TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #200: Ansel Linder

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Ansel Linder to discuss: - 2015 + 2016 bear market - Different iterations of altcoins - Fed Policy - Is QE inflationary or deflationary - How does Fed policy affect Bitcoin? - much more Follow Ansel 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 when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with an OG Bitcoin podcaster, Ansel Linder. I vividly remember tuning in to his Bitcoin and Markets podcast weekly in the 2015-2016 bear market and got a lot of information and value from Ansel and arguably listening to his podcast helped me develop the confidence to start this podcast so it was a very fun conversation for me personally uh we talked about bitcoin and markets uh the fed's policy right now whether qe is inflationary or deflationary and a bunch of other stuff i think you guys are gonna like it this episode is brought to you by great friends

at the cash app you freak should know about them but if you don't know about them let me tell you about them the cash apps help me stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please we're saying sat sat sat sat sats because you can make sats the standard within the app we're no longer buying fractions of a bitcoin which some people don't even realize you can do yet we're stacking whole sats we need to change that unit of accounts so people realize that you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin there's still people out there who think you need to buy a whole bitcoin you can stack sats whole sats at that on top of that you can stack slivers of stonks via the cash app if you are into stonks if that is that your type of thing if that tickles your fancy if that

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been complaining about the uh how loud the owl sound is so i'll give you a soft out today for you soft bitches out there. It's Owl's Lacrosse. Enjoy this episode. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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 on the Back Porch studio on a beautiful Friday afternoon. Very excited for this conversation, sitting down with a gentleman whose smooth voice I've been listening to for years and a voice of reason that helped me out early in my Bitcoin journey around 2015 when I was trying to consume as much content as possible and the scaling debates were starting to rage off. uh the gentleman uh sitting across from my computer screen right now uh was a voice of

reason during that time i'd like to introduce you freaks to ansel linder ansel welcome to the podcast marty it is an honor for me man you're the coolest guy in bitcoin so thanks for having me on i don't know man i don't i don't think i can compete with your voice you got the coolest smoothest voice it's you and maddie mazingtious who are up there like number fighting for number wanted to in my mind yeah so what we were just chatting a little bit about the inception of your podcast bitcoin and markets if you guys haven't uh if you freaks haven't checked it out definitely go check it out um again like it was a voice of reason for me a beacon of light at a time when shit coinery was high and the scaling debates were just

uh starting to lift off and it was really hard to uh especially if you weren't technical enough to understand uh what the best path forward was and you decided to start your podcast what what was the impetus for that and and i guess we could rehash the scaling debates a little bit for the freaks who are around before segwit2x yeah well that would be good because uh we don't want to forget history where how we got to where we are today but yeah i started my podcast man i don't remember now when exactly it was i think it was 2015 and uh it was because i didn't feel like there was enough bitcoin maximalist voices at the time i mean this is before the meme of bitcoin maximalism so it was just a bitcoiner voice going on that kind of had economic arguments and so

i started that right in the heart of the scaling debate and i was the first person i think to publicly say that, uh, the user activated hard fork or user activated soft fork was going to work. Um, I said that the day after it dropped on GitHub. So, um, yeah, I think I'm really honored to hear people say that because that's why you start a podcast is to make a difference. I think at least that's why I did it. And it's been a journey. Yeah. Journey. That's helped me start my own podcast as well which is uh no it is and it is crazy like back in the day the the sparse sparse resources that were to actually get good information that's what i liked about bitcoin and markets particularly is that you brought the macro aspect into i think it was

just you and um renegade investor back in the day you were making like the the macro uh arguments for bitcoin like uh on a consistent baseless basis from like a content production um standpoint and like it's a good sorry to interrupt i had to give a shout out to uh john seth and chris derose because those guys they uh i remember listening to them and they said well the hardest thing about podcasting is getting started and so i was like fuck it i'm just gonna to do it right and here we are five years later shit almost six years later time flies what um so what's been the craziest thing for you over i guess the last five years building your podcast and uh sort of honing your craft and your subject matter and um again i think you have a very good

uh finger on the pulse of fed policy and as it relates to the macro fundamental argument for bitcoin and how's that evolved it's evolved significantly right since 2015 well yeah fed well my opinions on fed policy have evolved a lot just in the last i would say year and a half to two years um i would say the hardest thing about well just to break that up that question up a little bit so the hardest thing about podcasting over that time uh was especially in bitcoin is all the the shit coinery and all the icos and and you're like you're watching other people take sponsorships and and do these launches of their ico and making millions of dollars and then you you know the only thing that stands in the way of you doing that is like a principle

that you want to be um a good source of information and so i think that honestly that was like the biggest struggle uh you probably deal with that too i mean i'm sure people contact you constantly probably five times a day trying to get you to review their white paper or say something about their project yeah i respond no and they say have fun staying poor yeah i actually don't respond to most people reach out for advertising very selective it's hard right to to remain uh true to the ethos bitcoin i'm not trying to signal like i'm more virtuous than anybody but i align very much with what you just said there like i just want quality information to get out there it's fun it's cool to make money off of

