On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 12/27/24 (Tether x Rumble, quantum threat, End of year predictions) (EP.587)

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for an end of year episode. In this episode:  Tether invests $775m in Rumble  Who are the Rumble shareholders in Trump's admin?  Microstrategy seeks approval for more Bitcoin buying We review the quantum risk to Bitcoin Matt and Nic's predictions for 2025  Sponsor notes:  Coin Metrics, State of the Network's 2024 Year in Review In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 291, we revisit major stories that shaped the digital asset industry in 2024 with a data-driven lens

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, A.I. $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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrix Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we are looking at the standout events that shaped the crypto industry this year. This was a banner year for crypto markets, with Bitcoin returning 125%, Salonah, 78%, and Ethereum 44%.

Q1 marked the debut of the Bitcoin ETFs, which amassed 110 billion in AUM with 1.1 million BTC held within them. Memecoin trading volume soared, peaking at 23 billion in November. Ethereum scaled with the Denkun upgrade, which drove demand for blob transactions. ETH analyzed inflation rate stands at 0.6%, reflecting reduced L1 fees and a shipped in activity to L2s. Stable coins hit $210 billion in supply, settling a total of $12 trillion on chain, estimated. Tethers and circles direct exposure to U.S. treasuries neared $100 billion. The fastest growing stable coin this year was Athena's USDA, with its market cap growing to $6 billion.

And market optimism surged post-election, ETF flow strengthened, micro strategies, Bitcoin holdings totaled 444,000 Bitcoins. CME Bitcoin Futures Open and Trust hitting a record high. That is your metrics minute. All right. Well, Merry Christmas recording this on the 26th. Do you have a good Christmas? It was great. Yeah, I got books and sweaters like every other year.

Nice. Any good books? I got a book of Chesterthes and Chesterton's essays, which I'm pretty excited about. It's one of my favorite thinkers. What about you? How is Christmas in the Walsh household? Christmas was great. Having young kids is a lot of fun around Christmas.

Playing with a lot of cool toys. My little guy got a little drone thing. It's like you just toss it up in the air and you kind of like bat it. back and forth. So I've been spending hours playing with that, a remote control car as well. So these toys are kind of for me at the end of the day. It's interesting how like RC cars is something you could have gotten for Christmas like 40 years ago as well. I would have just loved playing with it by myself. Yeah. It's interesting that I don't know. I'm not tracking the toy market. Has there been much innovation in toy technology in recent decades? Not as far as I can tell.

I mean, these remote control cars are pretty much on change from what I remember them as. But the drones, I don't remember the drones. Yeah, I guess that's new. We have better batteries now. The batteries are still awful, though. You play for like 20 minutes and you have to recharge them and it's a whole thing. Yeah. Well, this is our last episode of the year.

We have some predictions ready to go. We did a bunch of prediction last year. I was 50% wrong on those. just went through it. So not the best year for predictions, frankly. I'll need to catalog mine. I have 10 predictions for the year. I couldn't find my predictions from last year,

so I'll have to tweet them out this year. Just so I have something to go back to. My worst one from last year was I thought ETH BTC would end at 0.075, and I could not have been more wrong on that. Way lower. It was at 0.036 as of today. Yeah, a tough year for Ethereum. But a great year for the industry, though.

Yeah. I thought that smartphone manufacturers would add blockchain attestations to their images. Also very much did not happen. They should. Although I did order a camera that does ZK proofs on the device. Oh, you got that? Yeah. So the big guys aren't doing it, but there are now manufacturers that are doing.

that are doing it. Huh. I like that idea. That image came from that device. It's just a matter of time before that's a mainstream thing. I guess the, you know, the manufacturers probably aren't hearing from their customers that they want it, but they should push it out because it is a, you know, pro user feature. Yeah.

The other thing I was horribly wrong about was the crypto AI sector. I was bearish. And that was a huge winner this year. and I also thought, well, I don't know, I said helium would be a breakout success, and I initially thought I was wrong, and then I asked a few folks in the heel ecosystem, and apparently it's quietly done very well, but it's just very hard to get data. Well, a lot of people in Miami actually have helium, right? So that's a hot market for it.

Yeah, I should know. I don't have it, but I guess I could. Well, we kept up the content this week. you put out a piece in Bitcoin magazine. It was titled, I don't support a strategic Bitcoin reserve and neither should you. So that was what it was about. Yeah, it's what it says on the 10 basically. Credit to the Bitcoin mag, people publishing this, I don't think they agree with me.

