BTC Sessions - What Bitcoin Treasury Execs Won't Tell You (But I Will) | Parker Lewis

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 088: Parker Lewis explains the hidden risks of Bitcoin treasury companies, perpetual preferred equity, market premiums, and Bitcoin as money.Bitcoin treasury companies were sold as a smarter way to own Bitcoin. Parker Lewis argues the premiums are a mispricing of risk that will flip to a discount.In this deep dive, Parker Lewis (author of Gradually, Then Suddenly) breaks down why any treasury company trading at a premium to the Bitcoin it holds is mispricing risk, why perpetual preferred equity is effectively lending fiat forever with no credit protections, and why the whole structure resembles a game of musical chairs. You'll learn how the double-tax corporate structure quietly erodes shareholder value, why $65,000 could buy you a full Bitcoin or only half a share's worth at peak premium, and how the market gets better at pricing this risk over time. You'll also hear why calling Bitcoin "not money" is the deeper problem beneath the marketing — and what that means for long-term holders of Strategy, Strive, and similar products.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:07 - Parker Lewis on Bitcoin Treasury Risks1:42 - Self-Custody vs Treasury Company Tradeoffs4:01 - Premiums Represent Mispriced Risk in Treasuries5:18 - Why Strive Trades at Larger Premium Than Strategy6:58 - Premiums Will Flip to Discounts Over Time7:15 - Problems With Perpetual Preferred Equity Structures9:13 - You Never Lose Principal in Preferred Equity10:29 - Unpacking the Backed by Bitcoin Claim12:26 - Tail Risk and Musical Chairs in Preferreds14:01 - Products Remain Tied to Bitcoin Volatility18:46 - Perpetual Preferred Means Lending Forever in Fiat20:41 - Stretch and Strive Trading Below Par Value23:09 - Strategy Volatility and Investors Touching Hot Stove33:30 - Abundant Mines Hosting Sponsor34:25 - Management Risk and Key Man Concerns36:52 - Double Tax Structure in Corporate Bitcoin Holdings41:13 - Treasury Companies vs Bitcoin ETF Differences46:50 - Bitcoin Market Dwarfs Any Single Stock48:07 - Greater Fool Theory and GBTC Parallel1:00:01 - Holding Treasury Stocks at a Discount1:00:43 - Incentives Behind Treasury Company Messaging1:12:33 - Bitcoin Is Not Money Framing Problem1:15:41 - Where to Follow Parker LewisParker Lewis references his book Gradually, Then Suddenly (free online at the Nakamoto Institute), Saifedean Ammous's The Bitcoin Standard, and his work at Zaprite.🔗 Links & Resources:→ Follow Parker Lewis on X: https://x.com/parkeralewis→ Gradually, Then Suddenly: https://graduallythensuddenly.xyz/→ Zaprite (Bitcoin payments): https://zaprite.com→ Nakamoto Institute (free Bitcoin literature): https://nakamotoinstitute.org🔔 Subscribe for weekly Bitcoin Podcasts🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/BTCSessions🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/theBTCmentor⚡Sovereign Sessions — AI, Privacy, and Bitcoin education: http://youtube.com/@SovereignSessions?sub_confirmation=1💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Ben and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io ⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #ParkerLewis #BitcoinTreasury #MicroStrategy #Strive #PreferredEquity #SelfCustody #BitcoinAsMoney #SoundMoney #GraduallyThenSuddenly #MarketPremium #BitcoinInvesting #Strategy

Anytime a Bitcoin treasury company is trading at a premium to the Bitcoin that they hold, that that is a mispricing of risk. You are lending forever without credit protections. The incentive of those people is very strong to get people to buy the stock, regardless of whether it makes sense for the person buying. You could take $65,000 today and buy one Bitcoin. If you took $65,000 and bought strategy at that implied premium, this is about a year ago, you'd effectively be buying.

buying the share equivalent of half a Bitcoin. The rhetorical question is, if you turn Bitcoin into money, what is Bitcoin? Those premiums are declining over time and that they will eventually flip to a discount. There'll be a crisis of confidence. That's Parker Lewis, author of Gradually Then Suddenly and One of the Most Brilliant Writers in the Bitcoin Space. And he's been coming under fire lately for his critiques of the Bitcoin Treasury companies, including both strategy and strive.

In this episode, we discuss how the Bitcoin Treasury premium could flip to a discount, the misaligned incentives that are at play, as well as the hidden obscure risk that most investors aren't considering. All right, good morning, Parker. Thank you so much for joining today. Very excited to have this conversation. I want to have you on

because I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the Bitcoin treasury companies. What's the real value proposition there over something like self-custody? What are the incentives? And where does everything ultimately end when Bitcoin succeeds as money? So to kind of kick off the conversation,

over the past few months, strategy has shifted from a pure accumulation plate to something more closely resembling capital management operation. They're raising equity to build cash reserves. They're selling Bitcoin. And now they're buying back their own preferreds. To me, this all reads as very defensive, but maybe I'm wrong. So to begin, when you look at these kind of moves, what do you see?

Well, first, what I would say is there are a lot of things in between, you know, owning a Bitcoin treasury company and holding Bitcoin in self-custody. and I'm an advocate of people holding Bitcoin in self-custody. But whether you're holding Bitcoin with a custodian or holding Bitcoin even in the ETF, which I view as a more direct translation to passively saving in Bitcoin, that the second you cross over from owning the ETF even to then investing in stocks that hold Bitcoin, you are, that is the point where you're delineating between, you know, passively saving and taking added risk. Because a lot of times when people hear my positions on the risks and the mispriced risk in the treasury companies, both the common equity and the preferreds, they, they oftentimes conflate it with a purity test.

and nothing about what I'm saying is to say don't invest. Like risk taking is natural. People should take risks that they understand. In my view, particularly when it's building things that are a utility, and that doesn't just apply to Bitcoin. It could be entirely outside of Bitcoin. So I just wanted to state that position off the top because saving with Bitcoin in a custodian,

there is counterparty risk, but you're taking counterparty risk because the treasury companies are cussing their Bitcoin with somebody too. But then there's a lot of added risk on top of that that, in my view, is poorly understood or poorly thought through from people that are using these treasury companies as proxies for otherwise saving in Bitcoin. So just wanted to say that at the top that is not a purity test. It's really the delineation between the nature of the risk that is taken, the degree to which that's understood and the degree to which it's mispriced. Now, what I would say in terms of recent activity is that the two things that I would functionally put forward to people are any time a Bitcoin treasury company is trading at a premium to the Bitcoin that they hold,

that that is a mispricing of risk. Now, there is an exception, which I would say that if there was a extreme contraction in Bitcoin, which is not where we're at today at a 50% drawdown from an all-time price, or all-time high, that there is one scenario where there's extreme compression of the price of Bitcoin where a Bitcoin treasury company should start to be priced as an option value because that net asset value is contracted to such a degree. That's not where we're at today. But that anytime the premium exists, the companies will dilute you. They will sell the stock to buy Bitcoin or as they're doing today, buy cash.

