BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Greg Foss, Jay Gould, Laser Hodl, Mark Moss ep199

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

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Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. First time we've done this on a Friday in a while. I've been traveling. You may have noticed. I was pre-recording these while I was on the road because who knows? I could have come across some spot of internet, but we're back.

We're back. I am home and I'm back in my studio. It's nice to have everything behind me again. So we're ready to do this. I've got a killer panel. I'm super excited for today. I hope you guys are too. And again, we're back to being live.

So I missed putting this clip at the beginning of every show, but it's back because as always, this is live and anything can happen. So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live.

The thing sucks. Yeah. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those good things. Let's get this thing rolling. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our panel, of course, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I'm here on the Bitbo.

.io dashboard. We're sitting at $44,687 per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up $2,000. We'll pick you up 2,238 sats. Hey, we're getting close to that block 700,000. We're at 699, 957, 89.87, 89.58% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, next block, eight sats per byte, if you're willing to wait an hour, one sat per byte will still do you. So all good there.

Of course, show to two sponsors of the show, leden.com. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services here. If you're in a pinch, you need dollars. You don't want to sell your Bitcoin, of course, because taxable events and maybe you're worried about buy back in at a higher price, you can deposit Bitcoin, get a dollar a loan to your bank account within 24 hours. And when you pay back that, you get the same number of stats. They, of course, have their savings accounts or B2X offering.

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Bit refill really helps me with this. You can pick up any gift card your little heart desires and you can pay via Bitcoin main chain or, as I do, Lightning Network. You do earn Sats back as you shop and they've got a killer referral program too. So if you have friends or family, you can help them out by showing them where to buy give cards with their Bitcoin and you can get some kickbacks from that in the process. You guys know Keystone, one of my favorite, most use hardware wallets.

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If it's important, you open up the risk of fire damage, water damage, or somebody you know discarding it if they aren't familiar with what it is. So peace of mind with the bill foddle over at privacyprose.i.o can help you out. Anyways, enough of my rambling. Let's bring in our panel here. We've got Mr. Greg Foss. We've got Laser Hoddle. We've got Jay Gold and we've got Mark Moss joining us.

Killer panel. Gentlemen, welcome. them. I'm going to go down the line. I'm going to let you introduce yourselves really quick. Again, let people know who you are and what you do in case they aren't familiar. Greg, let's start with you. Welcome back, man. Can you let people know who you are what you do? Sure. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you guys. Laser and Jay. I've talked with you on a spaces call, I think, and Mark, we're the Os brothers. I'm not sure if anyone's gone, that's taking that out. So Foss and Moss are the Os brothers. I'm currently in Colonna.

I'm traveling across the country with my daughter and it's amazing because I posted that and it's just been people reaching out from all different angles. So yeah, I'm in Kuala right now, but I live in Toronto. I spent my life trading credit. So I'm a high-yield bond trader and hedge fund manager retired and then I found Bitcoin. My passion to help the kids of the world have a future because our politicians are flushing that future on a daily basis. So I'm here to help help build a community and what I believe is the most promising technological innovation to solve the woes of the Fiat system. Awesome. Well, Greg, I'm glad to have you back for the umpteenth time. There will be many more in the future. Let's move down the line. Laser, first time on

the show. I've seen you making the rounds. Let people know who you are. and what you're doing in the space. Hey, pleasure to be here. My name's Laser. And I am just a Pleb who has made a living in the software space. I'm a thinker. I like to geek out on things. And my latest project is Bitcoin and how it fits into the story of sovereign default

and monetary reset and how PLEBs and the space can hold these two things. in their hands and make sense of them. Awesome. I love it. I'm excited to hear your insights on this show. Let's move it down to Mark. Mark, take it away. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, happy to be back.

I have been, basically my whole career has spent, been investing in businesses and investing just for myself as well. For the last six, seven years, I've just been making content, a lot of content in the crypto space the last couple years just in regards to Bitcoin. I'm the host of a new nationally syndicated radio show. talking about Bitcoin as well. And so I'm bullish, and I like to talk about as much as I can. So I'm happy to be here.

Awesome, dude. Glad to have you back. And finally, another new addition to the show. Jay, let people know who you are, what you do? Entrepreneur, investor, father of four, got in Bitcoin, 2016. I started three companies that I sold. I built a social network, a video sharing site, and advertising network. And, yeah, that's pretty much it.

I also post the podcast myself on my own YouTube channel as well and we talk about Bitcoin and it's called DOSINs. Awesome, dude. Well, I'm glad to have you all. And for those of you watching that aren't familiar, the format of the show is very simple. We go by the three hours.

One of us is going to drop a reason why we're bullish. All together, we're going to riff on that reason. And then we're going to rotate to the next person. Very, very simple. And I'm going to get us started. Of course, if you're already in here, I'm seeing messages in the chat pop up already. Thank you guys for being here for the live.

Hit the like button, give it a share, get more eyeballs in here, and let's get this thing rolling. I'm going to get us started with my reason for being bullish. And it's a headline that I saw, I think it dropped yesterday. And some of the wording I found funny, but I just love seeing headlines like this. And it's from CNBC, and the headline reads, El Salvador's new Bitcoin wallets could cost Western Union and similar companies $400 million a year.

I saw a lot of people sharing that and saying, oh, I fixed that for you. Could save Salvadorans $400 million in fees per year or predatory fees. And again, I echo the sentiment. And I think in seeing headlines like that, it sends, out a signal on two fronts. One of them is other countries in similar situations that have large amounts of remittances coming through them are looking at that going, what piece of our GDP can we reclaim by switching to this monetary network?

And on another front, it does away with the narrative that Bitcoin is slow and expensive. because of the way that we've built out the infrastructure of the network, we've maintained the sanctity of the base layer and haven't budged on making compromises there and still been able to achieve instant and nearly free transactions through secondary layers and do all of the things. So the flood of years gone by of arguing transactions per second, that's done. It's been done for a while, but it's nice to see that. recognized on a global stage now. So that is what has me bullish. I'm very excited about it.

And I'd love to hear your input. So anybody on the panel that wants to dive in here, feel free. It's a free for all. So take it away anybody. I'll jump in first on that. I was down in El Salvador, boots on the ground about six weeks ago. I just put out a documentary about what we were doing down there. And it kind of goes into what you're talking about. So, yeah, on my YouTube channel, just Mark Moss, you can see that documentary. But basically, we went down to El Salvador, and we were giving them, we handed out phones that actually had an app that could open up, do microtas, do the job, and get paid instantly. And so I got to see firsthand how much of an impact that's making. You know, being in the little town of Bitcoin Beach, they're about two hours from town.

So if I sent them money via Western Union, they'd have to ride a bus, two hours into town, get the money. ride two hours back on a bus with the money, probably get robbed on the bus with the money. And so to be able to get it instantly and with no government in the middle, that was the big piece that really resonated with me. I didn't realize how hard it is for people to get bank accounts down there. You know, like just in the United States, we have to pay a fee, 15 bucks a month, 25 bucks a month to have a bank account. You carry balances.

They waive the fees, but they don't carry balances down there. And they can't afford to pay 25 to 50 bucks a month for bank accounts. So guess what? They don't have bank accounts. And so when you understand the problem that really these countries are facing, which is a lot different than America and Canada, you realize just how big that Western Union news is, saves them four or five hours round trip on the bus, saves them the risk of being robbed, and they don't have bank accounts. So now they can send and receive digital payments. It's a whole new world, and it's a 10,000 X improvement. So you guys are all businessman investors.

Small incremental improvements don't move the needle. A 10,000 times improvement cannot be stopped. And so I'm bullish. And how limp and tone death was the headline. It was Western Union could lose 400 million a year. You know, and the real headline, of course, is families could save 400 million a year. El Salvador will gain 400 million. Yeah.

And it's just, it's really incredible that, you know, there was this flustered, they're trying. to hack away at the excitement of it, trying to portray it as a failure. And yet, the excitement really just came out on top. You could see these name brands, McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut. You could see that, you know, the receipts with, you know, negligent fees, almost, you know, you could barely detect the fees. And it was, it's, it completely killed that narrative, that idea that this couldn't be used in a society for savings and payments.

And the folks that say like, okay, in 10 years, you're going to be really regret that you bought a Big Mac with that. Well, compared to what? If you're in El Salvador, compared to what? Compared to definitely losing 50% purchasing power a year throughout the rest of the next eight years monetary reset? So compared with what? That seems a world of a lot better.

