On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/18/21 (Bukele's Bitcoin ambitions, the World Bank spurns El Salvador, DeFi risks) (EP. 223)

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Nic and Matt return for deals and news of the week. In this episode:  What's the biggest story with Bukele that isn't being covered? Is Bukele motivated by a sanctions threat from the US? Will Salvadorians use the Lightning Network? How Bitcoin elevates heads of state in the popular consciousness Nic's paper on DeFi protocol risks The SEC's year-ahead agenda has no mention of Bitcoin The NY anti-mining bill fails The World Bank joins the IMF in spurning El Salvador Is the Salvadorian law a 'forced tender law'? Content mentioned:  Max Raskin in the WSJ: A Global First: Bitcoin as National Currency This episode supported by:  Eventus, the leading global provider of multi-asset class trade surveillance, transaction monitoring and market risk solutions. Its award-winning trade surveillance platform is easy to deploy, customize and operate. Eventus is proven in the most complex, high-volume and real-time environments and supports many of the industry's leading crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini, ErisX and OSL. Find them at onthebrink.link/eventus

This episode is brought to you by Eventis. Aventus is the world's leading platform for digital asset trade surveillance, transaction monitoring, and market risk, and they seamlessly support 24-7, 365, all the activity in the digital asset ecosystem. Some of the largest exchanges and institutions of the world are using Aventus to drive efficiency in their regulatory operations. On June 22nd and 23rd, Aventus and the Association for Digital Asset Markets are going to be co-hosting a premier conference, which is called Shepenus.

shining a light on digital asset markets 2021. You can head over to On the Brink. Dotlink slash Eventis to register today so you can hear from some of the key regulators and dot leaders in the digital asset space. That's On the Brink. dot link slash eventus. 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 the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter.

And first time recording in person since before COVID right now. Yeah, something like 14 months. It's, we had it down to a science doing it remote. remotely. Actually got a lot easier. We actually forgot how to use our in-person equipment. Yes. It's the radio frequencies are off again. It's all the same stuff we used to all the same problems. Back to the basics. Yeah. Well, busy week this week, the reverberation from your Twitter spaces with President Buckele are just rampant here. We had the Boston Globe covering it this week, the Boston Business Journal. It's getting a lot of press. Yeah. What's funny,

as I complained that the mainstream press wasn't covering it, and then I spent the whole of the next week talking to pretty much every outlet on earth about it. What's interesting to me is that the coverage hasn't really been about what I think the big story is here, which is potentially a path to a kind of a getting off of the dollar standard for some of these countries. And Buckele clearly did not say that that's what this was about, but I think that's the bigger story that maybe isn't getting covered. I agree. My hypothesis is that this is

at least partially motivated by the sanctions threat that the U.S. extended to the Salvadoran government after Buckele fired a bunch of members of the judiciary. And this is one way

of saying, screw you, I don't need the dollar network. There's this other monetary network that I can use. And I guess it makes sense in the sense that, you know, people that run countries that try to get off the dollar standard, you know, tend to have bad accidents. Yeah, they tend to not make it. So if you were doing this, you'd probably have a story around wanting to promote entrepreneurship

in your country and wanting to attract foreign investment and wanting to attract, you know, companies to build offices and things like that, as opposed to just saying we're getting off the dollar. So there is a cover story about making remittances cheaper and improving commerce in the country. I find it very far-fetched that everyday Salvadorans are going to learn how to use Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Yeah, I mean, I don't think the message of, hey, our dependence on the Federal Reserve is just a really bad thing for our country. And so we need to remove that dependence. And we don't want to get on the China central bank currency.

So we're going to get on a neutral settlement network. that doesn't really land as well as promote entrepreneurship. Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, Buckele could have gone to be, you know, he could have opted to be part of the Chinese orbit. And we should be glad that instead of, you know, opting into the Belt and Road initiative and becoming a node on the Chinese CBDC-D-D-C-EP network, he picked Bitcoin. that is a better outcome. It's definitely a better outcome.

I will be interested to see how this plays out on a geopolitical landscape perspective. His position as the leader of that country is going to be much better if three or four other countries do this pretty quickly, I think. One thing that I was reflecting on is, like, how many people in Silicon Valley, how many venture capitalists knew who President Buckele was a month ago? Very few. Also, how many people knew that El Salvador was dollarized? I mean, I'm going to pat myself on the back here and say, I did know that.