And you could be doing the same thing and you have to start applying a common sense test to say if they would sell the stock to buy something else not the stock, why don't you? And particularly, you know, a company like Strive trades at a much larger premium to the Bitcoin that they hold than strategy. But there's a reason they sell the stock to buy Bitcoin. And if you apply the common sense test, I can do that too. I can sell the stock if I hold it and buy Bitcoin. In my view, all of these stocks, given the added risk on top of just holding Bitcoin, should dictate and that the market will prove out that over time, the markets are inefficient in the short term. They get better at pricing risk over the long term.

That between the companies selling the stock to dilute you, as well as the other shareholders that are sitting alongside of you as they figure it out, they will figure out that a combination of many risks, the lack of control premium, oh, you don't actually own the Bitcoin,

the company does, they're in control of it, not you. Typically, there's a control premium that is pay which would come in the form of a discount for giving up control. There's less liquidity in these stocks and there's less diversity

of liquidity in stocks versus Bitcoin. There's more counterparty risk. there's risk associated with leverage, there's risk associated with subordination, that when you add up all of the incremental risk, that the way that the natural risk should be priced and skewed is that the amount, that the stock should trade it a discount to the amount of Bitcoin that they hold versus a premium, which is what they currently trade at, and those premiums are declining over time, and that they will eventually flip to a discount just purely based on the fundamentals as each, next shareholder figures it out. And then on the separate side is the preferred. You mentioned that

strategy bought back a portion of the preferred. I think a challenge of the preferred is that there's no long-term natural buyer of the preferred. And the reason being is that it's irrational or illogical to lend fiat into perpetuity because fiat is going to zero. The same reason that that the companies want to issue those securities and why they need them trading at par so they can issue more of it is because it's a bad trade for the buyer. That oftentimes they're framed and people think about it this way. I don't want to say just because it's been framed this way, but this is out that has been sold, that if you have a shorter time horizon that's shorter than 10 years, or potentially shorter than four years, then you're a quote credit investor.

And these are perpetual preferred equity stock. The consequence of that is that you are lending forever without credit protections. If you have a one-year horizon, you're not investing in a one-year bond. If you have a two-year horizon, you are not investing in a two-year bond. You are lending into perpetuity and you are hoping, whether you understand it or not, that in one year or in two years, the market hasn't figured this out and that somebody is willing to pay the same price that you paid to take on that, you know, what in your mind is a shorter duration risk than it actually is.

The companies will say we're marrying the, it's an indefinite life asset, and we're marrying that with the indefinite life liability or mezzanine equity and what it really is from a balance sheet perspective. Well, you're on the other side of that. Fiat is going to zero, and now you have a fixed dollar claim in Fiat. And I think it's Warren Buffett who coined the phrase, you know, never lose principle, you're going to lose principle. And, you know, the dividend or the yield might feel good in the short term, but Bitcoin

has no yield. The yield is really, if it were to exist in concept, is somebody else buying Bitcoin to cause an appreciation to be able to afford, afford that distribution. But if you lose your principle along the way, because people figure out over time, that the Bitcoin, or sorry, that fiat's going to zero. That's what you're holding. And fiat doesn't have to go to zero for the price to trade at a very depressed level. All it requires is for a percentage of the shareholder base to realize that what they

functionally did was not buy one-year risk or two-year risk, but a perpetual claim on Fiat. So it's basically only a temporary holding bin for people until the fact that they figure that out and as they do, then the market price will reflect it far, far sooner than then fiat actually collapses. Now, but Parker, I can already hear it in the comments. It's backed by Bitcoin. So I wanted to just unpack that a little bit.

Like, don't they have enough Bitcoin to basically fund this dividend in perpetuity? And the number two, I kind of want to tag in there. If this risk exists and then the, you know, the market's going to get wise to it at some points in time, why wouldn't they actually just issue this instead of quote unquote digital credit, why wouldn't they just actually issue credit at 13%. Yeah, I mean, what they would say is that it reduces the risk to the enterprise by not having a maturity. And they are correct. But you are the other side of that risk, right? You are then taking on the perpetual risk of fiat. And so, yeah, it might be true. You know,

there is risk associated with it in terms of interim volatility if things don't pan out in a time period that the companies want, that it could produce risk for, like, there's a scenario where it's lose, lose. But it's still a fixed equity claim, like a fixed dollar claim. And so, you know, assume the scenario that everyone in Bitcoin understands that that Bitcoin's going up forever in the yachts. going down forever. That there is a world where somebody could pay 12% or 13% into perpetuity by holding Bitcoin because the fiat's going to zero, right? It would have to be selling a smaller and smaller nominal amount of Bitcoin to fund that. But say you own $100 worth of perpetual preferred equity, that as that's happening,

you know, individual A figures it out and sells it for now. 95 cents on the dollar to go get Bitcoin. And then an individual B bought it from them and then they figured it out and they saw it 90 cents and so on and so on. So it's like, yes, that can work out for the companies, but there's a tail risk that in my view is inevitable for the holder for like across the base, that it's functionally a game of musical chairs or hot potatoes of just people's understanding of the risk that they're all they're holding and transferring on to the next person at a price that is depressed even

in fit in in fiat terms because it is a perpetual indefinite life loan that only has a claim in fiat you know and so if it if it had actual claim or was paid out in bitcoin or had some participation in the upside of bitcoin as the fia goes to zero it may be different but that's not at least the securities that are of the greatest scale when it comes to, you know, stretch in the context of strategy or, um, Seta in the context of strive. There are perpetual dollar claims with, with no call on the underlying asset or, um, you know, uh, any benefit of the appreciation of Bitcoin as fiat goes to zero. Yep. I, I completely agree.

Almost a lot of this to me personally just feels like, uh, almost like an information arbitrage. Like the more you figure it out, the more you understand Bitcoin, the more you realize you need to get out of these things. But that's just a personal opinion. I just want to throw in there quickly. No, that's true. And that's also what I want to, you know, what I hope people understand is that

these products are adjacent to Bitcoin. They appeal to Bitcoiners who are in search of yield. But they always have to remind themselves that Bitcoin has no use. yield and that these products, even in the short term, do not eliminate volatility. They were sold as low volatility, and now the pitch is lower volatility than Bitcoin. In the short term, that should be true, but they will still be volatile because the shareholder base in these products are Bitcoin adjacent. If Bitcoin doesn't make any sense at all to somebody, they are not touching these, right?

