On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 12/04/20 (The Dastardly STABLE Act, USDC partners with Visa, Larry Fink evolves on Bitcoin) (EP.154)

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

In this week's episode, Nic and Matt torch the STABLE Act cosponsored by their local representative Stephen Lynch (MA-8). Also covered:  Stephen Lynch and Rashida Tlaib's STABLE Act What the STABLE Act requires of fintech providers hosting user balances What stablecoin issuers are not like banks Why the STABLE Act would be disastrous for competition in the Fintech space Why the moral positioning for the bill is internally inconsistent The prospects for the STABLE Act Why legislation like the STABLE Act will likely become USDC partners with Visa, and what it means for the industry Why the USDC-Visa partnership solves a critical issue that the industry has had for years BlockFi announces a Bitcoin-back credit card Larry Fink starts to shift his tone on Bitcoin Garry Cohn's bizarre new Bitcoin critique Our takeaways from the BCAP Bitcoin survey Will Bitcoin outlive the Euro? Content mentioned in this episode:  Spencer Bogart, Bitcoin is (Still) a Demographic Mega-Trend Niall Ferguson, Bitcoin Is Winning the Covid-19 Monetary Revolution The STABLE Act press release Coin Center, The Unintended (?) Consequences of the STABLE Act 

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.

Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And we're in person. We are back in the office. How long has it been? It has been since March, like 11th or 12th, since we've been both in the office doing this.

Yeah, it's been almost a year or remote podcasts. We got pretty good at it. I think we're pretty good at it. And we're not back back. This is not that we're dismissing the virus, but we're doing a special. thing in the office today that we have to be here. We were nostalgic for the office. We missed the view.

It's still great. But a lot happening this week. Yeah, all kinds of crazy nonsense. Just, you know, our local state rep is acting up again. We'll get into that. We complained about him before. It seems like we're going to have a lot of complaining to do in the future as well. I think he heard our call to say this guy is being hostile towards fintech startups.

and he just said, what can I do in order to just be super hostile? And then he did that right before the end of the year. Yeah, maybe he listened to our show and he was antagonized by it. And he chose to write some pretty bonkers legislation, which is crazy because he oversees a district with a lot of fintech. So of course we're talking about Stephen Lynch. We might as well get into this right now because it's definitely, in my mind, one of the stories of the week.

Unfortunately, it took away from some big stories like USC and Circle and Visa. with a big collaboration. But Stephen Lynch has introduced a bill, which seems like it's not going anywhere, but the fact that he introduced it is problematic, introduced a bill that would essentially require any stable coin issuer to be a bank. And probably if you read the bill, it's actually more egregious than that. I think you were saying that it would really be that like anyone with stored value on a fintech platform, he's saying should have to go register to be a national bank.

Yeah, that's right. Right, so this is the stable bill. I think they spend more time figuring out the funny acronym than they did actually thinking about the contents of the bill. Because the bill is insane. It requires, as you say, not just stable coin issuers, although they claim to be referring only to stable coins, which is an industry term of art.

But really, and the authors admitted this recently, it requires any fintech platform with customer IOUs that are sort of redeemable for dollars, so PayPal, Venmo, et cetera, et cetera, to apparently get a banking license, which makes next to no sense because what stable coin issuers are doing is not actually banking. What banks do is they create credit, you know, they're doing underwriting, they're engaging in maturity transformation, they do not hold all of those dollars on deposit. They don't hold them in reserve. They hold a tiny fraction. And, you know, then they have all these obligations to make potential withdrawals.

