TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #706: Fix the Money or Face Civil War with DarkSide2030

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Marty sits down with Scott to discuss the historic silver squeeze, the fragility of global derivatives markets, central bank coordination against populist movements, government fraud exposed by DOGE, and why Bitcoin serves as the ultimate escape hatch from an impending financial crisis. Scott on Twitter: https://x.com/darkside2030 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/4pOv2L4 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://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. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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. Scott, welcome back to the show.

I reached out to you last week as silver prices were going, continue to go parabolic, continuing the run that they had in 2025 as it stands. right now as we're recording on tuesday afternoon january 20th so we're sitting at 94 dollars and 46 cents which is pretty astonishing if if you ask me especially considering where the price was last year what is the silver market telling us right now thanks for having me marty it's good to be here man it's good to uh catch up so let's talk about silver um yeah so we have um sort of the big long playing out in in the silver market uh you have a underlying asset which is not freely available to be borrowed and loaned anymore as the supply has become extremely tight uh you have industrial uh industrial uses that are outpacing our mining

supply so we're in a structural deficit and um large companies that need silver are hoarding it So you have this crazy scenario with a tremendous derivatives complex built on top of a metal that is not freely available to be borrowed, shorted, and loaned. And that leads to a tremendous squeeze in the underlying complex. And I think that's what we're witnessing. The question is, where does it go? You know, silver is so interesting because the industrial uses are so great. So whether we're talking about solar or we're talking about electronics or we're talking about batteries, but the amount of silver that goes into any one particular product isn't that great.

So that means the industrial buyers are really price insensitive because they need the metal. So we have this crazy scenario built up where the derivatives traders have made huge bets on the price of silver. We know that the listed markets are gigantic, but the over-the-counter markets are where all the action is. And we have no visibility into just how much silver is shorted over-the-counter, but, you know, seeing rumors out there of 5 billion ounces. Could it be true? Maybe. I would not be surprised, right? The arrogance and the hubris of derivatives traders can be their unwinding and their undoing. So we'll see where this goes. But at some point, you know, what's so interesting to me is we've gone from essentially, let's

say, high 20s to 95, and not a single body has floated to the surface just yet. But we know at some point the body will float to the surface. We're going to find out where the damage is, and that's where things are going to get crazy. I think that's the big question on everybody's mind. And I guess to dive into a few of the things you mentioned there, firstly, from your perspective, how much of this price squeeze is being driven by just industrial demand as the price goes up? The companies implementing silver into their products at an industrial scale realize, hey, we need to get more. If the price keeps running, it's going to be more expensive. How much of it is driven by that?

How much is driven by a flight to precious metals because of geopolitical and fiscal uncertainty rising around the world? And then how much would you contribute to derivatives traders getting caught off sides and just letting the price actually find true discovery because those trades are being unwound? Wow, that's a great question. Let's say, you know, there's a fourth one in there, and it goes into the geopolitical risk. But I think that there's a hot war developing, the hot war, not, you know, kinetic war, not being with missiles and bombs, but being with economics. So the question is, is China squeezing the U.S. or is the U.S. squeezing China? And then who gets caught in the crossfire? Certainly, Europe would seem likely as a potential victim of the fight.

But I suspect that China's move to cut exports of silver was a shot over the bow of the U.S. The U.S. will react, potentially taking countries like Venezuela that have large silver supplies and supply China with ore. And we're in – I mean, I'm almost speechless to try to describe how dangerous this moment is in time. But we're going to have to kind of work our way through. The derivative guys are going to be the bodies, right? They're going to be the guys that get just absolutely demolished. And, you know, I'm curious with everything that's going on with Greenland, what does that have to do with silver? And I think there's more there than probably meets the eye.

I think that the U.S. is in one way or another, you know, happy to see strife between the European continent and the U.S. They'd like to undo the leadership in Europe, which is controlled by central banking. Remember, the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, they're all essentially one entity through the Bank of International Settlements. And Europe is so heavily controlled by the ECB, it's hard for me to divorce what's going on in silver from what's going on in central banking. And I think the Trump administration would like to really put the Fed behind the eight ball. And in doing so, they really have to go after the City of London and the ECB and all of those entities. All of this stuff has to be tied

together, right? Putting the puzzle together seems extremely difficult at this moment. But for me, um i think they're all tied together yeah to your point about greenland and europe being in the crosshairs and probably going to be the sort of a benefactor for lack of a better term or the benefactor of the bad economic implications of whatever's happening right now i'm sure you've seen clips coming out of davos the world economic forum's going on right now and i tweeted uh less an hour ago there was mark harney was giving a speech and to me he's the epitome of globalist davis rott well with what he did at hsbc the bank of england now as the prime minister of canada i think he's one of the sort of globalist generals that has been trotted around and um he's been

stationed at different parts of the world to to achieve certain things and he was on stage today basically squirming and trying to get a point across to what Donald Trump and the United States are doing from an economic and geopolitical policy perspective is unsustainable. And the fact that he was scared squirming and lashing out as aggressively as he was on stage there was a signal to me like, oh, they do feel the pressure. And I guess something that the Trump administration is doing is is making them squirm which if you ask me uh is a good thing because i don't think we can continue down the path of the rules-based international order really controlled by central banks that you mentioned earlier yeah agreed and to that to that point you had besent come out just

