TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #467: The ETF Will Push Bitcoin To $500k with Fred Krueger

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Marty sits down with Fred Krueger to discuss the upcoming Bitcoin ETF and the impact of institutional money entering Bitcoin. Fred on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dotkrueger 0:00 - Intro 6:01 - The scale of ETFs 13:35 - The pace of incoming money 20:48 - Perspective of an ETF buyer 28:16 - Will the ETF change the cycles? 36:33 - Bitcoin improving payments 40:13 - Financial degradation 47:06 - Inflation from the perspective of the wealthy 51:39 - Apathy towards Bitcoin 1:00:56 - Older generations hold the wealth 1:12:14 - Bull vibes will return with ETF 1:17:19 - ETFs will have the largest stacks 1:29:14 - Playing it safe 1:35:57 - Fred represents the majority 1:38:11 - Block size and other dev issues 1:42:14 - Money printer go brrr 1:46:55 - Likely date for the ETF 1:49:22 - How Fred got into Bitcoin 1:53:57 - The Anti-SBF event 2:02:02 - ETF is inevitable 2:03:55 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

should i get on a horse and say the institutions are coming the institutions are coming are you waiting for an answer yes yeah get go get your horse all right all right enjoy this episode for i'm kidding um sat down with fred krueger who has a lot of experience in the tradify world and has a lot of thoughts on the bitcoin etf its potential approval and what that would mean for the amount of capital that would come into the space and i think more importantly like how people particularly high net worth individuals ultra high net worth individuals how they'll approach their exposure to bitcoin fred uh it's pretty wholly convinced they're all just going to buy the atf

it's good perspective i've really enjoyed the conversation long one i mean if you're looking for bull fuel it's a 10x from here bull fuel enough bull fuel for you logan i think that's enough yeah 10x let's go 20 i like 20 20x here you heard logan doing his expert analysis 20x from here it's not financial advice if you're looking to get mb4 at 20x go to river river makes it extremely easy to buy bitcoin they've built their whole exchange in-house they don't of any third-party dependencies all their cold storage is a multi-sig backed one-to-one so if you have bitcoin on river it's backed one-to-one a multi-sig cold storage uh you can set price limits if you want to buy bitcoin at a particular price above or below where it is now you can

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tell them that TFTC sent you, and enjoy this episode with Fred Krueger. Institutions are coming. 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

we're live now fred welcome to the show marty thanks for having me man enjoy well i'm really excited for this conversation because i think i was telling you i've had a few of your monologues that you've been posting on twitter about the etf particularly over the last few weeks coming to some of the group chats that i'm in i thought it was a really interesting perspective, considering your background. So I think this is a jumping off point for this conversation. It'd be good to get a little bit of background of yourself, how you came to Bitcoin, and why you think this ETF is something that people should really be paying attention to. Sure. So I'm originally a math PhD from Stanford who was hired in the late 80s on Wall Street

to become one of the first, you know, prop traders on Wall Street. So I was with the Solomon Brothers prop trading team under John Merriweather. So if you've ever read the book Liar's Poker, you know, that was my world. So I, you know, I traded at Solomon. I traded at Greenwich Capital. You know, I was directly trading, you know, a billion dollar balance sheet um back in the late 80s early 90s um so that was my prop are you there yep oh okay yeah so that was my prop trading uh experience and you know i i've since then i've been you know i've i've i've been

an investor i've funded and started multiple companies i've had 10 not totally non-crypto exits. And, you know, I'm still in touch with all my Wall Street buddies and very much look at the world from a Wall Street perspective. Right. And so I think that the crypto world that that I'm now a part of doesn't really understand the scale of these ETFs and doesn't understand the kind of the wall of money that potentially could be coming into Bitcoin. And just to give you a number, you know, I asked a friend of mine who's in crypto, who's pretty active, wrote a couple books on Bitcoin, is pretty active in the podcasting, Mark Jeffrey. I said, Mark, what would you estimate the size of the global ETF market? And he's like, I don't know, a trillion

dollars. And I said, what if I told you there's $10 trillion of ETFs? You know, so that number is kind of crazy, right? If you think about it. And what's even more crazy is that number was $300 billion in 2000, right? So right around when I left Wall Street, it was $300 billion. So it's grown from $300 billion to $10 trillion. So there's not some sort of cycle, you know, theoretical like what if the property market when became tokenized what if people this is like active etfs that are trading today um and uh you know it's a 10 trillion dollar market and it's you know primarily in our jurisdictions in the u.s uh you know european jurisdiction so this is not, you know, stocks are trading in China or anything like that. This is, you know, ETFs run

by, I think BlackRock itself has about $6 trillion in ETFs right now, just to give you the scale of the market. So I just don't think that people in the crypto world understand that there's, you know, $10 trillion of actual movable money. And the way that this money is kind of allocated is also very different from, you know, I would say the way that crypto people think about buying and selling or degens think about investing now. So it's really allocated in a very passive investing strategy

where people um where the people come in and they say great i'm going to put x percent of my money into say s&p you know so a typical typical you know fund or management managed account will say i will put 40 of my money in the s&p you know one of the s&p indexed etfs then i might put you know i might put 20 percent in more of a like a bond etf right and then i will put you know five percent in a gold etf and so it's a very bucketed approach that is very different than the way a crypto person will look at you know say deploying capital um and what you have is these big buckets and they're held very passively they're held for you know years typically um and you know the adjustments are really on the edge so somebody will say great i will

lower my stock allocation from 40 to 35 or i'll increase it from uh 35 to 37 and that that's pretty much that's pretty much the way assets are allocated and so in this world we have this new asset class which is um bitcoin right which is which is on the broader side is crypto right but let's just let's just start by saying it's bitcoin to start um and these people aren't gonna only say we're we only like bitcoin they're gonna say well we're mainly interested in bitcoin because that's what our user base of financial investors are interested in. So I think Bitcoin is going to be the primary beneficiary of this ETF explosion, but I don't think it's going to be the only beneficiary. But I think proportionally to everything else, it'll get, you know, 80% of

the money. So that's the, that's really the first thing I think that people don't understand is the wall of money that's about to hit with the CTF. And, you know, that's coming in two months and it's not going to come all at once. It's going to come, you know, it'll, it might be $3 billion the first day. You know, that's, that's sort of the estimate that like Mark Yusko, I would agree would probably be in those waters, two to $4 billion in one day. And, you know, we just saw a $1.5 billion sale of Bitcoin at $44,000 and it brought the price down to $40,000. So I think you're going to get 2x that on the other side. When the first day of actual trading, whatever the price of Bitcoin is, I would not be surprised if we go up, you know, 8,000 to 10,000 points on Bitcoin on that day.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the question in most people's minds is that wall of capital just basically shaking down the gate waiting to get into Bitcoin. It's not quite shaking down the gate. And let me explain why. So first of all, you know, this is a gradual process, right? So most of these funds, they're not there. It's sort of a slow recognition that this is an asset class that they want to get into.

Right. So I don't see this as like all happening in the first month, whatever. I think this is going to happen over a period of years. Right. But I think it could happen in a two to three year period. And the way these people are going to look, there's yes, there's some early people that are going to come in on day one. They're going to say, great, I need my allocation. Give me my allocation on day one. This is like an IPO, right? So if you remember when, Marty, do you remember when the Google IPO happened in 2000? It wasn't like a big, you know, you know, like watershed moment.

It was those people just got in. They were well aware that Google was going to be an enormous player, but they didn't get in immediately. Right. And, you know, then it sort of crept up. In fact, the Facebook IPO is another one. Right. Facebook IPO actually went down right after the IPO. And then it went up. So I think that this is going to be equivalent to those kind of things. I think it's going to hit. But after it hits, you can expect that there's just going to be a steady wall of money that comes into this thing. And that's why I think a lot of the crypto people are not looking at this thing properly, because what they're looking at is they're looking at, great, does the existing crypto money, you know, try to trade this thing, try to front run it, try to sell the news, all this stuff. And that doesn't matter. Right. Because really what's going to happen is over the next year, once people can access the ETF and once this thing is now just one more bucket in this, in their choices, do I invest in S&P? Do I invest in real estate? Okay, there's, you can invest in the QR, you can invest in equity office. You know, do I invest in a energy ETF? Okay, do I invest in a bond ETF, right? Those are single decision points. And, you know, with five or 10 ETFs, you can, you can pretty much create any portfolio now. So I think over the next year, this thing is going to make just an enormous difference because the amount of money that probably is going to come into this thing is, I think it could be $100 billion. It could be $200 billion in just a year.

