TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #656: Q2 2025 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Marty sits down with Matthew Mežinskis to discuss Bitcoin's power law growth model, why current price action remains on trend despite community concerns, and the long-term implications of network adoption versus traditional financial system dynamics. Matthew on Twitter: https://x.com/1basemoney Porkopolis: https://www.porkopolis.io/ 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: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ 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. Summer's over. Back to work. Back in the lab. It's time to get back to basics. This is why we're starting a post-Labor Day run of podcast here at TFTC with one of our oldest and dearest friends at the show, Matthew Mazinkas. Get back to basics. People are going crazy out there.

they are buddy september is on good to be here good to see you congrats on your expanding brood by the way thank you very exciting very exciting yeah it's uh it's pretty wild you know the uh i just saw the tweet from my friend who uh does a lot of the power curve stuff cena and he was just posting the monthly closes and august is the worth worst month for bitcoin uh not not only bitcoin it's obviously down month generally but um that is over and moving into an exciting fall i think which typically is exciting for bitcoin especially every four years and i've been talking about it a lot on my streams i mean if one is concerned with adoption and price and all the rest uh i've been talking about it a lot uh recently just looking at

the multiples and the percentiles and where we are and i'm sure you have a long view as i do so a lot of this chatter doesn't concern me too much and i would encourage listeners dear listeners to uh to feel the same that was the newsletter i wrote last night referencing the chart the chart the old power curve the old power curve i i messed up i gotta go edit it we've talked about this for years i dropped how did you mess up i dropped power law trend in there yeah power law triggers people um you and i've been talking about this i don't know how many years i first posted it in 2018 so seven years um yeah it's uh it's funny how there's when you

talk about like a model or an idea the word law can trigger trigger people but i've always yeah i've always used the word regression or curve because it's uh there's exponential regressions there's linear regressions and there are power regressions so well let's dive into what your friends we can look at the chart you want to look at the chart let's look at the chart because you said that cena said that august was the worst month ever or just this year uh it's it's traditionally uh bitcoin's worst month as far as performance yeah but that's a different thing that's just simply get simple simple uh monthly changes right yeah okay then i'll set up this conversation i wrote a newsletter last night the trend is your friend i don't know if

you've been observing this but i've seen a lot of people within the bitcoin twitter sphere which is consistently losing signal throughout the years but i feel like it should be addressed for those people who are freaking out they don't think bitcoin the bitcoin price is going up fast enough despite the fact that we hit a new all-time high a fresh new all-time high at 124 000 19 days ago now at this point and i was trying to be a good analyst if you will and being like okay let's look at the numbers and i went to the chart and august ended at the price of bitcoin ended at a hundred and eight thousand three hundred and sixteen dollars and 45 cents the power regression model at the end of august is showing 112 262 so we're two and a half percent

ended the month of august two and a half percent below trend then i just trying to compare it to something with the end of july bitcoin price ended 115 848 the trend was saying 108 993 so we were 6.2 above trend in july and so i was looking at those two months those two data points and saying hey it doesn't seem like the price is abnormally suppressed if we're looking at this model yeah there's a few different things going on there and we can go through

all of them but I think the the overall power trend is something we should talk about that first but then also we have this idea of paper bitcoin that's leaking its way back into the space I've noticed recently into the

memosphere and we also have the idea of i mean it's tangential and related but you know institutions bitcoin treasury companies uh sort of manipulating the price with excess leverage uh sort of unbacked by real value and there may be truth to some of the some of that but um the overall picture as far as i can tell and i've been you know like i said i've streamed about this most days european morning time um nothing has really changed underlying i haven't seen any of those signals and i'm definitely a sort of a if it's not broke don't fix it type of person so so we can jump into it um let me share here logan there we go so this is the old power trend uh i can't remember

i'm now putting it always on this 10 every 10 percentiles so you can see sort of exactly where we are before i was doing kind of like sigma is like one sigma two sigma there's less bands but anyway very quickly so people understand why is it power why is bitcoin power not uh exponential is this is a log left scale log linear and you can see it has this nice sloping nice downward i'm going to zoom in here a little bit this nice sort of a little bit fast at the beginning but then a gradual descending decelerating growth rate uh which is how networks grow cities grow it's very sustainable and it turns out that bitcoin is growing like that. If Bitcoin was growing like the stock market, or gold, or the bond market, or any

other tradify market, actually, then when you put this on log linear log scale, you would get a straight line for the trend line. And we can show I can show you some of those as well. But it doesn't, it has this nice gradually sloping curve, which is the 96% R squared on the power trend. another thing i'll just show you very briefly top level if i show you log bottom here and i know that for the listeners it's a little bit better if you watch this one but so a power a power trend will turn into a straight line on log log so i do log bottom whoops i need to reset this sorry logan might need to cut that just did it once and now it's uh it's buggy on log bottom ignore the january's at the bottom but anyway you basically see it's a

it becomes a straight line okay we're not gonna look at this long this way but power trends become a straight line on log log scale and the point is what does that mean it just means basically that as uh the thing grows it grows proportional with itself and that's different than, like I said, every other TradFi market, stocks, bonds, gold, because they grow constantly at an exponential rate, which more often than not, eventually will lead to some sort of a collapse or a crisis. I actually spent the Nordic circuit of Bitcoin conferences here this summer talking about this at riga and helsinki and prague as well it's not really nordic but um and we talked about this last time you remember that idea this jeffrey west book

and so just to remind people um well let me hold off on the jeffrey west actually because there's so many topics to introduce and up. Basically, Bitcoin is not growing. It's just not growing like other stuff. And before you get too disappointed, or you think that it's not exciting enough, or it's not growing fast enough, I can show you pictures of the growth rate, charts of the growth rate, and it's still still pretty solid. Alright, so if you look in here, we got all every 10th percentile, the zeroth percentile would be point one x the trend. It's way down here. That's like extremely rare, obviously. And the 100th percentile is 7.8x the trend. That's way up here. Probably never

going to happen again, either of those. Never say never, I know, but probably never, based on how the network has been growing. That leaves us the 10th to the 90th. And if you just zoom in on the last two to three years here, remember 2024 was the start of the ETF approvals, we've been pretty much bouncing around the trend line, the black trend line. And the trend line itself sits at about the 65th percentile. So that means two thirds of the time, the price is below this black line, one third of the time it's above. It is true. We're recording this on the second. So it's 109k price when I pulled in the model. So my trend line, which is different than some other people's trend line, some people a little

bit lower but my trend line is 112 000 so we're just below it um for a couple days but again to me as far as i'm concerned it's like nothing to worry about it's totally normal it's all totally normal behavior and um you know as a very very basic rule of thumb if you're below this black line you could kind of argue that this is an undervalued uh time in bitcoin's life and if you're above the black line you could also argue on the flip side that it's slightly overvalued but there's a lot of caveats there we have the four-year cycle to contend with and a lot of other things so um you know a lot goes into that i could stop there if you want to So I just want to comment on the psychology of the people who are stressed that Bitcoin isn't pumping as hard as they expect it to.

I mean, if you look at the chart, you can see early years, massive explosions in price corrections. And I think you mentioned it, like the introduction of the ETF. Since then, we've had sort of a more calculated and less volatile step up and to the right. Which I prefer, but I do think many market participants, even if you came in earlier, you just heard the lore of the crazy four-year cycles and you wait for, what is it, 18 months after the halving and that's when fireworks happen. and i think many people are anchoring to those expectations and becoming sorely disappointed that they're not materializing in the way that they would expect and under appreciating the fact that we we have this somewhat very regimented and what's the word i'm looking for uh just stable structured yeah yeah structured up and to the right it's boring but it's still moving in the

right direction yeah and and i i would comment on that too because i i sort of am on record of saying again like i said it's not broke don't fix it i'm not discounting the four-year cycle idea a lot of people are a lot of people are saying now is going to be just sort of a more stable less volatile bitcoin but my next question would be at what trend what is it going up because a lot of these people either don't understand the power curve or don't don't haven't read about it so from that side uh i would not be too worried like i think there's still plenty of time to overshoot um and have this euphoria which is you know again for if you do want to play the markets or you want to take some coins off the table for some lifestyle changes or whatever it might be

