TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #652: How To Position For The Bitcoin Boom with Tuur Demeester

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Marty sits down with Tuur Demeester to discuss his updated Adamant Capital report that revises his bullish Bitcoin thesis given new developments like ETFs, treasury companies, nation-state adoption, and persistent inflation while exploring why this cycle may be fundamentally different with longer duration and higher price targets. Tuur on Twitter: https://x.com/TuurDemeester Download the report: https://unchained.com/tftc STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be tur tur tur oh how the tables have turned you're sitting in a a seat that i dearly miss oh yes you're the one who's being grilled today i don't i don't know if i could take a grilling today it's been a long travel day

it's a good yeah and i and i got logan here in my corner so he's gonna like slip me those uh those questions that are the uncomfortable questions to ask. You'll find that he's not very helpful in that regard. He's a, he just puts that. I'm kidding, Logan. I'm kidding.

Very helpful. If you have, if you have hard hitting questions for me, they want to pass the term. Make sure you do it. He's already doing it in like sign language. We got this thing going. Uh,

it's a great way to end the week. I'm happy that, I know my flight was a little delayed. Uh, as I was telling you, might as well tell the audience audience too i'm getting back from georgia where blocks uh proto team the proto mining team unveiled their bitcoin mining rig called the rig and their fleet software was a really good event really good day for bitcoin i think as somebody's

been in the mining industry and i think it's been a bullish week overall uh not only the proto mining event but we had baltic honey badger conference where the arc second layer protocol is being tested out um with the btc pay server merchants went swimmingly wow that's awesome i've heard great things about arc so yeah i'm curious to learn more yeah this is like on the tech side obviously a lot of people are focused on bitcoin treasury companies what's happening on capitol hill which i'm sure we'll touch on in this discussion but just like set up this discussion like i'm incredibly bullish uh particularly having seen what i saw this week in person and observing what was going on in other parts of the world and not my bullish for the

those reasons but you've done something that you haven't done in your how long you've been writing reports for adamant did you start in 2012 or 2013 i i chose the adamant name back in early 2015 so the first report was yeah like april 2015 or something okay so it's 10 years yeah yeah and historically whenever you've written a report it's been in the depths of the bear market and you have a a very uh phenomenal way of releasing your reports right when the price seems to hit a hit a local bottom yeah i start writing when i feel sick and i usually publish right around the time when i'm starting to feel better and that that's worked out well um sick in the sense that i feel like i'm so bullish and that the market is just so despondent and just doesn't care anymore and

that's usually the motivation but yeah so this time around it felt like it is a little bit similar only in the sense that i think i still i disagree with the market I'm just seeing a lot of people that are like, well, they're just not very bullish, you know? And I'm like, what's happening? Like, you guys, retail is like nowhere to be seen, I think. Like, I'm starting to feel like some friends and family, like for the first time now that we're really at new all-time highs. But that's not an exuberance indicator to me. That's just the beginning of public participation to me.

So it felt like a good time to, you know, uh, revise the report because it's been two years since, uh, my last report, uh, which I think was like, what was it? April, April or May, 2023. I think it was like $27,000 Bitcoin. And then one of the, one of the price targets was like, Hey, we think this is going to go to 120,000 and beyond. So now we hit 120. So that also felt like a good time to, yeah, just look at the report again and reissue it.

It's not a complete rewrite, but the significant parts, I just, you know, I like pulled out entire things and I plugged in new parts that were just completely updated. Yeah. So let's jump into it because I feel like I have the same feeling where even though were what seven thousand dollars give or take away from all-time highs which were hit earlier this week people are somewhat bearish in my mind i don't think i think uh despite the fact that bitcoin's up massively over the last two years since you uh wrote the original version of this report we're up 100 103 in the last year and if you go back to may 2023 when you wrote the first

version we were hovering around 26 000 so up almost five x from there six six x uh six and a half x from there so but a six and a half return and yet people are still bearish which is fascinating um considering all the tailwinds that we have at our backs right now but you wrote a 23 page report um released it with adamant and unchained and so what did you feel was most necessary to revise and remind people of at this point in the cycle yeah the the revising i felt like the global macro picture has changed you know not fundamentally but the numbers are different uh i think it's more clear where we're going i think inflation is really ahead it's already happening i think we're real inflation rates are somewhere between 10 and 15 percent for the

dollar so it means like you know we have a every year it's losing 10 to 15 percent in value um and uh and at the same time we have a lot more regulatory clarity so we have a very kind of pro bitcoin administration which was not the case back when i wrote the report uh i don't think the ETFs had even dropped yet when no no they hadn't when the report was published and then I think the nation-state adoption has changed as well like that picture looks different uh when I published it um the micro strategy had uh of course already launched but there were no copycats yet we just had one treasury strategy company and that was it whereas now it's very clearly a trend and probably even an industry in the making so those are some some big changes yeah and one thing i

love about bitcoin and which actually surprised me a bit when i was reading through your report on the plane earlier this week one thing i love about bitcoin open source transparent ledger you can really glean a lot of sentiment and know what's happening uh with bitcoin by just look simply looking at the chain looking at coin days destroyed and seeing what long-term hodlers or short-term hodlers are doing and uh if you look at where we sit from a chain analysis perspective chain analysis in the good way just reading the ledger to see what's happening it seems like things are are pretty good right now yeah i i think it's you can see that we're in a bull market like it's not like back two years ago like they for example if you look at what the the the whales are doing

they are moving some coins um but on a net basis we're not really like i think this year we haven't passed um any any times where there were more than a hundred thousand coins at a time that were moving um and and whereas in the past sometimes that number would go to like four 400,000 coins that were just, bam, like moving on the chain. Um, and, uh, and, and I mean, it's not exactly that, but it's the equivalent of 400,000 coins. Uh, the, the, the metric I'm talking about is actually weighed by how long people are holding onto the coins. So if you have one coin that's held for a thousand days, that'll have more of an impact on the chart than if you have a hundred coins that were only held for 10 days. Um, no, uh, only held for like three

days you know then those would be lighter lighter weight in the chart so yeah that whale activity i always try to look at because i think whales are usually the smartest um they know what's up they know when sentiment is just overheated and then they start you know uh reshuffling their coins and stuff but yeah i mean we had 80 000 coins that were sold in a very short notice and it only moved the price 4%. I think that was a nice stress test just to see where we're at. And then another thing I looked at in the report is these drawdowns, just the price drawdown compared to the all-time high. And so in previous bull markets, that was a lot more aggressive, those drawdowns. Yeah, that's the one. So the fact that the drawdowns are lighter, like just not as deep,

corrections of maybe 20, 30%. To me, that's showing that there's just very strong buying activity. People are gobbling up the coins as soon as they look a little cheaper. And so to me, that means that there's probably going to be a longer cycle. That's why I'm so bullish in the report saying like, hey, we could tack on another entire year or even a year and a half to this bull market. I think that's a big question on everybody's mind.

like is this different because i think the first 13 14 years of bitcoin let's just say 2009 to 2022 so 13 years it was a pretty predictable four-year cycle you'd go up parabolic blow off top retail with russian yeah yeah everybody would sell over the course of 18 months you fall you'd have a capitulation dump and you begin to consolidate at lows and some period after that three to six months later begin to climb up rinse and repeat but it definitely does seem different this time i know those are famous last words for for many people throughout history however having been observing this for 12 years myself it's just undeniable in my mind it's objectively different in many many different regards like you mentioned etfs treasury companies nation states maturation

of of the industry it's certainly different yeah and it would just logically make sense that as an asset class matures it should get less volatile over time and we should have longer cycles like real estate cycles are famously multi-decade cycles um and so yeah i don't i don't understand why bitcoin would have to somehow magically keep adhering to four-year cycles if if none of the other asset classes have the same features um especially given that the effect of the having is is becoming almost negligible you know with with very little difference in actual supply every every four years now yeah and that's actually brings up a good point which earlier before we hit record i said was the jumping off point but i think a little pre-conversation and

then uh touching on a conversation you had with uh a hedge fund investor mark hart um recently in which he sort of provided what was the six principles of what makes a an invest an asset like really investable and appealing yeah so um i thought it was really refreshing to hear kind of again like a a fundamental thesis as to you know why would someone be interested in bitcoin in the first place, but also just like a universal framework. And so he, he just, he talked me through it, basically his thinking back in, I think it was late 2016 or early 2017 when he was thinking through this. And so he, he told me that, you know, he just went through his own list of, of these features of what, what gives value to an asset or an asset class fundamentally.