And again, $100 billion out of a total of $10 trillion in ETFs. that's just on the etf money that's just kind of currently in the etfs now there's all kinds of other add-on money that's going to come in that's not even in the etf stuff but that's just now going to come in because this thing has been legitimized so you know what's the impact of 100 billion dollars coming into bitcoin uh you know well i think we've seen what the impact of you know, $10 billion coming into Bitcoin in 2021 is, what's the impact of $100 billion coming into Bitcoin? I think it could 10x Bitcoin. That's kind of my gut feel. So, you know, and roughly speaking, rough math on these numbers is we kind of know that, well, let's say it's right now at

50,000. I'm just going to round it up to 50,000, a hundred billion at 50,000 is 2 million Bitcoin, right? How are you going to get 2 million Bitcoin into an ETF when there's only 2 million Bitcoin trading on exchanges right now? You know, it, Michael Saylor's not selling his Bitcoin. Block one is not selling their Bitcoin. Satoshi is not selling his Bitcoin, uh, or her Bitcoin. Um, You know, Draper is not selling his Bitcoin at $50,000. So this Bitcoin, you're talking this very small supply of 2 million Bitcoin, sort of almost an equivalent demand right there in that first year. The math is just very clear.

The price has to go up to match the demand. It's just that simple. and it has nothing to do with you know the prior prices the price like it doesn't matter it's just there's that much money that's going to come into this asset and it's just going to force the price up so i think it's i think it's a very very i mean it's an incredible bet um the ctf alone now on top of it you you add in the happening that's happening just coincidentally sort of the same time. I think, you know, where half the money that's going out right now, the money going out to pay miners is going to go down by half in April. So these two things

together is adding nitro and glycerin together. And, you know, hold on because I think it's going be a wild ride but i think it's going to be a wild ride that's going to end much much higher so uh that's kind of why i can't give financial advice but i would say my personal opinion is you don't need to time you cannot time this and uh but you do know that there's 30 days left for um you have 30 days left to get your chips in because once that once that think ETFs approved, you know, all bets are off, you know, like, it's like, when they spin the wheel in the, in the roulette, and the dealer says, you know, in French, rien ne va plus, you know, means you can't place your bets anymore, you're done. And I feel like we're, you know, this is a

great time, you know, we pulled back a little bit, but, you know, overall, we haven't pulled back that much i mean the market was at 38 000 on december 1st so we haven't pulled back that much i don't think we're going to get much more pullbacks and uh i think the relentless the relentless math of of this asset coming in is just it's it's going to be mind-boggling um yeah and i think that i mean are you going to buy the etf i'm just asking you like would you buy the etf personally personally no i mean i'd rather buy spot bitcoin and hold it myself well here here's the thing i would i i am going to buy the etf as well as you know hold my hold my own bitcoin then people are like why would you do that fred and i'll tell you why because

i'm you know i'm an old school investor and i have a bunch of money in you know major brokerages You know, and, you know, that money doesn't leave those brokers, you know, and that's kind of the way boomers like me think, you know, you know, once you have an account at Goldman, you're not you're not wiping out that account and putting into Coinbase, you know, like that's just not happening. Right. But, you know, I've got money at Goldman, you know, that I could easily, you know, with one click, as soon as that ETF comes out, I say, you know what, I might actually go a little longer Bitcoin, you know, I've got I've got, you know, I've got a very big stash of Bitcoin myself, you know, that I have, you know, off, you know, cold storage. but you know i'm i'm pretty happy buying some more if it's in the etf because if i want to get rid of it i want to go into some ai stock or something i'll do that but it's it's in the it's in the bucket it's in the place that i keep it right i don't even move money between my brokers account very much it's very it's very rare right and i think that's that's sort of the normal behavior i think for for most people um you know most people over 40 really you know i would say

that's that's that's typical i would say yeah so no it makes a lot of sense just the ease of clicking a couple buttons and getting exposure it's it's it's very easy it's click it's i click a bunch of buttons and i don't have any risk right that i wired the money the wrong place that i you know i sent something to some scam account or something right it's you know and i may even be talking to a broker like i'm not even doing the clicking i'm just calling my guy and saying pick me up some uh pick me up some of the vanguard uh not the vanguard the fidelity etf or what do you think you think i should go to the fidelity etf or the blackrock and the guy goes yeah we recommend we had morgan stanley recommend the black rock okay great pick me up uh 10 000 shares

of the black rock you know like that's the way things are going to get done um so you know i think everybody on in kind of non in non uh bitcoin crypto is always saying when's my token going to get listed on binance right remember that like you know every every one of these you know, altcoins is trying to get listed on Binance, right? But imagine getting your coin listed on Schwab, E-Trade, Ameritrade, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, you know, you just name it, right? And that's what's about to happen, right? You're talking about something that's, you know, it's 10x, like the idea of getting listed on Binance or Coinbase, you know for for for for everything so you've got you've just got this this it's really the first

time ever that most of these people will actually buy this asset they're just they've held off they've held off they're not going to buy it they're not buying gbtc they're not buying some canadian etf but forget it you know um and you know mstr maybe they'll buy a look they bought a little bit of it some people have but mstr is a software company that owns a lot of bitcoin that has a lot of debt you know it's it's not a great proxy for bitcoin so i mean i happen to own mstr but um but you know i think mstr could actually get hit by this etf you know on a relative basis you know i think i think it's going to do fine on an absolute basis but you know this is the first time major financial uh players not only major financial but this is the first time 100 million

American retail investors are going to be able to buy Bitcoin. So I don't understand why anybody is not like super, super, super bullish on this, this Fint. Now I understand that it's, you know, it's not in the total decentralized peer to peer, you know, your keys, your own money kind of thing. But I think that has to be balanced with the fact that this is going to really drive Bitcoin adoption and Bitcoin holdings dramatically higher. I mean, it could literally 10x Bitcoin holdings in the U.S. I really believe that. I mean, I think if you look at how many Americans have over $100 in Bitcoin, I bet you that number is $10 million. You know, now, once this thing kind of goes live, I mean, there's apparently about 20 to 30 million people who have any form of crypto.

But a lot of those are people who have $2 worth of crypto or something like that. you know, they were, they've opened a Coinbase account. They've, they've, they've not made money. They have a little bit of dust in there and that's it. So I think once you give, you know, a hundred million adult Americans with brokerage accounts access to buy Bitcoin and you can buy one of 12 different ETFs, that's when the, that's really when the game starts. So, you know, And what percentage of those are going to have Bitcoin? Maybe it could be, you know, 50% pretty quick. So that's a 5X as to where we have now.

And that's real money because that Bitcoin is now directly connected to all of their other money, pretty much. So if they want to double add, triple it, it's just one button, click and add. whereas you know the person who has a little bit of money on coinbase adding more money to that account is is a is a problem so i think this is just a it is it's such an enormous event um there's just no chance that this thing does not have a very positive effect on the price of bitcoin in my opinion yeah and this gets into a bunch of other questions because like you mentioned not your keys not your coins i would wish for people to own their own bitcoin and custody it the right way but if we're being honest and pragmatic like most people aren't going

to do that and bitcoin is an open source protocol that anybody can engage in including the black rocks and fidelities of the world if they want to create these etf structures but to your point of the game just beginning that's the thing i've been trying to really grok in my mind is we've had this first 15 years of bitcoin where you've had these cycles these four-year cycles usually after the halving the price pumps for 18 months and that's the big question in my mind is the etf launch and the stamp of approval from the black rocks of the world like a no turning back moment where maybe the cycles moving forward aren't as pronounced as they have been in the past and to the upside particularly does the um idea of these diminishing returns every four-year cycle

does that get thrown out i think it will happen so i do think you i think that this cycle will be the last and potentially one of the best of all the cycles right so if i had to guess right we've had diminishing every time right all three cycles so far they've been down right But I think this one is going to be an up cycle. So I think we're going to have, I think we'll do north of 10x this cycle, okay? But then that's it. That's kind of my thinking, right? Because I actually think that the ETF impact is going to be bigger than the halvening impact, right? I think that the ETF, I think it'll maybe be 5x the halvening impact, right? I think this is the big event. I think in general, the halvening is less important now just because of the sheer amount of Bitcoin that's left to mine. Um, but I also think this cycle gets us to a price where, uh, you know, where we're kind of at parity with gold, for example. Right. And, and at that price, you know, I, I'm not even sure we might even have some negative cycles, you know, it's possible. Right.

Um, so I just think this, this particular four years is, is really the key, the key thing. Um, and we may even go into a sort of almost non-cycle, cycles don't matter after this. Uh, so I think the, the, the real question is overall Bitcoin adoption. I think this could be the catalyst for that because, you know, people were saying, I don't know if one of the metrics I look at a lot is how many people own Bitcoin? How many single whole coiners are there? Right. Well, there's a million whole coiners. Right. But you go, how many people have a hundred dollars on Bitcoin? And that number is actually pretty small. I think it's on the order of 30 million that's it so the entire bitcoin universe really is just 30 million people so

you know that's point you know 0.3 percent of uh of the of the world population you know that's a very small number so i think uh i think we're going to get to something like two three four 5% of the world population holding some Bitcoin. But I think at that point, you're going to have some problems with just the numbers on block space. Unless they increase the block size, you have 200 million possible transactions per year on Bitcoin. That's the math right now. So, you know, if you have 200 million users of Bitcoin, that's one transaction per user per year. Hold your own keys. So, you know, does that change with block size?