And I also knew who Buckele was because the economist had this really interesting profile on him a few months ago. But virtually no one knew anything about El Salvador in the U.S. aside from, you know, that's a source of a lot of migrants and labor. And now today, Buckele is one of the... the best known heads of state in the world. So that's another part of this Bitcoin dividend is if you embrace Bitcoin, you get an audience with like all of these influential people, some of the most effectively powerful capitalists in the world, you know, eating out of the palm of your hand. That's got to be a strong, you know, attraction for a lot of these heads of state, you know,

and pull themselves out of obscurity and place them right on the world stage. Yeah, you get the Serotonin hit of all the Twitter likes, but you also potentially, you know, I think you'll see actually some companies start operations down there. And so he's going to be rubbing shoulders with some pretty influential Silicon Valley types, crypto types. Yeah, I mean, El Salvador is a world apart from Miami. Like, it's easy to see how a business could relocate itself to Miami. El Salvador is tougher, I think. But yeah, I'm sure he'll get some uptake on this. The other thing this week, so your paper with Linda Jang from Georgetown on D5 protocol risks came out. People seem to like that one.

Yeah, this is getting a lot of downloads. Read the paper. It's a mere 35 pages. It's nice and short. So this came about. I met Linda at the DC FinTech Summit several years ago. Yeah, so I wrote a chapter for a book. She was writing, which that chapter is actually not out yet.

and I guess she liked it because she asked me to work with her on this paper about identifying risks in Defi. And it turns out there's a lot. Turns out there's a lot. And so the objective of this paper is basically take practitioner knowledge and communicate it to a policy and academic audience. What do you see as sort of the logical takeaway from a regulatory perspective here? Defi has some risk factors which are totally analogous to traditional finance. For instance, like index manipulation, bang the close on a derivative, things like that. And it also has some risk factors which are completely novel.

So, you know, automated systems misfiring. The effects, you know, combination of flash loans and governance tokens. So there's new and there's new and there's. old. I think mostly these risks are pretty under discussed. For instance, in the admin key, you know, that's an entire category of risks or potential vulnerabilities. The existence of admin keys can be compromised and anything can be done to these enormous pools of capital. And I looked and there's virtually no discussion in the academic literature around admin keys and how these can cause these sort of cataclysmic events if they're exploited or compromised.

So basically, the objective was just to write this stuff down. I mean, you can find it on mediums and substacks and crypto-Twitter, but you can't find it in the policy discourse. And so that was the point, basically, to bridge that gap. Yeah, the admin key issue is pretty scary. And, you know, it's frightening to think about a world where just five people decide to go rogue and just take down an entire network. network and just evaporate, you know, billion dollars worth of, you know, value. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, if you put these things into multi-sig, that just really renders it more

opaque, who has control over network. Chris Black, we did a great episode with him on this exact topic. I mean, I relied on some of his work for that admin key discussion, but it's like how I meant to cite a YouTube video. Right. Because that's where the knowledge is. Right. How do I cite an on the brink podcast episode?

Well, it's back to. who are, you know, this is why these requests for comment from regulators, they can't go out and cite a podcast episode, but if you just write down verbatim what you said on a podcast episode, it becomes part of the public record. So that's, it's kind of a weird dynamic there. So, yeah, this is my attempt to take common knowledge and effectively formalize it. And I'm not, you know, trying to destroy defy or anything. I just think ultimately regulatory outcomes will be better if regulators do understand this stuff. And I think they've, you know, the ones I've interacted with, Elise, have proven themselves extremely astute and very, very sharp, very capable.

And so I'm just trying to sort of furnish them with some some more complete understanding around the way things that can go wrong in Defi and turns out there's a ton of ways. I didn't cover them all in this paper. Speaking of regulatory, the SEC came out with their agenda for the next year and crypto was not on it. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah, I was kind of mystified by that. How can you not cover Bitcoin or crypto? Yeah, I would have thought the Bitcoin ETF or, you know, market structure, you know,

whether or not some of these things are unregistered securities. It seems like there's a lot going on in crypto and just did not see it on the agenda. It was interesting. Not to say they won't have enforcement actions. I'm sure they'll have a ton of them. they still have cases that are rumbling through the courts, of course, and they do occasionally bring enforcement action with three, four years of latency. But I guess it's a good thing overall.