Stable loan issuers just simply lock up dollars in commercial banks, typically, equivalent to IOUs circulating on chain, and that's it. There's no banking activity occurring. It's not a depository relationship. It's just a completely different kind of activity. It's really mind-boggling. I mean, it's very clear from reading the outlines of this bill that the people that have proposed it just don't understand how the industry works, stable coins work. It's even more troubling

that I don't really know what the motivation is here. I mean, is it that they're trying to protect the banks? Because certainly that's what the net effect would be, is just really marginalizing the ability to start a fintech company. So really would just kneecap entrepreneurs who are going after these fintech opportunities. And I don't really understand the impetus. Like, why is that politically astute for Stephen Lynch to just come out and not allow fintech entrepreneurs to exist. Yeah, and another good point here is that this is, it seems to me that this is kind of targeting Facebook and their DM, formerly known as Libre Project, because obviously their activity would be captured under the scope of this bill. But I think what the authors failed to

understand is that there's always unintended consequences when you try and regulate these big companies with legislation and imposing onerous regulatory demands upon them most likely means that the largest companies are equipped to deal with them. And I think the net effect would be actually stifling competition from smaller fintax and stable coin issuers that can't keep up and can't afford a bank charter. I mean, Facebook can easily, they can afford a hundred bank charters if they wanted. Oh, no doubt about it. I mean, the net effect of this bill would be to absolutely hamströmptory.

early stage startups from existing in the fintech space. I think Jeremy Allaire had a really great take on this. It was very measured. I mean, they're coming right for him. So I'm surprised that he was so cogent and thoughtful in this. Obviously, we're a little bit riled up. But Jeremy said the Stable Act would represent a huge step backwards for digital currency innovation in the United States, limiting the accelerating progress of both the blockchain

and the fintech industry. Our industry is delivering solutions that materially improve the speed accessibility, and cost efficiency of payments and banking in the United States and around the world. Any act of Congress in this sphere should be focusing on embracing, investing in, and supporting the incredible pace of open innovation that is happening with stable coins and blockchain infrastructure. An enormous amount of innovation brought to the underbanked and small businesses has been driven by non-fin tech, non-bank fintech companies, Stripe, Square, PayPal, Circle, Coinbase, Apple, Google, and many, many others.

forcing crypto, fintech, and blockchain companies into the enormous regulatory burdens of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC regulation and supervision is inconsistent with the goals of supporting innovation in the fair and inclusive delivery of payments that comes from stablecoins. While there is clearly a long-term role for the Fed to play in the development of the standards and supervision around stablecoins, that should emerge from high level of public-private engagement and collaboration. This collaboration should be focused around the tech, and governance standards for stable coins, which may ultimately require new forms of charters and supervision that haven't yet been considered. We look forward to constructive engagement with

federal agencies as leading private sector actors continue to innovate in this rapidly emerging field. So I thought that was well stated. Yeah, I'm impressed that Jeremy kept us cool because effectively what we have is his local representative. Circle is in Massachusetts 8. The HQ for Circle is in MA8, the local representative is trying to push through regulation that would make life much, much more difficult for Circle's business. And I'd be shocked if anyone from Stephen Lynch's office has reached out to Circle. You have one of the largest companies in the industry, one of the forefront of this innovation sitting right in your home district. And I would bet that they haven't even gotten in to do an education session. And here's the kind of perverse thing. I mean, the language

that these representatives are using to sell the bill has to do with financial exclusion. You know, in the press release, Rashida Taleb says, getting ahead of the curve on preventing cryptocurrency providers from repeating the crimes against low and moderate income residents of color that traditional big bands have and has been critically is and has been critically important. It's internally contradictory because if she's saying that banks are systematically, you know, deplatforming or misbehaving relative to, you know, low-income users, what is then the purpose of, you know, stifling innovation and forcing stable coin

issuers to obtain banking licenses and become banks? I mean, if her animus is against banks, why then is the solution that's being proposed become a bank? That makes absolutely no sense. If you want to deliver consumer surplus, you don't force everyone to get a banking charter, which guarantees that there would be fewer organizations active in the space. It guarantees less competitiveness. You open up the free market. You let the free market deliver these services, which is exactly what's happened with stablecoin issuers and fintechs generally. And it has delivered an amazing consumer surplus.

