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The Wolf Of All Streets
Trump Wants $150,000 Bitcoin | Will He Make Bitcoin A Reserve Asset?
00:30:22
Trump Wants $150,000 Bitcoin | Will He Make Bitcoin A Reserve Asset?
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- [00:01]
Scott Melker
Donald Trump wants to see Bitcoin at $150,000 early in his term. These are the words of someone on his transition team saying that Donald Trump used the price of bitcoin just like he views the stock market. And we know that he will assess the success of his presidency certainly in the early by how well the stock market does. And now apparently bitcoin will a part of sending price there be a strategic reserve? We have a lot of mixed views on that. There's so much to unpack today, so much news this week. I've got NLW to go through all of it with me on the Friday 5. Let's go. Let's do what is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of all streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel. Hit the like button. Good morning. What's happening? How are you today? Things are good, you know, they didn't win.
- [01:06]
NLW
I. I have a slew of leftover hats from the FTX era. This one is, in fact, I was.
- [01:12]
Scott Melker
Gonna say I saw it. I saw. When you turned, I saw what was on the side. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [01:16]
NLW
Yeah, it's. It's anonymous. The only place I can wear them is in this basement. So. Yeah, it is this one by Lewis Hamilton, though.
- [01:26]
Scott Melker
Okay, well, okay, that, that. I think that that's a winner. My favorite UDI when UD goes on shows is when he wears those, like, bright orange FTX glasses. You know, the sunglasses.
- [01:38]
NLW
I will, I will say I was responsible for a lot of FTX marketing decisions. There were some that I wasn't. Condoms, not me. Just want to put that out there.
- [01:45]
Scott Melker
That was.
- [01:45]
NLW
Predates my time.
- [01:47]
Scott Melker
I mean, are you sure you don't want to take credit for that? You could.
- [01:50]
NLW
Yeah, not after FTX fucked everyone, man.
- [01:52]
Scott Melker
Oh, I see what you did there.
- [01:55]
NLW
Walk right into it.
- [01:58]
Scott Melker
Trump. Let's go to Trump.
- [02:00]
NLW
Now that the President is talking about 150k Bitcoin, we don't feel so raw about all this. It's great.
- [02:06]
Scott Melker
The hits just keep on coming. Trump wants bitcoin to hit $150,000 during his presidency. The source who gave this information says Trump is going to be very focused on the price of bitcoin. It's another stock market for him. He wants it to hit 150,000 early in his presidency. Would love for bitcoin to keep rising and eventually pass that early in his presidency. These are quotes from the source that gave this. I mean, it's one thing to have a president who's bullish it's another thing to have a president making like price predictions or saying that there are benchmarks in price that would make him feel successful about being president.
- [02:44]
NLW
I mean listen, this is a very, this is very on brand everything about this story, you know, sometimes you get reports from insiders that feel a little off. Not this one, man, this one feels dead, dead on. But listen, it also totally makes sense. This is a person who has always really closely connected market success and policy success throughout his time as a politician. Bitcoin and crypto are now fully in the slate of things that he views as part of the economy. You know, it actually makes sense now. I think that the numbers sort of arbitrary, but I think that pretty much probably what it means is like you know, another 50% from here. He wants, you know, a big meaningful go up, an amount of going up that can't be written off as just the market sort of normal movements, I think is what that number is saying.
- [03:30]
Scott Melker
That's right. And even if it is the market's normal movements to crypto insiders who have been here for a few cycles and maybe expect 150,000 as normal price action for 2025, that part of the parabolic cycle, he just wants to be able to say, look, I've been in office for four months, look what bitcoin did. Look at me, I'm the best. This is amazing. Your precious 401ks or 97bs or whatever he called them in the last president when he botched it. But this is going to be a marker for the success. This is on the mat. It's like, yes, it's on brand, but just seeing it happen, it's totally.
- [04:08]
NLW
Yeah, it's, it's. But I, I mean, I don't know, I, I'm sure that some of you, some of you guys watching are already feeling the same way where it's like this get, man. Does stuff get normal so fast? Like I think it was unimaginable a year ago is like, yeah, I mean, right, that it'd be weird if you didn't have a price prediction. It's going to be only 150. Donald. Come on, man.