It doesn't seem like they're going to come in and just have a sweeping. Here's the rules of the road. They're going to let it evolve. So I guess there's a charitable way to think about it, too. I think people would like a rules of the road, though. We've had this, quote, unquote, regulatory uncertainty for half a decade now, and people are getting sick of it. Well, there are definitely some places where I think there needs to be just regulatory clarity and a decision made.

The Bitcoin ETF, I think, would fall under that category. There are others where, you know, decentralized internet architecture and certain pockets of defy, it's just hard to tell from a market structure perspective what this stuff even is yet. So to some degree, I think just letting the innovation run for a little while on some of these categories where it's obviously not an unregistered security offering makes a good deal of sense. So, I don't know.

It'll be interesting. We'll see how they progress on this. So shall we get into deals of the week? There's quite a few. There are quite a few. Let's start out with one from the Castle Island portfolio. So Bitwise raised $70 million in a round with just a ton of awesome investors. So electric capital and Alad Gill led along with Henry Kravis, Dan Loeb, Stanley Drucken Miller,

Coinbase, Highland, Kosovo, Blockchain Capital, Castle Island, and others. So just an awesome round there. Congratulations to the Bitwise team. actually I interviewed Hunter last night and we're going to run it on Monday. So a bitwise episode on Monday. Huge congrats to Hunter and the team. Next up we have Bit Dow. Kind of reminds me of the Dow.

Decentralized investment fund. They raised $230 million from Pantera Dragonfly founders fund, Peter Thiel, jump capital, Alan Howard, Spartan Group, and others. Summer of the Dow. of the Dow coming up. What a race. I mean, talk about full circle here. I hope the outcome is better this time. It's a big one. Next one up is DYDX. This is the crypto derivatives platform. They raise $65 million in Series C financing led by Paradigm with participation from CMS, CMT, electric, hashkey, and Starkware. Then we have BC Technology Group, which is a parent company of OSL,

the Hong Kong-based trading platform. They raised $70 million in a private place. Next, we have Umi protocol, UMEE, UME. This is a cross-chain swap protocol. They raised 6.3 million from polychain, IDO, Coinbase, CMS, Alameda, BKCM. CMS, not to be denied this week. So then we have impervious technologies. They are building privacy tech on Bitcoin. They raised a pre-seed from Trammell venture partners. I think we'll be hearing from Trammell more.

their Bitcoin-focused venture fund, so a handful of those now emerging. Next is Instadap. This is an India-based company building Defi Middleware. They raised $10 million from standard crypto and Andre from Yern. Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol which aims at solving problems of over-collateralize. That round was led by A16Z with participation from SV Angel, Ballagies from Vassan, Defi lines, draft ventures, and quite a few more. Next is Real Vision. This is Raoul Paul's media company that has really landed into the crypto industry.

They raised $35 million in the round with a number of family offices. Then we have Sin Futures, a defy derivatives platform. There is 14 million in a series A from Polychie. framework, Pantara, By-Bit, Wintermute, CMS, Kronos, and iOSG. Next is Parsiq. This is a data monitoring platform. They raised $3 million, led by the Salana Foundation. And finally, Integrity. I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-E-E. Integrity. A blockchain privacy platform raised $2 million from L-D Capital, A-21, D-F-G, and others. Next one up is TRM, a blockchain forensics company.

They raised $14 million in a Series A led by Bessemer with participation from initialized jump capital, operator partners, blockchain capital, and others. The deal is just, they're rolling, they're rolling this week. So there was another, in news, Block 1 settled another lawsuit. And I must say both of these seem like great deals from their perspective. So they paid $27.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit relating to their $4 billion token. sale in 2018. Block 1. Great lawyers over there.

They're really good at picking the lawyers. Brock Pierce, I saw kind of appointed himself like the Bitcoin diplomat and led a delegation down to El Salvador. Yeah, as one does. As one does. So it's seemingly forgetting that he's not been on Team Bitcoin for like the last six years or whatever. He might have forgot that, but he's back.