Because if somebody thinks that Bitcoin is Fugazi and that Bitcoin is going to zero, then owning an instrument that is quote backed by Bitcoin doesn't make any sense at all. But if you understand some degree of Bitcoin, but you're earlier on your journey and you're like, oh, well, I'll take this risk because it's quote backed by Bitcoin. Well, eventually, but more realistically, a year from now, two years from now, you figure it out, If Bitcoin drops, the risk-adjusted return on Bitcoin or the likelihood that it's purchasing power increases and the downside relative to upside, the downside goes down relative to the upside when the price goes down of Bitcoin, that you're incentivized to sell the professional preferred

equity and buy the Bitcoin. These products are inextricably linked to Bitcoin volatility. Bitcoin crashes It connects for people Oh well I says Sell this preferred equity For Bitcoin Bitcoin starts to rip

You realize Oh I'm a Fiat bag holder I should sell the Fiat to buy a Bitcoin I think that's the one that people miss Don't even necessarily consider Like when I look around today I look at things like with the like the SpaceX IPO launch

And I think it was James Check Frame for me as a hot bowl of money just chasing things around. I think about like the the upside risk in the sense that if Bitcoin just starts to rip, like you're supposed to buy, you know, buy low and sell high, but no one ever does that. And if Bitcoin starts to rip, I wonder if you'll see like capital flight out of these because they start to realize they're missing the upside. And you start to see the preferreds come down while Bitcoin's racing upwards because they just want to get out and get the gains. They get it, they get that FOMO moment. They want to actually start chasing

when Bitcoin's doing this bull run thing. I think what you will. find is that the way to express it is that there will always be volatility in these instruments when Bitcoin is volatile. If Bitcoin is grinding higher,

these instruments are likely not volatile. It's volatility to the upside or volatility to the downside. Because in either scenario, that price action is information and the market will respond to the volatility in a way that makes fundamental sense. Again, short-term, less so long-term, you know, it's like the market figures out how to

price risk better as a function of time. And so when Bitcoin is particularly volatile to the upside, that, you know, some of that driving the volatility might very well be the logical people selling the preferred equity to buy Bitcoin as they realize the miscalculus that they've made. Now, I think that's different if like Bitcoin's grinding lower, Bitcoin's grinding higher, that, you know, when markets move more violently than, then people are questioning, you know, all of their finish position, but they're also learning because the price of the underlying is the market sending information. You know, when it's lower, Bitcoin's cheaper. The downside is less than relative to upside. And, you know,

the market signal that's being sent when Bitcoin is ripping is that fiat's going to zero. And you don't know when, you don't know when the true cliff is, when the true hyperinflation runaway is. But as a function of time, it gets longer. and longer. And that is why if you had something like a one-year loan or a two-year loan, where it doesn't really matter what the current market value is, if there's proper collateralization, if you hold it through that maturity, you can get the principal back and then you can go buy Bitcoin. When it's perpetual, it's just a market pricing function. Your loan is perpetual, is indefinite life. There is no maturity.

And so the market then has to price that. And the challenge particular is like, it is, the shorter the duration, the easier it is to price. The longer the duration, the greater the uncertainty, the harder it is to price. So if you were pricing risk for one year versus 30 years, you're taking a lot less risk if you are underwriting a fixed dollar claim. But then if you were to underwrite the 30-year risk, you're taking a lot more uncertainty. So you'd need to be compensated with a higher rate of interest effectively.

Well, perpetual is longer than 30 years. That's forever. And the dilemma or the unfortunate aspect of this is that the people who bought the preferreds weren't logically thinking about that. They were thinking about it being in the short term less risky than Bitcoin, not realizing that they're actually holding the long-term risk of the up. I would go as far as they might have been a little bit gaslight too in some of the marketing that went out there because they really were not directly in any sort of legal consequence

away, but it seemed like it was suggesting it compared to, I will say, other fixed income products and trying to put it in that category when, in my opinion, it's not, again, just my opinion, not make any necessary claims because I don't do any of that. And it's funny, too, because even for anybody that might be thinking about the risk in terms of time, you can just go and look at something like the Treasury yield curve. And it should be. The longer you're going on the yield curve, the more you're getting in terms of return, because the longer you have to wait, the more risk that you're adding in there.

And I do want to come back to risk, but just quickly for one second, I want to double tap on. Both STRC, both Stretch and SETA are trading below that $100 par, stretch. quite a bit below that $100 par. In your estimation, is that a signal for anything? Is that the market starting to figure out that there's more risk involved? Is that reflective of kind of what we're talking about? Yes.

Yes. And also realize that, like, this is a very common sense. If you have any understanding of Bitcoin, you can never lend fiat forever. Like, there's a reason why they want you to lend fiat forever to them. So that's that's number one. Number two is the more they trade at par, the more supply will be delivered to the market. The larger the number of these claims that make fundamental, that they make little fundamental sense or no fundamental sense to be on the other side of.

So as more, and also the supply of stretch and the supply of SETA compete with each other, they are functionally the same risk. They are the same perpetual fiat risk, right? So the more, and this was something that Jim Chanos in his, I hadn't listened to it, but Jim Chanos and Pierre Arshar had a debate about a year ago on Press and Preciate. is Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast, that as more supply is introduced to the market, there's only so, like, my view of is they make no fundamental sense at all. So you're up against the market figuring that out and pricing it over time. That fundamental is only made worse if more of the supply exists in the market. And so any time

If they were ever to get back There will be a time where they never get back to par If they were ever to get back to par The problem is a double one Because more of that That fundamental product that shouldn't exist Will increase and be diluted And now there's more of it

To go around And more of it to be debased to zero As Fia goes to zero So I do think that right now as you know you saw the volatility in in strategies which is interesting because strategy is less leveraged than then strives preferred and it trading down into the 70s was inevitably a class of their investor base figuring it out and saying no I'm out and I'll I'll take my loss and I'm

I've touched the hot stove and figured it out, that they need to then replace those investors that figured it out to get back to par. And the longer that it stays below par, the more it is a market signal that the people that plowed into them initially on the promise that they were low volatility, because I do think that that, like, my, you know,

people were gaslight. Okay. they they didn't realize and again it's on them too they bought it willingly you know you get the you get Bitcoin of the price to deserve

you get you know there is the disclosure all the disclosures are there that's totally true right but but they were marketed as low volatility as replacements of cash as as as money market like um

and they're not right and then once they became volatile, and this is, again, what I said before and I'm not going to rehash it, these will always be volatile around Bitcoin volatility because it's the same risk and because this shareholder base is Bitcoin adjacent, that now the marketing is they're less volatile than Bitcoin. Okay. And that's only in the short term. In the long term, they're more volatile in the wrong direction.

They're the inverse of it. It's more akin to a perpetual currency swap than it is a bond. And so that as the market learns that they're always going to be volatile, that the longer they stay below par, below like the $100 claim, that is an impairment of the shareholder base that tracks to the fundamentals, That tracks to people figuring out that what they kind of was framed for them is like, oh, if you have less than a four-year time horizon, then you should, you're a credit investor. But by the professional preferred equity, they realized that they weren't taking one-year risk or two-year risk or three-year risk or four-year risk. They were taking perpetual fiat risk.