totally fine uh on the flip side if you're a hodler if you're younger just getting started um or you're older and you have a stack and you're not thinking of like taking too much risk you know again it's caveat emptor i mean the hardest thing in the world to do speaking from someone i know you as well have been through these cycles the hardest thing to do really is to sell bitcoin it doesn't matter what price you know you no one knows the future and if you sell it and the price doesn't collapse as much as you think and you can't buy as many bitcoin as you would like from that uh you know exit that you made into fiat before whatever into gold whatever then that would be extremely disappointing so that's why i totally respect the hodl meme i

think it's makes sense and and all the rest but about the four-year cycle i honestly i wouldn't count it out i mean we haven't been through it right it is right now this is the uh for sure with 2017 for sure with 2013 this occurred both times in november december 2021 was a little bit of a wild one this time could also be a wild one uh you know 2021 we had a double top but the first top was actually probably the real top if you look at other metrics which we can talk about like the price extending over say minor revenue or something was actually probably the first one and then the second one was sort of uh i know people have called it the scam top or whatever but it was, that was actually, um, kind of like a, it was a huge dead cat bounce, but it was not,

you know, it was just not, uh, in relationship to other metrics when it usually extends. And, you know, likewise in 2013, we had a double top, although in that top, it was the second top was five times higher. So you never quite know. Um, we could always be thrown for a loop with uh with bitcoin but you know there's enormous returns to be made here compared to any other traditional market and if all you want to do is huddle great if you want to ape in and out with 10 of your stash also great so yeah i i don't think that there's any reason to discount actually the four-year cycle yet. And we can look at some charts if you want to look at that, talk about paper Bitcoin and all the rest.

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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. I can show you actually, let's look at the, let's look at one more here. So just so everybody knows, at least my opinion on where the price could go by the end of the year. So here's what I would say. If you look at this every 10th, right, zooming in to basically the trajectory here or the

price history, Bitcoin is traditionally during the booms, very easily gotten above the 80th. percentile each time it's in the earliest booms before that is 2021 it's gotten above the 90th percentile very easily each time 2021 again was a little bit of a little bit of a ringer the first top which is what i think was the real top this time which was early it was a very easily above the 90th for you know a month to three months three to four months is actually typically all the time that we get above the 90th percentile And then it barely got above in November 2021, right, where it should be. So again, just to remind you, these dotted lines are multiples above trend.

And then how percentage wise, how often that has occurred. So it's been pretty easily done for the prior three tops. But if this time we're different, and if it gets invalidated, or you know, this four year cycle for me i think it would be somewhere around for sure it would be bitcoin not getting above the 90th percentile which it did do in 2021 and all prior cycles and probably even i'd say the 80th like that would be the only reason that i would say okay bitcoin really is on this totally different trajectory that doesn't have anything to do with the halvings or excitement after you know, 18 months after the having just general hype cycles that markets have, I would say

if it doesn't get above the 80th percentile, which by the way, is 1.3 X the trend. And if we look at the end of 2025, the trend is 125 K. So 1.3 X is 170 K. So if we don't get above 170 K by year end, or into like the first couple months of next year, then i would say okay time to rethink the idea of the four-year cycles but not doing any technical analysis not looking at these impulses or elliott waves or whatever we're just looking at the power trend and where the price typically is over or under trend every four years it's actually pretty clear it's pretty clear what's been happening and there's nothing to me that would invalidate uh this idea until it's invalidated and it hasn't been invalidated yet so that's actually a bull i

would say that's a bullish message if you're listening hasn't been invalidated yet could potentially be could potentially be may not be turn on the 90th percentile there when what we have to do to yep so the 90th is is 2x pretty rare right so that means 90 of the observations would always be below this dotted line so 2x is 250 okay and i can throw on by the way we can we can make this even more refined and go to the top 90th uh and above and we can look at the 91st 92nd 93rd 94th 5th all the way up to the 100th as well but um very simple rule of thumb yeah i think 2x based on the prior trends could easily happen by the end of the year but if it doesn't say in the next six months then i would consider

the four-year cycle being invalidated or different or something so here's now let me show you this is the top 10 starting from the 90th now. So this is very exciting. Very exciting rainbow. Take off the 100th. That's extremely rare. Now let's look at what happened. So the thesis, by the way, that people should understand is as Bitcoin gets more adopted, these peaks do come down, right? So notice, I now have the 99th painted on this chart. It has for a couple weeks in 2013. And in 2017, gotten above the 99th percentile, which is 4.6x the trend. Okay, so 4.6x the power trend, which I told you is 125k at the end of the year. Bitcoin has achieved that every prior cycle, but it did not in 2021. Okay, so this is where we

talked about softer tops and i agree with that idea so if we take off the 99th 98th even 97th then we start to see what we hit in 2021 it was a 96th percentile the 2.8x round it here 3x and this is where i would say again totally base case totally possible would be 2 to 3x the trend so if you just look at this now go to the end of 2025 125k 2x happened every time pretty easily that's 250k bitcoin 3x roughly that's 375k bitcoin although i will admit with lower highs on each one of these cycles i think this is indeed the max i would be very surprised that bitcoin went above 350 or 375k by the end of the year but i think it's possible bullish again i hear we're getting to 444 000 in november who who wrote that here it's some i don't even know if he's

a micro strategy guy but uh josh man well 400 000 is the 97th let's go 98th so yeah on that 98th percentile somewhere between the 97th and 98th percentile it's pretty rare it's pretty rare uh you got to think about what that's saying you know three and a half times the trend line basically 97 97 and a half percent of the time it doesn't happen so this is how i'm looking at it basically this doesn't tell you the time right it's kind of like a caveman analysis honestly because it's we're just assuming the four-year cycle four-year cycle doesn't happen or if extends or not i can't tell you that from this chart but what i can tell you is if the market gets heated if people get you know if grandma's getting excited this thanksgiving

in the u.s and uh giving her grandchildren money to buy bitcoin then then perhaps it could happen again but yeah absolutely possible that we have lower highs and even possible that we get out of the four-year cycle but i'm still not seeing it based on the price action and based on where we are uh i'm not seeing it and we can look at some other charts as well to maybe further talk about that but base case what i'm thinking two to three x the trend by the end of the year or the first couple months in the next year that's 250k to 375k that would be how i would look at it i'll take that humble humble 375 humble 250 yeah yeah and you can imagine uh on the back end of this by the way because people this is maybe people will reset the narrative at this time

and be like oh because remember this happened in 2021 by the way people like to reset the narrative and say oh bitcoin is now on this trend and it's going here forever well stick with this trend line which i've come back to time and time again this black line marty has basically remained consistent since 2016 it's like the best trend line in all of finance way better than anything else and certainly better than the old stock to flow ratio so you know take comfort in that doesn't mean it's has to go there but if people start to think oh we're now at a new plateau you know the old uh irving fisher sort of talk and we're at 350k bitcoin and then all of a sudden you have you know x number of bitcoin treasury companies which

have levered their balance sheet up and their uh convertible debt uh facilities with less than three-year duration to buy a lot of Bitcoin. And then the price starts to get soft. And then, you know, the short market participants get a little bit excited. You could see absolutely a cascading liquidations of these Bitcoin treasury companies. You could see, who knows, it might go as high as the White House. I'm not saying that it will. I'm not saying that it will. I'm just saying you can imagine plenty of scenarios where this whole thing rinses and repeats just on a completely different scale Matt and I have been talking about this Matt Adele and I on rabbit hole recap for the better part of a year and a half now with this cycle

you have nation states and wall street getting into the degeneracy and we could see blow-ups unlike anything before who would make uh ftx and the ico bubble look funny in retrospect yeah precisely and i think for those blow-ups to happen you probably got to get a little bit extended on the high side first i think doesn't have to be the case but you know basic stuff at the end of the day uh you know i think a player like sailor obviously you know he's completely changed his uh the makeup of their balance sheet you know with the new facilities and they've gotten away from the converts um you know with pretty short duration at the beginning um which you know in those days of 2022 was looking a little bit difficult for him as you recall but i i certainly

think someone like him is uh and his uh his cohorts his colleagues around the uh around the micro strategy table are expecting stuff like this but the next 500 bitcoin treasury companies i mean would you like to buy a convert from them i don't know i don't think too much about it i know there's a lot of people with strong feelings about bitcoin treasury codes but buy bitcoin and be happy there is but let's let's dive into this so the paper bitcoin there's a ton of people out there who are looking at the price chart saying do something you're not high enough yet, and pointing at Bitcoin treasury companies, ETFs, and saying, hey, they're creating paper Bitcoin, Coinbase is re-hypothecating, giving allocations to the same Bitcoin to multiple