Yeah, they may. But like if that happens in the next couple of years and we get there, we're going to have a transaction problem. you know it will fees are just going to go astronomical and it has nothing to do with ordinals or anything else so i think the way we get there initially is to have institutions do the custody and people are buying into blackrock they're buying into fidelity and that's their main exposure to bitcoin not people holding their own keys i right now i would say yeah hold your own keys. Once this thing's out for a year, I'd say if you're an American, yeah, it might be a much better idea to actually hold the ETF. And there's a couple of reasons I say that, because first of

all, from a tax perspective, I think holding the ETF will have less problems with audits with the IRS, there'd probably be a tax advantage to holding the ETF. I think getting your money from an ETF to fiat will be easier than getting money that's held in a non-custodial wallet back into fiat. So I think the ETF, you know, inheritance planning is a lot easier with the ETF. You know, if I own an ETF, I you know, I when I die, I want to give it to my kids. It's a lot easier just that they own they they own the broker's account. Right. We know how to do that. And then finally, you know. Custody is difficult. You know, multi-sig is, you know, is is complex.

Single sig is is very dangerous, in my opinion. And, uh, so multi-sig is complex. And, uh, as you get older, a lot of people don't even want to, they don't want to trust themselves. They don't, they don't want to be, uh, banging out multi-sig keys on, on plates and storing them in safe deposit boxes. It's, you know, it's just, it's people are, are fundamentally, uh, they fundamentally don't trust themselves right after, and you get to a certain age where you, you just, you don't remember what you had for breakfast this morning. So why would you remember necessarily where you had all your multi-sigs? So I think for all these reasons, I think the ETF is going to be very, very, very popular.

And I think even core Bitcoiners, I think it's going to change our industry because, you know, right now we're sort of pushing this parallel, you know, path, like your own keys, You have to like, you know, have the Bitcoin values and so on, which I think are all great. I mean, I love, you know, Saifedean's books. I mean, I like, you know, your posts and stuff. I think there's a lot of value to all that. And there's a lot of value to everything that Swan Bitcoin is putting out in terms of content. Um, but, but having said all that, you know, I think holding Bitcoin becomes in an ETF

becomes a lot more, uh, sort of mundane, right? It's just like you have Bitcoin. Yeah, sure. I own the ETF and destroy that. You don't have to talk about eating steak or cast iron pots or anything like that, you know, anymore, uh, or best way to custody. It doesn't matter. You've just simplified the entire equation, and now it's basically down to what do you think of Bitcoin?

Or possibly what do you think of Ethereum if you're so inclined? But I think it's going to be a big simplification, and I think that's happening. And once that ETF starts trading, I think a lot of these other conversations become sort of irrelevant. What do you think? yeah i would disagree to an extent because i do think this is what i'm seeing in terms of being a user being an investor in the space like i do think at some point in the future maybe not the next day decade maybe like in 15 years maybe sooner potentially sooner like your the step function improvement that bitcoin as a settlement layer whether that's

the protocol layer layers above it lightning show me immense whatever it is is far superior to what we have in the incumbent system and that people are actually going to need to use bitcoin transactionally to participate in reap the benefits of these step function improvements at the payments layer and the final settlement layer which will dictate that they can't have indirect exposure via an ETF. I think the ETF exposure will certainly have its place, but I don't think mainstream Bitcoin use gets siloed into the ETF in the future.

I do think there'll be tech improvements at the payments layer, particularly above the protocol layer that dictate that people need to actually take possession. I think that's going to be certainly more true in the third world. I mean, the third world, the developing world, right? Than it is in the U.S., right? I just think that, you know, for me, I don't need another payments layer.

I really don't. You know, I have Apple Pay, Venmo, whatever. There's 10 ways I can pay, you know, for anything. And, you know, I have credit cards, et cetera. you know you get to a lot of the world where they don't even have bank accounts and uh or whether they don't trust the banks or like lebanon where the you put your money in a bank and you get it out every you know you get one-tenth of it out every uh month you know it's sort of like a roach motel so i think in places in a lot of the world i would agree with you i don't think so in the u.s

you know, I don't think so in Western Europe. I think there it's, I just do not believe that we're going to see Bitcoin payments really, you know, explode. I would like to believe in Lightning. I've, you know, used Lightning quite a bit and I know a lot about lightning but i just don't see it completely taking off in the next five years in the u.s i just i don't i don't see it but i'm not negative on it i'm just you know that's just my honest opinion i just don't think it's going to really uh i don't think i'm going to wake up in five years and say every i'm going to order everything on um you know i'm going to order everything on Bitcoin or Lightning. I feel like I'm going to still be ordering everything on Amazon.

I'm going to be using my Visa card and my Amex. And that's kind of the way that I'm going to get stuff done in the US. Now, in Turkey and Argentina, yeah, sure. It may very well be Bitcoin because you can't trust anything. So, you know, I think that's going to be a big opportunity but um i mean that gets into another question here like how long are we able to trust sorry structure that gets into the question of like how long can we trust the banking system here like how bad yeah i don't know i mean that's you know it may be in we're gonna have some i feel like we are on you know a shorter timeline than uh than decades right i think we have we probably have from a macroeconomic perspective you know we have we've we've got about five more

years before the really the perennial shit hits the fan you know pardon my french but uh you know i think they can keep the game going as long as they lower interest rates and you know we go back to a doesn't have to be a zero interest rate policy but a lower interest rate policy i I think we can buy ourselves some time, maybe even decades. I mean, Japan, I was in Japan recently, and, you know, the country is great. The country works fantastically. The roads are clean. Everything's great.

Meanwhile, they have 200-odd percent debt to GDP. You know, their entire system is propped up by vapor. but uh you know so they got almost twice the debt problem as us now there's there's clearly differences they don't have big armies to support and everything but um you know they somehow can can make it work so low interest rates will will keep the game going and uh i think that we are headed back into a low interest rate mode and so i think that's what's going to save the banks in the US. You know, I think that if you, you know, people like James Lavish, who are talking about debt spirals, you know, I like James Lavish, but I think at the end of the day, I do think

we're going to go back to a very low interest rates and the banks will be okay. That's kind of what I think. I do think at 5%, you know, 5%, we have a fundamental problem with 34 trillion dollars in debt times five percent that math doesn't work uh so i think you know whether trump gets in or biden or whoever whoever the democrats are on uh gets in i think no matter what we're going to have lower interest rates um so yeah i'm not too worried about i'm not too worried. It seems that we get to the same place no matter what, which is lower interest rates, which is also very good for Bitcoin, right? And I think they're going to try to preserve the system at all costs. And so I think the system gets preserved. I think banks get preserved. I don't

think we're going to wake up in 10 years and there's no rails and there's no money and there's no dollars. 10 years from now, there will be the U.S. dollar. It'll just be worthless, you know, worth less than it is today and uh and interest rates are going to be low again and there will be a lot of you know asset inflation and you know same old story so i think that's that's kind of where things are going in the u.s and in europe um at the end of the day i think all those things are extremely positive for bitcoin and and i think you've got about three years to to really get in because after three years of i mean you know the p the people who've got in right now are gonna have all the the all the toys and the nice houses and everything else

and everybody else will kind of the everybody else won't really have a great egg out because you know if bitcoin's trading at half a million dollars you know it's you know i don't know i don't know what's more risky you know buying bitcoin or you know you could really you know you could have you could you could argue that bitcoin might be just too risky at that point i don't know potentially yeah you know so i think right now it's just we're just in this like sweet spot where the risk return is just so excellent right you know we've we've just got and i i think that you know i've been i've been in crypto really since 2017 bitcoin uh and really got into bitcoin in 2019 but um but i think this is the best risk return that i've seen

because once the financial market gets in irrespective of halvings or anything else that's you know that's a wall of money that's going to come into this asset once that story gets played out in the next three years two three years uh i don't know what the next narrative is that that really makes you know that that that goes us brings us up another 10x but you know you never know i don't know i'm uh but i definitely think right now is is a great period so and it doesn't really matter to me afterwards you know like if if this plays out you know i'm i'm happy i'm happy diversifying a little bit into into other things i think there's there's always great investments i just think right now bitcoin is that

great investment um yeah when you i mean when you add up all the factors etf having geopolitical situation who knows what's going to happen between and weight cuts right and that's the other thing right that's the other thing to mention is the trifecta of things that's coming that's coming our way. And Bitcoin sort of shrugged off the narrative that its price is wholly dictated by interest rate policy over the course of this year, where we're up, what, 120% despite the fact that rates are at 5.25%. Well, imagine, I don't think, I mean, I do think it's been fighting that, right? I do think that interest rate hikes are really bad for Bitcoin, right? But so it shrugged off it but i do think it will benefit when interest rates come down right so it's not like

independent of interest rates when interest rates go down and all that bond money starts going oh wait a second we no longer can get five percent interest rates anymore oh they're three percent oh maybe i should buy some bitcoin maybe the price you know you know maybe and i i'd like to talk a little bit about inflation, because I think that, you know, I do have something to say on that front, you know. I think that really there's almost two kinds of inflation, right? There's the inflation for, you know, for the poor, I will say, you know, or the inflation for the masses, which is, you know, the cost of beef, the cost of eggs, whatever, right? That's the first kind of inflation. And then the other kind of inflation is inflation for the one percent, right, or the

five percent, whatever, you know, the top of the pile, which is, you know, the cost of premium health care, the cost of private education, the cost of a vacation to, you know, The best hotels in Aspen, Little Nell or the Jerome or, you know, the cost of private jets, you know. So they're really two separate kind of things. Right. And I think that, you know, if you and the cost of secondary houses, you know, so, you know, you want to buy a you want to buy a condo in Manhattan, you know, on Fifth Avenue, you want or Park Avenue. You want to buy a ranch in Wyoming. You want to do these kind of things. Well, I think the price of those things is really heavily dictated by the amount of money that's in the system.