And then they repriced that. They either sold it to get, you know, cash, Fiat cash, or they ejected to buy Bitcoin when Bitcoin dipped from, you know, 85,000 to 60,000. Because dollar for dollar, they could get more Bitcoin, which was logical. No, 100%. And there's a few things in there I kind of want to unpack. One is this idea of like they're, as soon as they hit at some point in time, they will come off a par and never return to it.

And it's kind of like how if something doesn't blow up in the existing Fiat system, people will always keep going out on the risk curve. They will always keep going up further and further and further on the risk curve until something collapses, kind of resets, and then we wipe out some credit and do it all over again. Additionally, I'm thinking about this idea of like, what's the total addressable market and the increasing marginal difficulty of getting a new customer. Like this, it feels like a little bit between like a taking time bomb. At some point in time, you're not going to be able to find new buyers and the existing ones are going to start to slip out. Do you have any quick comments on that? No, I would just say, I mean, like, if you were to think about this, because they do think it's replacement costs. Yeah.

You're having to perpetually replace people who've reduced the gap in the information asymmetry, and that's what you're depending on. But it's also related because as people figure out Bitcoin and they figure out that Bitcoin actually wasn't too volatile for them and that they, they, transition out of their ownership of the preferred equity perpetual preferred equity it's always important to say perpetual that like say say in an adoption

way of Bitcoin doubles or triples in value in terms of peak to peak well the person that was holding the fixed dollar claim realizes yeah that was me that was my opportunity cost and I'm going to sell it and they never come back.

Well, then you always just have to replace somebody that's in that exact same position going forward until enough people have figured it out that there's not a market to replace. And the claim persists. The claim remains perpetual. Maybe the companies buy them back at a steep discount and there's not been a future backholder,

but the incentive is it's a fiat claim. And so I do think that that's a good context of the way I would describe it is that it's a temporary holding pin with, you know, it's two people on the opposite side of a trade. And typically, you know, when you're investing in a company, it's better to have alignment than opposite, functionally opposite interest. No, I agree.

I'm curious quickly, too, if you think we talk about Seda and Stretch as kind of as competing offers, competing products there, do you think the daily dividend aspect with Seda is the reason it might be holding more of its value compared to PAR than Stretch right now, which would then, in my mind, I would think that Stretch would then continue to move towards that same sort of offering. I really don't know. I mean, what I would say is that from my experience, and this is not in no way. way is this to say to disparage anyone. But in my conversations with people directly, combination of friends of mine,

like people offline that are friends online, there is a lack of sophistication when it comes to taking and pricing risk in public securities, whether that's the common equity or the perpetual preferreds.

So, you know, like on a fundamental basis, if I would say none of these are investable, that if the market was pricing the counterparty risk between strategy and strive, there should be greater, there should be greater risk ascribed to strive, because it's more leveraged and it's smaller.

But it's got stretch in its holdings as well too. Right. So, so, so the, the, the, the quote,

rate of return in, like, from a, uh, fundamental pricing of risk, stretch should have a lower required return than, um, then,

then Seda strives. But they're functionally the same. They're comparable. So, in my mind, mind, it's likely because there's a bias towards the higher nominal rate that the market that is yield chase. It's like, I don't know.

I just, I have, what I have experience is that, you know, the sophistication amongst the people and understanding the risks that they're taking is lacking. And so it makes sense that there would be arbitrages or abnormalities in the space as well. If micro strategy or strategy is less leveraged, which it is, then its equity premium is much smaller to the Bitcoin that holds none. The premium shouldn't exist. In all cases, in my view, from a fundamental perspective, the stock should trade at a discount to the amount of Bitcoin they hold. They both trade a premium. Strategy trades at a very small premium.

strife trades a much larger premium, well, the fundamental of that would say it should be reversed because Shrive has more leverage than strategy, that the premium should be, the relationship with the premium should be opposite. But that's market mispricing risk. So my best explanation for why, quote, say that is trading more closely to par is that the nominal rate is higher, less so than the daily

dividend, maybe on the margin. I would say, to me, the daily dividend is more of a, you know, sends a louder signal to somebody that's like, wait, I give you my money today and you give me some of it back tomorrow. How did you generate the yield? So I think there's a counter signal to that. You know, maybe on the margin, one of the things that is talked about is that there's a more direct cost to shorting it. I don't think that that's the thing that's driving the long-term pricing of it. I think it's the more realistically the higher nominal rate in the yield chasing.

But they are all competing with each other. They're fixed. You know, the supply of one increases the supply of the other because they're all perpetual dollar claims backed by Bitcoin. Yes, different counterparties to some different risk, but the underlying fundamental risk is the same. One company I like pointing people to when they ask about Bitcoin mining is abundant mines. They were founded by Bo and Christine Turner after losing over half a million dollars to broken. promises in the mining industry, and they built their hosting model to remove the usual headaches. With abundant mines, you own your machines and keep 100% of the Bitcoin you mine. There's no revenue

share, no hidden skims. Pricing is simple. One flat monthly fee covers power, parts, labor, and repairs. They also guarantee uptime. If a machine goes down, their hash rate redirect system, routes hash power from their fleet, so earnings don't just stop. And every machine is insured at full placement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S. powered by hydro and mining equipment may qualify for 100% year one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant minds.com slash sessions. You mentioned quite a few risks at the top of the conversation as well too. You may have said us, I don't, I may have missed it too, but the other ones that came to mind too is even just like management risk. And even with something particularly like like strategy is key man risk. Like I'm not

wishing any ill will, but I'm just saying if something happened to Michael Saylor, what would happen to the stock overall would the market respond in accordance with that? And I think these are things that people don't necessarily think about. So we're talking about how you, in your estimation, the market would eventually move to price it under the net asset value. I'm curious, if that were to happen, if it falls below like the MNAV of 1, what are the consequences of that moving forward? What would you expect to see in response?

Well, one, I think it's important just to talk about from a fund. fundamental perspective, like, why the discount should exist. Okay. Because, you know, there's the same reason the discount should exist is the same reason why the companies are literally selling stock every time that it's at a premium. You know, it's the same dilemma. So long as the premium exists, it makes sense for them to sell stock to capture the premium. whether they're selling the stock to buy Bitcoin or selling the stock to hold cash to create

future optionality from themselves so that if it drops lower, they can buy Bitcoin or whatever it might be that there's a reason that the companies are selling the company's stock to dilute the stock to buy something else in the stock because they control the supply of the stock and there's a premium. The existence of the premium should be evidence enough. and it's not for a lot of people, but that's fine. Now, the reason why the fundamental discount should exist is because, and this doesn't exist,

because a lot of people get confused about saying, well, banks trade at a multiple of their book value. It's like, well, you know, this isn't a bank, and I wouldn't buy the equity of a bank either. So, you know, let's not confuse and conflate these things. But the difference in the context of the Bitcoin Treasury company, companies is that the asset that they hold is money, is Bitcoin, and that you can hold the identical asset outside of the structure. The one that I didn't mention is the double tax structure of the corporation.