Frankly, very few Bitcoiners agree with me on this. There's about five that I've identified that are on my team. But I don't support it. And I also don't think it's likely to happen. And I do think that there will be some kind of reckoning in January when if what I expect happens, happens. And we don't get an SBR. I think a lot of people think it's going to come day one with the executive order. I did not think that's going to happen.

I was listening to another crypto podcast and they said they brought up your piece. And one of the guys said, well, I think, you know, we could have a strategic reserve just by not selling the gox coins. And you could tell he didn't read your piece because you said you're good with that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's fine to have a stockpile and hold the coins that we have already. But doing anything additional and going out and buying new bitcoins, I don't think it's prudent. And I'll link the piece so you can read why.

But I also didn't think it's politically feasible. I think Trump would burn a ton of his political capital on that. And that's not his biggest priority. and for it to be enduring and to be democratic, I think you should run it through Congress because otherwise I think it'll just get undone in the next administration. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

In other Castle Island content, Wyatt sat down with the founders of Bitcoin layers to talk about innovation atop the Bitcoin network. So we released that on Christmas morning. Do you think a lot of people listened to that first thing, Christmas morning? If they're true Brink Nation fans, they would have.

That's going to be one to monitor Bitcoin layers is like a Bitcoin version of L2B. I think 26, or actually, sorry, 25. The next year is 25. I'm getting ahead of myself. That is going to be a banner year for Bitcoin L2s. We're going to see a lot of launches.

That's going to be the topic of one of our predictions here. All right. Good stuff. Well, not a ton of new deals, but there's a huge one. So Tether announced that they've invested $775 million in a mix of primary and secondary into Rumble, which is a video sharing and monetization platform, kind of a YouTube competitor.

What a huge deal that was, huh? Yeah, and this is a publicly traded company. They went public via SPAC. Actually, Kanner managed that SPAC process. And they were only trading at $2 billion roughly market cap prior to the announcement. and, of course, shares surged afterwards. I mean, you're injecting $7.75 million into something worth $2 billion. It's going to be needle moving.

But you found something pretty interesting. You flag this to me, which has to do with the ownership of the asset. Yeah, so what is it? J.D. Vance and Vivek were both investors in Rumble. I think still are, maybe. Yeah, and David Sachs, right? David Sachs. So it seems like.

it's a great deal for those guys, huh? Yeah, so I checked, and according to the disclosures, so J.D. Vance co-led the deal for Rumble out of Naria Capital One in 2021, and I believe Vavec invested in that round two. And then I looked at the disclosure, and I said, I didn't see anything about them selling those shares. So, based to my knowledge, and look, others, will look into this and probably get a better sense of it.

To my knowledge, they still have the shares. And then I believe David Sachs also has exposure to rumble. And I think there could be a lot of conspiracies about this, basically. Or it could be completely benign, but either way, Tether has found a way to basically value up the assets of three very important characters in the Trump admin, the head of Doge, the AI cryptos are and the VP. So, I mean, I'm not saying it's illegitimate. I think it's perfectly reasonable. But if that was the objective, then it was quite a clever move by them.

Yeah, for sure. So Rumble, I don't go on Rumble a ton, although I have watched, I guess, just in the last three or four months, more and more on Rumble, including some like Barstool stuff. I think Barstool is putting their stuff on Rumble now. And I guess the angle here with Tether is that they want to allow crypto payments.

And I guess they would be the back end for that. So does kind of seem like the type of deal where Tether could make their money back commercially here if they become the stable coin infrastructure for payments on Rumble. Yeah, it's certainly plausible that there is a commercial angle. I mean, it's a huge amount of cash for them. 225 primary is that what it was it was like or 250 in primary i want to say i mean it's their biggest outlay ever right if you don't count their uh bitcoin position yeah i think so so that one definitely raise an eyebrow over here um interesting to see tether just moving into different sectors

whether it's biotech or i or now video Yeah. I mean, I guess the charitable way to view this one would be if Rumble ends up being a bona fide YouTube competitor and it's crypto enabled, that just brings crypto distribution to a lot more people. And it could be a grow the pie type of a play. So, you know, that would be great for the industry. Just get stable coin payments more ubiquitous. You know, still a lot of tooling probably required to get normal people to have crypto payments. And maybe this could be a step in that direction. Yeah, I think you've just squint to see the crypto angle here.

