TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #743: Why Boomers Will OutHODL You with Eric Balchunas

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

Marty sits down with Eric Balchunas to discuss the Strategy investor call, the accelerating institutional takeover of Bitcoin through ETFs, and whether the cypherpunk base is cashing out just as Wall Street and the boomers arrive. Eric on X: https://x.com/EricBalchunas 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/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Eric, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. For those who are unaware, Eric Balchunas is covering ETFs at Bloomberg and has become rather popular on Bitcoin Twitter over the last few years covering the explosion of the Bitcoin ETFs. But before we get to that topic,

specifically, I think, jumping into the strategy investor call that happened yesterday, which Eric was a part of. I think we should open with that considering we've got somebody who was one of the few that was on the call. What were your thoughts and why was the question that you asked so controversial? Yeah, I mean, I didn't see it as controversial, but someone gave me a hard time about it um on twitter but um i had a good reason for it basically i'm not a stock analyst you know i'm they asked me to come on they said there had a couple stock analysts and a couple bitcoin analysts i'm assuming i'm a bitcoin analyst but um i'm really an etf analyst and one thing that i i knew they were gonna get asked about the yield the dividend will you ever sell bitcoin i was like

these other guys are going to cover that right so after they went through the whole thing you know there's about 30% of MicroStrategy where I get confused, to be honest with you. And I'm also a little, I wasn't going to like ask a question that was out of my depths about like some financial structure part of the company. So I left that for other people. What I asked about was, you know, he had slides of all of the government people who are into it, like, you know, the SEC commissioner, the Trump, this, that, and the other. And there was like, it was like a Brady bunch, a bunch of pictures. Then he went over all the banks that are getting involved. And obviously, this is bullish generally, but it's all happening very quickly. And I know from

going to the Bitcoin conference where I was interviewing Eric Trump and this guy, John Kadunis from Calamos, I could tell from some of the replies to the tweet that had me in there. And just in general, over the past six months, I like to keep my ear to the ground. And I've noticed there's generally a little hesitation to how fast the suit types are coming in how fast the government is like involved you know um the bitcoin conference had the fbi director i mean it was a lot of a lot very quickly government wise just after a lot quickly happened wall street wise and i think generally people are okay with it but the speed is really fast and here's my here's my question to him was you know how important is it to keep the base of original kind of cypherpunk

i'm here because it's um a way to subvert the banks and the government and if you go and you team up with the banks and government too quickly do you lose some of that core the reason that matters and it's not just some philosophical question is i just believe in bases you know i've I was just reading about Star Wars and how it's just gone down that shitter that this Star Wars was like the greatest thing. And Kathleen Kennedy made all these like sort of un-Star Wars-ian sequels and they lost the base. And now it's the whole franchise is lost. And I just think that with anything, you want to have the base as much as you can. Those are the people that are really passionate about it.

They understand the technology. And if you bring them along, it really helps because then the ETF people, A, feel more comfortable, I think. B, they get educated more. Whereas if the base is like, oh, screw this, I'm going to go find something else, then you only have sort of newbies who are using it through like an ETF vehicle. And I wonder, you know, does that make the commitment to it a little less strong and secure? and so that to me is an important question could almost be paramount you know it would be like asking kathleen kennedy like you know do you think that like you're losing the base by making uh the main character of the sequels someone nobody knows who has to go through no training and has more

powers than luke skywalker in like two seconds do you think that might be a little a little much for the base you know yada yada and that is the question and he had he had a good answer i thought he he got it and he answered it um i don't know if it went over that well with everybody else the other questions seemed a little more wall streety but to me maybe i should have explained why that's important and then but i also a phrase that like does it even matter like you know again i use facebook as a metaphor facebook has grown by two billion users since it became like uncool you know and some of the millennials left because all their parents joined and i i google this by the way if you google millennials leaving facebook because parents there's all kinds of articles that

are like i'm leaving i'm leaving it wasn't the political stuff that was 2020 forget that it was just their parents came on the network and they were like oh this is not cool anymore and um that's what's going on with bitcoin right now and i how do you keep that cypherpunk edge while also like cheering on Morgan Stanley and such. And that's to me, my, maybe the most primary question right now, but I, it's weird. That was so, I don't know if it was mistaken, but sailor probably spent as much time on that question as anybody else's. So I think he got it. He was a little defensive, but he probably should be. And some of, some of his, uh, comments I thought were good. I didn't realize a couple of things he said. I thought we're, we're really good at addressing it.

what particularly well one thing is you have to understand like all the bitcoin owned a lot of it isn't like the cool guy og sitting you know uh sitting there uh with his you know bunker you know and like all into this like there's people in china who own it there's people in the emerging markets there's um he brought in the people in iran and i suppose there are a ton of people who own it who have who don't even care about the cypherpunk they like a currency you can move without borders like using it there is no cool thing with them they're not annoyed that eric trump is in it like so i think that's part of it the second thing is that the price has appreciated and he was talking about how valuable that is because if you want it to be more ubiquitous

and use as a currency you need it to hang around and have like a decent price and and get more users so the volatility drops and i that's that's i get that as well um and i think generally he talked about the concentration issue which was part of my question which is like what if only like a couple people own like half the bitcoin is that a problem and he also said which i've all also made this argument some of the things he said i already knew i i sort of just wanted to get his take on him but the micro strategy shares are many different people you know it's it's a lot of individuals. Same with the Bitcoin ETF. So there's like millions and millions of regular people owning it that way. So it's not like there's like one entity who owns it. Like