That's right. Yeah. Big one. Totally, when I bring this up to people, they don't understand why even if the companies are not paying taxes today. well, why it's relevant to them as they value the stock. Like, that's a concept that a lot of these people have absolutely no concept of. Did you break that one down for us, laid out, the flow of the double taxation? So, yeah, but I want to finish the point that before.

So it's like, if you start at neutral of like as if the companies are trading at the value of the amount of money they hold. Right? because like if you look at any company, like it doesn't matter if the money is expected to appreciate or not, if you look at any company that functionally only has cash on their balance sheet, it always traded a discount to the cash. And that's functionally the same here because you can own the cash outside of. So when someone's evaluating,

do they hold the underlying directly, or do I take more risk for greater potential upside? Because it is, like, there is potential greater upside. But the key thing being not if you pay the wrong price. If you pay a massive premium to the underlying money that you can hold directly, you are never getting out of that hole that you've created for yourself. And it's the other side of the companies selling the premium to you. And eventually it's either the company is doing that to a point where then the market

figures it out because of the dilution or the share. shareholders figure it out and capture the premium before the companies do. And so, but the zoomed out view of it too is that all of these shareholders and the companies themselves are trying to justify the premium. And they're trying to justify it in part by saying, well, because of the leverage exists, these will outperform Bitcoin in a bull market. And there's no actual logic. there. All it is predicated on is that, hey, we're going to try to induce people to pay an even

larger premium and not discount all the risk associated with to effectively recreate what happened in 24 and 25, which, you know, then it starts to sound a lot like alt season, right, where there was a, there was a cycle where alts outperform, so therefore will happen in the future. And when you break down the logic, it is, so wait, you're saying that this other asset should trade higher than Bitcoin because dot, dot, dot, people are buying Bitcoin. Why? Why on a fundamental basis, if you're taking all this added risk, why is it trading at a premium?

Why is it trading? Because the implication is, why is it trading as if it's less risky than the Bitcoin itself? Because that is what is implied when the market is describing a premium. And again, with other companies, whether it's Google, Apple, whatever it may be, the only way to get a claim on those assets that are very difficult to recreate or replace is by owning the stock. In this case, you can own the underlying Bitcoin with less risk. And that's what the market's figuring out. Now, this risk, this individual risk that is

specific that you mentioned me, or you asked me to articulate or explain, or, you ask me to articulate or expand upon is this consequence of double taxes. And Jim Chano's, to his credit, also brought this up in his debate with Pierre Rochard a year ago on Press and Pitch's podcast. And this is also different than the ETF. The ETF holds Bitcoin and it exclusively holds Bitcoin and it's managed to now. The management to now that is honestly less relevant. It holds one asset and that's that's its mandate. And when you, there's a, there's a mechanism to take the Bitcoin

out of the ETF in kind without having a tax event. Because it's basically, it's like, it's, I don't know, I mean, it's just taking out in kind. I don't know that the tax, you know, terminology, but it's like,

you're taking largely the same asset and just moving the structure. which you're not doing if it's a Bitcoin treasury company that's in a, it's in a, I don't know if it's a C-Corp or an S-Corp, but the company is not a, is not a corporation in the same sense that the ETF is. You're doing a lot of other things than just passively holding Bitcoin. So therefore, you know, if you, you're more like a trading company, okay? But you're a trading company in a corporate structure.

So say strategy holds 840,000 Bitcoin. If Fiat went to zero tomorrow and strategy wanted to dividend all of those Bitcoin to the shareholders, they would have to pay the corporate tax, which is 20, 21%, before the Bitcoin could be distributed. They would be, the dividend would be treated as deemed sold. And so you would haircut 20% of the Bitcoin. Now, again, if fiat collapse tomorrow, that would actually work out in the favor of strategy shareholders.

It would destroy the, it would destroy all the people holding the preferred. But just because the tax exists doesn't mean that you necessarily lose. It's just that from a value. of what is the proper price that you're willing to pay, regardless of whether or not the company is paying taxes today, those taxes are obligated at some point. And if your thesis is Bitcoin goes up, then the tax comes into play. And, you know, a lot of the people that I've interacted with, they don't have this background in corporate finance or how to evaluate the tax. the tax consequences of owning a stock that has double tax. So when I bring this up to people, they will say, well, they're not selling Bitcoin today.

I'm saying, well, they're going to, you know, if, if, not if, the whole purpose of owning a company, investing in a business, rather than saving in money, is for shareholder returns, for value to actually be returned to shareholders. If there is ever to be any value actually return to shareholders, the consequence of corporate tax has to be evaluated. The way that anybody valuates any public stock that understands that,

regardless of if the corporation is actually paying tax today, even if it's 10 years out in the future or 15 years out in the future, And this is particularly relevant if you are looking at it as a proxy to saving in Bitcoin and recognizing that the only reason that you would do that is if you get more Bitcoin and you could own today, that that tax comes off the top before it's returned back to you. So if you're looking at a scenario and saying, oh, Bitcoin's going to go up by 30%, the liabilities are going to shrink to X, but you're not saying, well, what in that world would the tax be if they were to return it to me because they say, oh, well, I'll just sell the stock

on the secondary market. It's like, the tax still applies to the person pricing it. And if you're not pricing it today, someone's going to price it in the future. And as the market figures out that that is a massive inefficiency to just holding Bitcoin and is a mountain that you have to overcome, the market prices the risk. And eventually it will be priced into the discount. or it will be priced in as part of what causes these stocks to flip from a premium to a discount. And then, yeah, so that's that side. One other thing though I try to impress upon people too, though, is zoom out. Like the market for Bitcoin, permissionless money is orders of magnitude larger than the market for

single company stock that holds Bitcoin. And that as the market turns on to the fact that fiat's a problem for them, they start buying Bitcoin, those people aren't necessarily buying your stock. Your universe of buyers is inherently limited relative to the universe of people that will value permissionless money. And that it's more likely, again, like, as people figure out Bitcoin, as even the shareholder's figure out Bitcoin, they sell a stock and buy Bitcoin, but even others just coming in to the market,

buying Bitcoin, bidding the price of Bitcoin up because it has a fixed supply that logically the stock lags and is flipped to a discount because people are entering the Bitcoin market, not entering the stock market to access Bitcoin. And that also what is against this whole, illogical, irrational, not backed up by pricing of risk when people say, well, we'll underperform in a bear market and will outperform in a bull market, but that is alt-season logic. It's straight alt-season logic. And what's absent from that is what is it price to relative to the underlying asset? Is it a price at a premium or is it a price at a discount?

Because if it was priced at the proper discount, then that might be true. The discount might shrink, you know, as the liability. get more in the rear view. But your logic saying it will outperform in a bull market ignores the fact, well, if it's trading at a premium today, not true. You know, not true based on the fundamentals. And, you know, your comment itself that you're banking on is banking on people making an even more rational decision than you made.