You get the sureness of being able to know that you're savings and your economic life is not being manipulated by government. So I think huge success. Yeah. And let's not forget that if people want, they can, like, they can receive and store value in dollars if they choose to, but they're just benefiting from the money, from the, the network, the payments network that is the Bitcoin Lightning network. So they're able to opt into whatever, you know, either of.

the legal tenders in El Salvador and still be saving that, you know, whatever that percentage cut would have been from using Western Union as well. The interesting thing, guys, I don't know, Mark, if you met the guys from Chiva Wallet down there from IBEX, Mercado. Did you meet Carlinos and Jose? Okay, so I love those guys. I took them surfing, almost drowned him, but they made it. Okay, I love it. I love it. So I'm actually a huge fan of theirs. They reached out to me in Bitcoin, Miami. I gave a keynote speech to them to their, to their, a group of merchants. And I was doing it from Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. And it was just really, really cool. And these guys showed me in real life how you can, they actually have a slider on their on their app to turn.

what percentage of the payment is done in Bitcoin, how much the merchant keeps, if it's 100% or zero or some mix of that. So huge, huge applicability, friendliness. They're showing, they give the QR code out, they show the receipt. It's absolutely brilliant. These are young kids, boots on the ground that are doing real life stuff. And they're from Guatemala. And when I called them out on stage in Guatemala and Bitcoin, Miami, I had no idea that Jack Mahler six hours later was going to onboard. country on the same stage and it was only a three-hour drive from Guatemala.

So these guys are, you know, they were focused on Guatemala and all of a sudden they're thrust into that the El Zante and El Salvador. But here's the cool thing about Western Union or not the cool thing. I was on stage at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and I basically called them out. I said, look, as a former hedge fund manager, I'm all in short, Western Union. I mean, that's the simplest short I've seen in a long time. Their stock price is a bagel. At the end of the day, the biggest holders are Black Rock and Vanguard.

Okay, now these are Black Rock and Vanguard are ETFs. This is nothing, this is passive investing. These are stupid, stupid money that's in an ETF that is allocated to its percentage weighting in Western Union in the S&P 500. Okay? That is brought up by this guy, Aaron Segal, who today posted that ETF investing is communism. And I actually believe that in a little, in a little, in a way, that passive investing leads to inefficient allocation of capital. And this is exactly what's happened in Western Union. Okay.

So at the end of the day, Western Union is a short, okay? It's a core short in a hedge fund portfolio. I would be out there advocating that. they are in trouble. Creative destruction is the basis of capitalism. And guess what, Western Union? You're going to be creatively destructive. What are some other countries that are going to benefit from that?

Tonga. Okay, Tonga has the highest percentage of GDP in remittances. And we have a very smart prince over there that is advocating the use of Bitcoin. It's just a matter of time before everybody, all of these countries, understand the, the implications of a percentage of GDP. Like that's, that's growth right to the bottom line, right? Think of yourself, Jay knows this. You're running a company.

And all of a sudden, you're shaving off 20% of an EBITDA cost that is, they had, if I'm not mistaken, it's 20% fees of a 20% GDP. That's how they get their 4% GDP growth, right? 20% times 20% is 4%. Hey, that I have a couple of bars in Montreal. I promise you, I hate paying MasterCard and Visa merchant fees 1.5%. Don't you think I'm going to start looking at Bitcoin and my guys, it's the same thing. It doesn't matter whether you're a country or a company. This is bullish. I love your thought. Greg, I'm curious. How long do you think it takes for the other countries? Did they have to see some history here to say we should think about this? So they're watching and monitoring this?

I'll flip it on its ear. Great question. How long in business does it take a competitor to say, hey, somebody else is doing this? I better smarten up. Well, I can tell you, I'm in tech, so I would move fast and break things. I don't know how the other folks are doing.

This guy, the president, 40 years alone. You made a lot of mistakes. Well, that's all good too, right? Look, this is what happens, you know? But at the end of the day, the, I think it's going to happen faster, Jay. And the interesting thing is that countries are now leapfrogging hedge funds and companies.

Yeah. And that is huge. Yeah. Want me to go? Okay. I like the Lightning Network down there. McDonald's, Starbucks, and interesting, you guys are talking about that. So he kind of stole my thunder.

I guess the next thing I would say I'm really bullish about is just look at the on-chain analysis. I know you don't really talk about price too much. But to me, right now I was talking to Wilcomente. And this is what he said, and I just love it. He said to me, coins continue to get locked up by both the long-term hoddlers and the whales alike this week. week, including a spike.

Let me just get my thing here. In both for Tuesday's liquidation cascade. And he says to me, it's that this is macro as fuck is what he said. Yeah. Short term could have a retracement, obviously, to 40, 42. Who gives a fuck? Willie Wu, echoing very similar sentiments, was saying, and I like this, I'm pretty bullish on this.

Investors with limited history of selling in the ultimate diamond hands. I think he said it differently to end that in, hardly ever sell. It's an all-time high. three mammifications, he says. This is a newsletter. Now is the low risk time to accumulate Bitcoin. The bull market, number two, is unlikely to end in 2021, absent a macro economic development, the Fed tapering.

This is the risk. Nothing like long-term risk, but short-term risk, right? Demand supply factors continue to point to a bull market as well in 2022. And then also he said, number three, this is the first quantitative data that suggests that the four-year cycle nature of the bull-bear market may break down. Typically, the supply shock model is found at the bottom of the bear market. This indicates that the majority of the market expects long-term growth well into 2022 driven by the on-chain analysis and data rather. You know, and a lot of bitcoiners, I think they don't

really look at the Fed. I talk to people, they go, ah, Bitcoin doesn't care about the Fed. It's like, well, just to be clear, and Greg, you probably attest, everybody cares about the Fed. You can't fight the Fed. Ultimately, you're all right about that. It doesn't fucking matter long. term, right? It really doesn't. But in the short term, it can have a, it could have an issue. We could actually crash all the way down below 40,000 if they start to taper and it gets aggressive. We saw what happened in 2018. We saw it happen 2020 in the stock market. We also saw that it's not uncorrelated that people used to think last year, right? We dropped down to 3,800. So I definitely think that there is short term risks with the Fed and what's happening with their policy and how they

may react, how the markets may react to that. But I'm bullish as fuck long term. And I ask you pretty bullish as fuck right now when you look at what, sorry I'm saying, fuck. But I am bullshit, fuck. Nothing, nothing. Nothing off. Yeah, just keep it mute on my ass. Yeah. Yeah, nothing off limits here.

Yeah, I mean, here's the beauty of being long, well, just in general, being in Bitcoin, understanding the value proposition here and understanding, you know, with its success, where it's going is, is regardless. of what's going short term you were talking about, oh, well, maybe pullbacks to 40, 42. I mean, Bitcoiners are. If the Fed does what the Fed was saying, it could drop down to the high 20s or something like that. I'm not predicting that. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. And so Bitcoiners look at that and they think, oh, cheap sats, right? Like that's. But let's be clear, right? Let's be really clear about that. You say Bitcoiners say that. I'm in clubhouse. I host clubs in there all time.

And we get a lot of the newbies. We get the plebs that are coming into the market. The risk in this crap with the Fed is that you shake them, their weak hands, they lose money, they get a gap, they lose coins that they otherwise would have. That's the problem with the price action is that people that don't have long-term convictions, I haven't been in for a while, they get shaken out. And they may not come back in for a while and there's a gap, right? They lose. And that's the problem. Listen, if you understand Bitcoin, you're not doing that, right?

Once you understand it, you're like, it doesn't matter. This is all noise, right? So this is why most of the time it doesn't make sense to talk about this. It does make sense to talk about it for the people that are getting into Bitcoin for their first time. this is their first cycle. It's important for them to understand and understand the conviction from folks like you, you know. Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's, it's, it's getting over those hurdles for those newbies, getting them to understand, exactly, the long term so that they're no longer, because I mean,

everybody's brought up in this, this fiat world where, you know, they're looking to make short term dollar denominated gains and they don't realize the, the life sucking that is happening as they're holding, those dollars long term, it takes experience to switch your brain to a sat standard and stop looking at the dollar denomination of Bitcoin in terms of like, oh, what's my price target to sell?

If you're thinking that and you're thinking in days, weeks, months, or even years, you're probably thinking about it wrong. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, Michael Seller says if you're not buying Bitcoin on a 10-year time horizon, then don't buy it for 10 minutes, right? It just doesn't make any sense. I mean, at least a four-year, right? I think it's the time you've never had a loss more than four years.

But to your point, Jay, that's something I was, you know, pretty concerned with, obviously when the news went live of El Salvador, or the law went to effect on the seventh when we had the big drop-off, right? And I don't know, was that a buy the room or sell the news event? Was it manipulation to the IMF tried to take it down? We saw DDoS attacks on some big exchanges. But regardless of what it was, maybe it was just, you know, we had a 45, we had a 75% run up in 45 days, maybe needed a breather, whatever it may be. But I was afraid of the people, or all of those, but I was afraid for the people who just got airdrop $30 in Bitcoin and now it's $20 worth.

And so that's like the first impression, right? So you don't get the second chance to make the first impression. So like their first impression is like, shoot, it was $30 worth. now it's 20. So I get it, right? For the short term, for those new people, it can be traumatic. So passive investors who are in, who have been lulled into a false sense of security watching the Fed, it's, you need to zoom out a little and realize that as the center of gravity of money printing moves off the Fed and towards the IMF, as the IMF uses vaccines as a device to introduce SDRs into the balance sheets of nations.

As the Fed starts to buy more and more of the U.S. debt and foreigners buy less and less, the ability to export that inflation, import deflation, and basically keep that orderly market that passive investors have come to trust, that is fading away. And so you actually need to be thinking in terms of covering your downside and thinking through sort of a reset, thinking through the space between two eras.