Larry Fink doesn't really own all those Bitcoin and Michael strategy does own the Bitcoin, but it's really the shareholders do, you know, and so there's a lot of just more, it's actually potentially even increasing the retail adoption through these other vehicles. So those were all pretty good answers um and i just thought i wanted to get his take on him what i wanted to hear really was what i find a lot going on is that whether it's sailor or larry fink or anybody else they are generally talking to people who aren't in bitcoin or in the media who need still need to be convinced what i wanted to hear was these people talking to the ogs about why you want to come along and make into this marriage with wall street and the government i haven't heard that a

lot um and i but i hear them complain on twitter where a lot of people speak their mind they're anonymous so you get that's why i like twitter better than other platforms is that there's people who are anonymous um and they tell you what they really think whereas in other platforms they're like attached to a company and they can't really say anything um so there's no fear of like any consequences and you do get maniacs that's the downside of that but you also get just people telling you the truth so i felt that there were some of these concerns from like the people who were originally into it and like i said um i just think anything that's such a that is going to be cool and remain cool and interesting i think you need the base to to be part of it i completely

agree and i think you uh you're highlighting something i think like i was telling you i've been in bitcoin for 13 years now a lot of most excuse me all that time i spent on twitter that's where i built my conviction was building a bitcoin twitter list in the early days 2013 2014 that list has grown significantly over the years but i think there's certainly been a a phase shift change in last five or six years with new entrants i think michael saylor and strategy being the first of the the big new entrants in 2020 and i think the there is certainly a new crowd particularly those that are more fascinated with the equities exposure particularly strategy and other treasury companies that have that have popped up and in both publicly and behind the scenes i think a

lot of people that have been around for a while are looking at um people really banboying these treasury strategies it's like hey do you actually understand what's going on here but to your point i do think the the base is strong and stronger than ever and actually i was in vegas too and on one of the panels that i was on the human rights foundation stage matt odell who's a partner of mine at 1031 and we host another show rabbit hole recap weekly we've been doing that for eight years now he made a really good point where it's like yes the the amount of suits that are in the space is uh probably uh in terms of new entrants over the last four years been a net larger amount of people than those who've come for the cypherpunk

ideals however at the same time the cypherpunk tech and those who are in it for the cypherpunk ideals have also gone up maybe not as much as the quote-unquote suit coiners but it's still a relatively strong and growing base and uh it's not something that that i am too worried about but it is something to have on the radar and and well try to gauge just what i didn't mention is that the data i used to start the question was that in the past 16 months there's been about a million bitcoin bought by corporations government and etfs but there's been about 750 million sorry 750 000 bitcoin sold by individuals so that that individual selling was really part of the source of the question and to me whether that's a silent ipo that's why the

price went down 45 and i think it confused people because like everything's going fine why is the price crashing and so that that's part of it i was like wait are all these early individuals just going to cash out was it a ponzi scheme all along to them i mean and you hear i'm sure you've heard the story as well these people have held since 2012 20 yeah 11 if you if you sell some to go buy a house and stuff i get that but if somebody's like oh i don't like just because of their politics or they're just um too cypherpunk for like to be like i was i'm a gen xer and i remember when bands if a band went major label and like was on mtv like a lot of core fans were like i'm not listening to them anymore they were like that cool that they

couldn't be bothered or like be it's a snobby attitude frankly but that's just how it was selling out was like, like a sin basically in the nineties and even bands that sold out felt bad about it. It was a whole thing, you know, and there's something like that. If a person takes all their money out of Bitcoin because they don't like that, I really would like to find out more about that because, well, where are you going to put your money? Like, weren't you in it because of the scarcity and the debasement hedge and that, um, concept and of course the censorship resistance but like what aren't those important things still even if boomers are in it like don't those things still exist or is it really just a ponzi scheme and or something that was cool for a

while but you're like bored now yeah no that's funny because i think it's more money out for people who sold a little because they've been in it they deserve that they should take 20 cash out get their two million dollars buy a house i i think they stay they've been through hell you know though it is no joke to survive like multiple 70 drawdowns uh there you should get rewarded so but at that point at a price point of 100 grand when people started selling 125 i'm sure they didn't sell all their bitcoin to have a ton of money so i don't know maybe you have a better feel for this were those individuals cashing out completely or partially what do you think was going on there i've heard i think it's a mixture of everything um there are definitely

i mean i think it would be naive to say that nobody sold out because their favorite band went went mainstream i'm sure there was at least a handful of those people i've heard rumors behind the scenes that um some ogs were convinced to be uh a tax strategy to convert their original bitcoin into shares of some of these treasury companies for the tax treatment that is preferable in the long term obviously we know through galaxy that they sold an 80 000 bitcoin slug that was part of an estate sale it was just part of somebody passing away and the estate mandated that they liquidate all the bitcoin um so yeah i think it's a mixture of everything uh i do there definitely are some jaded early bitcoiners who who don't like the entrance of the suits and

on that note i mean you mentioned when you were describing why you asked the question that it's important for um etf people when you say etf people do you mean the issuers of the etfs or individuals buy no both well the users too because you know if you're new to this thing and you're like okay i get it it's a debasement hedge and it's an asset you want to maybe have in your portfolio for a while um having like again remember this came from the retail and it went institutional normally things go the opposite way ball street democratizes institutional investments for the little guy this came the other way so as these people who use etfs visors and such like um i just think that generally speaking having the base there or at least a lot of them

it's good for educational and just um you know strength uh for an asset especially one that doesn't have cash flows you know you kind of need that strength because you know somebody a stock could be deemed like not cool anymore or whatever but if it just pumps out cash flows it's still going to be very valuable. That's very black and white to people. But this is a little more of an asset that does have a little bit of faith involved. It's just true. I don't think it's full faith, but I think part of it is.