It's nice to have him back in Team Bitcoin. Yeah, I saw him cite as just a justification. the 2012, his 2012 participation in the Bitcoin Foundation. It's like... Yeah, he's been around. That was nine years ago. I don't know if that's still valid. Well, it was nice of him to rally the troops down there. But talk about a shalacking. Twitter did not like that one. They didn't. So here's something interesting. You all heard our episode on Greenwich, sorry, Greenwich, which is the coal-turned natural gas facility mining Bitcoin

among other things, in upstate New York, which really, I guess, got New York legislators into frenzy. They proposed a bill placing a moratorium on mining in New York for three years. That bill has been defeated. Yeah, so that one, so it passed the state Senate and then it died in assembly. I'm curious to see what the forces, you know, killing that bill were, but it's great to see that it didn't go forward. The forces of, you know, facts maybe? I don't know.

Yeah, but like, so it passed the state Senate. So that's not good. Yeah, but I mean, I've been pointing out that that bill would have actually raised Bitcoin's carbon intensity had it passed because New York has a relatively green grid and they have plenty of hydropower, especially in upstate New York. And so mining that happens in New York is pretty green. I mean, New York could not be. doing any more that is just to kill the crypto industry in that state. It is the most hostile state in the entire union in terms of if you wanted to start a business or if you wanted to start a business unit from a big company. It's just a really tough place to operate. Yeah, it's not been good. Hopefully other states follow the Florida or the Texas of the Wyoming model.

Yeah. So micro strategy was back in the news this week. Sailor is just an animal here. So they completed the $500 million over-subscribed bond offering to buy more Bitcoin last week. And so those were senior secured. They're secured by Bitcoin as opposed to convertible notes. And so, yeah, the thought process there, I think, was, let's not do any more dilution here. Or so people thought, they announced right on the heels of that the day that that bond offering closed that they will be selling $1 billion in stocked by even more Bitcoin.

So we have $1.5 billion in Fiat coming in pretty soon here to buy more Bitcoin on behalf of micro strategy, which is just staggering. If this works, I mean, he squeezed the pips out of the lemon. I mean, the amount of like financial engineering that's occurring here is staggering. I mean, it's just a speculative attack on the dollar, right? He's just turning his company into a conduit to just amass more and more Bitcoin. You had joked about the number of, would you say, he's trying to get to 100K? He's going to get way above that. He's going to be well above that.

Yeah. But I mean, how much leverage can you squeeze out of this asset micro strategy? Ultimately, it only produces X amount of cash flows. You need to service all those cash flows. Well, so you take the converts and you convert them into equity, I guess, right? I mean, it's... It really is a lesson in the loose capital environment right now, that he's continually able to find new structures to extract...

debt and equity from the capital markets, despite micro strategy itself being a relatively unexciting business, not to sound harsh. Well, you know, you have to hand it to him, though, because he was completely transparent with what he was trying to do. So he telegraphed this. He gave people, you know, shareholders the ability to redeem and get out of this before they bought any Bitcoin.

So he was incredibly forthcoming with the strategy. and he's just executing on it. The scope of what he's trying to do here is so much bigger than we originally thought. So speaking of Michael Saylor, I participated in his inaugural mining council spaces, which was like a conference call,

but just using Twitter spaces last night. How was that? I cut the last like 10 minutes of that. You were already gone. Yeah, I asked whether they would mandate disclosure, whether members would have any kind of obligations with regards to disclosure. And sailors seemed to suggest that they hadn't made up their minds yet. So is the community sort of come down on the fact that this is not a, you know,

let's co-op, Bitcoin type of group? Well, that was definitely one of the key messages of that space was we are not going to impose obligations or duties on members. and they're also apparently not going to really have any gating factor for membership. So virtually any minor, U.S. or not, is apparently welcome to be a part of this thing. So that should calm some people down, I would imagine. Yeah, it appears that the main product that this council will produce is reports covering Bitcoin's energy consumption. And so it would, apparently it's going to be more of an informational resource.

and anything. So they're just trying to get to 50% Korean so that Elon can start accepting Bitcoin for Tesla's again? Yeah, Elon has tweeted again this morning asking for more data on this. I mean, it's just never ending with him. Like if we give him the data, will he look at the data and really, you know, entertain it? Or it's like I'm trying to figure out how we can deliver informational payloads to him so that he sort of ingests them. and is placated. If you just stop thinking about them, it actually gets a lot better. So I suggest people just start doing that.

Maybe if we somehow communicate in meme format, he seems to really be kind of a meme connoisseur. Yeah, he's having fun out there, that's for sure. Yeah, he's having fun, you know, distracting everyone in the crypto industry and causing us to scramble, you know, every time he tweets, which is crazy. Yeah, I'm looking through his timeline right now. There are just a staggering amount of memes. Yeah, he loves memes. He really does love memes.