- [04:28]
Scott Melker
Best bitcoin price. The most beautiful bitcoin price. It's going to be the greatest bitcoin price. It's going to be amazing when he makes that the bitcoin price, man. I think we all hope that he does. And oh wow, look at that. And bitwise here saying Bitcoin, Ethereum Solana will hit new all time highs with bitcoin trading above 200,000. This was in their 10 crypto predictions for 2025. So they're aiming even higher now. To be fair, I think Trump would aim higher if you were talking about a full year from now. I really think that when you read the words about Trump's prediction, he's talking about, you know, by summer.
- [05:00]
NLW
Yeah, absolutely. He wants this. He wants this to be undeniably related to his ascension, basically is sort of the gist of it.
- [05:09]
Scott Melker
Right. But what I find interesting here is that you have the Trump side, Eric Trump, obviously in Abu Dhabi saying $1 million Bitcoin, right. And say. And a lot of people on his transition team, a lot of people close to him also throwing out their numbers. It's led to a lot of conjecture that people close to him know something like the reserve is coming or there's going to be something that we haven't heard about that's going to send the price. But you have the sort of crypto newbies who are saying the President can send price to 150,000. Then you have the people who've been here the whole time, the Bitwises, without even having to talk about the President or any of that, making a prediction like 200,000 for Bitcoin, it's really just because of adoption in the cycle. Yep.
- [05:51]
NLW
Yeah. If you dig into the Bitwise report, this is really where they land when they look at their perspective on continued bullish ETF inflows, continued institutional adoption, incorporation of, you know, microstrategy and potentially coinbase into index funds, things like that. You know, this is a reasoned estimate. Now, one thing that's important to note is that that $200,000 prediction is not inclusive of a bitcoin strategic reserve where the US actually buys Bitcoin. That basically, you know, every. Everyone kind of, when they. When they look at the possibility of the US government officially and strategically buying bitcoin, all bets are off. I start blur. Weird things start coming out of their ears and they just sort of like the numbers just keep going up, you know. So this is. This is sort of in the absence of that.
- [06:39]
Scott Melker
Right, Exactly. This is normal cycle. All of the adoption, the things they're seeing from an institutional perspective with the ETFs. I think we all agree that there could be some wild white swan, black swan, call them what they want, events that could send bitcoin massively up very, very quickly. And the reserve, which we will get to, is one of those. I mean, we don't just have Trump and Bitwise Talking about bitcoin favorably. This week we had Ray Dalio saying you should invest in gold and bitcoin rather than debt assets. He sounds like one of us again. All of a sudden In February of 2023, he was dismissive of bitcoin, said it was not a good medium of exchange, not a good store of value. And now he's yet another billionaire with strong opinions loosely held who seems to be coming the idea that bitcoin is a great hedge against inflation. And if you read his comments, it really is about the debasement of currencies and why holding that debt is not going to be a good idea in the future. But the guy's one of us now.
- [07:35]
NLW
Yeah, and, and it's interesting. Dalio's been, there's been, you know, he, he, he switched at some point in the past from negative on bitcoin to neutral on bitcoin to having a small allocation in bitcoin to now he's just talking about bitcoin with no qualifications. You know, it just sits next to gold, it's got its properties that he likes it relative to gold, all that sort of stuff. And I think again in a lot of ways the normalcy of some of the adoption that we're seeing from these big folks I think might be every bit as influential when push comes to shove as some of the more full throated endorsements. Right. You know, if you have someone who's launched a financial product on bitcoin, you got to have a grain of salt that you take when, when they, you know. Now listen, I think Larry Fink is influential enough that that one was still highly influential. But at the same time, you know, Dalio doesn't have a, a dog in this fight except in so far as he's just sort of sharing what he's seeing and you know, wants the continued perception of being right about stuff. And I think that the, you know, the less dogmatic, more blase takes in some ways when it comes to converting the people who haven't been converted yet could actually be more influential than the sort of full throated sailor, you know, arguments.
- [08:48]
Scott Melker
Right. When you have nothing to sell, your opinion matters just a little bit more. I agree though. I think Larry Fink himself, whether he was selling something or not, was the big pivotal turning point in this cycle. Much like actually Michael Saylor, I think in Microstrategy where when they bought bitcoin for the first time In August of 2020, I think we have fink in the ETFs for that. But to Your point? I mean, when you have Dalio, who maybe doesn't even own any, doesn't really care, just saying, hey, man, this debt is bad and bitcoin's an option, you should definitely listen. And this kind of leads into a story. We have a few takes on what the appropriate allocation of bitcoin is in your portfolio in context of all of this. CEO of Interactive Brokers saying he thinks 2 to 3%, not too much. I think 2 to 3% actually is quite a bit, depending on how much wealth we're talking about. But actually, BlackRock, who we're talking about, obviously does have a dog in the fight and something to sell. Wrote an entire thing here on sizing bitcoin in portfolios. Spoiler. They also say 2% bitcoin allocation is a reasonable range. Now, they weren't necessarily saying, don't buy more. This is kind of for your average investor that's looking at bitcoin. Go ahead, put 2% in. I think we would be shocked at even 1% recently. And this is probably a very reasonable take from them. I think a lot of people were disappointed that BlackRock wouldn't be saying, hey, buy I bit and put 10% of your portfolio. But this probably does make sense.