I mean, Tether has done some stuff that has nothing to do with crypto at all, just because they have so much cash coming in and they're just to basically privately held, you know, holding company that can invest in whatever they want. So, yeah, huge deal for them. Next one up is True, spelled T-R-R-U-E, which is apparently an ESG-friendly layer-1. blockchain that raised $10 million from Gem Digital. I don't know what that means. Yeah, I thought we were past the days of pro-ESG blockchains, but here we are.

Next up, we have usual. They're an RWA stablecoin developer. There is 10 million from Binance Labs, Cracken, Galaxy, OKX, and Wintermute. Then we have Avalon Labs, which is a Bitcoin backed stablecoin issue where there is $10 million from framework, kinetic UTXO management, and others. Then we have Allo, an RWA tokenization platform. There is 2 million from NGC and Morning Star Ventures. Then we have last one is Valhalla, a decentralized trading platform.

There is 1.5 million from Robot Ventures, GSR, Hach 3, and a number of others. So not a very busy deal week, never is this week. By the way, do you like my hat? We got to start doing the video. Oh, this is a Gemini hat, right? Yeah, Mars Safari. And I have, I have, you know, I have the biggest head probably in crypto. This hat fits phenomenal.

So shout out to the person at Gemini who sent this over. I won't docks them. But I got a whole kit. I keep seeing their ads in airports. It's kind of like a futuristic vibe. What's the deal with the ad campaign? Well, there's something. Well, I'm not sure I fully get it, but it's something about colonizing Mars.

is there's woolly mammoths on Mars in a bunch of the art. And the idea, I think, is if that's the future, fiat currency is just not going to be the backbone of it. Okay. Yeah, no, I like the aesthetics. I don't fully understand the point, but the art looks cool. I think the Winklevoss Twins are also on the same camp as me,

like pretty big head. And they must have tested these out. But it's really hard to find a baseball hat that works. And this is in that category. So you might see me wearing a lot of it. It was the Winklevye that told the barstool guy that gold was going to go to zero because we would find a way to mine asteroids for gold. Correct.

Correct. And Portna wasn't really convinced by that. I don't know if that's the best argument for him. But, you know, it is an argument. And it's one that I've contemplated. It is an argument. you could use. I don't see any reason why we can't be mining asteroids at some point in the next 20 years.

I think we should. And if we do, we're not going to find Bitcoin on the inside of those asteroids. There's a pretty good chance you're going to find gold. That's very true. That is very true. However, we do have to address the quantum thing. We talked about it on this show, right? Already?

Yeah, we've talked about it a little bit. So Google has a new quantum chip and there was a little bit of a scare of people thinking that that meant that Bitcoin was. not going to be stable here. What's your time? Yeah, I mean, I think the Wall Street Journal talked about it too. Like it's an existential thing. I mean, it could be an issue in, let's say, 20 years.

I mean, the Google supercomputer is nowhere near strong enough to break ECDSA. Five orders of magnitude too weak. But it is true that if you can break ECDSA, then or I guess we also have Schnor now those would both be considered quantum vulnerable

then in theory there's four million coins up for the taking well the Satoshi so it wouldn't actually I guess your point is that the first thing that you do

is go take Satoshi's coins yeah because he mine or they mine them in these in this old address format paid a public key and then not

not paid a script hash, right? Yeah, or paid a publicly hash. So since then, we've basically hash addresses more commonly. And then that adds the layer of protection of Shaw 256. And actually there's another hash function, Ripe MD. And the hash functions are quantum hard or they're considered much harder to break. And so the other way you reveal your address is if you reuse an address. then you know what the public key is.

So if you add up the Satoji coins and the reused addresses, you get to about 4 million Bitcoins, which is not an insignificant number. So let's play this out a little bit. Let's say that the technology progresses and it becomes something that the community wants to do a hard fork over. So they do a hard fork in three, four, five years or whatever and Bitcoin brings in a quantum resistant algorithm.

The Satoshi coins are still vulnerable. right there's no way unless satoshi were to come back and move them that they wouldn't be vulnerable so let's say that the the network upgrades it's quantum resistant but the stoci coins are still there and someone takes them what happens then well i first of all i don't even think we need to do a hard fork actually to make by coin quantum hard oh it's a soft fork based on the discussions on the dev mailing list doing some weird taproot thing you could introduce alternative signatures, I believe. But anyway, let's say we get consensus and we're able to fix it. Yeah, then there's still these, there's coins that are in reused addresses, which in theory, the owners of those coins would move them to new addresses, so those would be safe. But you're right. The ancient Satoshi coins that haven't moved would still be vulnerable.

