TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #689: Q3 2025 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Marty sits down with Matthew Mežinskis to discuss Bitcoin's power curve growth model, why recent price volatility shouldn't cause panic, and how understanding network effect adoption provides long-term perspective during turbulent markets. 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/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: [https://drinksote.com/tftc\](https://drinksote.com/) 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/](http://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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Matthew Mazingtious, our pet's heads are falling off. Bitcoin down 6% today, sitting at $86,262.

Is it over? Marty, we've been through this before. I know. We need to step back. congratulate everyone who's listening for still having diamond hands if you tried it a little bit congratulations even more but life is good when you hold bitcoin spend time with your family don't think about this too much although i haven't done uh you know like i was telling you i was even blissfully sleeping usually i'm blissfully sleeping during twitter drama uh you know

primetime us twitter drama over here in europe but um i i did want to check and i didn't even check it like this this five thousand dollar drop has to be not necessarily in percentage terms but in gross dollar terms one of the biggest you know daily drops we've had really we're right back i don't know we're right back to where we were uh seven days ago we're actually up yeah uh 37 basis points since this time last week yeah depending on your time frame it's either bullish or bearish we did a nice little bart formation here on the chart between yeah to get the old simpsons yeah people are very worried though people people are looking out there they're saying hey cycle theory is broken

There's a lot of demand out there There's a lot of buying, a lot of ETF inflows But the price isn't moving JP Morgan is manipulating the price of MicroStrategy's stock There's Caitlin Longs out there Saying there's price repression What are you seeing, sir? Well, you know

on my streams i try to do some deep dives on the price relative to other assets over a longer period of time and with the theory being that you know you can manipulate if you want to use that word manipulate or suppress markets you can absolutely do that in the short term maybe even the medium term but it's very difficult to do that over the long term i think that'd be most evidence by gold right there's a lot of bitcoin conspiracies don't hold a candle to gold conspiracies you know alan grainspan said in 1996 or so central banks stand ready to sell gold show the price rise and yet here we are gold four thousand dollars an ounce now a bitcoiner wouldn't like that bitcoiners expect bigger moves faster

And we are indeed on a much faster growth trajectory than the gold market. But I think the market eventually gets that price that buyers and sellers accurately reflects their demand and supply and I think will eventually sort itself out. But yeah, I envisioned doing my daily streams here. You've seen all my percentiles and running against the power curve. And I envisioned during exactly this time talking about, okay, so how many days have we been above the 80th percentile, 90th percentile? Just preparing people that we could run, trying to stay calm. I like the phrase, my friend, he goes by APSK. He's a good power law.

does a lot of charts uh on twitter he's like you said all you said bitcoin would break all our models but didn't expect that to be to the downside so uh you know we're gonna have to see but in general you know we can we can look at the part the charts whenever you want but i mean in general we're still on a power trend nothing is broken there and uh as long as you understand that bitcoin grows like a network uh which obviously you talk to plenty of people who who uh you know can reinforce that way different than any other traditional finance asset uh i think you're gonna be okay and the best way to do that is we've been talking about now for i don't know how many years going on seven it's crazy yeah but i was not going to say just about

the base money stuff, because that is true for the taxonomy of where we are, but rely on that power curve for some comfort. Because I still think, and I've said this before in your show, I still think that 95% of what Bitcoin does right now is relative to the power curve, right? Whether it's over, under, this is a trajectory of network adoption. You put it log-log scale. It's a beautiful straight line. This is how networks grow. We can talk about that in as much detail as you want, but that nothing has changed from that thesis. And you can compare it with gold, compare it with dollars, the stock market. They all have power relationships, which is wild. It is a wild thing because the rest of the world

is run on credit and grows exponentially and often very in a non-stable manner so uh you know even with these big swings in bitcoin you're still very much uh hugging this 96 r-squared power trend which is you know something to take comfort in it's a sustainable it's a sustainable trend unlike Tradify trends, which are not stable, often very volatile, often booms and busts. Bitcoin has a different trend. No, and I'm not sure if you've been following it, but to your point, 95% of what we see in price action is driven by this network adoption. The other 5% by external variables, if we're looking at short term. impact on price i mean i was a bit tongue-in-cheek with the suppression talk earlier but i think

what we're seeing now is mcqueen's use case as a liquidity alarm bell i'm not sure if you saw japanese bond markets last night and over the course of the last month looks like they're blowing out and boj came out i mean i don't know if it was the boj or just an official but sort of signaling hey we may have to raise rates here to control this runaway yield curves that we have here yeah yeah and uh it's funny because japan it's a story like greece i mean they've been going at this for 30 years now uh excessive money printing it sort of always seems to uh somehow be this surprise that we have to deal with um but how long this carry trade will uh continue to go uh to anybody's guess i don't know the yen

you know unless you're really worried about meta planet most people uh you know it's just japanese uh japanese investors that are usually the ones most suspected or japanese investors trying to get in and out of you know other currencies to get more yield than they used to get or typically get you know with their own currency um so i don't think about it too much but yeah it is a it is a major currency yeah well let's uh let's dive into the charts give people some peace of mind good all right so uh obviously you want to start with uh start with price first and foremost okay this is the old power curve if this was uh you know an exponential trend as i often talk about this would be a straight line not this nice smooth

sustainable line and we're definitely low all right i got this little dip in 86 600 when i pulled in the model and if you just go to the fun ones let's go to say the 90th percentile all right I did quantiles now which is a little bit different I would have the sort of jagged lines in the past sometimes because that is a multiple over under trend to keep a fixed multiple now this is a fixed percentile in any event it's it's very similar result so I envisioned you know somewhere here Bitcoin jumping above and then I'd just be talking to my viewers like okay so let's just expect how days are we above it here here let's just think about how many days we've been above it which

usually is not more than two to three months right but that hasn't materialized other than a little bit uh at the end of last year after the uh election and then a little bit uh last summer but again when i show these charts i always caution A lot of what the analysts, the technical traders will do on trading view is they're usually thinking in straight line and log linear space or exponential growth, which is how typically stocks move. And Bitcoin just doesn't do that. So I think whether you talk about these Elliott waves or ABCD corrections, all that stuff, Bitcoin, there's not an established method over the long term that is definitely going to do that. because it just does not have a straight line uh exponential growth on log scale so anyway if we take it the median the 50th percentile it's a little bit below the trend uh 40th and then 30th

is where we are so another way of saying that is based on the power trend which should give everybody a lot of comfort the price right now has only been this low 30% of the time. Okay, so 6,500 days of Bitcoin or whatever it is, you know, 600 days would be 10%. So 1,800 days, something like that. You know, you can just do the rough math. It's been at this level.

Of course, it can go lower, can always go lower. But what this can tell us is just the relative risk of where the price is, you know, relative to its relationship to the trend in the past. And if we go to the lowest levels expected, which would be levels like this back in 2022, with the SBF puking and all the other DeFi scams of that time, right now, that suggests the lowest, lowest level of $57,000 Bitcoin.

By the end of the year, it'll be a little bit higher, $60,000, $59,000. The trend itself, the overall trend will be $125K. And then getting in the 90th percentile, whether you do it a couple different metrics, I think you get like $200K or $250K. Now, I have been one of the few people to not fully discount the four-year cycle simply because we haven't been through it. I know a lot of people seem to be keen to make that call. I'm not saying it's definitely not going to be over. So it's kind of a wimpy call from that side. But I just, I don't know.

The data is not all in yet. We haven't even finished the year. You never know. There could still be a pump. And there's some other interesting little data that I could show you that shows at least something is happening on-chain with some movement of coins. So we can look at that as well. But yeah, I'll stop there.