- [10:11]
NLW
Yeah, I mean, I think you got to put it in the context of where things have been over the last year. This is the first year where I think there was a average kind of call for in the range of 1%. Right. You saw 1% a lot this year. So much so, in fact, that in that bitwise report, one of their big themes is that next year, 3% is the new 1%. Right. They're. They're betting that that is nudging up to 3%. Literally, as that's happening, you have a couple of different, you know, big, big reports coming out suggesting 2 to 3%. 2 to 3% doesn't sound like a lot for all of us lunatics who have 200% of our portfolios in bitcoin and crypto. But it is a huge percentage of the, of the wealth out there in aggregate. And more than that, 2% or 3% is 200 or 300 times, or, sorry, two to three times what was, you know, what last year was, you know, from a normalcy perspective. So actually a more. It's a more meaningful jump than it probably appears at first is my, Is my sense.
- [11:10]
Scott Melker
Yeah. Doubling and tripling the amount that is expected to be bought by this huge pie of global wealth is a very, very big deal. And the fact that now you're actually seeing it in the letters before it was a bunch of us talking about you should tell these institutions that they should do 1%. And what happens when that happens? Well, now it is happening and it's 2 to 3%. And if BlackRock is officially saying 2%, they control what, $12 trillion assets under management now their clients are going to be paying attention to these papers. Yeah, we always said what happens when Larry Fink tells everybody to actually put bitcoin into their portfolio? That just happened and it's a blip.
- [11:49]
NLW
Small percentages of things that start with T's are lots of money. Sort of a truism of I'm old.
- [11:56]
Scott Melker
Enough to remember when a trillion was allotted lot of money. But apparently we just print that and throw it on the debt once every like 90 days at this point. This obviously leads us to that sort of black white swan event that we were talking about, which is the bitcoin reserve. A lot of people thinking this could happen at the state level before it happens at the federal level. Dennis Porter obviously out there with Satoshi Action Fund saying he's in a race with Donald Trump to create reserves. Well, he got it on the docket in Pennsylvania and then in a Twitter spaces yesterday he had a Texas lawmaker live basically file for a strategic bitcoin reserve in Texas. Now it might not sound like this is such a big deal, but when you actually look at how large the economies are of states like California and Texas, it really is. You're talking about like France. You know, like this is not a small deal if they meaningfully add bitcoin to the balance sheet of a state. State with an economy this big. I mean, everything's bigger in Texas, right? Yeah.
- [12:58]
NLW
I'm looking at a chart right now that basically compares country GDPs to US states. And it's like Maine is Luxembourg, New York is Canada, Texas is Italy. You know, like that's, that's the thing that's hard is if we were talking about Italy, Canada and you know, Luxembourg, I don't know why I'm from Maine. I guess it's getting in there. You know, adopting bitcoin would be huge. It's just our perception is that, you know, because the states are sort of, you know, so, so clearly like a part of the United States, they're less influential. But listen, I think this is an area where the US State system, it shows how a bitcoin strategic reserve, why the game theory around it is so powerful. Unlike competing regulatory regimes, when it comes to state versus federal, there's no reason at all why states can't, in addition to a national bitcoin reserve, also have, you know, their own reserves. Right. States do have to think about themselves in addition to their relationship with the country as a whole. And the fact that they are, you know, there's that competition happening at that level at the state level as well as at the national level, I think really validates folks who think that this is a. It's a very potentially viral type of moment when this starts happening.
