he said that repeatedly. And that's definitely the future, I think, for all of this. But Dave, obviously, just to circle back on the, I guess the overarching topic here, which is that there's a lot of big entities that are still really excited to buy here. I'm one of them. I'm small.
- [32:26]
B
I mean, look, I, Yes, I think that that is true, but I mean the point that the people, people always ignore. People always ignore supply and demand until it becomes obvious and then they look back and go, oh, I should have seen that. I mean, you know what Ryan was saying about, you know, Covid, you know, the amount of money that's being inserted. I just, just a simple question. You have a worldwide. You have this sort of confluence, you know, conflagration, that's the right word for it. Whatever you. This, this, this sort of, of, of war going on and one of the most important choke points in the world. You know, people talk about oil, but obviously there are people who are more worried about helium because some huge percentage of the world's helium goes through the straits and is produced in Qatar, which has now been threatened. And yeah, we have weeks or months where they have the supply, but if you don't have helium, you don't make chips. You know, those are the sorts of things that, that you get people's attention. And what does all that mean? Well, all of this, you know, has to do with economic activity. And every single time the governments in the west see a potential slowdown in economic activity, what do they do? Well, they panic and they overprint. Why? Because they, they are all running on such huge debt burning burdens that they can't afford a recession because of what does it do? And so policymakers. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com visit to download your spaces today. It was everywhere. Do have the same thing in that sort of scenario. Just ask yourself what happens to things like gold and bitcoin? I mean, yeah, bitcoin right now is trading like a software company. Okay, fine, whatever. I mean it is what it is and you know, it feels like the narrative, you know, will get, it will get another jump start from all of this. And it just feels obvious to me. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid, you know, maybe I'm just stupid and you know, banging my head against a wall because I don't understand. But it feels too obvious sometimes. It is that obvious. I mean, Occam's razor is not wrong. And you know, when you look at it, you know, the market is sort of kind of telling you that ish. But the numbers are small compared to where they should be. That's really the point. So when you see, you know, $400 million of stri. Of strc trading in a morning, you know, what are you actually seeing? Well, you're seeing people saying, well listen, I'm willing to take the credit of bitcoin not failing because I'm going to earn a more than double the risk free rate. You know, but they're taking that credit. You know, it. So it's like, is bitcoin a junk bond right now? I, I, you know, I don't know. You can, you can look at it. But the truth is that he's paying an interest rate that is higher than most, most junk bonds or junk bond funds. But people claim that bitcoin is dramatically more risky. Well, is it? The market's not pricing it that way. To me that, that matters. I mean, I know I saw Gary was up here now he's not. I was curious what he was going to say about that. Was trying to tee him up. But you know, I don't know what people think. But you know, if you, this is the sort of thing that can last for a while. I mean, I don't know anybody who wants to earn yield and isn't thinking about STRC or have STRC as part of their portfolio.
- [35:41]
A
I saw a grain of salt jumped up and is Mr. MicroStrategy in my mind.
- [35:46]
B
So oh, he's up here. I don't see him.
- [35:48]
A
I just brought him up as a speaker.
- [35:50]
B
I think grain you there because I don't see you on my screen.
- [35:56]
A
And he dropped.
- [35:57]
B
All right.
- [35:58]
A
Jamie literally just dropped as you were saying that. Of course.
- [36:01]
C
Well, maybe he'll jump back in. I'll tee this up for grain because we were on Space last night and he was going over the idea about, you know, strategy and their accumulation rate because of, you know, the continue to capture inflows recently.
- [36:18]
B
Right.