recently just today and say you know europe has no no no no ammo in their their gun um and and they present no risk on an economic front. So yeah, wow. We could talk about Japan. We could talk about Europe. It would seem to me that, and here's my best guess. My best guess is that it's a large European bank that's offsides in silver in a major way. Let's just take UBS as my prime suspect. And this move in silver is coordinated to go after the European banking system. That would be my best guess as to what we're seeing. I imagine JP Morgan got themselves in a good position. Who knows about Bank of America and Citigroup? I would assume that they're okay, but that's a major assumption. But again, it comes back to the fundamentals

of a market like silver requires, and I keep repeating this because it does transition into a Bitcoin story, but a market like silver requires that you can borrow, loan, and short the underlying asset. And we're seeing lease rates in silver explode, which means you can't borrow it. it's getting really, really tight. And that means that whoever's short silver is pretty much

dead, right? There's no way out of this conundrum. Wouldn't it be amazing to watch a European bank go down and UBS, they're already sitting on their GameStop problem through their Credit Suisse acquisition, really possibly silver could be the nail in the coffin over there. And, you know, that brings us to the next question, which is, if it is UBS, how does UBS get backstopped by Switzerland? I mean, there's only so many Patek Philippes and chocolates and wood shoes that they can sell to backstop UBS, right? So who backstops ubs i don't know i mean it's could you know i don't know how that would play out but you got to believe that all of these things that are happening are sort of interconnected and tied

together yeah and i was doing research on the credit swiss uh acquisition to refresh my memory because that happened in 2023 uh they basically acquired them in a fire sale for 3.25 billion But you mentioned the GameStop. I think just to re-educate people about what UBS actually acquired, Credit Suisse had some terribly offside bond exposure, I believe, when they were acquired by UBS. And that was a big question after they were acquired, like how much can they paper over and band-aid over that terrible toxic debt problem that they acquired from Credit Suisse? And if I recall correctly, almost three years ago when it was going on, people said this is just a ticking time bomb. It's going to sit on this balance sheet for a few years. Yeah. Yeah. And to add to their bond woes, there was the GameStop story.

Archegos was primed at Credit Suisse. So we, again, we just, you know, all of this paper stuff is so fake. And yet silver is so real, right? Like silver is a real asset and you can measure it. You know, people can demand delivery of it. it's so much different than paper problems that can be you know covered up or papered over as you said um you cannot paper over physical silver now you can paper over the losses you can print money and and fill in those holes you know the monopoly board the monopoly banker never goes

under it just prints more paper but you can't print more silver and that's where things can get really crazy well i think they especially get crazy when people start demanding the physical and so can you speak to the sort of development of that trend which i think we're seeing what would be a classical vault run on the physical as people begin to question right so if you're If you're Samsung or you're a large solar company or you're Tesla or you're NVIDIA, you need silver, right? Without silver, you stop your production lines. So they're going to go out and they're going to get the silver if they become afraid that they can't get it at the COMEX, as they are becoming. We know that Tesla's been traveling around Peru, talking to silver mines, trying to buy silver directly from the mines.

That story's been out there for quite a while. So the problem in the silver market is that these large industrial users, consumers, are going to go out and they're going to acquire the silver by whatever means necessary. And they're not going to be price sensitive. They need the silver. At the same time, the producers, the mines, the smelters, the refiners, they're in a different position because if they've used the futures markets to hedge their positions, well, what happens if you're a, let's just give an example, you're a silver refiner and you buy $50 million worth of silver. You go out, it's going to take you a month to produce the actual silver from the

ore. So you go out and you hedge, and now your hedge goes up 50% and you get margin called on your hedge. So now you're forced into a position where you almost have to take your hedge off because you don't have the capital to protect your hedge. So the people using the paper markets appropriately, the consumers and the producers, they can get squeezed tremendously. The producers can get squeezed because they get margin called on their short positions. The consumers can get squeezed because they run in fear that the COMEX is not going to be able to give them the metal. And they're going to get a force majeure scenario where they get cash back instead of the metal because the metal is not available. So you have both sides of the equation are in a really,

really tough spot. And if you're a producer, you probably don't want to be hedged right now, right? Because who knows whether you have the capital to withstand silver running to 200 or 300. You might get margin called out and be bankrupted. Same thing happens to the miners, right what if the miners are hedged so so the story here is goes beyond just the the end uses it's the entire supply chain that you can run into trouble by a price dislocating and going crazy because remember when they sell forward contracts they have to produce margin yeah for the forward contracts for anybody listening somebody will basically give them cash up front for delivery of physical at some point in the future.

Yeah, in many cases, they'll go into the COMEX, right? The COMEX has been the sort of hub of silver, the LBMA, and they'll sell futures contracts. Well, as the COMEX continues to raise margin requirements and the price goes higher, well, they have to continue to put up capital to cover their short position. At some point, they just don't have the money and no bank's going to make them a loan to cover their margin requirements when volatility is like it is right so now you end up in a real tough spot if you're just a a silver miner who's been hedging you know appropriately trying to do the best by your shareholders yeah it's insane and i think that gets to the big question on

everybody's mind is how high can this run i've seen some people commenting on the silver chart and looking like hey this is a blow off top it's going to end soon i've seen people respond to that you're looking at it at the wrong scale put it on log what do you think it could happen here do you think this could be a blow off top where we're going to correct dramatically and we'll go back to what silver was before or something similar to whatever it was 2011 2012 or is this time different i think it's different i think you're seeing a structural repricing so imagine you're sitting on land in texas at five hundred dollars an acre and then all of a sudden somebody figures out there's oil under that land right and the next day that land becomes worth ten thousand

dollars an acre right and you see a structural repricing in in the price of that land i think that's what we're seeing in the silver market and so how what uh what does a structural repricing look like? Well, we don't know. Again, a lot of this depends on what happens in the derivatives complex. Do we get to a force majeure? How tight is the supply? Do governments begin to hoard? In the recent military bill that was just passed, two and a half billion dollars was allocated for purchasing strategically important metals resources. Silver was on the top of that list. So if the U.S. government starts hoarding silver and the Chinese government's hoarding silver, we're talking, you know, these are, the number becomes sort of irrelevant at the point when you have a printing press and you're trying to buy the metal. So how high can we go?