Just look at Cash App, for instance. Cash App has banked tens of millions of Americans that are, underbanked or don't have a bank, this regulation would make that virtually impossible. It's a great point. It's a really great point. You know, one of the things that's going on here is, and this is a little bit of a inside baseball view, this bill apparently has no chance. So it's the end of the session. It's not a bipartisan bill. It doesn't have a corresponding bill in the Senate. So it's not really going anywhere. And I've spoken with a number of startups and actually some bigger firms in the space as well over the past day or so. And there's kind of this perception of,

look, this is a crazy bill, but we're not going to come out and say anything because it's going to die. And we'll see if something bigger gets introduced in the next Congress. And we'll open him all then. But look, Stephen Lynch is the senior ranking member of the House Committee of Financial Services. He's the chair of the task force on financial technology, FinTech. And he's just basically signaling that he's ready to torpedo the entire industry. So, hey, call to action. If you're a company in this space and you're active and your business is contemplating using stable coins, using public blockchain infrastructure, time to stand up. And, you know, these people work for us. It's time to let your voice be heard. And we don't want to see this

reintroduced in the next Congress. This is just torpedoing the industry. Yeah. And I sometimes get some defeatist vibes from folks in the crypto industry as it pertains to regulation or, you know, the inevitability of certain patterns of activity being banned and so on. But, you know, remember, laws are malleable and they are, in theory, at least, a function of what the populace is willing to tolerate, and they're designed to change. So these representatives can't just unilaterally make laws that make no sense. And, you know, some interpretations have this bill making, operating an Ethereum node illegal, which is just completely preposterous. So if the technological reality on the ground makes certain laws impractical or just, you know, puts them out of step with reality, it's sort of our job to communicate that to these people who might be operating within these completely obsolete mental frameworks.

And I think that's clearly what's happening here. So, you know, speaking up makes a difference here. And we're certainly going to continue to speak up, see if I can get an audience with this guy. where he's constituents, so he should probably listen to us. Representatives are, in theory,

meant to represent us. So I think we have to kind of come together as an industry and do something about this here. Yeah, well, more to come on this,

I'm sure, but not a great way to, not a great way to start the podcast, but hey, it is what it is. It's kind of a stupid bill. I mean, and this is sort of

what we expected. As the crypto industry grows and goes from strength to strength and adoption increases, blockchain capital, had a great survey that just published about adoption and awareness increasing year every year. As the stable coin float grows, as Bitcoin gets larger and larger and continues to monetize,

certain people that are ideologically opposed to free enterprise and unencumbered commerce and non-state money will push back. And we're going to see a lot of this in the coming years. and it's our job to advocate for this growing constituency of people that have these extremely positive experiences with cryptocurrency, with stablecoins, and with fintech, which this covers. Those have unambiguously been a positive thing for the world, and they're going to come under pressure here as they start to erodes the state's kind of privilege on monetary action. So the stakes are only going to grow from here, unfortunately.

All right, so more to come on that for sure. Let's transition into some deals of the week. So, you know, for those of you who might be new to the podcast, the reason why we do these is to highlight the companies that are growing. Typically, companies that are raising capital or ones that will be hiring. So if you're interested in this industry, here are some companies that you might want to keep an eye on. First one is actually a Castle Island deal. So Rabbit Hole announced their round this morning. Yeah, so Rabbit Hole is a product which basically,

allows for the incentivized adoption of D5 protocols kind of similar in nature to urn.com. So we participate in that round alongside collaborative and slow and a number of angels. So congratulations to the rabbit hole team. Next one up is Zieglu. Zieglu is a crypto trading app. It was founded by

former Starling Bank founder Mark Hipperson. They raised 6.1 million pounds in a crowdfunding round. Next up, we have a firm that I'm sure we will be talking about a lot more in the future on this show. New York Digital Investment Group or NIDIG. They raised $150 million for two cryptocurrency funds. Yeah, NIDIG is a monster. It is an absolute infrastructure monster down in New York.

So they're building custody, trade execution, derivatives, asset management. This is a firm that if you have not heard of them, you'll definitely be hearing more about them in the coming years. And they've definitely been below the radar in the crypto industry so far, but they'll be growing in stature here shortly. And the last one up is one inch, which is a decentralized exchange aggregator. They raised $12 million in a round led by Pantera. It had participation from Parify, Spark, Gumi Cryptos, blockchain capital, Alex Pack, and a number of angels. Congrats to the one inch team. So we already kind of covered one news item, but there was actually a whole lot of stuff that went down this week. So where should we start?