players, and this is why the price is going down. Throw in CME Futures and the games that Wall Street have played with other assets like gold, and many are wholly convinced that the price is being suppressed by the combination of rehypothecation and financial engineering using derivatives. And here we can, here we can easily just look at a great chart from our friend, checkmate,

great on-chain analyst. And, you know, this is the light pink. There are above one year, but as you can see when the price is really skyrocketing, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, sub one year hodlers that exit when we get over 100k, particularly

this little spike at the start of this year. But as we've gone on, there have been more and more. And you know, that that ratio that mix above one year hodlers, just one year, one year and above becomes pretty large. I mean, for, you know, a lot of the middle part of this year, it was 50 and above of the coins that were taking profit which cohort did they come from way more than or at least 50 50 but sometimes i think clearly 60 70 percent of the mix was above one year hodlers sometimes you know five so there's plenty of coins that are coming onto the market and as check says here uh you know nobody ever sells their bitcoin they said it was all paper bitcoins they said i think that summarizes it pretty clear uh to me but why would

the og sell do they know something do they know the top is in is that why they're unloading coins and converting the fee i think not at all i think uh ogs are not watching your podcast i think ogs are not thinking about the power curve i think og's bought bitcoin at sub ten dollars and they're enjoying one hundred thousand dollar gains as they should as they should agreed the psychology of this is having been a part of it for 12 years now going on 13 you're just observing it throughout the different cycles throughout the years it is one of the most interesting things to me is how the psychology evolves especially as you get new entrants coming in like the the class of 23 24 you can go back to like 2020 seems like they're

they're young fawns looking to get their sea legs under them yeah completely unaware of just how this not unaware but i don't know to me like there's a ton of pattern recognition particularly on the sentiment side in the sentiment this summer and it's funny like i said august is historically the worst month summer's historically slow not only in bitcoin just traditional markets you have the the concept of the summer doldrums and it's funny when people are unable to recognize these seasonal and cyclical trends that have been pretty constant not only through bitcoin but through financial markets more generally and they succumb to the monotony of boring price movement yeah and we should look

at some other charts but just to to piggyback on what you said there i think that's a crucial point and i think you know five years ago or certainly after even the activation of segwit even the 2017 top every time that there are tops the narrative actually changes to the complete opposite of what you said, right, we flip on to a new plateau, new money, this is going to be something that the world has never seen, all of which are points that I very much agree with. But the timescale is way different, I think, than people are expecting. And the the idea that bitcoin will sort of absorb the financial system next week next month or even next year i got another few charts to show you on that one it's just too ludicrous all right i mean as

another quick example like bitcoin uh max i think has done uh well actually no max but the trailing 12 months, let's just say, has done something like $7 trillion worth of transactions on-chain. If you take everyday's transactions, roll them at the price, about $7 trillion. Fedwire, which is the core of the financial system, only one of central banks around the world's real-time gross settlement systems. When I say real-time gross settlement, I mean, it works just like Bitcoin. It's literally banks transferring reserves like payments for stuff that they owe to other banks, like checks to clear and all the rest, right? That's called Fedwire. That does $1.1 quadrillion a year. So you're at $1,100 trillion that the Federal

Reserve does versus seven that Bitcoin does. Bitcoin can absolutely get there. And the only thing that has to happen actually is the price to rise. But it's just not going to happen overnight. And so going back to the power curve, I think that the power curve actually should give a lot of people a lot of comfort, and nobody still is paying attention to it. Again, I posted this stuff before the stock to flow ratio with still with a marketing budget of $0. I know, but most people don't sort of understand it, think about it, whatever. But it's just the trend line that is showing how typically networks have grown the internet actually followed a power curve um crucially not if you think about that s curve network adoptions crucial crucially not

like cell phones and other things like dishwashers or whatever usually if there's a company that has a sort of a large share um technology products will not follow this they follow more that s curve where that sort of explosion in the middle bitcoin the internet other networks cities themselves, they don't have that. They have a decreasing rate of growth, which if you looked at it sort of as a supply, it looks exactly what we saw with the price on log scale, sort of faster at the beginning, slower over time. And so there's like huge comfort there. And I actually, you know, again, I keep saying I should reference charts, and we just talk about it. But because I like to try to show people facts with what I actually say. I believe, Marty, that like 95% of what we see in

the market today in bitcoin is the power curve of network adoption itself i don't think it has anything to do with the money supply the fed interest rates like literally five percent that's that's uh that's sort of my latest thesis and it's not really as of late i've been saying it for for a while now but yeah i think that's what i think i think you first brought this up earlier this year and i completely agree and i think that again if you want to anchor in confidence and filter out all the noise i think anchoring to that and just taking price and exogenous factors like monetary policy and geopolitics and macroeconomics out of it and just view it as network adoption uh of which price is just uh a an output of that adoption i think it makes a lot

of sense more and more pure representation of it yeah of this endogenous idea as you to use your uh continue your analogy it's it's just within bitcoin itself that's what we see we're looking at the adoption of bitcoin the system when we look at the price curve and i i do have to uh give you props too for that fedwire comparison i've actually used that a lot at 1031 talking to prospective lps when they really get in the weeds and they're trying to understand a good comp to bitcoin and many people naively will say visa mastercard venmo paypal it's like no it's the fed fedwire central bank settlement and that chart you have of the sort of multiple of fedwire um volumes and settlements compared to bitcoin over time

this one is one of the highest signal charts out there agreed agreed so there's your 1.1 trillion, 1,158. Sorry, what there's your 1.1 quadrillion, 1,158 trillion. That's what FedWire does over trailing 12 month basis in transfer value, or some people even call that payment volume, whatever you want to call it. Bitcoin, seven. It's maxed out at, yeah, closer to 20 back in 2022 and trailing 12 months, but seven at the moment. And then this supremacy, as you see, we used to be very, this is log scale on the right, but this black line, we used to be, you know, millions of times smaller, or more properly stated Fedwire was millions of times bigger than Bitcoin. Now, it's only 157 times bigger. Still huge. So again,

keep it in perspective. Don't get worried. We're going to wake up tomorrow and there's still going to be a Fedwire. I know people hate that. I'm not defending them. I'm not saying it's great that we have to rely on these Jackson Hole speeches and all the rest, but it's going to be there. It's going to be there. So, you know, keep that in mind. Use these things as a benchmark to stay grounded. Spend time with your family, stack stats. And if you want to, like I said, ape in and out on the extremes we have very good tools to do that yeah here's another one by the way well we're not going like to zero in fiat tomorrow even though fiat is a terrible storer of value so this is the through june only the top five broad money supplies meaning usually m3 it should

be m3 so us m3 36 trillion euro m3 19 these are all dollar numbers the yen 11 trillions china only publishes an m2 which i can explain the difference 45 trillion and then the sterling and they publish an m4 which is even more uh liquid is 4.3 trillion but the broadest money supplies, if you add that all up is 116 trillion. And I think in value, and I think that you can add another 20% for the rest of the world, I need to get a full chart ready, eventually for you when I come on, but I just don't have it yet. So you're getting somewhere close to 145 150 trillion, probably in global money at this point. And then the question is, you know, people like to talk about $100 trillion, we're definitely getting there for sure. But it's not now, it's not

tomorrow, it's not next month, it's not next year. It's going to be a while from now. And by the way, all the other stuff is going to keep going on with their madness as well. Sup freaks, this rip was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura. Obscura is the first VPN that can't log your activity by design. Instead of empty promises, Obscura fully embraces the Bitcoin or don't trust verify mantra. They can't log your traffic even if they tried. Obscura believes that user data is toxic waste in addition to private payments via lightning you can sign up with an account without having to give any personal identifying information it's a beautiful thing it's the vpn i use every day it's incredibly fast you can go on streaming sites with it they

