TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #138: BitcoinTINA "The Perfect Storm"

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with BitcoinTINA to discuss how the macro factors lining up in the world right now are a perfect storm for Bitcoin in the medium to long-term. Follow BitcoinTINA on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Well hey there freaks, it's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this flash episode of Tales from the Crypt. Sat down with our good friend Bitcoin Tina to talk about the perfect storm of things that are happening in the world that are bullish for Bitcoin. A lot going on right now, particularly this week in American markets and globally with the coronavirus spreading. I think you guys are going to like it. Quick one, always bullish. Bullish as always with our good friend Tina. this episode is brought to you by the cash app freaks already know all about them i was actually uh had a friend reach out to me the yesterday the not the other day yesterday he was like ah what's the easiest way to buy bitcoin i remember you told me download that what was it the cash

app that's what i said it's the easiest way to buy bitcoin uh he had to be refreshed his memory had to be refreshed yesterday i did a little uh a video on my cell phone showing him how to buy bitcoin i did that thing where you record your screen uh went to the cash app scrolled over to the squiggly line the chart over to bitcoin hit it up bought fifty dollars hit fifty dollars want to buy fifty dollars hit buy held my fingerprint down hit confirm boom fifty dollars worth of bitcoin in my cash app was able to send it right off to a hardware wallet uh and basically get my financial sovereignty in less than 30 seconds it was crazy all right so they're letting you stack sats they're letting you uh send sats receive sats and then on top of that they're letting you stack

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enjoy this episode with our good friend tina i know i certainly did you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent here with a Flash episode. had her good friend repeat guest reach out to me over dms and say hey we need to talk i'd like to introduce you freaks again to bitcoin tina tina how are we great every day is a good day in bitcoin that's what you're saying every all news is good news for bitcoin all news is good news for bitcoin all obstacles are overcome by the social layer of bitcoin because bitcoin is by its nature anti-fragile yes and uh to preface this episode we are not fear-mongering

all right this is an optimistic episode we are just laying the land uh giving a lay of the land and explaining how it may or may not affect bitcoin going into the future um so it's been a pretty chaotic week in the markets in the world uh coronavirus you are describing is the perfect storm for Bitcoin. That's going to be the title of this episode. Why do you think this? Okay, this is the perfect storm for Bitcoin. Now, first of all, Bitcoin is neither a risk-on nor a risk-off asset. Bitcoin is the core to an emerging economic paradigm. In my opinion, for what it's worth, I had believed and continue to believe that in the 2020s, We'll see negative rates. At a minimum, we'll see zero rates. And we'll see massive government spending. I believe that there's a very good chance that the coronavirus may have accelerated this timetable.

um i don't know how corona plays out it's very hard to say there's a lot of data we don't know yet and um i i don't know exactly how it'll play out but i think that it becomes an excuse for government spending that governments want to do anyway because governments like to spend money so it becomes a very easy excuse to spend it becomes a very easy excuse for central banks to cut rates because they kind of want to cut rates anyway regardless of what they say they still like to cut rates and they know they need to so it's not even their fault for cutting rates so they don't even have to take the blame because there are always these entities who want to go after them saying they shouldn't cut rates central banks can throw up their hands

We can't control this thing. Now, some will say that cutting rates doesn't help deal with a virus. And no, cutting rates doesn't. But the thing is, if markets were to crash, and I don't know if markets will crash or not crash. I am very up in the air on that. I had said a while ago that I expect stocks to be essentially flat for a decade. I continue to feel that way. I was somewhat doubtful of that view not that long ago when things were just soaring.

But it seems that events have taken a turn that has reeled in that possibility again, that we may be flat essentially for a decade. And I think we're sort of in this push me, pull you environment where it's tug of war between what gets done. So even though maybe stocks should decline because of events, if governments spend like crazy and central banks buy assets, then things don't go down. we have certain things which are immutable and demographics is immutable although some told me today that who knows maybe this thing is a is a plan to get rid of aged boomers um i don't know if that's true or not um i certainly hope not but i actually don't think it's a plan to get rid of aged boomers and those who are older than boomers i think if i had to guess that

nobody planned this thing this was completely unplanned and i don't know if it's nature or anything else but i hope not for your sake too huh i said i hope not for your sake too thanks i appreciate that well the problem is that even even if you don't die from it um i heard recently that you could wind up with permanent lung damage so you know even if you're 25 years old permanent lung damage for the rest of your life it's really not something to look forward to so you really don't want to get sick uh and i don't know that's you know the bad strain or the not bad strain but i think because it becomes this event which will encourage massive governmental spending um and i think you know i think we're gonna have huge spending regardless