And all you would be doing is recreate, recreating the bagholders, and then hoping for this perpetual cycle of bad quarters making irrational decisions to pay a premium to buy money that they could buy with less risk. It feels a little bit reminiscent of like the gray scale arbitrage. Like I can understand why someone would be interested in having Bitcoin exposure through strategy or through something like gray scale before the ETFs. It doesn't really make sense to me afterwards if we're talking about like institute players that have to have it in some sort of a Wall Street rapper. It also, it's a little bit, no, it's fine. It feels very much like a greater fool theory. Like, it's just speculating.

You're just gambling and think that there would be a greater fool who will pay more of a premium in the future. The other one that I want to tap on. I like to stay away from greater fool theory because they, you know, a lot of people say that Bitcoin is the greater pool theory. And it distorts the, it distorts the difference between, Bitcoin and the dilemma of paying a premium to hold stock that holds Bitcoin. And so I had more so, I'd caution against it. It might be true, but I would think more relative to what does a premium actually mean. And is that rational or irrational?

And so the way that I would distill it is at the peak of micro strategy, the last peak. This isn't necessarily the peak of the premium, but the peak in the stock. The premium was a little bit over 100%. So if the price of Bitcoin today is $65,000 approximately, what that means is you could buy $65,000, you could $65,000 today and buy one Bitcoin. Or if you took $65,000, this is at the peak, this is about a year ago in strategy, if you took $65,000 and bought strategy at that implied premium, you'd effectively be buying the share equivalent of half a Bitcoin. You're never getting out of that hole if you are buying the stock at 100% premium to that that you're, that you're, you're never getting out of that hole if you are buying the stock at 100% premium to, that you're you could just buy twice as much of the underlying. And if that is irrational, then you carry that forward and say,

is any premium rational at all? Does it make sense to pay a premium for a riskier asset when you can own the identical underlying asset? And should that equation change, regardless of whether the price of Bitcoin goes up or not, if more people are demanding Bitcoin. Like, why, if it's trading at a premium to the underlying asset, should more people buying the underlying asset cause the thing that's trading at a

premium to trade at a larger premium? And then if you're saying it should trade at a greater premium, all you're saying is that paying something like, you know, one and a half time of shares equivalent makes sense than buying, you know, the Bitcoin directly. And if you can reason through why, well, if I could buy one Bitcoin today, it wouldn't make sense to buy the equivalent of shares that has interest in half a Bitcoin. Then you're on your way to understanding the risk you that should dictate that no one should pay a premium at all for owning the underlying asset that carries less risk. And that the price going up or down really doesn't change that fundamental.

all of this change is as a function of time, the market that's pricing the stock relative to Bitcoin gets better at pricing that risk and flips the discount. I do think, like, in many ways, it's similar to the GBTC dilemma. It's different, different risk, but similar in the degree that there were a lot of people, and a lot of people don't remember or have the history of GBTC, but for those that don't, there were a whole host of institutional money. like the quote smart money, right, that said that the premium would persist and the premium would persist. It's actually, at the same time, there were a lot of people saying it should trade at a discount because, you know, people could go to Coinbase.

They could go buy directly the same time that it was existing at a premium, mass mutual bought Bitcoin. directly. You know, they technically bought it, I believe, in a fund of one, but like, they didn't need to go buy GBTC, but there was this whole class of people saying, the premium was justified, the premium was justified. And it existed for a long time until it didn't. And then it overreacted to trade it a very steep discount and then it trended back to one. That's what I expect to happen here. That it will, the discount will flip the people, the market of holders that could not conceive of why a discount should exist will have the foundation of all their thinking disrupted.

There'll be a crisis of confidence they will overreact. Not that I want them to overreact. I'm just using that GPTC as an analog. And then over time, as Bitcoin goes up and their liabilities go down in Bitcoin terms, you know, the discount will trend back up toward one as the liabilities get closer and closer to zero. That that's a, that would be a fair way to look at it. And that doesn't mean that a company with low leverage, you know,

won't do well in Fiat terms. My position is just that so long as they're trading at a premium, they, you know, at least in the common equity standpoint, that those people would be better off just holding Bitcoin because the price is misrep. the risk is mispriced, which it is. Is this a simple heuristic? If they're selling the stock to buy Bitcoin,

maybe that's a suggestion that you should as well, too. Right. The thing is, when I say that to people, and also Jim Cheneos said the same thing. I wasn't paying attention back a year ago, right? But I do encourage people to go back and listen to that podcast, because everything that he's saying from a fundamental perspective is consistent.

and in my view, logical. But, you know, there are, you can dig into it and really triangulate around the mispricing of risk, but you can also say to yourself, if this directionally was not correct, why are the company selling stock and you aren't? You know, and the reason they are and can is because the premium is this. Now, it doesn't mean that they can't sell a stock once a discount exists, right? If they view Bitcoin to be particularly underpriced, like significant, they could dilute themselves and the trade could work out, right?

So it doesn't mean that it prevents, you know, for the dilution or that the dilution can't actually be a net win. It just has to be priced relative to the underlying risks that they're taking and that the premium doesn't make any fundamental sense. and somebody's going to harvest that premium. The companies themselves or shareholders against shareholders. Doesn't it mean that at some point, like the potential for flipping where they're selling the Bitcoin to buy back the stock if it's at a discount to MNAV makes sense? Wouldn't they have an obligation to shareholders?

I guess if it's a steep discount. I don't know. I don't think so because, you know, you can look at it as the stock relative to Bitcoin, but then at a certain point, you're pricing Bitcoin. relative to your stock. So it's like, there's a scenario where, you know, if Bitcoin trades aggressively down for a short period of time, they're like, okay, I see what you're saying of like, well, why not in that scenario, sell the, you know,

sell the Bitcoin to buy the stock. But actually, you know, yeah, like there is that, scenario where until it basically gets back to NAV as a neutral. like depends on how you're again, yeah, maybe in that world

you could take out debt to, you'd probably be more likely to take out debt to buy Bitcoin rather than sell the equity.

You would likely from a fundamental perspective if it was trading a steep discount to buy back to sell the Bitcoin to buy back. But like,

again, it's this quagmire of you can own the underlying asset directly yourself. Yep. And

how do you price the risk of having somebody else own all of that. Yeah, because there's something that you pointed out with regards to owning the underlying, with something like Google, you can't own the underlying, except for going through their equity. But with Bitcoin, you can just directly buy the Bitcoin itself. It seems to me like on a long enough time horizon, none of these are

necessarily viable unless the underlying business is like cash flow positive, and that's essentially what you're getting, and hoping that they'll sweep it into Bitcoin. Like if the software enterprise side of things was delivering more in terms of returns, then I could see how it kind of makes sense, because that's the driving engine. That's what you can't buy on your own. You can buy the Bitcoin on your own, but you can't buy the enterprise software. Yeah, but then you'd be just evaluating the enterprise software. Correct.