And so he said, first, access, like people have to be able to access the investment. Second, they have to be made aware that it exists. Also, thirdly, they have to have a sense that it gives them a feeling of security in some way. It kind of makes them feel like they're hedged correctly or that it kind of covers some risks for them. um even even when famously of course bitcoin like adding just a little bit of bitcoin all of a sudden changes the the the behavior of your entire portfolio in a good way um and then he also said for like obviously return on investment like is it is it yielding is it is the past performance anything to to speak of and then fifth is interesting he said um patina

He calls it patina, which is like, I guess you could call it the vibe or I could call it the vibe or the, you know, whether it makes you feel good to own it or not. So, for example, like something that has negative patina for the past decade or so is like, you know, coal miners. like you know and it's so they're famously valued at a lower multiple compared to other assets other other industries because it's just very kind of you know it's pollute you feel like you're investing in polluting things and and that uh and so and so but also there's the other side certain assets just have a very positive patina and uh and so it's i think uh bitcoin has made an interesting trajectory in that sense where i've been saying this like in in the you know two years ago in the report, I was like, hey, you know, this cycle, Bitcoin is going to have

the reputation of being a conservative asset that protects you against all kinds of risk. And so it's going to get that more positive patina. But then the last one I thought was so interesting, what he mentioned, and he already thought about that back in 2016, 17, is the ability to use the asset as collateral. So if you have a high ability to be able to use it as collateral, that's going to give a lot of wind in the sails for future value appreciation. And so that was not the case for Bitcoin for a very long time. Like no bank would ever touch it. You couldn't get loans against it. And then gradually, I think back in 2017, maybe you could start to borrow a little bit against it. That started to happen.

But now, of course, with the Bitcoin strategy companies, we're seeing that kind of on steroids. So all of a sudden, these publicly traded companies are very successfully using Bitcoin as collateral to grow and grow and grow. And so, you know, if you compare, you know, think about the real estate market, like why is real estate grown into literally more than 50% of the value of all financial assets in the world is just real estate? I don't even know, not even financial assets, like, you know, just assets that people own, half of it is real estate. And the only reason that was able to happen is that you get the best loans by giving your house as collateral. And then you can borrow, you know, mortgages are just the best loans in the world almost. So, yeah. So I thought that framework was just super interesting to kind of, you know, maybe reassess Bitcoin and being like, okay, what's been changing for those six factors?

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collect any data all of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device it's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in sats go check it out at opportunity cost dot app that's opportunity cost dot app to really extend on the the thoughts you have on the sixth principle they were collateral i've i've been saying this for years and it's something that we're pretty convicted behind at 1031 and have deployed capital into over the last few years is that i think this is the cycle where bitcoin as pristine collateral really sees its day you mentioned, the treasury companies, they're obviously really leaning into it. You've got companies in private credit markets that are beginning to underwrite loans using Bitcoin as

part of the collateral package. Obviously, Unchain, Strike, Ledin, Debify, HodlHodl, they've been around, but I think their products are becoming more popular. People are more aware of them. And then I think what many people are sleeping on, and I think it's yet to be determined how big of a theme it becomes this cycle but i think ultimately in the long run it's definitely going to happen but with the abolition of sab 121 and the introduction of sab 122 which enables banks regulated banks to custody bitcoin that the banks may now be able to offer lending services yes to to their clients using bitcoin as collateral and there's been a bunch that have made announcements that they're working

to enable these products for their customers. Nothing's been launched yet. Famously, SpareBank in Russia, right? They're about to issue Bitcoin bonds. Yes. What are the terms of those bonds, too?

I don't know that. I only know that SpareBank is a big deal. It's like the biggest bank in Russia. Or the third biggest bank. I'm not sure. It's definitely top three. Yeah. yeah but again going back to what we said before listing mark's six principles like it definitely does feel like just the gravity and the tailwind the gravity around the tailwinds behind bitcoin

have never been like this yeah and because we were talking about the decoupling of bitcoin and and and you know altcoins or crypto or shit coins whatever you call them like i think that's really that's been happening the last six months for sure last year probably um of course now we have ethereum etfs but i i still feel that there's something fundamental that that changed here where all of a sudden we see a lot of government officials that are saying the word bitcoin we uh we have uh famously um uh um uh i was gonna say martin armstrong no uh the coinbase ceo brian armstrong brian armstrong who's using the word bitcoin again after years of not using it it's the best money we've ever discovered in his mind very interesting right right so so all the

sudden we we see a clarity in people's thinking and i think that's that's that's what's helping to give it this positive patina like you it's being disassociated from all this murky cowboy like scammy uh you know behavior from from the crypto uh crypto world the the very centralized stuff but ethereum it's going to run the the global markets tom tom lee told me this and it's like the biggest macro play the next 10 to 15 years no i i like tom lee uh but but time will tell time will tell it really will but so this is like what we're describing right now is what's happening endogenously within the bitcoin ecosystem and the people trying to interact with it but there's like extra exogenous factors as well in terms of what's happening global macro i think

you bet the like you mentioned earlier inflation still high real inflation 10 15 i would not be surprised that that's actually lower than actual real inflation particularly for core the core basket of goods that people depend on well about parker lewis did the the test with stake right I think he came up with 12% annualized inflation, just based on if you're a steak eater. Yeah. And there was, I'm sure you saw, but there was a woman who posted on Facebook and the screenshot was being shared on Twitter last week and the week before, but she bought 30 items from Walmart online in 2023, I believe.

And she went back and bought the same 30 items and the price went from $70 to, uh, I believe like $196. So you had like 168% inflation or something, if I'm recalling correctly, the numbers. And, um, I think that's one thing that's become very clear. You can't trust BLS. Yeah. And of course you can be like, yeah, but it's the tariffs or is this, or is that, but, but, but, but you have to take those things into account as well.

like it's like you know tariffs is a symptom of a de-globalizing world and in a de-globalized world price is going to be higher meaning you know everyday consumers they don't really care where the price increases come from it's just a reality and it's a structural reality yeah it really is and then on top of that like obviously we have trump and pal sort of in this very public boxing mat i wouldn't even call it a boxing match it's really one side it's like pal doesn't really uh respond to trump's barbs but it seems pretty clear that trump is not happy with where interest rates are uh once them lower assuming that that's going to create an economic boom but i think one thing's clear if you look at the deficit you look at the fiscal side of

things the the theme of fiscal dominance that lynn alden's really been beating the drum about luke roman's been beating the drum about for years is is manifesting and uh it seems like the money printing is is not only not going away it's probably likely to increase from here yeah it's the only way to to save the furniture and in the short term uh i looked at the numbers and yeah u.s deficits are over six percent now deficits in europe are over three and a half percent i believe and so those are numbers higher than the great depression you know so that's saying something that's really saying something yeah and i think one thing that you've done throughout the years and you've been very consistent about this uh which i really appreciate

is you've really anchored to basically denominating bitcoin in non-dollar terms whether that's nasdaq commodities gold specifically and you've been posting the charts for years but like your your recent analysis of where bitcoin is trading versus these different goods or basket of goods it seems like if i'm a ta expert it looks like it's brushing up against previous all-time highs getting ready to make a breakout yeah especially uh gold is so interesting right bitcoin expressed in gold uh you know you would think like oh we should be at new all-time highs but actually we've barely broken out uh bitcoin has been trading uh at parity um yeah there it is um so bitcoin has been trading at one kilo of gold for the last four or five years um and so

uh so that's that's this is such a this is one of the most interesting charts i think in the world you know um just just that psychological i remember the the one ounce you know when bitcoin was trading at one ounce of gold uh in 2014 and then it took like three years to break above that um that was a big deal like people thought psychologically like no one bitcoin can't be more than an ounce and then interestingly we had the 100 gram resistance then one kilo and and then well what's next well you would think 10 kilos actually 11 kilos will be gold parity so so So, I mean, of course, we don't know exactly how much above ground gold exists, but based on the best estimates, around 11 kilos is gold parity. So I think that's the obvious psychological barrier that people are like, no, Bitcoin couldn't be worth more than all the gold in the world.