I don't think it would matter who's in office. I think that you'd see spending either an infrastructure project or a green deal or any different ways that you would see just enormous spending. And I think the central banks, the Fed, will expand their balance sheet to keep that spending and the debt issuance from driving rates much higher. it's a very weird it's a very weird environment but if that view is correct on my part it becomes incredibly bullish for bitcoin crashing stocks at the end of the day is not bullish for bitcoin i mean if the water in the bathtub goes down your little sailboat that you have floating on the top of the water is likely to go down with it it's not going to be helpful to have stocks let's say get cut in half so um could it happen sure it could happen i don't know whether or not

stocks will get hit dramatically but i think that you will see actions taken by central governments actions taken by central banks that will look to prevent that whereas in prior periods um these various entities were always reactive i think they're going to be far more proactive because we've been living in an environment for the last decade where everything is bubblicious out there so if if capital markets come down very hard namely stocks that becomes a pretty big problem for everybody because um money conditions get tight when money conditions get tight credit conditions get tight and that becomes very hard for the real economy so net net i mean this may be a crazy point of view but i think that we will see an environment

that becomes perfect for bitcoin when you throw in the having with um what i think will be the backdrop for very easy money additionally there may be things happening like you saw with germany and now maybe announced today with France and India, you have a lot of, you have a positive backdrop for Bitcoin. And so to me, this becomes the perfect storm. By perfect storm, I mean, like a really great thing that you're going to see all kinds of forces come together that cause this thing to go possibly higher than numbers that I have said. I have guessed that you see a massive overshoot. The overshoot comes related to stock to flow,

which the projection is $100,000. And I have always thought that from a psychological perspective, getting to $100,000 causes a lot of people who are highly skeptical and critical to change their mind and look at this thing very differently and want to jump on board.

You get a guy who listened to Jamie Dimon, listened to Warren Buffett, listened to whoever was critical and negative on Bitcoin, and they look at a price of $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $100,000. They said to themselves, oh, I thought this thing was going to go away. And then it's sitting at prices that they think are crazy, and they start to say, I got to get me some of that. And I think you're going to hear a lot of people saying, I got to own me some of that. And I have said for a while, and I continue to say, just buy 1%. You know, it's 1% won't hurt you. Now, that's not financial advice. But realistically, if you fall off the curb on the sidewalk, and it's only like an inch or two, it's really hard to get really hurt.

I mean, sure, you could fall down and break your hip if you're really old or really clumsy, but that's not going to happen to most people. And it's really hard to do with 1%. It's only 1% of your net worth. And I think it's a highly reasonable thing. I think by the end of this decade, we can see truly insane numbers. And so the risk reward profile on that is just outstanding. So if I'm at all right about the backdrop for this thing, then it's just become a much, much better investment. And all of these things are coming together, hence the term the perfect storm. Again, not in a bad way, but in a really good way, a really optimistic, really positive way. and uh let me think about that government's starting to become more accepting really easy money and um what was the other thing that i said uh stagnant stock markets for uh no no yeah no really easy money government's coming together and um the government's becoming more accepting now i forgot what i said

fomo fomo after fomo after a certain level by uh no no that was that no i'm just talking about the overall backdrop i have to go listen to what i said to remember um interest rates falling below zero well that relates to the easy money well that and that will push people into wanting to on bitcoin um so listen to what i said to remember what i said um well but but it creates it creates a very positive backdrop those those those various uh those various things that are happening and so one thing oh the having the having so you got that you have the having you have very easy money which i think is is very likely plus you have growing acceptance among governments. I mean, what more can you ask for? To me, that's what you call an absolutely perfect

environment. And I think that people really underestimate this. I have said for a long time, all surprises in Bitcoin will be on the upside. And I think people who try to get cute with this, who try to trade it, who try to sell it. Oh, one of the things that really had a lot of impact on me recently is I was having a conversation with another Bitcoiner who was trading TLT options because he wanted to make a bet on long-dated paper, long-dated treasuries. And, you know, I told him I was a little concerned. I thought it was a great idea. I think rates would go a lot lower. But he had owned some April paper and some May paper. I said, you know, who knows? It could take a while. And then rates were like 150 at the time. And the 10-year yield

as we speak is 0.745 so it just got cut in half in like a little more than two weeks so i feel i feel like a real idiot but this stuff can happen really fast so that's that's something i want to that's what i want to dive into right is it feels like the fed markets have been blindsided and they're scrambling right now the fed had an emergency 50 bit cut earlier this week uh like like you just mentioned people are are funneling into to treasuries driving down those yields and that's like the fed cut uh seemed very bearish to me because it had like a five minute market rally after the initial after the cut initially hit the market and then markets began tanking immediately again and the one thing about this virus is it's really highlighting the the pain points in our