Like it almost has to go back to just evaluating the business, not evaluating the assets it holds. Yeah, and it questions whether, again, if somebody was good at pricing Bitcoin, right? Like, there's a scenario where you could outperform Bitcoin if it was a trading strategy, right? Essentially more akin to a market making. But then you would be evaluating an equity investment in a market maker, not a large passive proxy to Bitcoin. And again, they've, quote, shifted the strategy as, you know, if you go back a year ago, they had put out guidance of like whether or not they would sell.

the equity at below a two times, two and a half times premium. And the guidance was that, you know, they would do something else. But what did they do? They continued to sell the equity. When it was at a 5% premium, they continued to sell the equity. That, you know, it might be that when it, when it trades at a discount, that they actually then have to, you know, not necessarily sell the Bitcoin to buy equity back, but then that if they are, you know, if they are, you know, you know, issuing any equity that it has to more than account for the passive delta in terms of their stock and Bitcoin, something that actually can generate but then has greater risk of delivering a return in excess of Bitcoin. Right? Like, that's what it comes down to. And in my view, it always comes back to, hey, like, does it make sense to use a company that's holding Bitcoin as a proxy to holding Bitcoin? Given all of the out of risk, it does not make sense to pay a premium for that. And then the question is, well, does it make sense to hold it while it's at a discount?

Well, if the discount is proper, then potentially yes, right? Because if it was trading at a 20% discount, then you're basically pricing, okay, as Bitcoin goes up, these liabilities do come down in Bitcoin denominated terms. How much am I willing to pay for the risk of that and for the counterparty risk and the execution risk and the expense base? and then there's a sweet spot that justifies the risk. But in my mind, as long as it's trading at a premium, I don't know how you could justify my risk. I want to dive a little bit into the incentives at play here,

particularly in terms of messaging things, because you've given me kind of like a new piece of information that I'm playing around with. And I could be very wrong about this. You tell me where I go kind of astray here. But I have a sense that the incentives line up, that the treasury companies have to be in some regards adversarial and flood Bitcoin. They have to.

That he talked about that when the company has money on its balance sheet, that it'll trade at a discount to the money. And that makes perfect sense. And so one of the things that keeps coming up is these guys really hate talking about Bitcoin as one competing with dollars and as a money. They really keep framing it as digital capital. It's something else. It's not money.

And from my perspective, that is straight up flooding Bitcoin. If you're attacking Bitcoin's moneyness, its use as money, that to me feels adversarial. It feels like you're trying to, you're actually taking out one of the key reasons that it has any value at all in the first place. But if they were to talk about it as money, and if it was evaluated as money on their balance sheet,

they wouldn't have that premium necessarily anymore, so they wouldn't be able to issue equity and buy Bitcoin. Pull a couple strings together there. Could be wrong. Wanted to get your thoughts on that and just the overall incentives, particularly when it comes to how they're messaging with regarding to Bitcoin.

You know, I don't think that it's necessarily that they have to fud Bitcoin. I don't think that that's, that would be the proper framing. I think that it, I think the second thing that you said might be more, more correct, that they have to justify their existence. And that it's harder to justify the existence that, that they're doing something unique to create value or that that Bitcoin needs further refinement and they're the ones that are doing that to justify the premium that they're having to craft a story that doesn't line up with fundamentals and there might be an incentive to muddy

the water to create the shareholder narrative that the work that they're doing is necessary and that's what justifies the premium. But I view that differently than, you know, fudding Bitcoin directly. Where I think that they're, but I still say it is problematic. Like, I view it as you're confusing people about the nature of Bitcoin to further the end of selling the stock and getting people to pay a premium, which does themselves a disservice. If you think about it's like, if Bitcoin went up faster than the stock, that's good for

all the stockholders. They're not going to get diluted. The incentives begin to align, but they all, you know, if the stock doesn't go up faster than Bitcoin, that reinforces that they made a bad decision at the same time. It's a very weird quagmire. But the incentive that I've experienced is, again, not saying that everybody acts on this incentive, but the incentive exists, that if you operate or own the companies, you have an incentive to get people to buy the stock rather than Bitcoin. Because you need people to buy the stock. Because people buying the Bitcoin doesn't make your stock go up.

And that is an incredibly strong incentive, even if you hold 80% Bitcoin and 20% one of these stocks. Because if all else is equal, if someone was just going to go buy Bitcoin, you know, you you'd rather them come buy your stock to reinforce your own financial position. Now, you might say, I'm agnostic, but the incentive exists. And there's a whole class of people that are out there every day pushing, buy the stock, buy the stock, buy the stock, you're going to get more Bitcoin, you're going to get more Bitcoin. And those same people were saying the same thing for the 90% of shareholders that bought strategy

and have underperformed Bitcoin. And then they explain it away saying, well, it's a bare market, it will outperform. and it's like, no, you induce people to buy something with a promise that it would outperform without the logic to back it up. That you didn't talk about, well, it's trading at a two times premium to the actual Bitcoin house. How do you outperform Bitcoin if you buy the stock today? And then what they will also say is, well, strategies outperform for six years.

You know, go back further and say, well, no, 90% of the equity capital, the company has raised has been in the last two years, and they've significantly underperform Bitcoin. Yep. And so the incentive of those people is very strong to get people to buy the stock, regardless of whether it makes sense for the person buying the stock. Because it's either the people selling into it, the companies that are diluting the premium, that are harvesting the premium, or the same people that are taking chips off the table. at the same time that they're trying to induce people to pay an even larger premium.

So I wouldn't so much say that it's fudding Bitcoin, but it's creating a narrative to justify the existence or to justify a premium, which is inconsistent with the fundamentals in my perspective. Then on the other side, which I think is also problematic, and you can go see a number of these videos where they either talk about if you have a time, that is shorter than X and the preferred equity is right for you, that it's a replacement for cash, that it's low volatility, that it wasn't marketed as lower volatility than Bitcoin, that it was low volatility, right? And a stock, you know, trading down 25%, and then trading, you know, 15% below par for, for two months when the discount is merited from a fundamental perspective, it's not low volatility. But then after the fact. They said, no, we didn't say low volatile. They said lower than Bitcoin. It's like, no,

that's not what she said. Yeah. That's not how it was marketed. But that a part of the marketing is, like, and then this is in certain videos that people put out, they say, Bitcoin is too volatile for 99% of people by the credit when in reality it's a perpetual preferred equity. Yeah, it was got through digital in front of it. That's kind of the like the TM thing to get away with it. Or like to call it credit at all. You know, when it's a perpetual loan that virtually no credit investor that is actively, because there's also the confusion between institutions and passive ETFs that are largely owned by retail versus an institutional credit manager buying a perpetual loan to a company.