We could go really, really high, much higher than anybody expects. Yeah. And that, I mean, this ties into, I mean, to your point, like, I can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes right now. People trying to plug holes in balance sheets and basically bail out behind the scene without announcing it. We just went over $95 again. But then something we alluded to earlier, but then you have other things going on in

the market like the Japanese yield curve blowing out at the same time as all of this is going on and it makes you wonder is like how much can they actually, how much can they help the situation? Can they actually pluck the holes if all this is happening at once and if you're an institutional fund with exposure to all these different markets, like how much is too much all at once? Yeah. And the question is, how big are the unrealized losses? At some point, they're going to come to the surface. We're going to find out who's in trouble. And I suspect we're going to find out fairly soon. Blowing out yield curves and seeing long bonds take off, well, somebody owns those bonds and they're sitting on substantial losses. Now, in the case of Japan, it's probably less of a problem because they own 50% of their bond market.

But in the case of the U.S., it becomes a real problem as capital gets repatriated from Japanese investors start bringing their money back and buying those bonds. That's the real risk here. The risk is to our bond market. At the same time, now the Europeans, they plan on going to war with the United States, which, you know, you're watching pictures of troops landing in Greenland. um the danes threatening to sell their government bonds and it's just chaos right it's it feels like operation chaos suffrakes health care open enrollment has started it will roll through the end of january opt out of traditional health insurance which doesn't care about you it's impersonal it's expensive they deny an increasing amount of claims premiums are going up you don't

have to live this way you can opt out i opted out four years ago and joined crowd health i've been a crowd health member a very happy crowd health member for four years i've had two children a couple of health events in that time period. And CrowdHealth has been there. You pay a monthly fee, you contribute to the crowd. We were paying $1,800 on Cobra as a family of three. Now we're paying around $900 a month as a family of five. And that's with CrowdHealth and direct primary care. You can opt out of health insurance. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC. You're going to get $99 a month for the first three months if you use the code TFTC. Joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin

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moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. Having been doing, following these markets since I was 20 years old, working at the fund, it always felt like the big moment was was right around the corner and that's what i'm just trying to check my priors with this specifically with the silver gold running um with the japanese yield curve blowout and um everything else it's like okay it seems like this is the big one uh but throughout my history the last 15 years the government has always been able to step in and paper over this But when you factor in the geopolitical incohesion that exists, particularly between the United States and Europe, which if the blow up, if the problems are as big as we think they are behind the scenes, there would need to be some coordination and simpatico between Europe and the United States specifically.

That just seems like we may be too far away from each other right now to successfully be able to coordinate a bailout of something of this magnitude. And who knows? Maybe the U.S. isn't as exposed to it as European banks. Maybe we're better positioned and we could view this market turmoil as an opportunity to weaken Europe even further. I think that's the correct take, right? Look, you know, as guys who've studied markets for forever, it feels like forever, we become experts in pattern recognition. So we're trying to look at these patterns and we're trying to look for previous patterns that look like this and, you know, things that we can learn from history. But I don't remember in my lifetime seeing patterns quite like this one.

Right. So it feels like something tectonic is happening below the surface. And we just don't know because we're not privy to those discussions. But it does. You know, I don't think we can ignore the Ukraine war. I think that's playing a major role in what's going on here. I think Trump wants that over and Europe wants nothing more than to continue fighting for whatever reason. and we don't understand that. You've got the sort of crazy immigration story in Europe and here in the United States that seems to be bubbling over. Like we haven't even discussed what's going on in Minnesota. That's tremendously destabilizing. So, man, at every level right now, there's so

many things happening that it's hard to follow the ball. You know, I'm looking at Bitcoin's price i find that interesting because i think that bitcoin's the true measure of global liquidity and i think liquidity is stressed right now so at some point somebody's gonna break and we'll see where where that breaks my guess is europe yeah yeah it is um it is watching a bitcoin fell below 90k and then and then you bring it home domestically you look at trump versus powell and the sort of saber rattling that exists between those two with president trump adamant about getting rates down as quickly as possible and then you have he is another thing never had this in terms of a pattern emerge throughout one of these crises where you have

jerome powell on a sunday night release a a video that looks like a hostage video hostage video for sure of pining on the uh the uh the inappropriateness of the politicization of the federal reserve and reassuring the markets that independence is is key for the fed and that the the federal government such should stop playing political games by um filing a lawsuit against them for their their work on the uh federal reserve yeah meanwhile the the fed who cut interest rates about a month before the election in September, 50 basis points, unsuspected to try to help Kamala Harris, is now pleading, hey, we're not political. They're the most political body on earth. And again, it's not just the Fed, right? It's the Fed. It's the ECB. It's

