TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #475: Bitcoin Is Eating The World with John Arnold

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Marty sits down with John Arnold to discuss his article on Bitcoin's total addressable market. John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldTen31 John's Article: https://ten31.vc/insights/tam 0:00 - Intro 7:06 - The real John Arnold 10:26 - John’s background 23:10 - Total addressable market 29:31 - Tech stock returns 34:42 - Best time to jump in 44:04 - Why Bitcoin is eating the world 52:01 - Financial services 1:03:06 - Consumer applications 1:09:06 - Replacing the incumbent system 1:21:48 - Venture capital not recognizing 1:29:57 - Ten31 network 1:35:07 - Bitcoin is fun 1:40:45 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sote 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

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat down with john arnold the john arnold from 1031 to talk about why bitcoin is eating the world great deep dive into the opportunity that sits before us here in the world of bitcoin and the companies building out the space and investors who are looking to invest in those companies i think you guys are going to enjoy it john is a consummate professional extremely impressive i feel very lucky to be working with him at 10 31 this rip was brought to you by our good friends at river river is here building up bitcoin infrastructure they build their own infrastructure they don't have any third-party dependencies like prime trust or fortress they built their own wallets they custody

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building their own infrastructure what unchained is doing revolves around multi-sig custody two or three multi-sig quorum it's a collaborative custody model their vault product allows you to hold two keys unchained holds one you can distribute your risk eliminate single points of failure. Unchained is there to be the second in the two or three multi-sig quorum if you need them. They also have an IRA product. A lot of people aping into the ETFs. Don't think that's the best idea. You should get access to actual Bitcoin that you can control. And if you want to have an IRA and Bitcoin in your IRA, go to Unchained, transition your IRA into their Bitcoin IRA, and you can hold your own keys again with that two or three collaborative custody model.

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it's taking sovereignty back from a health care perspective typical or health insurance the industry is notoriously opaque expensive impersonal crowd health is a different model it's not health insurance it's crowdfunded health care you you pay a monthly fee you pay a membership fee you join the crowd health community. If you ever need to go to the doctor, you tell crowd health, Hey, I'm going to the doctor. I say, all right, get us a bill. You go to the doctor, you get the bill, you give it to crowd health. They negotiate the price lower. Then you pay the first $500 of that bill and the rest gets crowdfunded by the crowd health community. They've had a hundred percent of bills paid to date. They can't guarantee that will happen, but the model seems to be

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for the first six months of your membership fee. Last but not least, this rip was brought to you by Bitcoin Talent Co. Bitcoin Talent Co. is here to help you find the best talent in the world. If you're a company building out the space, a lot of the companies we talked about, John and I, in this episode, they need to hire. Some of them are using Bitcoin Talent Co. to go hire what they need. it's a bitcoin recruiting firm built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners they understand bitcoin

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cfo bitcoin talent go and find those people for you bitcointalent.co tell them the tftc sent you wasn't last but not least also new sponsor been drinking uh electrolytes to to supplement my water my hydration salt of the earth go to drink s o t e drink sote.com drink s o t e.com slash tftc check it out with that tftc promo code you'll get 15 off enjoy this rip 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

And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. John Arnold. Marty Bennett. It's an honor. It's a long time coming, sir. You've been working together for what? Two years now, almost?

Close to two years, yeah. We're very lucky to have you on our team at 1031. I just want to say that up front. i uh the feeling is mutual very very bullish on what we're doing uh i think it's very unique and uh we're just getting started so i'm excited yeah before we jump into what we're here to talk about which is the fact that bitcoin is eating the world you wrote an incredible piece laying out the case for bitcoin being the largest total addressable market on the planet but before we do that? Are you the real John Arnold? That's the question. I think we need to, my parents would

say yes. Um, but, uh, there, there is a slightly more famous and just slightly wealthier John Arnold out there, uh, who happens to be a billionaire. Um, and, uh, I guess this quick background on me, I, uh, I'm a traditional finance refugee, um, started in investment banking, uh, right out of college, uh, then went to work at, uh, the hedge fund Citadel for several years. And, uh, while I was there, um, got an email from, uh, another, another billionaire, uh, by the name of Ken Griffin, um, asking to, to talk to me right away. And, uh, obviously assumed as we're all trained to assume that that's, you know, some kind of spam, some kind of phishing attempt. But, uh, when I referred it to our IT department, I was assured, no, it's the real Ken

Griffin and you better give him a call. So I gave him a ring and I believe he was trying to get my opinion on some gala or charity event. And I was unfortunately unable to provide any useful information to him and hung up the phone, assuming surely I'm about to be fired. Checked in with his secretary to find out that he was actually looking for the john arnold the the real one the the billionaire with whom he presumably has some kind of relationship um and not uh the the underling john arnold who was you know a first year analyst at his firm um so that's my claim to fame at this point as being uh the the second uh john arnold in the world well the second john arnold but for second there we're like oh ken ken's like my my work as an analyst am i impressing him you know

generally when you're like 23 24 and the billionaire ceo of your company wants to talk to you it typically isn't a good thing so my first uh my first response was not positive but uh turned out to be turned out to just be a mistake and innocent mistake so live to fight another day Yeah, that's one of the funnier stories that you have in your belt. You have a few of them. That's one of my favorites. But it's a good level setting for the context of this conversation. Obviously, you're with us at 1031. You've come full throttle into the Bitcoin ecosystem, helping back the companies that are building out the infrastructure for Bitcoin standard. before we jump into the article and all that let's talk a little bit more about your background what you're doing at citadel what you're doing before that what you were focused on and how that applies to what you're doing now at 1031 yeah for sure um uh post-college like i said started in investment banking uh at goldman um for those that don't know that's a lot of um uh excel modeling building

PowerPoint decks, turning comments from senior members of your team at 4 a.m. and just trying to survive and learn the basics of corporate finance. Knew I wanted to be an investor, likely in the public markets, and so recruited for positions at hedge funds. Landed at Citadel, which had me doing a lot of just investment analysis of publicly traded companies. I was on healthcare desks focused even more specifically on medical technology. And the model of a lot of those modern kind of hedge fund businesses, the big shops, is to have kind of an army of people who are inch wide, mile deep, focused on very particular kind of subsectors and trying to be the axe in those subsectors and just kind of know them better than anyone else in the market.

That'll be relevant to the story of what we're doing at 1031 in a second. But I did that, was a junior analyst, worked my way up to some extent, worked on a couple of different desks, always focused on medical technology, providing a lot of the underlying analysis for investment decisions that our desk would make for our positions, usually on very lean teams. so only a few people typically worked for kind of just one person above me providing input analytical input meeting with management teams doing channel checks and just kind of learning as much as i could about the companies in our portfolio and so kind of built up what i think

is a pretty strong muscle on just basic blocking and tackling of corporate finance and investment analysis um in a public markets context um but i had always been um kind of a big supporter of austrian economics even from high school onward you know you've you've talked at length um you just had the episode of parker lewis out about how you guys were kind of both formed by the financial crisis in 08 i was also kind of in high school at the time um right around same age as you and that caught my attention um and made me interested in finance um in a big way for the first time but also interested in kind of what the causes of that um that crisis were and why suddenly uh all the smartest guys in the room seemed to not know what was going on and why you know we needed to um

take out untold levels of debt and print untold levels of money untold for that time um to uh bail out the system um and so that naturally led me down um the the federal reserve rabbit hole and into kind of austrian economics and the mises institute um and you know became a big ron paul supporter um and so i'd always kind of had that um vein um running through kind of my intellectual life even while i was working in traditional finance jobs um obviously as you would imagine a lot of those principles are not um you know they're not orthodoxy on uh your your traditional finance desks typically so didn't necessarily have a lot of opportunity to put those into practice um but you know over time kind of working in those jobs you you sense like

especially if you come to those jobs with the priors of austrian economics you can kind of sense that there there's something like a little wrong at least you know to say the least um they're kind of uh strange like short-term games being played and there's kind of less and less focus on fundamental analysis and less and less attention paid to what's a fundamentally justifiable valuation for a company. A lot more focus on just short-termism, quarterly earnings reports, or even weekly, monthly moves in a stock. Focus on others positioning and just increasingly trading all stocks as more or less like shitcoins, just like tickers on a screen that have maybe some uh tenuous link to real economic realities but like not really that you any have that you have