this but i'm not gonna sell my soul to make money yeah uh it's it and have fun staying poor it is one of the it's not it's at a point where i like a complete zen with it but it is funny watching these shit coin uh cycles happen over and over again and just the the basic gist of how uh they work mechanically is pretty much the same it's just a different ui on top of it that uh that makes it a new carrot for people to chase after yeah it's just a a new narrative on the ponzi scheme uh they they have to obscure it one more layer right that's what defy really is it's just an obscured ICO one more layer down

right and so like let's help the freaks understand how it's not much different than the pre-mine proof of work launches that were a big thing on Bitcoin talk back in like 2013 2014 which eventually evolved into

ICOs which are now quote unquote DeFi which are just again ICOs and pre-mine launches that you have a select few dumping on retail and making fun of you because you're poor. Well, it's I mean, there's no real new idea on Bitcoin. Every time you think you come up with a new idea,

just go back on Bitcoin talk in like 2011 and you find out that somebody had that idea before you. And then some, some OG told him why it was dumb and wouldn't work. So yeah, it's, I think this is basically a competition for supremacy of being money. And if you compete on features, like now we have all these smart contract platforms that do all this stuff, but look, what's so much better between Ethereum and Tron or all these other smart contract platforms

that they're just going to cannibalize each other. There's no thing that makes them special. And they would actually be better if they were centralized because the only thing you need decentralization for is money to keep that monetary policy set at 21 million but you need unstoppable touring complete virtual machines yeah that is but there is that like that noise in the space makes you think like am i missing out on an innovation like a defy like oh the ability to put tokens up as collateral get stable coins and get interest out of that yield farm is that really innovative

i don't think so no i don't think it is um a lot of the like we said it's just another layer of obscuring things so it does take a while for people to maybe figure out how to explain it why is this a scam but we eventually learn and a lot of times we don't want to put the time and effort into it i've told people this for years is that um you know i don't have to read your of white paper because i know it's stupid right off the bat because this is what this technology does and you're trying to do something different than that so it's obviously a scam or you don't know what's going on yeah and on top of that it's you see the same people over and over again just re-architecting same scam and positioning it and then on top of that these people like

the virtue signal that these networks are to save the world we're going to save starving people in far-off countries and then you look at the way like yield farming works and the amount of user interaction you need with these protocols it's like you're never going to get joe schmo to to buy uniswap turn it to die trade it for whatever yams put up to to to yield some interest right on top of that like it's complete pipe dream and then it's completely disingenuous to to market these things like they're they're going to be mass adopted because even the people who are very technical find it hard to get into these schemes yeah well it's it's um i lost my train of thought there what you what you when you're uh saying that

it's too much user interaction at the end of the day too like bitcoin was made to simplify things right like you just want sound money that you're able to hold and know that's going to uh maintain its purchasing power hopefully relative to the dollar over time yeah i mean what why you would buy into these schemes is to increase your purchasing power to increase your value and if you understand that oh you can just be cloned like this sushi swap cloned uniswap right they can just keep cloning it so what what gives you like an infinite ceiling on value for your token there's not much because you can just be cloned away if you're if your value proposition is a feature that feature is going to get copied um bitcoin is competing on something as being the best where

it's a fixed supply that is what it's competing on and you can't be more fixed than bitcoin no no and it's people can't come to the realization or they can't believe that bitcoin being as dumb as it is from a protocol perspective and the fact that it's very narrow in its uh in its feature set like people i don't know if they get bored or they just get like anxious like oh it should do more it should do more and they're essentially just re-architecting the system we're trying to get away from and they can't appreciate the beauty of bitcoin simplicity it's like it frustrates people for some reason yeah but it also rubs up against like startup culture i don't know how much

experience you have with that but um you know these people constantly looking for angel investors they're pitching people all the time they're they're trying to come up with this little tiny software app that they can make their their fortune off of and it's kind of cutthroat um i think that icos and maybe this defy stuff they kind of rub up against that um culture the startup kind of uh backstabbing cutthroat stuff that goes on yeah it's annoying culture too it's very emblematic of uh culture at large too like where we are as a society high time preference can't focus on anything like fiat culture yeah right uh are bitcoiners too virtuous do we think we're too virtuous or is there is there uh i think there's value in uh championing

the low time preference sort of crux of the bitcoin ethos um in society today at large i mean And you see right now as we're heading up to the election, like the narrative changes every day. And it seems like there's no focus on anything long term anymore. It's just a 24 hour news cycle. Yeah. And I think a lot of Bitcoin, the good Bitcoiners out there, the good influencers that they didn't necessarily sign up to be influencers. They just led by example and they talked about low time preference. They talk. It's similar to some of these things like a Jordan Peterson or something. He just strikes a chord with the listener.

