On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/19/21 (MSTR's speculative attack, Coinbase trading at $77b, The Tulip Bubble Myth?) (EP.182)

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Nic and Matt break down the headlines in yet another week of ATHs. In this episode:  Our cured meat scandal We dissect crypto mafias Necessary conditions for a corporate mafia to form Microstrategy'...s speculative attack on the dollar How the corporate adoption story took us by surprise Is there a goodwill dividend for buying bitcoin? Is buying bitcoin a bitcoin strategy? Nic's 50k road trip to Tahanis in Ontario Coin Metrics' partnership with Bitgo and KPMG Verge has a year-long reorg Is Coinbase fairly priced at $77b pre-IPO? Should Coinbase be worth more than Goldman? OFAC reminds us that it exists The implications of OFAC compliant mining How the tulip bubble is a Calvinist conspiracy Content mentioned in this episode:  Smithsonian Mag, There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever CM announces a partnership with BitGo and KPMG Coinbase pre-IPO shares trading at $77b

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:00:33 Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And you have a new mic. We have no radio interference. We had a listener come in with some great advice. And this podcast hopefully will sound a lot better. Yeah, we bought a very high-end mic. Well, I did at least. You still sound the same as you always sound.
Starting point is 00:00:51 But I bought a high-end SM7B mic from shore. And it's all the problem. So that was the solution, just buy a $400 mic. Thank you to the listeners, though, things that we would not have known. Yeah, there was all kinds of crazy stuff, like putting ferrite clips, and then there was a lot of intricate stuff that I couldn't do because I'm not an engineer. But yeah, we got some really detailed advice on how to deal with radio interference. So that's thank you to the listener that sent that in.
Starting point is 00:01:22 And it certainly was a busy week on the podcast front this week. Oh, yeah. This was actually a number one week ever even before today. So thank you for that. Here's something that we've never done. Ready for it? Please leave us a review in the App Store. We've never asked before.
Starting point is 00:01:41 Oh, does that matter? Yeah, actually it matters like a lot and we just never asked. I guess that makes sense because every podcast I listen to, they say, please leave a review, five-star review if you can, in the App Store, it goes a long way. I didn't. Does that go a long way? Apparently yes. So yeah, that's why everyone asks because like it really matters. And we do have some reviews. Some of them are a little weird. Some of them are funny. But we've never asked. So yeah, please actually do that by the way. It's, and does it help if you subscribe and then unsubscribe and then resubscribe? Because I've heard that that works.
Starting point is 00:02:21 I don't know. That sounds like a little far fetch to me. You'd think that they'd be able to detect that. But anyway, that's like, look, that's our request to you. So go ahead and do that, please. Yeah, we're, you know, we're bringing you some free content here. Please leave us a review. Apparently it matters. Yeah. And so it was our number one week, which was actually just due to a scheduling mistake, really, on our end.
Starting point is 00:02:50 We released two podcasts on the same day yesterday, in fact. So. Well, they were both really good. They were great. I don't know if that is the wisest move, but that's what we did. So we've released three this week already. So we had Zach Kelman on talking about chokepoint earlier in the week. And then we had Renee Van Kestrin of BlockFi talking about how BlockFi thinks about risk management.
Starting point is 00:03:17 And then we had Teddy Fusaro from Bitwas, who was kind enough to actually send me cured meat ahead of the podcast. He sent me Supi, which is an Italian day. delicacy out of Rhode Island out of Westerly, and it was delicious. I actually had it for breakfast and lunch, and then I had a little bit after dinner. Yeah, so this is a developing scandal because he told me specifically that I think he may have told you that some of the soupy was for me, but I never received any soupy. So I just had to, you know, due to COVID, I didn't want to be, I didn't want to subject you to my germs. So I just decided to keep the soupy to myself. Yeah, I'm feeling a little hard done by, to be completely honest with you.
Starting point is 00:04:01 I like cured meats a lot, big cured meats fan. I don't really understand soupy or the etymology of that term. I'm not sure I get it either. It's better than a pepperoni, I'd say, though. And it's way better than a slim gym. Look, so if any of you want to address this historical injustice and send me some soupy, and specifically not to Matt, but to me, please. please by all means you know I'll happily take delivery but yeah that was that was the first
Starting point is 00:04:34 time a guest has given us a gift in exchange for appearing on the show I think I think it's a good precedent to start though especially food yeah I'm thinking that we should actually normalize that so future guests you know what to do if you want to get on the show come bearing meats well there are a lot of deals this week let's hop right into them blockchain.com, which is a crypto asset brokerage company based in London, they raised $120 million in a round that included investors like more strategic ventures, Kyle Bass, Access Industries, Rovita Advisors, Lightspeed, GV, Lake Star, Eldridge, and others. So good round there. Yeah, huge round. Blockchain's been around for, I want to say, almost 10 years now.