supply chain and and the pain points of global is globalization and uh sort of the the vulnerable situation america has put itself in particularly um can you print your way out of this or do you think there's a chance that there's a total and this is something i i'm sort of leaning towards there's a a total crisis of confidence in the institutions mainly the fed that they're able to control this stuff i don't disagree with anything you just said but i do think that cutting rates will be supportive of markets i do think if markets were to simply just crash that that can create the environment that makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy if markets just get taken down very hard uh i believe that we are in a world and have been

in a world for a long time where the real economy has become the tail and the markets have become the dog and so i think that if if the stock market crashes if the global stock markets crash you wind up with overall tighter financial conditions, and tighter financial conditions make for a more difficult environment. I think these were bad policies from the beginning, but it doesn't matter what I think. It matters where we are. It doesn't matter how we got here. It matters that we're here now. It doesn't matter if the rock breaks the glass pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock it's going to be bad for the pitcher it doesn't matter if the stocks crater if they do it's going to be bad for the real economy and it's going to be a

problem i agree with you that there's a lot of weakness in supply chains there are a lot of fragilities in the economy but adding one more problem to the mixture doesn't make it better so no cutting rates in and of themselves does not fix the underlying problems but if stocks crash in conjunction with the other problems happening it doesn't make that cocktail a better cocktail for solving these problems at this point it probably makes it worse and um i don't think these good policies i haven't thought these were good policies for many many many many years but it's where we are now i'm not trying to say that you believe that no no i don't think you're trying to say that i believe that do you do you envision a possibility in which the policies are completely

ineffective this time around i think and they they pump a bunch of money in but not even that can can keep stock markets at stasis? Markets are dependent on earnings as well as price earnings multiples. I don't know if multiples can expand. That's why I kind of believe that you're going to see this push me pull you because you could have a tough earnings environment, and it can be a tough earnings environment for a while, which keeps pressure on stocks. But at the same time, you get all kinds of support from fiscal policies that become supportive of those earnings. And if you have central banks looking to control the shape of the curve and keeping rates down by keeping bond prices from selling off, then you create

in an environment where multiples can remain high. So that's why you wind up with this really strange environment of being able to maintain relatively high prices, even though maybe it shouldn't be. I think we're in a world today which is different from the world of the last 90 years, because I think that we, having been through these crises already, the response has become far more activist rather than reactive. And so it's not good that we got here, but we're going to do more of the same to keep the thing going. And that becomes very positive for Bitcoin. And ultimately, in my view, Bitcoin will be the thing that takes us to that next economic paradigm. And it has to become a lot bigger for that to happen.

And I think we're in that environment where Bitcoin is going to become enormous in the course of the 2020s. And I think it's going to go to levels that people cannot possibly imagine. I'd be very reluctant to part with my Bitcoin if I were whoever's listening to this. I'd be very reluctant to part with it. You're not margin trading it right now? No, I never margin trade it. I sit with fully owned Bitcoin. I also own GBTC.

And that I do have for the purpose of selling because I do have to pay my bills and I like to eat and I like to have a roof over my head. So I do have GBTC whose sole purpose is to sell because I will need to sell some. But I'm hopeful that I'll have some good prices to sell it at. And I think I'll be right about that. I don't think enough people really understand why this asset will benefit from the environment that we're in. Look, in a worst-case scenario, when we saw Cyprus in 2011, 2012, you don't own your money in the bank. don't own the money at your brokerages. Those are held by the institutions. We saw that with MF Global. If these institutions go belly up, and I'm not suggesting that they do, but if they do go

belly up, they can do whatever they want with your money, essentially. If you hold your own private keys, you actually control your own money. If you have an extremely aggressive inflation, I believe, and I'm not suggesting we have a very extremely aggressive inflation, although I think we're setting the stage for that to happen down the line that could take three four five six seven years i don't know how long that takes but that could take a while but it can be a very aggressive inflation having an asset which is fixed in supply as well as supply inelastic is very much a beneficiary of um of an inflating money supply where money will chase that asset because of its natural qualities in addition to its scarcity becomes an asset that you want to own so i think it becomes

the ideal thing to own for the 2020s and i think this is a really interesting kickoff. And this really started with a bang right in January of 2020. And I think I'd have thought for a while that 2020s are going to be a truly spectacular decade. I would not be surprised to see Bitcoin up in the three to five million dollar range by 2030, somewhere between 2028 and 2032 so i'm i'm my guess is a 300 to 500 x return from ten thousand dollars it'd be higher from seven thousand dollars i think the numbers will be absolutely spectacular and um i think today's dollars something really insane but five five to eight million dollars in today's dollars three to five million three to five you bid three to bid me up marty

i'll take the low side of that the three to five million um i think it's going to be some really crazy stuff and i think that i actually would like most people to think that's completely off the charts nuts i'd really prefer they think that rather than thinking it's possible so they probably do i'm gonna i think i'm comfortable enough to say that they they probably do people listen as they got you're actually a lot of people listening let's probably believe you but outsiders definitely oh they totally think i'm crazy um and i'm really okay with that i i think you know they're crazy numbers but i think that i think the world is yes i think in today's i think in today's buying power i think if you