And I think so real hardcore Bitcoiners with low type preference, they just strike a chord with so many people that it's kind of natural to become an influencer. But now if you're trying to reach out and become an influencer in Bitcoin, I'm always suspicious of those people. And you don't want to let those people that are trying to, you know, make a name for themselves or something, they're going to launch a shit coin in two years.

I've seen this before. Yep. yep every time richard hart was one of those people recreatin uh who else i mean roger for roger's story is very tragic it is particularly it is well he he was kind of part of how i got in you know i was an ancap uh with the interest in the free state project uh gold bug type and so the bears and the vorheeses and the max kaisers and stuff there they got me into this uh this whole space uh originally and so it yeah it was very very tragic to see the way those guys went well not max he's he's pretty hardcore bitcoin now but he did brush with an altcoin at one point

but he's he's um he's repented he's repented and now he's on a straight and narrow so yeah for you for roger or eric if you're listening there's our arms are open to welcome you back just repent no you don't have to repent you don't have to do anything i don't think they will but uh eric's story is a little interesting too he likes to he likes to poke poke the bear he's a big believer in the crypto future falling into the brian armstrong naked mole rat mentality that crypto is necessary for borderless permissionless financial system as they try to create a regulatory mode for any newcomers yeah i mean i'm confused about some of those people uh especially vorhees

confuses me he'll openly state that he's 90 bitcoin but then he provides this platform for ponzi's to sell to greater fools so i don't know it's it just is better to recognize them as not trustworthy and move on yeah yeah i agree speaking of not trustworthy we cannot trust the fed it's sort of the reason why we're here today is talk about fed policy and you mentioned it before we hit record uh and after we hit record that your your view of the fed and their policy has sort of evolved particularly over the last 18 months and i guess the the big crux of the debate of fed policy is whether or not it's inflationary or deflationary and how do you define those two terms in the context of the u.s economy and so i'm very curious to see what

your mental framework has been and how it's how it's adjusted and how you're currently viewing the state of fed's policy as it relates to inflation yeah i mean i came to this space as a gold bug as an austrian and so uh it was easy to recognize bitcoin's kind of value proposition of sound money and stuff and then i had an opinion on the fed and so i i just and it made sense it fit what we were seeing but like in 2018 we start seeing like the yield curve flattening and we start seeing it's getting close to inverting it's getting close in and it then invert in 2019 and oh recession's coming well we've been waiting for inflation sound money people have been waiting for inflation this whole time and we i mean the fed

upped their balance sheet from like 500 billion to 4 trillion and oh hyperinflation is around the corner and 10 years later we're going into a deflationary credit contraction time again where's the inflation and so i had to really question i that was like i questioned my assumptions. And I, uh, opened up to all these people talking about deflation. And so now that's, I'm, I'm on the deflation bandwagon. I don't think that we're going to see a huge inflation in the dollar. Um, I think we're going to see kind of a Japanification of the U S a Japanification of the world basically. And Bitcoin is going to be kind of the only place where all the green shoots are and where any sort of, um, return, you're going to find the return in Bitcoin and everywhere else

is going to be stuck at zero all right so let's dive into the dynamics of this why why flooding of money or excuse me flooding the global economy with capital via the fed window is leading to deflation how that deflation is materializing in the economy you alluded to the credit crunch but what about prices like for example this year alone the price of lumber is up something like 110 the last i checked uh the real estate real estate health care university costs have skyrocketed over the last 15 years stock markets are at all-time highs is there an argument to be made that inflation lives in these assets, not maybe your everyday grocery list. Yeah. And that's what I was going on for a long

time is that we see inflation in bond prices and we see inflation in stock prices, house prices. But I went back and looked into Rothbard and Mises and Mises said that inflation inevitably or prices broad prices inevitably increase when you have inflation you might see it go through the economy from different sector to different sector or different industry to industry but eventually it goes everywhere and i would think 10 years would be enough to to see a quadrupling of the base money quote-unquote base money inflate everything um and then you got to look at the arguments that deflation can also increase prices right because deflation can destroy production productive capacity and so if you have productive capacity going down like this

you mentioned the lumber um if supply chains get stopped but there's still some demand there right the prices are going to increase even though you're in a contraction and the industry is getting hurt and harmed and shrunk shrinking but prices are going up um so i i don't think we can look at solitary prices in specific industries and then draw a reverse conclusion that we have inflation i think you need to start with the inflation and then draw the conclusion forward um so yeah i don't think those two things necessarily go together interesting um so you start with the inflation and draw the conclusions forward so what would a world in which inflation does exist in your definition look like well we have to we'd we'd

have to identify what inflation is right inflation is a increase in the money supply and then people will look at m2 and be like oh look the money supply is going up so we that's inflation and inflation will create prices to go up um but i don't think that's necessarily what money is i don't think that qe is inflationary i don't think necessarily fiscal policy is inflationary either um i think what is money today is credit so credit has to be expanding to get inflation if you have credit contraction you by definition have deflation going on and then And that deflation can cause all sorts of spasms in different prices, just like inflation can cause price distortions. Deflation can also cause price distortions on the way down.