Starting point is 00:05:20 They were really one of the original wallet companies. They were maybe the original popular Bitcoin browser wallet. A lot of sort of famous people in the industry work to blockchain. Well, Nick Carey, if I have this story right, him and Brian Armstrong were kind of thinking about partnering up together for originally to start Coinbase. And then Nick went off and did blockchain. I hope I have that right. but that's how I remember it. Dan Held worked there.
Starting point is 00:05:54 Well, he was actually, his startup zero block was acquired by blockchain. I believe Roger Verrat worked there, if I'm not mistaken. I think he was an investor. Investor. And then CZ worked for blockchain. That's a fun fact. And of course, Antoine Rucadevez, very well known, the father of blockchain analytics.
Starting point is 00:06:16 Some call him he worked there before Coin Metrics. So there's all these really eminent people in the crypto industry that have been associated with blockchain. Same thing with it. There's a few of these mafias, right? Like Coinbase has one. Some would say Fidelity is developing one too. It's sort of like the Bill Parcell's coaching tree, which is then turned into the Bill Belichick coaching tree. Yeah, I would say the Fidelity Mafia is gaining strength with each passing day.
Starting point is 00:06:44 Very proud notice of the Fidelity Mafia. Although the Coinbase Mafia has to be the largest mafia. in the space by far. Yeah, it's a big mafia. Speaking of Mafias, Teddy Frasara, that was another topic of the podcast, Mafias, just in general. Like, but like the mob, right?
Starting point is 00:07:01 Yeah, like the Providence Mob. That sort of goes along with the whole smoked meat element, it's sort of on theme. One thing about the Mafia is, though, if you remember, like the, I don't remember who wrote this post, but this is a great post about Mafias,
Starting point is 00:07:18 And one of the points is that for a successful mafia to form, you have to have a good but not outstanding startup exit because the founders have to all have enough money to feel comfortable, you know, or the employees have to have enough money from the exit to feel comfortable starting businesses or investing in each other's businesses. But they can't have made so much money that they lose all motivation. So yeah, I thought you were talking about actual organized crime there for a second, but I'm glad you like corporate mafias. Yeah, we pivoted back. So, that's why the PayPal Mafia, I think, was so good because none of the other employees made that much. I mean, you know, they had good exits for sure, but they still had that drive.
Starting point is 00:07:59 So there's a Goldilocks zone for corporate mafias. And in crypto, it's weird because people just made a ton of money from the underlying assets. And their startup exits, they haven't been that many. Coinbase will be the first really big one, probably. Yeah. So it's like the whole industry is the mafia almost, the big. coin mafia. It is. Yeah, it really is the whole industry. So the next one up is figure. This is a blockchain mortgage platform. This was founded by SoFi's founder Mike Cagney. They're actually
Starting point is 00:08:31 launching a $250 million spec. Why not? Yeah. If you can do it, go for it. Synthetics. I'm sure you've all heard of synthetics. There is 12 million from Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and iOSG. Luxor Technologies, which is a Bitcoin mining company, raised $725,000 from Bitnomial, Argo blockchain, and Celsius. Next up we have Radical, which is CLE, not CAL. They're a peer-to-peer platform for open source collaboration and developers. They raised $12 million from NFX, Galaxy Digital Placeholder, and some others. And the next one up is Async Art. So this is a non-fungible token platform.
Starting point is 00:09:17 It's a platform for creating and trading these tokens. NFT is very hot right now. So they raised $2 million from Lemnes Capital, Galaxy Interactive, Signum Growth, semantic, placeholder, and a few others. So Cignam, this is Cigna with the Y. We've had them on the show. We've Matthias Imbach on the show. They're Swiss and Singaporean.
Starting point is 00:09:40 They're sort of a full-service crypto bank. They have connectivity. fiat system and they do a number of functions in the crypto space. They've secured a quote eight figure investment from SBI holding. So pretty impressive company definitely recommend that episode with Matias. I like these guys a lot. And the eight figure investment, it's pretty good because that could be, you know, it could start with a one or that could start with a nine. It's really hard to know. Who knows? Either way, it is interesting to see Switzerland and Singapore on the cutting edge here with crypto banks, USA a little behind, a little behind.