- [14:16]
Scott Melker
I mean, Pennsylvania and Texas are large states. It doesn't take much more than two or three to start talking about this for us to start talking about 10 or 20. Absolutely. We just need some of them to actually pass it. But interestingly, I don't think this is a prize. But now we're starting to get some real debate on whether the United States should have a bitcoin reserve or not. Obviously, once again, in our echo chamber, we think it's a great idea. We think that bitcoin is a great inflation hedge. Quite a few people out there that think maybe it's not such a great idea. This is a opinion column by Bill Dudley, but he was the president of the Federal Reserve bank of New York from 2009 to 2018, pointing out why a bitcoin reserve would be a bad deal for Americans. I think. You know, listen, I disagree, but I think that he makes some reasonable points. I think our initial reaction would be to just scream into the void and tell him that he's nuts, but basically saying that it would leave a lot of people behind who don't own bitcoin. And one point that we've made before could cause inflation if we have to print money to buy bitcoin. Right. Which, which reasonable. I think it's a drop in the bucket, but worth listening to. And then, of course, Larry Summers, who was the former treasury chief, no surprises here, blasts US national bitcoin reserve idea is crazy. So not everybody's a fan of this.
- [15:34]
NLW
No, but the Overton window has shifted that we're having rational debates about this. You know, that there are a bunch of op EDS that were sort of steel manning the pro argument as well from outside crypto circles that, that showed up in, you know, I think it was the Washington Post maybe, you know, not fringe outlets. It's not just coindesk and blockworks who are publishing this stuff. And even the Bloomberg opinion piece, you know, that's. That's a former Fed governor who, you know, took to the pages of Bloomberg to talk about this, which I think is reflective of where it sits in the Overton window. I also think that the arguments are, they're, they're, they're still sort of in the realm of generic when it comes to, you know, what Dudley always arguing against. But yeah, I mean, listen, to the extent that you feel like there's always a pushback against ideas whose times have come at the very last minute, you're certainly seeing a lot of that. And I'll tell you what, even if this idea and the energy around it dissipates in this particular cycle, the number of people that have discussed a bitcoin strategic reserve now is off the, it's incalculable compared to where we were just a year ago. So it's an ascendant idea whether it fully reaches its potential this time or not.
- [16:50]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I'm still really interested to see where this falls in the first hundred day agenda, if this is something that we actually start hearing from lawmakers and from Trump after the transition. One of the points made by Summers and others here is that this is just lip service to the crypto industry that's donating a ton of money. I think that's cynical personally, but worth considering. So I guess we're going to find out very quickly in the coming months how big of an issue this actually is and how willing they are to put their political capital behind it.
- [17:22]
NLW
Like him or not, Trump doesn't really spend a lot of time accommodating even people who have donated money to him. You know, he, he does if they continue to agree with him and continue to be in line. But this is not a person who's known for, you know, bringing someone along, even if their opinions and have diverged from his. So I don't know. I think that's a, that's a fairly silly critique, relatively speaking. I think that the, the better question is the same one that we've always had, which is just how much political capital would this take and is it, is it worth it? And that's still a big question mark to me. I, you know, one thing that's interesting which, you know, does, is a little bit orthogonal to this, but I think related, you're starting to simultaneously really see the ascension of the narrative that stable coins are good for US dollar, the US dollar, and that they extend dollar hegemony for another generation. Right. This is a theme that people in the crypto space have been discussing forever.
- [18:20]
Scott Melker
Right.
- [18:20]
NLW
That, that stablecoins in particular are not a threat to the dollar. They're actually probably the best thing that could happen to the dollar. And I actually think that the more that that takes hold as sort of a standard belief in Washington, the more space it creates for not being scared of something like a bitcoin reserve. You basically have crypto doing multiple things for you. It's strengthening your dollar, but it's also providing this own. Take a. Take a hedge or take a flyer on this other thing, which looks totally different from anything before. But also, you know, this is the classic thing that big companies do. Big companies try to buy their competitors before they can turn into competitors. So I don't know. I think that the. Even it's all kind of working together as part of a shifting sensibility around crypto in. In the political halls of power.
- [19:11]
Scott Melker
I like the idea of tether, which was once the most flooded asset on the planet, doing the heavy lifting to get a bitcoin reserve. Yeah.
- [19:18]
NLW
But it's. It's not that crazy.