have a very aggressive inflation the numbers would just be whatever no i think in today's buying power if you had one bitcoin today it'll buy you what three million dollars would buy you today that's what's going to happen to the value of that or five million dollars what it buys you today uh which means if you have 10 bitcoin you know you're talking about being like a a small whale and if you have 100 bitcoin you are a whale and i think a lot of i think a lot of the OGs, a lot of them, I think, will lose their Bitcoin along the way, which I'm really happy about, because I think many of them underestimate the asset that they have. They've held it, what for them feels like so long, they're like all nervous. You're not using this as a

medium exchange yet. No, my God, it's not going to really work out. You got to push it for a medium exchange. They feel like these 11 years is like this eternity. And I look at the 11 years like it's nothing and the thing grew from from zero to today what what are we at 170 180 where are we today market cap probably 165 to 175 billion i would imagine so that's that's enormous and and i think you know it's going to grow exponentially in this decade in my opinion uh will the return be as big as from zero to 160 billion no i mean but in absolute dollars the numbers are going to be off the charts spectacular and uh and it's going to be really big really huge money and everything's pushing it that way no i agree i mean the world is insane right now and uh i think

at least to me i tweeted it out this morning bitcoin's engaged in a war of attrition it's It's just got to outlast the incumbent financial system and the incumbent financial paradigm. All it has to do is keep producing blocks. And this is a good segue into another ingredient of the perfect storm that you're talking about. Again, the regulation in countries around the world. You mentioned France, Germany, India. On Rabbit Hole Recap yesterday, Matt and I were talking about how we think the German And I believe, similarly, the French regulations or new laws are bearish.

But you're saying it's bullish, even though it may be restrictive for companies to start. This is overall good for Bitcoin in the long run. Why do you think that? It's bullish as can be. Because the key to Bitcoin ultimately becoming the money that we use is being large enough to be able to grow and create an internal market that enables us to do things without worrying. You hide in a crowd. Let's face facts. We live in a world where lots of people use cash to do things that they don't want to pay taxes on.

So, how many times have you heard somebody say, you know, give you cash for a discount, and they get the discount. So, everybody knows what they're going to do. And if the crowd is large enough, and if the techniques are there, there are going to be too many transactions to keep track of. So I am not bothered by these regulations. I think that when you have 50 million people, 70 million people in America, 70 million Americans using it, some people will coin join and some people will use lightning. will use lightning and probably pretty much everyone will coin join or many many will will do that you end up hiding a crowd i think what you'll end up seeing at some point along the way is the tax laws will get changed because bitcoiners will be smart and they will create political action committees they will donate to packs packs will donate to congressmen and senators and will end up getting favorable laws passed at five hundred thousand dollar bitcoin there are going to be people who should be giving some money to support politicians who support our

point of view who support favorable tax laws for bitcoin uh i think it'd be crazy not to and if you have 10 bitcoin it's half a million dollars that's five million dollars that's a lot of money so you can afford to give a few thousand dollars to uh to politicians and and you do it with you Another 50,000 Bitcoiners becomes a lot of money, and politicians will speak – will support your point of view when you give them money. That's how this works. We live in a world where money talks, and I think that it will be a very positive environment. So I'm not at all disturbed. we just need to see number go up and anything which promotes number go up and enables people

to come into bitcoin is a positive so even though regulation so think about this regulation means you're not banning it if you're regulating it you don't ban it if you're going to ban it you ban it you don't regulate it to ban it because you just ban it so regulation is positive it's not negative regulation enables people who look at this and say i don't want to buy bitcoin because the governments are going to ban it you say well dummy they just regulated it so they're obviously not banning it so you can now invest in this thing you can be comfortable this is just like what you're comfortable with so when you can say to people who have a lot more money than we do guys who may be in my age of people that this is regulated and you can feel comfortable owning

this they watch it going up what are they going to do they're going to buy it and they're going to help drive the price higher so let's hone in on that huh i was gonna say let's hone in on that what do you think a lot of boomers are thinking right now especially this week in the stock market uh a lot of uh people your age are they're absolutely not thinking about bitcoin are they worried about the retirement funds and they're worried about their retirement funds right now everybody worries about their money in the stock market when the stock market goes down unless they're short who doesn't worry about the stocks that they own when the stock market is going down well i guess better question is is how overextended is your generation in stocks