to like pay attention to um so kind of went through that you know career progression with those priors in mind um and you would think that that would have led me to uh fully grok bitcoin much sooner um but heard about it for the first time in 2013 in college um i think around the time that mount gox blew up i knew it was kind of a it was popular among libertarians but it seemed uh you know esoteric and scammy and um i thought nice science project but probably never gonna work um then i my next touch point was while i was working in finance um in the 2017 bull run um got a little more interested then but still just didn't have the conviction to fully take the plunge and you know obviously you're drinking from a fire hose on you know

finance desks and you'll have a lot of time to drill into something that takes 100 plus hours of work to start to get. So, that didn't work either. But finally, spring 2020 happened and that forced me down the rabbit hole. And after a week or two of some real diligent work, it finally clicked that this was indeed the fulfillment of the principles that I had learned from Austrian economics. This was Hayek's sly roundabout way to change the monetary system for the better in a totally peaceful, voluntary way. From then on, I was hooked. I continued to work my hedge fund jobs for another year plus, just learning as much as I could about Bitcoin, being in the space as much as I could, much to my wife's chagrin, as I'm sure a lot of Bitcoiners

can attest that becomes kind of the only thing you can talk about or think about. So I went through that period. But to your point about coming from an investing background, around summer 2021, so after being in Bitcoin for a little over a year, kind of just started to have the intuition that if Bitcoin was going to do what I thought it was going to do and what most people listening this probably think it's going to do, there will be a massive kind of wave of demand behind that for companies building applications to make Bitcoin easier to use, to extend its utility to both retail users and enterprises. And because Bitcoin is money, then there's no industry that

it's not going to touch and we'll get into that more but that by itself was kind of this intuition that made me start thinking about investing in bitcoin companies and trying to figure out a way to do that and right around that time 1031 popped onto my radar kind of came out of stealth um and you know i saw that 1031 was combining traditional finance experience um you know some of the two co-founders have experience in private equity and hedge funds and then they were bringing you know you and matt odell on and um you know you guys were formative in my orange billing experience my going down the rabbit hole um and so it just seemed like uh the perfect kind of shop to go try to build um and uh you know just a totally unique opportunity um combining the two things you would

need to be a successful investor right in um the bitcoin space which is some traditional finance investing experience and deep deep bitcoin knowledge and bitcoin focus um so i think i slid into grant's dms you know in like summer fall 21 and just kind of wouldn't let up until we got on the phone um he and i started talking and i started doing you know some work with you guys when i had a chance on the side and um one thing led to another and yeah uh spring of 22 I think the day that Terraluna blew up, it came on full time. Baptism by fire, baby. Exactly, exactly.

But it was validating too, right? I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing where, you know, a couple of years before I'd been looking at all the investment in kind of the crypto space broadly and thinking these things look like perpetual motion machines. You know, there's a ton of noise. everyone's missing the signal of remaking money of kind of digital bearer value that's absolutely scarce. And, you know, that was one of the things that pulled me to 1031 with, you know, the contrarian viewpoint that you guys were taking. And so I think it was appropriate that

basically the day that I joined, we were kind of like vindicated in a very big way, you know, unfortunately, when one of the, probably the perpetual motion machine of crypto par excellence par excellence uh totally blew up par excellence no it's again for level setting for this conversation it's so true i mean i had a very short stint in traditional finance about three years which included two years of college where i was working full-time and taking night classes but it was different side of traditional finance with managed futures fund or fund of funds index commodity trading advisors so it wasn't like a long short equity portfolio where we're diving into individual companies and looking at valuations and trying to place bets that way

was more of a macro theme looking at commodities markets and i had similar experience where i would sit there with the chief investment officers of these large commodity trading advisors and this was in 2012 2013 right around when janet yellen was taking over the helm and we were coming out a qe twist uh and then the qe2 and i was simply asking them like are you guys worried about all this monetary base expansion they're like no the Fed doesn't really control markets and I think the amount of complacency that I witness at a young age at that level of high finance if you will for lack of a better term was was eye-opening for me it was like oh all the quote-unquote smartest people in the room really don't care about something which I'm pretty sure will have

an immense impact on global markets everywhere whether it's equity equities or commodities and other financial assets like treasuries and that was really radicalizing for me in a way where it was like wow these nobody knows what's going on and that's same time falling down the bitcoin rabbit hole and really realizing oh this is solution to solve all this insanity in the world all this mispricing we need to fix the pricing mechanism which is the money and that dovetails into what we're going to talk about like i would argue that over the last 15 years 16 years now post uh 2008 the ability to actually go in and properly value companies has been completely distorted we're looking at pe ratios of some companies like nvidia above 200 which is

insane um obviously the amount of monetary base expansion and debt expansion has flown into financial assets and yes and p at all-time highs or it hit all-time highs end of last week i'm not sure where it is today i didn't check yesterday um and people view that as the stock market being a barometer of the economy like oh everything's well and good but if you look at the dislocation that exists out there in terms of the quality of life that individuals have and the amount of economic pressure that your average joe is is feeling right now just does not compute with what's going on so there's a dislocation bitcoin hopefully sound money standard will get us back to a proper pricing mechanism that will allow us to then go allocate capital efficiently uh and and

properly to to do productive things to increase the quality of life of everybody um and then what we're doing is sort of a layer above that like we're going to fix the money and then to do that we have to build out infrastructure that gives people access to that money and provides them utility to do things with that money so that's what we're trying to do at 1031 investing in in private companies building out this infrastructure but before we dive into the nitty-gritty of what we're doing i think it would be a good place a good place to start would be to just dive into the heuristic of total addressable market versus other heuristics which you you open the piece with these frameworks that investors use to sort of make their decisions it could be value-based

could be team-based but the one that unites all that you put in the piece is total addressable market what is the opportunity we have to get a return on our capital yeah absolutely um and i would say the various kind of heuristics that investors use um to evaluate investments are like not mutually exclusive right so probably you should be evaluating um a variety of of things including you know you have to uh even a great investment you know can't actually you know a great company can't be a great investment if it's like very poorly priced right so if you get in at a level that is dramatically um overextended relative to kind of the free cash flow that the company can actually generate over a reasonable holding period than even if they are

indeed like a good team in a good market with a good product and competitive moats, etc. The pricing of the investment can completely throw your returns out of whack. So, valuation is important. That's one of the things that I saw not really being respected during my time in traditional finance um so that's an important heuristic that i think will return to um more and more as uh bitcoin hopefully kind of resets um our monetary framework um and you know there are various other kind of ways that you can chop up and look at whether a company is an attractive investment and you should do all those different things but the point that i make in you know the beginning of the piece as you point out is pretty much every investor kind

of regardless of whether they're just trying to buy you know the the cheapest things possible and hope that they can kind of get a pop um in a relatively short time just as valuations correct or whether they're hyper focused on you know growth and the cutting the most cutting edge technology that they can find um uh or you know anything else everyone needs to and has to inevitably pay attention to TAM as you say, total addressable market. Because for a given probability of success of the investment and for a given quality of a team and for a given level of scalability of a company's unit economics, a huge lever that will differentiate between all of those holding them all equal is just how big is the prize that they're actually

targeting right um you can think of it on you know one extreme one extreme end of um you know a local kind of you know contractor doing work around like his hometown um that may be like an absolutely great business and probably we need like a lot more of those we need more skilled trades people and electricians than um you know we have in this country for reasons that you talk about in other episodes of this podcast but there's naturally kind of a ceiling on um how much revenue that business is going to generate and thus also how much cash flow it can generate, which is ultimately what you have to care about when making an assessment on whether you're going to make an investment or not. And so as you ramp up the addressable market,

the shots on goal, the size of the customer base that a company is selling into, you lever up and you ratchet up the impact of the team and the impact of scalability and um you know the impact of the profitability for a given um business with a 20 profit margin that can max out at you know a million dollars of revenue right okay well you get 200 000 of profit off that if you can scale those same unit economics with that same team to you know 100 billion dollar market just by having just by addressing a bigger opportunity um you've are you've dramatically levered up and scaled up the price that you can pay for the investment to make sense and the amount of free cash flow that it can generate and so as i point out in the piece like tam is not the only thing that matters by any

means um and in fact certainly there are kind of more traditional vc early stage investors that have gotten way too focused on kind of like pie in the sky tam numbers and said i can pay pretty much any multiple that uh that i want i can i don't have to care about you know time to revenue generation or time to profitability because it's this this company is addressing a trillion dollar market a hundred trillion dollar market and so you can throw out these wild numbers and even at a very low probability of success you can convince yourself that you know something is maybe a great investment so that's not the way that we need to go and again i think as capital gets more expensive as easy money goes away that kind of thinking will go away but there's still significant value