But, yeah, and, again, I've just seen things where they abandon their base or betray their base or forget about their base, and it usually doesn't end that well. It's a huge warning, by the way. Yeah. I mean, well, Facebook might be the one where it did end well because it went from $1 billion to $3 billion in the past 10 years. The only thing about Facebook – and so this is where I think could happen where you could lose some of the base. But the ETFs and the exchanges like Schwab and all these brokerages, it's just so powerful that as all the boomers come in, it just totally overwhelms those few OGs that sold. Maybe that's potentially what we're going to be dealing with here.

But what's interesting about Bitcoin is the underlying thing is exactly the same. In my view, all that happened was the intermediaries got a little cheaper and arguably a little safer. Like, you know, you can trust these ETFs in particular because they're regulated under the 40 Act, which is a pretty strict regulation law. And then they have a 35 year track record of treating investors really well and not losing anything. Nobody's lost stocks. The gold has never been lost in GLD. Like it's a good, clean industry. And so I think you're going to have a lot more people come in. So that's all. It's not the end of the world. It's just something I've been thinking about because I'm from the ETF world and I defend that boomers coming in as being really good, smart money, in my opinion. But on the flip side, I sense a touch of snobbery from some of the people about that, and I don't like it.

I wouldn't do it, but I also can understand that the speed at which this is happening is a little fast. you know it went from again ftx was what four years ago not even yeah and now we're already here you know it all is happening very quickly but you know one thing interesting about the the the i interviewed eric trump and john cadunas on stage and they both had a story about getting unbanked and debanked or having a problem with banks and so it's interesting i think some of these suits might have more uh direct in uh understanding uh or be able to relate to bitcoin's purpose than people think too i think a lot of them just because they dress a certain way or whatever they have money or whatever i don't think it's uh fair to judge them uh like a book by its

cover um on the flip side i have found that some people in tradfi really write off crypto as just being like gambling, a bunch of bros, all that stuff. I think that's misguided too. So I have been going back and forth between these two worlds and I've just found myself in a spot where there's misconceptions from both. Um, but they're in a marriage. They really should stay married. Um, they're, it'll benefit both of them, frankly. Um, and you know, I also would just say to the people who got in early, like you were right. Like they should take it as a compliment. you know i personally when i was into a band early and they blew up i was like i felt a little pride that i had that taste to get there uh before i remember we were i got into smashing

pumpkins early and i bought tickets to roseland concert and it was just before siamese dream came out siamese dream comes out they blow up and we bought the tickets for i don't know this is back in the 90s probably like 35 i could have sold them for quadruple the price so like i actually have seen this happen again in short order with a couple different bands back then and i frankly was like nah i'm not gonna sell i'm going to the concert because i love them but i think it's kind of cool my friend and i were like wow we we could uh we could make a lot of money selling these and we just thought it was kind of you know cool to see that moment where somebody goes from like sort of more underground into the mainstream um it didn't bother me that much um occasionally

occasionally what i guess but um it's sort of something that just happens the things that are kind of cool or good um it they get discovered and they get you know exploited a little bit maybe but they also are able to reach more people and you bring in competitive elements and usually all that competition and professionalism helps people at the end of the day yeah i mean as somebody who had a gen x father and unfortunately passed away but going down memory lane i can remember the bands uh that he would he would say went through this transition to him it was stone temple pilots alice in chains uh pearl jam uh even guns and roses in the 80s when they when they were coming up guns and roses was the bridge between the 80s and the 90s like they were 88 to 92 but they they

really they couldn't they just didn't fit in with the grunge people but they bridged that gap between michael jackson and grunge was guns and roses but all those bands were really good like if you grew up in that area you feel spoiled today they were all struggling with shit and so the music was so good you know um they were not they were always swimming upstream and that's when you get some really good writing and uh you know a more emotive kind of sound versus when someone's like has everything going on that's like had like completely like has life figured out which feels like some of the music now everybody's like there's no nobody's really like battling anything so it just comes off as a little dead but back then everybody was like dealing with

man and it was uh the music and and you know i wouldn't say that a lot of the art was was i thought pretty good but the music in particular was a little bit of a golden age looking back yeah i was actually listening to some uh stp acoustic sessions in the car this morning they they came out and they were uh viewed as derivative of pearl jam like ripoffs of pearl jam but over time i actually prefer them to pearl jam um i don't know why i think there's a touch more art and mystery in their stuff pearl jams is a little straight up like classic rock you know and i i like that edge a little more edge um but they're both good but i think stp actually aged really well surprisingly yeah rest in peace scott wyland uh yeah yeah