the Bank of Japan. It's all of these entities. And we have to look at them as one. And that's why what's happening in japan and what's happening in europe it's all about what's happening at the fed and what's happening at the bank of international settlements they must be in an outright panic right now um you know i just don't again as guys who rely on pattern recognition when we go outside of the patterns we don't really know what to do we just kind of look back and go wow this is interesting and try to try to draw conclusions but sometimes the best thing to do would say i don't know right that's how you keep yourself out of trouble yeah yeah i i'm a big believer in that admitting when you don't know especially when you know you don't know and i

think that's the case here i don't know exactly what's going on but i will say um i mean you brought up minnesota and it feels like there it feels like there is a degree of stress in the air particularly in the financial sector and people in the finance sector looking at gold and silver run and now the japanese government bond yield blowing out and i don't think anybody's running around with their hair on fire quite yet but like we've been alluding to behind the scenes are probably very stressed out and it seems like the markets are calling bullshit on the scam of the fiat and the sovereign debt system as it exists today and i think a lot of people get worried like we can't have the financial system meltdown we need everything to be bailed out

government central banks need to step in but then you look at something like the minnesota fraud the fraud that was unearthed in california and now there's been a bunch of copycats following nick shirley's steps and unearthing fraud that exists across the country not only minnesota but in states across the country i think it's i'm pretty confident saying that the the fraud um that was on earth in minnesota we can just assume that exists in every single state to some degree and when you aggregate the amount of money that is simply being pilfered away from u.s taxpayers and printed in debt and pointed towards overt fraud the whole system is completely fraudulent and point i bring this up reason i bring this up is because like okay if we're calling bullshit and

there's going to be some financial turmoil it's probably a good thing at the end of the day let's Just get all this fraud, waste and abuse out of the way, reset the system and get back to a sound money standard where the governments and central banks don't have the ability to pilfer taxpayer money and debts taken out in the name of taxpayers to simply hand it to people who are just essentially just stealing it for their own good. whether they're buying new cars in new homes or taking that cash and sending it to a foreign country to fund terrorism yeah worse worse yet right and elon musk went on joe rogan i don't know if you caught it but he said 50 of the government budget is fraud 50 that's what seven trillion dollars that's three and a half trillion in fraud yeah um you know and then you have other talking heads coming up and saying well we got to get back to a little bit of fraud and i think a little bit of fraud is like telling a drug addict to smoke a little bit of crack, right? It doesn't

work. We are a nation of laws, right? That's been what made America so investable. And the fraud story is an investment story in the end. Are you going to invest in a company that has 20% of their budget as fraud? No, of course not. So why are you going to invest in a country where 50% of their budget is fraud and let's just take elon at his word i think he knows because he was in there with doge i think he he got a look under the hood and said oh my goodness what in the world is going on here i really do think that you know it's crazy and the whole meme of fiscal dominance that's really taken hold of the markets and become become basically just like a rote uh or a rote description of the environment we're living in it's like oh we're shifting from monetary policy

dominance to fiscal dominance and that that meme's been growing for like the last two years um it makes sense like we the government is issuing all this debt to basically figure out what they're doing through yield curve and it's like okay we're living in a system of fiscal dominance uh as dictated by the treasury and the federal government spending our money and to your point we're finding out that 50 percent almost almost four trillion dollars of that fiscal dominance is overt fraud and i would not be surprised if that 50 estimation by elon is even low like it's probably much higher especially when you factor in the military budget to think that there's not waste fraud and abuse happening within the black box of the military budget which

hasn't passed an audit in over a decade uh it would be extremely naive and so we literally literally live in a fraudulent system here in the united states the rule of law um is not being respected uh it's pure anarcho-tyranny and that's the thing i think getting the message out to the american people and helping them realize well i do think trump and his administration are doing a lot of good things i think it's important to highlight that this fraud, waste, and abuse is bipartisan. It's happening across both sides of the aisle. We're in the loot the treasury stage of late stage empire. Yeah. And I think that's right. Elon made that point that this is impossible to clean up because it's both sides.

Look, when you talk about late stage, you know, I've been in the crack up boom category for quite some time now. And I think what we are witnessing is the early to middle stages of a crack up boom, at which point, look, there's two ways to get to a depression. You get there through a deflationary spiral. That's what everyone kind of thinks of when they think of a depression. But you also get there through an inflationary, hyperinflationary environment. And that's the risk here, right? The risk here is that we can't allow our interest rates to go to a point that they make sense, because that would kill the economy and the deficit would get worse and the printing would get worse. So we're really stuck. You know,

we're in a box. The government's going to have to step in and do some form of yield curve control or our rates will go to, you know, north of 10%. At what rate would you loan the U.S. government money for 30 years? Right? I mean, for me, that number would be north of 20%. 20%. So given that that number is looking at 5% right now, and we know above 5%, you're going to have real problems, especially in the 10-year with housing, with the auto loans, the entire economy would come grinding to a halt. So we're stuck. And the only way out is to print more money, right? Larry Lepard's got it 100% right. The big print is coming. It's coming in the form of yield curve control. But it all leads to a crack up boom. I mean, eventually the dollar

becomes worthless. How quickly do we, do we get to the government intervention? Do the bodies need to show themselves and float to the surface? Yeah, I think so. But I think that's happening in 2026, right? I don't think we're making it, you know, much longer. And look, I think when we step back and look at everything that's happening here, we can't discount that this is about the midterms. This is about defanging Donald Trump and dethroning him. And I think, look, 2026 has the potential to get absolutely wild. I think the powers that be, the Federal Reserve. It's been a hot start. Yeah, we're off to a great start. But the powers that be in the monetary kind of universe, they would like nothing more than to crash the economy and see