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to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in sats go check it out at opportunitycost.app that's opportunitycost.app i know we just gave the whole spiel of power tread network adoption endogenous factors versus exogenous factors and exogenous is probably not as impactful as the endogenous just your peer-to-peer adoption of bitcoin driving up the price however the endogenous factors are are getting more interesting we were talking about a few charts if we think about podcast content uh it could be 95 is indeed the exogenous factors and i understand that very well so we could talk about that as well well um before we get yeah i know uh you're not his yeah i know you're not a fan of him at all but did you catch the uh richard

werner tucker carlson interview i i i did not i mean i um a few things about that first of all didn't that guy say that like the cia created bitcoin he did years ago but i've heard from behind the scenes that he's become more open-minded toward bitcoin yeah okay yeah that's sort of tucker tucker said that too are you talking about tucker or richard richard i think both of them said it yeah yeah well tucker doesn't know much but uh if if uh if warner himself said it that he's backed off that then i guess that's a little bit better but yeah i mean the uh i didn't i didn't watch it in full i saw some clips and generally a lot of things i would probably agree with yeah i think it was the most thorough and thorough and

approachable understanding of money creation happens via credit creation and then but really piqued my interest i think his solutions i think he's missing bitcoin and they sort of hand-waved about gold but i think when it comes to like how money is actually created in the system via credit creation it was really the clarifying in many regards like walking to the mechanics of of it particularly going back to japan in the yeah in the 90s so let me let me pivot off of that with another chart okay this one is what i was this is a part parcel of presentations i was giving throughout europe this summer goes back to the idea i think we talked about it before about super exponential growth and werner talked about it as well it's

basically at the end of the day most people understand that we can't go back to at least the system we're on right now you can't peg anything you can't fix it you can't uh you can't not grow with the amount of fiat and obligations that we have out there you actually need to grow faster and faster. And some of that I would actually argue, again, I'm not defending the system, but I'm just trying to look at what's actually happening. As I just showed you with those broad money supplies keep growing and growing. And I think we'll continue to grow because that's all that they know how to do at the base is continue to print. But if you look at this Jeffrey West, very interesting theoretical physicist who wrote this book, Scale, and I drew

a lot upon his work in my presentations he makes the observation that it's not even only you know inflation in fact he doesn't really talk about inflation much at all it's just the way that we grow the way that we do things socio-economically we're moving faster and faster you know what would have taken thousands of years to evolve in the stone age or the bronze age can take 30 years now all right and the idea is we're going faster and faster and then and his question which he leaves open is this idea of a mathematical singularity where you increase the growth rate every time but to get you get to a mathematical singularity so if i show you the s&p here which is a derived s&p back to the 1800s because the s&p started in 1955 but you can run a trend

from 1800 to the start of the federal reserve and the stock market grows like two percent a year okay it's very rough it's probably even lower than that because there's like survivorship bias there's There was a ton of railroad companies that went bankrupt. I'm sure they're not included in this index. But anyway, from the start of the Federal Reserve until 1971, we went through a Great Depression in the U.S. and we grew the markets faster at 4.8% per year CAGR. Okay, so the trend line is the slope of the value of the market.

1971 until 2008. we went even faster trend line growth of 9.6 per year and then 2008 caught us right in the middle of the crisis a new monetary epoch clearly so that's where i delineated a new trend 2008 trend actually was below like like like a truck sliding down a muddy hill right we were way below our base but we grew faster all right so if i put this trend line up now the red trend line you can see from the 9.6% CAGR before 2008 for the markets, we now grow at 11.5%. All of these are before dividends reinvested. It would be probably 2% more on your CAGR if not. So these are all targets to shoot for, right, for your returns. The trend line for the stock market since 2008 is 11.5%

per year so you could see this idea of the faster and fastest faster and faster treadmills is is clearly happening and i think will continue to happen and probably at shorter time intervals uh still i mean if you just do the caveman eye test on this number one it looks like you have that sliding truck with every new trend line that you've put on this chart going back to 1914 it was below the 1800 trend go to 71 it was below the 1914 trend 2008 and yeah this is pretty illuminating in that sense and you can feel it too not only it is weird i think we talked about this in the last episode when you brought up scale in in these concepts but you can you definitely feel it socially in your life with inflation

with prices um certainly becoming more palpable not palpable but um very tangible right he uh he focuses on like the growth though as far as um you know actually good things like inventions patents, patents, kind of weird, right, for us in libertarian world to focus on patents, but inventions, discoveries, and, you know, increases in GDP, things like that, which, again, we would say a lot of that gets papered over. But I think it's fair enough to say that there's some of both, right? There is, it is undeniable that, like, I'm very glad that we live in this time right now than in the Stone Age, or even 100 years ago. And I think there's a lot of hope there, actually, there's a lot of, you know, there's always the apocalyptic view, there's always the view that

we're really on for, you know, in for a train wreck. But as long as we can jump to the first of all, this is back to the point of Warner, which I wanted to address is, if he's saying that they always paper over things, or they have to keep growing faster and faster. It's true, I agree with him. But there's actually a positive way to look at that. And that's we are increasingly getting better, uh, healthcare stuff in the U S it's always more expensive for lots of reasons, but in a lot of places, uh, healthcare is improving. People are pulling themselves out of poverty and there's, there's actually a lot of good things to think about from these trends. Now they are absolutely countered from the fiat madness of the money

printing, but we have to, we have to sort of parse through these things, but here's how it relates the bitcoin okay so this is the this is kind of the uh one of the things that i was trying to show is notice marty all of these trend lines right you see that they're straight lines right they're increasingly faster growing straight lines on log scale so they are exponential and they are in fact what he calls super exponential in his book this is i think it's a very good graphical representation of super exponential trends. But then if we look at Bitcoin, go to price. Let's go to trend. Here's our old power trend, our friend. We do not have a straight line. We just do not have a straight line on log scale. And if you actually showed the growth of that

black line, it decreases. All right. So the interesting question will be, and this is again, also what I kind of left open in my presentation, my different presentations throughout the summer is what will happen when this super exponential growth of TradFi meets this decelerating growth of Bitcoin? Like, is that the singularity? Is that a new Bitcoin standard? I have no idea. You know, Jeffrey West, when he wrote his book, he was not thinking about Bitcoin at all. He wrote it in 2017, but it wasn't on his radar. You know, he left it open that hopefully it's a new invention. Hopefully we can figure it out. Maybe we're just moving to another faster singularity for the 15, 20 years. But Bitcoin was not on his radar.

So the interesting thing is, if you look at, for example, the stock market's growing at 11.5% without dividends. If you reinvest it, it's probably closer to 13, 14%. But that's constant, exponential, constant growth. Bitcoin, if you look at the returns from the beginning until today, were right about 42% per year. So on a curve, you'd actually get way more in the past. But on a curve, you'd be at thousands of... Sorry. On a curve, you're at a couple 100% if you hold till today. If you have it today, 41%. And then as you move toward the future, we go down. And I could pull this all the way out to 2050. We still only get to 23.5%. This shows you, this is why, again, people need to back up and look at the power curve. These are monstrous

returns, even with all the inflation and the craziness in the stock markets today. We're still at 41% CAGR, 42% CAGR for Bitcoin right now. And they said you have no idea, but you have to have some thoughts on what happens when these two trends collide. And that's like, I think it's a very yeah it's a very interesting graphical representation that's what if you zoom all the way out on this like even though it's a power trend still 23 and a half percent kager if you go back to the exponential log chart they just had a like the 2008 line is what 11 and a half percent kager so like even though this looks exponential the power trend is still producing a bigger kegger and so like oh god i gotta turn these things off um yeah congratulations

congratulations thank you but leave that on the final final cut but i guess maybe you have to extend the power trend out even further and is there like a point yeah so this hits this hits 10 in 2070 2070 okay and maybe like the singularity when the exponential kegger converges with the power trend well that's the idea i mean uh that's one of the ideas i should say no one i do not know to be honest there's so many things that could happen right uh obviously there's the world is sort of on fire the eastern authoritarian autocracies are trying to get more power away from the Western democracies. We got people in Western democracies

fighting amongst themselves. We're in Eastern Europe here. Everybody should know my position now. So there's a lot of stuff that could happen until then. Maybe we do peg into Bitcoin at one of these points and then things could change from there. I don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't actually want to If you think about all the newsletters, I've talked about this a lot, right?