but one thing by the way let me recommend a book for you there's a book that i just read that has scott wyland in it it's not his book but it's called i forget what it's called it ain't easy or it's so easy by duff mckagan is the basis from guns and roses he's seen it all so he was with motley crew but then also with stp and like the the allison chains he um played with them too so this guy was literally in that bridge area and he tried to help uh scott wyland get clean and there's so many good stories in that book because um he also talks about axl rose coming on like two hours late and like pissing everybody off and how they got started and like that band was like they got started in like um one of those storage units in a back alley in la like just all

living in like squalor and like that's what it sounds like we had the band tomorrow too towards the end right um dave navarro was with um jane's addiction and then he went with red hot chili peppers i don't think he did with guns and roses but i thought duff and him started a band after that oh yeah you're right they duff also was in i think velvet underground velvet underground that's yeah yeah so anyway it's for anybody out there who's like you know still listening he's like that is a very good book if you want to get a picture for like that era that period of time so freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey bitkey makes bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose it is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two

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Use the promo code TFTC. Once you set up your account, you're going to get $99 a month for your subscription for the first three months. we'll bring it back to to bitcoin and to quill yeah you're maybe maybe not your fears but you're uh to answer your question um and maybe the tide in the facebook like the to put the case forward that this could be a facebook situation where the millennials left because their parents came on i'm one of those millennials who left facebook has been on in over a decade uh and the early ogs

left because the two corners came again last week in vegas human rights foundation track two activists one from uh former yukoslavia and another from i believe zimbabwe uh i was at a dinner at the hrf and they talked about this on stage i feel comfortable sharing the story but they basically said hey everybody in this room that's building on bitcoin keep going because I know there's times when it doesn't seem like anybody's really using what you're building, but I can assure you, we can assure you that in parts of the world where Bitcoin is desperately needed

for its properties of being censorship resistance and money that lives outside of dictatorships, people are using it and they need the tech, so keep building. At least anecdotally, the demand seems to be there on the ground in areas that desperately need digital money for the digital age outside of states and central banks yeah and um you know i think there's you know at least in my research on this there's two main properties that are

very attractive censorship resistance and the basement hedge the censorship resistance in the u.s doesn't resonate as much especially now that the government's like oh we think this is cool we're going to like get into it, but governments change, you know, that, that could come in handy someday. We don't know. Um, the debasement hedge works everywhere. You know, that nothing stops this train phrase from Lynn Alden. I, I find is so perfect. It might be the phrase of the decade, um, because it's, it's like political, but apolitical, it really doesn't matter who's in power. And it's not even the politician's fault. The people will never vote for like to cut their own benefits or entitlements um and it's hard to also tax people so like

inflation is like a silent tax so the idea of actually just using money printing um it's such an easy button to solve for things if you're in the government and so like the incentive system is just to just keep increasing the money supply like it really does seem like an unstoppable train And that's, to me, one of the most powerful pitches for Bitcoin is that there's only 21 million. And if people do deem it valuable, it becomes like a gold in that regard. The censorship resistant, oh, by the way, could come in handy someday, you know, maybe. The only thing is the people who buy the ETFs, they're probably not getting that. So, like, I think most of the ETF people are buying it for that.

And maybe the tech, you know, it is really interesting tech. And if it does sort of take off as a currency, then maybe you get some of that. So, you know, it's sort of like half tech, half gold in terms of investment. But for portfolios, that's interesting to people because a lot of stuff is correlated to these days. People are looking for different things. So I think for the most part, those investors don't really care about the censorship resistance. They might someday, but not now. But to your point, it's very useful elsewhere.

you know um there's a lot of stories i read about and it's something that some people we i just did a like a year-long book project on this and some people we spoke to they would say you know it's ironic the u.s is probably the least in like needed for bitcoin because the inflation is bad it's like you know i'd say it's it's happening but it's not as really bad like some countries the inflation is horrible and there's horrible censorship it's just like you know it's so bad on both fronts and in the u.s like those two things aren't really that bad um they could be and they're definitely not great so i don't know it's interesting it's almost like you could have a world map of like the level of censorship and debasement and then the more

red you get, the more that's where Bitcoin would be needed. I bet the U.S. would be low on that list. Not that it's not needed, but I think in the U.S. a lot of people are intrigued by its ability as a performing asset. But it doesn't matter. People buy assets for all different things. But certainly that censorship resistance is, if you read about Bitcoin, it is fascinating that they were able to build something that's truly decentralized, where the computers, the nodes and the people running them don't even have to know each other or like each other and it can last 17 years i mean it's not just building it it's that it lasted and has just operates every day for 17 years as like a headless system there is no there's nobody running it and

it works it's it's it's hard to believe honestly when you really like think about it and that's I don't, I wonder how many of the ETF people really lock into that. I think for a lot of them, it's well, it's, it's digital gold. I've seen it really do some interesting things. I think it'll be good for my portfolio and they just kind of move on, you know, but I think if you go down the rabbit hole, you definitely, I think might, might find yourself more convicted because of those properties. Um, but those properties I think are why the, again, back to the original base that they were so into it, they were like, wow, this really is something. Um, so we'll see how the etf people kind of like educated themselves and get more into it over time i think