Donald Trump removed in shame. And that's a real scary proposition. When you have the Federal Reserve, you know, the European banks, the whole world trying, the whole financial world wanting to crash the system simply to remove an american president uh and to defang him uh that has a lot of potential to go uh sideways quickly yeah i mean that it's having had uh multiple conversations um geopolitical macro analyst over the last couple months particularly leading up to the end of 2025 beginning of this year a lot of what do we have to look forward to or what are you expecting to happen in 2026 and i was uh i don't want to say dismayed but it was a bit shocked to hear multiple people respond almost immediately civil war and like number one on the list headed

into 2026 and to your point about the year starting hot i mean you look at what's happening in minnesota you see all these ice protests and then obviously the saber rattling um from a political perspective with what we did in venezuela what's happening around greenland right now and the sort of um battle of words that's playing out in davos right now it seems like the the rhetoric is getting hotter and hotter by the day and to your point uh made sort of conflict being forced on on the public um to to push the economy or the political will the country in one direction or another. Seems very obvious at this point. Yeah, it does. And I would argue what we're seeing in Minnesota is a civil war. It's just

only one side's fighting right now. And if the other side starts to fight, that presents a real problem. And that's not good for any of us. A civil war is the worst possible outcome. So, you know, I'm hopeful that somehow they step in. But again, when you look at the sort of the landscape that we're in right now, it's hard to be optimistic. I'll tell you that much. Sup, freaks? This rip is brought to you by good friends at Silent. Silent creates everyday, fair day gear that protects your hardware.

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wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a Bitcoin company. They're running on a Bitcoin standard. They have a Bitcoin treasury. They accept Bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15 off anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out there are cracks in the foundations of your money governments around the world are managing record debt the same way they always have by debasing their currencies and the effects are already showing up across markets in his report the debasement trade james lavish explains why

the shift is reshaping portfolios why gold tends to act first and why bitcoin often follows as the implications become clearer on january 28th james joins unchained live for the age of debasement a presentation and q a expanding on that research and exploring what this environment means for long-term investors if the playbook no longer explains what you're seeing this event helps put the pieces together register now and get early access to the report at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc and so what what do you think happens for bitcoin from here like said we're below 90 000 right now we believe it's this barometer of global liquidity which seems obviously stressed at the moment um will bitcoin uh basically signal to us will be a leading

indicator for okay they're about to turn the money printer on or conversely the liquidity crisis is about to be laid bare yeah look the bitcoin story is a story of self-banking so So a banking crisis will be a boon to Bitcoin. That's clear to me. In any type of financial stress, Bitcoin is the off-ramp from their financial rails. And, you know, it's interesting. We sort of default to this position of a bailout. And the one thing no one's talking about is a bail-in.

So I'm going to be a contrarian here and say I've got my eyes on the potential for bail-ins. Imagine that scenario where you wake up on a Monday morning and everything you have in the bank over a certain number, let's just say $100,000 is seized. That's, you know, I know that's sort of a low probability take, but I'm not sure that there's the ability to conduct another bailout without inflating away everything. So it's interesting to me that nobody is discussing the potential for a bail-in. And yeah, I've got my eyes keenly focused on the potential. But look, either way, in any type of banking crisis, Bitcoin's the only off-ramp. You're not going to be able to take delivery of gold or silver. So what are you going to buy to get out of their system as their system runs into trouble?

You're going to buy Bitcoin. You're going to buy Bitcoin. You're going to yank it off the exchange. in under an hour, that's your offering. And the largest institutions in the world already have the money sitting in the Caymans outside the U.S. where they could ship it over to Dubai or Singapore and get into Bitcoin in size, right?

Like where else, if you have a billion dollars, where in the world are you going to put it? I mean, 08, 09, this didn't exist. You and I have discussed this previously, right? bitcoin is this crazy off-ramp that enables you to get outside of their financial rails yeah and it seems like with the the price action in recent months obviously 2025 and now into this year obviously we had a little pump to start the year but we're we're falling back towards where we ended um where we ended the year but it does seem like there's almost a

a lulling complacency entering the Bitcoin market where people are becoming more convinced, like, oh, gold and silver were the horses we should have been on. And Bitcoin doesn't seem like it's stepping up to the plate in terms of acting as this neutral reserve asset for the digital age that people fall back to when things get chaotic. And I would posit to those people,

just zoom out three years, look at where Bitcoin was. It did an 8X between November 22 and October of last year, and maybe it's cooling off a bit, but to your point, where are you going to go? Are you going to buy, especially if you're a large institution, buy billions of dollars of gold, have it physically delivered and sit in a vault, which in recent years, gold sitting in vaults has been susceptible to confiscations, particularly Venezuela and Russia, I believe. And that's what I wear for particularly Bitcoin retail investors. They get lulled into the state of complacency where they convince themselves that the Bitcoin story is over. And then at some point you have something like a bail-in, which I'd be interested to get your thoughts on how they would justify a bail-in. But I think that would be a massively triggering event for flows into Bitcoin as well.