as you differentiate between investments um and looking at how big is the actual opportunity set because that's gonna at the end of the day you know to bring it back to kind of like um you know boomer warren buffett language like your margin of safety goes up um if you're addressing a much much bigger market than someone else you just have more shots on goal to drive revenue more potential customers um and a bigger total pie that you can sell into and maybe you know take share of right um you know would you rather have 10 of a trillion dollar market or you know 50 of 100 million dollar market right um so the just gaming that ratio in your favor by addressing the biggest markets possible is, I think, a major lever of investment success

that pretty much any investor, regardless of their stripe and what they focus on in terms of methodology, needs to pay attention to and what every investor out there is paying attention to. Yeah. And this piece, Bitcoin is eating the world, was obviously a play on software is eating the the world. I mean, you mentioned explicitly in the piece by Mark Andreessen from A16Z, Anderson Horowitz. And I think to set the context for the Bitcoin conversation, it is important to go back and look at the last wave of innovation that led to insane returns for investors, which is obviously the transition to the digital age and the companies that really capitalized on that. So you have a great chart here of the investment returns of the core four, Apple, Microsoft,

off Google, Amazon, juxtapose the S&P, gold, and long bonds over a 20-year time horizon, and it is pretty insane when you look at it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, you know, I kind of acknowledge in the piece, like, this is not going to be surprising to anyone who looks at it, I think, if you've been paying even the slightest amount of attention to, if you have, you know, a retirement account, if you have any kind of, like, portfolio, and, you know, increasingly, you know, no one has been able to really save in just in dollars in a bank account um so we've all had to kind of pay more attention to this

right over the last 10 20 30 years i think everyone intuitively knows this is the case right um that fang stocks broadly you know these massive tech leaders what are now being called like the magnificent seven um are really holding up a lot of a lot of the s p um and uh are explaining a lot of you know overall stock market returns um because and part of that is because of um you know monetary based expansion that it's kind of deleterious consequences and forcing people to apply more premium to them but there's also there's also real dramatic economic value that's been generated by them right like there's a reason that these companies are in the position that they're in it's because one of the main reasons is because they were leading infrastructure providers

at the forefront of a radical secular shift in the way that commerce operates right the the dematerialization of communication and information storage and transfer through internet enabled software was you know the highest leverage or among the highest leverage innovations and inventions in human history and people obviously needed tools and applications and services to fully avail themselves of the benefit of that right and so the the companies that you see on that chart apple microsoft google amazon and several others that we can think of one by positioning themselves as market leaders providing those services and you know obviously the the path to get here is is strewn with you know some corpses of companies that were once

their competitors that didn't quite make it some of those companies just got bought by the few companies that you see on that chart but nevertheless um there was very clearly tremendous value generated even before the the crazy kind of multiple expansion of the last five to ten years by the the bellwether companies that enabled um mass both retail and enterprise use of the primitives of the internet protocol stack and of you know consumer software right um and so you know andreessen as you referenced wrote his piece in 2011 software is eating the world to kind of um encapsulate uh that point that exact point um that this was a massive secular shift and the companies that were uh driving it were set to even in 2011 there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit

to be picked and the companies that were picking that low-hanging fruit were set to um drive massive returns for investors um and and that they did right the difference i would say with his piece versus kind of where we are right now with bitcoin um is in 2011 right like the iphone had been around four years android followed shortly after facebook had been around i think seven years um i think hundreds of millions of users at that point netflix was already doing streaming and that was clearly picking up steam um amazon had like pretty much already already um you know signed the death warrant for um you know physical bookstores and a lot of physical retail um so he wasn't really saying anything like highly controversial yeah maybe like you

know capital allocators weren't fully paying attention and maybe they were still like somewhat underweight tech but in reality like your grandma was already on facebook in 2011 right like it was becoming a fairly consensus viewpoint um but we're sitting where we're sitting with bitcoin today is you know we're 15 years ahead probably 15 20 years ahead of where andreessen was when that piece was written um the theme is just as powerful and i would argue even more powerful but it is far less consensus at this point um and that means that the asymmetric upside is orders of magnitude greater um so that's you know a reason to kind of be excited i think about what we're doing yeah when you were going through that the the fact that the competitors came when it went

throughout time in the tech sector i couldn't help but think i always thought that ash jeeves was going to was going to make it and compete with with google but i guess i mean i completely agree we're much earlier in bitcoin's life cycle compared to when andreessen wrote his piece in 2011 where the tech cycle was then and i guess that gets into the question of timing like can you be too early in this yeah i mean that's that's um uh a key like lesson to learn in investing is that you know being being early is tantamount to being wrong um so uh there are definitely situations where um in my own career i've been kind of right on the you know investment thesis over like a 12 to 24 month period but you know very wrong in like a three month period um and

so timing is very important um what i would say though is i think what we've discovered um over the couple years i guess you know four years now since synthron was launched and a couple years since i've joined is you know we all people always say in bitcoin that you know the the best time to buy bitcoin was yesterday the second best time is today i actually think um the the flip side is true um for bitcoin infrastructure you know a few years ago even um bitcoin still had not gone through as many stress tests as it has today um lightning was still you know even more immature than it is today and certainly i think it's still quite early for lightning but there were very few companies even you know really building on it at scale um and uh you know we did multi-sig was

still um fairly new unchained was still having to really beat the drum on just even using collaborative custody at all now you can see like some real indications that those things have shifted significantly um we've had a lot more stress tests since you know five or six years ago um block size wars um ftx um the china mining ban um and a variety of other things you know yet another 80 plus price drawdown i think that's four now in bitcoin's history maybe maybe five and so um we're at a point now where there's a greater degree of maturity in the ecosystem in the builders in the ecosystem and in just the last couple years we can say you know anecdotally um and i think we might have actually put out some some data on this in a prior piece that we wrote

But the number of companies coming to market with really interesting solutions is inflecting. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but there have been far more Bitcoin-only deals done in the last few years, even amidst kind of the carnage of the VC carnage of 22 and 23. Then the last couple of years probably combined the deals that we've seen in the market overall. that vastly outstrips the total deals done in the 10 years prior, right? So I think we're entering the stage where the technology stack, the ecosystem,

the companies and the quality of companies are mature enough and have progressed to the point where you would have been too early like five years ago, probably. I don't think we're too early anymore. I think we're at exactly the right time to lean into this thesis, especially heading into a period

of the next having coming up and um 11 major traditional finance institutions now having put you know their imprimatur on bitcoin being an investable asset for institutions you and i might not care about that that much and i know i will not be owning the etfs and i highly recommend everyone you know um listening to this choose a collaborative custody option like what unchained offers or you know another collaborative custody option like that where you can actually own real underlying bitcoin while also not having to take on the complexity of key management but that said it's still very meaningful that the biggest asset manager in the world um has now filed for this etf and larry fink the head of that asset manager you know has changed his tune in just you know a few

years time from bitcoin is a tool for criminals it's an index of money laundering it has no intrinsic value it makes no sense to it's a tool that protects you it's uh it's it's there in case your your government tries to censor you or it's there to protect you against monetary debasement you know suddenly he sounds like you know ron paul like 10 or 15 years ago right um he's kind of parroting those same lines and i don't i think we shouldn't understate what that means for um institutional awareness of and acceptance of and adoption of bitcoin and what it will mean over the next you know five to ten years and so i look at all that and i say okay no we're not too early like this is just the right time where the asymmetry is still there the alpha is still

there people still don't like fully get you know why bitcoin is differentiated and why these opportunities are exciting but they're starting to wake up the ecosystem is significantly more mature than it was even just a few years ago and so we're at a really good kind of balancing point where we're not too early we're not too late um and i think it's it's exactly the right time to leaning into investing in these companies i completely agree having been around bitcoin for 10 years the maturity of the space over the last five years particularly has been amazing to see and you couple that with the macroeconomic tailwinds that are coming our way not only is the fiscal situation here in the united states utterly dire um it seems that the

banking crisis that we experienced last year is probably just um band-aided over and lurking right under the surface ready to pop up at any time and then you have the culmination of geopolitical events that have happened over the last few years where the u.s has weaponized a dollar system seized treasury assets and you have other large players in the political realm beginning to form alliances that that seem like they could attempt to erode the sanctity of the u.s dollar as global reserve asset and um you mentioned etfs getting approved and i think another thing socially when i mentioned earlier like people really feeling the pressures of inflation in their everyday lives is beginning to stoke that that question in the common man's