Starting point is 00:10:20 Yeah, but the OCC, you know, we got to keep the talent at the OCC and we will get there. Well, our biggest ally, Brian Brooks is gone, so who knows who's going to replace them. Well, let's talk about micro strategy. They are at it again. Michael Saylor is just an absolute savage of a CEO. So the company has priced $900 million in senior convertible notes, which is up from a 600 number earlier in the week. This also has the option for 150 more within 13 days.
Starting point is 00:10:54 So I'm sure that it'll be $1.1 billion. These are notes that pay no interest, and they will be used to buy Bitcoin as part of the company's treasury management practice. So what do you think? I mean, this is a textbook speculative attack on the dollar. end of the day. And it seems crazy to do something like this. But if you think about it, it just the more you think about it, the sainer it seems. If you can borrow for free, you borrow a rate of zero interest and buy a rapidly appreciating asset that has historically always appreciated
Starting point is 00:11:31 against the dollar, against the instrument you're borrowing in, why would you not do that? I have done a complete 180 on this since we originally heard about this move months ago when we said I don't really get this note structure. Not only do I think this is a great idea, I think it's undeniable that we're going to start to see people FOMO into this trade. Why would you not do this if you have access to this type of capital? So because the Fed suppresses interest rates, the cost of money is effectively free.
Starting point is 00:12:06 and if you're corporate and you're AAA or AA rated, you can borrow for free or investors will even pay you for the privilege of them lending you money, you can borrow for better than free. Why would you not get out of those hot potato dollars and get into the hardest money ever invented the history of the universe? Kind of a no-brainer.
Starting point is 00:12:33 There's a game theory here and it's very advantageous to the first movers, and it's not very advantageous to the last ones. So, you know, if you're not paying attention to this, you probably should, as the saying goes. I mean, it's stuff like this that makes me realize that it's actually happening. It was not in my bull case for Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:12:54 Publicly traded companies buying billions of dollars to Bitcoin with borrowed money, which they expect the value of that debt to erode over time with inflation, and buying hard assets with that debt. That was not in my bull case, but I am also not complaining. No, and it's so true. It was not in my bulk case either.
Starting point is 00:13:16 What was in my bulk case was registered investment advisors actually waking up and getting their clients into this, which doesn't actually seem like it's really happening. There are just so few registered investment advisors in the country, let alone the world, that actually understand this. The funny thing is once I started talking about RIAs and how generally unaware most of them are, I started getting a lot of emails from people
Starting point is 00:13:40 forwarding things that their RIAs have sent to them. So like FUD about Tether and the fact that Bitcoin is unbacked and all this stuff. So, you know, the growth in this market is not coming from the RIA channel, but eventually it will. I'd have to imagine. I mean, they can't, you know, eventually they're just going to be so many Bitcoin millionaires that, you know, who are they going to put their money with? Probably RIAs that understand the industry. Yeah, the corporate adoption of Bitcoin was something I didn't expect. I'm still wrapping my head around it a little bit. And it's it's orthogonal to the corporate strategy,
Starting point is 00:14:17 but it's almost like there's a Bitcoin goodwill dividend from adopting Bitcoin as a corporate. A lot of people thought Bitcoin was a scary asset. That is flipped. Bitcoin is now this glamorous, sexy asset. And now your Bitcoin strategy doesn't involve technology or turning on payments for Bitcoin, your Bitcoin strategy, it's an acceptable Bitcoin strategy to just own Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:14:41 Just buy Bitcoin. That's what I tweeted this week. I mean, for the longest time, you had these big financial firms that were just, you know, dreaming up blockchain strategies and they couldn't figure out anything to do. But, hey, just buy some Bitcoin. That's a good strategy. You don't have to sit around a room and all stare at each other and try to imagine how, you know, settlement for syndicated loans is going to work.
Starting point is 00:15:01 That's not a thing anymore. Yeah, you don't even need to pretend to, like, Like the underlying technology or whatever, which no one likes, by the way. You know, I was talking to Ali from Tahini's restaurants in London, Artario on Clubhouse the other day. Shout out Tahini's. I haven't forgotten about you. Yeah, I actually, at one point I committed to doing a road trip with Naraj and Joe Wisenthal to Tahini's restaurant. When we hit 50K, we did hit 50K, but Canada's got some rules about how you actually can't get in the country right now.