Yeah, of course. Right. But either way, right, bail in, bail out, you get to the same place. Arguably, the bail in is tremendously deflationary. The bail out is tremendously inflationary. But like I said earlier, both scenarios go to, you know, both roads go to the same place in the end. So, you know, the question is, would 90% of our populace really kind of struggling right now to make ends meet? Is, you know, is a bailout and massive money printing and another huge round of inflation, is it even tolerable?

Add to that, we have the AI story on top of everything, you know, like we're going down a rough road, man. It just seems like a really, really rough road. The bail-in, remember, bail-in was done in Cyprus. The trial run has been completed. They know what, they know how to do it. They know how it works. we kind of go down the great taking route with david rogers webb um that's really interesting

um but at some point here look they're gonna have to recapitalize the system um let's see where it goes uh you know i again i would i would bet my i'd bet everything on yield curve control if it wasn't for the midterms and the fact that the central banks so badly want destroy donald trump so i think we can go into a really really dark place here um you know leading up into the midterms how do you defend against the uh central banks and the globalists trying to do this is it a public messaging thing is there mechanical stuff you can do from a market structure basis to to defend against this uh how do we how do we how would you make it clear to to people that hey this is an attempted take out of donald trump because these people don't

like him because they don't like that he's not on board with the globalist agenda yeah i think the only way to defend against it is not to have debt um that's what's going to be the the undoing of so many lev you know leverage always kills you uh when you have a deleveraging and it certainly would seem that we have a massive deleveraging coming our way now in the case of you know an asset like silver just to go back there again the deleveraging can be to the upside if all the leverage is on the short side uh you better be careful because things can get crazy um in bitcoin it probably sees you know we go lower until there's a financial crisis at that the first sniff of a financial crisis bitcoin rips okay yeah yeah it is crazy times

What else are you looking out for in terms of things that would signal that we're getting closer to this deleveraging event where the body is rising to the surface of the water? Look, I think we're really, really close. Again, I'm expecting at some point here soon somebody to float up to the top. And if not, they're going to push these prices. They're going to push yields higher. they're going to push gold and silver higher until they get there right somebody's going to float up to the surface and it seems to me that this is what the trump administration wants so you know the u.s has the world's largest printing press they'll get to where they want

to get to don't bet against the treasury and one thing that's been interesting too i'm not sure if you've been following this but the delay of the supreme court's ruling on the tariffs And it feels like every time they push that back another week, the probability of them giving the green light to the tariff regime goes up significantly. And I think that would be massively beneficial for Trump's economic policy. That's another thing that could be destabilizing if they have to unwind those as well. You're talking hundreds of billions of dollars that we need to figure out what to do, how to give it back. just it's crazy times i i you know again wherever you look there's another grenade sitting underneath a uh you know some leaves and and you just got to be careful it's like landmines are everywhere

and i've never in in my career i've never seen a setup like this i just i've never been more defensive in my opinions than i am right now because i honestly i just i don't know you know I try to revert back to first principles. And first principles tell me that the derivatives complexes, that again, it's not just silver. We could talk about treasuries, right? If silver breaks, what happens to treasury derivatives? If they break, the whole thing breaks, right?

If you think the silver market's big, you should see what's going on in the basis trade out of the Caymans, which is trillions of dollars, right? We have estimated a quadrillion dollars in derivative exposure. These are not numbers that we can even quantify. We can't even understand them. And the entire system is held together by counterparty, like counterparties that trust each other.

And if we see one large counterparty fail, the entire system crumbles. Yeah. And, I mean, you mentioned earlier, like, the Danes saying they're going to dump all their U.S. treasuries. Granted, they only have $100 million of U.S. Treasuries in the balance sheet they've been dumping for years. I mean, obviously, it's not going to have a material impact on the structural integrity of the Treasury market as it stands today. But it is sort of a market signal. Like, hey, they could be the first to say that.

Who knows? Maybe some bigger country out of Europe with a larger exposure says, hey, we're going to follow the Danes. maybe get china japan saying something similar japan would be we need to defend our own yield curve so we sort of need to dump this but that's the big one right it's japan uh the chinese we know they'd love nothing more than to see the dollar collapse the japanese are really caught in a box themselves right they're gonna have to at some point here step in and defend their yield curve they have to defend their bond market i just can't like we know that these losses are in the system whether it's pension funds whether it's you know banks japanese banks they're my

guess is that there's structural insolvencies around the world right now and we just haven't no one's raised their hand yet but it's going to happen yeah i mean as it pertains to japan specifically just looking at the charts like left side of the bell curve caveman uh chart analysis It feels like something has to happen soon because they're going parabolic straight up into the right. Last night was a Six Sigma event, right? Every time there's a Six Sigma event, we learn about the bodies really soon after. So my guess is we're about to find out about who lost a metric shit ton of money, and we'll see where it goes from there. But that's going to be the spark on the Bitcoin story.