So, yeah, I see that we're in a deflationary environment. Credit is contracting for every, what is it, $3 of government spending. We get like $1 in GDP growth now or something like that. so it's uh um we're just in a deflationary environment it's very hard to grow credit and uh these deflationary shocks um are a symbol that we are in a deflationary environment i don't think we're going to see inflation even though the fed's trying to overshoot well i think that is i'm starting to call that the placebo effect because i don't think the fed can print money. I mean, legally, they can't print money. They can buy, they can shorten

durations, right? They can shorten debt durations and they can give you reserve casino chips that you hold dollar denominated casino chips at the Fed. And you can call those Fed reserve or reserves held at the Fed. But that's not real money printing. So QE, actually what QE in my mind, QE is taking a liquid treasury or security out of the market and replacing it with illiquid reserves at the Fed. So QE is deflationary. The only reason why you might see some inflation or some prices going up, the market could be rescued, quote unquote, rescued by QE is the placebo effect. People believe it's going to cause inflation. And so they act as if it's going to cause inflation. And we can get 2%. But you can also look at it like, okay, so this actually works

really well when you think about the size of the inflation that we're getting. It's really hard to get to that 2% target. And when you talk about the placebo effect, I dropped my pencil. When you talk about the placebo effect in medicine, the placebo will have a notable effect, right? People will actually, uh, you'll be able to measure it. It'll be statistically significant, but it won't be very good compared to the real medicine, the people that got the real medicine. Um, it's the same thing with inflation. So the placebo effect can get you that one or 2% inflation, but it's never going to get you 10 is never going to quote unquote cure the system through letting it run hot you're just going to get maybe one percent interesting and so

what is the mechanics of qe specifically think about that you switch out assets between the federal reserves books and the member banks books and you get them better more liquid reserves the member banks in hopes that they will then loan out that money and that would lead to the monetary supply inflation that many people expect but we're finding that those banks aren't willing to take on that that credit risk they don't see an appetite from the market or maybe an appetite from the market but they're not willing to lend that money out considering a certain market structure and so is our credit system just completely borked right now like well it takes two to tango right so in a loan you have a lender and a borrower and when rates are

low you have borrowers really with high demand you want to take out that 30-year mortgage at two percent or 1.5 percent if you can get that but banks aren't willing to lend so you're going to actually have tight monetary conditions because of the lender. Now, when interest rates are high, say 15%, it's going to be the opposite. You're going to have a surplus of lenders, but not very many people are going to want to borrow at that high price. So at high interest rates and low interest rates, you are actually in tight monetary conditions. It's only that sweet spot, I don't know, 5% to 10% that you're going to have easy monetary conditions where credit is expanding and things like that so as long as interest rates are at zero you're not going to

see inflation there's there the banks are not going to lend credit will not expand yeah and so how do you see this playing out in the near to medium term i think we we're seeing jerome powell sort of pegging uh trump and uh pelosi to get something through congress for fiscal stimulus He seems to be under the impression that the Fed is all out of ammo and can really do nothing more at this point. So, like, where do we go next? You mentioned a Japanification of the global economy. Is that essentially it? I think so.

You know, people talk about maybe fiscal policy will get us inflation. You know, if the government spends, velocity of money will go up and that will get us more inflation. But I think that's a misunderstanding of what fiscal policy is. You know, for the government to spend, they actually first take it out of the economy, right? So they're just changing public savings, or sorry, private savings for public spending. There's no increase in the money supply. And so that wouldn't be inflationary either. And maybe Jerome Powell is trying to pass the buck to the government and say, look, it's not us private bankers, private shareholders of the Federal Reserve.

It's actually the elected officials that are keeping the economy down. So I don't know if they go to MMT or not, but if they do, I would expect there to be some sort of warning. It's not like they're going to just come out one day at some Fed meeting and say, you know, oh, this is what we talked with government and they're going to start doing some MMT printing of money. I think it would take a long process. We'd see it coming for a year or two down the road that they're thinking about this or they're forming some committee to talk about this, what it would look like. Oh, there's a working group at the Fed. And so I think we would see that coming and we just don't see that right now. So as far as we know and that we can see out in the future, I would say we're just going to see zero, very low growth, 1% growth every year, 2%, very low interest rates, very low inflation, deflationary environment.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, I don't think so. um i think bitcoin actually it's better for bitcoin because people can slowly wake up it's not like you are rushed into some hyperinflationary scenario where you have one year to get your capital out or two years you know you can kind of wake up slowly um of course you'll be late to the bitcoin party but you won't necessarily be late to exiting fiat because if you have really low inflation you know your purchasing power can last for a while um but then i don't know if you listen to uh stacy herbert and max kaiser show and they talk about jabo the global