Why don't we start with the USDA and Visa announcement? What did you make of this? And what was it? So if it hadn't been for this disastrous stable bill, I think this would have been the news of the week. Yeah, for sure. This is a really fascinating development. And it's one of those signs of industry maturity, which people might overrun it. look a little bit, but is incredibly consequential, and I think representative of the shift that this industry is going through this year. So effectively, Visa is partnering up with Circle, with the USC. Visa will not currently be cusseting USC, but it looks like there is a path to a closer a relationship. Effectively, they will help Visa credit card issuers start integrating USDC software and will allow them to send and receive USDC payments. And then in the future,

once Circle graduates from the Visa Fast Track program, Visa will issue a credit card which lets businesses send and receive USDC. So effectively, this integrates USDC into visas enormous payments network. And I think there's a couple takeaways. One thing is that if you are a business that pays your employees, you do payroll in USC term, in USC terms, because maybe your employees are in 15 different countries and you don't want to go through the correspondent banking system to do that, they then have the problem of having USDC, which may not necessarily be accepted by local merchants. So you have kind of a a supply chain issue because you can't convert the whole supply chain to stable coins all at once.

So Visa helps them alleviate this by allowing them to spend USDC and the merchants are just receiving regular old fiat on the other side. So this makes it much easier to actually spend USDC once you have it within the kind of regular financial system. So I think that was a significant barrier to stable coins getting greater adoption was the ability to actually exit a stable coin position through regular payment channels. And now that this looks to be on the pathway to being solved, you'd expect that people would be much more willing to accept USDC payments because they can sort of use them easily without having to convince another recipient of their transaction to custody stable coins.

Yeah, I think that's the way to think about it. And as Kai Sheffield, who's the head of crypto at Visa said, you know, Visa is this network of networks. And so this is really just bringing a blockchain network and a stablecoin network like USC into that network with Visa. And there's tremendous network effects around others being included in that network as well. And so it's a real, if you just think about this from a distribution perspective for USDC, it's about as big as you can get.

I can't think of another network that you'd want to plug into in order to just get. accessibility for your product. So these, you know, these guys have been working on for a long time. It's really impressive. So great job by the Circle team and the Visa team. You know, you know, Visa had this like little skunk works thing and now it's real. Yeah. And I think really the trend here is blurring the lines between on-chain payments and established payment networks. and this is also something that I think PayPal is pushing towards. You know, you'll be able to hold your crypto balance and then pay with PayPal at a merchant, with, you know, debuting against that crypto balance and the payment actually occurring in Fiat terms.

Similar concept, basically creating tools, semi-custodial or fully custodial tools, but tools nonetheless to allow individuals with crypto assets to transact in the regular old kind of legacy, I suppose, payments system, which I think obviates a lot of those critiques about, you know, crypto not being saleable or it being trapped in its own silo. You don't have to flip everyone to accepting Bitcoin anymore. You don't have to go into merchants and say, hey, would you accept Bitcoin? Chances are, at this point, if they accept regular payments from some of these payment

processors, they probably, by proxy, accepting crypto transactions too. So it's a big sea change here. And this is one of the big, big critiques of the industry. You know, it's not good for payments. You have to go in and individually sell these brick and mortar businesses to accept Bitcoin, you know, learn how to use a wallet. That critique is kind of being obviated by this. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, staying in that kind of vein talking about some payments innovations, BlockFi announced that their credit card is coming. So they are collaborating with Visa around a 1.5% Bitcoin cashback card. And the wait list just started. I got right on it. I don't know about you, but I cannot wait for this product. I'm so pumped. And obviously, we're investors in BlockFi. So we're a little biased here.

But this is a real Bitcoin back credit card. That's an industry first. I mean, 1.5% cash back paid in Bitcoin. How many people are about to have their first Bitcoin accrued just because of their credit card purchases? This is unbelievable. Passively accumulating Bitcoin, you're spending credit, you know, fiat credit, the worst money in history, and you're getting the hardest money in history back.