So then as a community, we would have to make the decision to brick those coins. or just to let the Google or the U.S. government, whoever it is, let them have those coins. And this is where your idea comes forward here around recycled coins. And we solve the ultimate fud of the stability of the blocker award. It's just, hey, miners, we got some coins free to mine for the next 100 years. Yeah, we can solve two fuds with one stone here and collectively agree to take the old coins and put them in a kind of endowment that's gradually paid out to miners over the next 100 years to solve the security budget problem. Hey, it's not a bad idea.

I mean, the alternative is we brick the coins. So we do a hard fork to Bitcoin. We just all agree those coins are dead. No one's ever getting them. Or the attacker gets hundreds of billions of dollars in free Bitcoin as a, the bug bounty or we agree to recycle the coins. But anyway, I don't think we have to worry about it. This is decades away still.

The quantum thing kind of breaks my brain. Did you see Mark Andreessen talking about it and saying that it proves the existence of parallel universes? Yeah, I didn't fully understand that one, to be honest with you. Something along the lines of it would take you more than, you know, more than the time in this universe to solve it. which means that there are parallel universes. I don't know.

It broke my brain. I spent about 20 minutes just thinking about what that even means. Yeah, I don't remotely understand that. Yeah, I would put quantum in the category of quality fud. It's quality fud for me. All right. Well, not a ton of news, and we'll hop into our predictions soon, but I did want to call out this micro strategy news.

So they're calling for a special meeting of investors. basically to seek approval to expand their purchase program beyond the 21 billion of equity and 21 billion of debt. They want to do more. You were telling me before we started recording that they are entering some kind of blackout period where they can't do anything for a month. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. And I think the market's probably, I think the big actors in the market are certainly aware of that. But come, I think, Jan Juan, micro strategy is going to be quiet here on new purchase.

for almost a month. That's a long time. I mean, they're the primary, you know, entity that's active in the market these days. They're definitely the strongest bid in this market. You see they announced a couple days ago that they were buying at 106. So that was, that run up to 110 was definitely micro strategy.

Yeah. So, I mean, I would have to imagine that their shareholders are going to approve this, um, this expansion? Why would they not? I would think so. I mean, I, Sailor has been really smart about aligning incentives with shareholders. You remember when he did his first thing, he announced a tender. Basically, anyone who wanted to get out could get out.

If you're staying in that stock right now, you're in it because you are pro-Bitcoin and you want to see micro strategy run it up. Yeah. So I was kind of musing about micro strategy a bit and I just don't see any way for activists to take it over and try and get the bitcoins out. So I guess it's pretty secure. Well, so I think it could certainly trade at a discount. And I think at some point it almost certainly will trade at a discount to Nav. But you're right. At that point, it just becomes a shareholder math game where you have to get 51% of the vote to actually kick out Saylor and his team and liquidate the coins. But

I don't know. They have $40 billion worth of Bitcoin. So what's the incentive to try to if you try to liquidate, you're just going to crash the market anyway. It seems like a fool's earn. Yeah. And if they traded a discount, they can just sell some Bitcoin and use that to buy

back the stock and converge it back to Nav. Yeah. So I don't know that the activist thing would ever happen. Although it's certainly possible. what's more likely to me is that they could shoot themselves in the foot by just doing something very risky on the dead side

by issuing an instrument that's actually callable or something like that. Yeah, but we're not near that and as far as I know, the debt doesn't have those kinds of provisions. No, it doesn't. I mean, it's largely convertible debt. They did have that Silvergate loan at some point, but they paid it back.

So, Sailor can't really get liquidated. I mean, he's certainly, get liquidated on debt instruments like that but most of that cap table is uh is convertible in nature so we have prepared some last minute predictions for you the i don't know how exciting they are bold but uh we're going to make them anyway so all right so what do you want to do here alternate we each have 10 i believe yeah why don't you go first all right um my first one is that a Major centralized exchange will settle an OFAC violation and that in 2025, travel rule compliance will take center stage. Okay.

I just think you've got to be doing travel rule compliance is not the most glamorous thing to do in the world, but centralized exchanges with OFAC violations is something that is a future of this market right now. Very plausible. Mine is that stable coins tack on another $100 billion in supply. They're about $200 billion today. I think they'll end the year at $300. I was doing a little bit of math here, and I think stable coins could actually reach $750 billion in float if they regain the highs of their ratio to large cap,

which fluctuates between 10% and 35%. And they're at the bottom end of that range right now. So I think there'll be some kind of catch-up. where stable coins grow relative to the large caps. And if they do that, if they go back to 30%, then they hit three quarters of a trillion, actually. Okay. So your prediction is what, 300?