mind like why is this happening why can't i live a higher quality of life like i was just able to five six years ago and naturally that that question will will lead them to the solution which is bitcoin um and once they come to understand it which i think that's another part of the thesis here is that like as it stands today in 2024 there's never been more of a wealth of a knowledge base built out for people to easily learn what bitcoin is why it's important and you have different educational materials for the different types of archetypes of people and the way in which they learn so i think timing is perfect we've got another having coming up we were just in nashville last week and i think that is i mean obviously i've been hyper

focused on mining for the last six years but i do think that is one of the first big dominoes to fall is once the energy sector really notices and leans into the benefits that bitcoin mining as a an alternative revenue stream a grid balancer a way to be more efficient with your your stranded assets once that light bulb goes off in the energy sector and they lean in heavy i think that's a massive domino that begins to spread and make it obvious that bitcoin is here to stay it's it's a net benefit for humanity and um there's going to be a lot of activity companies spun up people saving in bitcoin it's going to get really cool and i think uh i've never been more excited it is daunting 10 years many cycles as you can see on my face i

look i'm only 32 i probably look like i'm 42 i've seen a lot but um i would i wouldn't put you a day over 28 oh thank you thank you um but no the timing feels feels good and i think the fact that that bitcoin has survived these waves and just really reinforced the the value prop of the network the peer-to-peer distributed cash system the the hard supply uh and the fact that hash rate has gotten to the level that it is and been distributed geographically as it has over time i think it's you'd be an idiot not to recognize that there's something here um but to fall back to um sort of the the underlining first principles of why this is important like why is bitcoin eating the world like in your mind yeah for sure um the

The simplest answer is Bitcoin is superior money and there is no way that any self-interested economic actor will be able to ignore indefinitely the consequences of what that means and will be able to indefinitely not adopt and use Bitcoin in some way. I go through kind of the properties that make Bitcoin superior money in the piece and like a little table, it's probably something that, you know, if you've been in this space for a little while, you've seen a version of it. If you're newer to the conversation, you know, I, we can walk through it or I, yeah, there it is right there. I highly recommend just kind of taking a second to, to step through it informed by people who have been in the space for a while as well

as just Austrian economics kind of principles there. But these various properties kind of lead you to uh the inevitable conclusion that bitcoin is the best money we've ever had um and as 1031 advisor parker lewis you know famously um at least famously for those who are in the bitcoin space wrote in uh the piece bitcoin obsoletes all other money um money converges to one right um you don't want to hold 10 monies where you know your money a is like your best one but you also hold some of money B, which isn't quite as good, and it doesn't hold value as well, and it's not as liquid and saleable, but it's still okay, and money C, et cetera, like, no, you will always trade the inferior monies. You always tend to trade the inferior monies as much as possible for the

superior money. Even in the world that we live in today, you can look around and say, well, every sovereign nation has, just about every sovereign nation has its own currency. And we're kind of in this world that Hans Hoppe called, you know, partial barter between these currencies, which have like reintroduced the double coincidence of once the problem money was introduced to solve. And so you could say, well, you know, we haven't converged to one, you know, in the last 50 years since the start of the fiat regime, like, is it really true that money can converge to one, but the reality is that the world's settlement asset is the dollar, right? You can have, you know, these little fiefdoms that have their own currencies that they've made up that they kind

of manage but at the end of the day the dollar has the dominant network effect and if given the choice and you see it around the world right now with the emergent stable coins especially people right now want dollars thanks to the petrodollar system which you've talked about on this podcast a good amount and we have reason to believe is is crumbling partially for the reason that you pointed out, which is that the U.S. has really shown in the last few years that it will debase and seize your dollar-denominated assets and your U.S. treasuries at will if it wants to. And that's just one of the reasons that that system is kind of crumbling. But for now, the dollar is the big dog. There are not 10 big dogs. There are not 10 major kind of reserve

assets for the world that people want above all else. There's one, and it's the dollar. Our thesis is that that will inevitably change over who knows what the timeframe is, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, but it will shift to being Bitcoin for the reasons that we outlined in this piece about Bitcoin's superior monetary properties. Bitcoin is absolutely scarce, so it will be the best store of value over time that's enforced by a decentralized consensus of self-interested actors that cannot be easily gained. It's permissionless to interact with. It's digitally native bearer value that can be sent globally 24-7. Very, very difficult, if not impossible, to censor, at least for any meaningful amount of time. um and capital controls are not effective against it um and so everyone as knowledge distributes every person on the earth will want to increasingly get more bitcoin um we've seen that in history

with kind of the emergence of gold as the global reserve asset um up until the point at which gold no longer scaled for global commerce it naturally spontaneously evolved as the world reserve asset the settlement asset across a bunch of different highly diverse societies around the world and at diverse points of history because everyone wanted the best money. Gold was for a long time the best money. We're now living in this fiat experiment that has for about 50 years disrupted that and that the seeds of that were sown by gold's failures

and its spatial limitations and its inauditability and its difficulty to custody and move around. But that experiment, as you've referenced, is probably not long for the world. It's creating significant instability and political pushback in different pockets of the world in different ways. And it will be ultimately impossible for any corporation or any government to force people to value the dollar or any fiat currency more than they value Bitcoin. They might be able to, for a time, mandate usage. They might be able to enact certain laws that make using Bitcoin more burdensome. But as Mises points out in Theory of Money and Credit, they can't make people subjectively value a currency. So the properties that make Bitcoin superior will inexorably pull people around the world to use it and store wealth in it

until the point at which everyone in the world is using bitcoin as their reserve asset um and i'll you know i can i can stop there but i would say there are two major implications of that that i think people um who are even constructive on that thesis people who even already own bitcoin whether you're an institutional allocator and you have some allocation to bitcoin or you're just a pleb on twitter who stacks sats every day um both of those types of investors both those types of savers will kind of only go that far and then stop but if that's true then it has two big implications one of which uh is um the picks and shovels if you want that will enable people to acquire bitcoin use it store it safely um put into lightning channels to spend it um

ensure it uh distribute its custody uh you know whatever you want all these different kind of applications that we can get into will naturally be buoyed up and will be required ultimately for that distribution process to take place so for everyone if everyone in the world is ultimately going to own and use bitcoin they will be doing that partially with the help of applications and service providers and tools developed by companies that are providing ux that you know allow them to do that with a 10x 100x better user experience some of that will be certainly free and open source software that people can just download and run and you know without any sort of connection to a company but there will also be corporate service providers

like unchained or ankle watch or strike or any other company that you see in our portfolio that can provide um that can and will provide a better experience that will be demanded by the market as people look for ways to acquire and use bitcoin so they kind of go hand in hand right if you're bullish on bitcoin's adoption then you necessarily have to be bullish on its picks and shovels too so that's implication one we can maybe unpack that or however you want to take it we can talk about implication two maybe in a second yeah it's digging implication one i mean you mentioned Many of the different companies that are providing these tools and services to be able to reap the utility and the benefits of Bitcoin. But let's get a little more granular and better define the subsectors and the verticals that you think are addressing these different needs.