That gold bugs have written since the year 1980, especially in the 70s when gold got de-pegged. This is only 50 years ago, 55 years ago. You would have thought that you would have absolutely won, like civilization was moving back to gold. the fact that gold went from $35 an ounce in 1971 to $850 for two seconds on the COMEX in January 1980, you would have thought that sound money was returning, the rest of the world was going to catch on. And then lo and behold, they went into a 20-year bear market. And in 1996,

Alan Greenspan said the Federal Reserve stands ready to sell gold should the price rise. So I'm not saying that Bitcoin can be co-opted like that, although that is always some good doom porn on Twitter, about any number of topics, as we know, I think it could be mixed, right? This is another idea that I've been throwing out there is it's totally possible, by the way, that Bitcoin, if we think about go to the math, and back to the, to the ideas of different curves, we have the power curve, which, in my opinion, is a more sustainable growth rate. And we're looking at that now versus a traditional instrument like the dollar. But let's go the other way. Let's say that Bitcoin turns into growth rates like this, where now I'm not actually showing the

growth rates, but I'm showing the growth of the of the supply, right of the supply of the stock market value, right? It's still straight lines on log scale, and it grows faster and faster and faster. If Bitcoin would move at some point, right, if the straight line sort of stops being the scale invariant, gently sloping curve, decreasing rate of growth, right, and somehow it just shoots up and turns into a straight line, like an expo curve, and sort of just mirrors the rest of the financial system. That might be good for Bitcoin holders, that might be good for value, but that might not be good for the world you know what i mean like that's just sort of bitcoin um like bitcoin kind of more matching into what it's trying to it's kind of like gold 2.0 like

it's just it's there it's better it's much better but it's controlled for whatever reason like there's a lot of fiat uh units that are paying you know bitcoin treasury companies people lines of credit all the rest i mean it's actually totally possible that bitcoin could turn into an expo curve, by the way. It's not now, but it could happen. On the flip side, what would happen if the rest of the world, the TradFi world, and again, this is not next month, next week, next year. This has to be decades from now. But if everybody can start to see the beauty of Bitcoin, we really stay decentralized, we don't have government fiat mandating how everything is going. If Bitcoin keeps on this idea of this sort of nice, beautiful, sustainable growth rate

in other fiat currency, how would you even charge interest if Bitcoin was rising in a power curve? That actually is the one of the key questions. And I think that you you can't how do you how do you keep what you know why would you even accept a fiat loan right like more and more fiat interest interest in this asset that you know is scarce you know there's only 2.1 quadrillion sats why would you even accept uh as a as a uh lender let's say to lend out your satoshis when you know that you're going to go at this very nice power growth and you know you're going to get paid back in some fiat interest on those satoshis you might not get your collateral back um that's what i see those

are the worrying sort of two sides it's basically either either uh bitcoin goes exponential kind of like the TradFi world, right? Or Bitcoin pulls the rest of the world into its sort of nice power growth. But if that happens, you can't really calculate interest on loans. You just all this stuff, Bitcoin treasury companies, people taking converts and everything. It won't actually work because loans literally, literally interest will only work in exponential fashion. Compound growth is exponential. So you can't do it. You can't do it with this power growth. So it's a very sort of deep philosophical way out in the future idea. But those are the two extremes as I see it. And I honestly don't know. I see so many different things that could happen on the spectrum where

we could go one way or the other. I would say probably the less optimistic side is if Bitcoin just kind of turns into gold 2.0. It's a great hedge, but the system is what it is. Bitcoin is exponential just like gold and stocks and bonds and everything else well on the latter of the two extremes i know say for many others i've talked about a potential transition from debt financing to equity financing where instead of giving a loan to somebody with an attached interest rate a lot of financing will be equity driven where you give somebody money you get a portion of the business and you read the benefits of the commensurate cash flows that come your way from that equity injection yeah equity uh equity does solve uh like just simply to say that you

have equity would solve that idea you don't have to worry about it like interest rates or anything um and maybe that could happen but uh things would have to turn into very short-term like even if you're thinking about working capital or something it would have to be very very short-term fixed rates of interest and you just they can't work very long that's my thought about that idea uh you know is the world going to be ready for you know that upends everything. And hey, we're ready, obviously, obviously for Bitcoin to upend everything. But you know, the credit markets are huge. You know, the biggest markets in the world, I mean, bondholders all over the world, they get paid back first before stockholders, like it just

upends everything about the financial system. And so if we go to this sort of everybody's a stockholder, everybody has equity, there's no interest rates, or interest rates are very, very short term uh yeah it could happen and i would say that's probably the better outcome that's where bitcoin stays on the power curve it stays on a sustainable lower and lower rate of growth but if you're on that curve you literally by definition cannot calculate interest over the long term you would explode the system with fiat interest there just wouldn't be enough stats to go around yeah it's fascinating it is fascinating to think through these philosophical discussions of what we transition to and i've always been

partial i think we've talked about this but it's always good to touch on like i think when you talk about transitioning and what it looks like i think we're beginning to see that manifests in the form of bitcoin becoming part of collateral packages um a lot of people look at micro strategy and converts and all that but i think in private markets particularly what we're seeing with the emergence of products like debify battery finance like the tools the infrastructure is getting built out to begin seriously injecting bitcoin into the credit stack as collateral and you i think you can squint and look at that and see that as a first step towards equity financing particularly if the lender and

the borrower are sharing in the upside of the bitcoin appreciation over the duration of the loan yeah it depends on the uh nature of the contract um as a borrower i think it's an absolutely great uh deal obviously sailor himself uh you know doing a lot with that idea uh sort of borrowing with bitcoin on as collateral or borrowing to buy more bitcoin uh and then have that as collateral it still is though you know the the trad fi model right uh i mean have you seen these collateral deals where you know i've seen some i think in the u.s they've done it where a lender will have the developer of, say, real estate take a loan, but also a portion of that loan should buy Bitcoin.

I think that's very interesting. So you have sort of a dual hedge, dual collateral hedge against the loan. All of that stuff, at least as far as I can see, is still modeled on the TradFi world. It's modeled with rates of interest. And since Bitcoin has such explosive growth, like as you see here and the whole that you're holding time we're roughly on a curve we're

increasing the power trend at a hundred dollars a day so as a kegger that translates into 42 percent per year we're looking pretty solid right we're looking pretty pretty we have a lot of buffer even enough to take care of the drawdowns or the bear markets if they come again which we talked about already at the top of the show, I think they probably will. There's still a lot of buffer before we get down to your, you know, your senior collateralized debt of like major companies, or major real estate companies where your people are trying to get, you know, five, 7% now maybe with a lot of crazy treasury markets. But obviously, treasuries themselves, I mean, you want to be even below 5%, depending on your duration of the curve, but

there's a lot of delta there right there's a lot of room to play around right when bitcoin's doing 41 percent trad fi roughly let's just say it's five percent maybe leaking a little bit higher and as we talked about with the s&p 500 it's probably making a lot higher as far as stock returns go i think they're going to careen like i do think that they're going to hit each other and before they they hit each other we're probably enough people will see the writing on the wall understand bitcoin that it's just it's it's the place to be but what i'm very curious and i think what you'll start to what will start to take shape let me try to put some more substance on what i'm saying for the listener is in the next you know 20 years if you know if we're pretty locked down

in developed markets if you can't withdraw bitcoin if there's just kyc up the wazoo like you can't do anything, uh, in like the real sort of the real quote unquote real world, if, if nobody cares about, uh, key management or even node management, then that looks to me like a pretty traditional trad fire world going back to exponential and that, and in that world, interest rates work totally fine. They work totally fine. They're just, you're going to get the boom bust cycle. You're going to get a lot of government intervention and that's what it is. I think that's not that exciting but in the other world that's really hard for bondholders i mean it's just it doesn't the math doesn't really check out so yeah again a long-winded answer to your

question but i i think there's even those examples like you i don't know have you ever seen debt contracts or uh bitcoin denominated contracts that are like fully equity and that's kind of like a is there a marketplace for that where it's like fully equity only bitcoin probably not i think pretty young immature i think the converts are like the closest thing because they convert to equity right right so we've seen that that's going to have a duration yeah that's probably pretty short sailor rotated out of that market right and he got more into preferreds which have no duration uh so he's he's kicked the can down the road on that idea yeah i'm looking to um cormint the miner west texas shout out to jamie mcavity um they did an interesting series b