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to hop on with you the price is uh falling wondering if you're out there particularly if you're relatively new i'm sure you're thinking maybe you bought bitcoin above a hundred thousand and maybe you bought a little bit at the top at $123,000 to $126,000. You're thinking, gosh, what did I do? What did I do? What am I doing? Did I get duped by these people? This is why we check in with Matthew once a quarter

and look at the power trend because nothing is out of whack here. Yeah, and it moves fast. If you want to know some numbers as far as how this thing goes, the trend itself goes up $100 a day. It still does. right? By the end of the year, the trend will be growing at 42% a year. 42%. So you compare that to your stocks, bonds, gold, whatever you want to... JGBs, whatever you want to compare it with. The trick, the interesting thing, which a lot of people are trying to figure out, including

myself, is there's this interesting... As we have this thing, it's not a straight line, right? The stock market would be the gold market, which I'll show you in a second. That actually means that the rate of growth is declining for Bitcoin ever so slightly. You can find these calculations on my website, but it's an interesting phenomenon. And well, without getting too deep into it, I think it's possible that Bitcoin could go exponential, which means it could turn into a straight line on long-term, which, by the way, is faster growth. If you just want to go full bull case,

or I don't know, you might like exponential growth. But the thing is, wrapped inside of exponential growth is a lot of fiat interest. And that's just the nature of the math. mortgages, your car mortgage, lines of credit, everything in the world is exponential growth. And so if Bitcoin starts to take on enough fiat credit behind it, maybe Bitcoin itself will be pulled into this exponential growth. What I'm hoping though, because this is sort of an idea that I think it's like, okay, well,

maybe early investors will just have number grow up, but the rest of us will be still laden with a lot of debt and there'll be that, you know, a lot of fiat interests swirling around the lower levels of the Bitcoin system. I think a more interesting scenario could be as the world continues to go through these debt crises, however they may play out. There's a lot of theories there, but however these sort of sovereign debt crises or situations may play out, whether there's excessive inflation or some deflationary crashes, which as you know, you and I are both inflationists. They're always going to print a paper over that. But in any event, how this might play out is if the world starts to understand that Bitcoin really is that

risk-free asset, and no matter how you want to phrase it, you cannot print Satoshis like you can print dollars, there's a possibility the credit could completely change. The whole game of credit could change. And so that's what I'm trying to think about right now a lot. I talk about this a lot because then you might be in a situation where this nice, beautiful, sustainable power curve of Bitcoin changes the entire TradFi system, where the entire TradFi system doesn't go into these unsustainable booms and busts, but it more becomes into this sort of gentle growth. that mirrors the growth of Bitcoin that you can see with the hash rate or address growth or the growth of the price and market cap itself. So that's a little bit, you know, that's a lot for

the start of the episode. But that's one of the things that I'm thinking about, sort of, will Bitcoin change the system? Or will Bitcoin be changed by the system? Yeah, and this is a thread we've been pulling on all year, essentially, when the power trend slope and the exponential slope intersect what what takes over what i hope it's the yeah i hope it's the uh the bitcoinization of finance and the sort of curbing of excess risk taking and credit creation i'm hopeful that can happen too yeah but it's going to be a fight you know i mean like we talk about this all the time and crypto twitter right uh bitcoin twitter crypto twitter it's like okay well we have all these you know you have these like

ethereum etfs i mean you have a lot of wall street chasing a lot of garbage as they usually do zcash zcash yes yes unfortunately i uh don't have any of those saved hawk into bitcoin but win some you lose some um the the idea that wall street can just sort of come in and overtake the bitcoin industry like it's overtaken any sort of nascent industry is of course strong in this you know you started out the top of the show talking about what caitlin long's saying what a lot of people in wall street are saying and i think still a lot of people in wall street don't even buy into bitcoin

right they're more interested in ai not at all asking about the energy consumption of ai versus bitcoin but that's another story and uh you know the the verdicts the jury's still out on that obviously bitcoin is a global thing it's not it's just not even though it might be very nicely tailored for some collateralized Bitcoin instruments where you can draw on it, sort of like you can draw on Manhattan real estate and all that stuff. Bitcoin is a global system that's really outside the purview of any central bank. And as long as it doesn't get co-opted by central banks like the gold market has done in the last 100 years. I think at least that short to midterm manipulation, to use that word, would be very difficult. And probably not even

the long term, as we said. I don't think the long term, you can manipulate this stuff over the long term, but they're going to give it a big fight, man. They're going to give it a big fight. And And, you know, all these people were talking about a year ago how the Trump administration, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this, like Trump administration's going to legitimize Bitcoin and crypto. It's hard for me to see them legitimizing anything at the moment, Marty, but I'd be curious what you think about how, I do not think that the nation state threat to Bitcoin is over yet. A lot of people thought it was a year ago. No, I don't think it is either. I think we have some recent actions that would prove that the fight is not over, particularly the samurai plea deal and then sentencing, which was incredibly egregious. in terms of um the attack on open source developers building non-custodial wallet

software being punished right yeah that's not a good sign that's happening in trump's america um and then as it pertains like trump and his crypto policy i think obviously the two of us are of a certain purview that bitcoin is a thing worth focusing on if we're just being objective of the first 10 months 11 months of 10 months of this administration it's been unfocused on bitcoin and more focused on stable coins market structure and potentially creating the foundation to co-op bitcoin by putting strict laws and regulations around it and sort of ordaining particular companies as those are the ones that you're allowed

to interact with, with Bitcoin. And again, going back to the samurai thing, the sort of punishment of those using Bitcoin in a self-sovereign fashion and building tools to enable people to do that. So, but yeah, I think we're in a weird spot. And actually, I think the way you set that up in terms of is Bitcoin going to get co-opted like gold or is it going to break free, considering the fact that it is this unique beast, this unique tool that gives you the ability to do both. I think the last six months specifically have been, if you're not paying attention, you probably should be because we've seen this sort of conflict coming to be, whether it's MicroStrategy, Strategy, launching all these preferred offerings, trying to put Bitcoin into these wrappers and provide yield on top of it.

obviously strategy stock has not been doing well we can get into the theories around jp morgan and their attempts to co-opt products like that because they they deem them as a threat but i think if you juxtapose sort of those actions with what we've seen from companies like block and their square point of sale rollout to really and their aggressive their aggressive campaign to make bitcoin everyday money i think uh if you look at public markets and two of the behemoths in public markets as it pertains to bitcoin strategy in block we're seeing those two visions sort of duke it out at that level right now as well maybe not even duke it out we just simply present two different paths for bitcoin's future yeah and it's going to be interesting to

see you know how strong the u.s really can be in some of these things right with this global asset because i was on a panel in helsinki with peter todd and i'm back over the summer and it always revolves back to this sort of political nature versus the sort of economic force that bitcoin is and peter was he said this a lot you've probably seen him right you know he's referenced the cypherpunks in the 90s and the uh code of speech and uh you know the national security issues that were surrounding code crossing borders in the 90s and the u.s as the sole hegemon at the time that was a huge deal and it was one that that issue was one in the courts of the u.s that that you know code was speech to some extent and it's not you know these national security issues like

you could take code across borders and the cypherpunks did that on the other hand so i think there's a lot of so what peter was saying basically is at some point it is going to have to be political you're gonna have to win politically but then on the other hand i think about this a lot in that, you know, it seems almost bizarre that Bitcoin would have to be deemed legitimate. Like at the end of the day, what's it going to come down to a Supreme Court ruling over something specific, you know, it's like five guys in black robes or ladies in black robes, like deciding that this some Bitcoin, you know, ruling is really going to

sort of set the policy for bitcoin in the next 50 years i think that that's actually less likely especially based on the way that the rest of the geopolitical world is kind of going at the moment you know china's trying to be big in gold and obviously russia's a basket case which we are dealing with over here and the us you know is having its own new approaches to uh geopolitical issues in the americas north and south so it's just it seems less likely to me that a supreme court ruling would be sort of like the final arbiter of where we go with some of this but anyway starting to philosophize a lot on that so we can we can bring it back to the charts um so anyway point is

70% of the time we've been higher than this relative to the trend so with some statistical accuracy you can say there's a 70% probability that we'll be higher than this into next year especially if you don't consider

or if you consider that we have not had really a blow off top which would make it more likely that we shoot below these levels anything can happen but that's sort of how I'm looking at it If you look at gold now, all right, so here's gold over the last 50 years on a weekly basis. And its trend is not as good, but it's an exponential trend, straight line. See, Bitcoin has this nice curve, right?