Yeah. So I'll give you the way that we kind of cut it up at 1031. But this is not, you know, the only way to think about the space. And there's also obviously overlap between a lot of these. But the first most obvious one is, you know, to go back to Parker Lewis, you know, if Bitcoin is money, I think he wrote this in some piece, maybe he said it in a talk, but if Bitcoin is money, the first order product of money is financial services, right? So that's kind of the, if you think about the addressable verticals in like concentric circles expanding out, one of the first, you know, center, the concentric circles is financial services products that allow you to save in Bitcoin effectively, to custody it, to have, obviously to buy it as well, to buy it and trade it as necessary, to take out loans against it and do anything else. that um uh involves interacting with the traditional fiat system um and building those interactions between traditional fiat system and bitcoin and so you know a few examples

um of a company like that would be obviously unchained is one um they provide a lot of those services and we're kind of the forerunner in building kind of those services out building out collaborative custody to allow a user to benefit from, let's say, the benefit of a custodian without actually surrendering to custodial permissions. So in a two of three multi-sig, I as a retail user or I as a company can hold two keys, on-chain can hold one, and thereby eliminate or greatly reduce the risk of catastrophic loss if my private keys if my hardware wallets are compromised, right? They also provide kind of intuitive trading and lending services on top of that all-in-one interface so that I can interact with

my Bitcoin more in the way that I would be kind of used to doing if I'm coming from the traditional finance, traditional fiat world, which ultimately like definitionally everyone is, right? Everyone's kind of coming from that world. And so a company that can provide a way to much more safely custody the bitcoin and then also use it in these different ways that people are familiar with um is highly valuable and very necessary too right it's it's necessary for most people to have something like that to bridge from you know not just buying bitcoin and leaving it on coinbase you know having their coinbase iou or having their etf iou as as will increasingly be the case for many people as their first kind of touch point in bitcoin um but also not have to immediately

make the leap to holding generational wealth on a hardware wallet in their desk or burying it in the ground somewhere. Those are two ends of the spectrum that people are naturally uncomfortable with when they come to Bitcoin. And so having a collaborative custody option that also gives them the ability to interact with Bitcoin in ways that they're familiar with from a traditional finance perspective is highly valuable and very important. And now we're also seeing, you know, you've banged the drum on this a lot over the last

year or so, multi-institutional, multi-sig. So not just, not even only having a relationship with Unchained, but having a two of three relationship with Unchained or OnRamp or Ankle Watch or various other kind of custody providers that we can talk about who form a quorum for you and allow you to interact with that coin without ever actually having to touch private key material, which is necessary for a lot of institutions and enterprises that might want to use Bitcoin, have it as a treasury asset, but have fiduciary responsibilities that prevent them from being allowed to have the discretion over private key material. Obviously, there's more of a trust trade-off there, but it's trust

distributed across three institutions rather than just a single point of failure. And for those who listening i would highly recommend reading drew bonsall's piece from unchained on building a network of keys um a network of key signers and um i think that that principle will become very important to real institutional adoption of bitcoin and to our point earlier that's an example of something that was not even on anyone's road map three to four years ago right um it's only come about because of advances in multi-sig and understanding of multi-sig and getting more more institutions kind of on board for that um and so a lot that's an example of how a lot can really happen in a very short time um and a lot has happened to put uh bitcoin and bitcoin companies

in a position to really bring mature offerings to market and so that's a lot on just financial services um and i would maybe quickly run yeah go ahead well i was gonna i was gonna say i would add with unchained particularly not only do they have the technical expertise to manage and create the the software to manage these these multi-sig quorums but they also understand the asset as well on the financial side and the cyclical nature of bitcoin's price history and on their lending products specifically i think this really shines through where they have an extremely low ltv which most people look at and like oh my god that's pretty insane but they understand the asset the team understands the asset and they know that there's gonna be

a lot of volatility so they have a low ltv to reduce the amount of of liquidity and they never had a loan loss throughout their five plus years of offering this product and when you juxtapose that like leaning into to toot the 1031 horn here uh disclaimer for this episode obviously uh 1031 is invested in a lot of the companies we're talking about but i think unchanged shines through because we were getting made fun of for for quote unquote missing the block fi wave wave a few years ago they hit a four billion dollar valuation at the peak of the uh 2021 or 2022 um and we made the conscious decision like we don't trust the way that they're they're running their their lending product it doesn't make any sense to us and that proved to be a wise decision at the end

of the day to allocate towards unchained which was much more conservative having a fine understanding of the asset and the volatility that comes with the bitcoin price um and block five which tried to apply this fiat model to the bitcoin standard and there's no lender of last resort in bitcoin and if you lend it out somebody loses it you're not getting it back yeah absolutely um it's a great point not having any loan losses on a product like that through two bear markets and the carnage that we saw in 2022 multiple times with taraluna then block fi then at the end of your ftx right like to to make it through all of that with um no loan losses it's just really testament to um what they've built and also testament to um just focus on bitcoin and the

importance of that that's true um for all the companies in in our portfolio right it's not just um an ideological theme where we're we're bitcoin maxis and so we only want to invest in people who are ideologically aligned you could say that's like there's relevance to that and i think that's it says something about you as a founder, if you have kind of made the jump to understanding why Bitcoin is sphere of money that will obsolete all of the money. But even more kind of importantly, just from an investing perspective, there's significant edge in understanding the asset that you're dealing with and the things that can go wrong with the volatility that Bitcoin experiences if a product like you know the coinback loan product is not structured well

in terms of um conservative ltvs and non-rehypotification of the underlying collateral right so that's just a feather in the cap not just for unchained but for every business that is exclusively focused on bitcoin because that is that drives real commercial edge and real um sustainability to the business that i as an investor care about even independently of some sort of ideological you know viewpoint on bitcoin versus any other you know cryptocurrency um but to to just quickly round out um on your other question about the verticals that we look at you know the others would be the other major ones would be kind of lightning and layer two that's something like a strike or a mutiny wallet um very different kinds of the spectrum what they

provide but both leveraging lightning to do really innovative things um i would say also it's not even our focus is not even so much on lightning as such although that's the only real like layer two um protocol that is battle tested and has existed for you know five plus years so we've done a lot in lightning but i think um i say lightning slash layer two because we are open to the idea of new protocols coming along that could also have commercial viability and commercial use cases you might call you know it's like uh controversial perhaps what you might call like sentiment protocol right like a layer two in some way i know that again like there's some disagreement on if that's the right way to um approach that but it is kind of uh an additional

protocol that you know only really came about in the last couple years that extends bitcoin's utility and provides kind of new ways to interact with bitcoin and you're seeing that with um uh what fetty is is uh spinning up um and you know famously kind of you you and odell were um the ones that kind of spoke Fetty into existence. And I'll let you speak on that a little bit if you want, but also now Mutiny Wallet, like I mentioned on the Lightning side, also doing a lot with the Fettyman protocol to kind of carve out their own use cases and their own niches. And so that also speaks to what you were asking earlier about whether it's too early or not. Fettyman is a great example of that, of just the vibrancy that we're seeing in the ecosystem over

last couple years and because these are open source protocols a lightning company can very easily kind of integrate uh fediment capabilities in some way or a financial services company can integrate lightning or you know you can have all these kind of cross-vertical uh pollinations um in a way that you really can't in uh closed source tech stacks or kind of more broadly diversified vc portfolios where you're investing in uh fintech and insurtech and health tech and all these different kind of things that don't really talk to each other or play with each other so um you know that's kind of the second major vertical again i said i would i round it out quickly and i failed to do that but take your time i'll just say quickly uh you know consumer

applications would maybe be the next one um so something like primal or fold or you know bitcoin gaming um plays all of those are kind of using bitcoin in ways that um talk to and uh you know part makes sense with existing consumer use cases um they're not necessarily about bitcoin but they're more kind of using bitcoin as a means to an end to drive consumer engagement and establish consumer behaviors so fold does you know rewards obviously rewards is i don't have the number off the top of my head but a massive category that merchants spend you know billions of dollars on every year um and full is focused on kind of using bitcoin to create interoperable rewards which are more valuable to consumers um you've got primal which is obviously a noster

client um noster is itself um not just a noster client but a noster client and tech stack but um noster itself is you know another kind of protocol which i some have maybe called a layer three i don't really like that classification but whatever um but it's one of these other kind of can naturally directly interact with Bitcoin as, you know, it's an open source communications protocol interacting with an open source money protocol, right? And so that's another good example of like consumer application. And then, you know, also the other last two would be kind of mining infrastructure. And so that's prop mining plays, like actual companies that are doing self-mining, grid being an example of that, and then also just picks and shovels

around mining value-added services and technology to allow miners to gain an advantage or to power themselves off power sources that would otherwise be inaccessible. So upstream data is an example of that. Also, Giga Energy, both of whom are really seeing a lot of great uptake among oil and gas producers, something that you've talked about a lot on the show and we think is going to be a huge theme which maybe we can talk about a little more as it relates to um the way that bitcoin will slowly kind of spread out and eat the world and eat these other industries and then you know last vertical i would say would be security infrastructure so that's any hardware

or software um that enables uh either a single user or an institution to securely uh and or privately interact with bitcoin um the most obvious example of that being um coin kite and the cold card the tap signer the various products they have to make that um uh accessible for everyone and that's another good example of you know uh five years ago those products were substantially less advanced than they are now tap center didn't exist um you know cold card was several iterations uh earlier and you know they've made a variety of improvements since then that have kind of turned that product into the gold standard for um for interacting with bitcoin securely and privately in a way that any random pleb can go access um so yet another example that