And of course, you and I think, well, of course it can. And so I think that's why, and that's what I've suggested in my presentation about the macro outlook. I think that's the next magnet. And actually the term magnet I got from, um, David Bailey, you know, from, from, uh, Beatsy Media, we, we, uh, we had a dinner, uh, in, in Puerto Rico, uh, what was it? Two years ago or something. And he was like, he just brought that up. I was like, Hey, I think gold parity could be the next magnet.

And I just thought, I just always stuck in my head. It's such a brilliant way of thinking about it that it's like, it doesn't mean it's gonna, you know, it's gonna touch the magnet and stick there. but at least it'll be the the psychological pull uh for this cycle and uh i think i think that's and you know samsung now talks about one million dollar as a magnet those are actually in the same range you know as at least right now if gold does a big rally then it'll be higher um but uh but so interesting that those those levels they're both psychological milestones they're actually quite close uh if you think about them yeah well let's dig into that too

because i feel like gold's moving in a way very aggressively particularly in the last year that it hasn't since bitcoin launched maybe outside of one or two years maybe or two like blips of an event but it's very it seems like the world particularly post 2022 seizing of russia's treasury assets by the u.s government and our allies has really forced international players specifically to think about diversifying away from u.s treasury bonds and gold's on a run it doesn't look like it's slowing down anytime soon from what i can tell and i wonder if it's and i don't mean not like no disrespect because people often use like boomers with like a kind of disdain or something but i wonder if it's it's being rediscovered as a by boomers as a safe haven

asset uh i actually pretty recently i i was in a in an uber and uh all of a sudden this this older gentleman who was the driver he was like hey what do you think of this you know what do you think of this thesis that um you know we have a military age chinese men by the thousands you know roaming around in the u.s what if at some point they they they are activated by the ccp and they start um um um sabotaging uh electricity plants to to create a blackout across the u.s and and then his next the next part of his what do you think was you know what do you think of gold as an investment to to hedge against that and i was like wow you know like regardless of you know whether or not that you know scenario is realistic you know that that's new i five years

ago i i would have none of my uber drivers would have ever you know come up with a scenario like that plus the gold answer so you know it's it's of course just one data point but i do i do feel that you know the the boomers that already have gold they feel very much validated and so maybe why not sell if you have three houses whatever or a few condos why not sell one of them and buy more gold um especially because you know maybe your kids it's pretty clear by now that they won't find work in that area where you happen to have a house so it's gonna have to go anyway yeah that's fascinating i wonder like if gold keeps drifting higher does that perturb what seems to be like a long-standing trend in the bitcoin to gold ratio or does that

sort of there's bitcoin to your to david sees david's term just still stay true to that magnet of like the next order of magnitude i think so it's just you know it's only it's only two trillion you know it's it's it's because bitcoin has the ability to be so much more than gold is today you know like you said the pristine collateral you can move around the world it's provably scarce it's decentralized it's highly auditable like all you know you can you can issue assets on on the Bitcoin chain. There's just so much going for it that to me, it has to gain more market share against analog Bitcoin, which I think is gold. Over 10,000 investors downloaded the original how to position for the Bitcoin boom when Bitcoin was just 27K and it called for 120K plus. That

target's now hit. So what's next? Ter Demeester is back with the 2025 edition, refreshed for the mid-cycle moment, packed with new data, new insights, and Ter's latest price outlook. Plus, You'll get exclusive access to Charting Our Way Through Chaos, TUR's new 30-minute Q3 2025 presentation explaining why this bull run might be only just beginning and what forces could push it to the next level. Read the first ever mid-cycle report from Adamant Research at unchained.com slash tftc. That's unchained.com slash tftc. And also, if you're using Unchained, you can use the code tftc for $50 off any of their services.

Go check it out. No, and to that point, too, bringing it back to collateral, I'm very interested to get your thoughts on this, because that's one thing. Whether it's the treasury companies, I think it's pretty clear, I would be shocked if MicroStrategy sells Bitcoin anytime soon. But in the private market, in the private credit markets, like with these new collateral packages and structured credit that include Bitcoin for commercial real estate and other types of longer duration loans, if you see that trend take off and they're successfully able to pull a material amount of Bitcoin off the market, put it in these longer duration structured credit products. like i've been talking to andrew hones about this for the better part of a year more than a year uh you begin to see like a forward-looking duration curve of an amount of bitcoin that you know is going to be off the market for x amount of years yeah yeah because if you're issuing if you're issuing securities against the bitcoin collateral then well you have to keep the collateral in place

to be able to honor those uh you know those promises that that's a good point and it's true right we had announcements of uh uh what is it the the jack mallers howard lutnick um blockstream as well like you know there's like significant amount of bitcoin that we knew of course that that bitcoin was around before but all of a sudden it makes sense for these bitcoin whales to be like all right let's let's pull some of this bitcoin and uh and and put it to work like we've seen michael saylor do yeah and it's actually fascinating too because i've digging more into this and i was actually talking to my brother about this earlier this week we went golfing he works at unchained so he's like following the space very closely he's like

why isn't the price going up with all these treasury companies are buying so much and um we had a conversation about to your point like a lot of these whales sitting on large amounts of bitcoin for many years many over a decade now at this point and these treasury companies not only are the way to put bitcoin to work obviously there's risk involved with that but they also provide like a tax benefit from what i understand like it increases their cost basis to where bitcoin is today in the tax preferable way wait explain that like if you put your bitcoin in kind into one of these spvs or pipes whatever it may be to help the treasury company develop it's bitcoin treasury

from what i understand there's tax benefits you know the tax and your cost basis gets bumped up oh so um oh i guess i would have to look at but i i believe you i can see that yeah um and then maybe you could withdraw in kind as well again because then that would be not a taxable event if eventually you could withdraw yeah i'm not sure it's kind of like you're putting this is not a great way to put it but or at least not a perfect analogy but like imagine if there's a casino in vegas and they just the house needs more collateral to be able to honor all the all the all the the bets that are being paid out if you add to that pool and then you you get some income from whatever revenue they generate based on that but then

later if you the you could withdraw your collateral again and uh you've never sold it so that's not a taxable event yeah it's really fascinating it'll be it'll be fun to see what Just broadly, before we get on to the next Bitcoin Express and commodity chart, broadly speaking, how do you see the Treasuries company theme playing out? I've been saying publicly, to me, it seems like a game where economies of scale are necessary to win if you're viewing these Treasury companies as competitive with each other. So I'm under the belief that there's going to be like a Pareto distribution of companies that are able to deploy the strategy, execute and really stand out from the rest and basically soak up all the capital that is interested in this type of strategy. Yeah, that does make sense to me. I think there is probably some, maybe some unique risk to the very large ones, just geopolitically, you know, if we get a hot war between like major nations and all of a sudden somebody needs a lot of money to finance things in the short term, then you could, you know, you could, you can nationalize one of these big companies. i don't think they would liquidate all the bitcoin they would probably nationalize it and then say

you know we're going to now issue issue issue our national bitcoin bonds that are backed by this collateral and you know we're doing it protected to protect shareholders and like in belgium for example the the central bank of belgium used to be entirely private and then the government came in and started owning 40 50 60 so even today you can own shares in the belgian national bank But of course, you can never withdraw the gold. Like that's, there's, this goes back decades where there's shareholder meetings and the private shareholders clamoring like, hey, we want our gold. And it's, this stock is criminally undervalued.