Which everybody should know now, by now, in log space, log linear. Gold is a straight line, so it's exponential growth. And obviously, we're super, super high. um if you do these quantile regressions which sort of just take every individual level as their own thing and try to run their own trend lines uh the worst you know was in the early 2000s and the best is indeed now all right it's relative to the 1980 top and you know relative to the 2011 top we're at we're creating new highs basically every you know almost every day whether this is some real long-term resistance i have no idea but

i can tell you one thing that peter like some peter i've drawn these different trends on my stream like this line right here if you just like imagine here like the price my mouse is over the b here which it shouldn't be a b actually i just realized with this chart because it's a gold price But over the B, it is obviously going super fast from the end of 2023. And – or the end of – yeah, the end of 2023. That's like a 40% trendline growth a year, 40%. It's matching Bitcoin, basically. That's like a Peter Schiff trend.

I just do not imagine that continuing. in fact you can run all the numbers like it's just it's not going to continue it could it go for another year or two yeah could we get to ten thousand dollar gold sure but gold just is not on any sort of a trend to reflect you know a hundred thousand dollar gold or two hundred thousand dollar gold well so yeah does this chart speak to you in terms of the thread we've been pulling on in terms of bitcoin power trend meeting the exponential growth trend of uh of credit at some point in the future and what happens like with this so we're looking at gold over the last 50 years obviously gold i would imagine in the early days millennia ago it had a power trend

adoption as it was being monetized and obviously it's been fully monetized for millennia now at this point and now that it's on this exponential growth trend is that what happened to gold it sort of ran into the the exponential trend of credit growth before long before bitcoin um and this was the the end product that's a interesting question i've never been asked that or thought about that uh i have no idea if gold would have followed a power trend the beginning but i imagine uh i imagine that if gold was the general unit of account in silver as well and we had credit which is sydney homer has said from the history of interest rates credit uh which i agree with you know credit credit is long before gold right it can be in primitive

societies advanced societies you don't need barter you don't need money you know you can promise your uncle uh you know the proceeds from the yield from the crop next season if he lets uh if he lets you use his plow or something i mean you can you can make credit out of anything and credit itself itself by nature has interest i would imagine that there would still be some sort of an exponential function always which again makes bitcoin really really unique weird I've never seen an asset grow in power. So that's what I would say there. As far as gold's growth, it's really not that exciting, which is another funny thing, right? A lot of people say this number like 8%, 9%. But that's if you're over the long term of gold.

That's if you cherry pick down here, the $35 price, and like now, $4,000 price, then you can get up to 8%, 9%. But that's a cherry picked sort of present future value, as I always try to do. If you take the long-term trend, measure the slope of that, you're at five and a quarter, 5%. So it's actually not even been a great hedge, if we consider that the global money supply, which I also measure and have always measured every quarter for the last eight years, has been growing at 10% to 12%. 12%, if you think about it more in native terms, 10% in USD terms, it means the USD accretes 2% over other currencies or other currencies lose 2% relative to the dollar on average. It shows the

supremacy. If you think about those rates of growth, then yeah, gold is actually not even that great there. So I would say it doesn't apply. It's a gold, gold, just it's so wrapped around credit. Here's the thing with Bitcoin, bottom line, if Satoshis are so rare, as rare as we know that they're going to be, you can look at the supply schedule that how many Satoshis are going to be you know minted 50 years from now and it's like such a small amount um credit's going to become you know it's it's it's it's going to be in my view very difficult to have credit markets because holding on to those satoshis passing them down to your family is going to be much more valuable endeavor than just you know going after a few extra percentage points

on some short-term corporate loan, which might fail, right? And so that's the one thing. And then the other thing is, it's just how long can this fiat game keep going? I think it can actually keep going for a long, long time, and I can show you lots of charts that will sort of reflect that.

But I have a hard time, unless it's full, this is where unless we sort of lose the legislative or the political battle. Unless everyone is literally in a financial panopticon at the wind of a gun, forced to use fiat currency for the next 80 years. And again, that's going to happen for a while. The next 10, 20 years, that's going to start to be a question mark when Bitcoin starts to become so huge. I think it's going to be hard. everything that you've always talked about on your show is basically what I'm describing here in mathematical terms. It's going to be hard to issue more and more debt to raise money for your

armies and militaries. It's going to be hard issuing more and more debt for your welfare programs. Bitcoin is what you're going to be fighting for. Everybody's going to be fighting for. And Bitcoin doesn't mix well with exponential growth. It's a limited, sustainable growth pattern. It's hard to wrap your mind around this idea, but if credit, if debt, if interest represents something that can take off, can gallop exponentially and cause a lot of these booms and busts, Bitcoin by its nature, and we've seen this in the math, does not do that. even in dollar terms which is wild so i have a hard time seeing that it might do that in the future i can show charts on this as well to make it more concrete like as far as bitcoin

continue to grow as power versus maybe growing exponential we can look at those but the general idea is yeah i think a more uh just and exciting future for everybody would be if we're not all forced to use these fiat units. And then the powers that be understand that they need to accumulate Bitcoin for their war chests and their treasury chests more than having the right to print money. So it's going to be crazy. Next 20 years is when you're going to start to really, the rubber's going to hit the road. That's where Bitcoin is going to be large enough to meet the level of the u.s debt or the monetary base or a lot of these other things in the tradfi system sup freaks have you noticed that governments have become more despotic they want to surveil more

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Um, you can get most of the data for free a little bit for some of the extra, uh, data, but these are all the different huddle waves, right? So generally as people huddle, you'll see longer and longer, uh, more, more darker, purpley blue colored waves here. Every once in a while, though, you see those waves shrink like we did here, July 4th. Someone sent like 84,000 bitcoins to Gemini, right? It's actually this deep 10-year hodling wave shrank. Anyway, if you take out the longer-term waves

and you just cap it at a year, we are seeing some little bit of short-term UTXOs growing, which typically have been around booms, right? That takes time. It could take a year. But you see it happen here, you see it happen here, you see it happen here. and of course we've had this long boom right with the three static distinct tops here since

the etfs were approved but there was an interesting notable jump here uh over the last couple days again i'm not i'm not saying but the farm on it but as the utxos are destroyed on the longer side and uh created on the shorter side that sometimes means some excess hype in the markets for price well in fact all the times mean means that when we go really extended and we're you know you can see we had three sort of two booms in the last one and even during this last price can you hear me yeah all right sorry uh and even during this last uh price spike in august of 2025 we did not have as much of a sort of a boom in the short term uh utxos but now we are which is interesting with this deep discount where we got down to you know 80 85k intraday i think

intraday it was even 80 right i don't think i picked it up on the daily 85 but so there's something so we're gonna pump in the end going straight to the to the 90th percentile it's uh it's probably too early too early to tell uh you know i was talking to james check matey a couple weeks ago and he was trying to you know he's very good at reading the on-chain He's like, probably shouldn't say it, but it kind of looks like a dip, and it turned out to be a deep dip. If it still is just a dip, to be seen, but there is a noticeable jump in short-term UTXOs. And if that spike in short-term UTXOs gets sort of proportionately high relative to the other UTXOs, then you always see the price pump. Yeah.

So, look, do I have to give my Midwest caveat of not financial advice? I'm never going to give you that. I'm never, never going to say, bet the farm, we're pumping to the 90th percentile. But it's fun to look at, right? It's fun to look at this data. It's fun to look at all of it. You know, well, and that's the other thing I think I've been trying to really wrap my head around, too, is like what's going on in the incumbent fiat system? Like, what's your read on what's going on here in the United States?