we're exactly at the right point to start investing aggressively in these companies um we're hitting the point at which to quote or to paraphrase andreessen um in his software piece you know he said we're finally at the point where all this technology um can be delivered to consumers at scale around the world um we're we're maybe not exactly like right there at that spot yet with bitcoin but we're very close and you want to be investing in these companies when you can see the contours of that taking shape not when you know it's already happened and you're kind of just saying what everyone's already seeing right so there's still a lot of alpha um to be generated in investing in these types of companies um it's a long-winded response but that's the general kind

kind of heuristic i guess i would use to carve up the overall infrastructure yeah there's there's a lot to go down that's what i love about the team we've assembled at 1031 because obviously i have experience on the mining side of things matt's heavily focused on privacy lightning uh noster freedom tech more broadly yourself grant jonathan really understand the financial services side of things and i think we complement each other extremely well which allows us to go do a lot of these interesting deals and explore um the full breadth of the industry as it's forming and the going back to the mining stuff like that is again coming off the tails of the energy and mining summit in nashville the one thing that interests me about the mining play specifically

is it's somewhat of a proxy play on energy more broadly which i think is going to be a massive theme over the next decade as it's becoming abundantly clear that we've completely borked the energy systems of the world to a certain extent. It needs to be fixed. There's going to be a lack of supply in a lot of areas, which is naturally going to drive up prices. And these companies are going to be looking to create efficiencies and off-grid mining, on-grid mining for that matter as well, both provide alternative revenue streams are just going to be desperately needed by these energy companies but then going on that to like the rewards play with fold just makes sense why would you lock somebody into some company shit token we

can just give them bitcoin rewards and they can spend that anywhere um financial services i think they're going to get more robust as people begin to hold more bitcoin for longer periods of time and you have it in the piece you have the huddle waves that prove that that is happening um so yeah think the timing is ripe and now we just spent like 30 minutes on implication one what's implication two do you remember yeah yeah no i i got it um yeah i mean it's putting a pin in implication one it's basically there's probably a trillion dollars i'm throwing out a number but i think it's something like that a trillion dollars of revenue opportunity just in the picks and shovels if you want to call it that of the enabling technologies that will see tremendous

demand um on the back of um growing bitcoin adoption and it's it's both just the companies that exist today with um the capabilities bitcoin already has but it's also you know the companies that will emerge on top of this current like generation of you know innovators right um I think about something like, I put it in the piece, like a Shopify, $100 billion plus market cap business or Salesforce or ServiceNow, or you can think of a bunch of different kind of tech businesses that are not in like the Magnificent Seven, but are still like very, very valuable and do billions of dollars of revenue. Those couldn't have existed like 20 years ago. So you needed prior advancements in bandwidth and networking and server architecture, as well as just like the distribution of like high speed Internet and the growth of like consumer computing devices to enable something like e-commerce. Right. But once you have all of those things in place and you have the capability for e-commerce, then now you can build a business like Shopify. And there will be more businesses coming down the pipe just in kind of the picks and shovels category.

of Bitcoin companies that couldn't have existed without work being done by the current innovators that we're seeing today. So that'll continue to be, it's not just like, what's the opportunity right now for the companies that exist today? It's also a question of what are the companies today going to enable that will allow for some totally impossible use case, a use case that's impossible today, but will be very mainstream within kind of Bitcoin picks and shovels in 10 years right um so that'll compound and that that'll be a massive opportunity kind of by itself over the next couple decades that's implication one generally um the picks and shovels are going to do great um i think application two is um what we like to say at 1031 is just like every company

had to be an internet company had to become an internet company over the course of the last 20 years to survive and to stay relevant and and to thrive um so every company will have to become a bitcoin company um to survive um the kind of reasons for that and the drivers for that are multi-fold um you know one is that as those bitcoin um picks and shovel providers start to gain traction um start to build real businesses um the ones that are touching those kind of inner parts of the concentric circles of bitcoin verticals will start to naturally disrupt um, things like, uh, payments infrastructure, right. Um, and financial services, which we just talked about and asset management. Um, and, you know, I think it shouldn't be understated how

revolutionary, um, digital bearer value that's absolutely scarce that can be instantly settled anywhere around the world, um, at any time, um, how radically, how radical of a paradigm shift that is, relative to the Rube Goldberg machine of the chain of, you know, credits and IOUs and counterparty risks that are required to make, you know, a single transaction at a supermarket work, right? There's so much fixed cost built into that. There's significant delays in settlement. There's armies of accountants and technicians and lawyers kind of holding that all together

with duct tape. And that's how, you know, the traditional payment system is built. And over time, you know, the history of economic development, I guess the arc of history bends toward technological innovation winning. Now, the arc of history bends toward, as Jeff Bezos said, you know, your margin being my opportunity. Free markets such as we have them, maybe they're not as robust as we would like in the U.S. today, but they're still operating to some extent. free markets are ruthless about excess margin and inefficiency. And if there's a way to take costs out of the system, if there's a way to do something that serves end users better and that an entrepreneur can profit from doing, the market will do that. It's just a question of how long it

takes. And payments infrastructure and financial services are kind of like the first industry in the crosshairs of Bitcoin picks and shovels companies that will develop and start to kind encroach on on their territory right um because they're providing end users a better more cost effective more secure way to make payments to custody assets etc um and so when you think about implication two that's kind of the first way it plays out is incumbents look at um that growing trend which is an inexorable trend if you believe that bitcoin adoption is is inexorable and it will grow to everyone in the world they'll look at that trend and say we need to either integrate bitcoin in some way we need to um develop capabilities on our own um or we need to buy some of these

companies right uh we we think you know at 1031 that the option that a lot of incumbents will choose is to be strategic acquirers um to avoid kind of uh being the victims of the melting ice cube of, you know, watching their businesses, um, evaporate, but there will also be, you know, forward thinking companies, um, forward thinking blue chips, um, that, you know, maybe do have the ability to kind of develop, uh, in-house. Um, but either way, what you will effectively see is, um, more incumbents of traditional industries needing to integrate Bitcoin in some way and becoming Bitcoin companies. And so that expands the surface area for what you can invest in as an, as an investor focused on Bitcoin infrastructure.

The the other thing to consider is or I guess I would say just to put a little more kind of detail on that. It's not just speculation, right? Like we're already seeing it with a variety of companies, even outside of, you know, you're seeing it in payments, you're seeing financial services, but even expanding outside of that to some of these further the rings that are further out on the concentric circles. right? Oil and gas, power and utilities, like you mentioned, Bitcoin mining is getting substantially more integrated into those industries in a way that was very much on display, as you mentioned in at the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit last week. There are senators that are kind of

seeing that connection. There are major energy executives on both kind of the grid and utility side, and also on the regulatory side, and the oil and gas side that are seeing that the synergy between Bitcoin mining and what they do and trying to leverage it. And so that's already playing out. And it's not surprising, because it's exactly what we saw happen, you know, with the internet, logistics companies, manufacturing companies, medical device companies, you know, all had to start leveraging internet capabilities if they wanted to compete with both upstarts, you know, startups that were kind of doing something interesting with internet enabled software in their industries.

And also they're more forward thinking and common competitors that were either buying those companies or trying to develop similar solutions in house, right? And so if Bitcoin is just as or more influential to global commerce as the internet, then you expect to see the exact same phenomenon with um companies in every industry um and you know like i said um we're already seeing it some of the in the portfolio and maybe the most kind of exciting implication sub implication of that i guess for us as investors is um when we see a company like stat news we have in the portfolio a non-bitcoin company see the power of bitcoin and what it might be able to do for their business over the long term and come to us to invest in them and to

give them some guidance on their bitcoin strategy and to have us on the cap table because we're aligned with um seeing the way that the world is going to go with bitcoin adoption um and so that's an example of you know an early example of something that i think we'll see a lot more over the next 10 years is non-Bitcoin companies of various different sizes, both kind of, you know, pre-seed stage startups and series B, series C companies that are like about to go public, looking at this trend and deciding they need to find ways to integrate Bitcoin in some way, whether that's lightning micro payments for like a consumer application or whether that's, you know, a heavy industry company looking at ways to kind of use Bitcoin

mining like you've referenced um we you know that will dramatically open up the surface area even further for investors who are focused on um on the space and you know i put some numbers around it at the end of the piece it's it's virtually impossible to call that right now um you know it's a little i i i don't want it to be you know moon math or kind of pie in the sky thinking um But if everything that I've just said is right, if Bitcoin adoption is going to do what we think it's going to do, if it's going to lead to, you know, a trillion dollars plus of new value created by picks and shovels providers, and that is itself also then going to lead incumbents to look for ways to integrate Bitcoin in their own industries, all of which I think is kind of, you know, follows from just Bitcoin being superior money. If that's the case, then Bitcoin infrastructure will capture some percentage of the revenue generated by all those industries that need to start integrating Bitcoin. It'll enter their value stack in some way, or they'll just be disrupted and the revenue streams will be replaced by companies that are leveraging Bitcoin. And so with just the set of industries that I talk about specifically in the piece, obviously, this is not even all the industries in the world.