$300 billion? Yeah, $300 a year end. Okay. I think that's, I'll take the over on that. I like that prediction. All right, I'll stay on stable coins for my next one. My next one is a major financial services firm in the United States launches a stable coin.

Oh, that was also my next prediction. Oh, all right. I was going to say specifically a bank does it. I think banks will be unleashed next year, and we'll get the green light to do a stable coin. U.S. banks. All right, I like that. I'll stay on stable coins here.

So this one, maybe this is obvious, but a stable coin bill passes through Congress and gets signed by Trump. I mean, a lot of people think this is guaranteed, but there's still a lot of political work that needs to happen. Yeah, I mean, this is something that French Hill is going to push, and the numbers look favorable for getting something like this done, but you want to get it done in a smart way.

You want to preserve that state pathway. And, you know, we will be talking about Maxine Waters and Stephen Lynch on this podcast because they will not be in favor of this bill. For sure. Also on stable coins, I think they will do in the next year, 70% of on-chain settlement by value settled. They're actually below that right now. So I think they will increase their share of settlement on blockchains.

They have been at 70% a couple of years ago, right? Yeah, there was hit 80% during the bear market, but the large caps kind of did a ton of volume more recently. Okay. All right. I like that. All right. I'm going to go more in the commercial side here. So I predict that in 2025, a top 10 bank acquires a crypto custodial infrastructure business. Banks. It seems very plausible. You got to be in custody. And, you know, it's assumed here, I imagine, but Sab 121 going away is going to be the catalyst there. So the banks being able to custody, how are you going to custody? Well, a bunch of these. banks are going to be looking to buy.

Yeah, build or buy and not a lot of talent out there, probably a buy. Still on stable coins, I believe a major country, I don't know which one, will have some kind of currency crisis and they will blame stable coins for the crisis. I like that. I like that. It kind of already happening in Nigeria. Yeah. That is, that's definitely the template.

whether or not stable coins are the cause, but they're certainly getting blamed. All right. I predict that at least two crypto companies will go public via initial public offering in 2025. Yeah, I'm very excited for the IPO window to reopen. I think that's quite plausible. I'm doing a Bitcoin one here.

According to Defy Lama, the TVL of Bitcoin L2s, is 6.6 billion today. I think it'll be at least 15 billion at some point next year. Depends on how you count it, of course. Do you count wrapped Bitcoin or not? I'm going to go for sort of like the pure,

quote unquote, true Bitcoin L2s, I think will accrue at least 15 billion in TVL. What's your view on BitVM and BitVM's role in that? I think BitVMVMV2 will have an active role and this is my stretch goal. I think you'll see a true roll-up whether ZK or Optimistic launched on Bitcoin next year, via BitVMV2.

All right, that is not a consensus opinion. So I like that, like these non-consensus opinions. All right, I'm going to go into the politics side a little bit here. I predict that Gary Gensler will align himself in some paid capacity with better markets. Ooh, that's good. That's good. My political guess is that there will be a strategic Bitcoin Reserve announced,

but not for the U.S. Some other country will do it, and it will not occur here in the U.S. And to be clear, just holding the currently held Bitcoins does not count as an SBR in this prediction. That would be a big deal depending on who did it. Can you imagine if Saudi announces that they're buying Bitcoin? I mean, that would be a huge story.

Yep, without a doubt. All right. My next one up is Operation Choke Point 2.0 related. So I predict that Elizabeth Warren will become a central player in this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 scandal and investigation. In her role and some of her former people that used to work for her. in their role in this. And just how involved was Elizabeth Warren

with some of these choke point 2.0 kneecappings? That's a good one. Yeah. And I think we have a very good chance of getting real hearings on this next year. I do too. Now, this next one is a question, actually. So three chains, Celestium, Monad, and Barra chain,

three highly touted altus. Which of these do you think has the best year in 25? Well, I'm biased, obviously. We're investors in Monad, but I believe Monad. And I think it will be a top five chain for stable coins, actually, in 2025. That's one of my predictions. Okay. And my next one is ETHBTC.

I'm going pro-Eth on this one again. I'm saying it ends the year at 0.05, the ETH-BTC ratio. Hmm. 0.05. Okay. And what's it today? It's like 0.36, I think. It's not looking good for ETH, frankly.