What's happening broadly with these geopolitical tensions increasing? seeing obviously we talked about the japanese bond yield blowing out earlier it seems like we're at this point and i don't know if you've been following the tea leaves of like deep economic prognostic not prognosticating but people trying to read what besent and trump are doing at the treasury and what they're trying to do at the fed and there's a lot of talk about this needle threading that they're attempting to do with tariffs, reshoring manufacturing, weakening the dollar, and trying to make sure that we can get it on the other side

and still have a sense of dominance, particularly in the realm of monetary economics. And I think we're just in a really weird inflection point as it pertains to geopolitics and its effects on macroeconomics. yeah two two things i would say two things come to mind the first one to be a little bit redundant on purpose what i just talked about at the top of the show take comfort in the fact that we have a very unique trend for bitcoin that uh you know look i've been on this trend you know the the bleeding edge of this trend since the beginning uh there's a lot of wacky characters in the space of

the in bitcoin in general but you know the people talking about different trends and you know we've had stock to flow projections and all this stuff i've been following this for seven years the that the power curve itself what's your 2025 yeah and 2018 i first did it so the giovanni character uh he's big into it he's a little bit ahead of me um but uh no matter how you you know follow people in this space. In this space, everybody's very passionate, let's say. And what I can tell you, trying to be mostly understated with some disclaimers as I usually do, I'm highly confident that the power curve itself is... It's like one of the main drivers of growth. And it's the reason... I was on Danny's show recently, talked about it. The reason is

this is how networks grow there's a lot of this is you know there's a lot of research to suggest that organisms grow this way you know uh i talked about this on my talk uh sort of my summer circuit when we're talking about growth rates and stuff like this might have been in jeffrey west book as well scale which is a great read like something like godzilla that would be an exponential growth type animal all right it would Like, it's a massive thing, it would need like a mountain of food, and by the way, it would just collapse on itself. It's just not possible, sort of in nature.

But what we see in nature is you have this nice relationship with, proportional relationship with the way organisms grow, like pretty much all mammals. Sometimes people take it to the whale size, sometimes they take it to an elephant size. But they need actually a proportionately less food as they get bigger, but they also... they don't grow to godzilla size this is proportionate growth and if you charted that sort of calories and size on log log scale you'd see a nice beautiful straight line you see it with networks right you see a few large nodes take a ton of connections and a bunch of small nodes take few connections this sort of 80 it's 80 20 rules basically it's a power law

um there's power curves everywhere but the to see it in bitcoin is really really wild and so again take comfort in that because you don't see it in the growth of gold. You don't see it in the growth of the S&P. You don't see it in the growth of stocks. Let me show you this. This is the top eight tech stocks in the world. Same thing. Now, this is a very fast R-squared, by the way. Big drops. This is Apple, Microsoft, Google, top eight stocks. It's got Broadcom in there as well now a big one with the chip uh chip race but you know they were 11 trillion dollars the top eight tech stocks in the us in 2021 fell down to 6.8 by 2023 then the ai boom started just like gold they've had 40 growth by the way with like a huge 30 uh well not 30 maybe 15

yeah during during liberation day liberation day my favorite day of the year now. It's hilarious. 13 goes down to 13.9 trillion. Now, all of a sudden, back up to 22.8 trillion. That's volatility. That's volatility. And this is an exponential curve. Actually, one of the best performing, if you just track these eight stocks. Sometimes exponential growth can help you. Sometimes it can hurt you with inflation, but it's a very volatile, volatile thing. But the fact that Bitcoin is not growing that way is very uh it's very important very interesting the next thing that i would show you is this chart remember this one i always show this guy yes yes yes this is long-term debt of the united states

and again having in mind what i just said about how the nature of bitcoin is something to take comfort in itself here's the nature of debt in the history of the united states itself It grows, grows at 7% or so, doubles every 10 years. It's actually growing even slower in recent years, surprisingly, compared to where it was growing, say, just after the Bush years. But anyway, we have overlaid with this is the central bank holdings of U.S. debt. You see it peaked in like 18% at the end of the Vietnam War. and it went down, but it was actually going down because debt was growing faster than central bank holdings. Then you had the crisis. This big dip was a Wall Street bailout. They

swapped corporate bonds for treasury bonds on the balance sheet for a time. Then they gave everybody guarantees and they went back. Then they had QE 1, 2, 3, drop, big taper tantrum repo spike in September 2019 before the madness of 2020, been the madness of 2020. And now we're down. So where does that leave us today? November 2025, the Federal Reserve held $6.2 trillion in treasuries. $38.3 trillion have been issued. All right, so that's 16%. Where have they been at the max? Well, during the crazy season, November 2021, they maxed it out at 28.3%. So by my count, that's over 12 points, 12 percentage points that they could go. All right. It's not a full double, but basically

the Fed could double what they have held in the past and still proportionately not be bigger than the highest inflation they've ever had on their balance sheet. Now, would they want to do that? Probably not. Certainly not all at once, But we know that we're going to get a dovish, a very dovish Federal Reserve chairman in soon. And anyway, anybody who casually follows economics knows that the Federal Reserve, no matter how much they say it's independent, it's not independent. The president will always get the interest rates that they want eventually, no matter the president, Democrat, Republican. So it's par for the course as far as I'm concerned. And, look, they have a lot of room to go higher if they want to go higher.

No matter all the noise, all the talk, you just look at this chart. I'm not saying it's a good thing, by the way. I'm not defending the actions, but they have a lot of room to inflate. I mean, at the very least, it would not be unprecedented if they did inflate and go back to all-time highs from here. just like eyeballing the chart pre-2008 um like well before before that dip pre-2008 they were 10 percent nine percent yeah we're hovering at 16 now it's a whole it's an interesting history of the united states right here all in one chart um federal reserve was not really involved in the funding of world war one you see they had

less than one percent of government bonds it was more like jp morgan private bankers were doing that they did become involved after the great depression or during the great depression uh and as well during world war ii but and and much more during vietnam actually and then much more after the crisis but there's no you know there's no start date or end date to this stuff they're just going to continue to to to print and to try to hold on to their power yeah so can you uh that's what we can expect can you overlay the percentage of holdings of farmers sure uh this one hasn't been up this might not be exactly correct in the last couple months but basically it goes down yeah

And that's a problem for Besson. He wants more foreigners for sure. And it's going down. Foreigners used to hold maybe 35% of the debt at the peak. And now they're down somewhere to 22, 23. This might even be a little bit lower. I haven't updated this in a couple of months. It's something like this.

Do you buy into the theory that the Genius Act was a way to get this? Like, would Tether be considered a foreign holder? I don't buy into the theory of any of that at all. Yeah. It's, what's the market cap of stablecoins? Like 180 billion, I think, right now. Yeah. The repo market itself is, by my count, 7 trillion.

I've heard higher. It's not very clearly stated, but I can show you the old U.S. money supply chart. Tether's $184.6 billion. USDC, $76.5 billion. Right. Growing, growing, but here's the old total money supply of the United States. All right, calculated by yours truly. federally, Federal Reserve has not calculated M3 since 2006. So you actually have to go

back into the numbers. Most of the data is still there. But it's hard to sort of parse through and euro dollars are not there. So this is even bigger than it shows. So it's a little bit conservative here. But the most analogous buckets of money that will fit into stable coins are these buckets right here which is part of m2 and m3 by the way what's the difference between m2 and m3 marty uh m2 on me m2 and m3 m3 gets into credit right it's a it's it's a common you know how many twitter charts have you seen of bitcoin lagging m2's money production of too many clairvoyant yeah first of all bitcoin is not comparable to m2 folks it's m2 the difference between m2 and m3 is m2 is less regulated retail deposits m3 is less regulated

institutional okay there we go and by the way what's the hottest money institutional so why in the hell would bitcoin be anything related to m2 m2 is a retail that's a retail type money supply it's not it does not include the hot money it's basic stuff but like and again i i i can forgive plenty of people for being confused on this because the federal reserve themselves have not published m3 since 2006 so you got to go through these numbers you got to sort of figure it out but my my account the hottest money right now is seven trillion in all-out repurchase agreements on the bank and shadow bank side, $5.3 trillion in money market funds for institutional and $2.1 trillion in retail money market funds. You put those two together, obviously it's seven.

So seven and seven, $14 trillion. $14 trillion, probably, not most, this is the instrument itself, but probably 14.2 trillion is US and some foreign holders mixed in there. That's the biggest holders of treasuries right there, these instruments. And so I don't see any tomorrow fix for sort of a lack in demand for treasuries, if there is one, coming from stable coins. I mean, It's a drop in the bucket compared to these markets. It's $14 trillion compared to $200 billion in stable coins. Hey, $250 billion, okay? They're clicking up.