- [36:18]
C
And so the idea of strategy accumulating the 1 million bitcoin to me right now, Bitcoin, it's very narrative driven, right. There's nothing wrong structurally, the network's strong hash rate, everything, there's no issues. But we're currently in a downtrend, we're sideways ranging. It's not really an exciting time right now. And I was watching basketball. I don't know who's an NBA fan, but I was watching at this NBA Miami player scored 83 points last night. It made me think back to the, the home run race with Barry Bonds and, and Mark McGuire, if you guys remember that. And I'm not really into baseball like that, but I was excited and I think like something like the idea of, you know, a narrative of strategy accumulating the 1 million bitcoins could be something that, you know, could excite the, the bitcoin community. And then obviously as bitcoin goes, so does the broader crypto market. So I just think that as far as a narrative and if a macro perspective of something that like the people, something like that could be something that people really get behind, wow, this thing is really going toward it. It could be really fun and exciting. Is it going to get there? And I think something like that is something that beyond all the talk and you know, the macroeconomics and the conflicts is something that I think could largely power, you know, sentiment, you know, in a different direction. I'm not sure what you guys think about that.
- [37:51]
H
I think you're right, Jamie. And sorry, as I joined, I wasn't able to speak. So. So look, once strategy or once I bit gets and there's a race between both of them to get to a million bitcoins, the calculation that people be able to do in their head becomes very simple. Because If Bitcoin's at 100,000 and they have a million Bitcoins, then they're worth $100 billion. And people like round numbers. And so from a human perspective, a million is just a big number. Why? Because it's one more than 999,000. And so being a seven figure number is a big deal. And what David was saying before, what people aren't getting is that the conservative analysis is that strategy gets to a million bitcoins before the end of this year. And it's really going to happen a lot sooner, especially if the price of bitcoin stays low. So if it stays low, they're able to acquire right now at a very. They acquired 18,000 bitcoins last week. And I think this caught a bunch of people, including myself, off guard that they will get to this metric somewhere around September, October of this year, get to a million bitcoins. And in a bull market, as David was saying, Dave was saying, was their ability to Buy bitcoin goes, goes faster because they'll trade at a, at a higher positive M NAV and we saw this happen in 2024 as the price of bitcoin went to its all time high in 2024. That's when they were able to acquire more bitcoin. So right now we're in a bear market. Bitcoin is approximately 50% off, 45% off. Its all time high. And now because of STRC they're able to this. The other metric that came out this morning is that the volatility on STRC has dropped down to basically 1%. And you're like, well, who gives a crap? Well, the sharp ratio went to 3% and 3% is basically unheard of. In credit markets anything above 2 is considered excellent. So with a 3%. Sorry, with a 3 on the sharp ratio and that what that means is the given return, the 11 and a half percent, given that there's basically 1%. Sorry versus the risk free rate of 4% that their Sharpe ratio is 3 is a completely unheard of number. So as the volatility drops, the ratio gets better. And this is the weird part, strategy can acquire more bitcoins in a bull market. And right now they're doing for the week 167% of the mined bitcoins per week. So bitcoin mined per week is 167%. But they only trade STRC five days out of the week. So all of these metrics are looking better and they'll get better as the price of bitcoin goes up. Which is the weird part that's counterintuitive because a lot of people think as the price of bitcoin goes up, their ability to acquire bitcoin slows down. No, it actually accelerates, which is their net leverage drops and their amplification drops, which is the right way to go. I'll answer any questions.