And I think if you want to preserve your purchasing power in that category of things, I think bonds are not going to do it for you, even at 5%. It's just it's not going to do it. So I think Bitcoin will keep up with that. I think it'll actually I do think that the price of Bitcoin is going to, you know, it'll it'll outperform the price of the price of New York condos or the price of Malibu real estate or Paris apartments or whatever, you know, so or or even, you know, premium health care or hotels in Aspen, Colorado. So I think Bitcoin is it's the only one of the only ways that you're going to be able to hedge against that kind of inflation. And as people as the interest rates start going down, everybody's going to start going, wait a second, how I'm rich. OK, so they're going to say, well, I'm rich or I'm wealthy or I've got some assets. right? I've got a couple extra million dollars. And right now, I could buy a condo in Brooklyn

for that. But I don't need that condo in Brooklyn today. I might want it in five years. What asset do I have that'll keep up with that purchasing power? And that's where I think people are going to go well i no longer trust bonds i no longer trust uh i may not trust the s&p 500 really even for that right um because we all know that there's only seven stocks that have kind of been doing well which is the you know the fang plus plus and so how do i how do i hedge my wealth forward 10 years other than with bitcoin and uh you know i don't have a great answer to that you know maybe somewhat gold but uh but bitcoin will probably do better much better than gold because of the adoption um you know everybody everybody who has ever wanted to have gold

has gold you know i bought gold physical gold in bars in 1992 uh so you know i don't need more gold um but bitcoin there's almost all my wall street friends from my era do not own any bitcoin and just they they have not they don't want to they don't want to spend the time to understand it they don't but if it's just buy a little bit of the etf they can do that um so what do you think is driving that lack of ambition to understand it just they've already made i just think look it's it's it's a combination of um it's a combination well there's people somewhat lazy right but it's also i'll let me let me give you a couple i'm without saying their last names or anything i'll give you a couple actual kind of case studies right the people i've tried to red bill orange

bill right so case study number one is my friend philippe okay french guy um worked with him at solomon brothers he went on to ubs super intelligent guy um you know high net worth guy been following bitcoin i've been trying to get him interested in bitcoin and you know, the first thing is like, where do I buy it, Fred? And like, how do I hold it? What happens if I want to sell it? You know, all these questions, you know, he's analyzing them, but he can't bring himself to do it. You know, it just seems so foreign to him, you know? So that's one case. The other case is my friend Jim, right? And my friend Jim had a little bit of Bitcoin at one point, just doesn't understand the difference between cold wallets, hot wallets,

custody. He's a little older. So now he's, you know, he's, he's, he's getting confused, right? There's this actual confusion about Bitcoin, the asset, like, you know, what is it? Where is it? You know, if I own Bitcoin in cold, you know, on a cold storage, what, what is, where is the bitcoin stored in that in that device oh it's not stored in that device so it's stored on multiple devices at the same time what's multi-sig like it's too much for for him right um and then i'll take a third case and the third case is actually my father and uh my father got into Bitcoin and he got into two places and he got at a good time. Actually, he got some in Gemini, right.

And he got very worried because Gemini was pushing Gemini earn. And so that, you know, that whole, he avoided that, but it, you know, That was a narrow miss. Right. And the second and the second place he had some was on GBTC, which, you know, he he bought at a when GBTC was trading at a premium, it ended up trading way down to a 45 percent discount. Now it's trading at about a 10% discount. But overall, I would say, you know, his experience as a owner of Bitcoin has not been great, right, from a financial guy, old school banking guy, a banker. My dad was a banker. And, you know, he's not going to hold keys, you know, like in a Trezor or a Ledger. There's zero chance that that happens.

But, you know, even something like Gemini was a very bad experience for my father. GBTC was a very bad experience. So, you know, now he's happy because Bitcoin's price has gone up. but uh you know it's just it's it's not the experience of my generation kind of with bitcoin is not good generally you know um and i'll tell you one last thing is i have another friend whose daughter um had a coinbase account and i don't know how much she had in the coinbase account but the whole thing got drained by um uh somebody coming in and uh draining out a thousand dollars a day from the coinbase account over you know a course of 100 days or something right so she lost

like 100 grand on coinbase now i i can't even imagine that happening on like you know any traditional brokerage account but here it is happening on coinbase so you know and there are a lot of people i know who've had problems with coinbase with 2fa you know and all these other things so you know these things just don't seem to happen with regular with regular uh brokerage accounts partly because you wire money and so on you have to wire it to somebody it's the kyc aspects are much better understood but you know you wire money out of a coinbase to account you don't wire it sorry if you move bitcoin out or any other crypto out of a coinbase account that's it it's done so i think you know for all these reasons i think that you

know it's it's generally been a very bad impression for most people and because they've had a bad impression they do not tell all their friends yeah i had such a great experience on coinbase right a great experience on uh you know uh on uh gemini or something so their experience is negative it's all negative and uh on top of that you have another uh another group of people that they just said, this is all too complicated for me. I'm going to buy Coinbase, the stock. And of course that did badly, right? So that's also negative. So I think, you know, basically we're looking at this incredible negative experience. Combined with that, Bitcoin now is down 40% from its all-time high. So I would say until Bitcoin has an ETF and until it's trading at its all-time high,

i would say my generation is generally a pass now that completely changes once bitcoin is again at an all-time high and again the etf is out so i can just buy the blessed etf you know has the word fidelity on it or has the word blackrock on it now i can trust it so yeah that's that's what i think i think that that totally changes the the psychology of you know everybody with substantial assets moving money into bitcoin so that makes a lot of sense yeah it makes a lot of sense um even though i i just think it's it's it's so much bigger than you kind of think you know what i mean and and you know we're not seeing you know we're seeing a little bit of a you know the bitcoin's moving up a little bit in anticipation but i really don't think that

the people who own bitcoin and the people who are about to buy it in these etfs know each other they they really don't you know it's sort of like you know the the banker you know uh you know with the top hat and you know going and talking to the baker you know to buy it they're two separate worlds right like you know the the the world of people with deployable assets that can buy this thing is just there's so many more assets there's so much more money than there is in the world of crypto now you know it crypto's done great you know we've all made some money in crypto i've had an amazing year personally in crypto you know in bitcoin but um but you know i i most people if i go to a party and they say fred what do you what do you do and

i'm like well investor you know bitcoin they're like oh i'm sorry to hear that i'm really sorry to hear that fred you know like i i'm in a member of this this uh i'm a member of this uh this club in la all right called the jonathan club it's you know it's a premier club you know and literally somebody sat down to me the other day and was like fred i just you know just want to give you a little bit of warning you know you know i'm i'm concerned you know i'm concerned because bitcoin you know it's just you know and this is you know because i'm a lawyer i've been a lawyer for like 30 years and you know this thing's going to get banned you know and i just I like you, Fred. I like you. You're a good guy.

But this Bitcoin thing you've been talking about, not really cool. So that's kind of where I sit. Now, I think once that ETF comes out and once he's got a little bit of it in his 401k, I think that we're having a different conversation. And I think you touched on something very important here, too, which is in the grand scheme of things the older generations have most the wealth right now too and so it's we have all the wealth i mean like yeah like you know and look my mother's a very wealthy woman right so she's you know she's and i can see

and every month i listened and it's interesting because you know she's kind of from that generation and we're managed accounts right so we talked to a broker from morgan stanley my brother and i talked to this broker and he's like hey dorothy how's it going and uh we're gonna put a little bit of money into you know we're gonna put a little bit we've deployed a little bit of money to this emerging market fund you know you know two percent of your portfolio and then i was like well i just would like to put a word in for the bitcoin etf when it comes out and then they're looking at me like hmm bitcoin etf yeah i've heard that that's coming out right and i said as you go who's managing that i said blackrock they go oh okay well that's good yeah i said

are you comfortable with that name and they're like we we are very comfortable with the name blackrock actually we have you know we're we at morgan stanley we we quite like that name thank you so my point is uh you know that's that's the people giving advice to you know an 80 year old woman um you know in boston and you know she's she's looking for that kind of advice and you know forget forget saving forget saving your your crypto to a key that's just never going to happen but you know even even just getting into an etf that's already going to be it's already going to be like well my neighbor had this etf and that's done well so you know i think we're going to be we're going to be in a new world where everybody in her boston condo is going to start talking

about the money that they made in the etf and that's going to take a year to play out right And, you know, that's, you know, the other thing is all these people eventually will die. Right. And eventually in the next, that generation in the next 10 years, it's going to pass away. And, you know, what do their millennial children or Gen X children, what are they going to do with, you know, those portfolios when they talk to that same advisor? They're going to be like, yeah, I think we might want to sell the Caterpillar stock and sell the Exxon Mobil. And I think, you know, it's time for us to buy the Fidelity BTC. It's only trading at $200,000 per Bitcoin. So pretty good. Yeah, we'll buy that. So that's what I expect to happen.