Yes, yes. Look, it's going to grow. It's going to grow, no doubt. But none of this stuff is a... Trump definitely wants a bite of Lutnick's Cantor earnings, right? I mean, everybody knows each other's a great business. Don't get me wrong. It's all great stuff for them.

uh you know clean just collect that interest and uh you know issue the token but that's a that's a money market fund it's gonna take a long time for that stuff to revolve into stable coins and it probably is going to come but it's just not structurally it's not even there it's like when i show you the chart of fedwire versus bitcoin right remember that i can pull that up if you want to see yeah well that's one of my favorite charts and so i was i guess i was loosely correct when I said M3 is when you get into credit instruments. It's when you have all these repo, money market funds, retail market funds, buying bonds, which are credit instruments.

Sure, yeah. But to be strict on what I'm counting here, it's actually you're just counting liabilities of financial institutions and banks. That's how you count money. So it's just liabilities. What they buy on the other side is not specifically stated in the money supply. That's why I said it's probably mostly treasuries, but not always. But if you want to talk about the hottest, fastest money that's chasing US government bonds, it's here. And this is not part of M2.

Well, retail money market funds are, but institutional money market funds and repurchase agreements are in M3. So again, it's kind of a nitpicky thing, but that's important for people to think about. All right, this one, what have I... I haven't actually... It doesn't really matter. I haven't updated this one since August, but here's the old Fedwire. This is, again, why, you know, just relax.

Bitcoin's got some time here. We have $1.1 quadrillion that goes through Fedwire a year, and Bitcoin, as of August, four. And actually, that actually looks even wrong. I think something happened on my back end. I think it's seven, but it doesn't really matter. One of those is close enough. It's just orders of magnitude difference. Actually, yeah, something happened on my backend.

That's why I don't have this up on my site yet. It's like seven, seven trillion. I don't know why this is showing four now. So the black line is slightly better. Down. A little bit. Yeah, the black line will be down better, but it doesn't really matter. It illustrates the point.

I mean, in the black line, for people both watching the video and listening at home, they can't see the black line. It is on a consistent trend down and to the right as time goes on. And what it's measuring is the sort of ratio of Fedwire transfers to Bitcoin network transfers. That means that Bitcoin is growing in prominence. yeah when that gets to one then bitcoin will be competing you know apples to apples with fedwire yeah so i gotta so we're not i think starting like 2010 on the black line yeah i could just take this off something happened on my back end this this is partly right but i don't know what happened just here but anyway doesn't really matter uh the best we're actually not even at

the best. Say it's 7 right now. The best that Bitcoin did on a trailing 12-month basis was $18 trillion, which would have been at the time 57 times smaller, or more appropriately said, 57 times larger than Bitcoin, which is good. I mean, that's a great run by Bitcoin. But still, If you just look at this simply with your eyes and you see how huge the dollar network is, it's massive. And you got to think about how, you know, day to day, block to block, how much time this is going to take to accrete, right? For Bitcoin to accrete in value, it's going to take time. It's not going to take forever. but we're on you know we're on the sort of 10 to 20 year track when we're going to meet

a lot of these levels both in terms of volume and in terms of value yeah i mean if you put the black line too just to put it in context in 2010 2011 fedwire was more than a million times uh or excuse me more than 250 000 times yeah we get to no 2011 may uh which was very close to a peak in bitcoin right i can probably zoom into june june was a peak 420 000 the month before 5 million so uh and these are correct by the way so so it's uh you know it can be growing very fast at times for sure but this is a massive network with a lot of guns behind it and it's going to take time yeah uh let me show you this one so we talked about bitcoin we talked about tech stocks

Let's look at Bitcoin market cap in terms of tech stocks. This is another interesting thing. So this is also a power curve, nice, beautiful curve line on log scale. But what is sort of interesting is Bitcoin has fallen off it since it's been coming down in 2022 because AI has been growing so massively specifically during this time. So if we draw some percentiles, you will see we are putting in new lows basically every day, which is wild. So again, depending on how you want to look at this, depending on how an investor might

look at this, especially if they are coming at this from the lens of being a tech AI investor, which there are a lot of those for Bitcoin, Bitcoin is getting cheaper every day compared to the top eight tech stocks. Now, again, you could argue some of that's justified. AI is an amazing tool. It's going to take the cost down for a lot of things and the market cap up for certain companies. But Bitcoin itself is a more amazing tool, as we know. So, it's getting very cheap for tech investors looking at Bitcoin, right? If you had all eight stocks and you were just sort of looking at maybe rebalancing, getting very, very cheap. It's basically putting in new lows every day, which is wild. Now, let's look at Bitcoin in terms of gold.

Same thing. The power curve dominates. It's still 95% R-squared. But similarly, this run, since gold has also had, just like tech stocks from 2023, 40% growth since 2023, if you're a gold investor now looking at Bitcoin, you are at almost, as far as a quantile model goes, all-time lows. Bitcoin's relatively cheap right now. It's relatively cheap right now. 20 ounces of gold per Bitcoin. And I would also caution here, which I think is very wild. So 20 ounces of gold per Bitcoin, that's like setting a new low on the quantile

model. But go back even here, where Bitcoin didn't get, in terms of gold, was not at the zero with percentile. It was definitely under the 10th. It's probably around the 5th or something of all time. The price of Bitcoin at the time was nine ounces of gold. So three years ago, Bitcoin was still cheaper. Or in other words, Bitcoin right now, even with its extremely poor performance against a booming gold asset, Bitcoin is still double what it was three years ago. That's a wild thought. And to think if we have this saying, at least the investors I used to work with would joke about a lot, like you can be a pig, but don't be a hog. I am very curious how good gold bugs might have it at this point. Is it going to go back to nine? I have a very hard

time believing i mean like literally again just like the tech thing the tech analysis we're excuse me we're setting new lows on this trend every day so you know statistically bitcoin is as cheap as it's ever been relative to the trend uh of gold btc gold well if we go down to the zero percentile of the power trend that would be nine times that's when we would go back right be around 56 you mean the power trend in in dollars yeah i mean if gold stays at 4 000 bitcoin goes to 56 that's nine times right yeah or if another way to think about it is the power trend of bitcoin right now in gold ounces the trend is 64 ounces right so we're at 20 so 3x staying at current gold prices would take us back to trend for gold so 3x in dollar

terms meaning you know close to i mean definitely definitely close to 200 000 if not more yeah doesn't mean it's going to happen doesn't mean it's going to happen this cycle doesn't mean The cycles are not over, but we're at wild extremes globally on a macro level from where Bitcoin has been, and certainly at levels that Wall Street... Wall Street knows about the power curve by now. They love this fear. They love it. They would love to exacerbate this more, accumulate more Bitcoin, no question about it. How long do you think they could exacerbate it i know you said short to medium term no idea yeah your guess is as good as mine yeah there's a lot of fiat dollars and fiat interest uh running around paying people's

salaries you know i mean they could they could go a long a long time uh pushing this price down but But of course, Bitcoin has a very, specifically in the gold analogy, Bitcoin, as we know, balances its budget every 10 minutes. And Bitcoin, due to the difficulty adjustment, is not susceptible to the same supply-demand relationships of gold, right? So, you know, gold miners are just loving life right now. I mean, they are, I'll show you this one. How hard are they digging right now? Very hard. I mean, you got, you got projects, no doubt that are, you know, we're just absolute duds that are now being, you know, revived. And, and just, you know, pie in the sky projections, I'm sure scaling up slowly. And, you know, some of those projects are going to work out fine.

other projects are going to remain complete duds and there's probably a lot of jokers that are coming into this business just like jokers come into the bitcoin business but the difference is this uh you know as they say the cure for high prices is often high prices if you're a buyer and the uh cure for low prices is often low prices if you're a seller so so the the idea that gold is just, like I said at the beginning, looking at the gold trend, just going to continue to 10, 20, 30k per ounce. Again, it might go a little bit on the short term, but supply and demand is going to start to rear its ugly head. And people are just going to wonder, literally in the jewelry shop, why am I paying this much for gold? And they might go into platinum or

whatever. Let me show you this chart, which will show you a little bit what I mean here about how crazy this is for some of these people right now. Again, I'm missing something here, but I'll zoom in from this point. all right this is similar hold on it's a little bit outdated but it'll do the job this is a similar chart um kind of like the transaction throughput but this is mining revenue okay this is through

june actually this is through september close enough all right so today um 16 billion by the the way, not even a top on a trailing 12-month basis. This just assumes all miners sell their Bitcoin in terms of their block reward and their fees every 10 minutes at whatever prevailing price there is. This is academic calculation. A lot of miners hodl. A lot of miners don't even pay fiat. They take credit. They don't pay out of pocket. It's a crazy business, as you know. But this is generally how the mining business is. It's a $16 billion business right now. This is gold now over the same period.