i have no idea it's it's so hard to say because you know you can't everybody's different you know you have some people who have a lot of money and they may be overextending the stocks but i know a guy who likes to brag to me that he bought a lot of stocks in 2009 so he's up a lot in those stocks I mean realistically you're pretty close to the all-time highs up here so you know if you bought stocks the S&P it's seven or eight hundred and the S&P is now at twenty nine hundred how much can you be hurting you're still all right you're not happy that it's down I mean but but but you're up multiples and depending on the stocks you own you could be up an awful lot. So it depends on who we're talking about. I think it's hard to generalize. I think

people like to generalize. There are some people where the average retirement amounts are in the neighborhood of $200,000. There have been people, speaking of late, that have been using those kinds of numbers. $200,000 is probably not enough to retire on at the age of 65. How much they own in stocks? I don't know. I think that even a retiree who's 65 should today own 1% in Bitcoin, even if you had only $200,000, 1% in Bitcoin will make sense. The odds of them buying it under 20,000, I think are close to zero. The odds of buying it under 100,000, I think are not much more than zero. And people tend to chase price. That's just how we are. Most Bitcoiners come to Bitcoin, they get inoculated the first time they hear about Bitcoin. They say, oh, that that's

crap. And then they don't do anything. And then the price is up five or 10x or some number from where they first heard about it. And they say, oh, yeah, I think I'm interested in that. I want to buy it this happens all the time this happens with probably most people in bitcoin there there's only a handful of people who heard about it and bought it right away um at least that's from the stories that i hear and and people can correct that uh if they know different but i think that the upside is enormous and even if you pay a hundred thousand dollars if i'm right on the numbers and i believe that i will be then you still have tremendous upside so that's really going to be okay. So people will come into this in the course of the next few years. I think this

will be the first mainstream bull market. And there's a good chance that like that first big bull market you had early on, not the one in 2016 and 2017, that this will be quite surprising to where it goes, because there's a global tsunami of money that's going to start coming into Bitcoin. It's going to come in as a trickle. Everything in economics seems to be gradually, then suddenly. That's how markets tend to work. Gradually, then suddenly. And gradually takes a while. Exponential curves look linear in the early stages. That's the gradually part. They hit a critical point and then suddenly happens. And I think Bitcoin will be no different. And I think we'll go through a series of these things. And I think the next

year, two, three, possibly four years are quite shocking. Take us to numbers that are really quite crazy. I don't know what the next bear market looks like. I think the next bull market, which we may be in the early stages of, will end up being quite spectacular because the psychology which is set up, and that's a big factor too. So you have all these positive forces happening and you have this massive buildup of negative psychology. It'll be like a dam bursting as people know what they heard about bitcoin they know about the negative view i mean how many people i talk to people and they they think i'm crazy i talk to a lot of people yeah bitcoin no i'm not interested people think you're crazy yeah no i'm not i really i'm not

interested in that thing don't don't bother me oh the bitcoin guy oh my god gotta get away gotta get away from that guy it's a bitcoin guy he's nothing but trouble i mean he'll make jokes about this but it's true we're annoying i'm really annoying um oh don't say that oh i'm sure people think that but well you're touching on something that i'm very interested in and something i think about a lot too is after the next bull market or x amount of bull markets what does the the correction look like is it as intense and psychologically what is the threshold at which people are like, all right, this is here. This isn't going anywhere. And we don't see an 80 to 90% crash again after maybe we plateau, fall 50%. Okay. So you have misquoted me from our first

podcast back in January of 2019. You have misquoted me when I said that volatility will subdue, i.e. downside volatility will become lessened, but upside volatility will remain insane so i think that there's a good likelihood that at some point maybe the next bear market more than likely definitely the one after that that the downside will be greatly diminished from what we've seen now i'll give you a caveat if we were to go to a million dollar bitcoin in the next four years i don't know what it looks like if bitcoin were to go from where it is now through a series of moves up to a million dollars, I don't know what a crash would or would not look like.

It's very hard to guess. If we really overshoot where I think we should go, and I think we should go to that $200,000 or $400,000 range, which people think is crazy, but if we really overshoot, could we crash down to $100,000 or $200,000? Maybe. And I actually don't want to see million-dollar Bitcoin

in the next three or four years. I'd rather only see, you know, I know people think that's crazy, Bitcoin going to, you know, $200,000 to $400,000. Because if you dropped from a peak of $400,000 to $150,000, which is not nearly as bad as what we've seen, then lots of people will feel comfortable coming in at $150,000. If you went to a million in this massive spike, where like in the last month or two, you went from $500,000 up to a million, you'd potentially have a lot of people who just got blown out on really high prices. So how long that takes to correct, it could take a really long time to correct. I don't want to see something like that. Could we see it? It's possible we could see it.

I don't want to see it. I think that would be an incredibly hard environment. I think it'd be very hard to trade. I think it'd be very hard to sell. I think the chain would become probably heavily bogged down. We'd have a hard time moving Bitcoin to sell Bitcoin. I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that.