equity funding 20 29 million i believe they did use both equity and debt financing including unique bitcoin denominated loans that was debt to fund its expansion low-cost bitcoin miner from what i understand they those instruments perform very well um i think yeah i think all this is to say that we're still at the very in the very early innings of people getting creative and really beginning to explore and innovate with bitcoin based financial contracts agreed yeah it totally i would say i would prefer the equity based but i think about it a lot i think about the different things that would have to happen for that to occur and a lot of that is

self-sovereign stuff you know people standing up to you know some of the draconian uh financial regulation that we've seen grow and grow and grow since the 1970s so yeah i think it could go either way honestly i think it could go either way and i think bitcoin would do well in either scenario but different people will be hurt in either scenario yeah well let's let's paint the picture for people um what does an ideal landscape and capital stack and tech stack on a bitcoin standard look like in your mind i mean you experienced it the earlier this summer uh in riga particularly like what i think is very underappreciated and not really talked about enough is the maturation the lightning network particularly as this connective tissue between disparate second

layer technologies whether that's liquid e-cash mints in the case of riga they were using arc in the background for all the merchants and this is something that i'm very passionate about and And I can actually see it materializing in front of our eyes is this sort of emergence of a new tech stack for a banking system with all these different second layer technologies. And so I think if we want it to be true and if we want it to manifest and materialize, then the tools are there to make it happen, make this cypherpunk Bitcoin standard banking stack possible. i agree and i think that uh we're going to go in that direction i think that is very good and i absolutely uh absolutely you know support everybody that's doing that i think obviously the noster ecosystem is helping a lot there um it's amazing it really is amazing i i'm i'm all for it i'm all for it uh are you like a larry white

hal finney we're gonna have a free banking system built on top of bitcoin i i've been partial towards that um yeah well the risk of the free banking system is that it can be unfree right and that's the interesting thing that i think bitcoin's trying to break and so what do you mean by unfree just over regulated yeah it becomes it becomes monopolized and captured and over regulated and then we don't have a free banking system anymore we have a centrally planned central bank system which central banks have no idea like in washington dc they have no idea what the bank reserve ratio should actually be in wyoming or something it's just it's completely gone we had that in the 18th and 19th centuries in a few different markets

actually in a lot of markets but uh big in northern europe and in canada as well and then we lost it so i think people got to look at all sides i think anyway the good thing i know we're i won't be too heavy on this like people are going to do bitcoin you're going to hold bitcoin you're going to do what you need to do on noster or you know all the different relays and uh l2 l3 options that are coming which are awesome absolutely amazing i'm just wondering about you brought up you know the free banking system the problem is when you get to that sort of centralized too big of a centralized hub right and we can already see i mean look it's already happened like let's i know people don't like this company but let's say

finance this was you know totally you know shitcoin company they were an ico company um but it's absolutely one of the most successful icos ever right and what happened they didn't they didn't stay free they didn't stay you know the mission obviously no bitcoin is really going to sort of um like agree generally what they're doing but they're they were a untethered unregulated zero fiat company same with bitmex same with bitmex these guys were free banking untethered using bitcoin primarily but also in check coins i guess more in binance case they were a decentralized free system and they both got captured yeah um so that to me is the interesting question really about what will or could happen with a bitcoin uh like a true bitcoin

free system because uh those those examples i agree they're more sort of free banking like they're more you know but any system if you're going to get big enough you're going to have enough money people your footprint is starting to get around they're going to want to get you and they're going to want to tax you yeah well and i think this is where implementation details really come into play and obviously bitmex finance bitmex i think most beautifully and i don't think they get enough credit for really building a a primitive bitcoin bank with the way they implemented multisig and did all their payouts and sure geographically distributed but in the case of bitmex and binance like you needed

i'm trying to figure out how i want to describe you you need those core teams really understood the space and were able to spin up a business like a legal business entity with processes and all this and they had like their siloed sort of way of operating and building their businesses where i think i've been really on this tip that i think like the re-emergence of e-cash mints particularly the two protocols feddy mint and cashew the fact that you have these protocols that are open source permissionless and you sort of had these out of the box this out of the box banking infrastructure that doesn't necessarily you have a team of open source developers building out these protocols and anybody can leverage the the product of the work of that open source team

whereas in the case of bitmex and binance you're really dependent on those closed source teams to build out that infrastructure and i think you can squint and see an implementation of a rapidly growing competitive and hydro like free banking system with these cashew mints and if you go back to chom in the 80s and what the the holdup was there is that it failed in the 80s because you need permission from the banks to actually do anything whereas with these e-cash protocols you don't need any permission you just go to github and figure out how to peg in and peg out bitcoin an issue um e-cash tokens and boom you have a bank that is my dream maybe it's naive maybe it's too optimistic but i think implement no 100 for me uh as well the you know to use the

old parallel uh word right it's fiduciary media it's a it's a you're setting up something that's related but different to the underlying base which in the old days was of course gold or silver at times uh there are so many better things about the both the systems that you just mentioned fetty and cashew than any other prior system but even there right the um the different coordinators or i can't even forget the language of fetty uh but you know say you're a farmer like say you have a big farming operation in africa yeah the guardians right my understanding is there still is a possibility that guardians could uh certainly in some way shape or form rug you uh you're right right i mean for lack of a better word and that that's that's totally fine but i'm not totally

fine but that's that's natural the way that the system needs to scale i'm not i'm absolutely not uh poo-pooing any of this this is like this is like like you said this is basically my you know one of my dreams as well that's why i like reading about free banking history because it's it's something that existed it worked it was there and then it failed so we have to do better than that and i think we're on the way i think it's amazing what uh those guys are doing and i think it's totally possible i uh i do that the rub will be though uh probably two main things right it's be of course the co-opting it at some point like you said if you know however that form might occur it could be different in different places and different geographical factors and

socioeconomic factors it might be you know some some guardians turn out to be mafia like some guardians might turn out to be co-opted by the state i have no idea i'm just saying i know these guys think about that stuff too all the time uh we got plenty of time so that's that's probably the main risk that people think about but then the other risk which goes back to the power law stuff and the um you know the exponential stuff is you can start to make money off of these systems if you can be like well you know let's just let's keep the bitcoin here you're just going to start using our uh fiduciary media our sort of certificates yeah this this uh this uh this chami and mint is backed one-to-one but this one isn't because the state is involved and then this

other state is involved here here here and you can just imagine that there is if the economic growth is big enough anywhere it doesn't really matter what we're talking about if the economic growth is big enough there will there will be that sort of perennial tendency of the of wherever you are operating to come after you and you know fill their coffers uh with with tax revenue so um it's it's just going to be interesting it's going to be interesting to see how that works i mean on the one hand you know we could maybe set up the the true dream of the old the anarcho-capitalist paradise where things everything starts to have a fee and a price and service can be delivered from infrastructure water you know bitcoin mining right can give

heating you know there's all sorts of amazing things that can happen i'm sure you've done some shows with some of those miners um talking about that like gridless was doing that and stuff but the uh the question will be is if we can overcome the state the state monopoly there when they want to come in and start doing it their way very mafia like as rothbard said there's only the the mafia and the state are the two groups that can just sort of come and demand demand revenue from you without necessarily providing a service it's fun to dive into these like deep philosophical where we'll go and i think it's not only fun but it's important i think to anchor to put something down like here's a vision to strive for to at least test out

um and i think it's also important to recognize where we are still in the very nation stages of bitcoin overall and even more so these second layer technologies and these financial contracts and his way of doing things but i think it's also important to recognize that the stuff is getting built out like really tying this back to the overall tenor of the beginning of the episode which was people are somewhat disappointed with where Bitcoin is from a price perspective. And there's another contingent of people who are disappointed because Bitcoin

doesn't seem to be maturing at all at different levels, different parts of the stack. But I think that's inarguably untrue. They are actually paying attention. All this stuff is getting built and getting more mature and getting used more every day. yesterday we have somebody helping us out with the youtube thumbnails uh the clickbait to make

sure that we're getting as many views as possible and he sent me uh he sent me an invoice via blink wallet which i was not expecting at all this is some dude i think we found on youtube and he has to get paid in bitcoin using blink wallet using the lightning network and that was a that was a shocking um sort of signal to me like oh people are waking up this network adoption is happening yep oh there you go man it's a great no it's a great thing um i'm super bullish i mean we talk about all these uh don't get me wrong if listeners are thinking i'm you know doubting i'm absolutely um very very confident that one at least one of these paths uh to sort of stay free in bitcoin will work and obviously it's not limited to just one i mean there are just so

many different ways to do it um i think it's i think it's for sure green pastures but yeah it is the sort of the current fiat world that we're in can be quite uh unforgiving for people giving very depressed yeah I don't know I think people are waking up though