So I really, really think this is not a, you know, I don't really have a super short term perspective, but I have a, you know, a medium term perspective or, you know, two year, two to four year perspective. And I just think that in a two to four year perspective, you're going to have this entire generation of new millennial inheritors, as well as even the older generation of people who, you know, finally can buy this stuff. And it's now got this it's got this this era of acceptability. Right. So it's an acceptable asset now. That's just going to change everything. and you know this is all new money coming into bitcoin so all all all the people like me and you who've owned it prior and who who love it and love the ecosystem and lightning and everything else we're still there you know we're not selling so this is all new money coming in and i think that

new money is is what's gonna that's what's gonna take us 10x from here you know and let's not even like worry about beyond that like that's the only thing that matters to me is can we get a 10x from here and the answer is i think we can and uh you know can we play it no we have zero ability to time this thing uh you know but it's coming pretty quick you know and so i i because the the timeline storyline is happening with predictability. I think, you know, I think the better way to play this is to just get in, forget about it. Try, try to take a chill pill and relax. Try not to worry about the blips and the panic attacks and the wicks down and everything. let's not worry about it and um you know get get to as close of your maximum exposure as you can

pretty quick that that's what i would say uh and if you're thinking about buying a house or something i would delay that decision a couple years because i think that house priced in bitcoin is going to be a lot less i think you could get that you could get uh you know i have a friend just thinking about buying an apartment in Paris. And she, she recently just said, yeah, you know, I think I'm going to buy Bitcoin instead and then buy the apartment in Paris two years from now, and I'll get a much bigger apartment. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, you have to buy the Bitcoin now because buying the Bitcoin a year from now may not get you a much larger apartment in paris you got you kind of got to get the bitcoin you got to make the you got to make the

the decision you know to go to the gym you got you don't lose weight if you don't actually go into the gym and and work out so you know this is a case of you can talk about it all you want but if you don't own it well you know you're just talking about it so yeah that's kind of my view is like you got to be in the field you know you got to take this you know like days like yesterday and today right or today really you know where the you know the market gaps down and nobody knows why right and people are saying one guy sold one and a half billion dollars in bitcoin right but you know i don't know anybody who predicted something like today or really even understands i don't know but that's just that's bitcoin so yeah you know you but you can't time it you can't

analyze it and analysis will get you nowhere so uh i think uh i think you just gotta get involved and you you gotta get involved and you gotta fasten you know somebody was saying uh yeah it's a rocket ship to the moon but the other guy goes fasten your seat belts which i think i I think that's, that's accurate, man. It's like, this is going to be a bumpy road, but it's going to be, it could potentially be the best, one of the best investments, you know, investment times to invest that I've seen period, you know, but it's going to be, you know, you, you gotta have,

you gotta have conviction. You gotta have, but there really is no, there's no plan B here. It's just like, you jump in, you're going to get out, get out in two years you know put your your time the only thing you're going to do is when when i get out that's it but it's not i'm not going to trade this you have to sort of convince yourself i will not trade this i will not trade this i will not try to find the the the bottom i will not try to get in and out the bad idea that's the other thing too there's only 21 million of these things and that'll be the psychological factor on the back end of the cycle if we do 10x it's like all right i could sell it now doesn't run i have to buy that bitcoin back eventually

what is the uh the appropriate i think it all depends on the person right so i think it's sort of like where you are in life right so you know the question is are you at the point where you know 10x is going to give you your ultimate number or not right so if you're a college kid and you got you know let's say you got five thousand dollars in bitcoin well 10x is great you got 50 grand you know like great you know that's a like that's probably not enough right you know it's not it's not going to buy you 50 grand is not going to buy you an apartment you know so you know that's that's that doesn't matter right if you uh you know if you got 10 million dollars in bitcoin and at 10x you got 100 million dollars well maybe that's enough you know it depends on

the individual right but maybe that's really all you need and then you're gonna say well at that point i may take 50 million and put that aside and buy an island with that and you know whatever whatever whatever whatever you want to do in your life you know uh but so i think it depends on on your your your amount right and where you are in life again if you're if you're young you got your entire life in front of you um why sell it at all you know it's great you know it's like you might be you might get a 20-year run on bitcoin fantastic right if you're you know if you're 70 years old yeah i mean just take the money diversify it and and and and don't get out completely just sell some you know but that's what i think you know i think we are i just think

the risk return is going to be different let's just suppose bitcoin is at 500 000 and what how would i look at it i would look at it i would say okay okay it's at 10 trillion dollar asset now it's at the same market cap of gold right could it go to two times yeah i could see it two, three times the price of gold, but, you know, we're kind of getting into like a lot of things have to happen. You know what I mean? You know, if the government start, you know, really retaliating at that point, you know, that could, that could impact my position, you know? So, So, you know, I definitely think it has, as a risk return, it's a little, you know, the next 10x, I think it might be a little bit more difficult to see, you know, at that point. Then where I see now, I see this initial 10x from here is amazing because it's like finally going to go on sale at every store in America, right?

It's like Bitcoin is going on sale at every brokerage in America. That's a big deal, right? Now, this is the IPO. And it's unique because this is like the first time retail's had this much runway to front run, something like this happening. Well, retail, yeah, but I mean, and yet people aren't really doing it, you know,

because I think we're still, you know, I keep on forgetting, but look, we're still FTX. That was when? 12 months ago, right? Yeah. It was like 12 months ago, Sam Bankman Freed. And he's in a jail right now, right? So, you know, that's still weighing on people, I think, you know.

You know, Do Kwon, Sam Bankman Freed, Celsius. I mean, this was not that long ago. So I think, you know, front-running it, yeah, I mean, some people are just, you know, they're still in shell shock from that whole process. so i think i don't think people are really in the front running mode i think people are still still there's still this shell shock kind of like are we really back is there really a bull market is it really a bull market i don't know you know like you know it doesn't it doesn't even though

bitcoin's up 130 percent year to date it doesn't feel like a bull market you know because because that pain was so insane on the way down. So I think it's going to take, it will take an ETF, it will take us hitting that all-time high. I do think we're going to get to that all-time high shortly after the ETF. And I think that psychologically will totally change the, it'll change everything and and then you're going to get the psychology of the etf uh the you're going to get the psychology of the new of the etf buyer where all of a sudden they're up right so the people who bought in in say february right when the etf goes live in june they're going to be up 20 you know so now it'll be like oh i got in early i got in in

february in 2024 in bitcoin wow you know back when it was only 50 000 wow amazing you know now it's uh now it's trading at 80 000 i should have got it in february oh my god so so i definitely think that's the case and i think those guys are not front running it because because first of all if they buy even if you know for the same reasons that we talked about they're not they're not going to do self-custody and stuff they could do coinbase that's one possibility but even if they do they can't roll that coinbase money into an etf which is what they really want right it's not possible to roll it in what you were going to do let's say you bought, let's say ETF goes live and it's 50,000. And now two days, three months later, it said

80,000. Guess what? Okay, great. Good news is you made 30,000 on 50,000. Okay. So you got a 60% gain. Bad news is it's all ordinary income, right? So you pay half of that in tax right off the bat to the government right uh you know i mean not that great and then now you're you're rolling it into the etf so you have this huge tax bill and you know in 2024 and um and you have to fund that where are you going to get the funding because now you're rolling it into the etf you know you're going to either you're going to just you're going to have to sell half of it just to pay the tax right and so i think i think a lot of people are going to be more into especially if people who want to just put it into their as a passive uh asset allocation kind of thing they're just

going to wait for the etf they're not going to try to front run that they're not going to try to buy something different actual bitcoin and coinbase you could say it's not even actual Bitcoin, but, you know, Coinbase Bitcoin, you're not going to be doing that two months before the ETF. I don't see that happening. So I don't think the ETF is front run and certainly not from the point of view of like the sheer amount of money that's out there that's going to probably go into this ETF. I mean, we're talking, I would say on the low end, $30 billion, on the high end, $200 billion or 300 billion um you know how much money has front run this thing so far i don't know a billion maybe you know so you know it's it's it's it's inconsequential i would say relative

size of money that's coming into this market inconsequential does not make a difference um so that's a good point maybe the last point we could touch on or something i have no idea how will play out but do you foresee a scenario in which the etf launches it's massively successful here in the u.s and then you have financial hubs in other parts of the world southeast asia middle east like we want some of that action and then they begin spinning up similar products opening up the floodgates in their parts of the world or is that not likely they can right but i mean look that world is international right so even if you're if you're in hong kong or singapore you'll be able to buy the blackrock etf right okay so you know i i do

think they might build some of their own products but i don't think i mean we got we have 13 etfs that are being applied do we need 20 you probably 13 already there's going to be the competition among those ETFs is going to be intense, right? So I don't think we need more Bitcoin ETFs, really. What I do think you're going to see is Bitcoin, and this may be negative too, right? But you're going to see some derivative action on the Bitcoin ETFs, right?