And actually, that brings up a good point. I forget who said it. Core developer recently said that the pace of development at the protocol level is pacing nicely with the price right now. So Bitcoin is usable at this price, at this adoption level. and um it'll be interesting to see how development paces with the price going forward especially if markets continue doing what they're doing animal spirits take over do you think the protocol uh is is better positioned for a a bull run moving forward is better positioned than what than it was three years ago 27 the protocol like the the technology

I'm not an expert on the protocol. I'm not going to speculate on that. I'm not knowledgeable enough there. I think there's a lot of great things happening, but that's really a question for other people, not for me. I think that the infrastructure background is friendlier towards massive amounts of money coming in and will continue to accelerate and we'll see more money coming into developing potential scaling layers and and businesses trying to find their way. Look, we see that with somebody like Square, a company like Square that is supporting core developers,

that is doing a lot of really, really positive things. I would expect with rising prices, we'll see, at least I hope we do, more companies that are like Square. We have Fidelity that's doing stuff. I think that we'll see a lot of investment where companies are trying to build their own businesses and benefit from using Bitcoin and are supportive of the values of Bitcoin.

And I'm hopeful that we'll see that. As far as the protocol goes, that is over and above my head. I'm not an expert in that. I won't comment. I think for the infrastructure, I think we've built a lot of infrastructure in the last few years.

And I think that will continue to happen, which will allow for more money flows coming in. Was the Cash App around in 2017? Towards the tail end, I believe. Was anybody using it? Not as many people as are using it today. People are using it widely. So Cash App is a phenomenal onboarding tool.

And so there are a lot of things that are onboarding. You've got GiveBitcoin out there. That becomes an onboard. There are a lot of things that are out there that are building. There are a lot of things that were not there in 2017, which would be supportive. But if things become truly crazy and you're dealing with a very fixed asset, it depends on what hodlers do, how much they release and what prices they release at it. It becomes really hard to imagine. People become crazy when prices go up.

They really do. We saw this in the late 90s in the dot-com bubble. so it's hard to know i find as much as i say these things i don't actually believe what i say and i'll give you whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa no let me no let me let me tell you i'll give you a perfect example it's my in my own personal life so in 2003 and four i was talking about gold and i was saying you know there are going to be all these problems and and and uh so i bought like two gold coins it's like nothing and then 2008 happened and they did tarp and i said to myself oh my god the banking system almost just shut down so then i started buying

gold um this thing can really happen the banking system can actually shut down so when i say i don't believe what i say i say it but then it's like oh i don't go load up on gold in 2000 2002 2003, when I should have been doing that. So I thought rates are going to go down. And then like two weeks later, they get cut in half. So yeah, I think rates can go down, but I don't think rates are going to go down in two weeks. So when I say I don't believe what I say, I can be right about something, but yet I'm also surprised at how aggressive it is, and how right I might be in something so your idea is right the timing's off a little bit well it's just like you believe it but it's like it's when you're talking about things which are really hard to believe

it's sometimes even hard to believe it yourself that if bitcoin is sitting at four hundred thousand dollars i'm going to be like i said i'm going to four hundred thousand dollars but man i didn't think it would really go to four thousand dollars this fast and and and we won't it's gonna be hard to believe i promise you it goes to four hundred thousand dollars you will not believe it and neither will most other people and if it goes higher we're gonna be really bonkers and the whole world will be bonkers they're very we can say these things but actually watching it happen you still sound you still stand there with your mouth open just in astonishment and i think it should happen but actually watching

the thing actually happen. I'm astonished that the 10-year paper is at 0.748 right now. I'm astonished. I look at the yield curve. The curve is all, pretty much, not the 30-year, all under 1%. These are astonishing numbers. I did not live in a world like this. I mean, I saw a short post post-2008. But in the 90s, you had rates that were what we considered normal rates in the 5% and 6% range. These numbers are crazy. I mean, we regularly had money markets with 5% and 6%. We had two-year, three-year, five-year treasury paper, 5%, 6%, 10-year paper in numbers like that. It's just really hard to imagine when things really do happen. And so talking about it as one thing and then seeing it happen is really very different. I am comfortable in my views,

but even though I'm saying all these things, we'll still be shocked when it happens because these are shocking things and they you can't you can't deny your your human instinct right everybody has a hard time imagining a world that's different from the one they know and that includes me it's very hard to imagine a world that you don't know yet and yet yes i believe it yes i think it's going to happen but when it happens it will be astonishing it will astonish even those of us who believe it will happen does that make any sense i know i know you looked you you got really nervous when i said that you got really nervous i can see the look across your eyes like what the hell is this i thought

you're uh i thought you're going to contradict yourself but i completely understand what you're saying i felt that way in 2017 like i couldn't believe i got the 20 000 when i got there and like you i've been uh i've been saying that i think it will hit millions of dollars one day What year did you buy Bitcoin? That's a very personal question. Approximately. Okay. Approximately what price did you buy Bitcoin?