And so I think it makes sense that people watch the Fed, but their ability to actually do anything is fading. I would absolutely concur, Laser, well said. I don't believe the Fed can taper, okay? It's only mathematics. In fact, I would go out on a... I've done dumb things before, Greg. You've seen it.

Well, okay, they'll try. They're also right now hostage to the stock market, though, Jay. That's the only thing that they're like, look, all pensions funds are actually in a surplus right now or in the best shape due to the performance of the equity market. Bonds are absolutely fiat contracts, their program to debase. There is no return left in bonds. High yield bonds have a negative real return before expected default losses, guys. You got you got to run through how. stupid this is that high yield bond investors are only asking for 3.87% annually before expected default losses. Guys, that's a cost of the high yield market. Where does that money move? Because it's going to move, right? So what is my whole thesis is if you own credit, you need to own Bitcoin. And this is how markets develop over time, Jay. And unfortunately, there are going to be short term traders that get washed out. But that's actually healthy for a. market, okay? And leverage getting taken out of a market is very healthy. And you see the stats that these unchained analyses can show the leverage coming out of the system. It's so healthy in Bitcoin

to know those statistics and see Bitmex get liquidated. $800 million of selling in Bitmex on forced liquidations. My God, if you had that information in real time for some of the calamities that I've live through in leverage unwinds in traditional markets, we wouldn't have those leverage unwinds, painful events like the great financial crisis in 2008. So this is part of a market. But Jay, you're absolutely right. In the short term, in the event of a risk off trade, right now, Bitcoin does go down. But over time, I actually think it goes up when volatility increases. Because what is Bitcoin? It's actually a long vol position. You're actually a actually. you are short credit.

And when you're short credit, you are long volatility. And that's what Bitcoin is. It's a short credit trade, meaning you are short in credit. You absolutely think that credit is programmed to debase. And the funny thing is when people get into Bitcoin, and let's say they do get up to a 5% weighting in their portfolio, my God, it's as if they forget about what the other 95% of their portfolio is in. and they're only focused on this 5%.

It's like the most retarded thing. I can honestly tell you, Ben, I did not look at the price of Bitcoin today. Okay? I swear to you, and then you brought up Bitbow.io, and it gives me a chance to shout out my two Canadian buddies that have the best, absolutely the best dashboard

for Bitcoin anywhere in the world. And that's Chris Gimmer and Mark, who designed the Bitbow.com. dashboard, okay? But don't look at these intraday trades. This is a rounding error, okay? And when I get my chance to riff on why I'm so bullish, I'm going to tell you why that you don't look at price action between 40,000 and 50,000. That's for knuckleheads. Greg, before we move on, Mark said something about why Bitcoin recently dropped. I thought it had a lot less to do with any manipulation or anything within Bitcoin. I thought it had more to do with like just the economy

in central you had bad jobs report you had there was a variety of things that just came out you know what it was it was the options market the option market was skewed to the bullish side okay you had a futures unwind you had bitmax hundred times leverage and all of this was documented by guys like will clement okay guys like dylan leclair that take this data and i look at this and i'm like this is magnificent this is clarity this is transparency this is exactly what you need from markets. And it's part of developing a market. You know the expression, Jay, you've lived at bulls, bears, and pigs, right?

You need guys that are bulls. You need guys that are bears because that's what makes a market. And then pigs, they get slaughtered. And anybody who comes in to be a pig in this market, guess what? You're getting carted off the floor. And you know that's going to be the hedge funds because they're trying to use this to boost their returns right now. Right now they're using that. I promise you as a former hedge fund manager, this would be a core portfolio holding

forever because the math is just too darn. But you know your your counterparts in the industry. Are they doing that or are they using it? Because when I talk to Skaramucci, he's like, they're going to use it to boost returns. They're trading around this. And they're also, this is another point. They're using the lack of a wash sale rule here to offset the gains on their other assets. Jay, you know this, right?

In a core holding, you always trade. You always trade a core holding. I'm talking professionally here. I'm not talking mom and pop retail. A core hedge fund trade, you all, excuse me, holding, you always trade. Why? Yeah. Because sometimes you can pick some stuff up.

And sometimes you, you know, so there's an expression. When everyone's selling, yelling, you're in their selling. When everyone's crying, you're in there buying. And when you have the chance to be a buyer when people are crying, you don't want to be 100% allocated to your core holding. You need to have that flex. And it's just part of a market that develops over time. And I honestly believe Jay, and I've written a paper on this, I believe within the next 10 years, Bitcoin will be a risk off long trade.

Meaning when the market and when VIX is exploding and credit is getting destroyed, people are running to Bitcoin for sheltered. They're not selling it. Since we have you here, your background, I'm sorry to take up the stage here, guys, but I'm just curious what you think of wash sales and how it relates to the volatility within Bitcoin with the way it's being probably in. manipulated to offset the gains. Here's the neat thing. Okay. So we, I was part of a founding group in Canada that got the, uh, approval of the OSC to issue a closed end Bitcoin fund.

And now Canada has Bitcoin ETS. And one of the biggest problems with the regulators was they were concerned about this wash trading and we were able to document without a doubt to show the regulators that it is absolutely not an issue. Really? Okay. So these are the fudsters. These are the fudsters.

We convinced the Ontario regulators. We took them to court. We won. And how did we win? We brought facts to the table. And this is what's beautiful about Bitcoin. You can see the transactions. It's transparent.

And you can't argue. So then based on the transactions, look at the on chain, they're not doing what we suspect that they're doing, which is selling and driving it down. There's always parts of it. But my God, if you think that's a problem, go to your common. And go to your common trading, your flash traders and your guys that pay for order flow. Jim Simon. And ask yourself, you know, what is more, what is actually more detrimental, you know, paying for options, order flow or, or some of these potential wash trades. But over to you, Ben, I don't want to take, you know, great questions, Jay.

Like, you guys are, no, no, man. No, it's good. I mean, I'm having questions instead of answering them. I'm sorry. Let me add a piece. And so that, that transparency has to be very scary to central place. planners because these smaller games, you have the investors holding passive, you have shit coiner pretending to own pictures of rocks, you have hedge funds playing a bigger game on top of

that. But all of these fit inside an even bigger game of central banks and the sovereign nations on their balance sheets. And basically the execution of an orderly transition from the old monetary system to the new monetary system. We're in the middle of the largest sovereign default of all time. And typically what happens is they want to carefully manage the fallout of confidence in government money. And that's an acceptable thing because they're able to launch a new system and transition people into it. And so they restore the confidence in government money. But the problem they're going to have is that investors are going to, they're going to look at Bitcoin and they're going to see this transparent free market evolving. And they're going to have to hold that in one hand

while the government is promising them a new bucket of monetary trust, and you're going to know that the bucket is not transparent. You're going to know that the bucket of trust will not last. That's a huge problem for sovereign nations. And if you use credit default swaps, which is my, you know, background to value Bitcoin using current open market rates on the chance of default, various sovereign nations, Bitcoin's intrinsic value today is worth over $150,000 per Bitcoin. And that will change in value as the CDS market starts to incorporate higher chances of default over time for various nations. And everyone says, oh, don't worry, the U.S. won't default.

And right now it's a very low probability. But you can argue that 1971 was actually a default, but not even going there. How about this, guys? I have been alive, and during my trading career, Argentina has defaulted three times in my career. And guess what? Argentina is a G20 nation. We're not talking about one of those G 150. We're talking about a G20 nation.

And then you go further down the road and you look at Canada. And Canada has a mystical AAA credit rating with a prime ministers who's about as stupid as they come. Okay, so we have the stupidest prime minister in the history of mathematics, okay? And we have a AAA credit rating, but guess what? You look at the credit default swap market and they say, no, no, no, Canada's trading much closer to a single A default probability. And if Justin Trudeau even understood what that meant, he would shut his trap when he talks about, I don't have to worry about monetary policy. I care more about families. we got to get that guy out of office okay because if he was a CEO if he was a CEO he'd be fired on

the spot okay budgets do not balance themselves mr trudeau you were a loser you were born on third base and you think you hit a triple Greg today I have I have the inlaws I live up in Canada my sister-in-law and brother-in-law I sense my brother-in-law he works for ice he's an executive at ice houses should sit empty when so many Canadians are trying to buy a home. This is fucking crazy. So we're going to ban foreign ownership in Canada for the next two years and tax the existing vacant foreign owned properties. You would think that someone hacked his account and made this shit up. I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a joke. I thought it's unbelievable. Well, when you realize that Canada is pretty much a communist nation now, it's not that

surprising, I guess. Hey, great, just real quick though, like, you know, obviously the bond market is completely manipulated. I mean, you got the Fed buying 85% of the bond issue. And so like, who knows, there's no price discovery there. How is the CDS market? Is there better price discovery there? 100%. That's all open market. It's traded by sophisticated institutional investors that needs what's called an ISDA, an international swaps dealer association advocate. Now, the problem is some of these ISDAs are signed for family offices like that guy that I'm drawing a blank on the name of his fund, that he had too many ISDAs with the various Wall Street counterparties. And he was out of actually levered up the wazoo. The guy that, uh, Bill,

somebody, Bill Huang or something like that, his family. Oh, right. Uh, anyway, look, uh, CDS is a non-manipulated market to a large extent. You can't get a government going in there. Imagine you get a government going in there. Hey, I'm the USA and I want to sell. I mean, I want to buy default protection on myself. Holy fuck. This is like a pyromaniac that what that says, hey, I want to buy fire insurance on the house down the street so I can fucking go and blow that thing up, you know? It doesn't happen. And there is counterparty risk. And this is what, you know, in the great financial crisis of 2008,

you had early warning systems coming from the credit market. And the equity market was like, oh, don't worry. The Fed's going to cut rates. Everything's fine. And don't remember when Jim Kramer had his meltdown in 2008 and 2017, he goes, they have no idea. They have no idea. And that poor girl, Aaron was like, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim.