I think people are getting fed up you gotta have that optimism we're gonna break free absolutely

it's inevitable that they will get fed up and look for other options and you know Bitcoin's gonna be there

gold failed there right like I said you were the gold bug if you were the gold bug

and we were at some gold conference in 1981 you're like this is it this is on game on and then 20 year bear and alan greenspan in the 90s is telling you that he's got the gold market captured bitcoin is not doing that i mean it's uh it could it could happen but absolutely you know actually capturing it

actually actually stopping every single person from running a node and uh you know being able to censor every transaction and being able to control the market price we're a long long way from that so i have no uh no doubt that we're going to give it a good run here with bitcoin it's the best chance we have it really is but speaking of gold bugs and gold well it's having a moment right now it's having a moment it is it's still i saw your tweet i saw your tweet about the uh gold you know getting to the highest reserves ever and more than treasuries uh i'm pulling up right now we are so obviously it's 35 we're at 35 63 corn's even pumping a little bit up 111

k the model that i just pulled in earlier at the start of this episode i think was 109 so we just pumped like 2k during the course of this episode of course of this chat 2.5k hasn't even been posted yet and the universe can feel signal coming from it smash buying bitcoin what a letdown if it's 105 when this thing is released but uh no i love it dude no i mean yeah gold is pumping i think it's um it makes sense geopolitically that states are doing that uh it's funny though you know

the trend i do like trends on this stuff as well also to look at uh you know comparisons with bitcoin the trend is still generally flat to even slightly down since the 60s of gold of central banks holding gold but since 2008 they've been consistently buying and like you said we're getting now to the point where in dollar terms gold is you know your gold reserves are more than your treasury reserves that's uh that's that's big news yeah i'm just gonna pull this up here i'll share a screen for the first time ever during one of these episodes but just to put a visual on this for um everybody watching on youtube or wherever here's the chart we're talking about foreign central

banks hold more gold and treasuries for the first time since the early 90s yeah that's a good chart i gotta get that i gotta get that data online yeah i mean and even though exogenous factors only factor for five percent of of bitcoin price movement right in your opinion it is fascinating to observe what is going on if only because it just take bitcoin out of the question it is very obvious that we are in some sort of phase change in terms of the global monetary system as is evidenced by people falling back to gold in favor or in disfavor of treasuries yep you see there it's 75 that's an 850 gold price for like i said two seconds on the comex in 1980 uh that's a huge valuation there of gold and um you know can we go back to that

i don't know but i absolutely think the bitcoin will be a part of that now moving forward um but also i'm not you know i think there's a lot of conflicting messages between bitcoiners as well you know you have a lot of bitcoiners that are even uh I don't know you have a lot of Bitcoiners who are saying that it's a good thing that governments are starting to reserve Bitcoin you have a lot of Bitcoiners that

think that that's a bad thing that governments reserve Bitcoin what's your take on that if Bitcoin starts to become a mix in that basket I have a very mvk view on this which is bitcoin is money for enemies and there's nothing you can do you just have to if you're worried about the government potentially co-opting

or wall street co-opting blackrock co-opting whoever the only way to prevent that is to hold your own private keys run your own node and make sure that hash rate's sufficiently distributed um i think what if they say no withdrawals for americans like no no americans can hold gold yeah that's when uh that's when you take to the streets and you say no that's why don't wait for it and it is certainly a possibility as you just mentioned it has happened before in u.s history with executive order 6102 and to best prepare for that is to make sure that you get your bitcoin off the exchanges and into your own wallets that you secure and i think luckily we're still in this period where a majority of bitcoin is held

in individual wallets with private keys secured by individuals the trend is going in the wrong direction but that is a product of the institutions coming in and buying via the etfs and paper bitcoin summer with the treasury companies um right i do think everybody should be proactive and if you want to protect yourself from the withdrawal button being turned off by the u.s government at exchanges just don't don't wait for that to happen be active get it into your own wallet secure your own private keys yeah and if the government does do that like i think i think it would be hard for me to believe that people bitcoin or specifically particularly the early adopters would just roll over and allow that to happen without some pushback right i was on a

panel with uh peter todd and helsinki and he said similar things i mean on some level it is going to get political uh you know there you will have to push back um he gave the example of the you know if code is for speech right the cypherpunks had to do the government in the 90s it actually won although that analogy is still very hinged on a u.s centric world which we're moving away from now frankly so in any event i think it's still better bitcoin is i still think going to do well in this world right in a more multipolar world even though these you know russia of course has no gold because they're stupid they lost it all but china does um have a lot and they continue to buy uh and so so gold will be a part of it and if you think bitcoin will be a part of

it but you know yeah i hope i hope it like the other side of whatever comes here i hope it's not you know too bloody too violent but uh like you said you i think people are gonna have to push back if this you know if your basic rights and private property rights free speech rights start you get taken away you will have to push back yeah and i can think of a number of founders that run exchanges in my mind that if the government were to signal like hey we're going to turn off the withdrawal button like i like to think the romantic in me likes to think that there are principal bitcoiners and positions and many exchanges that would sort of force their users to withdraw saying like hey you need to figure out how to download blue wallet

we're going to send you your bitcoin because we don't want to we don't want to be holding this do you think that there are principled owners of bitcoin treasury companies oh god i think a lot of sorry i just had to lob that one out there for you well you want to hear my theory what are your thoughts on um the u.s government taking a 10 stake in intel hold on i want to hear your theory first well this is the setup for the theory what are your thoughts on the u.s government taking 10 stake in intel i'm not gonna i'm not gonna throw too much judgment out there first of all uh you don't get too much back into the geopolitics of this episode but um

if you want to envision yourself as a citizen fully sovereign uh way in the future or your your grandchildren or your heirs way in the future i think that's sort of easier to uh envision but we talk about even just a hundred years ago uh the consolidation of power between you know monarchies and a few governments around europe uh we're completely consolidated and completely hopeless as far as the proletariat i think we're somewhere in the middle of that today okay so what i'm saying to answer your question is i don't think i think it's a gray issue i don't think it's black and white if someone wants to you know if we talk about pure capitalism in a free market uh i think that's one thing but if you're talking about an entity like the government

buying 10 of intel okay but what about if the chinese government came in and tried to buy 10 of intel or the indian government tried to come in and buy 10 of intel you don't think that the u.s government would stop that so there are pros and cons there i understand the idea of the u.s government trying to do this for a defensive as a defensive play um and those those uh though that position is not without merit on the other side as a free market person obviously yes i'm not a fan of seeing the government come in and you know take bigger and bigger stakes in companies so it's mixed i could see there being merit to it but also like intel why are you buying intel it has been good since annie grove died and you're basically buying a loser in hopes that

the injection of or like it's not even they didn't even check there that's the chips act they're basically converting subsidies from that act into equity um it's like they're getting the money anyway u.s is getting the u.s government is getting in taxpayers by extension theoretically are getting a return based off of that equity injection but you know the point bringing up is if you didn't want a 6102 if you were the US government if you

understood the game theory of Bitcoin adoption and particularly tipping your cards to your adversaries in terms of what you're doing on the Bitcoin adoption

side one great way To build a Bitcoin stack is to have somebody in the private sector acquire 3% of all Bitcoin and then come in one day and just print money, acquire that company and their balance sheet and make their shareholders whole via printed money. That's a great way to build a Bitcoin reserve. sure sure and uh are you referring to anybody in particular by chance yeah micro strategy you know large bitcoin holder yeah perhaps yeah six hundred thousand plus coins yeah no man i mean the theories are out there for sure i mean the headquarters is a tyson corner i believe it's right next to every defense contractor in the united states no i mean um

look you and i are pretty skeptical on a lot of that stuff so i'm with you there uh no not actually like honestly like it's just a theory it's fun to to talk about and to surmise but honestly if you're thinking like the most um sort of painless way to do a 6102 like event just like you have like a strategy acquire all the bitcoin once it gets to a certain level the government's like okay this is a good strategic reserve for us you print the money you make shareholders hold maybe even at a premium everybody gets paid back the government gets their bitcoin and again i'm not saying this is happening but yeah it is funny yeah so so i i share your skepticism most of our listeners who've listened