Starting point is 00:15:33 So we're having to delay that. So, you know, I was asking Tahini's like they're a Bitcoin maximalist falafel restaurant, right? You know, as one does. And they, I asked them, do they accept Bitcoin? They're like, no, that's too difficult operationally. And from a tax and accounting perspective, and it's just a nightmare managing the custody of the Bitcoin. And they're like, all we do is we just transform a balance sheet in Bitcoin. And that's their Bitcoin's right.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Just buy Bitcoin, I guess. So you don't need to actually use Bitcoin to be a Bitcoin company. You just convert your balance sheet into it. It's crazy. It ended up being a strategy. So we're going to see more news here from micro strategies. And they have not bought the Bitcoin yet. So, you know, people are just front running the company at this point.
Starting point is 00:16:28 And that's probably a big part of the reason why we broke 50 this week. Yeah, but at this point, dare I say that information is priced in, but the efficient market guy over here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Bitwise, so we talked about this on the pod, but they are launching a DFI crypto index fund. So if you are a public markets investor and you don't want to use Uniswap, you can just buy their index fund. Yeah, it's great to see this product. innovation out of Bitwise and had fun talking with Teddy about that on the podcast this week. So definitely check that out.
Starting point is 00:17:08 Scroll down in the feed. Next one up is Coin Metrics. Yeah, shout out Coin Metrics. They launched a partnership with KPMG and BitGo around new product suite, nicknamed Ferum, which is basically a network risk management tool. So obviously we're very closely involved with Coin Metrics. disclosure. Basically, fairum or, you know, risk analytics is a way to determine whether those anomalies occurring on the blockchains themselves, specifically targeted at sort of large
Starting point is 00:17:46 enterprise users of public blockchains so that they know if there's something weird or concerning happening so they can evaluate settlement risk in real time. So really big step forward for them. So congrats. I, so I was talking a little bit about about this with Renee Van Kestrin on the podcast just around how the blockchain itself, how the blockchains plural, I guess, themselves during times of high volatility and stress, just get a little bit wonky where you'll have people trying to send collateral and the mempool is backed up. And so all sorts of, you know, fee estimations are off. And so this tool, from what I can gather, just allows brokerages, exchanges, really anyone engaging with
Starting point is 00:18:27 blockchains to get a real-time sense of what's happening on the chains themselves so that they can tell, okay, I need to like juice up the fee or I need to halt withdrawals on a particular network. Am I getting that right? Yeah, that's correct. And I think people that don't run 80 nodes all the time or I think CM does hundreds of nodes, but it's, you know, some number of nodes on unique networks don't really have a good sense for how unstable a lot of these networks are. So if you run enough nodes on any given week, there'll be a stoppage or one of these blockchains will grind to a halt.
Starting point is 00:19:06 And it just doesn't get reported, but it happens all the time. They'll go out of sync, developers have to reset things. If there's like a master node or super node or validator, things go offline, things go wrong and there's manual resets. You'd hear about it if it happened with Bitcoin, but there's a bunch of other blockchains out there. And there's all kinds of crazy nonsense in anomalies that happens. So this is designed to just give investors and large consumers of block space insight into what's happening. And if you're in exchange, it's like you're sort of operating with a blindfold on. But exchanges are the principal targets of network attacks, whether that's denial of service attacks, eclipse attacks on nodes, obviously reorgs.
Starting point is 00:19:53 And we see these. They happen. especially on weaker proof of work chains. Verge, which is a privacy-focused chain, which I've historically tangled with the Verge fans. They had a year's worth of blocks reorged the other day. You hate to see it. So a year's worth of transactional history invalidated. So this stuff does happen.
Starting point is 00:20:18 I mean, Verge is a special case. But even Dogecoin, Dogecoin is merged mine with Lightcoin. For a moment there, Dogecoin. which is block rewards actually exceeded those of light coin, which would have created, you know, strong incentives to disrupt light coin. So it's things like that where you just want to know what is actually going on at the network level. And historically, exchanges have been totally ignorant of this. Yeah, it's kind of like, I think of it as almost like a cloud flare, but for public blockchains. It's sort of making these public networks safer to engage with
Starting point is 00:20:56 as a participant. Yeah, it's a dark forest out there. It really is. Yeah. So the next story up is Grayscale, which is, of course, the asset management subsidiary of DCG. They announced a bunch of executive hires this week, including notably Hugh Ross, formerly of Horizon Kinetics. He joined as chief operating officer.