When you have de facto bank runs, the ultimate bank run now exists, and it never did before, right? There was nowhere to hide. You could pull your money out of one bank, but you had to put it in another bank. Well, now there's a place you can go where you don't put your money in any bank, right? And that will cause a global bank run, the likes of which we've never seen before. Yeah. Well, I know you're having this conversation with many individuals on a weekly basis in the Bitcoin Today spaces. What is the most common retort you get when you put this thesis out there? Look, I think there's just so much normalcy bias that's been built up over the last 20 years

that people just can't see the obvious, right? You get away from first principles when you believe in normalcy. So things are fine today, they'll be fine tomorrow. But as people that have been around markets for decades, we know that's not true. And then as guys who study pattern recognition, we know that what we're staring at is not normal. It's not even something we can go back and point to in history. I would have to go back to the Weimar Republic to even get close to some of the things we're witnessing. And look, it shouldn't be lost on anybody that it's not just the monetary effects. We have social problems as well. And all of this was kind of mirrors what we saw in Weimar Germany in the 20s. So that's why I kind of lead towards

the crack up boom thesis. Just my pattern recognition goes back to just first principles of austrian economics yeah i mean on the social side of things you look at how polarized things are there's a large subset of the country and i'm going to clue to myself and that is like okay finally as it pertains to immigration and fraud we're getting back to law and order if you're an illegal immigrant it's time for you to go home and if you're fraudulently taking money from medicaid medicare uh programs we're gonna come find you uh and reprimand you appropriately and then on the other side you have something i'm sure you've seen at the um virginia just what's happening on the ground within the state of virginia now that democrats are in control of um the

governorship and the legislator there the laws that they've passed since the beginning of the the year and basically increase taxes on the rich get rid of mandatory minimums try to create more opacity around voting and make it easier to to vote from home or do absentee ballots and it's just going in completely opposite directions from the right it's like okay we do want to bring back law and order you know as particularly as it pertains to immigration and federal government fraud abusing programs like medicaid medicare and then on the left it's like no we need to you know speed run this color revolution and make sure that we get uh make it so we can just do whatever we want um by passing all these laws that lead to more anarcho-tyranny yeah it feels

that way, right? And the division just keeps getting wider and wider. And, you know, I'm at a loss as to what they expect to achieve with these policies, right? Like, where do they think this is heading? And you have to ask yourself, would any sane person want to go down the road that the far left is is taking us down and and by the way like these policies weren't even considered extreme 15 years ago like this concept of of no borders open borders this was this would have 15 years ago it was commonplace for for people you know for ice to function in our society and today it's not it it's just i can't explain it marty it we've we've completely departed from rational self-interest and yeah you gotta ask yourself like do they think that money's

printed on trees and that you can continue down this road forever and on some level i think they do i think they just believe that you can print money in at infinitum and that you won't have a problem and i don't know is it foreign influence that's doing this are the chinese behind this is possible i would not be shocked and it's like to highlight the complete insanity and hypocrisy of modern day policy on uh on immigration policy here in 2015 i don't know i think actually that guy looks familiar yeah it's tom homan um okay it appears genuine uh i was gonna say that's real yeah that's real yeah so i it looked a little ai so i just want to make sure but there's a real picture in 2015 barack obama awarded tom homan the presidential award for service for making

america safer at ice 10 years later um liberals want him killed but it is i mean this yeah this mass psychosis that has taken over where something that was once common sense even on the left and i'm sure you've seen many others have seen the campaign videos of hillary clinton brock obama two decades ago making it a point to say we're going to secure the border and make sure any illegal immigrants sent home now today you're a right-wing nazi if you think the same and again And with all the fraud being laid bare, it's completely mind-boggling that anybody would think this is not a worthwhile, invirtuous policy, especially if you're an American taxpayer. It's like, hey, they're literally just taking money from us.

I don't see why there's big effort. And to your point, I would not be shocked if there's foreign influence. It does feel very color revolutionary. Like when you look at Antifa, how they operate, and I think it's an extension of the weather underground movement from the 60s and the Marxist influences that have infiltrated the university system specifically. Yeah, then look, we can even go as far as to talk about H-1B visas, right? So we have legal immigration problems, corporations, you know, choosing H-1B over hiring young Americans and, you know, then hiding behind, well, there's no one here to do the job. So even Trump said that, right?

Like, are you crazy? Like, how did we do this before H-1B visas? And the whole story is just ludicrous at every level. again going back to pattern recognition i can't find anything in my in my quiver that can parallel what we're witnessing today in society um it's the story is just almost too much right there's so many different fires going on all at once all over the place that it's really hard to put your finger on you know what what do you tackle first well that's the question has been lingering in my mind i haven't articulated it or expressed it publicly yet but it's like

i'm beginning to question like the system as it stands today the fiat um in the sovereign debt system as it exists like is the fraud like it is late stage the point at which fraud is completely necessary because they need the ability to print money and just like push money into the system by any means necessary even if it's objectively and abhorrently fraudulent just to keep the charade alive. Well, and that, and that's the point, right? The GDP lie that we're all told is that we need, you know, we need GDP and the GDP comes from fraud. Money stolen is spent much faster than money earned. So, you know, from the perspective of the government, if you cut out the fraud, we'd go into a deflationary spiral tomorrow. So again, I don't know how you fix these problems

without resetting the money, right? The money is what's broken. It's the money that's causing all of these extraneous issues. And without fixing the money, we just keep going down this road until it leads to pure civil war. And I just, again, I don't see a way out. Yeah, and now that we're going further down the story, just thinking generationally, I'm sure you saw the stats came out,

like average new hire in 2025 was 42 years old, an increase of one and a half years from 2022 the median home buyer is somewhere around 59 60 years old um so young people another stat i saw the other day and talked about a video that we released this morning is um since 2023 85 percent of american citizens under 25 have essentially dropped out of the job market are not looking for jobs because they don't think it's it's worthwhile which is insane um and to your point like we're getting to a generational point too where the young people who are supposed to have all this opportunity and be um in the prime of their lives and having the prime of their lives manifest in financial stability and hopefully family formation