- [19:20]
Scott Melker
Actually. It's not crazy at all because most people just conflate them all together. Right. The bitcoin versus crypto thing is good for our echo chamber, but most people obviously don't understand the nuance. And as you were talking about it, thinking through it in real time, assuming that Trump just does what he wants and actually puts this on the docket, the will to play to a heavily donating crypto industry will weigh heavily on the other lawmakers who actually need that money to support it. So I think the game theory actually plays heavily in favor of it getting approved or at least getting wild support that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
- [19:56]
NLW
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the political will thing, ultimately the political power of the anti crypto position, I'm not talking about individuals, but just the position itself is at a very low ebb right now. It was pretty well broken by this last election. So you don't have a ton of people who are willing to expend political capital fighting this. So the question is, how reasonable, you know, how much money are we actually talking here? Where does this sit relative to other things that the government allocates? Because I think to your point, if the version of this, whether it's, you know, the Lummis proposal that just keep what we've already got, or more likely something in between. The specifics, actually, I think matter because if. If folks can, you know, win those points from the bitcoin and crypto donor base while also just basically authorizing one additional small expenditure relative to everything else it's there, it could flip very quickly and actually become just an easy Win.
- [20:55]
Scott Melker
The, the narrative and the fact that it's even happening matters much more than the amount. If the United States government buys bitcoin even it was a billion bucks. It just sets things in a crazy direction.
- [21:05]
NLW
Yeah, I, listen, I think that the, you know, when we, again, we're, we're, we've, we will, at some point, you know, the political discussion will dissipate. But it's just so clear that anti crypto was not a useful position. Being against crypto just didn't win anyone votes. You know, there's, there's no one who's as vitriolic against crypto as some of these politicians were. Now some people just didn't care at all. Like it's not, not even in their agenda. Maybe they're annoyed that we're spending so much time on it, but it was just a losing position. And that, that sets, that's going to set the tone for a lot of policy this cycle.
- [21:39]
Scott Melker
Yeah, I mean that seems so obvious. You have to wonder why they would put themselves out there as sacrificial lambs. Who was behind that? But we can talk about that pretty much endlessly.
- [21:49]
NLW
Being against banks and money has been a successful position. It continues to be a successful position. The insane response to the United CEO being shot I think reflects the fact that being against money is still a powerful narrative force and in fact continues to be on the upswing. But, but unfortunately for Warren and the anti crypto army, the bottom up didn't conflate crypto with big money in the same way that she wanted it to.
- [22:15]
Scott Melker
That's right. I think that it's about big money. We obviously didn't intend to talk about United Healthcare, but I think it's more of this very clear sentiment in America that there's oppressors and the oppressed and that whoever the oppressor is, whether it be a CEO or the big bank or the politician, that person deserves everything they get. It's a pretty scary place. Yeah. Honestly. And I mean this is kind of an honorable mention, but it goes well with the potential legislation. And what might happen for bitcoin is that French Hill will chair the House Financial Services Committee. I don't think you could choose a better person to replace Patrick McHenry who's on his way out. This is just another win for potential reasonable crypto legislation. Another supporter in the houses of Congress in a really pivotal role. Yep.
- [23:04]
NLW
And it's a win both in the standpoint of him being an ally and a long term ally of crypto as well. As him being an effective politician who doesn't alienate people on the other side, which is one of the things that McHenry had as well. McHenry was able to work with people. McHenry retiring was a. Was a very sad thing for a lot of reasons. You know, outside of crypto as well.
- [23:23]
Scott Melker
Just a reasonable guy.
- [23:24]
NLW
Yeah, exactly.
- [23:25]
Scott Melker
And I don't have many of those. I mean, Richie Torres, I think, wrote a whole thread right when French Hill there. Richie Torres obviously is, you know, the, the, the first gay congressman from the South Bronx who's on the left but crypto supportive. He was like, french Hill's my buddy. I can't wait to work with this guy. We're going to get stuff done. Yep, good. Exactly what we want to see. You mentioned tether before. We're going to Kai cook through these tethers. USDT approved as accepted virtual asset in Abu Dhabi. What does this mean exactly?
- [23:53]
NLW
It means that if the world shifted real fast and came coming at them, at least they have one safe home. Jurisdiction is. Is sort of the short of it.
- [24:01]
Scott Melker
Yeah. And I mean, my, my position is that if Lutnick is going to be Secretary of Commerce and is now a partial owner in tether and is saying the Canter Fitzgerald is custody tether, that tether is probably in the best situation it's ever been in. So hopefully they won't need this. But yes, it's still important because you never know what happens and you never know what happens in two or four or eight years. Completely pendulum swings. Yeah. Yeah. The next story we have, obviously is Michael Sailor. So his case for Microsoft buying Bitcoin got rejected by shareholders. I think the vote was like 0.55% in favor. Didn't go too great for us. But I think it's part of a greater story here about microstrategy being potentially added to the queues coming up here. And then of course, people saying that's good, bad or otherwise. Right. But I mean, microstrategy, Michael Saylor, he is in the spotlight for better or for worse and staying there right now, and he is not relenting.