And so, you know, I could imagine a similar scenario with the spark being some kind of crisis, like either a fiscal, huge fiscal crisis, very high inflation, devaluation of the dollar or something, or a military conflict that all of a sudden it's like, Hey, you know, it's, uh, times are tough. Everybody needs to put in the, put in, you know, do what they can. And so we're going to issue an order, but, but still, you know, I think that's not happening right now. Uh, and it could be a few years away. Um, so yeah, I, I, if you kind of bracket that as a risk, I do, I do agree with you that the large companies probably they're going to have the best relationships with these wall street banks who then have the deepest liquidity when

it comes to the bond market, et cetera. Um, yeah, that, that makes sense. My, uh, in the short term, it seems that was so interesting. It was actually also Mark Hart who tweeted about that, that, um, it seems like in the last weeks, like four weeks or something, uh, JP Morgan in particular has cranked up margin requirements for strategy stock in particular. So if you want to borrow against your strategy stock, say you've got a million or 10 million sitting in your brokerage account, and you want to borrow against that, you used to be able to borrow, I think, $40 for every $100 worth of MicroStrategy stock. Well, now you can only borrow five bucks for every hundred dollars yeah so that means that basically from being you know being able to borrow

with two and a half two and a half x over collateralization now all of a sudden you have to put up 20x over collateralization uh for what you're going to borrow and so it's weird because that would somehow imply that the you know the micro strategies is something changed fundamentally they're a lot weaker but that doesn't make sense so the question is like are we seeing some kind of concerted efforts to try and dampen uh activity in these um bitcoin strategy companies from from wall street you know that there may be seen but it seems like that isn't is an underappreciated factor as to why these stocks are lagging currently compared to the bitcoin price i was not aware of that 40 yes yeah 40 ltv to five percent is drastic yeah super

drastic uh but then somebody tweeted that my fidelity has the same uh has kept their rates the same uh but then other people were confirming definitely by jp morgan that they just mysteriously cranked it up massively the requirement and because there are people typically taking out these loans before the change getting forty dollars per hundred dollars they put up and then going and buying more micro strategy sometimes yeah right sometimes yeah if you're bullish you know why not be bullish 130 especially if you're thinking about hedge funds and you know and then they may be hedged in other ways so you know they might have some downside protection but but if your ability to go to be bullish is curbed then of course the price is going to reflect that

like also because like like the six points earlier like if if you can if one share in microstrategy all of a sudden is less potent as a collateral in itself well then that's going to hurt the value yeah that's fascinating i wonder why jp morgan i was completely unaware of that um but moving back to the report and bitcoin being priced in different things this is interesting is gold it seems like we're brushing up against this previous all-time high say it one kilo i love when americans have to use the metric system one kilogram is that yeah whatever people have said kg i hear that sometimes in the u.s one kg one kilo brushing up against that but if you look at bitcoin expressed in just a broader basket of commodities it's already broken out a little bit

well over all-time highs looking at bitcoin to the u.s dollar reuters jeffries crb index what's what's in this basket yeah so that one i'm trying to make sure i get it right i think it's like 20 metals maybe 40 oil and then 40 agricultural commodities like it's it's pretty kind of intuitive uh and the cool thing is they haven't changed it in 60 70 years so it's just the same index i think they base it on futures prices so yeah i mean to me that's that's kind of you know if you want to if we want to see if something is resistant to inflation you want to see it go up expressed in these commodities uh and of course bitcoin has done that and and so yeah recently we've broken especially uh in the last six months we've broken north of um of the

highs of that resistance. So again, it's, you know, if you're bearish on Bitcoin, well, because of the dollar, you know, a chart that's expressed in dollars, which we know is facing accelerating dilution and inflation is a very poor way to look at the markets. But, you know, expressed in gold and commodities, all of a sudden we're seeing Bitcoin break out. To me, that's very hard to stay bearish then you know like all of a sudden we have to assume it just broke out but it's somehow the end of a bull market it just doesn't make sense yeah so do you think people are when you say people are bearish like how for those that are bearish right now and think that we've seen the this sort of cycle top or we're near it how how surprised or shocked do you think they'll be

account yeah i mean i think different people i mean of course you know people who are in bitcoin there's people who just long bitcoin and they might still be like oh you know it's going to top out at 200 000 or something yeah we might run a little more but then it'll top out maybe a lot of those people are afraid of just a general stock market crash you know like oh it feels like there's dark clouds on the horizon and so traditional interpretation is that oh it means a stock market crash. It means a repeat of 2008. And then we get a huge, um, you know, crash in Bitcoin as well. Cause it's, you know, it's the most liquid asset in the world is the easiest to sell much easier than a house or something else. So it might be the first thing that you sell.

Um, and then there's the no coiners, you know, I think they are, they're, they're going to hurt, you know, it's going to be very painful for them to see it go to 150, 200,000. And then, then you start feeling FOMO. And so the thing is also that back in 2020, 2021, all the crypto stuff, that all was dilutive to Bitcoin. Like it would, the money that went to crypto was taken away value from Bitcoin. Whereas if you look at the market now, we have Bitcoin, but if you have more risk appetite, you can still stay in Bitcoin. You go to the treasury companies and then imagine if it turns into a mania and we had new treasury companies launching and then even imagine some of those treasury companies buying stock in other treasury companies and putting it on their own

ballot like you know that's all i'm not saying that's healthy but i do think it would it would push up the value of bitcoin it would just kind of create this mania that that that stays roughly speaking in the same universe the bitcoin universe um so that i think it's very easy to imagine another 4x from here or even a 10x from here if if that kind of mania happens yeah this is something i've been trying to wrap my head around because again going back to if we crash you guys can clip it you can make fun of me but like going back to this time is different like the the different archetypes of demand drivers are out there not only like the amount of capital that they have behind them but just the the plurality of them the just like from

a numbers perspective, um, is unlike anything that's ever existed up to this point. Yeah. And the same for me, like, you know, I'm, I'm very happy to be, you know, featured as like, you know, this delusional guy, he put out a bullish report just before we crashed 75%. I feel like I can't lose because if, if, you know, the report turns out to be true, then it's nice, you know, it's kind of, that's kind of what I'm planning for. And that's great. but if uh if we do get a big crash i i just i'm gonna have another lesson in humility and those are the best ones it hurts but uh but it shows that you you can't um you know you really can't know the future for sure like all you can do is kind of uh you know share your best thoughts

and um and and accept that you'll never know better than the rest of the world like it's the the price is going to be the price um but uh but then again you know might as well you know it's it's it's something i'm thinking about privately anyway you're thinking about it privately anyway so why not just talk about it and share our thoughts yeah speaking of something i'm thinking about i mean you mentioned it bitcoin's the most liquid asset if you have like an equities downturn maybe it'll be the first to go because it's the most liquid easiest to sell But do you envision a scenario where Bitcoin is seen as this real flight to safety if there's trouble in the equity markets?

Well, yeah, because I mean, especially if they paper everything over, you know, because to me, the context is back in 2008, we had a big crash and then there was complete disbelief when the numbers started coming out. We had these, um, I think it was Timothy Geithner at the time who was like talking about bailouts and we're going to rescue these things. And it's going to be like 500 billion, these enormous numbers. And people were like shocked, like what? You're going to bail out these banks like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and then the big banks. And then, of course, we had a few bankruptcies, but, you know, Lehman and a few others, but they were just very limited. So that was one phase. Then we had 2020, where it was assumed, the question was just, how much are we going to bail them out? Like, you know, how much are we going to print?