He loves memes, yeah. Okay, the SEC charged whatever BCT token is. They apparently did a $30 million ICO. This is the Boaz-Mainer one, the CG blockchain, BCC. This is a big thing. They'd already charge some people. I mean... They've charged more now about it, people.

It's an unbelievable amount of backlog here when you just think about all the nonsense that was going on in 2017 around, you know, just go to ICO bench and some of these, you know, ICO drops websites and just look at some of the things that happened back then. And half of this stuff is just still hanging out there. And I'm sure the SEC is just trying to work through it. And it's like, okay, well, this, These guys stole $30 million.

These guys stole $45 million. Didn't ship anything. There's so much of this. Yeah. I mean, there's probably hundreds of others like BCT token. Yeah. There was one of these like every week. It was you pick a crazy idea.

It was on a blockchain with an etherdress. And it raised $20 million in 2017. Fed's got to raise rates. Fed's got to raise rates. That's the only way this ends. Just crazy. Crazy. So just some personnel news.

So Mike Lempress, the former chief legal officer at Coinbase, he has joined Silvergate Capital as chairman. So that's a strong move over there by Silvergate. Congrats to Mike and the Silvergate team. There's a great op-ed in the WSJ, which is a sentence I rarely find myself saying these days. Really surprising. It was really great. It was called a global first Bitcoin as national currency is written by Max Raskin. And it was just really thoughtful.

Yeah, unlike a lot of the other media coverage, it wasn't knee-jerk critical of the move. Max also identifies the fact that the Fed is weaponizing the money supply and that Al Salvador is potentially derisking their exposure to the dollar here. Max also wrote a great paper with David Yermak back in the day about the merits of a multi-covert. currency world and their potential to introduce consumer welfare. I actually cited that paper because I thought his name was familiar. I'd cited that paper in my most peaceful revolution blog post way back in the day. And so Max, a really, really solid academic and writer and somehow convinced the WSJ

editorial board to print an article which was not critical of Bitcoin. You love to see it. Yeah, maybe we're kind of shifting to. new phase here. I'm still trying to secure a column in one of these tier one publications hasn't happened yet. Just so you can get the propaganda out there? Well, it would also be cool. But yes, orange pill the masses. So returning to El Salvador, I think we're going to talk about El Salvador a lot in the coming months. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, if this is, this is either going to be really ugly and it's going to show that, you know, lightning network's not ready for

prime time or it's just going to be one of many kind of events where you have sovereigns adopting Bitcoin. So it's either going to be really good or it's going to be kind of ugly. It could go terribly wrong. First of all, a lot of Salvadoran economists are really upset about it, as I've seen from the Twitter discourse. A lot of regular monetary economists are not happy. They're saying it's a coercive law. It's not a legal tender. it's like a enforced legal mandate. So like the Micey, the Mises guys, I always say that wrong, but the Mises Institute. George Selgin, very, very unhappy about it.

They refer to as a forced tender law because merchants must accept Bitcoin if you interpret it according to the letter of the law, which honestly I think is wrong. I don't believe it is going to be a forced tender law. I think the law is underspecified, and we were going to have to wait 82 more days to see how it actually gets implemented. But, you know, a lot of people love to jump ahead and just blindly assume what things are going to look like three months from now. And, you know, take these very uncharitable interpretations of the law. But I suppose we'll see. I, for one, am taking a wait-and-see attitude.

I recommend that the other fiat economists do the same. So what's the, the World Bank was, maybe hostile is the right word towards this? Certainly not friendly. Yeah. So the various Bretton Woods institutions are scandalized by end. So the IMF, not happy. World Bank, also not happy. IMF, you know, this move might throw the IMF's, you know, generosity into question with regards to helping Elsie.

Salvador with its fiscal position. Now, the World Bank has also said they're not going to help with the implementation of the law. And I suppose as both of those institutions are very closely linked to the dollar and to U.S. dominance and things like that, it's not that surprising. It's, you know, if you just separate yourself from the emotion here, you have a country that has pegged its currency to another country, a bigger country. The bigger country decides to print 25% more dollars and set it up as transfer payments just to people living in that bigger country, while the smaller country still needs to use that currency. So the obvious effect is the inflationary impact on smaller currency or a smaller country. And they want to maybe get off of that.