Approximately. Range. I bought it at the height of the last bubble before the 2017 bubble. But did you buy lower than that too? Yes, I did. Okay. So when you bought lower than that, did you really think it was going to hit 20,000? i mean i thought so yes but when it happened were you amazed when it got there

yeah i was having i think and this is a psa to all you freaks out there like make sure you have uh especially stuff that you have in your own custody down like lockdown uh because that that treasure this hardware while it's get very heavy when that price starts to rise um no but my point is my point is you know if you see something if you're buying bitcoin at three hundred dollars and you see it at $10,000 and it's not that many years later, it's pretty astonishing. I have to add this one thing before we go.

Bitcoin is the key to a long life. Why do you say this? Because it may not be any longer, but watching it every day, it sure seems like it's a lot longer. Right? yeah yeah it's been a very long two years i know well it's been a fun two years too what's up it's been fun get it's been a fun two years i didn't say it isn't fun i just said it's

long we watch this thing 24 7 right even people who say they don't look huh do you ever think about taking a vacation from watching this stuff 24 7 how do you take a vacation from it it's it's it's it's everywhere you can't you can't help yourself um i like to watch it but i don't but don't trade it i just sit and watch it does that drive you crazy at all i mean you're already crazy not really not really no i i look i'd be happier right now if bitcoin was sitting at 25 000 i think it's dumb at this price i think nine thousand dollars is stupid cheap i mean i i did not think bitcoin was going to get wrecked from six to three thousand uh i just didn't think that was going to happen i wasn't happy when it happened i thought when it got wrecked to 3 000

people saying it's going to go to 1 000 that was just stupid and that's why i wanted to talk to you back in in january 2019 um i think this is just a very large base that we're tracing out that will give us an enormous uh what's your name louise madison says the bigger the base the higher in space so we just have this huge thing that we're tracing out here that we're only people who really believe in this thing end up holding on to it because they ride through uh the ups and downs which this has been very beneficial for the class of 2017 to 2020 it's been a very beneficial time for them to load up on Bitcoin. And I think that there'll be people who are dollar cost averaging into it today, who if they are able to hold on to what they have, if you're 25 or 30

years old, when you're 50 or 60 years old, you're going to be very, very rich. I think even one bitcoin will make you very very very rich i talked to a guy the other day told me he only has 53 million sats and he's trying you know trying to become a whole coiner and i said you know keep keep keep doing that keep working on that um i think even 53 million sats will be a staggering amount of money many people will have sold well before the numbers that i think it will get to in 20 to 30 years. But if you're able to hold onto that, a hundred million sats will be a lot of money. And that seems crazy. And we think, oh my God, how can that possibly be? But if you bought Bitcoin at a dollar and you bought 10,000 of them, which is only $10,000, which is not a lot

of money. I mean, $10,000 just in the world of investing is nothing. It may be a lot of money to do certain things with but that today is how much is that today how much is 10 000 it's 90 million dollars how much is that 10 000 bitcoin oh um i think it's 90 million right yeah well we don't we don't want to make that stake that woman made uh on msnbc who said that who said that bloomberg's half a million dollars and everyone could have had a million dollars from that we we don't want to make that mistake right here i'll look it up right now 10 000 times 9 million 90 million dollars so who would have thought 10 000 could become 90 million dollars that's crazy and i think that you know i think that 30 years that's a long time 30 years

from now 20 years from now that one bitcoin that nine thousand dollars today will be worth an enormous amount of money so because a lot of people will sell they'll end up distributing out that bitcoin to other people the genie coefficient will keep will keep growing there'll be very few people who are able to really hold on as these things go up if we watch it go to two three four hundred thousand dollars if you own 10 bitcoin today you gotta go no we own 10 bitcoin today and it's at three hundred thousand dollars that's three million dollars so that's a lot of money and that's a lot of money goes to three million dollars in 10 years and bitcoin is 30 million dollars that's an enormous amount of money so it'll be hard to hold on to our stash because

we'll always be scared of how it trades it's going to be difficult people will spend and people have to live you know you got to pay your expenses so if you have a job uh you'll you'll be earning an income but your stash may become worth a lot of money and you want to you want to take nice vacations you want to buy a car you want to do things with it so people will do things but they will also want to enjoy that money as well so people will probably spend some of it some will done more than others a lot of people won't hold anywhere near the amount of bitcoin the number of bitcoin um that they have in 10 and 20 and 30 years yeah no i agree i've seen i mean we've seen it happen time and time again already that's all i'm saying yeah and i guess we can end it with uh

talking about like the perfect storm and another thing that i thought was very um And one thing I thought was very interesting this week, again, playing into fundamentals and then going back to your comments earlier about getting Capitol Hill involved and lobbyists involved, is Bitcoin mining becoming a function of power plants. And we're seeing more oil and gas companies get into it, too. So a lot of people are depending on the coin centers, and you were describing a Bitcoiner's pack in the future. I think we may be able to Trojan horse our way in through the energy sector, particularly oil and gas companies. Well, I think that's actually brilliant. I think that people might be negative on this, but think about Bitcoin has tremendous incentives built into it for energy innovation, energy efficiency. Some people complain that utilities mining Bitcoins are negative, but one of the things I believe, and so I'm not an expert here, so give me a little leeway.