It's like a speculative attack on US dollars. How good is that? The only downside is that this encourages you to spend through that worthless fiat as fast as possible. You're going to have people trying to buy cars on their credit cards. Like, can you buy a house with a credit card? Come on. We'll find out. We're going to find out.

I'm so pumped. My current credit card for three years, I just didn't take advantage of the rewards that I was piling up because I was just too lazy to. And they came in gift card format. So recently, I just received like 20 gift cards in the mail, which was all my accumulated rewards. That could have been Bitcoin. Oh, man. Well, I have a great credit card right now. It's a fidelity card.

It's a 2% cashback, but you can put it into any of your fidelity account so you can fund your 529. So, you know, it's a classic question is, do you want to stack more Bitcoin because that'll help pay for college or do you want to put it directly into the 529? I don't know. It would be great if we could do both. Yeah, this is so, so exciting. Zach, please bump us to the top of the list if you're listening. They also announced this week that they're now active in the CME. Bitcoin futures and options block trading market as a liquidity provider.

So blockfi, it's like every week they have something. That's great. Did you see Larry Fink's comments on Bitcoin recently? Yeah, Larry Fink, who previously hasn't had that many positive things to say about Bitcoin came out this week and he was talking about how this has caught the attention of many people. He was interesting. He was talking about the searches on the company's website and how Bitcoin is very high up on the search terms and it's caught the attention of obviously a lot of people and that he's saying

this could evolve into a global market asset, which I think is a really good term for it. It's kind of this global market asset, this pristine collateral, whatever you want to call it. I'd encourage people that have the ability at your companies to check the searches for Bitcoin. If you work at an asset manager or brokerage, that might be something interesting to take a look at. Go through some of these firms have call center technology that can identify words and pinpointed, but be curious what the number is for Bitcoin. I mean, if you're sitting on the inside of one of these places, we hear from listeners all the time that, hey, I work in a big bank,

or I'm at this broker-dealer, and we're kind of thinking about Bitcoin. I'm trying to educate people about stable coins and crypto assets, but management doesn't have a buy-in. Hey, if you have the ability to go check the call center logs or check the search terms for Bitcoin versus other types of assets, that might help you out. That might make your case a little bit. Yeah, so it worked for Larry Fink, I guess.

I mean, he had been pretty much a skeptic before, and now he's saying, look, Bitcoin could well be on the path to being a genuine monetary asset. He emphasized that it's still somewhat illiquid, pretty small, it's not sufficiently. Because BlackRock deals in trillions and trillions of dollars. To BlackRock, Bitcoin is still too small, really, for them to truly take notice of and engage with. But, you know, that's also a demonstration of kind of the Lindy effect. He's saying, look, if we, if this thing lasts a couple more cycles and it sticks around and proves itself to be anti-fragile, then we'll take it even more seriously. So, you know,

never forget, as a newly monetizing asset, the mere passage of time is a positive for Bitcoin. Because that in the minds of people like Larry Fink, that does vindicate it as an enduring monetary asset of consequence. So, Bitcoin just has to survive in order to get more credibility. Yeah, I think a lot of people look at the big run-up in 2017 and fell off the face of the earth after that, down, what, 80%. And the fact that it came back, I think, has caught in a lot of people's attention. I mean, tulips didn't come back.

It's always the second bubble that gets you. The first bubble, you can write it off because it looks like a bubble. But the second time around, you see it come back and now you start to wonder about it a little bit. Yeah. Well, Gary Cohn didn't really have the same sentiments about it. So Gary Cohn is the former president of Goldman Sachs. He thinks Bitcoin might fail because the system today has no, quote, has no transparency to it. There are a lot of people that question why you'd need a system that does not have an audit trail. That was a head scratcher. Yeah. Of all the critiques of Bitcoin, we've heard many. I have never heard this one before because it's the craziest thing ever because Bitcoin is the most auditable. asset possibly in history. Was he misquoted or something? Because like if you run a Bitcoin node, you have an audited transaction log of every

transaction that's ever happened on the entire network. I mean, you don't have KYC. I mean, maybe he's talking about you don't have KYC attached to it, but they're a puzzling. There's also no assets which natively have KYC built into them. Yeah. To be clear, gold is just gold, okay? There's no history. There's no gold transactional log for anyone to consult.