Is it going to be a trillion? Is it going to be four trillion? Like, what's the deal here? um and so and so now if we have another crash i think we have to keep in mind that everybody is assuming bailouts even more even sooner even more aggressive maybe even stimulus to prevent the you know the crisis from happening in the first place which is what trump seems to be steering towards with wanting like a dovish fed etc um you know with the big beautiful bill that's another 400 billion in spending so um and of course with all the interest payments that are just you know going

crazy in the uk and japan and the us uh you know the the budget required to pay the interest on the debt is so massive that you kind of need a permanent stimulus anyway to stay afloat so anyway like to me it's like if we're gonna see a crash i i just i don't see it to i don't see it to go as i do think expressed in commodities yes of course that's what's happening is that it's already happening like apple stock is completely flatlining against commodities for the past four years so stagnation is here stagflation like that's the big word right stagflation that that's the decade that we're in um like sluggish economy combined with inflation. So that's why. Don't obsess about dollar denominated charts. So if

we get a crash, then to me, commodities are going to come down as well. And so then if you look at Bitcoin expressed in commodities, it might not be an 80% crash. It might be something that looks more like a correction, more like a 30%, maybe 40% kind of correction. And then the structural bull market could could still resume even if that happens like the next month or so yeah i mean and on this note logan pull up the uh real estate expressed commodities i think this really visually articulates what you're describing here and you have some notes here we're seeing diminishing returns to fed stimulus which beats up private banks ability to issue low interest mortgages once we get to a point where commodity prices consistently outpace real estate a trend

reversal builders and landlords will very likely start facing negative cash flows so this is another thing this chart i had to look at it for a while to really and then like think about what's happening real estate happening in commodities to um to sort of understand what's happening here but since 2016 the net result of fed stimulus on housing is now flat so this is like a stagflation story yeah which is crazy because real estate prices seem to be going insane yeah it's like a dead horse like they're you know you can pump you can pump adrenaline into it all you want but it's dead and and because the problem is with real estate is that part of your input the commodities are part of your input costs like you need commodities to build houses and so if those

prices soar and at the same time interest rates are higher um so that means people can't easily renew their mortgages. And the high interest rates affect insurance costs, right? All of a sudden, the price for home insurance is soaring. And then the cost to just repair your home, if you need a new roof or something, again, you're facing these high commodity prices. So from an investment point of view, all of a sudden, corrected for inflation, you're actually losing money. And that feeds on itself. That's why I totally expect this this graph to just go down like we're going to see it slide over the next 10 15 years especially because baby boomers you know i think they own 10 million homes in the u.s or something like some

huge amount um i think it's even more and so baby boomers next year will be aged 62 to 80 years old and so a lot of them i believe are going to be selling homes um you know and that's of course we can extrapolate for the rest of the world i think but um but yeah so i think it's important to look at these general asset classes where where investments have been traditionally parked and the more those are impaired the bull the more bullish the case for bitcoin becomes yeah well i guess uh i don't know if this throws a wrench in that argument but i think it does highlight sort of the very weird period of time that we find ourselves and i'm not sure if you saw the stat yesterday um from fortune but they reported that there are now more home buyers over the age of 70

than under the age of 35 that's just so sad oh my god and and and like it's not like the the 75 year old is like oh it's a starter home it's like no this is clearly an investment asset or something like that you know that's just how their program i remember my granddad telling me like you know uh i think he was he was a little bit atypical but still he said bonds gold and real estate that was how he built his wealth over the over over the decades and and then it's fantastic formula as long as it works but i think especially the real estate and the bond part of that that's no longer true it's a different world now yeah no and i wonder if this sort of pricing out of millennials from the housing market could also be a tailwind for bitcoin it's like all right i

can't go buy a five hundred thousand dollar million dollar house don't have the down payment but i do have enough to buy five thousand dollars for the bitcoin this month or to put ten thousand dollars in well yeah and also if you just simply compare the the rent that you pay with the mortgage payment that you would face if you would buy the same home if if that's out of whack and it's much cheaper to rent than if you have a little inheritance from your parents or something well why not rent and own bitcoin instead of putting it all in the same deteriorating asset that that's a house yeah it's fascinating that's uh i forget who was uh i was talking to somebody at the uh down in georgia at the proto event i forget exactly who

was or maybe it was a tweet i think it was a tweet somebody sent but it was like even though we're doing a podcast here you have your podcast we have this podcast we've been educating people about bitcoin via your reports for the better part of it for more than a decade i've been doing the show for eight years but uh i forget who sent the tweet but it was essentially like hey these podcasts are obviously going to convince some people and help them educate themselves about bitcoin but like in terms of like creating bitcoiners and being like a sort of bitcoin conversion mechanism the biggest conversion mechanism is going to be like not being able to buy a house or having your bank account withdrawn by one dollar and you get charged 35

or your country shutting down your access to um the money in your bank account uh and limiting the amount that you can withdraw like and it seems like a lot of these themes are happening both here in the west and in other parts of the world and lat am i was saying before um we have record bolivia i haven't told you what's happening there yet but i think this is a really interesting indicator that bitcoin is working as it was designed and people are recognizing that it is an alternative to these oppressive financial systems that operate under oppressive regime. So in Bolivia, where annual inflation has reached... This is like a triple whammy. Annual inflation has reached 25% and banks have been limiting withdrawals of US dollars to

$100 a week. Bloomberg reports that Bolivians are turning to Bitcoin and digital assets as alternatives to the Boliviano. I'll just read the whole thing. This is from the Human Rights Foundation Financial Freedom Report, by the way. I'm not the only one using Bitcoin. Christopher Rosales, a coffee vendor in La Paz, said, there's a barbershop over there and a gym that also accepts Satoshis. For Salas, Bitcoin is both a hedge and a protest, a way to preserve the value of my savings, but also a way to go against the system, against bureaucracy. Bolivia's hybrid authoritarian regime lifted a decade-long ban on digital assets in 2024. Good to see. Since then, the volume of digital asset payments has grown more than fivefold to nearly 300 million in the

first half of 2025 the university of san andres allegedly pays its international faculty in bitcoin carlos nera co-founder of colombian wallet provider miro i read this i read this yesterday one rabbit hole recap it blew my mind reports a staggering six thousand six hundred percent increase in bolivian users since the ban was lifted fantastic yeah yeah you're absolutely right i mean it's it's it's the the complete package there um and and and um one example that came to mind as well and it's a link i haven't heard a lot of people make is um you know obviously trump has been very pro bitcoin the last couple years but he recently i think it was the last couple weeks he had this uh executive order i think or i think it was an executive

order about basically curbing banks' abilities to debank people in the US. And he was very adamant that to give the example that he had been attacked and he had been debanked and he had lost bank accounts all over the US and he had to like, you know, move money around and all that. And I think those two are very closely linked. People, you know, just think about somebody's personal experience like you you know you think you think your wealth is x and you've and all of a sudden you lose your access to your own wealth like that goes very deep i think for uh to inform somebody's position on how they think about banking and and just you know money in general yeah i definitely think more people are beginning to question like what is a bank supposed to do

what is money did you did you see richard werner on tucker carlson did you watch that interview at Oh, that was great. Yes, the guy who broke the story about what's happening in Japan back in the 80s. Yeah, that was that was if you're looking for like a one shot, like understand how the banking system works, how the academic economists at the Fed and in finance are sort of misdefining how money is created and really not telling people the truth about how money is created and how money creation via credit creation is corrupting the system. You have to go watch it. I learned a lot. I got to say, it doesn't, I mean, not to, of course not. It's just like, if, you know, I'm sure it's the same for you. Like if, if you've been looking at the history of banking and money and investing for 10, 15 years, it's, it's, it's a, it gets a little bit harder to be surprised by an interview and to learn a lot. But I was like, wow, a lot of stuff.

I did not know that he was talking about. Yeah. Same. And like, I don't know what thoughts were running through your head but the whole time is i spoiler alert anybody's listening to this who hasn't listened to that yet basically one of his theses is that like the economy and the financial system goes off the rails the more the banking sector consolidates so we've seen that here in the united states over the last four decades going from tens of thousands of banks to i believe 7 000 um if i recall correctly um but you use the example of how china post mal sort of broke out of that that sort of atrocity and that happened when mal was in charge and the i forget uh the name of of the chinese dictator took over after mal but he went to japan he was like hey how'd you guys

how do you how do you have a function economy and they said you need how many banks they asked him how many banks you have he said we have one bank he's like well you need you need more than what you need a lot of banks and you need heavy competition in the banking sector particularly at different sort of for like different types of banks serving different size companies specifically if like so small businesses medium businesses large corporations like you need banks to match um the these sort of balance sheets of of their clients in these subsectors and it's obvious here in the united states that the banking sector is consolidating it's accelerating particularly post 2008 but like while he was describing this i was like bitcoin

backed chami and mint banks like make a lot of sense like if you actually want to like create an environment where you make it easy for banks to pop out like why not leverage the open protocol that is bitcoin uh and then some second layers that are being built on top of it i'm leaning into chow mein specifically but who's to say there's not other sort of designs that could enable a flourishing of of new bank competition yeah yeah absolutely and yeah the other the other thing that surprised me about the interview was um just his focus on credit creation out of thin air specifically going towards asset purchases so like uh and And his thesis is that actually some actors inside the U.S., U.S. government probably or banking, central banking, they deliberately pushed Japan to be very generous, for their banks to be very generous with creating credit, real estate-backed credit, mortgages, because they knew it was going to create a giant bubble and then pop the economy.