insurrection against banker occupation and uh i i think it's legit though because if you have zero percent growth people get very frustrated uh you start the the poor start seeing the rich maybe getting ahead a little better than the poor and so there's riots in the streets and pretty soon they'll be tarn feathering so that could that could happen but um i think in general um it's a good thing for bitcoin a good thing for bitcoin but it's a good thing for people like where do we get to a point where you have the flywheel the economy sort of back on its feet and you have people building cool things innovative things things to make us more efficient more productive like does this deflationary environment

perturb that cycle and does it prevent it from reaching a capacity and potential that that it could had had the monetary and financial situation been a bit different um not sure if i understand that yeah like how long do we have to put up with this deflationary environment before we get back to a market cycle that's that's more run-of-the-mill like people are lending money people are building things people are paying back those loans um yeah i think um well if you look at japan they've been doing qe for what eight years i think or maybe 10 years longer than the u.s so we probably at least have 10 more years but they've also been just at zero growth for like 30 years so the u.s could go on for another 20 years in this

zero growth thing if it weren't for bitcoin and i think bitcoin is going to play a big role like i said it's going to be there for people to leak over onto bitcoin and that's where all the green shoots will be and things like that um and that that will be a process probably over the next decade and then eventually one day there'll be a flippening right where bitcoin will take over from the dollar yeah but now that we have japanification japan situation sort of well understood and people are banking on like the u.s like oh since japan cycle went like this the u.s following this cycle will take 10 20 more years from now you think people try to front run that cycle and next does that expedite um

downfall of the u.s dollar or the financial system at all yeah i think the people buying bitcoin would be front running it um so yeah that's a good point uh but it's it's again it's the placebo effect the the more people doubt the fed the more they'll come out with we're going to print money next time it's going to be a five trillion in six weeks instead of two trillion whatever it was this time and um the same with the government i just saw a headline like trump floated a 10 trillion dollar rescue package so 10.2 it'll just get bigger and bigger and people will it'll be very hard for the average person average business person even that's savvy it'll be hard for them to like how could this not cause inflation but it's not gonna

by what metric though like are you looking at the cpi the pce what do you think about the chapwood index and their their uh reporting of inflation what seems to be much higher than the cpi they would argue that across some of the major cities here in the u.s inflation's running at about 10 percent annualized um in some cities for like the last five years at least well i think just by the definition of money supply increase doesn't matter i mean the reason why they use pci and cpi and wage inflation and sticky inflation and all these other things is because they don't know how to measure the money supply that's why if they could measure the money supply they would just say oh yeah we're gonna get inflation but

they can't do it because now it's all mysterious in the back room we we interviewed uh jeff schneider on my new podcast fed watch that i do with ck on bitcoin magazine and um he was saying yeah every crisis you'd have to get a new m measurement you know like m0 m1 m2 and we would be like on m22 by now if because it's really hard to measure money you don't know you have to figure it out the the system is evolving it's not like 1971 it just stopped evolving it's been evolving the whole time and every time there's a new regulation the system routes around it again and invents some other crazy backroom deal between overnight desks at banks and they create different types of money uh so we don't know uh we just know the overall character is credit contraction or credit

inflation or expansion and so that's what we have to look at to measure inflation in my mind yeah yeah when you consider things like the euro dollar and how it's essentially just like a dark dark matter market where you have no idea because the banks are just european banks at is they're just able to pull those out of thin air and trade them between each other. And that's one of the most fascinating series of Macro... Was that with Jeff Snyder on Macro Voices, that? Yeah, Macro Voices, Eurodollar University, yep.

Yeah, and him dumping into that is... The Eurodollar world is just crazy when you try to even wrap your head around it. And even after listening to that University, get your dollar university series that he did with eric towns and it's still like what the fuck is going on there so bring it back to bitcoin how bitcoin simplifies some of these things like is everything too over engineered in your mind financially um is everything too interconnected do you think bitcoin brings us back to a simpler um easier to understand financial system or will

it just be an asset plugged into this already complex system yeah i don't know maybe i'm getting older but i feel like a lot of the new technology that's coming out doesn't necessarily increase productivity doesn't increase our well-being and our happiness it actually makes us you know less healthy and sadder and as a population and so i think that we're probably going to reset like bitcoin will obviously people will save a lot more their time preference will be a lot lower. And there'll be a period of like, I don't know, 10, 20 years where people have invested and they're waiting. They're just waiting. They're sitting on their stack and they're waiting for something else. They're waiting for something better. And so I kind

of see a stop at least. Have you had Jeff Booth on? I have, yes. Yeah. And so his technology driving deflation argument. See, I think that comes to an end because consumers will go away. People will, their preferences will change and they'll be more towards, you know, raising a family. they'll be more towards planting a garden instead of constantly working 80 hours a week they're gonna want to work 20 and sit on their bitcoin stack um so i think that's what maybe 20 years from now looks like something like that i'd be happy with that world yeah i would selfishly i'm a bitcoiner so already sitting on the stack um but will more people adjust to that hopefully And so I guess that's a good transition into like a Bitcoin conversation, like pricing Bitcoin. I saw you posted a piece a couple of days ago.