There's no fiat. There's no dollar transactional log. Those U.S. dollars, the physical ones, there's no log of those transactions whatsoever. So I don't really understand his prerequisite for something being an asset of consequence because no assets have these kind of inbuilt KIC mechanisms. That's all right. We'll go easy on Gary this week. He had a tough week. I don't know if you saw Goldman's trying to claw back $10 million worth of bonuses due to the one MDB thing. So he's got other things on his mind this week. Yeah, we would invite Gary to learn a little bit about Bitcoin. There's a whole literature now mastering Bitcoin. I mean, really, just read the Wikipedia page. Just the Wikipedia page along.

You'll understand it better. Yeah, we're going to give him a Mulligan on this one. That's all right. It's like, I read this. I said he didn't mean that. It just makes no sense. It's the precise opposite of reality. All right, Gary.

Well, we'll let you off on this one. Well, why don't we move on to the blockchain capital, Harris survey? So I like this survey. It comes out, I think, every year, 18 months or something like that. But blockchain capital basically hires Harris, the polling company, to do a report on people's attitudes towards cryptocurrency. And this year, I thought there was some interesting tidbits. Yeah, for me, the headline figure was they got among, here's the caveat.

It's among individuals polled who had heard of any cryptocurrency. crypto asset. 14 of them claimed to own Bitcoin and that equivalent figure was 9% in the prior edition of the survey in spring 2019. So the survey, they covered a lot of different questions. Most of them showed renewed growth from 2019 to present. I don't know if this 14% is generalizable to the whole US population, but still a really interesting headline figure. The other interesting thing was that in the 18 to 34 age bracket, 55% of respondents said they were very or somewhat likely to purchase Bitcoin in the next five years. So we have officially flippened the millennial and the zoomer bracket. Yeah, that was interesting.

They're officially net positive on Bitcoin. There's another one that 38% of people surveyed expect Bitcoin to exist longer than the euro. I'm surprised that wasn't higher, actually. Yeah, that one is a total no-brainer. I would happily wager money that Bitcoin would outlast the euro. I mean, there's not even a question in my mind. Yeah, I mean, the euro, it's like, it's kind of been, it has teetered kind of on the brink, so to speak. Yeah, that thing is really on its last legs.

One of the interesting takeaways is that Bitcoin awareness is kind of saturated. So you could think it's either good or bad, but we're talking about 91% penetration in terms of millennials that have heard of Bitcoin. Even in the older bracket, 65 plus, 90% of those pulled had heard of Bitcoin. So this is another explanation for that puzzle about why there aren't that many Google searches

about Bitcoin, I would say. It's because people already know what Bitcoin is. They don't need to search what is Bitcoin again. At this point, they kind of know what it is. Now the question is, you know, does that convert into wanting to take a position in Bitcoin? That's a very different concept entirely. But to me, Bitcoin awareness is saturated. Now, I think, is the stage where people get comfortable owning some, which is a totally different thing.

Yeah, yeah. Another story this week that I thought was interesting was, and it's from ErasX, which is also one of our portfolio companies, they introduced these new futures contracts that I thought were kind of clever. I haven't seen something like this before. So they're cash collateralized bounded futures contracts. So basically the upper and the lower bounds can be capped to protect against maximum potential losses, which is really kind of interesting in the context of crypto assets where you do have these crazy price swings.

So it bounds that kind of upside and the downside on some of these products. So I think this is interesting from the perspective of just a new type of contract that is possible and really an emergent phenomenon as a result of public blockchain technologies. They're entered into and settled in cash, which allows the customers who kind of otherwise might be restricted from holding crypto assets directly to gain that exposure. So there is that kind of market structure thing here where there's there are people that would like to participate in these markets but can't hold the asset directly as an institution. So this, I think it'll be interesting to see if people pick up on this.