- [41:08]
A
That was a hell of a way to finish that. I too will answer any questions you guys have at any given time. But I might not be smart about it. But I don't even want to say anything. I just want you guys to ask great questions now
- [41:21]
H
and let me chime in and give people why the counterintuitive part is real from a historical perspective. On January 1st of 2024, before the spot Bitcoin ETFs went live. They went live, I believe January 11th of 2024 there was a thought process. People aren't going to buy MSTR because you could buy IBIT and, and all the other spot, Bitcoin ETFs and whatever, seven or nine of them went live. What happened was at that point, strategy had less than 200,000 bitcoins. And even though I own strategy, I did not think that they would acquire 500,000 bitcoins over the next two years. Because as the price goes up, I thought intuitively it'd be harder for them to acquire it. That was my thought process. I was wrong. Then from 2024 and 2025, they acquired 500,000 bitcoins as it went up and hit 120,000 above 120,000 multiple times. And I was like, this doesn't make sense. But then when you think about it, when they traded a positive M Nav, that's when Sailor made that statement, hey, I'm selling a $1 stock for $3. I arbitrage the $2 difference, and it's accretive to the shareholders. And people are like, what the hell did he just say? I'm like, he's selling $1 worth of stock for three bucks. It's a 3M navigation. The difference between three and one is $2. And that $2 goes to buy bitcoin. And that's why he was able to acquire 500,000 bitcoins, double the previous three years, in two years. And so now he has 740,000 bitcoins. And so now you're thinking, okay, well, how much can he acquire this year? Well, last year he acquired $23 billion worth of Bitcoin. And this year the price is lower, so it's easy. So he can acquire again for the same 23 billion. If he does goes up by 35%, which is really not that hard for him to do, that will put him over a million bitcoins. But as the price stays lower, he's accumulating them. But his M Nav is 1. If his M Nav goes to 1.5 or 2.0, he's literally acquiring the bitcoin at almost twice the rate. That's the counterintuitive part. And he needs the price of bitcoin to go up. If it just stays flat, he's golden. Because the STRC and the Sharpe ratio. So this is like a lot of new metrics, and it's very hard to project this because STRC has only been available for about eight months, and it's almost $4 billion, which is kind of crazy, but hope that makes sense. I know that this sounds counterintuitive. Yeah.
- [43:59]
D
I have a question. Since you graciously volunteered to Answer them. Do you think this is a model that all the other treasury just sitting and watching this with baited breath, hoping that this is their salvation. Like, like my, you know, sailors doing something else. Like he has another strategy. And are, are the other treasury companies that kind of found themselves in hot water looking at this as a potential path out?
- [44:25]
H
Well, they would love to do it, but only, only Strive is the only other company that's doing this in the US Strive has 13,000 bitcoins and they also bought $50 million worth of stretch was announced today. So they announced they bought $50 million worth of stretch yesterday, put that on their balance sheet and then they also changed their trading range that used to be 95 to 105 on their, on their target range, even though their par value is $100 like on stretch. That's for SATA. SATA. So they changed their, their target range, which they're allowed to do. I'm assuming they're allowed to do it because they did do it and so they made it a tighter range and so they're, they're going to emulate what strategy is doing Meta Planet in Japan. Theirs is moving very slowly. The regulators in Japan are, are different than obviously in the US and they're doing it. The other bitcoin treasury companies for the most part, if you have less than about 7 or 8,000 bitcoins, you're not big enough to ever to get this working. It doesn't matter how much you want to do it. You just, it's very difficult to find an issuer that will take you seriously. So that cuts out the vast majority of the bitcoin treasury companies to do. They all would love to do it, but very few are able to and especially if their stock price is impaired. That's a nice way of saying if their stock price is in the toilet, so. Or if they're trading below, you know, effectively below 1m NAV. So they would love to do it, but they can't.
- [46:01]
A
Brian, did that answer your question, I assume?
- [46:04]
D
Yep, that's exactly what I was wanting to know.
- [46:07]
B
So, you know, it's funny, I just responded, someone made a. Let's see if I can find it. Someone basically made a tweet saying money markets hold $8 trillion paying 3 to 5%. You know, STRC is paying 11% at whatever the number is, but it's a hell of a lot smaller. You know, why is no one talking about this? So of course I posted that. We are talking about this right now. But the point is not that People are going to, because money market funds are, you know, more or less from a regulatory point of view, they are. There's like no risk. And obviously if bitcoin goes to zero strike, you know, STRC blows up. I mean, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but, but it's a non zero possibility. And so it really becomes this question and the point that you're making grain is very important people to understand. We had this whole argument yesterday in another space from someone who is enumerate, which is a fancy way of saying he doesn't understand math and that people who believe that bitcoin will not fail, but is likely to languish here for a while because that's what they believe should have their money in strc. Because if it's not going to fail, you're getting paid 11 to wait it out. And then when you think bitcoin is ready to go up, if that's what you're, whatever. Because if you're holding your money in cash as opposed to in STRC, you're giving up 11%. That's a lot of people, you know, that, that. I, I think I, I think that's a lot of people. And I don't, I don't think anybody really understands the effect of supply and demand that that does. I mean, did I capture that? Because you were part of the conversation.