Now Jim, now Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim. And they finally cut an equity markets rally to a new high. But credit markets were calling them out. Nothing improved in the credit markets. And six months later, we were at the depths of a leverage on wine. Don't look to equity markets, guys. They have no clue what's going on. They're traded by stupid people.

And stupid trees grow to the moon ideals. Look to the credit markets. Credit always holds the clue. And March is brought up. You know, the Fed is in the bond markets, in the cash bond markets. Yeah, it's bought high yield. Yes, it's manipulating the 10-year rate. Guess what?

Don't look there. Look in the CDS markets. Look at China and we'll bring up ever grand later, right? Ben? Why? Because contagion, contagion in credit and the confidence in the credit system is all that matters. And when that unravels, it's over, guys. And equity is the tail and credit is the dog.

And the tail gets flung around like a rag doll. and equity has no idea what's happening. Oh my God. Oh my God. What's happening? And it's the credit guys that are in there shorting the shit out of the stock because the bonds are getting destroyed. And if the bonds aren't worth 100 cents on the dollar, the stock is worth zero. So, hey, it's a fun game.

It's not a game for juniors. This is a real life game. And the Fed has no clue who they're up against half the time. Greg, let's use this opportunity to foray into into your reason. just because I know that we're, uh, uh, we started touching on it here. We may as well. So somebody was was speaking with me earlier. I was on a clubhouse room and, uh, and they had some questions.

And I kind of gave you a heads up. But anyways, uh, Greg, I'm going to, I'm going to pass it to you for your reason for being bullish, but I, I think that you might, uh, lean towards, uh, the Evergrand stuff a little bit in there. Not, not. Okay. So here's the thing. So look, we said we wouldn't bring up price, but I need to bring up a

gentleman by the name of Urien Timmer. Do you guys know who that is? He's the head of research at Fidelity. Okay. And he's a great guy. I met him down in Bretton Woods, but I have a very good friend who's worked at Fidelity for many years, ran Canada, and I loves him. And Urien published some research on Bitcoin price potential.

Have you guys seen this? He calls for Bitcoin price. Now, I'll couch this by saying when I was at Breton Wood. Woods, I threw out my price target on Bitcoin, which is over $2 million of Bitcoin. And I laid out how I get there and it's not hard. And someone said, well, Foss, have you seen what you're in? And I said, I didn't. And I read his research.

He says that Bitcoin can potentially hit one billion US dollars per Bitcoin. And I'm like, Jesus, Murphy. And he backed off that a little bit. he's calling for a range between one million and one billion and I'm sort of like okay that's cool I guess you can put that sort of uh I'll take the bill okay how about that but listen how do you get to a billion I don't even know the reality is though first of all this is fidelity this ain't Greg Foss okay well he used he used the uh stock to flow model I mean I did I did it I got his whole I got his whole slide deck leaked and I did a whole YouTube video and I broke down every slide that he

had presented um so he was using the stock to stock to flow model for that price prediction, which got to like one Bitcoin being $100 million. Well, here's the neat thing, Mark. The cool thing is if he puts it out, you don't take it as gospel. You put your own probability distribution on that bad boy. And you say, what percent is the market charging me right now for it to hit that price target and the balance is it goes to zero? So here's my price target.

Okay. Yuri and I love you, man. A billion is pretty darn aggressive. But even at $2 million of Bitcoin, which is my price target, I can back out a probability right now that the market is giving me a 98% chance it's going to zero and only a 2% chance it's going to my price target of $2 million. And I'm like, damn, I love those odds. I'm a buyer, okay?

Because I think it's going to $2 million, but I'm not 100% certain. But that being said, if the market's only saying it's 2% likely, I'm way higher than 2% that it's going to 2 million. Well, what about 1 billion? I don't even have to come to work. I'll just tell you that if Bitcoin is trading below 1 million today and your price target is 1 billion, you're probably doing a good thing at buying it at a million bucks. So look, the point is this, it's a price target. I came from the trading community. here's the funny thing I'm going to tell you, right?

When you exceed your risk limits and they call it a, they call it a limit, the trader's announcement was limit, damn it, I thought it was a target, meaning you wanted me to put this much risk in my book. You know what I mean? So it's not a limit, it's a target. Well, look, Urian, yours isn't a limit. It's a target, okay? And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether it's a 0.0001% chance that it hits that

Target, it's bigger than zero. And it was published by Fidelity. So I'm bullish on that basis because of who published it. But let's move back into the non-price. Here's what really got me bullish. You guys know who Blockstream is. Adam Back. You know, Adam Back, one of the OGs.

He just raised 210 million bucks. Okay. Valuing his company at over $3 billion. And some of the use of proceeds is going to go into ASIC, manufacturing in North America. We need that. You tell me that's not frigging good. And by the way, Adam back may be smarter than Michael Saylor.

I'm not going to call out who is smarter. I'm just going to say they're both in the same level of super fucking IQ. I'm just a regular guy. I can do some math. I can look at guys and say, hey, show me the info. I'll tell you how to trade it. Okay. How come?

Because I changed my mind when the information changes. I'm not Peter Schiff, okay? I take information and I can change my mind when the info changes. But Adam back and Blockstream and ASIC chip manufacturing, this is part of the whole ecosystem that Bitcoin opens up. Bitcoin is digital energy. You're going to see energy companies investing in Bitcoin mining with excess energy resources. and all of a sudden it's going to be game on between the countries. And if I can get the province of Alberta finally to understand how valuable their natural resources are,

despite what the idiot prime minister in Canada says, my God, we may be able to get Alberta as being a Canadian province that thinks like El Salvador. What a beautiful province. I passed through it yesterday and today. Okay. Alberta rocks. Okay. Alberta friggin rocks.

and I want Alberta to compete with Texas on the Bitcoin mining stage globally. Yeah, so do I. I would love to see that play out in my own province. I love seeing Steve Barber and what he's doing here with Upstream. I think he's a godsend to the region because I agree with that. And we're doing the same thing at Validus Power, right? I'm not sure if you know that I'm involved in that company. But we have sold, we have two gigawatts of power to sell to base.

coin miners two gigs okay and by the way the flows coming out of china yeah they're real all right there is a transfer from west some from east to west of the most valuable technology if the u.s doesn't understand that they have just been presented a gift from china that they can actually take a pure store of value used as a savings account as a global reserve asset called bitcoin and continue to use their crappy fiat as a global reserve currency as their checking account. So your savings account is your Bitcoin, your checking account, the U.S. can actually skate themselves on site. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I like what you brought up about the, the, the ASIC manufacturing, because that was, that was a, not a lot of people like to admit it, but that was a pain point, right? we having a lot of that fabrication happening in in china almost exclusively in china or a large percentage of it was was uh you know it having that outside of that that those borders and having some of it come to canada to the u.s and and around the world it's just it's the network doing what the hash rate has done over time because again hash rate um mining pools and everything there was a degree of centralization in China and earlier on amongst just singular mining pools.

We saw, I think it was 2014 or 15, I think maybe 15, where ghash.io, they had over 51% of the hash rate very briefly. but then luckily because it was decentralized enough individuals with hash rate moved to other pools to help mitigate that risk but we've seen that that hash rate get further and further from a threat of 51 percent and we're seeing other aspects of the network decentralized as well you know the actual hash rate where it's located the the mining itself and now chip fabrication so you're right I'm I'm very excited about the block stream developments. They've got a good number of things. They're dabbling in a little bit of everything. Can we get our antibiotics and penicillin over here too? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That'd be nice.

The mining story is so critical to get right. And especially as it pertains to defending and protecting the sovereignty aspect of the value proposition of Bitcoin, you know, hopefully bring. that development into a company like Blockstream, which is highly aligned with the ethos of Bitcoin, hopefully we can see things like open chipsets that have auditable architecture where you don't have binary blobs hidden inside. Hopefully we can see things like the commoditization of guerrilla mining, a home mining, where we can further decentralize mining throughout homes. Hopefully we see further integration with their satellite network.

so that we can know as a community that Bitcoin could withstand a network partition between a continents or a mass power outage event. So my hope is if we move the mining development closer to where the discussion of Bitcoin happens, that we'll be able to cover these use cases and defend sovereignty going forward. The other thing I would add to that just about staying on the mining for example for a minute, you know, especially Laser and I, we talk a lot about this kind of revolution cycle that we're in, where we're kind of going from right now, like peak centralization and going back to like decentralization cycle. And if you think about like the Bitcoin mining specifically, the way that the world was formed today, which is based off of like countries with natural resources.