the environment and you know whether that's more money printing and inflation shock uh some kind of new government where they do censor you i don't know like those things i think you know there's a catalyst down the road that could be you know pretty powerful you know i think covid was one of those covid i think your work bitcoin really i know from talking to people in you know around blackrock that was one big step for them to go closer to it they saw what happened during covid especially the performance um so you know we we don't know what's going to happen macro wise what the state of play right now is not going to last it's everything's temporary so those properties could you know obviously come and go um depending on you know what's going on in the country you

live in yeah that's funny matt alborg um he did i mean this had to be six or seven years ago now this this point but he was doing research for bit refill at the time and he actually made a map indexing per capita for for bitcoin uh adoption and at the time back in like 2019 venezuela was number one in terms of adoption per capita with a GDP per capita lens layered on top of that as well. Yeah, the per capita is an interesting list. You know, I think the U.S. might not even be in the top 10. I mean, it's down there. It's all really mismanaged countries. But there was some there was a study i think you might be talking about the same study i can't remember what the study was called but it was one where they did also point out that it also helps to

have like some decent like young people who know tech like it can't be too remote there's this sweet spot of like totally mismanaged country but enough tech that young people are like able to like kind of use their phones correctly for this um that's like that sweet spot where you get a high per capita yeah i mean and just building on this because you tweeted yesterday and i mean i think you've gone through the sort of tradfi um reasons why they don't get it but you said the crypto natives underestimate tradfi and tradfi natives underestimate crypto and that the two worlds will slowly merge what does that look like i mean like keeping on this thread what do you what the catalyst that will get the two sides to understand each other i think yeah um i i think

generally first of all this is a battle for intermediaries it doesn't really impact bitcoin bitcoin's still doing its thing but the people who are going to get it for you because you're too lazy to get it on your own um you know to be honest it is full of friction that's where the battle is so what i'm really saying is that um bitcoin itself is a little too complicated and frictiony for an old person to use they got to work on interfaces that are better that are seamless and don't cost anything like i can use fantasy football um it doesn't cost me anything i just put my email into yahoo and it's very easy i can change my lineup i taught like my 11 year old he's now 15 but i taught him when he was 11 it was very easy they need that for

bitcoin they have developed that these crypto exchanges have developed something that's somewhat fantasy football easy but they charge like one percent per trade so i think what what's going to happen is tradify is going to come along and do the fantasy football easy but for like almost no fee and that's going to take over but the the access is still to the underlying crypto so you're to be bringing in probably more money so in a way the the golden goose is the crypto but the way to get it is going to be more tradify i think than the tip the intermediaries now the only thing i think is should be um you know people who are really want people to be more on chain is just to look at how easy the etfs are and say how can we match this um you know because i

i i'm pretty with it i work with james on this book and i was like okay if i'm gonna write a book on this i've got to try to get bitcoin myself and it was clunky probably took me three or four hours uh to get the bank statement or the bank um account transfer the money get the ledger wallet the ledger app by the way gives you some choices but they're all 1.5 or more just to move your money over and then i was confused on like sending it from the from the exchange to the ledger app and then on the app it doesn't even it's not even that clear what i'm doing um the app could be the the thing itself this hard digital wallet it's it's kind of cool but it it's like i don't know like my ipod back in the day was way more intuitive so like i just

I feel like all of that has to be way easier. So I think TradFi could actually help with that. We'll see. But they're certainly going to play the intermediary role better. They've done it with stocks. They've done it with bonds. This is what they do. I mean, shameless plug for BitKey here, but they just launched their new wallet. It's like, okay, this is a UX. I'm happy to have designers and hardware developers like there's a square i have this wallet i don't know if you can see that can you see the picture

yeah yeah that's the image i got for boomers so when i go to these crypto conferences i'm like i i i have this chart where i'm like the boomers are going to be better hodlers than you think and then i flash this part and i'm like do we look like we cans to you sunny because i'm like they've seen some shit they've lived through a lot of cycles of stocks and oil and all this stuff and wars and uh they've seen it all you know not only that but their allocation is smaller so they can probably handle more vol given it's not their whole nest egg but anyway i do think um they enjoy getting trolled over that because they on one hand they're a little a little too cool for school assuming everybody who uses an etf is an old person

it's not i just play into that and so i like that that's that's a anyway just some backstory on that picture um because i just like that um hardened looking boomers all right freaks you know me you know i don't take sponsor money from products i wouldn't use myself so listen up the AVEN Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat. No gains, no annual fees, no minimum draws, and your Bitcoin is custodied by BitGo, which is one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. AVEN never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control. And guess

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go to Unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. That's TFTC10 at Unchained.com. I mean, this is a good segue into just the state of the ETFs and the impact they've had on the market overall. The data that you've been sharing that has been coming out over the last couple of weeks. I mean, it seems like despite the fact that we fell to 60K high 50s, that the inflows continue. I think you pointed out the other day that iBit was number 11 in April flows at $2.3 billion.