Starting point is 00:21:16 So really a great hire there, and Hugh's awesome. So congrats to the DCG, Grayscale team and Hugh. So here's something interesting. Speaking of Grayscale, actually, Barry Silbert's former company before started DCG was a second market, which was acquired by NASDAQ private markets, which is currently pricing Coinbase equity at $77 billion pre-IPO. How about that? People are going to think that's crazy.
Starting point is 00:21:49 I don't think that's crazy at all. No, no. I mean, I think that could double on the public markets as crazy as that sounds. I've been on record saying that I expect Coinbase to trade at 12 figures. We decided to do the math there, aka north of $100 billion, which would cause it to flip in Goldman Sachs. Goldman's trading at $104 billion right now. I think there's going to be a lot of people that are very happy to see that comparison.
Starting point is 00:22:20 It's just a real changing of the guard, you know? Real changing the guard moment. I mean, there's still, the fact that you still have these, apparently the Credit Suisse CEO this week said something like, we're not doing anything in Bitcoin, but we like the underlying technology. These comments are completely inexcusable in the sense of being a fiduciary to your shareholders. It's appalling that we're still hearing this. And so this coin-based thing is going to be really interesting from a few perspectives. One is that a lot of people in the quote-unquote traditional space have no idea how big this company is. I think that the revenue quality is marginal.
Starting point is 00:22:56 It's not. It's pretty strong revenue quality. And so it's just going to be eye-opening, I think. And fast forward a year or two from now, it's just going to be inexcusable to have no opinion about public blockchains. And furthermore, to have no strategy, I think we're just going to not see that anymore. Yeah, I think this is really truly going to be the moment
Starting point is 00:23:19 when the crypto market goes fully mainstream in the U.S. I was looking at some work trying to assess the kind of crypto penetration in the U.S. Fred Ersum, co-founder of Coinbase, now Paradigm, said it was he thought about 10% of Americans owned cryptocurrency. And people think that's, people are surprised. They think that's too high. But at this point, yeah, that seems about right. Yeah, I mean, you have these on ramps with Coinbase and Black. and River and Robin Hood Square.
Starting point is 00:23:57 A lot of people have access through these platforms now. A lot of people have more access when it's available on Schwab and TD and Fidelity.com. So hopefully that happens soon. And not to mention the fact that there's a bunch of non-financial stuff popping up, right? Like non-fungible tokens, I guess, would classify as crypto assets, right? Yeah, I mean, they're still financial. Like the excitement around them derives from the fact that they're sort of innately financialized. and it's like Pokemon cards, but they're liquid on a market right there.
Starting point is 00:24:28 So the digitization means it's easier to trade them. But yeah, NFTs are exploding right now. Yeah, it's a great use case. So looking forward to the Coinbase IPO, I think that is the watershed moment. Really alongside an ETF, that's going to be one of the big public markets, watershed moments. The other thing I think it will do is suck some of the enthusiasm away from those other publicly traded firms, which are proxies for the crypto markets. Because Coinbase is just a much pure proxy for crypto exposure. Yeah, that's interesting.
Starting point is 00:25:09 Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they trade, you know, the Voyagers of the world versus Coinbase. That's a good point. All right. Well, here's another story, BitPay, Crypto Asset Payments Company. they've settled with the Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is part of the U.S. Treasury, there were charges of over 2,000 sanctions violations relating to enabling merchant transactions with folks that live in sanctioned countries. So the company will pay a $507,000 fine.
Starting point is 00:25:42 I guess this is just a good reminder to exchanges and brokerages and all sorts of platform infrastructure companies that are enabling outbound crypto transactions and inbound, I suppose, that OFAC is real and you've got to make sure that you comply with it. Yeah, OFAC, they're always kind of there kind of nipping at the heels of crypto companies, huh? This isn't the first OFAC announced when we've talked about this year. It's interesting, though, because I, you know, I don't know when BitPay had these violations. I think it was actually like 14 through 16.