- [47:46]
H
So, yeah, you definitely captured it. And I was at Strategy World along with. There was two tracks there. There was Strategy World talking about the software company and Strategy World. Bitcoin for corporations. They're both, you know, in two different days at the same event. There was a company there, Prevailon Energy. And the guy, the guy came up was like the chief financial officer of the company said, look, I purchased more than $10 million worth of STRC basically as the cash account. So he wasn't buying it from an investment perspective. He was saying that we have. He goes, I will buy and sell STRC on a daily basis as I need to, to fund, to fund payments that go out. So company has accounts receivables, money comes in, there's accounts payables, money goes out. Basic accounting. So what anybody would do with a checking account is you don't fund it at 100% of your account payables, you fund it at 200%. You need to have a buffer because sometimes you have a payment, right, you don't want to bounce a check. So that buffer amount, assuming, you know, assuming he puts $10 million into it, his payments are probably in stable months, or probably half of that. So on the $5 million, he's picking up 11.5% interest, right? Some months it may be, Maybe he uses 75% of it or whatever it is. And so he just said he's basically using it like his checking account. And he was very clear about saying, I will buy and sell as necessary, but he wants to have that little base value in there. And I think that. And for him, that was a relatively easy thought process. I think that also when you have the Sharpe ratio that goes above three, people are like, that's how much you're getting in return based upon the volatility dropping. And that's where these ratios get kind of weird. As your volatility drops, not weird, your Sharpe ratio goes up, which is a good thing. And I don't know why people don't get this strc. The other weird part about this, or all the press for strategy. Legally, they're debt. Saylor calls them digital credit, but legally they're debt. Those shares do not count towards the shares for mstr. They're issued as shares, but they're not counted there. And that's why MSTR has this amplification of 33%, because strategy, by using the prefs, is buying Bitcoin, which is a shared pool, but that doesn't increase the shares outstanding for mstr. And that's why it amplifies the. The MSTR holdings. And so again, as the price goes up, that, that leverage drops, you know, and the simple example is this. If anybody buys a house with 20% down, you buy a house for a million bucks, right? To make the math simple, you put down 200 grand. As that price of the house goes up, your leverage ratio drops because the value of the house went up. And so you finance it based upon 20%. But if the house, just to make the math simple, if the house were double in value, your leverage rate, your. Your leverage that you put into it dropped because it's only 10% that you finance instead of 20% because it doubled in value. I don't know why people don't get that. Maybe that makes sense. But people that are strong with math, I don't know why they can't explain it. I mean, to me, it seems kind of realistic. If you have double the equity, you know, sorry, if you have. If the house doubled in value, that 20% you put down is only 10% of it, your net leverage has dropped. And that's why Saylor will be able to. He's able to acquire more Bitcoins in a bull market. So the stress test is in the bear market right now.
- [51:26]
B
Yeah, my biggest concern with the way they do it is the way he trades. The way he trades it and implements the money, the way he set it up is just, excuse my language, but it's stupid. You know, it's like if instead of when he gets leverage, immediately smash buying, he algorithmically bought and in fact did it, you know, used. Well, I mean, I'm not going to mention there's, there's a bunch of customers, there's a bunch of companies that created. There's one in particular Scott and I talk about arch public. But the truth is you could, could easily use a more DC8 approach when you have money because. And it would get him more bitcoin and you wouldn't get the silly chart that has the bigger orange spikes as the price goes up. Because people see that, I mean what you say is true. And if bitcoin had a smooth power law kind of advance towards digital gold, that's cool, his strategy would work great. Except it doesn't work like that. You know, it's, it's volatile, it goes up, it goes down, etc. And you know it. But, but you're absolutely right that the higher the price of Bitcoin, the more buying power he gets automatically. And so it becomes. People call that a flywheel, I call that pyramiding because then he's effectively losing on, in losing confidence by buying at times when maybe is the opposite of buying when others are greedy or, or others are fearful and selling when others are greedy. But that, that's, that's my, that's my personal thing. If, if I were running their, their process, I would, I would implement a far different method of, of accumulating Bitcoin that would absolutely end up with a much higher bitcoin yield over time. But that, that's really the only, the only issue. It does however, in a lot of people's minds create risk. That's the thing.