And it was the only ETF that had those type of flows with negative returns year to date. Yeah, it's very rare to be, I mean, unless you're Vanguard. Vanguard is special. they just get the money no matter what's happening their investors are like hodlers on steroids in fact they're they're probably i mean from what i've seen they're better than the bitcoin people um but and the reason why by the way the reason why vanguard people are so good about never panicking is they they feel like they're married to their fund and they've got the best partner so imagine like pick up your dream partner sydney sweeney whatever whatever my wife my wife there

you go good answer uh anyway you feel like i couldn't do any better if i wanted um and they are married to voo they are married to vti they don't think there's a better deal out there and that's powerful and that really helps and to me that's a little bit about ibit for bitcoin i think people like this is a really good deal um bitcoin people i think um might i mean they're pretty good obviously and they've seen drawdowns that are really bad and the fact that it's come back all those times is really impressive so i can't knock them at all um but i bet taking in money even though it's down is rare normally only vanguard does that and only areas that are quote beta which would be like you know a market cap weighted index of stocks or bonds those would be like

stuff to be in your core of your portfolio the hot sauce bucket which you people use to like decorate with some speculative stuff those tend to be more flighty so like for example like i don't know 10 years ago there was this huge craze for currency hedging a lot of people piled in it worked to like buy international stocks but like short the dollar or hedge it out and then it stopped working the unhedged ones started to um outperform and a lot of people left the arc had a little of that arc went wild people bought it and then like half the people left uh esg was a little bit so there's always these like flavors of the month hot sauce stuff bitcoin did not really have the same experience it seems more permanent yes nine percent of people left but for a 50 drawdown

that's really good and so that nine percent there's only one number that really matters it's like the equivalent of like batting average in baseball basically it's the cumulative net flows lifetime so over the years they've gone up and up 30 40 50 they got to 62 billion of net net the reason that number is hard is because it's net of people leaving and they went down to 52 or 53 something like that well they're now back up to 60 so they've almost completely filled that hole and a couple more days or like this or a week they're going to break through to the 62 point and start breaking new ground in what is the most hard number. And to do that refresh off a 50% drawdown, it's not like it's gone up another

a hundred percent or 80%. It's gone up 20%. It's pretty good, but that's pretty, that's a very impressive. The key to ETF category growth is not how much you take in when the times are good. that's important but it's how much do you retain when the times are bad and over the over time this is a very very strong showing here so i think you're in good shape if you're a bitcoiner worried about this i think most of these people you can tell from the flows have decided to allocate and not trade this is this to me is much more of a debasement hedge and a portfolio diversifier than it is a FOMO trade, like it might have been five, ten years ago.

Yeah, and how much of that do you think is driven? I mean, just to steel man this, is there potential that it's coincidental that this is happening? Because around the same time you have Morgan Stanley coming out, launching their ETF, you have portfolio recommendations coming out, increasing from one percent to two to five percent depending on the ria or bank that you ask um there seems to be new entrance and obviously stuff going on in dc in terms of the seems like we may be on the cusp of another sort of regulatory go signal uh here how much of that

is being driven by just a validation uh via these new products and what may be a stamp of approval from the government a little i think um those are catalysts that are helpful i i think i just think the bigger fundamental reason to buy it is those two things i mentioned for etf people it's a scarce asset that can hedge to basement you know almost everybody is on to this they're like yeah the government loves to spend money it's an easy way out of problems to deal with problems so like that's pretty powerful fundamentally and that's not going away um so the other the idea is that people generally like to have things in their portfolio that are like different and so those two things combined are why people are buying them

The traders might be trading around these narratives of the legislation, but what I think generally happened is I don't know how much any catalyst news-wise is going to move the needle. It seems like it does go up in inches, but nothing is giving it god candles like back in the day. And I think the reason for that is in 2022 and 2023, that's 24 months, the price went up 450 percent on ETF excitement. But really, a lot of narratives that played out were baked in. Like people were like, wait, if BlackRock does it, then Fidelity does it, then Morgan Stanley. And they really went all the way down the line. They're like, I'm – this could be – this is it. We're finally arriving into mainstream America.

well over the next it got a little ahead of its skis you know at 450 that's way above normalcy and so i think some people sold because they wanted to sort of like front run the cycle or whatever but as the narratives came out they didn't move the needle because it would already priced in i think so now i think you're at 80 83 and it seems like from here there i don't think there'll be any crazy runs up i think it'll be a grind up based on like the slow uh spreading of the etfs the brokerage platforms um it would have to be something like i don't know maybe the u.s government like announces like a huge strategic reserve bigger than what we we thought and other and china matches like that might move the needle because that's not really baked into the narrative

of like wall street adoption but all of this stuff like government wall street adoption is pretty baked in i think um you would have to take something that's maybe completely different so i think maybe you might see like a little bit day-to-day of the price movement but i don't know that's just my read on it i don't think headlines are just going to move it that much when it comes to these like you know so-and-so company doing this or the government putting this i just i don't know it just seems like you already got the returns for that frankly I mean, iBit still is up 75% since launching or something like that. It might be 80.

And it's also up, I don't know, like 200% since BlackRock filed. That's a nice run for like three or four years, right? That's like, what is that? Around 40, 50% annualized with the drawdown. So in a sense, all that was rewarded. It just happened to be so high. And there was a Kingda Ka roller coaster in Great Adventure. It went up too high.