These are just the ones that are kind of the most obviously impacted by Bitcoin. You know, with 1% revenue penetration, you can get to like, you know, $150 billion in category revenue for kind of Bitcoin companies. This is a very like high level, rough, heuristic way to kind of think about the opportunity. But it gets at the intuition that because Bitcoin is money and monetary technology will affect every industry in some way. There is no commerce at any scale that can avoid tapping into and being touched by monetary technology. Bitcoin will have a role somewhere in the value stack of all of those industries and even more.

And so once you start to take that seriously, you have to ask yourself, even at very low penetration of those revenue streams. And to be clear, like in financial services and payments and oil and gas, like I think the penetration is going to be a lot higher than 1%. What does that mean for the available revenue? What does that mean for like the TAM, right, to get back to the beginning of our conversation of this category of companies? And, you know, it puts them even at a conservative estimate, you know, around like the size of enterprise SaaS. Enterprise SaaS is like a 200 to 300 billion dollar revenue category annually.

And so at fairly low penetration of even just a select few of the most obvious industries that should be disrupted by Bitcoin or should be affected by Bitcoin in some way, you're basically at enterprise sass level because bitcoin gets to play across all of these different verticals because it's money because this is monetary technology that everyone needs in some way um so as you know as andreason says uh that's the big opportunity that's where we're putting our money i mean i thought i was bullish after helping you edit read the piece then read again after you published but hearing you articulate it in person just got me even more bullish it's pretty insane yeah i mean no one is bullish enough right that's uh it's always true and so i think with all that in mind like we've talked about the trend of incumbent companies adopting a

bitcoin strategy why do you think the incumbent venture capital space has not seen this and why do you think even within the broader crypto venture capital space this thesis hasn't been recognized and there's a relatively small pool that we're playing in at 1031 yeah absolutely um i think it's it's a couple things um up until 22 2022 when you finally had the washout of a lot of um the froth of um zerp the end of zerp and a lot of which was manifested in kind of the all coin industry um part of the reason i think was because um venture capitalists you know looked at uh all coins as this unprecedented opportunity to get quick liquidity right you can in the market where literally every asset that's not tied down is just constantly going up in value and you can

always underwrite like someone's going to come pay me 2x or 5x or 10x multiple for you know this round that I'm doing right now, someone's going to come mark me up or, you know, there's just money sloshing around and I can find a buyer somewhere. There's, you know, there's first of all, minimal incentive to diligence any, the long-term viability of any project because it's all kind of a greater fool game. But I think specifically with crypto in VC, there was this unprecedented opportunity to pull forward liquidity events, right? Normally in venture capital, you know, when you're making an investment, it's, it's a liquid, um, you know,

your investment timeline could be anywhere from three years to five years to seven years to like 10 years. Right. And, you know, ideally if you make, um, good investment selection, you're compensated at least on a few of those investments with, you know, outsized 10 X, 20 X, a hundred X, thousand X type returns, but it takes a long time to get there. Um, and there's, there's kind of like the purest form of VC is like the ultimate low time preference game or it should be. Um, but, uh, in the last few years, again,

up until the, the washout of 2022, you had a lot of VCs able to get, you know, liquidity in like six months by funding some token project and taking a big allocation of a pre-mine or, um, just an allocation of, uh, you know, founder tokens right and then um listing those publicly somewhere on some exchange and hyping it spending you know some amount of money to hype them up having a good marketing team um and you know uh selling those i'll say to to retail aggressively and for some retail investors that maybe worked out a little bit if you timed it exactly right but for most that was probably

not a good trade but it was generally a great trade for for the vcs that had the the pre-mines right um and you know it allowed them to operate you know with the to have kind of the return profile of a venture capital fund with the time horizon of a hedge fund um which is you know a compelling argument if all you care about is kind of very short-term fiat gains and not kind of building a long-term business um and you know uh investing for where the world is going not just kind of where it is um you know right now kind of right at the tail end of zurp right um so that was one of the big things that i think led to substantial distraction um in vc space which is just like you can't do that with bitcoin right there's 21 21 million bitcoin um you there's no

way to game a bitcoin company um such that you can uh you know go um sell a bunch of uh pre-mined tokens to to retail um and so if you're gonna invest in a company um that's building on bitcoin um you have to be willing to invest for at least like a few years right um i do think you know we will have some exits in our portfolio within the next like three to five years but there will be some that take longer and in any case like we will be unlikely to have you know a 5000x markup event in the next month from um you know a pre-mine that we kind of drove um and so if if that's what you're optimizing for um i can see why you would uh only focus on kind of you know crypto schemes um as we saw you know as we predicted at 1031 and you know as um we structured our

kind of investment thesis to express this theme but um that all ultimately blew up to significant kind of reputational damage to um some of the investors who were involved many of the founders who were involved um and you know also beyond the reputational damage like if if you were not um the winner of the musical chairs game then you're sitting there with a really big markdown and a lot of zeros um to take back to your lps so that worked out ultimately kind of as we thought it would it was as i said like a musical chairs game that could be played for a little while but was not ultimately sustainable um and but it was i think a huge distraction and a huge source of noise um for any crypto vc that otherwise it might have taken the time to um look at where the space

is actually going over the next like 10 years right um so that's the first big thing the other thing i think is um bitcoin is a big paradigm shift in thinking for anyone who comes from a traditional finance background we reference this a little at the beginning um but it you generally like when you're operating in kind of um a fairly short-termist keynesian influenced mindset um and that's how you've been taught in college and all of your colleagues around you think the same way and that's how you have to play you know the the game that you're in professionally um it actually it's like it's not profitable for you on like a day-to-day basis to like step back and ask yourself the question of what is money right um that's that's like a huge distraction it takes

100 plus hours to even start to kind of uh grok um the underlying problems that money is trying to solve and then another thousand hours to understand like why bitcoin is money and how it works and everything um if you're from a background where two percent inflation is good because because economists say so um and that's the the sign of a growing economy and that's just like a uh an axiom that you take for granted um it's very difficult for you to kind of step back and evaluate what would actually make good money and where why actually does money need to lose value progressively over time and um why why do we have you know a a central bank um issuing money ex nihilo um to you know the greater and greater degrees every uh every year right um

so i think part of it is just there's a need to step back and do work that traditional finance roles don't necessarily incentivize you to do um so for the people who are early to that thought process and take the time and get pulled down the rabbit hole early um you know there's there's alpha to be generated there's there's an asymmetry um in kind of being first to that to the conclusions that would follow from asking those questions just like there's a symmetry to you know just owning bitcoin initially um you know before before the rest of the world catches on So there is also asymmetry to owning equity in Bitcoin companies before most crypto investors or traditional VCs understand the implications of Bitcoin being money and what it means for

their investments in other crypto projects and what it also means for their lack of exposure to Bitcoin infrastructure companies. Yeah, extremely well put. And I think beyond that like i think what we're doing at 1031 to to pump uh pump our own chest here i think again since we're bitcoin focused i think that's a it's becoming clear in the broader vc market is if you have a thematic um fund focused on a very niche market it's probably more advantageous for you but i really like what we've done what grant jonathan matt myself you have done to really imbue the nature and the ethos of bitcoin on what we're doing like with our with our tribe events really trying to communicate hyper communicate with lps to let them know what's going on in the

portfolio and then getting the portfolio companies themselves to speak with each other to do some knowledge share to figure out how they can work with each other because that's another unique part of what we're doing at 1031. The portfolio that we've developed is a lot of the companies, you didn't even mention it explicitly, but you're talking about Unchained. They work with Coldcard. They work with mempool.space to an extent as their block explorer. There's many other synergies across the portfolio that can materialize because you're building on this open source protocol. It's so early. And so investing in one company can help out another company in the portfolio as they can collaborate and sort of raise each other's boats yeah absolutely