- [53:13]
E
Hey Dave. Yeah, I had a quick question for you and I just put a post up in the chat. Obviously strc11 yield certainly beats the hell out of money market funds. Yes, the volatility of BTC is less than it used to be. But if we want to look at something that has yield in crypto off of something that really has no volatility, if you look at USDC and we know Circle, there is a weekly dividend ETF that trades off of srcrcl, which is crco, that offers an annual dividend yield Right now of about 116%. So sounds like it's a better number than 11 for STRC. And we don't necessarily have to go through the mental machinations of figuring out what Michael Saylor is buying and when he's buying and when he's not buying.
- [54:08]
H
So what, what's, what's the ticker for that? Or what, what's the.
- [54:11]
E
Yeah, it's cr, Charlie, Robert, Charlie, Oscar.
- [54:18]
H
And, and. Okay. And, and that's, and that's an etf.
- [54:21]
E
Yep, it's an etf.
- [54:24]
H
Okay. Did you look in the prospectus to see how they're able to generate that number?
- [54:28]
E
Yeah, they're doing it off of Options.
- [54:33]
H
Okay, I will look into that and, and, and, and make a comment about it later. I haven't read on it. I think that in this particular space, looking at Misty and IMST and MSTU and MSTX and for transparency, I was a large buyer, excuse me, I was a large buyer. MSTX and MSTU when they came out, but I only held them for about six weeks. They were not long term holds. Over time, these options, typically they degrade pretty, pretty horribly. So if you look at Misty msty, that's the poster child that people thought that it was free money and it was showing a rate of like 90% return per year and it ended up being a pretty miserable product.
- [55:19]
E
Yeah, no, I, I hear you in terms of looking at the nav deterioration that can happen in these cases. But, but if you look at something that basically has a stock chart that's kind of going up and to the right or is at least stable, that may serve to mitigate the nav erosion. You also, at the same time, if you want to pay the price, you can get, you know, you put, put options around this or you could sell calls.
- [55:49]
H
Yeah, so, so I'm going to say this. And, and I heard the other gentleman speaking about AI and, and I heard somebody, it was another podcast with somebody else in the space that I respect and the person said, oh, you can use AI or you could vibe code all your analysis. I'm just going to say right now I'm a tech guy. I've been in Silicon Valley for 26 years. I use AI approximately two hours a day. I'm not a coder. My degree is in economics. I could do all kinds of Excel spreadsheet analysis. Been doing it for 26 years. There's probably maybe in, in the bitcoin space or Bitcoin treasury space, you got like maybe eight to 12 dudes and they're dudes. Because I have yet to run across a single woman that has done any form of vibe coding, Excel spreadsheet analysis, and posted it to their website. You got a lot of people that make comments about that, but I've been to multiple events and there's maybe, maybe charitably 12 dudes that do this. When we talk about AI and Claudebot and Multbook and all this, there's very, very few women that do it. And it's an incredibly small subset of dudes that are very excited about doing this. And that's great because I'm one of them. But it drops off very fast. If I want to go explain bitcoin to somebody, I don't do it anymore. I'm like, you know what? There's a thing called STRC. It pays 11.5% per year. You get it paid monthly. And there's, you know, you don't get any capital appreciation. And it's return of capital. Like, what does that mean? I'm like, well, your taxes are deferred till you sell it. That's it. It's a one minute pitch. I can do that pitch in one minute. I don't tell them Satoshi Nakamoto, I don't tell them it's backed by bitcoin. I'll say, you know, put 5% of your portfolio in it, run it for six months, and if it works good for you, then add more. You don't like it, they go, and then what's like the lockup period? Or how long am I stuck in, like a cd? I'm like, no, you sell it whenever you want. And I would tell you to sell it, you know, on the 17th of the month. That way you pick up the dividend for that month. But that's it. That's the whole pitch. And I just want to be clear. I love talking about AI, but let's be realistic. It's a bunch of dudes that are talking about it, and there's very few women that are interested in it. If they are, they're along to promote it, which is fine. And it's just a really small group of people that do it, that do any form of mathematical analysis. So what you just said about doing puts or calls on top of a structured product, on top of USDC, the market for that is 10 people or less. It's not. What you're saying is not incorrect. It's just a really, really small edge. Edge case.