So when it comes down, people are pissed because it came from up here. but honestly you're still like this and so i was i always tell people and the media is like oh my god it's over i'm like not really like if you if you draw a line from where it was to here even though it went like this it's still like this but you know how everybody gets like has recency bias and compares everything to like the last month and it's short-sighted stock investors don't do this as much i mean a little but um i don't know it i just i try to tell i some of the crypto people who seem like upset about it i'm like would you let's say i can go back in time and take 200 of the 450 and take it out of those two years and like spread it around the next two years

would you would you rather have that a lot of them say no they'd rather have that exciting move up and i'm like either way you're getting the same spot adrenaline junkies no and i yeah i wanted to steal man because i wanted to see if there's a different perspective i agree with you in fact earlier today somebody tweeted out question for anyone bullish on bitcoin here name the catalyst the specific event the market is front running and i quote tweeted like imagine waiting for a catalyst when you understand the fundamental value prop which aligns with what you just said in terms of once you see it and it's a debasement hedge in your mind you're just going to allocate and hold yeah i don't yeah there's something about this asset that

it pisses a certain kind of person off like i call them high priests this asset pisses off high priests and that's a positive thing in my opinion i i didn't know much about it but i definitely saw it irking the right people and i was like oh this i felt like some camaraderie with it even though i didn't know i did what it was i was like it just bothered uh real uh you know you know who i'm talking about like certain buddy duddies like it just really got into their skin and like i don't think they'll ever get it i'm not sure um what else you need to see but you know you to be fair most of them probably have the same view of gold too but this gets them even worse because it's like you can on the block it's getting a lot of tension it's taking

away from their their high priest preaching you know what i mean and so they're they don't like it it's like who what's this thing down the block getting all the attention i'm here trying to give you all a sermon and uh i don't like that and i like that i think anything that does that is good it tends to be good and lasting so i um i definitely understand that idea of people just throwing out these random questions but if you look at the money supply it's gone from 11 trillion to like 23 in like 10 years and it's hard and when doge came out the elon thing and here you had a a new elected president with like a lot of uh you know once you win an election you have like a lot of like what you call that not goodwill but like you have a little extra power

because you just got in so you can start doing things quickly that are a little abrupt so they had that going on and Elon who's obviously richest guy in the world and very smart and they couldn't really do much to make the government more efficient and this was like people who wanted to do it and so i'm like wow if that didn't work i i just don't see anything stopping this gigantic like this guy just huge flow of money um i'm not sure how this plays out but bitcoin feels like as uh this guy this he's not a um he's an author but he's just a regular investor who wrote a book, Ben Hart. He calls it the second amendment of money. And you basically, it's the similar concept to the second amendment. It's, it's protection from your own government.

In this case, protecting yourself from, from their debasement. To me, that's a very clear message that is totally intact. It doesn't need any more catalysts. That's why I don't really get carried away with like short-term price movements or the latest headlines or trying to decipher it all um but i do like i said i do think some of the people who were early having them stick to that is useful you know because just to remind people that we're not just buying this because of some headline that might happen um it's really this all that's gravy right the main the main purpose is this thing so anyway that's a i think that's probably you the right answer um that's what i would think but um the media also has to write stories so they're gonna

write like when it goes up it's the greatest thing since sliced bread when it goes down it has no purpose um just i don't know if there's any way to stop that whole thing but um yeah we'll see maybe i mean etfs went through a little of this um same process they also a lot of they were pirate chip at first suits came in some etfs had issues like this one vix etf had a problem uh it kind of tainted i've seen this happen with this industry similar fashion um but ultimately things that are cool things that are good things that people believe in tend to just grow over time it's not that complicated you know we we like to use that midwit meme you know the guy on the bell curve who's like oh you know he's in like a he's a fit he's all these he's got like this whole essay

written about how about how all this is wrong and then like the jedi and the dummy are like u.s stocks are good u.s stocks are good like it's just not that complicated like there are certain investments that if you um you know if they're good and you like them like don't don't go mid wit you know like it's like overthinking things it's almost a total um investment killer simply because it takes a lot of patience to win right so you're going to just not over uh overthink it sometimes um that's that's generally from my experience in this industry has been my philosophy is overthinking can be really lethal yeah completely agree and uh it is curious like don't mid-curve it and but the um the question has lingered in my mind for for many years now

like at what point thinking of the media naysayers and those in trad fi and precious metals like you mentioned that people still view gold this way like why hold it why hold it i'm giving a sermon over here but part of me like there has to be a threshold out there whether it's time that Bitcoin's been up and running and sustained a trajectory of price growth or market cap that people have to recognize like, okay, this thing's not going anywhere. It doesn't make sense to try to smirch it and convince people from turning away from it because we're X amount of years in and that hasn't come true. Yeah, I'm not sure about that.

um i gold the one thing you have to respect about gold is how long it's lasted um you know it it's been around since before dirt basically i mean it's mentioned in the bible 400 times you know literally like jesus is like basically throwing gold coins you know i mean it's very it's it's actually um anything that's been been able to last through that many cycles i gotta tip my hat now i i think gold and bitcoin will probably just exist together um there's plenty of big stocks that can exist together um there's also international stocks which can exist with u.s stocks it's okay i also have this um i get catch vibes from the gold and bitcoin crowd very similar to the movie step brothers you know when they they first meet and they're like

obviously uh they don't like each other because they're in competition for the same parents affection so they're like constantly like crapping on each other and sabotaging each other but then there's a moment in the movie where they're like wait a second we actually have a lot in common and he's like did we become best friends and it's like yeah let's go uh do karate in the basement i just feel like gold and bitcoin there could be some day where they just they're they actually align because they have almost the same fundamental message they're just competing for the same slug of the portfolio to a degree. I don't know if that will happen, but it's possible.