so it was kind of a way to to blow it up so to speak and i hadn't considered you know that kind of um situation that actually you know it wasn't just night they were just naive and dumb but that it was actually kind of uh pushed from the outside and then if you think about you know what's happening in the west today it was like well i'm not saying that it's outside actors that are trying to blow up the the economy but it's still concerning that real estate bubble is so huge and uh and it can take the economy a long time to recover from something like that once it blows up it was fascinating we don't have to do a podcast about a podcast but the uh yeah it was like a sleight of hand by u.s banks and the central bank and potentially

the government saying hey maybe you guys should just like lean into this real estate because they were flourishing at the time in the presence of yen like japan was from what i understand it wasn't alive but having listened to podcasts read books about it like in the 80s people thought japan was going to be the number one superpower in the world like all the electronics we were buying here in the u.s were from japan they were dominating industry and richard werner uh he uh he basically said the u.s like did not want that to happen so they went and like gave intentionally bad advice to japan to sort of slow that that progression now that dominance down well i mean there is implication potentially for the bitcoin

right i mean uh just to kind of like kind of you know bring it back to bitcoin is that if you i'm just thinking about this out loud for the moment but but um you know if if dollar denominated banks are allowed to create credit out of thin air um that allows then the international public to acquire more bitcoin and extract value out of the dollar system using bitcoin you know it could also undermine the whole structure you know that that whole setup so i think that's something to you know that's why i'm i'm a little hesitant to be long-term bullish on oh yeah the u.s government is going to totally be supportive of bitcoin all activities because there's clearly an element where bitcoin can threaten the dollar uh big time so so yeah it's

just something to really monitor i think it's true i was told bitcoin strengthens the dollar because stable coins exist yeah yeah that's like there is what are your thoughts on that like there's like a very wrong direct conflation with bitcoin and stable coins because like they're somewhat tangentially related yeah yeah i mean the assumption is i mean i guess the the the generous take is that everyone is going to copy the model of tether uh which is that you know you you back your stable coin with short-dated u.s dollar treasuries three three month bonds and then 15 percent of your profits are going to go to bitcoin so in that sense there is a kind of a situation where especially if then somehow tether can start paying out dividends or something like that

where the dollar is kind of shored up but uh but that's those are a lot of assumptions that all that that model is going to be copied everything is going to stay that way nobody's going to just extract the bitcoin at some point uh i mean the other option is that you build up a reserve but it's kind of like how do you do that you know you have like a bitcoin reserve that then is back the dollar and then but then it has to be redeemable so how do you how do you honor those those redemptions you know we could have another de gaulle just like that who just pulls out all the bitcoin as soon as they can yeah did you see safe's presentation in vegas this year i think i heard about it i haven't seen it yeah it was like it was pretty it convinced me like i think here

in the united states there's this administration and everybody advising them and everybody involved with stable coins more broadly is like convinced that like stable coins are going to save the u.s treasury market we're going to drive incredible demand there's going to be a ton of uh there's gonna be a ton of adoption and it's going to go from 500 billion uh treasury demand as it stands today to trillions and trillions of dollars of demand and safe basically just made the point Like, hey, if you even if you map this out and you look at the deficits and the interest on the debt, like it's not going to make a material dent in demand for treasuries. It is. It feels a bit like a Hail Mary or like they're just trying. I mean, at least they're trying something, you know, that that's good.

But yeah, I mean, the thing that I've always heard, you know, kind of grizzled investors and, you know, real veteran economists say is that, you know, the moment a country starts monetizing their debt, you know, so the debt becomes money. Once that happens, that's the next huge step towards hyperinflation. And, you know, because the Asiniaz, for example, in France, which was issued just on the, you know, that's why the hyperinflation happened. Those are short-dated treasury bonds that were just used as money. And so if you think about a stable coin, it's like, well, it's almost that, right? It's like they're just shy of sharing the dividend with the owner of the stable coin. Like that's maybe still missing. yeah no this gets into a good point to jump back to the revised report is like there is especially

in silicon valley and wall street it's like stable coins of the future when implemented and everything when integrated and everything when across border payments like you're gonna have a stable coin wallet everywhere it's gonna be incredible and i think it's just like missing the forest for the trees and you're making the point in the piece so like bitcoin becoming the tcp ip of money protocols that is extremely profound from a competitive perspective yeah i mean yeah you're you're how do you compete with bitcoin you know it's just it's it's that's why we have what how many 200 000 cryptos that are with arrows in their back laying in the ditch that have been tried over the past 10 years um how do you compete with bitcoin it's it's it's

so elegant. It has that momentum. It has the biggest firewall in the whole world of any kind of digital network protecting it. Yeah. So, I mean, you can try and slow down, especially, I think it's very heartening to see that more and more companies and increasingly pension funds and that they're starting to buy Bitcoin because that is kind of a shock absorber for the crash that's coming in bonds and real estate and and and you know the the deterioration in in stock market valuations like bitcoin can kind of rescue some of that value so that uh pensioners aren't left with nothing or that insurance companies still have something to pay out uh debts but um but yeah i mean let's just hope for a relatively smooth transition because i you know it's people

might accuse us of like oh we're talking our own book here but but um but yeah i mean time will tell let's let's see how this clip does 10 years from now it's like i just think it's superior technology so we have to take into account it winning just how if we were talking in the 1880s we would have been talking about crude oil and how it's just better than whale oil like it's sorry it's we just think it's better yeah usually we think it's better like i think objectively is better i mean you have vijay's famous sort of bitcoin gold fiat comparison chart that'll be timeless that'll be that'll be in textbooks centuries from now but it's like objectively all the properties are superior yeah and the nice thing is that people don't have to take

our word for it like you can kind of go through and do your own research and do your own work and and like you know analyze the logic and uh and try to find flaws and then make your own decision yeah when it comes to comparing bitcoins like ethereum solana any name your shit coin harping back hearkening back to what i was saying happened in riga last weekend with like arc payments in the wild nobody knew they were using arc it was btc pay servers at the merchants you were presented a lightning invoice everybody thought they were paying to like a lightning wallet but lightning was just a connective tissue it was actually going to like an arc wallet um wow with vtxos and like it's a it highlights the interoperable nature of bitcoin and the layers

being built on top of it and not only protocol to an individual layer above it whether it's lightning network liquid arc taught me immense but like then on the second layers of multiple second layers between each other because of the lightning network yeah and what we'll see the critics do is they'll now they have now they're just going to move the goalposts it's like before they would say like oh you know lightning haha you guys were so bullish on it and and and and you know look at all the limitations and so now we're like well you know now we have another second layer protocol that's interoperable and that's massively extending um functionality and of course you know they'll probably move the goalposts and but that doesn't matter the fact is

bitcoin is becoming more and more functional and effective in the real world as we've been expecting yeah and it's so exciting to see and there's so many people sleeping on it and like and i think it bears leaning into the freedoms with which bitcoiners and particularly bitcoin and protocol engineers have approached building out the protocol particularly in comparison to altcoins that have that have arisen in its wake it's like make sure that the base layer protocol is sufficiently distributed open accessible simple easy to interact with and then do all the complex stuff on top of that and there was many there's been meant in 16 years now of that very conservative methodical slow approach to protocol development that has enabled this

flourishing of second layers we didn't even mention spark from light spark like that but i was in georgia at this proto event that was like one of the top the the two like second layer discussions were about arc and spark and these are relatively new i think both maintenance launched earlier this year and we're already seeing people implementing them and others seeing what's being implemented and getting very excited yeah yeah i mean uh i was gonna say second layers um well yeah i was gonna say there's also a self-selection effect when you think about the human capital in in this whole you know blockchain space so to speak is that basically if you want to leave a legacy and and and build something to be proud of you want to be putting your shoulders