You know, you're going to see calls, you know. Can you imagine? You can buy calls on MSTR right now, right? Now you're going to be able to buy calls on Bitcoin ETFs, right? So once these things start getting launched, the real degens, right, the, you know, the 25-year-old version of me on Wall Street is going to be like, you know, buying some calls on, you know, super out-of-the-money calls on Bitcoin ETF, right? That's what, you know, so, and that could fuel even more, you know. Now people are saying, well, they're going to make it short at like the gold market. Maybe, but I do think that, you know, I think that this ETF, you know, one of the things that's going to happen, I don't know if people really have realized this, but BlackRock is probably going to own, it's probably going to end up owning, it'll be the second largest owner of Bitcoin behind Satoshi.

You think so? i i'm it might even exceed satoshi's it might even exceed satoshi's stash right like just think through what that means right it means that bitcoin is going to be an asset that is owned by blackrock okay i mean they own six they manage six trillion in etfs okay michael saylor is the i don't know the fifth largest he has one and a half billion they're going to exceed michael saylor on day one on day one blackrock will have more bitcoin than michael saylor on day one okay by the end of the year they will be 10 michael saylors okay so so just think through what that means like you're gonna have the the institutionalization of this asset

is coming in 2024 right it it is going to be an institutionalized asset in 2024 and uh you know and it and and an eath too by the way you know once once they finally approve that and that that's going to have all kinds of consequences because you know in eath you own more you have more voting power right you can stake right that means but basically blackrock is going to control all the decisions in eth right just a bit poetic i mean literally think about it they they will you know they're going to control the validators like okay right they're all controlled by blackrock done it's called blackrock coin now right yeah no they're not they don't they won't and by the way they also owned a massive amount of miners

right now right they're the second largest or the largest or second largest shareholder most miners marathon riot hut right iris all those guys iris of course right so you know blackrock is going to be it's going to be the numero uno player in bitcoin whether we like it or not that is what's happening um and they have the biggest marketing arm of any of any entity in the world right so these guys these guys can uh these guys can market the shit out of bitcoin you know i mean just imagine everything that swan bitcoin's done and they've done a pretty good job right now multiply that by 100 100 they have 100 times the marketing budget of swan bitcoin it's like to say remember the gbtc stuff it's going to be 10x that it's going

to be like you know and it's going to be subtle it's going to be you know it's going to be at these you know it's not gonna be a dump gold campaign what it's not gonna be a dump gold campaign yeah like but much better like it it won't be just like this stupid retail dump gold shit but i mean it's gonna be a private dinner you know with larry fink and you know and just you know walking around to as the rich people in hollywood or the rich people in you know bellevue washington you know and just like let me we're gonna have a little long dinner let's uh okay uh jeff uh jeff bezos uh i'd like to put in an order would you is one billion or two good for you you know i mean that's literally what it's going to be and jeff's will be like i'm kind of

feeling like three would be a good number because you know i mean that sailor guy has got you know he's got three so actually five make it five make it five give me five yeah that's what we're going to right you know and you know once these billionaires are can i mean sailor he went through hell to get his stuff but once these guys can just click a finger and buy it and they've got you know black rock sales team coming to them and having this nice private dinner you know yeah i i know this world i mean you know i know i i know this world and i i know how this stuff works and um the institutions are coming it sounds the institutions are coming and the ultra rich are coming right the ultra rich are going to this is going to be viewed if you're a if

you're a mega billionaire and you know bernard arnault does he own any bitcoin probably not does francois pinot own any bitcoin i know francois pinot i've met him a couple times I'm pretty sure he does not own any Bitcoin, okay? Yeah. He has a net worth of $40, $50 billion. But, you know, does he own any Bitcoin? No. You know, like, so I think this stuff's going to, you know,

I think it's going to really, you know, once they can sit there and go, yeah, okay, Larry, you're telling me, Larry, this is good i'm in done you know so that's that's the way these ultra rich people are going to play it and they all go to the same they all live more or less in the same areas you know they all go to the same parties and so you know once once one of them has decided that they're going to do it with blackrock all of them will and just it'll just catch on like wildfire so that's what i think is going to happen i think we're going to see this ultra rich kind of um stuff and then and then lower below it just the high net worth worth you know people you know with the you know

managed accounts at morgan stanley and goldman sachs and so on they're going to get pitched this stuff and then goldman's going to come out with their own product right that's coming i know it like we've got the goldman bitcoin opportunity fund where we're going to take an allocation to the uh to the uh uh etf and then we're going to sell some calls on it to generate some additional yields you know i this is if i was a goal if i was at solomon or goldman right now that's what i'd be doing i'd be coming up with the enhanced bitcoin goldman enhanced bitcoin fund right yeah the higher yield and i would say you know it's better than bitcoin because you know what we've done we're selling these calls and we're going to make 10 a year we're going to give you bitcoin

plus 10 percent how does that sound to you and then we're going to buy some puts so we have downside protection you know like you know it's like well that uh that begs the question are these is wall street going to learn the many lessons that a lot of the crypto dgens have learned like could this take under some wall street firms to get overextended on these types of strategies who knows who knows but i i just think it i think we're heading into a very different world right Because, you know, everybody talks about all this money that's out there, but I can tell you, it is out there, you know, it really is out there. And, you know, these, as the government prints money, that money kind of ends up in these kind of asset pools, right? And that's where it ends up. It doesn't really end up in inflation, right? Because it's going into other assets. And those other assets now can move around. And that money kind of like, it can move into different buckets. And this bucket now becomes a movable bucket. It's a bucket where that money can go in. and so once this stuff really hits we got a couple more months but we don't have a couple

more years because this stuff's going to start this will totally change the game in 2024 and uh and that's why and that's part of the reason why i want to be in the etf too you know because what i'd like to do is i do think we got a 10x right in front of us so what i'd like to do is have that 10x in my etf right so ideally you know i will take some pain on on some taxes soon right and uh and i would i will take some pay i'm not going to move everything to the etf but i will i will do some because i do think that this is going to be when it does come time to sell i don't know when like you know for me that might be 10 years from now it might be five years from now you know whenever it is i want to be able to be

just click a button and sell my etf right and then then if i want to bring it into finance great mr kruger uh we'd like to uh spend 50 million dollars where should we wire the money to oh yeah here's my account right you know no problem right so uh much different than oh i got 50 million dollars on coinbase i'd like to wire it out uh excuse me sir uh you just breached a protocol level three we have uh the sec online too and uh you know like that's the other thing is just do you want to be somewhat outside the system or do you want to be in the system, right? I'd rather be in the system. I'm more kind of a, you know, if I can be in the system, that's great, right? Because I don't know what Elizabeth Warren and these kind of people

are going to do. You know, they're threatening this, they're threatening that. I don't think they're going to threaten holders of the Bitcoin ETF. I just don't, you know what I mean? So I feel like i'm i'm very happy holding my bitcoin etf you know i'll pay some tax get out pay get into my bitcoin etf and it's just it's so much simpler um and so i think the new guys are never even going to think about these other assets so you know i mean there's some will but i think most people are going to just it's going to be so much simpler just to buy that etf and you know the thing is going to track pretty well there may be you know you can argue that there's some fees but it's immaterial you know whatever one percent in fees for an asset that goes up

you know anywhere from you know 50 plus or minus 40 percent i you know i don't care you know it's one percent fees does not bother me so yeah the uh marty i think we're on the right track here or what i mean i think there's definitely going to be a mountain of money coming in due to the reasons that you laid out it's just going to be so simple but i do worry that uh etf will be pointed at by elizabeth warren and say this is the only way you can get bitcoin that's a battle for another day but also that's another thing is yeah the you know fighting the elizabeth warrens uh first of all i don't even know if she's going to be in power you know two years from now right But like, you know, hopefully not. But, you know what I mean? I think that, you know, just from a pure like legitimacy point of view, you know, I think that's probably your safest long term place to be as a as a Bitcoiner is at least have some percentage of your net worth in that ETF.

You know, because, you know, you may lose as good as you are, you think you are, you know, safeguarding your keys. You may lose some of them. Right. But you're not going to lose your ETF. You're not going to lose your ETF. Right. So I'd say this is almost as a security thing. I think having BlackRock custody, some percentage of your assets, your crypto assets, I think is probably a good. it's probably a good idea you know they're going to do a they will do a better job than me of custody for sure yeah right yeah that's why i'm bullish on the trend of multi-institution multi-sig with the auditable address where yes you don't hold any keys but it's distributed against across unchained kingdom trust backed whatever it may be yeah look i mean there's good stuff

out there but like especially as i get older i'm like you know i i actually test my memory now i have like go through every year now i test my members to figure out yeah like when i was 25 i was a very smart young kid i got to tell you you know you know my but i can't and i look at my phd thesis right now i don't understand it's like a different person who wrote that thing you I do not understand a word of it, you know. And so, you know, you have to recognize that, you know, we're all mortal and we all we all degenerate. Right. Like our brains can't you can't solve the same problem at 45 that you can at 25 or at 65 or at 85. you know so you know i think that um it's not terrible to have a custodian etf it's not it's not the end of the world having sam beckman freed as your custodian is the end of the world as it

turns out but uh you know having blackrock probably okay you know fidelity they've been in business a long time i think they're going to do a pretty good job so you know i i trust them I might even spread it among two, just to be double sure, right? But I think this custody thing is like, everybody was always talking about custody as being, like if you go back to 2018, right? Novogratz was like, what's the biggest problem? Custody. Custody is going to be the biggest problem.