- [58:42]
E
The market has inefficiencies that exist in small pockets. Sometimes. And sometimes they grow into bigger pockets or not. I would say I was on the board of directors for an early treasury company, btcs. So looked at how could we actually create value out of these things? It was an interesting experience. And yeah, if you want to call me a bro, call me a bro.
- [59:13]
H
Well, that's fine. I mean, I wrote a book on why bitcoin, I did, I'm going to use a term right now. I did a postmortem on why bitcoin treasury companies went under or not went under, why their stocks, you know, traded horribly. Nobody wanted to read the book. And I did a whole mathematical analysis. I published it, I explained, you know, where they made the mistakes. You know how many other people I heard that did a post in Silicon Valley when a product doesn't sell, out of all the companies I worked at, every single company, if we had a product that didn't sell, we always did a post mortem. It was a very common thing to do. But I'm the only person aware of is why did bitcoin treasury companies not do well? I wrote a whole book on it. I published it in January. I've done multiple, you know, spaces on what happened with it and I get very little engagement on it because it's validating back to people what they, why they lost money. And people don't want to hear that. What people want to hear is, oh, is Metaplanet going to retake its all time high?
- [60:13]
E
And yeah, no, I was just going to say, I mean I was on this space back, I think in August last year saying Dave and I were going back and forth in a, any spirited debate, basically saying treasury companies, I said that they were going to end badly. You know, I didn't write a book about it. You did. So kudos to you. But I would say the one thing I realized when I was on the board of that company was that at the time the only thing that we really had to offer people was that it was easier to buy our stock and get access or exposure to crypto than just to go out and do it yourself. Now that ease of access point has been taken care of by all the ets. We can throw a stick at, I bet whatever you want. So, you know, that advantage was gone. So, you know, the only way that you could really work here from the standpoint of having an attractive crypto treasury company is if you actually had a strategy to create value, much as you outline mind with respect to strategy. So thanks for doing that.
- [61:17]
H
So I, yeah, so, so let me just Sum up real fast. So. So I'll give a simple example. And by the way, there was a public space. David Bailey was on it. So what I'm going to say now is public information. It was recorded and I posted it. So I. I asked, basically asked David Bailey two questions publicly about three weeks ago. I said, did you model a 50 downturn in the price of Bitcoin when you started your Bitcoin treasury company? And he answered, no, we didn't. So they did not model a stress test. Their investment bankers didn't do it. And they didn't do it. They didn't model it. He said it publicly. The second thing I said to him is, did you ever think about your share count? And he's like, no. Now, in retrospect, when they acquired Kinley, and he said this all publicly, I'm not talking about any private conversation. We should have done a reverse split on Kinley before we actually launched it with the SPAC of the reverse merger that they did because there would have been less share float. And I'll use Nakamoto as a good example. They have almost 900 million shares outstanding. So basically, almost three strategies. Almost three times strategies. 350 million. It was 511 million. So it was almost double. But now, once they complete their acquisition, they're almost at 900 million shares outstanding, and they own 5,500 bitcoin. If there were 7,000 bitcoin, it's off by a factor of 100. So everybody's like, why am I bringing this up? If you slice the pizza into an extra 400, 400x slices, did you get more pizza? No. You did. Basically, the liquidity has destroyed your convexity, and that is the key word. There's no convexity because they sliced it up into so many pieces that each share has almost no value to it. That's why the stock trades at 25 cents. I just summarized my whole book in less than one minute, and people are like, oh, the share counts matter. I go, how could you have. Metaplanet has almost four times. Has 1.2 billion shares outstanding, and it has 1/20 of the Bitcoin. It's off by a factor of almost 80x. That's the whole book summarized. And the investment bankers. Oh, does that matter? I'm like, well, I guess we should just. Let's just increase. Bitcoin did 210 million, right? Or two. You know, let's just make. Let's just, you know, increase. There's a reason here.