One of the things I believe is that energy producers like utilities, electric utilities, have a problem with is peak load issues and stabilizing their production of power. If you're mining Bitcoin, and you can say, okay, we'll turn the Bitcoin off, the power level is whatever, you can better predict the loads you're operating at, because that becomes a variable item that you can either use or not use. And now you can stabilize that load. You can plan your energy production in a much more precise way. And my guess is, and I'm not an electrical engineer, I'm not an expert in utilities, but being able to plan the load that is being produced is probably enormously beneficial to a utility. so i think there are a lot of really good things that come out of that and people say oh no this is a terrible thing but it's probably it probably means that you can re-evaluate your investments in the latest technology um produce energy more efficiently produce energy with less pollution is that you no i think that's you i got some music going on in the background there I don't know what it was.

I'm trying to figure out what it was. It could be. No, I didn't. It sounded like it could be an ad going off when your tab sits open or something like that. I have multiple computers here. I can't find the mouse. That's weird. Anyway, so I think that it becomes very beneficial to the utility sector.

I think it will tend to drive innovation. And I think that that will be a very, very good thing. And I think that we'll see a lot of positive stuff come from that. I completely agree. That's one of the things I'm most passionate about right now with the Bitcoin narrative is trying to change that energy narrative particularly. I think it is changing and it will become more obvious that Bitcoin really helps fix inefficiencies in the energy sector, particularly. And in a glaringly obvious way, once you once you actually see like this, this power plant that went live in upstate New York, they're consuming 14 megawatts a day.

that's insane well if if um being able to have a a stable amount of production i believe and and you'll need somebody who knows more about this than i do but i think that's actually a really positive thing for an energy producer rather than having this huge fluctuation and i think you wind up with fluctuations on the basis of uh on the basis of the time of day as well as seasonality in the year but i think it's those shorter term production cycles which become difficult for utilities and being able to smooth that out probably is very beneficial to running those utilities but you'll need to talk to somebody who knows a lot more about it than i do oh well i actually one of the first episodes we had on this podcast was with somebody who works

um at an energy company at a facility and he was saying uh joe looney shout out joe looney he was saying um i don't know if it was his uh particular facility or another around him but they were uh basically putting water in like train cars and pushing it up a hill and dropping it down uh the hill which then had turbines that would pick up the water and sort of reproduce the energy so they had like a net uh zero energy consumption overnight when when the load was lighter um so they could keep the factory on but now just being able to use that energy to mine bitcoin instead um you can make money that way and not have to do that redundant useless task so just it just makes a lot of sense there that'd be fantastic yeah and then

it'd really be fantastic oil and gas energy lobby seems to be one of the biggest in the world like We may not even have to depend on Coin Center and me help them out so much that they go to bat for Bitcoin on Capitol Hill. That'd be great. That would be really great. And I think we'll see a lot of innovation in the space. I'm not an expert in energy. And so incentives are really – economic incentives are better ways to drive behavior than are regulation or moral imperatives. you may think something is quote unquote the right thing to do but if you benefit from it

economically by doing it you really tend to want to do it anyway so that just i think you can economic incentives are very powerful drivers for human behavior many of my views around bitcoin all revolve around price and what price does and uh price is incredibly important maybe the most important thing in an economy price causes consumers and producers to make choices and if price drives individuals and entities to do things that are net positives then that becomes a good thing so bitcoin becomes something which creates incentives to drive behavior that is is beneficial that probably sounds what's up yeah no no it's beautiful no i wholeheartedly believe that the

incentives are such and the third second third order incentives outside of the direct network are uh are beneficial as well and people are just starting to notice this it's a perfect storm seems like it's all coming together everything is good for Bitcoin all bad news all good news is good for Bitcoin

obstacles are nothing but things to be overcome by the social layer of Bitcoin Bitcoin's inevitable Marty I think so as well and I guess let's end it last note how strong is the social layer of Bitcoin right now

Has it gotten stronger in the spare market? I think so, but I mean, I'm just one person. I mean, I only see what's on Twitter, and I think that may just be a limited window. But the social air is created by the incentives of Bitcoin. So turns out, Marty, that you don't change Bitcoin. bitcoin changes you and we're gonna end it on that peace and love freaks