- [24:57]
NLW
Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty hard to argue that it's anything for better. Saylor, you know, he may be out there relative to Wall street, but he's still respected. He's still seen as a smart guy. And you can't argue with the success that he's had with his strategy. And you know, to your point, the. So again, if we're using bitwise to help frame one of their other predictions was that they think that Coinbase could see a doubling of their stock price over the next year, which would make them the world's biggest brokerage. They would be bigger than Charles Schwab if that happened. But they're also thinking about what that means in terms of inclusion in the S P500. And I think that the on the other side of this is massive passive exposure to the crypto industry vis A vis MicroStrategy inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 and potential Coinbase inclusion in other index funds. So that's something to watch for sure. Going into next year.
- [25:55]
Scott Melker
If you basically own broad exposure to the NASDAQ and MicroStrategy is included, then whether you like it or not, you have exposure to bitcoin. That reminds me of the days when I would see people rail against Zuckerberg and Musk, rightfully or not, and say, I would never own these guys stocks. And then you say, hey, what do you invest in? And you know, their IRA or investment retirement portfolio is like 30% exposure to big tech and these stocks that they don't even know about. You own all this stuff, guys. I hate to tell you, bitcoin is going to be a part of that. The last kind of honorable mention story here we can get into before we close. El Salvador plans bitcoin policy changes to secure $1.3 billion IMF loan. There's actually quite a bit to unpack here because the bitcoin strategy basically cut El Salvador off from the IMF and the World bank and all of these loans. But they kind of at the time said, good, our bitcoin is going to do the job. We're not going to need these loans. These are predatory. We know that once you take a loan from the imf, you never get out from under it, obviously as any of these countries. A lot of people looking at this and saying bukele is folding. How could they backtrack on what's been so popular and so powerful? But then if you really read into it, there's not much concession here on the bitcoin side. Literally, to my knowledge. The only part of this is that vendors won't be forced to accept bitcoin if they don't want to when they were before. Yep.
- [27:21]
NLW
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's exactly it. I think the. There is a strong. I mean, look, most things in politics and negotiations come down to compromise and both sides gave up a little. Yes, El Salvador did give up the legal tender aspect of, of bitcoin in terms of making it a forced acceptance from, from, from merchants. But they weren't even enforcing that. They didn't have the power to enforce that at scale already. So it's. They're not giving up anything practically. Whereas the IMF had been very aggressive about not wanting El Salvador to have governmental exposure to bitcoin from a balance sheet perspective. And that concern is gone. You know, that, that was, that got cut out. So again, it's just a negotiation. Every side compromised a little in ways that ultimately didn't really matter to anyone, you know, and they were able to move forward. I think this broader question of how much it means in terms of a backtracking around the imf, I don't know, man. I think that we might have been overstating in the first place the reality or the realism of a government the size of El Salvador in today's current world being able to actually cut itself off from that system, however pernicious and problematic it might be.
- [28:37]
Scott Melker
Obviously he was negotiating from a much more powerful position now than he would have been then. And that is arguably because of bitcoin alongside a number of his other policies. I mean, we saw other countries like Argentina that seem to be moving in a direction of some sort of acceptance of bitcoin get very, very heavy handed response from the IMF saying you will not get anything if you even mention bitcoin. El Salvador was in a, I think, unique position because their currency is the dollar. And so that meant that the imf, World bank of the United States, couldn't effectively attack their currency as a result of them doing it. So El Salvador may have been the only country at that time on the planet that could have taken on this experiment in the face of all of this pressure. But I think right now the real story here is that Bukele ended up negotiating from a position of power and this is probably very reasonable and this will likely help his country.
- [29:29]
NLW
Yep, that's kind of how I feel as well.
- [29:31]
Scott Melker
Perfect. Guys, we covered it all today. Follow NLW on X. I called it X for the first time there. Then Twitter. I think I finally, finally did it. And of course, listen to the breakdown. We can get much more detail on all of the biggest topics daily on crypto and bitcoin and AI Also now we got a crypto and AI Are they're going to be linked together. You might have to combine them in a show now.
- [29:58]
NLW
Yeah, well, we got two, two shows for one person, I guess.
- [30:02]
Scott Melker
Perfect. All right, guys, that's all we got. We will see you next Friday. Have a good one. Great weekend. That's dope.