and home buying is just simply not materializing and i mean this is something that is true throughout history when you have a completely dejected cohort of young predominantly or young male generations they are going to react in one way it's usually not a good reaction and so again going back to my point like a fraud is completely necessary just to sustain the system i think that's just like a philosophical and social question we have to all step back and ask ourselves at what cost? Are we trying to just prop up the system? Yeah, look, the measure of a society should be how well 30-year-olds are doing and how often they're getting married and are they having three kids and are they buying a home? That would be success for our society, not GDP through wars

and forever wars and military budgets and theft and fraud and everything else that's built into the system. So if we really look at, you know, our 30 year olds getting married, having three kids and buying a home, the answer is no. And that should be the ultimate metric of are we a successful society? Not, you know, what is our GDP? You know, what, what are all the, the CPI and all the CPI, I should call it and everything else, right? It's all, the whole thing's become a fraud. And, and the only thing that's going to fix it is getting back to hard money is breaking the back of this dollar enterprise. I don't see another way to get there. And I guess the good news is that we're probably getting there sooner than most people expect. And yeah, it's going to

be really, really hard. If we hyperinflate the dollar, it's going to be brutal. But out of the ashes of that will be born a new system based on real money. And people will earn a good living, and kids will be happy again, and yeah, the boomer class is going to get smoked, but that's the way it's going to play out. It's pretty obvious to me. It's interesting how the Trump administration has its blind spots here too because of the whole $200 billion mortgage bond buyback using the proceeds of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,

or the profits from them to try to force down interest rates and positioning it as this bailout or not bailout positioning as a way to bring down housing prices for for younger generations like no it's going to have the complete opposite effect you're going to bring down mortgage rates which is just going to push up the price of housing and it's essentially another bailout for the boomer generation but then only a week two weeks later, after announcing that $200 billion bond buying program, we have the 10 year and 30 year blowing out to the upside towards 5%, which would prove, I don't know if they started buying these bonds yet, but certainly didn't have the effect that he would have liked it to have, even if it

was just a headline two weeks out. Yeah, it's pretty clear that our leaders aren't on top of things the way many think they are. I'm no fan of Scott Besson. I think that they are looking at the situation from the wrong lens. They should be focused on restoring free markets and getting out of the fraudulent game, but they're not. They're just trying to continue to push on a string, and eventually that string is going to break. Why do you think that is? Do you think they don't recognize it or do you think they understand the uh the gravity of um what would happen if you ripped out all the fraud well i'll tell you i think trump's focused on legacy more than anything else and he doesn't want to preside over economic collapse but we need economic

collapse at this point um that's the only way you're going to fix the system so you know it's interesting. Again, I think it comes back to midterms and the entire four-year cycle of the way the United States works, right? It's clear to me that a benevolent dictator is a far better form of government than what we have with a broken republic. Because at least you get things done. Here, we can't get anything done. And then every two years, we got to reshuffle the deck. That being said, we do have a constitution to fall back on, and if we get back to being a constitutional republic, it's right there in our constitution. We need to have hard money. So it was getting away from our constitution, which got us into this plight, but we're so far away now, I don't see the road back.

Yeah, and that's really disconcerting. I mean, this has become a very popular thought over the last year, particularly as some Trump voters became sort of disillusioned by what he's actually done since he got in office for the second time versus what he campaigned on. and you have particularly young men calling for a Franco-like strongman to come in and make everything right, and a lot of people pointing to what Naeem Bukele has done in El Salvador and saying, why can't we have that? And then obviously you have the other side of the spectrum, which is we need to 10x the size of the government

to get more control in the middle of everything. And it is a chaotic time to be alive, to say the very least. and a very hot start to 2026. Look, the Bukhali story is the benevolent dictator side of things, right? That's what I'm referring to. But that requires suspending constitutional rights

and throwing people in jail and a lot of people in jail, a lot, like building prisons and throwing people in, a lot of people in jail, including politicians, judges, and there's not the political will

in the United States to do it. So I just, again, how do you, you know, people are calling for Don Lemon to be arrested for the issue in Minneapolis the other night. Do you really think, even if we arrest him, isn't a liberal judge just going to throw it out of court? Like, have we got to the point where we can't even enforce law because the system is so broken? again i just i i don't see the the path out of this other than the collapse of the dollar right that you collapse the dollar you collapse the system you can rebuild the system based on the constitution but we're so far away from that that i i just don't see how we get there yeah stay frosty out there uh stay away from debt keep your bitcoin in cold storage and uh

i think that's the best advice we can give right now right i think so i i honestly think that's the answer right now is when you don't know what to do do nothing yeah well thank you for joining us we'll have to do this again uh we can't wait uh six months we'll probably have to catch up uh in q2 we get an update on all this i think as we described earlier it seems like things are progressing rather quickly right now particularly in financial markets and even in the geopolitical realm so it could be a completely different landscape uh just a month from now yeah i agree i suspect things are going to move very quickly yeah all right well thank you for your time thanks marty thanks for having me i wish we had a more upbeat uh space and more upbeat

discussion but uh look we got to play the cards we're dealt and right now we're dealt a very difficult hand so play it close to the vest and keep yourself out of trouble yeah i think it's great advice no i mean sometimes you need a sober recognition of reality which i think uh the last hour and five minutes certainly was that so thank you for that and again we won't wait six months we'll do it um we'll do it uh in q2 we'll do a catch-up sounds good sir thank you so much for having me thank you peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening

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