Oh, shit. Gold is getting, you know, there's about 100 million ounces of gold that are mined a year. Gold is becoming a $400 billion industry. It's massive. I mean, this Christmas is just going to be amazing for gold bucks.

They're just going to be, you know, I don't know how... I used to curse more on your show, but I feel less inclined to now. I mean, it's going to blow off. There's no question this is not going to sustain. But it's going to be a fun ride for a lot of people in that business right now. And it's just like, even from, say, January of 2021, they were making record revenues for this business at $200 billion.

Now it's getting close to $400 billion. industry. But just so you see how small Bitcoin and gold are compared to oil, this is the oil markets, right? Trillions of dollars a year. So, you know, again, doing the math on where we are in Bitcoin, back out, don't freak out, block the block day to day. You know, not financial advice, but maybe take advantage of some of these cheap prices there's just a lot more to the whole structure

of all of this than I think can be than one needs to stress about over one morning waking up and see Bitcoin crash 5k and I think another thing to put into context is this is not abnormal

for bull markets either it's 30% corrections which is what we've seen over the last month and look i mean it's going to go on for a while i mean look at the oil markets you know they can they can crash a trillion dollars in annual revenue um it's it's just it's part of the game still going back to what we talked about bitcoin being the sort of pristine asset risk-free asset i believe all of those things i do believe that we could have all of these markets you know eventually priced in btc or something like that

but it's going to take a long uh long time we need trillions and trillions and trillions tens of trillions of dollars to come in before that happens right what do you what do you think about uh silver and its blow off top right now what is that historically sort of lagging silver top to gold yeah it's high i don't think i have one charted uh but it's obvious it's the same deal i mean you're at 100th percentile right i mean it's it's could not have been higher let me see if i have one on the 10th see where is it right now silver is trading at 57 new all-time high yeah this is all-time high uh and as far as if you would measure that as far as minor revenue

even more of an all-time high because there's more bullion silver bullion being mined now than there was uh 15 years or not 15 12 13 years ago when silver was lasted 55 bucks so yeah these guys metals investors are having a good christmas no doubt um but oh maybe i didn't completely finish the thought about the supply demand though So at some point, a lot of these jokers, particularly, I believe, in the gold industry, which is obviously a very analogous asset to Bitcoin, you know, high prices will become the cure, right, to high prices. there would just be too many speculators, investors, miners in the business chasing too many projects, too many jokers will start to come in, and supply is just going to outstrip demand. And once that happens, price falls. As we know, Bitcoin is not susceptible to that problem

because of the difficulty adjustment, because its budget balances every 10 minutes. It's just a completely different beast you know that's why we have number go up technology we have uh just a you know however you want to define it the only fixed asset in the universe it's a completely different thing i'm very much looking forward to how you know bitcoin will react in the future to some of those supply demand dynamics because uh there's just simply a cap on the amount of coins that can come out every 10 minutes due to the difficulty adjustment and you just don't have that in the gold industry you don't have in the silver industry you don't even have it in the oil industry so that's the again backing out trying to be more calm about what's happening

we can we can expect that's going to happen you know do i you know this could go another year or two these gangbuster prices for gold and for tech with ai they're growing at 40 a year right now on a trend it's massive uh but bitcoin actually is also growing at 40 a year on a trend so have that in mind as well yeah it's interesting to bring up bitcoin mining too because we did i don't know for yeah we're still over zeta hash we sort of crescendoed a couple weeks ago we've had two downward difficulty adjustments in a row but there was a point where we passed an x hash with authority on a trailing average in the middle of september and then between the middle of september and the end of october we added

100x a hash in that six week period and I think putting things in perspective like it took I think my memory

serves me correctly it took us until 2020 to get to 100x a hash and so the network yeah

took us like April 2020 to get to 100x a hash with authority and so it took 11 years to go from 0 to 100x and my work added in six weeks between september middle of september and end of october this year yep actually precisely that perspective like when i sat back and looked at the chart and

put that in perspective like holy crap that's uh it's an insane amount of hash rate coming on the network and now granted the asics are way more efficient bitcoin's been industrialized to extent but i still think there is some some signal there uh in the hash rate markets yep i would uh really like to to chart that actually that's a nice that's a very nice uh nice stat basically uh let me show you what we've done in terms of market cap this is going to go a little slow. Hold on. Hash rate, by the way, another screaming power curve when it comes to Bitcoin, right? And we can show you how the hash rate relative to the market cap, cap, or i.e. the network value has trended.

So this is literally dollars per hash of value. So you get extremely small numbers, even smaller as we go up, because hash is so outstripping market cap. assume that during the booms you would have you know these busts or sorry you would have these peaks in market cap versus the trend and it's interesting uh it's not it's not i mean it's not growing as fast right as it used to at the beginning but it is um kind of stabilizing i I don't know. This is one of the other ones that I would say is more for a more stable sort of Bitcoin future with not as much volatility relative to the trend.

But this is with my multiple around the trend. It's a little bit different. Might need to run this on the percentile quantile analysis. But in any event, yeah, it's not like, as one would expect, prices booming relative to the hash rate at the moment. And it's just sort of stabilizing at this number. But regardless, it's just incredible how much Bitcoin security has grown relative to the value of the system. Yeah. What does that say to you? It's maturing. It's maturing.

Do you think there's more price-insensitive hashers in the market? Uh, you would be able to probably answer that question better than me. Uh, I don't, I don't know, but I would say like looking at the revenue, which is another way to back into this question, I could find the damn chart here, here, here. Uh, So here, okay, this is a little bit more refined. This is 30-day minor revenue. It's not even at a 30-day all-time high, right? Miners would make $2 billion a month back in March 2024.

Now they're making $1.6, $1.7. and hash is what it is right growing growing growing so again like super secure network competitive uh at some point you would expect these numbers to be much much higher but you know predicting that is difficult yeah well this is definitely a number go up chart yeah i mean it's going to be more profitable in the future to mine this very scarce asset. One can argue about the reasons why it's not so high or whatever, but it's undoubtable to me

that this is going to be a huge number in the future, something that compares with the gold markets or even the oil market. It certainly looks to be trending in the right direction. yeah but you know but one would think it'd be much higher yeah one would think well but you're the mining guy yeah i think there's more price insensitive hashers in the market and i think uh i also think the market's got like i said obviously the machines are more efficient and i think uh there's been enough time that the industry is

sort of wised up to okay we need to really focus on cheap energy cheap electricity and there's a ton of people going out there and finding stranded wasted isolated energy to mine bitcoin with um then obviously you have the industrialization of the mining industry on the demand response side which is becoming critical to grid systems and so i think you're going to have i don't think they're there yet but i think you will have somewhat price and sensitive or less sensitive grid operators that really need it for demand response.

Yeah. But let's bring this back. I know we got less than 30 minutes here. Really focusing on the topic of the soul of Bitcoin. What is it? Is it this capital asset? Is it digital capital? That is to be used as a collateral asset only to have structured credit products built on top of it.