to me and you chat for all these years hopefully know that i share your skepticism but i also have this other layer of skepticism towards other governments and the united states actually i don't think it's the worst i still think it's the best looking horse in the glue factory as i usually say the dollar and even the government in some cases not in not in others but um you know a very simple example all the uh nice hard right uh anti-woke podcasters or some of them let's say uh were contracted by russia earlier this year via a company called tenant media and were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars an episode to create content you know the likes of tim pool dave rubin these guys it's it's not it's not only walled to like it's not the u.s not the government

is not playing just with itself there are there are a lot of other players happening so that's what i meant with my intel answer of trying to say it a little bit of both ways like it's a defensive it might it might be a dumb move it like you said it could be a totally dumb move but i don't actually know again in the world where our grandchildren and their grandchildren are living in a purely anarcho-capitalist paradise running a node and maybe mining a little bit of bitcoin on nuclear fusion or something versus the world of 100 years ago we are unfortunately i think and i would use this word unfortunately we're still in a world where there are big big powers that play with a lot of money and a lot of guns and they're worse going on right now so it's very

difficult you got to watch out for that and i also think and this is where i kind of land more on the side of like i think the way that peter todd looks at some of this geopolitical stuff he's a big ukraine supporter by the way um is they're they're just our adversaries they're there are government government adversaries there are government uh intelligence agency adversaries there are good companies and bad companies in different jurisdictions it's just not the u.s government alone by itself uh anybody can argue about the strategy the u.s government takes on a lot of things i would certainly argue uh in many ways but that little example of the right-wing podcasters being paid by the kremlin which i have been again yelling for years as rt was ascending

in the 2010s on youtube that's just that's one example to think about you know we just thought there's a summit in china right right now where all the all the dictators are meeting including modi even though people like to say that modi is a like india is still a democracy because trump put all the tariffs on them right and now he's meeting with xi and putin and kim jong-un is even coming in is he my train yeah he's coming in by train and they canceled all the trains uh in china like lovely communist uh the move right there like i don't know how many hundreds of millions of chinese just got shut off of a train he's coming in but i mean he's coming in by train and this is a very rare event by the way you know kim jong-un would come like he might meet with

trump in singapore or he might meet one-on-one with xi but this is a major dictator event that's occurring right now you know erdogan's there from turkey and and then modi who's real i mean we can say india's democracy but there's they're fledgling democracy at the moment modi himself has got plenty of uh autocratic history let's say i feel like he's been in for quite a while he has indeed that's that's really all you need to do is look at the track record like putin for 25 years lukashenko was there of course from belarus very close to the baltics here he's been in for 31 years i mean it's a wild it's a wild world man it's a wild world so anyway there's that stuff as well going on that's my long-winded answer to uh to your point there about the

government getting involved in u.s businesses yeah why can't we all just get along man vipers everywhere man vipers everywhere i'm just trying to run around the block with my son not have to worry about that and do that hey let's go back to the top of the show message we're getting close to the end right uh enjoy the power curve it's 95 of what bitcoin is doing the adoption you can see it you can visualize it uh let me finish off with one more chart here just so people those brave souls that have stuck through our that you have one of the highest retention uh particularly my rants because i know a lot of people don't like my ukraine stance but let me show you let me show you the

bitcoin as we close it out here i think this is my new headline chart as far as showing the whole thing it got the power curve we got the power curve we got exponential curve we got money we got bitcoin so this is now what i'm calling trad five base money it is available gold and silver so it doesn't include industrial and then since gold and silver is actually a little bit apart of the monetary base there's like four trillion now because it's a huge value in uh backing the fiat based money which is liability you take that off so you just look at unbacked uh unbacked uh fiat money that's what this is okay at the moment that total right now is 38 trillion all right 38 trillion and the

the bitcoin network all right this is right there okay bitcoin dominance 5.6 percent all right 2.2.1 trillion is this moves from actual values right into the trend lines right so you can see them but uh this is actually graphically what i mean when i say 95 of bitcoin's action right now is just the uh the power curve itself like we literally this is kind of the real bitcoin dominance if if fiat based money altogether is 40 trillion gold silver fiat based money central bank money bitcoin's two trillion we're at five percent all right question would be when do we uh cross that would be here go out to 2041 or so uh actually it's changed a little bit here but um 2041 roughly 120 uh trillion

and there's an idea for you 15 years from now um something to shoot for the it's around this mythical 100 trillion all right and i think that we're going to get close there uh probably sooner and again when we do meet it's still 50 50 so that's money that's valued in something like a dollar that has nothing to do with bitcoin okay because it's unbacked fiat based money would be something like 100 trillion 120 trillion uh bitcoin itself if it got to 120 trillion there would still be 50 50 so so i keep saying these money supplies keep growing skate to where the puck is going uh yeah i think 15 17 years is probably where we will match and this is this is how you can see basically um you know

tradfi which runs in a exponential straight line on log scale right versus bitcoin which runs in a power trend on log scale which is a sort of nice gently sustainable curve so that's what i think i'll keep tracking this uh keep tweaking it but that's what i think is going to happen you know what i think is going to happen tell me we're gonna get to year 2041 and people are going to be digging through the archives of the episodes that we've been producing for seven years seem like this guy was a genius he told us how exactly how it was going to happen yes looking forward to that no uh it's tweaked around a lot like these numbers are super sensitive and um the trend line is sensitive like you know i could tweak a couple

things and this could go up to like 140 trillion so just want to make that caveat this can be i'm tweaking this all the time based on the changes in the numbers and the uh the updates of the trend line itself when i do these quarterly reports so it's you know the big big big ticket numbers uh long time period out might be like may something like that that was it was showing that before when i before i did this quarterly update it was already up to like 140 145 trillion now it's down to 120 we'll see we'll see based on all the price action and everything that happens but who knows it might be that mythical 100 trillion uh is exactly where bitcoin passes the fiat world but this is this is how i see it sort of a headline idea yeah i like it very exciting

very exciting so all reasons to be bullish all reasons to huddle never financial advice but if you want to play around with the extremes of those uh percentiles and ape in and out check my streams mostly every day check the streams check out porkopolis.io there's a porkopolis economics let me say yep yep yep popolis.io we'll link to all this money.world you can get a lot of different uh a lot of different places it was funny because i was setting out to write the newsletter last night i wrote the newsletter that i wrote last night because i was beginning to question myself i guess bitcoin is it not doing what it should be doing is are we having a depressed cycle and then i just went back to basics i went to look at the chart

i said no it's right on trend we're we're fine people are the noise for anybody listening i think the lesson to take from this conversation really every conversation and matthew and i have um every quarter is this is the best way to filter out the noise this is the signal if you're ever feel your emotions being manipulated by people on twitter or gold bugs or whoever it may be just fall back to basics look at look at the data this is where the signal is there's a lot of noise out there it's only going to get louder and there's going to be more of it so twitter is not real life it really isn't it really isn't running around the block enjoy with your kids is real life okay good i love it man i'm very happy for you good luck with the uh the newest getting some sleep and

uh and all the rest but i'm very happy for you buddy thank you sir i'm gonna run around the block actually it's you said you said tonight so you got a while yeah we got a while i could run around the block with my little one maybe we'll do that yeah um we're gonna be doing this until 2041 so i think we will do i think we will oh i just hope uh i hope central and eastern europe are preserved and safe until then that's what we're working for yeah i think i think we're gonna be good i think we're gonna let's see let's see and uh when in doubt run your own note yeah bitcoin enjoy yourself marty always a pleasure my friend maddie the pleasure is always mine. Peace and love, freaks. If you've made it this far, I want to thank you for listening

and ask you for a couple things. Can you subscribe on the platform that you're listening to? Maybe give us a rating and a review. That helps the show quite a bit, whether you're listening on Spotify, Apple, or Fountain. Speaking of Fountain, that is my favorite podcasting app. If you go over to Fountain, you can subscribe to the show, become a paid subscriber to support the show and receive these episodes ad free in a day early let's go find fountain we're going to fountain.fm become a paid subscriber