- [63:47]
B
But you just. But. But xrp, you Know, you know, that's why they think it's going to go to the same price as bitcoin. They don't care that the number of, you know, how many tokens there are. I mean, you know, it's like market cap. What's that? I've actually on faces say, or in an X say, why do you care about market cap? Price is the only thing that matters. And, and at which point I, I, I almost don't know how to talk to people like that because just linguistically it's like you're on different planets. You're it, it. There is a huge enumeracy problem, you know, in this, in the space. And all you've just done is highlight it.
- [64:23]
H
Yeah. And, and that's where I get this basic math. It's in, you know, that, well, share counts don't matter. Well, I guess the total number of bitcoins don't matter either. I mean, I remember in the old days like 48 hours ago, there was a countdown to the remaining 1 million Bitcoin. This is like the old day, guys. This is like today's Wednesday, right?
- [64:42]
B
Yesterday.
- [64:43]
H
Yeah, yesterday. Everybody's saying, oh, there's less than 1 million bitcoins to be mined.
- [64:47]
E
Right.
- [64:48]
H
And they're like, and we applaud that as bitcoiners. But then when we talk about bitcoin treasury companies like, oh, you think the share count matters? Oh man, I'm like, yeah, I do.
- [64:58]
B
PSA to the audience. You should always care about market cap and total amount of shares and not look just at nominal price. Ryan, you had your hand up because we're gonna, we're getting close to one in a row.
- [65:09]
D
Yeah, I think it's just a difference in worldview and where people come from. Like there's sound investing and then there's speculation and casino. And the speculation casino mindset is just looking at number go up, number go down. And they're not looking at the big picture because it's not investing. It's just minute by minute. My question is, and I don't know if this, I don't know a lot about traditional markets, are these lower level treasury companies able to simply Invest and hold MicroStrategy or the larger treasury companies and that way stabilize themselves? Rather than just acquiring bitcoin directly, could they just acquire a larger treasury company shares?
- [65:53]
B
I mean, I guess, I mean it depends on how their, how their corporate charter, what they've told investors. Because the thing is, once you're a public company now you have to worry about the Torque bar. So if you say things to investors and you do the opposite and it doesn't work out, really bad things happen to you. And depending on as directors of the company, you know that a lot of people don't have DNO insurance or director's insurance, then they're personally liable to too. So you have to be very careful. So in all likelihood the answer is in a practical matter, no. Obviously from a cash management point of view, I mean, strive buying STRC tells you the answer, at least to some degree, is yes. But that's not the bitcoin exposure. That's the management of cash. If that makes sense.
- [66:34]
D
Yeah, because I'm just wondering if something like Nakamoto or these smaller treasury companies are just getting wrecked, could tether themselves to something larger and more stable, but still have the same.
- [66:44]
B
Because look at it this way. Nakamoto wouldn't get wrecked nearly as badly if people thought that they didn't have hair on the process. Right. Because you know, if you buy. Let's. Let's just pick a simple example. You know, we say. Well, that the. When David and I had our argument, what I said is that the failed treasury companies will get will their Bitcoin will get bought back out, you know, on the cheap, etc. Etc. It won't hurt Bitcoin. The companies themselves. If you're trading at high M navs, people who buy them are going to get wrecked. I've always said that. I said that about Meta Planet, Nakamoto, etc. The. The thing about Nakamoto in particular is, however, in addition to buying their Bitcoin, you have to buy their debt. People can m model that. That's math. What you also have to buy is the liability of shareholder lawsuits and other liabilities of. Of what goes on for potential mism. Arguable mismanagement. That's why in a lot of of bankruptcies, the M and A isn't to buy the stock of the company. In fact, that's actually rare. What's more likely is buy the assets of the company, in which case it doesn't help the stockholders or helps them very little. It's the bondholders who generally run the process because they're senior in the cap table. So all this stuff will get cleaned up, but it will get cleaned up in a way that isn't necessarily good for shareholders. Bondholders on the other hand, will be the ones driving the bus. That's why grains math is so important.