All right. Staying on ChokePoint, I believe that an executive of a U.S. bank will receive some sort of relief from Congress to be able to testify to reveal the details of what was described to that executive under confidential supervisory information during Chokepoint 2.0. and that we will get at least one executive to go on the record with what was being said to the bank in relation to what they should be doing in the crypto space. That would be great. That's what we need. My next prediction is non-crypto-related. I think that there will be some kind of falling out between Elon and Trump over Doge.

Oh, no. And I don't think, I don't think, I don't. don't know if that'll happen next year, but I do believe Elon will be focused on other things other than Doge. I think he will struggle a lot with Doge. Actually pretty optimistic about Doge. I think cutting some of this red tape and regulation would be a great thing. It's just make it easier to start a business in the United States. Hope so. All right. My last one is I believe that you will have over three no action letters issued to crypto companies by the SEC in the year 2025.

I am three or more, I guess I'll say. Okay. And my last one is again, I'm going to say this again. You know, first you don't succeed. You know, I think one of the major smartphone manufacturers will add some kind of out-of-station layer to content created on their smartphones. and I think you'll see AI devices that you wear that allow you to do attestations to blockchains. I think it's going to be a big year for verifiable content

as a way to get around deepfakes, basically. Well, what would you rather have Apple do? Install stablecoin payments natively in iOS for messaging or do the verifiable pictures and videos? Well, I think the stable coin payments. payment's layer is going to be very well served by various third parties. So I think it would be very, it would be most interesting if they did out of stations. Do you remember the circle feature? I don't know if they still have it where you could just text dollars back and forth.

Well, you can't, way back in the day. You could text like that on iOS now, right? You can just send cash via text messages. Well, you could do it, but it's like a third party integration, right? It's not native to iOS. You can't have like an iOS wallet. Well, there's definitely not stable coins natively. But yeah, I think we're basically on the

cusp of this transition to getting a global Venmo via stable coins. I think that will be ubiquitous next year. So exciting predictions. We got to catalog these so we can actually hold ourselves accountable. I know. We should write them

down. Any predictions for the on the brink pod i predict that we will still be doing it this time next year much to my chagrin uh there appears to be no off ramp from this podcast so i mean when did we start it was in 2018 so maybe early 2019 yeah 20 or maybe early 2019 late 2018 early 19 but uh yeah basically just you know guaranteed that you were going to be spending hours and hours and hours talking about Crypto News. I mean,

we're meant to be on holiday right now. Right. And here we are doing the podcast. So it just, it literally never ends. So,

do you predict that we'll do some video episodes this year? Seems like that's gotten a lot easier. I'm a seller of that concept. Yeah. Mainly because the burden will fall on me. So, you know,

it's really just a matter of whether I want to do it or not. Maybe we need to train up a video. editor internal to the Castle Island. We could like it can't be that hard. I think we're just psyched out by the idea. One of the issues about going to video other than the fact that we actually built out a studio that didn't really work.

That was that was one thing. But the other thing is that on the audio version of this podcast, we have greater flexibility in cutting things. And so if we were just streaming this directly to YouTube, we've said a lot of things over the course of the years that we just need to cut for various reasons. It's just harder to do that on video. You may not believe this, but I would, in a typical episode, it will make 50 to 100 edits.

Yeah. You can't do that for the video. It looks weird. And sometimes we're talking about, talking about things that we just shouldn't be talking about. And we need to cut them. All the time. There's a lot of cutting room for footage in the show.

You know, including some with Three Arrows Capital back in the day. Yeah, that's on your conscience. I think that was your episode. It was my episode. Well, that's it. It's been a year. I would say overall was pretty successful. We kind of got everything we wanted. I had a great email from, I don't know, it was June maybe. Maybe it was a little bit later than that. But someone had asked me my price prediction and I always just resist giving press predictions. But I just gave a basic one and said, if Harris gets elected, I think it'll be 60K. If Trump gets elected, I think it'll be 100K. And it looks like we're going to be right about 100K to end the year here. Yeah, my prediction was that it would be 100K on election night if he got elected.

And that just did not happen. For some reason, it was kind of flat. I mean, it was up a little bit on election night. It's only a 9x till gold from here. That's true. Well, it'll be a bumpier road to get there without a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So I'm not fully out on the concept. I just, I worry that a lot of allocative enthusiasm to Bitcoin has been premised on the reserve idea.

If it doesn't happen, I think you could see a 15% and 20% sell off. People will be disappointed. Yeah. I mean, it's almost conventional wisdom now, and that's really dangerous. All right. Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you to the listeners of On the Brink, Brink Nation. We appreciate you another year in the books here. and we will be back in 2025. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend

and a safe and healthy New Year.