Or is it peer-to-peer digital cash to be used in everyday transactions? I think, I don't believe it can be both. It can get both out of it. But I do think there is, again, this year particularly, I think the fight over the soul of Bitcoin's future. or maybe it's like a perceived fight because I don't think it really is a fight like I said I think it can and will be used as both and I actually think it's very productive

that this conversation's been for lack of a better term hashed out this year and going back to the juxtaposition of block versus strategy I think that's actually extremely healthy for the long term and I've been more focused on And how do we make sure that Bitcoin becomes peer-to-peer cash more recently? Because I do think it's important.

I do think the meme of it's only going to be digital capital, never sell your Bitcoin, never spend your Bitcoin is completely short-sighted and asinine. and i am really interested to see what the data looks like a year or two three years from now post square opening up bitcoin capabilities and their point of sale systems i think the product that they release with the highest signal is probably the automatic conversion of daily revenues to bitcoin you can sort of choose the percentage that's the Bitcoin treasury play I want to see small medium sized businesses

sweeping some cash flows in the Bitcoins and holding it on the balance sheet Is that a question? It is a thought, a jumping off point to jump in It's a great thought

I have all the thoughts here because um like we talked about i i personally have a hard time chalking all this up like the future of bitcoin only to be what you know the supreme court of the united states says i have a lot of like i can understand the sympathy for you know us being the largest economy largest capital markets uh largest military that there's a lot of reason to believe that sort of whatever the u.s says to enforce the moneyness of bitcoin like that could be the future of it but due to the fact that it is unlike gold where it's not easily confiscatable and remember during the first

year of world war ii um 1940 80 percent of the world's gold found its way into the united states or somewhere around the united states like canada into their coffers because this is actually the biggest nail in the coffin of the international gold standard was not roosevelt during the 1930s it was hitler and stalin during uh world war ii so and by the way we're going back to as you well know very unstable geopolitical times which is a topic for another conversation but the nature of holding bitcoin i think is where way outside of their hands at this point like you know etfs still large amounts are getting there you know anybody can hop on bitcoin treasuries and see it pretty closely how all of that stuff is tracked but this is still a

you know cypherpunk retail like decentralized phenomenon and we all want to see it stay that way so i would say you know hold on to that vision no matter all the news that comes out with with the economy and interest rates and wall street and this and that we have this power curve. It's the way the networks grow. It's a, it's, it's censorship resistant cash with many use cases that you have studied with your guests throughout the years. And as long as I would say, particularly as long as that decentralized nature holds we're going to, you know, we're going to be fine. We're going to be fine. But how that would play out as a

pricing mechanism, I think that is most interesting. And I really would say that I hope that it continues on this power curve, because the power curve was, would show you something sustainable. So here, I don't know if I've shown you this before, but this is same thing, got the old power curve and we also have an exponential curve so i've shoehorned in what bitcoin would look like if it was on an exponential trend you can clearly see it's not an exponential trend right like so at the beginning it wasn't here and then when it went through the whole mid cycle of its life it barely hit this trend line a little bit here and then we've been off it since 2022 uh not even close so it's not an exponential trend the r squared is worse it's

just clearly not it fits this nice trend and uh if bitcoin would do what a lot of the people that have been uh clamoring for i guess in wall street and if it would just be this sort of base asset where you could collateralize against it and then draw on it and we just have a bunch of fiat interest around bitcoin this trend would not hold it could not hold it actually this is where it would have to be something where like all your models sort of uh break but presumably it would break to the upside but it might not be the world that we want so to have the world that we want it would need to be on this this sort of a trend line and we'd have to have just a different credit market you know surrounding this uh but if we do have wall

street take over for whatever reason you might see something like this where it turns exponential like here if it happened at the end of the year it'd be more like this trend or here if it happened after 10 years it'd be more like this so this is where you could get it maybe go on a straight line and you get something like this so still could be crazy numbers like if it started to go exponential by the end of this year and then we go out you know 15 years that's 22 million dollar bitcoin by uh you know 2040 exceeds everybody's expectations well higher than the power curve by the way but what's behind that 22 million dollar bitcoin probably loads mountains and mountains and mountains of fiat interest and government bonds and stable coins and all the all

the rest. That's not really a future that people would envision. And for you, the statement that you just made about it's only this sort of huddling or investable technology where it's not using peer-to-peer transactions, that would be more likely under this scenario. Does that make sense? When it goes exponential, it's going to look more like a Wall Street asset. And that would be, in my opinion, not an ideal scenario. It may still be great for investors, right? Like on that number go up sort of... Not even on the number go up ethos, just on paper, it looks good, right? But that's the same thing like Manhattan real estate. It looks good on paper. You can pull out whatever you pull out a year for your expenses and everything, but you

still get rolled over more accumulative debt, debt, debt each year. And at some point, that's harder for anybody, anybody that's there, unless you have like some major business that can keep ahead of, you know, lots of inflation or any economic growth at some point that debt for personal balance sheets becomes very difficult, especially in rising interest rates and interest rate environments. So that's where I sit. Basically, mathematically, looking at what you said, you could see 15, $20 million Bitcoin in the next 15 years. But in my opinion, that would be too high, actually. You would want a little bit more sustainable, something along this curve. And compound interest does not work on a power curve.

which doesn't work so that's that's my that's the thing that i'm sort of trying to figure out with this uh you know how how our time our work is valued and you know how people are going to value bitcoins but i would be very personally very careful i know this is like a booming industry and everybody's loving it and sailor himself has accumulated a boatload of bitcoins doing this But I would just say on a personal level, one should be very careful about accumulating too much debt behind their stack of Bitcoin because you don't want Wall Street to take it or whoever you're posting the collateral to, especially if you've got to liquidate in a day or less than a day and all of a sudden your Bitcoin is gone because you were margin called. so in other words if you want to see that decentralized future I think it's

it's got to come from around the world it's got to come from other currencies well I think too the sailor specifically is saying never sell your bitcoin I'm going to burn my keys when I die I mean is this

I don't know if it's intentional or naive or ignorant but i mean the tech around the payments use case is only getting better and i was thinking that today like right before we hopped on it's december 1st ran bitcoin payroll for the employees here at tftc except bitcoin um for part of their part of their salary and it's always a beautiful experience it's like hey you wake up i get a zap right zap right invoice obviously there's some ux and automation that can be built around this particular use case i know there's companies working on there but the way it works here i get the zap right invoice i pay it and that person gets that part of their

paycheck in bitcoin within an hour and is that uh monthly or bi-weekly it depends on the particular they're employing summer bi-weekly it's a good day for uh for that for them yeah in terms of stats bad day for the business good day for them no it's a good day for business they're getting happy yeah but uh no it's always uh and we've got contractors who do some some uh miscellaneous work uh and that's one of the stats or anecdotal data points that has really encouraged me this year is the amount of contractors that sort of know that we're a Bitcoin company

and just send us invoices in Bitcoin. It's like, okay, this is cool. So your point about it's going to take sort of retail adoption, I think it's happening. I think it's only going to accelerate. I'm not sure if you've been paying attention to developments around ARK and Spark and what's happening with the Xiaomi events,

But the payments, UX, as it pertains to speed and cost, and then on top of that, privacy benefits, it's only getting better. And if AI really is taking over, which I think, not taking over, but is a thing, I think it's real. I think there's a there there. We were talking about it before we started recording. We're both using Claude pretty extensively in our businesses, and it is making us more efficient. and allowing us to do more than we could by ourselves and without having to hire full-time employees. If the agentic future materializes when it materializes,

these agents are going to need money, and it doesn't make sense for them to use fiat rails. Yep, not at all. This is a chart of Japanese yen. we talked about jgbs at the top of the show this is japanese yen in bitcoin this is not from an exchange it's triangulated from the dollar with official exchange rates but uh also a power curve 97 r squared and you know 13 million yen for bitcoin even a little bit below trend now Now, four years ago, 5.9 million yen at the peak.