- [68:05]
H
Thank you. Thank you, Dave. And, and. And by the way, I did lose a bunch of money on metaplanet. But I wanted to figure out why. And while that was painful for me to, you know, lose, you know, seven figures on it, I wanted to figure out why the mistake happened. And there wasn't a lot. I, if the math is so easy, how come there wasn't 50 people that did a postmortem like me? I think that's the disappointing part. We have AI that could calculate this. Anybody can, Anybody can write a book and self publish it for, for less than you could. Anybody can write a book tomorrow and post it onto Amazon Kindle. And your cost to do that is only your time. There's zero cost to do it, provide the book sells for less than $10 a copy. But there wasn't anybody else that did a postmortem. And given all the tools we have, how come there wasn't more scrutiny to figure out why that happened? So you don't, you don't make that mistake again. Like I didn't have to write this book and tell people why I thought it went wrong.
- [69:02]
B
What's funny about that, and we're going to wrap here, is that in every single crash bubble or issue, you rarely get people thinking about the why so as to prevent it the next time. You just have people saying, oh, that'll never happen again. So the great financial crisis, the global financial crisis, was because people totally didn't understand correlations and, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And there are a few things and what you get out of that, you got Congress basically creating Glass Steagall and laws that, that if they did anything, you know, we'll see. You know, with the Internet bubble, it was like, oh well, we're not going to deal with eyeballs and whatnot. And if you look at crypto valuations, you know that people never post mortem that or understood that because the same shit happens. I hate to say it, but you know, greed and fear overpowers thought every time.
- [69:54]
E
Hey Dave. Yeah, I actually threw a link to the prospectus for CRCO into the chat if anybody wants to take a look at it.
- [70:02]
B
Cool. I'm gonna wait for Grain to read it because I'm still, I'm trying to, to finish the, the book. I, I want to try before I go on vacation in April. I, I, I want to try to get my done my book down to my publisher.
- [70:13]
E
So, hey, love to read it if you want to put out pre publication copies.
- [70:18]
B
You guys, you guys. Well, I will be talking about it. It's, it's called Million Dollar frat boys and it is a, it's, it's a first person set of, of stories. I tried to cherry pick all the funnier and more illustrative stories on Wall street of how electronic trading changed, you know, everything and that. So that's what I'm doing. So people who follow me will get to see snippets. Etc.
- [70:40]
E
Some of this is like this is Liars Poker for a digital age.
- [70:44]
B
It's over a longer time period. But yeah, it's in that style of Liars Poker because that was first person from Michael Lewis. The difference is, is he even by his own admission was sort of a bit player in the, in this where I was kind of right in the middle of it.
- [70:56]
D
So it, it, it's a great title. It's a great title.
- [71:00]
B
I'm, I'm in the process. I'm 14 out of 18 chapters written and everything else has the bullet points and now it's a question just getting it done and then getting it out to Wiley and Sons to see what their editor does with. With it and hopefully we'll get it published by the end of the year. So we'll see.
- [71:14]
E
Cool. Go Dave, go.
- [71:16]
B
Ciao. Anyway, we're gonna wrap here guys. We'll, I don't know about Friday. We will try to post about it. I won't be here if somebody else can help.
- [71:23]
E
The 13th, don't do it.
- [71:26]
B
Yeah, we may be back next Monday, but we, we shall see. In any case, stay safe out there. The market's. Oh, we're back below 70. You know, it's rabbit season, I guess not duck season. So for those who are listening before. Take care everyone. Ciao.