Well, actually, the ETF solves custody, right? It solves the custody problem for ordinary people. because you don't need to have somebody to custody you etf you hold the etf it solves custody it solves inheritance um it's going to be massively liquid right so if you want to get in and out it's going to be easy right it's going to be as liquid as bitcoin itself so maybe not quite but it's going to be pretty damn liquid right yeah um so it's going to have all the attributes you love uh i think and um so i'm actually just selfishly interested in in in having it for some of my other assets that you know that i that i still have some you know stock and and fixed income stuff

you know i'll move i'll move more into bitcoin you know um and then you know that's that's probably what i will do is i'll probably just add to my bitcoin exposure and then sort of slowly sell off my uh you know my the bitcoin that i have in uh multi-sig you know non-custodial you know stuff and this and as i get really old i'll end up with just a bunch of etfs that i can easily give away to my wife and kids so yeah i think you're a very interesting archetype people that probably don't come on this show most often but if we're being honest with ourselves people like you exist out there and these are well i'm i'm the majority you know like i represent that's what i'm saying like we're two separate worlds like

my type that there's a lot of people like me you know what i mean a lot i really i just we're not on you know your show we're not on you know these bitcoiner shows because honestly we you know tip i'm i'm the rare kind of intersection of these things you know but i think in a year from now you're going to get a lot of people on cnbc who are going to be like talking about the their etf positions and so on you know and and that's it it's just going to be another another thing you invest in you know what i mean so that's why it's it's interesting now because you know we we see this stuff we have held stuff now for all these years right we've tried all the different ways of holding it you know including you know i even had some bitcoin with at celsius back in the day

Right. Fortunately, I got out. But, you know, I think I think, you know, we're the kind of people, we're the dying breed, you know, of people who who self-custody and, you know, worry so much about this. you know you're not your keys not your bitcoin i think most i think the the majority of bitcoin is going to be in places like blackrock that's i actually think that will be the majority it might be the blackrock a blackrock fund that's you know sitting in qatar you know but uh or saudi arabia or something but i think they're going to own the majority of bitcoin over the years you know once we get into the you know past the next decade i think it's going to be heavily institutionalized asset which which will then solve to some extent the um the block space problem because you know people who are just using it as a store of value will just use it they'll just own shares in etfs

right people who want to use it as um you know for transactions that's going to be a that'll be kind of a premium use case right and you're going to have to pay up for that so you know you want to you want to trade bitcoin on the main you know trade it holding your own keys in your own wallet great you can do it but the average cost now is a hundred dollars right unless they increase block size right but which might not be a bad idea at some point not a good idea now but it might be a good idea in two three years to try to increase block size so does that make sense yeah it makes sense when the block size thing like i think they're definitely more creative things that we could do i mean i trust that the bitcoin

i trust that the bitcoin devs are going to find a path right because we we did it with segwit right um you know it's you know i am interested in this ordinals thing independently just like almost from a purely intellectual thing but you know i i don't think i think at the end of the day block space is rare it's cheap i mean it's it's it's expensive uh it will probably be more expensive and it'll stay expensive for a while this is not a problem with bitcoin it's it's it's just a fact of the fact of what bitcoin is and uh if it becomes too much of a problem it'll it'll get solved um and i'm not i'm not too concerned about it so neither am i pressure creates diamonds when it's like segwit was a perfect example of yes it was a great solution for this thing you know and

you know for the time right it's not that it's not a solution for all time but it's a it was a good solution right you know and look taproot was very useful for lightning right so you know um you know it had this sort of side effect of ordinals but you know it was very very useful for lightning and light lightning has you know it's it may not be the ultimate solution but it's a solution but there's other solutions too you know there's you know that as you know so like you know there are other ways around you know bitcoin as a payment system as a transaction system uh and you know just to keep the subject on to finish off on the the etf though i i do think that none of those things affects bitcoin's core value or the the um the value proposition

that we have today in front of us with the ctf coming out so you know i'd like to kind of end on an up note and say that i'm you know i remain you know despite yesterday or today's uh move i remain super super bullish and uh you know i think it's going to be it may be a little bit a bumpy ride but that's fine you know you don't go from you don't go up uh you know 10 000 x in a straight line you know it's just not going to happen yeah we're not going to go up 10x in the straight line either you know it's not happening no there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road so place your bets now mentally prepare for the bumps yeah fred is gotta be mentally prepared you got you know you got you got to just love the value proposition you got

to love the the finite amount of bitcoin and and just kind of the the money printer go brr i i feel that is that argument is so strong right and you know whether it's lynn alden or you know all the all the guys that that you know that we follow and love right they've really kind of um i think they've really made a great case for why the 20th century has been the era of money printing right it's just it's just it's been like and it's really almost non-partisan right it's like you know the democrats republicans doesn't matter right that they're all everybody's affected by it everybody's everybody's doing it europe's doing it you know america's doing it china's doing it everybody's money printing and uh the only hope that we have of fighting it

you know is to own you know rare digital good rare physical goods like real estate or gold or rare digital goods. And really, the only one that's sufficiently rare, in my opinion, and is sufficiently rare that people believe in it to the extent that a world asset is Bitcoin. Everything else is just not... I just do not see a scenario where Solana becomes the world currency. i just i cannot imagine i mean i don't know it may be very fast or whatever but like it's like

how can you have a world currency where a criminal owns 10 of it you know i mean it's like no you know like it or 20 i don't even know what sam bagman free does you know but like you can't the origin of bitcoin is it you know people say it's a religion i think that's a good thing you know i think to me it's sort of like it better be a religion because you're you're actually betting like you know a huge percentage of your net worth on this thing you know so like i think the religious aspects are like really accurate like okay how what was the origin story of it how did it happen you know you know what's its history you know like so all that to me is why i'm a bitcoiner because i believe in this asset you know and i don't believe and while i

own a little bit of some other crypto i don't i don't think any of them is going to be digital money you know what i mean it's just none of them have have no shot zero of being digital money for the world and uh and bitcoin is that to me bitcoin is it's going to be the world's digital money you know that that's what it's intended to be that's what it's going to be if you can wait it out if you're young oh man you've got a great if you can hold this thing for 20 30 years you're going to be in great shape you know what i mean you know i probably still have 20 30 years and i i think it's a great long-term bet it's fantastic i'm just you know and so you know i just would say to anybody just get as much as you can now never sell until you really have to until you

really you know you something you really want but i think it i think this thing has you know it it really has the potential to be that that you know and and it's going to be a winner take all that there is no you know sailor there is no second best there is some second best ethereum is the second best it is the second best you know but ethereum is not digital money it's not like there's not even a finite amount of the thing you know it's like so it doesn't matter like it could be a security i don't i don't know but but i don't care i'm not even going to try to fight it i don't want like doesn't matter to me i don't think it's useful to try to fight these wars with other cryptos or other things it doesn't matter um the only thing that matters is did you

get your bitcoin are you holding your bitcoin and you know are you going to hold it safely for the long term and i think the etf is going to be that i think it's going to be a safe way to hold bitcoin for the long term so you know that's what i would say to do two months likely approval next month 45 i think next month we'll get the approval i mean hopefully right unless unless gary gensler's got some kind of uh you know torpedo ready to kind of just blow us all up but no i i think march i mean january 8th you know 29 days from today i think january 8th is we're going to have the etf approval jan 8th and then you have 45 days until it starts trading after that correct well we don't know do you know i i have not seen any definitive anything on that that's what i've

heard i do not know for sure yeah but some of these other etfs have started trading in the week really yeah like these bitcoin futures etfs they've traded a week not even like they were announced on friday they started trading on monday could be the case right but but that look on jan on jan once they announce that thing okay man that that's when the you know the checkered flag starts and the races are going right that's it so we're very close to the beginning of the the you know the indie 500 here you know we are very close gentlemen start your entrance you know what i mean because that is like, is there going to be an ETF?

Well, they just announced that there is going to be an ETF. So yeah, there is going to be an ETF. Okay, so Bitcoin is not a security? No, Bitcoin is not a security. Okay, so, well, in the prospectus, it says that it still might be. Yeah, well, they put that in to cover themselves, right? But we are a month away from that revelation.