So those who have oil, gold, minerals, et cetera. But now with Bitcoin, it's it's going to decentralize. that it's going to mix up the whole world order. So we're already seeing that in El Salvador, for example, where they don't really have any natural resources, which is one reason why they're so poor, but they do have a volcano with a bunch of energy, right? And typically that energy wouldn't be worth anything to them, but today it could be. Or like I'm a surfer, I travel to the South Pacific a lot.

A lot of those islands are on volcanoes. There's no natural product or resources on those islands, but now they could tap into that energy, which was never valuable before. They could start doing Bitcoin mining, et cetera. And so I think we'll really start to see that distribute more evenly across the world, which will then further decentralize kind of the natural resources and the kind of power graphs on a global scale. That stranded energy story is so critical, too, because as these ESGs emerge, which are basically their soft money incentives created by the money printer,

those will create a gravity to them, and it will pull the mining industry closer to the state. And so you need a counterbalance to that. And this stranded energy stories a very good counterbalance. Because if you're, let's say you're a fund manager of very large monies, what we want as bitcoins is that fund manager to have to choose between, okay, so you have one mining investment, which is pitching to you that, hey, they have awesome unit economics because they are very close to the money printer, right? And you go, okay, that's something.

But then you have another investor that's pitching to you that, look, we're actually immune to the money printer. When the money printer fails, we will have continuity. So that's exactly what we want. We want the soft money incentives of the money printer to serve to create an unstoppable mining industry. And so without that story, you don't get that outcome. So it's extremely bullish. I often say, right, guys, if you're Vlad Putin and you're selling your valuable natural resources for debasing Fiat dollars, you've got to be scratching your head. Don't you think that Vlad should actually start pricing his natural resources in Bitcoin?

Wouldn't that be the revolution that changes Bitcoin to being the reserve asset of the world? Very simple. Digital energy for natural resource energy. I think they're stacking. I think they're all stacking, to be honest. I think it's a matter of who says so first. Yeah, we had people. Wouldn't you see that in the price movement if they're stock?

They print their own money. They could just buy as much as they want. They could, I mean, I don't think we would have saw that in price. The on-chain data would probably show that too, right? Yeah. It'd be hard with it. They'd have to give up the wallet address. I don't think they are laser only because I think, as Jay points out,

they might get a few here and there. But in order to move the needle, you would see a price gap up. I've said this before. and some guys calling me Gap Daddy Foss. I thought they were talking about the space in my teeth. But no, they were actually talking about my price projection. If the first central bank comes out and say, and I want it to be Canada. Hey, we own, Canada has zero gold reserves.

No, I know. I agree. We have zero gold reserves, though. Okay. Canada has zero gold reserves. I mean, as a Canadian, that pains me, given the amount of gold mineral production we do in Canada. But, you know, we have a bunch of fools running this country. That's pretty clear.

I would love some smart guy like Pierre Poyev to embrace Bitcoin. Hey, Pierre, good luck in the election. Jeff Booth and I are huge fans of his, as you guys know. Honest to God, if he gets into power, I think there will be a time where Canada takes this seriously. So, you know, let's get it happening. It's thought-provoking. And Canada has a lot of natural resources. And I'd love to see some of those natural resources going into stacking Bitcoin.

Yeah, 100%. Well, I think I'm going to wrap this topic here and keep it rolling. But I love what you're saying. And with laser mentioning, you know, the possibility of nation states stacking, I think, you know, we've seen them still stuck in the past. There is a more gold hoarding going on. Keep it simple in the chat said they're stacking gold. Peter Schiff is advising the old guard. So there is that.

But I think at some point that that signal gets through and people wrecking. I mean, we did. We had the first nation state by the dip the other day. So, I mean, it is. It's a gradual process. We'll see more of that in the future. But it'll take some time. So Mark, I want to pass it towards you.

Okay. And I want to let you kind of. take it away with your reason for being bullish. I'm not sure if it's going to be a clean segue or not, but to you. For sure. It's always a clean segue. I would say what I'm the most bullish on, I'm going to start back to where I was in El Salvador and I'm going to bring it forward a little bit. But so I was down there six weeks ago. We dropped off these phones. They opened up an app. They put in a unique code I gave them. They were able to do a microtask and they got paid in Bitcoin instantly. And I knew how I was going to work. I went down there to do that. But to see it

in action was different. And in my instant, my first thought was like, the governments can't stop this. It was just like all of a sudden, like, wait a minute, like there was no job application. I don't know their name, address, phone number, social security. There's no K.C. I don't even have an anonymous username. I didn't ask them their name. I didn't get an email.

They didn't even have a username. And then they were able to do the job and get paid with no bank account and they can go spend the Bitcoin anywhere in town. And so I thought like, wait a minute, the government wasn't anywhere. in the middle of this, which then the next thought is, well, then why do they need to be? Well, which of course they don't need to be, which means they won't be. And so that was kind of my big like, like aha moment. And then over the last couple of weeks, I've been continuing to see this.

So for example, I was at Bitblock Boom in Dallas a few weeks ago. They had a, they had a hackathon a couple days before and seeing some of the technology that's being built on Bitcoin. a phone. Someone designed a phone that can call over the Bitcoin network. Like Bitcoin isn't just digital cash. It's not just digital gold. It's not just a commodity. It's software, right? It's a network. And someone designed a friggin phone to dial over Bitcoin. You have chat applications on Bitcoin, video voice applications on Bitcoin. It's true dissident tech that cannot be stopped. And so what my bigger thought about why I'm bullish so far is it's a unfortunate it's double-edged sword. The governments around the world are cranking the screws on us everywhere we go. And a lot of people don't understand

why we need Bitcoin. Why do we need it? Why is it important? But the more they crank the screws, the more people are waking up, the more the urgency is there from a financial side, 25% inflation, all the way to censorship, et cetera. And so I'm bullish because Bitcoin, is responding to the pressure that's being exerted by it. And it's advancing at such a pace that it's making the nation state look incompetent and obsolete. So for example, two weeks ago, 30 people from the ECB signed a bill to ban anonymous wallets. Okay, good luck.

I could just go create $100 million right now. And so it just shows incompetence. It shows how, you know, incapable they are. And so I just see, you know, that's why I'm bullish. Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin, it's, you're right, it responds to the stimuli. Whatever, whatever hurdles are put in front of it, it's, it just naturally, Bitcoiners themselves go out and build around said hurdles.

We've seen it with challenges early on with, again, the old transaction per second, all that kind of stuff. But I mean, in terms of we just saw, what, 30, I don't even know what the number ended up being in terms of hash rate drop off the network. And we kept up pumping out blocks. Nothing changed. It was a couple of minutes slower for a short period of time for Bitcoin to pump out those blocks of transactions. And then it was business as usual. And now the hash rate is recovering.

in what other instance could you see something like that happen? And this is, I think privacy is this cycle's transactions per second fud. Because I think privacy is kind of on the forefront of a lot of stuff that's happening in Bitcoin and is a big part of the worry that I see. And it's a big part of... I would add to that, though, like obviously privacy is a big piece of that. But here's the thing, though, like those people in El Salvador,

they got paid in Bitcoin and they spend in Bitcoin. If you never interact with Fiat on either end and no KYC, it's pretty dang private. Because if I got it anonymously and I spent it anonymously, there's no one. So it is, it is private. It's pseudo-anonymous, right? You can see the on-chain transaction only with AI, you know, chain analysis. If you, K-Y-C yourself at some point, maybe they can tie it back. But in a true Bitcoin environment, getting paid in spending, it's pretty private. Well, it's even better when you're on Lightning, right? Like, there's even less to point to. And

like you were talking about the privacy tech that I saw what you're talking about, all of the hackathon around Layer 3 apps on top of Lightning. that red phone thing, the messaging apps, even file sharing using atomic multipath payments where they wrote, they took a song and split it into pieces and routed it through different routes of the lighting network to coalesce on a singular person on the other end and reassemble. It's crazy. I didn't even know that stuff was possible until a couple of weeks ago after reading about the hackathon. You know, I'm old enough to remember the days before.

the internet. And I remember if we were having this conversation in 1995 or even 1997, we're asking ourselves, what is the internet? And it's like, oh, it's a way we could, you know, send electronic messages and like a message board. And maybe one day we'll actually, like, you know, buy stuff on there. Um, we didn't know that our car would be hooked to something called a cloud using something called social media to like navigate us because we didn't have any of that. And so today it's like, oh, yeah, it's kind of like digital money. It's kind of like digital gold. We didn't know that it's kind of, we're going to be able to do phone calls or digital file sharing over the Bitcoin network. I mean, it's, it's,

It's amazing. It's about, it comes down to ramps, right? You come out of a KYC ramp into wallets and then there's heuristics you can use to attempt to track what's happening from that point on. But those heuristics are being degraded by mixing techniques that allow people to basically go one way into the Bitcoin-only economy. And furthermore, you have the second layer that's emerging on top that is making it even more difficult to understand what's going on. So the thing that's hard for people to understand is that the privacy story is emergent because Bitcoin is a layered protocol. So you wouldn't expect it to sprout atomically and suddenly be private. And we need that traceability mechanism in order to have that 21 million hard cap.