behind bitcoin as an engineer or something rather than these i don't know these like one-off projects that that uh they're like fireworks like they're bright for uh for a year or two and then they just fade and everybody forgets about them it's like you really want to spend years of your life to dedicate it to those kind of things that just that are going to be buried and forgotten or do you want to do you want to contribute just a little bit to a project that's that has the potential to last for centuries yeah that reminds me i was on a panel at uh i was the i was invited as the the bitcoiner to this event that was uh thrown by a law firm and they they uh support a bunch of crypto projects and crypto funds in the space and

they wanted a bitcoin rationalist uh perspective i won't say maximalist i will not give uh metallica's flowers there uh and it was crazy this is january 24 so last year and there was like we were i was on a panel with other venture capitalists in the crypto world and two out of the three really leaned into pump.fun like pump.fun is like one of the most innovative projects that's ever existed like the ability for any individual to create any mean point is going to really enable the the uh sort of digital economy to flourish and it was just like wow i'm very proud of it and we'll go find there's it's up on youtube somewhere but i was like you guys are number one insane number two like what you're doing is immoral like we've seen this play

out again do you not understand the dilution effect that occurs when you give the ability of anybody to hit a button and create a token and how do you expect any of these things to sustain any material market cap for longer than we've seen it with beanie babies right like yeah no but to your point about like what mark do you want to leave i was very disappointed in and that's that's been the way and you touched on it earlier but i do think we are getting to this point where the broader market particularly the smart money the serious money is looking at a lot of the serious money and on all of it but a lot of it is looking at bitcoin be like oh this is a serious project and look at everything else like this what is this

this is childish yeah yeah exactly i mean and it's there's also some poetic justice of course like i mean in terms of you know maybe and a lot of bitcoiners have said this like you know you start off and you get excited about these better than bitcoin projects and and then you kind of uh you know you kind of uh you see some black snows you know you're like oh and then you get humbled and and uh and so then in a way it's an opportunity to to uh to course correct and and and talk to some other people yeah so i think our advice here is like focus on bitcoin uh yeah that's that's what i believe but you know at the same time you gotta at least that's what i try to do is like the the hardest thing is to know whether you have survivor's bias right whether you're just so uh

full of yourself because you were just lucky betting on the right horse for 10 years in a row uh but then uh you know you never know it's still man-made like we're talking about man-made technology so at least theoretically something better could come around or there could be some some blind spots that we share about a vulnerability in bitcoin so i think that's why we keep having these conversations just to kind of double check and and have each other's back about um you know is this still the thing we thought it was i think it is do you think bitcoins i mean that's particularly with the emergence of the treasury companies as we have a lot of long-time bitcoiners saying ah we're getting away from our cypherpunk roots this is turning into something i i did not

join the movement for quote unquote do you feel that at all or is this an inevitable outcome of the like what what comes with the adoption of a better money yeah i mean bitcoin either it was always a winner take all like whether either it was going to become big and boring or it was just going to disappear and uh and of course there is a kind of a more dystopian scenario where bitcoin does become big and boring and people neglect it's uh it's amazing uh capabilities of of allowing self-sovereignty and and autonomous storage and and collaborative custody and all those things yeah and then that's that's kind of a then you get a somewhat better fiat system where people might still be stuck in bitcoin banks and things like that that's not really happening i think i

think we have a healthy culture but it's it's one of the risks i think if we lose that vigilance then uh we could use some of the actual you know tangible perks yeah i think you have anything report but as it stands today more than 50 of bitcoin that has been distributed market is held in self-custody yeah held by individuals in self-custody i believe yeah yeah that's something that i don't think many people number one understand or appreciate you can't appreciate if you don't understand it i think there's an assumption that everybody's holding their their coins on the exchange also there's an assumption that all the bitcoiners are somehow magically on crypto twitter it's like nope there's huge wells out there that nobody's ever seen or

met on online um and uh and i think that's for the better you know people who uh who just kind of quietly um you know live their life and and and take their time to decide what to do with this legacy yeah and for those who haven't decided to uh to get in yet but are maybe thinking about it listening to this reading your report you have some recommendations for allocation strategies based on risk profile yeah so i think there's a few ways this is i tried to just simplify it Because, of course, you can go at it from 20 different angles. But one simple approach that I think makes sense is just to think of Bitcoin as an insurance policy for the rest of your investment assets. Similar to how if you own a home, you're going to get homeowner's insurance.

And just in case it catches fire, you never know. And so I think for homeowners, historically, they would pay like 0.25% of the value of the home per year to the insurance. And so when I published the report two years ago, I said, you know, maybe two and a half percent, you know, take two and a half percent of the value of all your assets, put that in Bitcoin as a kind of a lump sum insurance policy. Um, but I think, you know, two years later, it's sort of like there's smoke coming out of your kitchen already. Like, you know, it's kind of your house is starting to catch fire. And so the cost of insurance has to go up then. And so that's why I'm, I'm suggesting like 5% of your assets in Bitcoin in order to really,

you know, if there's a bond market, cause people, a lot of people have sort of the 60, 40 portfolio, or, you know, maybe you have, I think it's actually most people have 60% in stocks and maybe 40% in bonds. That's probably changing. And there's a bunch of real estate in there as well. But, but yeah, you know, if one of those catch fire, I think Bitcoin is going to compensate for, for those losses, at least so that at least you can kind of maintain your purchasing power time. And then the other way to think about Bitcoin is as a speculative asset. And so speculative, of course, that word has a negative ring to it. But really, if you try and define it objectively, I think a speculative bet is kind of a bet that you know a little bit better than

most of the other participants, especially when it comes to government intervention. And so specifically, because the government keeps printing money, certain parts of the economy at any given time are going to be way overinflated in value. And then other parts of the economy are going to be artificially lower valued. They won't have caught up yet. And so that's why I've been so bearish about real estate, for example, is because it was so easy to borrow money to buy real estate. Whereas if you wanted to get involved in commodities and growing wheat or pulling oil out of the ground, well, credit was a lot harder to get for those type of companies. So that's why they were undervalued for so long. One of the reasons.

So anyway, long story, but from that point of view, I think Bitcoin is still really undervalued. It's not like you could go to the bank and get a loan to then invest in Bitcoin. That has just never been the case. Um, and so that's why I think, you know, from a speculative point of view, you could think about like 20%, put 20% of your, uh, of your, you know, so basically allocate one entire basket of your diversified portfolio to Bitcoin, uh, as an asset class. So that's the other suggestion. And then the final suggestion is, okay, we'll say that you're a younger person and you're thinking about reducing the age of retirement and being more comfortable with your family, then I think you could consider 20 to 50% of your assets invested in Bitcoin. And that's, of course, aggressive, but the goal is, of course, an aggressive one as well, is to really drastically reduce your retirement age. or you could get on zero like some of us and go 100 all in yeah but it's hard to defend that as like you know trying to be a reasonable uh you know financial analyst i'm being facetious i'm being facetious but you also have a advice on like weighing the decision to get in with a lump sum or

dollar cost averaging how do you how do you view those two different allocation strategies yeah so Over the years, it's become pretty clear that they both have their benefits. If you do dollar cost averaging, that's easier for younger people that just don't have a lot of built up savings, but they do have steady income. So that's just more accessible for younger people. Have it just a fixed amount, invest in Bitcoin every week or every month. And the added benefit of that is that it's also psychologically easier to bear. because if bitcoin crashes what comes to mind for you is like oh now i get to buy more bitcoin more cheaply right and so you just steadily accumulate but over time if you have the ability if you have

built up savings which is usually more the case for older people and you can invest a lump sum just basically decide look i'm going to invest 10 of my portfolio in bitcoin so why not just do it today instead of spreading that over one or two years very slowly let it trickle um historically almost always you're going to get a better return you're going to be able to have more bitcoin um if you do a lump sum versus uh spreading out the same amount over time which is you know logical because of of how bitcoin has been moving up uh and then so additionally it is a bit harder to weather such a decision psychologically because you might be underwater for one year