Why is that so crazy? You're not allowed to question the orthodoxy. It's just so if you just approach this from a pure economic standpoint, it's like, well, they printed more money over there and we can't get any more of that money that they just printed. So maybe we should think about something else. So historically, your incentive to play ball has been financing, either short-term from the IMF or long-term from the World Bank. And it may be the case that El Salvador is forsaking these tools. Certainly other states have done so. They tend to come with stipulations and strings attached. They're not neutral.

They're not solely coming from the beneficence of the U.S. It's kind of the same way that, you know, being part of the Belt and Road Initiative has strings attached too. So maybe this is, as Ballagy keeps saying, maybe this is the growth of a new non-aligned movement where certain countries stake their third way. They reject the fraying kind of bread, Woods, Washington Consensus, some people refer to it as. They reject the Sino Capital,

the Belt and Road, the DCEP way, and they take the Bitcoin way. Well, so if you think about all the other countries that have had sort of a tax on the dollar, think about Gaddafi, think about Saddam Hussein, they did not have like a groundswell of support in the United States. And so if the United States wanted to go after those people, it was not controversial. if there's some move here that the United States can take retribution on El Salvador, if they want to do something like that, I think it would be really unpopular, particularly with technically sophisticated people who understand cryptocurrency.

Yeah, I think there's a zero percent chance that there's an actual military reprisal here, a zero percent chance. With Gaddafi, I mean, he was like a genuine dictator. Yeah, he was like a bad guy, right? Yeah, he was objectively not a good guy. Saddam, a genuine dictator. genuine dictator. Buckele was democratically elected, Western nation. There's tons of Salvadorians living and working in the U.S. Those are tightly interlinked economies. The U.S. will probably

find ways to put them under pressure if they are really upset by this. They shouldn't be, but I don't think we're going to see a military reprisal, I think. A lot of people jump straight to those other cases where countries question the petrodollar. You have to remember, like, Iraq, in Libya, those were also big oil-producing nations, and so they're more important in terms of dollar hegemony than El Salvador, that's for sure. And other nations have de-dollarized in the past without, you know, significant reprisals. Yeah, in the grand scheme of things, the GDP of El Salvador is on par with maybe a mid-sized U.S. state anyway. So it's not like the biggest country out there.

So I don't think the story is fully written. I think we'll see more developments there. Also, it looks like there's a contagion because quite possibly the Salvadoran experiment is looking attractive to other Latin American policymakers. An opposition politician in Panama has actually suggested that he would introduce a bill to do roughly the same thing. Panama also dollarized country. So, you know, this is kind of what we, did we predict Panama on this show?

I was, I thought that it would be, I can't remember if I said Norway or one of the kind of big energy sovereign wealth fund countries is what I always thought would dollarize first or would adopt Bitcoin first or buy it, maybe. That's true. I think our big picks with Norway and Singapore back when we did our predictions a few months ago. But last week when we talked about future destinations, I think we, in the near term, I think we said Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica. Yeah. Yeah. And so we'll see. We'll see. I mean, does Bitcoin need this? No. I mean, it's like the micro-strategy thing.

Bitcoin doesn't need sovereigns to adopt legal tender laws. What I thought was at best central banks would adopt it in their foreign exchange reserves. Making it legal tender is an additional move beyond what I'd expected. Making it legal tender could be, you know, huge for holders of this. this and changing the way the tax treatment works could be a real game changer for companies in the United States for individuals eventually it could be yeah that's maybe what people should be thinking about more i mean it puts it on an even par with the dollar it's it's really astonishing that this tax treatment is how the dollar's primacy is maintained that is the key way all right so

i think that's it for the week we um i guess the maybe the last update for people's still listening is you came down to my house this week and you broke my slingshot. Yeah, we, I wanted to see the turkeys. There weren't any. I was practicing with the slingshot and the little clay pellets, I guess. And your slingshot just didn't prove robust enough. So maybe that's part of the problem. That it's just the slingshot just wasn't good enough.

Yeah, we have to get you an industrial grade one. But yeah, we'll be back with an update next week. hopefully, you know, we have some turkey scalps sitting here in the office. We might have to edit the, we might have to edit out the. Turkeys don't have feelings and they don't listen to this podcast. They don't know what's coming. It's only Brink Nation that knows. All right, everyone.

We'll have a great week and we'll see you on Monday.