And so what you would expect is that this privacy story becomes fuller over the coming years. And that's what we see now. So I don't see any alarm bells from an engineering standpoint that would start. suggest that we're not going to be able to make the heuristic that point-olytic companies use completely useless. I found it funny, Mark. You said you're old enough to remember when the internet didn't exist. I'm old enough to remember when personal computers didn't exist.

In fact, I graduated in 1986 from McGill Engineering without ever having used a personal computer. Oh, my God, Foss is a computer nerd, a computer illiterate. No, no, no, guys, I did mainframe stuff because. because personal computers didn't actually exist when I graduated engineering in 1980. Well, maybe it was, but I certainly didn't use it. Here's the funny thing. This thing in my hand here has more power in it than put two men on the moon when I was also alive in 1967.

I could tell you, Greg, I did not see this coming. And I was in the heat of it in the mid-2000s, saying with executives. And I was like, when it came out, it was like, game changer, you know. I was in my head, I was short rim, which was Blackberry and Long Apple, but as a proud Canadian, I couldn't even short rim, okay? Like, I was just so discouraged that Apple was going to eat Blackberry's lunch. And I was long apple stock, not in my hedge fund, in my PA, but I didn't have the guts to short rim. And that's exactly where Western Union is right now, okay? Are you literally going to throw a short on?

Are you going to do that? Are you just saying you're short like, but you're not really? I don't have that I don't even have a prime broker anymore. I can do it through the options market or whatever. But, you know, at the end of the day, look, when I was running hedge fund money, you needed to have your shorts because you're not a hedge fund if you don't have shorts. So you've got to come up with some stuff. I was, there was no credit on rim, but I could have I could have done a synthetic option trade that would have turned it into a credit. But I didn't have the, I actually wrap myself in the Canadian flag and said, I'm too proud of Canada.

I can't do this for rim. I should have done it with Nortel as well, okay? Right now I'm doing it in my head on Western Union. And the other short is, excuse me, is Justin Trudeau, but I can't short him. I love that you brought up the, just the smartphone transition. I feel like, again, we're in that similar place with Bitcoin because I remember there was the period where the Blackberry was kind of, a thing that a number of people had, but you were like, and it was Palm Pilot, stuff like that. And you're like, yeah, am I going to, am I going to get one of those? I don't know. And then all,

it was like a switch. As soon as that iPhone dropped, it was like a period of everybody had flip phones and you knew like a couple of people that maybe had a Blackberry. And within two years, if you didn't have a smartphone, you look like an idiot. And I remember looking and being like, how the hell did this happen so quickly? Like you saw like just faint little bits of it here and there. It's that 10,000 X you guys were saying. But there you go, Jay. I mean, this is, who were the guys that ran BlackBerry again?

I'm drawing a blank on their name. Lazarus and or Lazarus or whatever. And the other guy there. Oh, don't worry. iPhone will never be used for business purposes. Okay. So, you know, our BlackBerry is secure and our two thumb typing. It's going to be like, and guess what?

Like, you're right. It took two years. You know, it's funny because I had the Raider and the Trello because you had to have my foot phone, right? And they had the Trello because I had all the buttons on it. And then I had the BlackBerry track ball that he's talking about. And then I got the iPhone and I was like, I got to start my BlackBarr. I must have done that for like a couple of years just because I was so used to the buttons. But at a certain point, you're like, why do I have two phones in my pockets?

It's like annoying as hell. And I just got used to just using the iPhone, you know? Same thing. It was a game changer. It was like a pivotal moment, I think, like, intact was like there was the before and after 80, you know, and, you know, B.C. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's going to come fast.

I think we'll have that that same moment where all the sudden a lot of people are going, how in the hell like when did all the sudden everybody start saving in Bitcoin? When did all the sudden everybody start using it and transacting that way and it get integrated to everything? When did people, you know, like we see Twitter working on that. We see I think it hits that that yeah, it hits that inflection point where all of a sudden it's just in front of everybody. And if you're not on it, then what are you doing? And that's coming. I do.

Jack's going to do something. He's talking about something with the wallet. There's got to be something I think that makes it like so simple, right, that your grandma can do it. And that's coming. I don't know when just like we didn't see this coming. I'm sitting in meetings and nobody saw this coming. You had executives at Viacom and others saying, what's your, what's your mobile strategy? Until you show me an actual use case that we can have a mobile strategy, there is no mobile strategy.

And then this comes out in the middle of 2007. And I'm like, wow, that's a game changer. I can totally understand how this is going to be huge for the internet. The other thing I'd say, with all of us being so old in our living, living to that experience, you know, the same thing, too, is like it does take a little bit of time. So it is that gradually and suddenly. So like Netflix came out in like 1997, but they couldn't actually stream flicks on the net until like mid-2000s. Because the internet was too slow.

In 2000, the dot-com crasher, the famous pets.com webnetcom, the internet was too slow. You couldn't even buy stuff online yet, right? And so kind of like with Bitcoin, the phone calls that just came out, like it doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. It's very slow. The file sharing. But that changes with time, right? It's going to speed up over time. Networks.

Yeah. The big tech companies are, they're in a hard place right now because on one side, they have the states courting them saying, hey, let's get married for this next chapter of society where you're going to help us administer this surveillance state. And you can see this in like Apple. So Apple's had a pro-privacy stance for a long time. And you see they've dropped their principles to the side. And they've sort of, you know, said, you know what? Maybe we will wet the state.

And there's been an uproar over it. People are saying, you know, listen, we're, you know, that breaks the implicit deal we have with. And so I just want to call out, you know, it's not forever. They had their rise to fame and they control a good deal of the tech. But people do see these moves in regards to privacy and sovereignty. And so, like, I guess I can't let a conversation about Apple go by without saying that if you cared about personal freedom and the privacy of yourself and your family, you probably at this point should be looking at something like, googling a unlocked phone and putting like a graphene or calyx on it. So just a little insert in there so that it had to be said.

We've got APD media in the chat. He was saying pixel 4A with Cali or Graphene OS, time to get private. So shout out, dude. These tech companies are becoming the instrument, the arm of the state. And it's no secret that what they're aiming at is a sort of high-tech social score society. And that social score needs inputs. The inputs are going to be your devices, right? So you have to choose.

Do you choose devices that provide all that data, all that your behavior, all your thoughts and your communications and what you do? Or do you say no to that? And so I think it's a dangerous game that tech companies are playing. And people need to have this conversation. when we're talking about Apple and Google. Laser, I had a phone call this morning with Jason Williams. We were talking in the morning, and I'm having breakfast with the kids.

And we have a timer that goes on for the bacon. Every morning we have bacon. I'm a carnivore. So the bacon is the timer goes off because we have an Alexa in the room. And it's like, ding, ding, ding, in the middle of him talking to me, I'm like, Alexa, cancel timer. And he's like, you have an Alexa in your house? And I'm like, yeah, he goes, where? I got him in all the rooms.

He goes, what are you out of your freaking mind? He's like, there's surveillance in you. I go, do you have an iPhone? your pocket because they're doing it there too bro they're doing it everywhere anything connected to the internet the nsa can tap right in yeah and not to say that the answer is to go extremely low tech and go live in the hills um you know software can either be uh autonomy preserving or it can seed your autonomy and and so big tech companies have a strong centralizing effect and um well i think society should learn from bitcoin right we should choose things that provide asymmetric defense

defense to our life. So unstoppable money, unstoppable devices, unstoppable communication. This is how a, you know, a unstoppable, peaceful society

would emerge out of Bitcoin. Yeah. And it's all on top of Bitcoin. All on top of Bitcoin. Well said, guys. Very well say, which they can't tap in that,

I guess. Hey, laser, while we're on there and we're on your talk, well, we haven't gone to your topic yet. I'm going to,

segue it to your topic. We've heard from Jay, we've heard from Greg, we've heard from Mark. Let's just do it. Let's just segue into your reason for being bullish. I'm going to let you crown this out and enlighten us. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm hugely bullish from a macro point of view, from a very zoomed out point of view,

because what I see is that for the first time ever, society is getting unstoppable money. We're getting this energy money, where you can put your family's sacrifice, into it and it cannot be extracted. And that is a very important thing when you consider the way that central banks and their governments execute monetary reset. See, it looks a lot like the Christian Western super empire is coming to a close.

It looks a lot like we're in the largest sovereign default of all time. And the government is aware of that. And so they can choose either to let it all come crashing down or they can execute a very careful, controlled demolition of every pillar of every institute of society so that at the very least, it's controlled, it's orderly, and the solution that they would like to replace it would seem like the most obvious thing to transition society into. And that, of course, is what the Great Reset is. It's it's carefully destroying societies we know it today in such a way that it gives this new society a leg up when they transition us into it. But Bitcoin really flies in the face of that because you simply can opt out.