And then once that hits, these firms are just going to like, okay what pr campaign do we what what's the ad campaign great let's put a billboard out on time square can you see that i mean i can just see it right now yeah larry fake bitcoin etf full time square you know multiple billboards on time square you know you're gonna see whole pages of advertisements and baron i mean you're gonna turn cnbc on and it's gonna be it'll be the bitcoin etf they should change it to the bitcoin etf channel okay because you're gonna have joe kernan you know uh you're gonna have um uh tom lee uh you know from fun strat and by the way he's one

of the main reasons i got into bitcoin by the way really i'll just tell you yeah so uh i was at this crypto event in the Bahamas sorry Bermuda in 2019 and I was hanging out with him for four days or three days right and you know there's like 40 50 people at this event so I got to know I got to talk to him I'm like so Tom what do you think you know like what and Bitcoin was at 5,000 at the time right and i was like so what do you think you know 2019 depths of the you know it's come you know come up from like 3 500 was low right but it was like early 2019 um and i was like where do you think it's going it's like my price is 1 million and i'm like it's at 5 000 right and he's like Yeah, but it is the perfect asset for the millennial demographic.

And demographics drive investment decisions because that's the number one thing is, you know, the old silent generation, they wanted gold. The baby boomers want S&P 500. Gen X want tech stocks. And millennials, they're going to want crypto and Bitcoin. so he goes bitcoin it's very simple that's it it's all demographics you don't have to go you don't have to look any beyond that it's all demographics they want an asset that's truly

digital they want to control it themselves they want to use a mobile phone too uh and no no intermediary and so i think it's going to a million and i was like you know what i think you're right so i bought some bitcoin after that conference i i met him afterwards i told him i said you know tom you you really made me a lot of money uh because uh you know it's like you know it's it's kind of like one thing like just hearing it on tv and then the other thing is hanging out with him and listening to this stuff i was like wow that is a great argument you know makes a lot sense it makes a lot of sense but it's kind of like it's so simple but the the reality is it's all this stuff is all great investment decisions are real simple it's like some real simple thing

that's based on you know 21 million simple right totally decentralized simple you know great nothing else you need to know that's it and you know i think the demographic thing it's very simple but I think that's, that is the key to this thing. And, and that's kind of where I think, I think we're going to get to this million dollar level inside of two cycles, right? I think this cycle, we may, we may end up in the 500,000 kind of three, 300, 500,000 kind of range next cycle might be a million, might be 2 million. I don't know. But, you know, I think this cycle is you know this is gonna this is the this is the we just find ourselves at this amazing kind of cycle right where we've we've got the stuff's kind of ready for prime time now from

a financialization of it and you know we finally got this etf over you know at the finish line level and and then people are saying yeah but it's overbought like no what are you talking about man we've been waiting for this etf for 10 years four years excuse my 10 years the 10 years yeah i mean 10 years really yeah like 2014 yeah the wink of eye right remember they were going to do one back in the day that thing got next right and so 10 years we've been waiting for this thing so now we are at we are finally there and what do you prefer an etf managed by the Winklevii or an ETF managed by BlackRock and Fidelity I'm going with BlackRock and Fidelity man you know hey tell me you don't want your ETF uh managed by a cover band because by the name

their music is terrible by the way these guys even their music honestly have the worst they they're one of the worst uh cover bands I've ever seen so look I think all this stuff's going to make Bitcoin much more legitimate. And I think this is going to be the anti-Sam Bankman Freed, right? We've seen the Sam Bankman Freedization and, you know, Doquan and all this other stuff, right? But now we're going to get the anti-that, which is it's legitimate. It's managed by pros, by adults. You can trust it. You know, there'll be research reports. I mean, i used to get these goldman sachs research reports i mean i'm i'm just looking forward to looking at those things for bitcoin you know research report morgan stanley q4 2024 we're

pleased that bitcoin made a new high of 120 000 our analysts have been analyzing the uh the penetration blah blah blah you know we think that you know so i've seen this thing play out with a couple different industries in in finance i saw it with gold right so i was involved in gold before the gold etf right gold etf hit i think was 2003 and i might it's from memory right but it was you know gold was about 200 in the gold etf hit right now it's at two thousand dollars right so you know it's gone up 10x now it took 20 years but like that's gold too right and not in a period of inflation right so we have not had inflation from 2002 to now i mean last two years we did but this has not been the

70s right this has been the era of low inflation and gold is 10x why part of that is because that etf right so i saw that etf and you can just look back on how that etf did it did great right um so i saw it with gold and i also saw it with commodities right like um jim rogers you know who did the investment biker book great book to read and you know talking about emerging market you know pioneer and emerging markets investing you know he co-led the quantum fund with george soros you know very very smart guy right his thing is well we got all these markets of soybeans and all this other stuff i'm going to make the goldman sachs commodity index the rogers commodity index right and all of a sudden everybody on wall street could invest in the goldman sachs commodity index

great well i can get exposure to sugar and soybeans and everything you see in trading places frozen concentrated orange juice pork bellies all this stuff you know and you know i can get exposure to that price basket right well guess what now everybody owns a little bit of commodities you know like nobody in wall street invested in commodities and you know a third example of that is real estate now when i was in solomon there was no such thing as reits didn't exist okay didn't exist and sam zell you know recently passed away brilliant man right and he's he's got a great book out i forget the name of it it was a great great book on sam zell stuff he created the equity office uh trust and equity residential trust right and uh sold it to

Blackstone, $20 billion kind of sale. And, you know, he basically created a first institutionalized product for real estate because, you know, before Sam Zell, it was a bunch of people buying individual office buildings, right? And it was considered sort of a dirty asset class. And after Sam Zell, they said, great, we're going to own office buildings in all the major metros. We're going to have them serviced by a, you know, common company. We're going to have, you know, CBRE did a lot of that, right? And we're going to have these things appraised and vetted and everything else.

And all of a sudden now you have an institutionalized product that you can buy in one click. EOP, right? Equity office. You want to buy residential instead? EQR, buy residential, right? And so that later led to Voronado and all those other kind of REITs. But the concept was, let's create a product that institutions can participate in, the product that's ready for institutions. So BlackRock is, they built their entire business on making products like this for institutions. And we 100% know that these products made for institutions appeal to institutions, right? I mean, before Sam Zell, there was no way that an average fund in Minnesota could take exposure to office properties in New York or in Chicago, right, where Sam's from. So, you know, I think we are now in this next phase, which is we got these digital assets and let's expand from Bitcoin to include everything in the digital. Let's even throw in NFTs for that matter. Right.

But all these digital assets are going to be institutionalized and packaged in a way that they can be purchased legitimately at low cost with low transaction costs, low holding fees by institutions all over the world. right and that's what's going to happen with crypto it's the it is the packaging of crypto the packaging of bitcoin into something that fits in the existing financial system and you know you may not like it but that's what's happening um and you know i think i think the world we are going to be in three or four years from now it's going to be very different I mean, I love whatever Swan Bitcoin and everybody else is doing, right? I think all those things are really great, and they definitely play it a part. But I think Swan's going to have a hard time selling people like me

on why they should use Swan Bitcoin instead of just putting their money in the ETF. I think that's a losing fight, you know. So we'll see. We'll see. uh but you know i mean there's certainly a role for swan bitcoin they're doing great they just raise a lot of money they're doing great um but uh but i do think that the big story in all of this is the etf uh it's the elephant in the room you know and everything else is just you know rabbits but the financialization of this thing is really going to be the big story and i think it's going

be tremendously tremendously successful that's my that that would be my gut feel we got do not underestimate the do not underestimate the dark force you luke you know this is dark darth vader saying come to the dark side you know that's what it is so yeah i think i agree i mean like i said earlier is nothing anybody who doesn't want to see this not in the world can do to prevent it like it's gonna happen and it is um really insane to think about the amount of money that it can bring in to bitcoin what that can do for price um and there's perception it's going to be beautiful it's going to be great for the price it's going to be great for the reputation of bitcoin right and it would be so good to have you know people in suits

you know on cnbc talking about how excited they are about it as opposed to guys like you and me and i used to wear a suit but you know what i mean you might have as well but like i'm just saying like you want you want that guy on cnbc pounding the table and not pomp well pomp does wear a suit but you know what i mean yeah but like that was the best we had right kind of at you know at the time right but you know what you want is i mean michael saylor's done such a fantastic job right like you know because he kind of straddles that public company you know he's well spoken he doesn't you know he he chooses his words very carefully you know he's he he's he's believable right um but even more believable than michael saylor is uh you know is traditional

wall street analysts you know from fidelity or from you know yeah lizanne saunders you know from bank of america you know that's that's what we want you know we want those people talking about bitcoin right you know and that's what we're gonna get right so we're gonna get we're gonna get a whole different world of people and i for well i welcome it you know i'm like i'm all for go for it come pump our bags yeah but anyways that's uh that's kind of what i got um it's been a it's been a while feel free to cut it up whatever way you want or not whatever you want to do we don't cut anything up here fred this is a fascinating discussion thank you but thanks a lot marty and i i'm gonna definitely follow more of your stuff too uh it was great no i appreciate it i

think uh i think this perspective is incredibly bullish number one but two it's important to be realistic about what people uh at the institutional level are thinking about bitcoin how they're viewing it particularly their exposure to it so i appreciate you taking the time to do this and who knows maybe we'll have to meet man we'll have to meet again really enjoyed it yeah i want to do something maybe mid next year or this time next year when the etf is let's see how we do in a year let's see how we do all right all right i'll talk to you later enjoy the rest of your afternoon peace and love freaks