and like i said you know i referenced this earlier i think a little bit but you don't get that um opportunity to benefit from those synergies if you are like a broad diversified investor you know early stage investor vc um investing in pretty much every vertical out there and kind of taking a spray and pray approach to um not just every vertical but also the many companies you know populating those verticals right um and so i think that's you know i referenced this earlier at the kind of the very beginning but like there's there are huge returns to specialization and focus even if you know you're a capital allocator out there kind of hearing this message and thinking um you know being somewhat skeptical of some of our conclusions about money or about bitcoin as

money um you know there's no denying i think that um like i mentioned earlier the citadels the Millenniums, the Balyasnis, et cetera, of the world that have kind of gone to this highly focused multi-manager framework where you have very smart investors going inch-wide, mile-deep on very particular sectors, has generated outsized returns for those strategies. And I think it's no different here. You can't overstate the power of being highly hyper-focused on one very particular theme, which for us is Bitcoin and Bitcoin infrastructure, both because it makes you understand the companies building on that better than anyone else. So you can identify what looks promising and what doesn't, where the weak points might be, where the opportunities might be better

and faster than anyone else. But also because it gives you just the best network that you could possibly have. Many of the companies in our portfolio are exclusive to us because you and Matt and Grant and Jonathan have just developed relationships with some of the founders over years and years. And when smart developers finally just kind of wanted to put pen to paper and build out an idea into a company, they came to us and said, hey, I want you to be the only investor on our cap table because I know you and I learned a lot from you in the case of you and Matt. And I know we're aligned and I've gotten a ton of advice from you in the past. And so let's just do it you guys will be the only one on the cap table you don't get that by being you know

highly diversified right you don't get that by having you know a sleeve that invests in like solana and a sleeve that focuses on the ethereum ecosystem and a sleeve that um you know does uh somewhat a random like tech vertical you know integrated within like a hundred billion dollar portfolio that's invested in a thousand other things right you get that by being hyper-focused and on the ground all the time with the smartest people who are pushing the space forward. So again, as I just think about whether you care about the Federal Reserve, whether you care about Bitcoin as money or not, I would just consider as you're looking at the space, ask yourself who's best positioned to, if we're right about this, to benefit the most from it and

to make the best investment selections within this theme? Is it someone who spends 1% of their time per year kind of casually thinking about the space and trying to arrange some calls with founders whenever he can, or is it someone who is entirely obsessively focused on this and lives and breathes it every single day, 24 hours, seven days a week, basically?

I think the question should kind of answer itself. Focus is a highly powerful lever driving investment returns and that's a big part of what we do focus it's important it's important but for us the companies it's beautiful thing it's fun are you having fun john i am having fun it's uh it's a great time waking up and doing bitcoin stuff all day is a dream come true it's a ton of fun well it was a big leap of faith for you coming from citadel you could have rode that train pretty far uh came to a somewhat upstart venture fund in the bitcoin space in 1031 at a time when the market was blowing up what's the the first two years working full-time in the

space been like reflecting right now a little introspection yeah i mean it should tell you a lot about my conviction right like yeah um you know just i i wouldn't just kind of jump um for for any opportunity um i really do think temporary one is very unique i think you know if you look at what we've done just in the last two years deployed over 100 million dollars into the space biggest portfolio in the space like i mentioned um a ton of our investments are exclusive because of the relationships we built up um over the last you know 10 plus years um with with you and matt and then grant jonathan as well um and i think it's just fully validated the last two years have fully validated kind of why i made the decision i made

um and made me even more kind of bullish about the opportunity that um that i see ahead of us the ecosystem is like you mentioned um even more vibrant than i expected it to be um kind of when i was you know on the outside looking in paying attention as much as i could to the companies and the builders in the space um you know that was not enough to help me fully appreciate um how much development and how much innovation there actually is and how quickly it's moving um when you're focusing on it every day you really see that um you know front and center um and so that's all been very validating but yeah i uh i think you know the proof is in the pudding our work speaks for itself and um you know i think there's a billion dollars plus of deployment

opportunity out there in just the next few years in the space um that we can go tackle and that you know we we plan to tackle so uh excited yeah what excites me too like this morning we sent out that letter defense and and uh co-signed by a lot of the companies in our portfolio and that's that's one thing that gives me incredible joy obviously working with people like you matt grant and jonathan is incredible but then obviously continuing to develop relationships with the the people the builders uh for lack of a better term creating the infrastructure that is going to lead us to a bitcoin standard has been extremely rewarding and to add to that like i do think the people that are building out this infrastructure right now are in it to win it

number one but get it as well and i think the co-signing of that letter to finson was indicative of that that people understand the gravity of the situation that exists in our world right now that things are terribly broken we need to to fix them and people have formed companies and are building tools to go fix the world and it there's obviously a large enormous economic opportunity as you laid out in bitcoin is eating the world but that's the other thing when you can marry that economic opportunity with a a drive for virtue in the world which i believe uh all the companies in our portfolio are doing it's just a very special thing and i feel very fortunate to be on this journey with you and everybody else at 1031 and everybody else in the portfolio?

Yeah, no, no doubt. Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn't mention, you know, when I, as I, as I said, kind of at the start of this conversation, you know, growing up 15, 16, 17 year old kid into Ron Paul and into ending the fed and preserving, you know, civil liberties in the U.S. and kind of returning the country to some of the principles on which I think it was founded. I was really disillusioned, you know, with the prospects for that over kind of my time going to college and then going into traditional finance roles, not necessarily because there's anyone particularly, I mean, certainly I think there are executives in the space and some of companies um that are actively working against all of those principles but more than anything

i just you know you kind of encounter like a degree of apathy about any of that um and you know i think it's been very invigorating to see both my co-workers at 1031 you guys but also um like you said all the founders that i work with that we work with are also very um driven by in most cases those principles and sometimes in some cases certainly we disagree there's not you know um ideological homogeneity among the portfolio by any means but where it matters and where it counts um the people that we invest in um are very very highly principled um and yeah you know shouldn't understate how unique that is um and frankly i also think on the long-term on a long-term basis that that drives investment returns too so it's it's a it's

a double-edged benefit for us both um the the financial case long term of the quinine in the world and also just what it means for the types of founders that we get to interact with yeah it's a beautiful thing john this piece was incredible if you haven't read it yet you're listening to this go read go read it we'll link to it in the show notes if you want to find out anything more we're doing at 1031 you can find us at 1031.vc before we wrap up here is there anything we didn't cover or mention that you think we should get out to the freaks before we wrap up here yeah you know the last thing i'll say is just like i think we all see at 1031 like there's a degree of humility required um in being like an investor like none of us know like exactly where

the space is going to go over the next couple years i don't think like you know feddyman we mentioned earlier like that as much as you and matt were kind of on the forefront of kind of speaking that whole project into reality and really marketing it um and getting the right people in the right rooms to um you know bring it forth um you know none of us necessarily like saw that coming like only a couple years ago and there will be things like that in the next couple years where we're like you know things develop in a certain way a lot faster than maybe we expected or you know a new like uh scaling initiative happens you know in terms of like a soft fork uh or a new layer two protocol hits that opens up really interesting new possibilities like all of those

things are possible and i think you know the i guess the sign of a good investor is someone who has like strong convictions weekly held you know we have the ability to kind of look at the landscape and see it evolving and have the humility to know like we can't plot out like exactly the the way that everything is going to go we certainly have some opinions and i think many of our convictions will be you know um proven correct over the next like 10 years or so but what i would say is i'm just really excited to be in a position where um we have a unique position to see those changes kind of as they unfold like we're on the ground at bitcoin park and the bitcoin commons you know with the founders and the devs and the really intelligent people

who are making those changes and and pushing things forward and innovating and so you know we have humility um the humility to know that we don't exactly know where everything's going but i think we are uniquely positioned to kind of be there when those inflection points happen and kind of see the big changes but before you know almost anyone else is looking at the space so um yeah that's what i'd close with yeah it's a perfect close with john it's been a pleasure we got to do this quite often moving forward we need to we need to yeah man we need to break you out from we've been we've been hiding john like in the corner not in a corner but like hey this guy's got too much effort but it's uh it's been a pleasure working with you you uh the way you

approach what we're doing at 1031 you're a consummate professional i think you really accelerate what we what we're trying to do here and it's i feel very fortunate to be able to work side by side with you and meet up in different cities around the country around the world even um to just yeah go push bitcoin forward appreciate it man totally totally agree feelings mutual and uh there's a lot of work to do so we're just getting started yeah that's what we got today freaks peace and love