You simply can say, you know what, I'm not going to let my family's monetary energy be used to fund this transition, fund this new society. And, you know, even further, it's not even just the money. Bitcoin is teaching us. If we let it teach us, we're going to learn that those principles can be applied in other areas of our life. And through that, a sovereign era can emerge. And it could be that these cycles that are emerging from money printing, the short cycle, the short debt cycle, the long debt cycle, maybe even the empire cycle itself, it could be that this is actually the last cycle and a new era is coming out of this. So I'm bullish because this is the best time to ever exist. The next, you know, eight to nine years are probably the most important eight to nine years in the next several thousand years.

So yeah, yeah. Leaser, I got a question for it. Are you suggesting that you think the government will back, they're going to support Bitcoin and move towards a Bitcoin standard? Laser, are you still there? I think he's, I think he cut a little bit. I'm back there. Where did I drop? There you go.

Oh, did you hear my question or no? No, I didn't. I dropped just 10 seconds ago, I think. Oh, my bad. What I asked you, laser, is are you suggesting that you think that the government in the U.S. is going to support Bitcoin and move towards a Bitcoin standard? Well, you know, that's really hard to say. I mean, that all depends on if you think the West, see, that all depends. Oh, sorry. It looks like I broke again. This must be my connection. I apologize. So whether or not the United States adopts Bitcoin all depends on whether the, the interests that run the U.S. want to see the U.S. as superpower in the next long cycle. It's very hard to say. I think there's a lot of merit to the idea that the central bank interests that essentially view the United States as a portfolio position,

want to see a de-emphasis of the U.S. as hegemon, and that replaced with a sort of Western globalism. And so I think what they're probably thinking is that, okay, let's copy a lot of what we see in China in terms of their high-tech kind of their high-tech, it's kind of like a communism in the front and like a high-tech fascism in the back. So let's leapfrog them. Let's have this Western globalism rise that acts as like a loose coalition in this kind of EU-IOM. EMF, new world order. That's what my gut says is that there's a deemphasizing happening. And so, you know, when you look at things like us botching Afghanistan, you know, was that just a complete mistake and like, oh, how embarrassing?

Or was that an intentional way to deemphasize the reputation of U.S. military, which, of course, is what backs the confidence of the dollar, right? And so, you know, I don't know if Bitcoin's going to end up anywhere, my gut says it'll probably end up in the bucket of a backing bucket for an IMF digital currency. That's my gut. I'll add on to that. I think it depends on the time frame. Like, what time frame are you looking at, right? Is it the next five years, next 10 years, next 50 years?

I mean, laser went out a thousand years, right? So I think it depends. I think history shows us that we have these cycles. And Laser kind of said him and I kind of agree that this cycle that we're on right now might be the one that ends it. So history just goes from oppression, revolution freedom, oppression revolution freedom as far back as you can go. But that's because man keeps getting in there. But either where we're at right now, either one, technology creates the perfect prison that maybe we never break out of for the rest of humanity. or with Bitcoin we have taken away their power for all of humanity.

And so that's kind of like the importance that we're here. I would say that history shows us every 250 years, those revolution cycle. So it goes from, and that's kind of where we're right right now. So we're rejecting peak globalization, rejecting peak centralization to move to decentralization. And so I think while everyone's looking for a centralized answer, will the dollar remain the currency? Will it be a digital wand? Will we go back to gold?

Those are all centralized answers. I think the future is decentralized. So for me, Bitcoin's my reserve. For Michael Saylor, it's their reserve. For El Salvador now, it's going to be their reserve. But some people might still use gold. Some people might use dollars. So rather than saying, like, will the government, like as the U.S.

or the central bank adopt it, they probably, the, my forecast is by the end of the decade, I believe we kind of see the end of the giant nation state. And we go back to smaller, more decentralized governments like the United States was founded on, right? kind of 50 independent states. And so it will be a lot more decentralized instead of like one giant central bank. Eventually, good money drives out bad. And so eventually they'll all have to come around.

So that's why I say it kind of depends on that time frame. It also depends on who you're talking about, like what government are you talking about in terms of there's going to be new politicians that cycle in over the course of this happening, right? And some will be stubborn and will write out their terms, never accepting it. But again, there's a whole new slew of a whole new generation of people that will eventually come to be part of various forms of government. And when they grow up in a world where Bitcoin has always existed, it just kind of becomes, well, this is just how it is. Of course, of course, this is where you save.

And of course, if I'm in any type of government, whether it be a smaller nation state, whether it be like smaller like city states or whatever it may be, when you grow up in that world where it's a given that you store your wealth in Bitcoin, you're going to want to store your nation's wealth in Bitcoin. So it's just kind of a matter of time and perhaps generational time. to truly establish that as the norm. And it also, oh, go ahead.

Go ahead. Oh, it also might be that you don't have a sort of a Bitcoin success or a social scoring panopticon, kind of great reset success. You might actually have like a fork, right? So I think there are enough people that are happy to just kind of allow the government to guide them in,

transition them out of the old norms and into the new, out of the old monetary system and into the new monetary system. And so I think they'll probably get that off the ground. But at the same time, there's a growing group of people who find that vision intolerable. And they're opting out at every layer. And so, you know, to a certain degree, you might have the monetary reset is successful from their point of view. There's a large percentage of the population that goes into that.

But then on the side, you have this flourishing effect from voluntary commerce and Bitcoin, and that excitement starts to be a suck of talent. And that creates a competing dynamic where Bitcoin eventually disenfranchises that central model. And so that's possible, too. It's really, I think over the next eight years, it's going to become a lot more clear what this looks like. Laser, do you ascribe to the like the fourth turning kind of idea where we're like dead dead in the middle of the fourth turning right now? Yeah. So hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times and on and on.

I think there's a lot of merit to that. So if that's real, that is inside of the Kondratyev cycle, which is a, it's like a average 50-year cycle where you have these technological revolutions. And that's been happening ever since the central banks came onto the scene in the late 1600s. So if you do away with the central banking cycle, the large debt cycle, then you probably, probably do away with the fork turning. And there's something funny you could take away from that. If that is an emergent quality of central banking, then it is not good times that create weak men.

It's actually central banking that creates weak men. I like that. Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, it's reactionary. I mean, I know it in my own life. I mean, it's not just Central Bank, but like my dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. And when he grew up on a farm in Iowa, like he got loaned out to go work on other people's farms. My dad's the hardest work we've ever seen.

I grew up being a pretty hard worker, not as hard as my dad. And I've done much better than my dad. And now my kids friggin lazy. The reason it's intergenerational is because what Central Banking allows you to do is prevent the market from learning in real time. And so you basically, you build up all this learning that has to be done all at once, and then you get this huge generational cost, right, where, of course, in a complete voluntary free market,

you learn as the mistakes are made. And so then the market adjusts in, it is more nimble and it adjusts to it as the mistakes are made. So you could argue that maybe you won't see that generation, hit where you have a whole generation that doesn't have to pay the piper that doesn't have to face problems and then you have one that has to face all of them and so I think that's the reason why it might be actually central banking that is creating weak men and not just good times anybody else want to tag on there I think I'm going to start around this one I don't see them just laying down and not turning the money printer off I just can't see it like they're going

down with a fight guys yeah they're going to go down with a fight jay but I'm going to call out the young kids. I'm going to call out the young kids. So I got in a little bit of hot water with some of the toxic bitcoins out there. And I love it, by the way. So thanks for keeping. By the way, I did. I did this week too. And I think Laser put a tweet up earlier. It's all good. Here, look, look, look. I will say this. The kids are what give me absolute incredible confidence. The kids I call anyone under 30. I put a tweet out. I want to make the top 30 under 30 bit coiner. Okay. And I started with a list. and sure enough, guys came at me.

Like, okay, so Will's on my list, okay? I love the guy. Dylan LeClaire's on my list. I will just say this. I'm 58 years old. I have kids that are almost 30. They're hard workers, but they're not going to make the top 30 under 30. Okay?

And that's okay, because everybody has a role to play. And Dylan LeClair dropped out of University of Vermont because he didn't want to be Kenzie and, brainwashed. I love the kid. And now I'm a friend of Dylan and his family just because I've gotten to know him. And he produces some of the most incredible research for a kid that hasn't gone to an Ivy League institution like I happen to go to. Okay. I'll just tell you, I am so comfortable with the kids of the, and the under 30s that are doing such great stuff in the Bitcoin field, including building layer two and layer three applications. You guys, I mean, I have no

why do you're talking about. Okay, I understand layer two and layer three and building this and lightning nodes and all this. Guys, you lost me when you said, okay, Foss, there's seven transactions per second. The base layer of Bitcoin is mathematics, and that's what I understand. I understand math. I understand math plus code equals truth. And I also understand this. When you get open source software, like Jack Mahler says, you can't compete against it, guys. it's over open source software will win the day. And look what he did. He onboarded a country. So the kids are what I love. There will be a hundred years of change in the next 10 years. Okay. That's what I'm predicting. There's a hundred years of change in the next 10 years.