So what did you make of Neil Ferguson's massive on the topic of Bitcoin in Bloomberg? Yeah, so super well-respected monetary historian coming out and basically saying that he spent a lot of time understanding Bitcoin and he's a big fan, it looks like. Yeah, we kind of actually knew this already, although this is his magnum opus as it pertains to Bitcoin. He was involved in some capacity in Ampleforth. Fun fact about Neil Ferguson. But yeah, he's tweeted favorable things about Bitcoin. the past, but he sat down and wrote a long favorable thing, which is incredibly well done,

my opinion. And he's, of course, the author of The Ascent of Money, which I think he had put a chapter on cryptocurrency at the end of that, the new edition. So, yeah, this was a well-written-up op-ed, really. And some people didn't like it, actually. Yeah, so he did have some critiques of Bitcoin. So these are maybe slightly better than it's not auditable. So he says it's slow, is a means of payment, which is fair, although, you know, I think at this point we've probably evolved beyond thinking it's a retail payments mechanism, hopefully. He also says there's high transaction costs. He actually talks about Coinbase fees, which some people thought wasn't a valid critique, but honestly, I mean, onshoreing wealth into Bitcoin from the, you know,

the Fiat world is going to come with fees. So he's not wrong. that there are transaction costs in engaging in currency substitution. There are totally are costs. And then he also says there's a negative externality because Bitcoin produces waste through mining, which is kind of a classic argument. Yeah, well, it's, I mean, we've heard that before. But yeah, I thought this was great.

I mean, there's a lot of, it's probably not surprising that, you know, the price of Bitcoin has gone up. So a lot of people are waiting in. Paul Tudor Jones had another really good interview I thought on Yahoo Finance this week. Talked about a range of issues. Talked about political election stuff. Talked about digital currency. Basically I just said, look, I think it's the wrong market cap.

He's like, I'm not an expert, but it reminds me of internet stocks in 1999. No one knows how to value them because there's a world of possibility ahead. And so that's how he thinks about cryptocurrency. So someone is wrong. And it's either Paul or everyone else. Yeah, I mean, Paul Tudor Jones, betting against him hasn't historically been a great way to make money. Yeah, I'm going to take his side of that one.

Well, we had some great podcasts that came out this week. We did Matthias Inbach from Cignam, which is a full-service crypto bank in Switzerland and Singapore, which people, the feedback I got from that episode was people were shocked to hear that there were these full functional crypto banks operating already because our experience in the U.S. is not that, level of progression. We also had an episode of Pelle Brannigard

of Nodabene, which was largely about the travel role, kind of demystifying a travel role. And we have some really great ones coming up next week too.

Yeah, we've got a ton of content heading into the holiday season. And I think we're probably going to do two a week here for a little while. So next week, we have a minor Chinese-based minor.

who has agreed to come on and give us the China perspective on mining and finally answer the question, does China control Bitcoin? Oh, man, I can't wait. What is going to be the answer? Who can say? What a tease. What a tease. Yeah.

And find out about the regional migration of hash power, all of these questions that are sort of rumors out here in the West. We're going to get to the bottom all of this. I'm very excited. All right. Well, I think that's all we have. I hope everyone has a great weekend. A little, we're landing the plan a little bit hot here with the fiery podcast to end the week.

But I hope everyone can look into that stable coin bill, form your own opinion, and let's go from there. Yeah, and if you are a constituent of one of these representatives, write them a letter or something. I don't know how it is that people contact their representatives these days. Yeah, certainly their email addresses are on their websites. and that's a good way to get in touch. We choose the podcast angle as a way. Hopefully they are eager and avid listeners of on the brink, and so they are getting our opinions this way.

I think if they were eager and avid listeners of our podcast, they would understand how transformative this technology is and maybe not be trying to kill it. That's true. They may not be our target demo for this podcast. Maybe we can convert them into listeners into the future. Well, that's it for this week. We will see you next week and have a great weekend.