So that is a higher multiple ahead for the Japanese four years ago holding Bitcoin than it is for us or those who are dollar-oriented, say 85K versus 60K four years ago. right so anyway you slice this it's going to be better to hold bitcoin and also to transact in bitcoin get paid in bitcoin you know this is the the old message from andreas right so yeah i mean i anything that that that can bolster that uh story i'm i'm like 100 behind i know wall street's like very exciting and price and everything but you got to think about what's going to be behind that story if if like you really want wall street to be there and uh like that's the main driver and everything the only thing that's going to be behind that story is a lot of fiat interest like a lot and uh this chart this chart is basically you know telling that

story it's like at some point we're going to start thinking in terms of satoshi's i know but basically with you know without showing you too many charts in 20 years in 20 years for sure we're going to be at the level of the monetary base which i haven't talked about this show yet but that's uh probably when this drops there'll be a another update for people to see the third quarter of base money, which is really basically flat, you know, even all things considered, still about $26 trillion. So Bitcoin is, you know, less than 10% right now, just like it is, it's actually about the same level of those top eight tech stocks, by the way. But anyway, the world will certainly understand Bitcoin a lot more in five years, a lot more than that in

10 years, 15, 20. It is a compounding technology. But if you want to think about this in terms of like the old traditional TradFi model and sort of model it out a straight line on log scale and do all these ABC, Elliott Wave stuff, I'm just telling you, I've been following this for a long time. It does not follow that pattern. It follows a nice sustainable growth rate. And if you want it to follow those sort of old school Wall Street models with a lot of interest baked in, right? There's going to be consequences of that and probably more booms and busts. So I would say that's not... It's still okay. I mean, if you're holding Bitcoin, Bitcoin is going to do well in either scenario. But it's one of these things like,

you know, gold bugs, right? And how many gold newsletters I've read, I just can't tell you. And I talk about this on my show all the time. It's like, they sell fear, they sell doom, they sell gloom, they don't really sell hope. And gold miners don't hold the gold. We just talked about this, you know, how it's just going to be a golden Christmas for these guys. They don't care about the gold. They want to get it off their books as quick as they can, you know? Sell it, lock in the profits, move on to the next thing.

It's not a, it's not part of their underlying, you know, worldview, but that's not the case for Bitcoin. So there's just so many different things in Bitcoin that are going to affect the relative growth of the network. So many political things, geopolitical things, technological things, privacy things that just no other asset can compete with. I really think people got to be thinking about those things more. And yeah, it all comes back to the sort of, as you were talking about,

using this on a day-to-day basis. if you're only about number go up or thinking about this as some exponential asset that's going to do better than whatever, there's going to be a real big consequence to that if Wall Street comes in and just loads up a ton of debt and fiat interest behind it. Exponential growth for Bitcoin would be, based on the numbers, it would start to look rough. It would start to look unsustainable. And so that's what I'm trying to show with these charts is Bitcoin, by its nature, very interestingly, is not following the growth trajectory of any other asset. And that's a good thing. People should try to understand that, pay attention to that, and take comfort in that.

Because 20 years up, 10 years up for a gold bear, then 20 years down, then 10 years sideways, uh that's not a it's no way to go through life it's no way to go through life and and you know just it's so fascinating to go back and and read some of these gold newsletters like these old ones and then don't get me started about some of the types of people that some of these people are and uh you know there's just some crazy like just crazies out there in this in a lot of this uh you know speculative political space and a hard hard asset space and a lot of them have just been wrong about gold like completely wrong so don't hit your wagon to wall street or um i don't know just a lot of the hype around that yeah it's going to drive demand sure but i would highly

uh caution about too much debt for you personally around your bitcoin or in anything But Bitcoin, if it all goes according to the power curve, that is going to look completely different in the future. It's just not, there's just too, this is an oxymoron sort of, there is so little Satoshi's to back more and more and more fiat interest, you'll just have to have a different concept of future value um and you know giving up those satoshis uh for rates of interest which probably aren't going to pay yeah bitcoin it's a better way to go through life that is funny um thinking about the sad let's say again not blowing smoke up your ass i always love

catching up with you quarterly because as you mentioned i find much more comfort in where we are i think it's inevitable to succumb to the animal spirits and the uh sentiment that is uh fire hosed your way via social media and uh if you look at youtube thumbnails youtube thumbnails you gotta you gotta play the game it's all ending this we'll have a good one for this it'll be a burning background and uh the elmo but honestly if you're out there relatively new or seasoned and haven't yet internalized that bitcoin is exhibiting power trend adoption it's riding this power curve and if you just look at the data the back-tested data going back to bitcoin's inception

we are lower we're below trend but we've been at this this point for 30 of bitcoin's life in relation to where the trend actually is so yeah and we're closer than other relationships just quickly as we close it um you know here's plan b's 2019 model this might look kind of close but on log space if you actually look at the numbers right so he's at 770 000 right now power curves 120 is a 770 his 2020 model more absurd six million uh and then you can do a power trend so again bottom line without going through the math these are incorrect because they assume exponential there's an exponential component to this he's using gold silver all sorts of other nonsensical things. There's an exponential component, which Bitcoin doesn't do. So they're

wrong. Bitcoin is a power curve. You can sort of shoehorn in a little bit a better one like I do not using these exponential components. Again, not to be too long winded, it's a little bit better. But there's no predictability to it, or let's say stability comfort to it. So for example, if you see my number here, the sort of lighter green shaded one, power trend on stock to flow 350k. That would be if you didn't assume any other weird things like Plan B did and just leave it at that. But still, if I had only taken the 2016 data and projected out on that way, whoops, I already got this red line. Let's look at the difference. 350 between 584. Again, you're still 200,000 off. So the 2016, the dotted line showed no predictive.

And when I say predictive, I don't mean like I can predict the future. It means it's statistical. it's showing you know it's like is this medicine going to work there's no sort of prescriptive uh predictive in a statistical turn sort of relationship there but now let's look at here's the power curve 120k what if we took the power curve from 2016 projected forward and didn't do anything else from 2017 18 19 2021 22 23 24 25 that is the 2016 number 128 000 so if you don't like if you're not on board with this again i don't even care i'm not a uh like i don't care for the uh you know if i found it first or if i didn't it's just a formula it's not a big deal but the uh the you need to look into what this actually means how it's it's it's displaying

the growth of bitcoin and no other market looks like this other markets are these straight line on log scale, or bastardize stock to flow things, which are, they're just not, they're not jiving with the way that Bitcoin grows. And so we can see power curves on address growth, hash rate growth, nodes, a lot of different things with Bitcoin, it makes sense, it's a network. So it makes sense that it's growing this way. So to understand how the thing grows, which it does, in fact, slow down a little bit every year grows sustainably. that's going to give you more comfort in my opinion over the end and if it just becomes this savings asset like you said which is in some level naive or not good yeah it might look good

on a price level but there's going to be a lot a lot a lot of fiat units that are baked into this number eight here and even though it might look really really good after 20 years maybe 30 million dollar bitcoin you're going to have like 10 000 gasoline or whatever i mean it's just going to be absurd it's not going to be a future that anybody's going to want so that's the fight that's the fight and to do that you need to keep it decentralized you need to use it spend it like you said all the things we talked about so i'll leave it there with that my friend thank you for comforting us during this trying time i do what i can it's always we have bigger we have bigger issues over here i i abstain from bringing those up during your uh show so i'm sure you

listeners will appreciate that we'll catch up on it next time yeah i'm happy to beginning of february next year it's just actually a timely turnaround uh yeah it's about it's about time uh two months after yeah but it's uh like you said there's more stuff happening behind the scenes and i'm hoping to not just be quarterly after the end of this year but maybe we'll get some more rolling better updates not that you and i have to do it every month but uh but money supply is just it's a backward looking thing do not look at m2 retail money supply in the united states and think it's going to predict the price of bitcoin 11 weeks from now that's not it's just not doing that no not a good way have comfort in the power curve

the network effect and spend time with your family yeah spend time with your family and if you're really worried about it do your part to expand the network effect by educating people about Bitcoin helping them download a Bitcoin wallet and teaching them how to receive Bitcoin

do your part Matthew enjoy your night enjoy your Christmas and the New Year and we'll catch up in 2026 thank you my friend always a pleasure peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far

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Thank you.