Cycles have gone from long cycle to short cycles to micro cycles. There is a very good chance that Fiat absolutely implodes and that we go to war. And, But there is hope. Bitcoin is the hope that we avoid all of that because central banking does not work. And printing money, you cannot print yourself to prosperity. Wake up, AOC. You failed your map. Wake up.

Okay. Steve Hanky, you should be fired. Johns Hopkins is an embarrassment. I would burn John Hopkins degrees. And all of these. Does it come in two plight? Is it a Johns Hopkins degree time of two plight? because fucking Hanky is an embarrassment.

Wipe my ass right. Great. Laser, laser. And all of these. Yeah, so all of these Malthusian spears that, these Malthusian fear spells that young people have been inundated with, Bitcoin actually solves them. You know, these are the things that our politicians have been absolutely hysterical about

when they're holding the solution right in their hands. If overpopulation is real, Bitcoin resolves it. If the climate is being spoiled, Bitcoin preserves it. If we're too soft to endure viruses, Bitcoin makes us harder. If racial justice is required, Bitcoin provides it. If overconsumption is really that gross, Bitcoin corrects it. We're holding the solution, and so hope is huge. And so I know young people are suffering through this COVID hysteria.

Suicide rates is really high, but the reality is, Hope has never been this big and we are. Such a good thought. Laser. Laser. Come back to us. Why is hope never been this high? Well, hopefully, we'll get him to finish his thought in a minute.

He's too busy. Oh, he's back. Yeah, I'm here. So hope is never. Yeah, so I went out at the worst place ever. Awesome. Cliffang. So hope has never been this high because we are on the cusp of an unstoppable peaceful era

that's sprouting out of Bitcoin and I feel that. Yeah, 100%. Beautiful. I think this is a good time to wrap it up. That was an excellent sentiment to end on. What I'm going to do really quick, first of all, thank you guys all so much for being on. I'm going to go down the line one more time.

If you can, again, let people know who you are, where to find you, and just any final thought that you may have. So Greg, I'll toss it to you. and then I'll go down the line. Guys, so great to meet you, Jay, wonderful thoughts. I love people that make money, you know, entrepreneurs. But here's what I know. A little bit about myself.

So as a Miguel engineer, I brought that up. I went to Ivy League Cornell University, graduated in 1988. I met some of an amazing Americans, absolutely the greatest country in the world. And I'm Canadian, okay? I'm Canadian, and I will tell you that the USA is the greatest country in the world. And we need the USA to succeed. And on that basis, I'm looking forward to getting together with Mark Moss. And we will take the Evergrand conversation.

Sorry, Ben. We'll take it to Mark Moss's show when I go on Mark's show. He's invited me on his show. But I want to call out my Cornell history a sad weekend for me. Sorry, guys. No, that's okay, man. My roommate 20 years ago was killed in the World Trade Center. Okay. Wow. I'm calling out my roommate. Sean.

Sorry. Sean Lynch, three kids killed in the World Trade Center 20 years ago. The USA is the world's greatest nation. We need the USA to succeed. It stands for everything. Freedom of speech. Proud military history. We do not, and you do not abuse that history. Afghanistan may have been a bad situation, but honest to God, the intent was there to make good on people who died 20 years ago, okay? I love the USA. You cannot fail. And Bitcoin is your savior. If you get Cynthia Loomis and the 50 million Americans that own Bitcoin to rally around the cause, China just served this up on a platter for you, you know,

United States, embrace it, and run a dual economy. It's a name, it's called a network transfer. You are going to transfer from a fiat based reserve currency to a Bitcoin based reserve asset. One is your checking account and one is your savings account. It's a network transfer and you do not turn one network off. You do it over time. God bless the people from 9-11, including some Canadians that died on that day. But please, guys, this is not a drill. This is about the future. And the young kids that are going to bring that future, I'm so proud to be part of that.

Amen. Awesome. Greg, thank you for your thoughts, everybody. Just so everybody knows. It's not futile. It's beautiful. Yeah. Well, Greg, I'm so glad that I got to have you on again.

Thank you. Let's keep going down the line really quick. And Jay, again, people know where people get to find you. That's emotional. Yeah. No worries. Greg, really enjoyed all you guys. And particularly, Greg, your energy was amazing today. Um, you know, look, um, you can find me on Twitter, Jay Gould. And, um, I could just tell you that I recently had a, um, a rough go. I had to go to the hospital for an emergency surgery. And, um, you know, almost a, didn't make it and I'm doing much better now. But one thing I'll tell you about Bitcoiners, hundreds and hundreds of people when I put it out there on Twitter,

DM me. And they weren't toxic like they called Bitcoin maximalists. They were not. These people were gracious and the gratitude that they showed me. I'm just forever grateful because they pulled me out of a really tough spot, made me feel really good. Then I talked about chill frogs and they came after me, but that's okay. Because that's Bitcoin, right?

We know that's Bitcoin. I was trying I was I'm like just people understand if they're listening and people see my tweets Jason Williams was like fucking around with this he's trying to understand the NFT space a little better I said I got nothing else to do I'm freaking stuck in my bed let me understand it so I'm going down this rabbit hole a little bit just to understand it um I'm not a shit coiner never bought a shit coin um but I will say I just wanted to thank everybody that sent me a message from the bottom of my heart you it meant a lot to me and my wife um And I just thank you.

And I don't think people understand the community that the Bitcoin community is. Beyond the money, beyond the freedom, beyond all that stuff for a minute, it is one of the, I've been on a lot of different things. I was an athlete growing up. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an investor. You can identify yourself in different types of groups. I never really did.

I definitely identify myself as a bit coiner. I don't have to identify myself as a maximalist because I'm not so toxic, but I do identify myself as a bit corner now. And I got to tell you, I can't tell you how appreciated I have been from the support that I received from the community. You guys are great. But thanks guys. Awesome, dude. Thank you for being here. Laser, how about yourself?

Hey, you guys can get me on Twitter, Laser Hottle. If you like the idea of being able to navigate the next eight years with a straight, clear mind, find me there. Look, it's not futile. It's actually beautiful right now. You have this volcanization effect. free states. You have people moving their sacrifice into Bitcoin. You have people rolling their own sovereignty stacks and opting out of this big tech overreach. And so the general message is that you actually can become so expensive to tyranny that they lose. And that's what Bitcoin is teaching us. That's what it's about. And yeah, I love you guys. Awesome. Thanks, man. Mark, let's cap it off. let people know where they can find you and any final thought?

Yeah, so yeah, just type in Mark Moss on YouTube and I'd talk about this type of content all the time and on Twitter number one Mark Moss. I've done shows with everyone but Jay, so Jay, good to meet you. Recently someone like tweeted like are Jay and Mark the same person? I was like, that was funny. Yeah, so anyway, that was good to meet you. I would, one, I would definitely echo what Jay said. I mean, the community in Bitcoin is amazing. Like I said, I just got back from Dallas and hanging out with like four or five hundred bitcoins there.

I mean, it's just, you know, mainstream wants to tell us that we identify or we, we group together based off of sex or preference or gender or whatever it may be. But the reality is we do over values. And the stronger those values are, the more we can come together. And so Bitcoiners unite over shared values and strong values like freedom and liberty, right? So from that, the community is awesome. So I would say my final thoughts would just be, you know, to say the cliche, right,

it's darkest before the dawn. And man, things are bad right now, not sugar-coding it. That was what I was bullish on because the more they push, the more that Bitcoin is responding. But I have a message of hope, and that's that this fails. We know that centralization always fails. Central planning doesn't work. Central banking won't work. You can't pay people not to work.

All of this fails. And so on the other side of this, a couple of years from now, I see massive hope, massive prosperity. I believe that we break this cycle that we've been in. And so it is a message of hope. We need to figure out how to get to stay together and make it through these next couple of years. But it's going to end. We're going to win. I ended my talk at Bitcoin Bitblock Boom with a slide.

And basically it was a quote from Nietzsche. And he said, that which is falling. shall ye also push? And Bitcoin's doing the pushing, and we're going to win. I love it, man. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. This was a hell of a show, especially for my first one back home. Really enjoyed it.

Thank you to everybody that's in the chat. I hope you guys got a lot from this chat as well. You are all welcome back on any time. I'm going to wish you a wonderful weekend and thank you guys so much. I appreciate you all. Thank you. Thanks a lot, guys.

Cool, I'm going to kill your audio video and do the outro, but I will see you guys soon. Great work. Okay, see it. All right, everybody watching. Thank you so much for being here. It felt good to be back home and to have all these awesome guys on the show.

There were a bunch of you watching, lots of great stuff in the chat. So again, bottom of my heart, thank you guys for being here. If you haven't already, smash that like button, subscribe, share,

all of those things. Really, really do help get more eyeballs on the show. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Ledden, Bit Buy, bit refill,

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You hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you click to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. Anyways, guys, thank you again. I really do appreciate everybody that jumps in and is part of these shows

and watches these shows and comments. So yeah, I will see you guys next time. As always, I am Ben with BTC Sessions. This was your daily session. Toddled at Bitcoin.