Consolidation is getting tight on your Bitcoin Pulse newsletter. And like, where are we from a price structure perspective in your mind? Like, it seems like things have been very, very consolidated. Volatility is very low. it seems like the spring is just getting getting ready to pop so what's your view on the price right now well i'm a a big happening believer and stock to flow believer i think that it will you know this is just natural compared to where we are in the happening cycle and you know i don't know i think there's it's almost magic the way markets work and we don't know why the supply

or the halvening has this effect why the stock to flow has the effect but it just does um and so i think we are in the beginning of the parabolic move for bitcoin now day to day yeah on my on my member newsletter i do lots of i talk a lot about um individual like on a weekly basis where do i think it's going and the chart patterns and things um but yeah i think overall globally when you step back like on a month-to-month chart it's it's just gonna start the next parabolic move right now how how high do you think we go that's good uh what's historically it's like 10 to 20x on each bull run so somewhere in that ballpark yeah and do you think these these cycles persist the way they have um up to this point moving forward into the future that's

one theory i have i don't think they especially to the downside i don't think they'll be as pronounced to the downside moving forward um i'm not so convinced well they have i think they've gotten a little bit less to the downside already right um i think it went from like 95 to 85 to now 82 or something percent on this last one so um yeah i agree with you i think it'll be less pronounced to the downside and probably the upside too um well instead of seeing a 20x we'll see a 15x then a 10x and yeah yeah it'll be uh so what do you think leads this next uh you said you're a stock to flow believer it's blasphemy to a lot of people it is what would you say to the stock to flow deniers well i would tell them i

don't know how it works but look at the chart um it's it's pretty damn spot on and it's not i mean obviously it's not like there's some law of physics that this is describing okay this is just describing a general way that things work um i i said on the fed watch podcast that um it's kind of like elevation you get cooler with elevation so as you go up it gets cooler but it doesn't have to like you can have a hot plateau or something somewhere but it's kind of like stock to flow so as as the stock to flow goes what would that be up then price just goes up that's it doesn't have to but it's kind of a good rule to have yeah no i saw an interesting chart on twitter i believe it was yesterday somebody dropped it like

a flow chart uh trying to visualize the the having of the subsidy and i think that the way he described it was actually really good like there's an information asymmetry built into the stock to flow model of people who understand the subsidies getting cut in half and therefore less supplies being distributed to market every block and they are buying bitcoins from weekends and holding it knowing about the supply crunch and that that information asymmetry coupled with the the supply subsidy half uh really drives that stock to flow uh into motion yeah in markets you never know how a market will react but you know that it will react in a certain it'll react um it won't stay the same after something has changed and so yeah we we know

that something is going to happen and it's probably uh i mean it's a good guess that when you cut the supply of something and you don't change anything else the price will go up um so it probably it's at least a point of departure the stock to flow yeah yeah it's um it's funny how triggered people get by this this model it's uh it's like yeah it's for me it's like i don't me personally like i think stock of flow the model is like a nice to have i don't like to lead with it like hey look at this model it's been created this is why you should buy bitcoin it's like hey you should buy bitcoin because it's a peer-to-peer distributed sound digital money uh that seems to be working pretty

well and by the way hey look at the stock to flow chart this model was put together and it seems to be following it pretty pretty nicely yeah i mean it's not perfect because like a piece art has a stock to flow of one right or whatever um there there is no new unique pieces of art that are being made that just like that um so yeah it's it's it's a good rule it's a good model to depart from and i i don't know why people hate it so much i think it's because they are like violently opposed to uh predicting the future and they and that's what they think it's doing yeah yeah bitcoin is going to be 1 million dollars by 2026 just accept it freaks it's happening uh so what um what excites you about bitcoin these days like what uh like you mentioned your

ancap austrian roots you think bitcoin's staying true to that and what do you think like a world on the bitcoin standard could look like i mean you already mentioned the um people working 20 hours a week and raising families but what else particularly like a tech perspective interests you oh that interests me tech technically wise um i mean censorship resistance and confiscate unconfiscate ability or whatever that term is that's that's pretty awesome i also think like i'm i'm i'm not going to be the person that does this but i'm excited to see the first person that gets sued or that gets um you know arrested by the government of some some way and they say no i'm not giving you my keys we're kind of seeing this