Starting point is 00:26:17 I don't know. I forget. I read the complaint a few hours. hours ago, but the software to do these screenings has gotten a lot better. And so some of the out-of-the-box solutions and travel rule compliance, you know, we're investors in Nodibene. There's tools to make this a lot easier now. Yeah, it's interesting. I've never seen OFAC applied to the peer-to-pool model. That was one of the big worries. You know, what happens if Iran or North Korea injects liquidity into a pool that thousands of other people are using in defy,
Starting point is 00:26:53 how on earth do you accommodate that? Do you have permission pools? How does that work? I don't know. There's got to be some common sense, right? I mean, it's not, it shouldn't be an OFAC violation. If you do a Bitcoin transaction, you pay a fee and that block gets mined in North Korea or something, right?
Starting point is 00:27:12 Like, that shouldn't be an OFAC violation. So at some level, this is a new technology where we'll have to just find, out what those edge cases are well do we do have compliant mining now so that's a new thing pretty controversial right yeah certainly certainly because that's potentially gateway to i think that that mining uh those if i'm not wrong those blocks exclude transaction fees potentially because they're they're but yeah that that is the first step to normalizing you know censorship at the minor level so
Starting point is 00:27:49 Kind of cause for nervousness there. All right. So one thing to talk about is the tulip bubble. As we know, every time Bitcoin hits an all-time high, people start to talk about tulips. And maybe that's just not a good comparison. Well, we know it's not a good comparison, obviously. But what I wanted to talk about in this week's rant is actually how the tulip bubble was basically a conspiracy. Like, it wasn't real.
Starting point is 00:28:18 or say more. Yeah, so people think the tulip bubble was like a real historical event, but actually it's a Calvinist Psiop. So it's, you know, the damage, the fallout from the tulip bubble is greatly exaggerated for purposes of moralizing against the excesses of financial speculation. So I would encourage anyone that has ever uttered the phrase tulip bubble, whether in a derisive context to attack Bitcoin or any other stock or anything else like that, to actually look at the historical record.
Starting point is 00:28:56 So the Tuleau bubble was popularized by this famous book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is this book by a Scottish journalist right in the 1800s. And he basically is responsible for popularizing this Tula. bubble is one of the original financial panics and, you know, big speculative episodes. But if you look at it, there wasn't that much damage. So there's a good article in the Smithsonian. There's whole books written about this debunking the tulip bubble. Historians couldn't actually find anyone that went bankrupt, couldn't find any real effect on the Dutch economy, just very, very
Starting point is 00:29:43 limited fallout. So then the question is why is there this lingering, you know, view that the tulip bubble was this extremely negative financial, you know, event? The answer is because it was used by Calvinist, you know, reformers to effectively moralize. And, you know, there's a great quote, Smithsonian Magazine article saying All the outlandish stories of economic ruin of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb of chimney sweeps waiting into the market in hopes of striking it rich
Starting point is 00:30:27 those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that tulip propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has stayed with us to this day. So the Calvinists were basically the no-coiners of the 1600s, and they were super against, I guess, wealth accumulation and viewed it as, you know, on Christian. And so they produce some very effective propaganda, basically exaggerating the impact of the tulip bubble and turned this very minor historical episode into something that's now perceived as like this terrible event, you know, that ran.
Starting point is 00:31:12 ransacked the Dutch economy in the 1600s when basically nothing meaningful occurred. So don't use the tulip bubble as a historical basis of comparison. Yeah, that is henceforth outlawed. Wow, good rant. I did not know that, but what I usually do is just talk about, you know, tulips you could not send internationally in a censorship-resistant manner. So it was a little bit different than Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine a tulip that?
Starting point is 00:31:42 that you could teleport somewhere at the speed of flight and never rotted. And there was a fixed number of them in the issuance rate. You know, they had fair issuance. And you could hold them on a computer. That would probably be worth a hell of a lot. I think it would be worth about $950 billion as of today. I think, yeah, I think that would be a pretty valuable piece of technology, actually. That sounds better than every other commodity that's ever been created, if you ask me.
Starting point is 00:32:12 So. Wow. All right. Well, that was a busy week. We'll see what next week portends, but I think it's going to be a busy one too. Yeah. Let's see if we crossed the trillion threshold. That seems like an important number.
Starting point is 00:32:25 It does seem like an important number. Although, you know, the real flippinging is is flipping in gold. And for that, we need to get over 11 trillion. So we have some ways to go. Well, we have some fun announcements coming up on regarding this show soon. So we do have some cool stuff. I'm actually very excited. I almost told a few people about our secret announcements,
Starting point is 00:32:50 but we're going to keep them under wraps for now. Yeah, there's still secrets. But we'll get there. All right, everyone. Well, have a nice weekend, and we will see you on Monday.

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