or for two years or for three years. It might take that long to actually see your investment be in the green expressed in dollars. Sorry, I was on mute because I was screenshotting a visualization of these two different strategies juxtaposed. So Logan, if you want to pull that up, just get some data in front of people so they can see this if you're watching on youtube or podcasting apps with video

so number of analyzed periods so this was ws bitcoin um wicked bitcoin is wicked bitcoin not sure not sure yeah this is a good visualization lump sum does seem to be superior like you mentioned but but you also mentioned i think particularly for younger people younger millennials gen z it's very daunting for them because they see bitcoin at 117 000 ago i'm never going to make it but i always like to advise like just start like you said every week every two weeks every month whatever you can stomach just start and don't stop go at it for four years and look up and i think you'll be very happy consistency is king absolutely and it's the same thing with a lump

some, then, you know, the consistency there is, is that you have to commit to holding it for a certain period. And that's why I usually recommend, look, think about an amount that no matter what you can hold for four, five plus years. So let's say five years, you lock it in for five years, no matter the price, no matter you use, even in your mind, run through the scenarios, it crashes 80%, 90%, you're still going to hold it. So what's the amount that you could do that with and that's going to be different for everyone yeah get ready for hey who knows maybe we're in new cycle territory maybe we have elongated cycles maybe no more 80 drawdowns who knows maybe it's easier stomach for people to lump some i mean there's always the possibility of a panic

you know where the market is just composed of humans and so no matter what we can we saw oil go negative like who could have imagined that right like a physical asset all of a sudden trading at a negative price in the world then you had all the uh all the reddit traders who were taking futures not understanding that uh if the futures contract comes up negative you actually have to deliver oil to comex not an ideal situation to be in yep yeah and i guess last but not least actually second to last but not least you get into bitcoin how do you think people should look at custodying it yeah i think um i guess what i usually say is just buy a little bit first you know before

all this the complicated stories about how to hold it and how to you know just you know just try to get dip your toe in the water like get a little bit of exposure uh the chances that whatever platform you use especially you know there's a few suggestions that i have these are companies that that have been around for a while that that have built up some good reputation the chance that that company is going to go away overnight is is very low so so let's just get a little exposure first um hold it on that platform and then once you have it and you start you know starting to kind of feel it more then you can start looking at different ways to to hold your bitcoin um and so i think that the one way that's described um that's becoming probably the least popular now is

just simple single signature self-custody and that's not to poo-poo that entirely you know i think that you know it might work for people um but but i i think it there's a pretty general consensus among bitcoiners that have been around for a bit longer that multi-sig is superior even if you're going to hold all your own keys multi-signature is just uh has just more features that make it make it more secure um especially it loses the this you know you you get rid of the situation where somebody compromises just a one location and um and and based on that one you know it's like the evil maid attack like she finds your hardware wallet or your backup keys and then she can just withdraw the whole wallet that scenario pretty much goes away with multisig um and so then

i think the next question is like okay do you do you hold all your own keys in multisig or do you work together with other people or other companies to to help you manage those those keys and then of course the the last scenario is you you don't bother with your own keys at all you just deposit it at a third party like a i don't know could be a fidelity digital assets could be a kraken could be a um any any of the centralized exchanges and then uh you hold it there i guess that there's one other option is that you buy the bitcoin etf or you buy you know one of the one of the strategy uh companies that that would be the last option yeah my recommendation would be if you're gonna hold it on an exchange i typically you mentioned kraken kraken has been

around for a while but i tend to uh to lean towards the bitcoin only exchanges so like if you're doing on an exchange like strike river are the two that i recommend particularly for us there's really something to be said for you know big focused on bitcoin only it just less distraction for the engineers you know less distractions means on average probably better execution um yeah i think there's absolutely something to be said for that um i think also just based on the stories that i've heard over the years maybe not hold all your bitcoin in the same place it's just so devastating you know when people have all their bitcoin in one you know one little basket and then the basket falls and they get hacked or something

and you lose everything like that means your your whatever future you had imagined could be wiped out you know yeah so that's something that i do kind of tell people is like hey consider some some some different places to hold it especially if it's a significant amount yeah it could be catastrophic and the and a lot of people get complacent there was just a i'm not sure if you saw but there was a big exchange account earlier this week at btc turk 48 million worth of bitcoin other assets just drain from the exchange oh wow yeah yeah wow so it's like it's a real risk i think people we've seen it time and time again and now also you know with ai it's just getting a little scary you know the the amount of the the abilities that they have to

to social hack your account to pretend to be you towards the exchange in order to whatever change your password or or somehow get access is uh is is increased by an order of magnitude because of ai's abilities yeah so be careful you get in practice makes perfect i like to i like to tell people spin up a mobile wallet write down the seed send a very little bit of bitcoin ten dollars twenty dollars erase the wallet from your phone delete the app re-download it recover from your seed get comfortable sending and receiving and then seriously contemplate like beefing up your security because it's important yep yeah i mean it's it's true um there's there's no there's no real shortcuts you know um it's it's

true because you know you have to do you have to put in some work you know you can even when you're saying like oh i'm going to work with companies like well then you got to do some due diligence on which company are you going to work with and and and how or even if it's like well i i'm not going to do that i don't know well then you're going to trust some talking heads that recommend things so then who you're going to trust you know so you you then want to kind of at least put in some work thinking about okay what's going on here who am i trusting to make these decisions um and and and is that based in reality yeah think about it freaks i want to end it on this because i i thought this was a great way to end the piece logan pull up the very last page

of the report i just really like the uh the commentary you put under this this work is titled the power of the peace it was created in 1577 to convey and hope the hope of a young beleaguered nation to achieve peace in its territories which was eventually achieved in 1648 with the formal recognition of the independent dutch republic the etch by sorry for butchering this wirx von cleve is full of symbolism it shows how prudence reason force and time can work together to control violence in society the swords and lances from the war are transformed in this sickles and plowshares retooling society for peace in the grand furnace displayed center stage we see a display of technology as a force for good this is also

our hope for an expectation of the cypherpunk project and its current apex bitcoin channeling human effort in a way that encourages society to grow more orderly and peaceful bitcoin contributes to a harmonious world by serving as a scarce robust money that protects families wealth through space and time by acting as an incorruptible tool for builders supporting them and creating honest and enduring institutions and i thought this was a perfect way to enter because it really anchors the reader back to why we're in this in the first place yeah it's a hopeful future exactly to me that that piece is really helping me reflect about i think it's a fact that capital in itself isn't bad technology in itself isn't bad it can be used for bad things

but but we can retool we can retool things uh and and and and start using them for better and and making like like in in the picture right i mean you you got swords and you then you create plowshares out of them so so all this monetary energy that is in the world we don't have to do we don't have to delete it we don't have to destroy what's there we just we're just working on retooling it and and making it so that people's ability to act in a fair way is enhanced. And then, of course, we have to also build fair institutions and networks to do that. So that, you know, I think that's very important these days because there is this kind of tendency towards maybe like Marxism or nihilism, or it's like, oh, you know, business is bad. And so we need to just kind of take the

brains and, and, and, or, or like do the revolution and start from scratch and delete everything. I think that's terrible. I think, you know, it's much better to, and it's harder to do, but, but it's, um, it's, it's the only way to really get to where we want to come is, is to go through instead of, uh, trying to deny the reality and, uh, and trying to start from scratch. Like nobody's ever achieved that i think no for all you luigi populist out there um find god first and then find bitcoin there's we're gonna work through this amen it's uh we're gonna do it tour you're a tour de force been writing these reports for a decade now first mid-cycle update and i appreciate you for spending your friday afternoon with me to go through it it was a blast thanks marty

you go enjoy your weekend and uh we'll link to this in the show notes freaks go check it out send it to anybody in your extended network family friends who you think is sort of on the cusp of either becoming bitcoin curious or already is it needs a little push over the ledge this report i think is uh the push that could get them over there peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show i hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe rate review the show it helps us out a lot and also if you like these conversations i've come to realize that many people listen to the podcast they don't know we have another sort of layer of this media company we have the newsletter the bitcoin brief go to tftc.io make sure you subscribe

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