with bitmex right now right um and that is exciting that's very exciting to me because it's testing the unconfiscatability of bitcoin you know let's jump into this a little bit what do you think this is a necessary hurdle for bitcoin to overcome to sort of incite some animal spirits to pour into it or yeah that's a good thought i think um well like so the scaling debate was very important once bitcoin once a segway was activated it cleared up a lot of uncertainty about bitcoin and how bitcoin is upgraded who controls the code who can influence the code and things of that nature so um this could be another similar thing to that so we i mean tether has kind of gone down this road a little bit but bitmex is definitely um front and center and maybe this drags on for

a year or two but i i think yeah however it turns out is going to set precedence for the future that's for sure and it will convince a lot of people one way or the other um if they somehow force bitmex to give over their their multi-sig um that's going to be a big blow to bitcoin i think what do you think i think it's interesting i think it's up to how spiteful arthur hayes and samuel reed and the other executives are willing to be um records they can just throw you in jail and say we're not gonna let you out until you sign these keys i guess it's just like a battle of attrition at that point and then you get into the the argument of if the government's allowed to lock them in a cage under that that um under those circumstances into perpetuity i'm not sure

i'm not like a legal expert but i think they may be able to do that right well i'm i don't know i'm not a lawyer but i would assume there would be some sort of maximum term that they could get for certain crimes so maybe 20 years something yeah aren't they willing to sit in a cage to prove a point for bitcoin that would talk about martyrdom no they probably wouldn't do that i would say they they probably use wasabi or some mixing service and get just close down bitmex and send those bitcoins somewhere else um and that would also prove bitcoin's uncensorability and and confiscation resistance or whatever yeah it just claimed to be hacked oh our insurance fund got hacked somebody moved the funds and actually have control of them yeah it will be interesting

to see that's i mean that's a thought experiment i always play in my mind like somebody not that i'm doing anything illegal or expect this to happen but just like what if they came and took my hardware wallets and were like we need you to sign this i was just like no yeah well it also brings up game theory about like we i mean people have said for a long time um where money will go where it's best treated and so the government doesn't necessarily want to crack down too hard the u.s government because then maybe some tech innovation will go elsewhere and hide from hide from their the long arm of the u.s government but we'll see yeah i think it's a very important case for sure yeah i mean just piggybacking on that thought like the doj

came out this week with some pretty aggressive guy i mean just not aggressive but they came out with guidelines basically prove they're paying attention actually understand what's going on i think much better than anybody expected uh and they really they highlighted privacy as something they do not like specifically in that report which is interesting and i think setting the the groundwork um to begin in like enforcing um enforcement against people innovating in the united states which i think is just terrible uh and because right because it just achieves you're going to achieve the opposite the opposite of the goal that you set out to to achieve like you just want yeah you'll harden you'll harden bitcoin you'll harden the technologies you'll

get more mixers out there you know more people mixing their coins they'll make it even harder to track where things are going so yeah you'll push you'll push innovation into areas that you deem as like enemies or like you're into jurisdictions that you don't want to be innovating and so it's like that prisoner's dilemma do you do you just let it run free and let your your citizens your citizens your subjects the citizens of the country uh the united states innovate at will um knowing that there's a risk that they may build privacy tech and stuff like that or do you try to clamp down and push that innovation elsewhere and me personally like i think the latter is going to happen unfortunately i think there's going to be a big battle well if

you drill down on it more like the individuals that are behind that report do you think writing that report made them want to buy bitcoin or not uh i would imagine so yeah i think so too and so the more that people look into it even if it's one percent of everybody that looks into it buys bitcoin i mean slowly bitcoin takes over and it's going to be it's really hard to crack down on something when say 10 of your population owns it or 20 so hopefully bitcoin can scale up to that type of adoption before these type of draconian enforcement happens that's a good point and that's why seeing the uh the trend of corporations publicly traded corporations specifically uh absolutely dumping bitcoin on their balance sheet is is very encouraging and do you how do

you think that plays out moving forward oh it's just going to continue um square probably won't stop at one percent they'll they'll go up to 10 or 20 i don't know um more people obviously there's there's some businesses that might fit with bitcoin better i don't know like if western union would buy bitcoin or you know some of these companies that might get disrupted by bitcoin then they would have more of a vested interest in not letting that happen so they might diversify into bitcoins uh as holding some bitcoin in their on their balance sheet but yeah i'll definitely continue yeah it's exciting it's like things that we've talked about for years yeah it's happening finally it's happening the gift's happening

it's crazy time how early are we do you think oh geez um probably i mean what's the the common hockey stick of technological adoption that we see it's getting faster and faster um i don't think that's gonna hold true for bitcoin it's probably going to be a little bit slower than some of the most recent things um so i would say we're about halfway to being a significant player bitcoin is halfway interesting but that's not necessarily uh winning it's just being in the conversation right um being there at bretton woods 2.0 and people are talking about oh you we will go with you on this but you have to have bitcoin backing it or you know something like that so that's we're about halfway to