Like, that just doesn't line up. But I view it as problematic to say, like, and again, you could say this could say this is fudding Bitcoin, But for the people that they're steering into the perpetual preferred equities, when they say the Bitcoin's too volatile for 99% of people. That, that, you know, the Bitcoin being money is an Austrian frame and that in the Keynesian frame, money is stable. So it's just a difference of frames. and that 99% of people need stability and income and they can't tolerate Bitcoin's volatility when that's just not true,

they're getting people into a volatile asset that they understand even lesser that's harder to understand than Bitcoin because it's a derivative of Bitcoin and it's a perpetual equity claim that they're not experts in investing in perpetual equity claims and that Bitcoin is so simple. There's only, you know, yes, it's complicated, difficult to see,

but there's only 21 million Bitcoin is an easier concept to understand than a perpetual preferred equity that can be, you know, diluted itself, that is a indefinite life loan effectively. What are the protections? Very little when it comes to, you know, it doesn't have standard credit protections. But as it relates to this marketing, it's problematic, is saying Bitcoin is too volatile for people.

or it's because you have a shorter time horizon. And the reality of it is that Bitcoin being volatile is because to go from very few people understanding Bitcoin to the majority of people, it necessitates people who've never priced Bitcoin or never saved in Bitcoin for pricing it for the first time. And that is what the volatility is. The volatility of Bitcoin is the market of new entrance

pricing Bitcoin for the first time and necessarily doing it with less information and less conviction than if they could be the same person but go five years out, where they've accumulated knowledge, they've been in the market, they've tolerated the volatility before, and that there's also no path from here to stability in economic, the economic stability of Bitcoin without people in mass adopting Bitcoin and the place that we get to in Bitcoin is not volatile is when greater than 50% of the market has already started to save in Bitcoin

where any incremental demand would represent a fraction rather than a multiple or an order of magnitude. And so I do think that there are serious problems that, you know, are derived from misalignment on either side of the common equity or the or the preferred, I would just stop short of saying that they have an incentive to flood Bitcoin.

They have an incentive to explain Bitcoin to a degree, to get people to take a certain side of the risk without being deliberate about, you know, whether the premium should or shouldn't be justified or the risk that they're taking there, or the consequences of taxes, or what a proper discount rate would be, or what hurdle rate they top target in Bitcoin denominated a return so you can know how much extra Bitcoin should you be expecting rather than just taking a whole boltload of risk and paying a premium to do so, or on the other side issuing a perpetual fiat loan

because somebody has sold it as low volatility or light cash when in reality it's both volatile and Bitcoin's not too volatile for you. Just save in Bitcoin to a degree that you can tolerate its volatility because the volatility will be to your benefit by being early. But the volatility is real. And rather than just being transparent and upfront about that, it's let me create some instrument that realistically to my long-term benefit, but that's to the detriment of the long-term holder of that same instrument.

Nope, fair enough. And I will say just for myself, not for you. I'm always going to be a little bit skeptical and a little bit hesitant and look at it a little bit more adversarily if I'm seeing someone trying to promote a alt coin, a shit coin backed by equity. That's going to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up a little bit there. And then additionally, too, from my perspective, just speaking for myself, if Bitcoin is not money, it has no value or utility.

And so whenever I see someone personally, again, they're not speaking for you, but I see someone personally downplaying Bitcoin as money or trying to call it something else that just immediately raises red flags for me. But again, no, no, I will say the same about that. And I, again, yeah, maybe I'm talking about Fudd at a different level. Fair. But I agree with you. I think that it is problematic.

for people to go out of their way to describe Bitcoin as not money. Yes. And on that side of it, my problem with it, again, some people would say, oh, that's just semantics. It's just frames. It's just language.

It's like, yeah, language definitions matter. The one thing that makes Bitcoin unique is money. It was purpose-built. and designed to be money. There's a unit of currency in the system that makes the whole thing work. If you're trying to describe it as not money, you're taking something that's confusing

and making it more confusing. Because the rhetorical question is, if you turn Bitcoin into money, what is Bitcoin? Yep. And you don't turn it into money. It is money. it's just in the path of monetization

and you have an incentive to sell stock and you're creating a justification, but you're doing it at the consequence of creating something that's confusing and making it even more confusing. And then on the other side, when people start saying that Bitcoin needs digital credit, the digital credit is the most important inflection point

in the history of Bitcoin. It's like, wait, the issuance of preferred perpetual stock of a single company is the most important inflection point of Bitcoin, what are you talking about? You don't expect to be called out for saying ridiculous things like that. And then when you double down on it,

it then increase an incentive for people to do the work to understand the problem. So I think on both of those sides, there are problems with the language that people are using and that it's not semantic, that it is at a fundamental level. If you can't come to understand Bitcoin as money as the thing that it was fundamentally engineered to be, then it becomes a turtle's all the way down.

Everyone's just saving in digital bits to do what. And so I think that that does a disservice to everyone, themselves included, but they're following a short-term incentive at the consequence of long-term incentive. There's some sort of irony here where this journey started out on a podcast, podcast literally called What is Money. And I think they got the answer right earlier on. Yeah. Like a decade later, we've gone astray.

Yeah. Agreed. Parker, this has been absolutely phenomenal. Love chatting with you. Had a great time. Really enjoy the conversation. Tell everybody where can they go to follow you, your work? Check out your stuff.

What are all the great links and things that they should be looking up right now? Sure. Twitter, X. People can follow me at Parker A. Lewis. Zaprite is the company that I'm working on, have been working on for the past several years, you know, what I encourage people to do if they are still on this journey to understanding Bitcoin is to listen to podcast, pick up a book and not accept Bitcoin as payments. Now, with all of my views that I talk about vis-a-vis these Bitcoin treasury companies are,

these are not good vehicles to replace saving in Bitcoin. You don't have to go spend your Bitcoin. It's not, you know, the other side of arguing that, you know, everybody needs to be, you know, adopting Bitcoin as payments today. That side of it is these are not good proxies to just saving in Bitcoin. They are not analogous to saving in Bitcoin, and you're likely to get more Bitcoin by just saving in Bitcoin. Nothing to do with spending.

But if you do understand Bitcoin and you are running a business and you figured out why Bitcoin stores value over time and that you understand the significance of Bitcoin's fixed supply, I highly encourage you to evaluate accepting Bitcoin's payment. And that's the problem that we're working on at Zab Rate. So you can find us at zaprate.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E.com. If you're looking to take that step, and I only really encourage it for people that are well on their Bitcoin journey.

And then on the other side of it is if you're not yet there, you can check out my blog, Graduallythensudely.com. I also have a book under the same title, Gradually than Suddenly that's available on Safe Dean, Amuse's website, which is TheSafehouse.com. So safe is spelled S-A-I-F, SAIF, the author of The Bitcoin Standard. My book is available there for sale.

And there are other great books on Bitcoin on thesafehouse.com. I encourage people to book the trend of Amazon and buy directly from the Bitcoiners. So thesafehouse.com, they can find my book gradually than suddenly and others. And then also the online version of my book is free on the Nakamoto Institute. and I believe that is Nakamoto Institute.org. So Gradually then suddenly is free online open source, or I want to say open source, but free online at the Nakamoto Institute. If you enjoyed this episode with Parker Lewis, hit that like button.

It really does help us out and check out last week's episodes with Simon Dixon and Duneberg.