bitcoin being seriously in the conversation yeah yeah actually i think i can i can get behind that as well i mean you see like more and more senators talking about it uh starting to to eke its way into the energy sector uh it's just starting to ingrain its roots and everything its roots spread and sort of force bitcoin uh to be reckoned with in different industries different jurisdictions um yeah it's fascinating so do you ever see a point in time where uh we're not podcasting and writing about bitcoin because it's just a foregone conclusion that it exists and everybody understands what it is and and we're unnecessary no i think it's going to get more and more popular listenership will go up because um instead of talking to some freaks on

the internet you're talking to everybody right uh you're talking to uh 20 of the population's interested in this instead of two percent it's just going to grow our reach and hopefully our profitability monetization so let's talk about that a little bit the uh the fed talk podcast you started with ck how's um why'd you guys decide to start that he reached out to you reached out to him um i've caught a couple episodes really good content um especially if you're a fed nerd like myself um yeah the bitcoin and markets podcast is kind of on a hiatus and i've started this thing with ck i was a guest on like episode six of theirs and then their other co-host left and so ck asked me to join he was like i think episode nine that i

started or something like that and jumped on with him on that and we started interviewing macro people talking uh the deflation inflation debate and so that's uh it's been great what are the plans for the future continue the same um interview more and more macro people specifically macro experts that we want to peel apart that specific argument like how is the fed creating inflation where where does this go in the future like do we think fiscal policy is going to change things what uh what did the fed say this week that made you think that or you know just kind of peel really dive down into the the niche topics uh of the fed yeah they're boring at the surface level but when you uh when you dive deep enough it gets

very interesting you find out how crazy our monetary and financial system is yeah and there's a there's a big market i think that's going to be coming over with gold bugs um gold bugs or or even followers of like hedge eye or or some of these other type of places they're i think they're going to really get interested in bitcoin and they're going to see like oh well keith sold all his bitcoins that's kind of say so i made a terrible trade this week Yeah. So it keeps sold out as Bitcoin. So I need to start listening to somebody that knows what he's talking about. And then we'll see people kind of move over to Bitcoin content and Bitcoin as a topic can grow and grow. You got time preference, you got carnivorism,

you have all sorts of things that Bitcoin touches on. And so I think podcasts, Bitcoin podcasts will kind of expand out into these other niches. interesting bullish i'm very happy to hear this i've actually had like a a scenario in my mind where like like i said earlier like people understand bitcoin at some point in the next five to ten years and it's like all right bitcoin exists people get it all the ui or all the technical aspects have been obfuscated behind good uis and ux and uh the need for me to speak into a mic and help hand uh handhold people through the bitcoin process sort of goes away and just fade into the ether and look back and say hey that was a fun

decade um but it would be yeah i mean well what's what's the what's the goal what's the um what are you trying to accomplish by your podcast same thing i just want people yeah to understand bitcoin i think it's important imperative technology for society moving forward i just want to provide a venue for people to learn about it and at what point is that critical mass of collective knowledge hit where it's unnecessary right or are people just going to have to continuously learn well you'll probably find another another um mission because like with my podcast it was first the scaling debate teaching people about that and that kind of ended and now it was like i was trying to figure out what i could do my podcast about and now i've

ended up with this inflation deflation debate and talking about the fed because that's a i think very very important i think jeff schneider's the stuff that he's doing is critical and i want to be a part of that um so i think once bitcoin does hit critical mass and you've achieved all of your goals then you'll probably find a new mission and i get bored easily so i'll be looking for one i'm sure that's what that's why i'm happy uh to be involved a great american mining because that that scratches my itch of um just being curious about something new which is the oil gas industry and learning about that alone is keeping me very occupied and very engaged, which I think is exciting.

Ansel, it's been a pleasure to get you on here, man. Is there anything you think we should wrap up with before we wave goodbye to the freaks? No, I can just tell people where to find me. I'm doing a Bitcoin Magazine podcast. called FedWatch. I still do my weekly newsletter. So you can find that at bitcoinandmarkets.com. And my personal podcast is taking a little hiatus, but it will be back sometime soon. And lastly, I did write the Bitcoin Dictionary. So you guys can find that at bitcoindictionary.cc.

I kind of summarized years of learning about Bitcoin into terminology or definitions for these books and it's kind of like each word is a little mini wikipedia article about it a couple paragraphs so people can learn about the history of the terms maybe where to find more things about bitcoin so check it out bitcoindictionary.cc extremely valuable resource there's a a lot to a lot of history to understand a lot of very specific terminology with an expansive history to just sort of get yourself bootstrapped up on what's going on. And so thank you for producing the content that you do. Again, it helped me out significantly

when I was in the earlier part of my journey, particularly around the scaling debate and putting Bitcoin in a macro context. So I'm, again, very pumped that we were able to get this done and thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me, Marty. You are a good influence on the space. and you're doing god's work so oh thanks you are as well we're all on the same team

you you are too freaks peace and love