And I don't see gold going away. I just see Bitcoin living alongside of it. There could be some catalyst that shows everybody why not having to, you know, gold is tricky to move around borders and whatnot. There could be some catalyst where people, like, really see the sort of transportability of Bitcoin. Those catalysts have happened in other countries. people who are in countries with dictators know exactly why you can't really just leave the border with your money but for developed market people i don't think they have any like

something will need to happen that will show people that that trait is really that important until then i think what we're going to have is just like maybe some of the more conservative institutional types lean on gold still and then you have people using bitcoin or both i just don't know i don't know if gold like i said it's just hard for me to bet against gold given it's got like a 5 000 year track record i just it's like you know so hey i have my gold holdings you know and here at tftc we we recognize that we are ideologically aligned with the gold bugs and we welcome the gold bugs and have good conversations with them because to your point were simpatico and on most issues as it pertains to monetary policy and the thoughts behind sound

money in general that it we're stronger together than than fighting over the slug of the portfolio but um with that said i know we're coming up in an hour here i want to be respectful of your time but with the emergence of morgan stanley other players obviously vanguard hasn't released their own etf but last year they um allowed their customers to access other bitcoin etfs outside of their their uh their own products what um what are you looking for forward to or what are some i don't want to say predictions but what are you looking out for between now and the end of the year as it pertains to bitcoin etfs specifically now that the competition seems to be increasing Yeah, I think, you know, first thing that comes to mind is Goldman Sachs and BlackRock are rolling out Bitcoin premium income ETFs.

Both of these should be definitely watched. These are the most interesting, potentially potent new launches since Morgan Stanley. And Morgan Stanley was the most interesting one since BlackRock. So I think the guy running Goldman, the ETF business, he built equity premium income ETFs while at J.P. Morgan into a – it's now a $200 billion thing. This is basically writing call options on your equities. The big ETF he built was called JEPI, and JEPI is like $40 billion, $50 billion, something like that. And then JEPQ, which is on the Qs, that's like another $30 billion. He's the one who filed for this.

So can this guy jeopardize Bitcoin? At the same time, you have BlackRock, who only filed for Ether and Bitcoin. They filed for a Bitcoin equity premium income. And we know how big iBit is. So you have both of those people entering this category that up to this point exists, but it only has a billion dollars because all the other issuers are pretty small, like Neos and Roundhill. These are two heavyweights coming in with very good track records of raising assets. and the idea of having bitcoin with like guardrails and income is going to appeal to certain people so that's probably the biggest thing that's going on the other one might be just

some of these other coins are coming out like hyper liquid and um i can't remember the other ones but there's new coins of course well one of these coins catch fire and like have this shiny object moment where everyone's like oh actually that's that's interesting uh for now all the coins that come out after bitcoin and ether and solana they've slowly diminishing returns and interest but is there some new coin in sort of like second level tier that is going to have like a major breakout i don't know um those are two things i'm watching i guess uh but you know there's 150 bitcoin or crypto etfs filed um but those are the those are the ones that i'm most interested in monitoring uh the other thing would just be watching these brokerages

get into a fee war um back in the day like five years ago seven years ago geez fidelity and schwab were in a little tiff over like commission free and vanguard was involved i won't go into details but like basically they used to charge you like a certain amount of money for a trade for a stock and then Schwab was like you know what screw it we'll go commission free and then Fidelity who has real problems with Schwab they're like certain people are like heated competitors so Schwab went free and then Fidelity's like okay we got to go free now Fidelity makes money by selling you active management Schwab makes money by taking your cash on hand and investing it in a higher earning money market fund by only giving you a

little bit that's interest income so these firms figured out other ways to make money but they can give you stock trading for free and then i think it was td at the time they all went zero and it all happened within about six months it was like a shot then a month later another shot and then the shot started coming like quicker and then when the dust settled it was like free trading for everybody for all stocks and etfs it's like i'm gonna try to find i made a timeline of this and it kind of starts slow, but then it turns into a full-on brawl. This is going to be interesting. Morgan Stanley just said they're doing 50 bps per trade. Schwab's at 75. Coinbase obviously higher than that. Who's next? And Schwab tends to like to be cheapest. So Schwab

may come in at 40. It's like Price is Right, where they just try to come in $1 less because they want to go around and say, we've got the cheapest crypto trading. So this is going to be interesting by the time december hits it could be like i'm not sure free but it's probably going to be like dirt cheap all around that's crazy it's possible but i say 95 chance what i just described is going to happen well that's what when it comes like schwab trading i'm interested to see if they'll let people take bitcoin in kind if it's simple simple spot trading i haven't looked into the details of that um yeah somebody asked me that um will they let you like transfer the bitcoin to your own wallet i assume yes because coinbase allows that right um but i'd

have to double check that's the other question is how many people who use schwab care yeah i think a crypto person who might want to join like a you know mainstream brokerage they might care but they probably again they've probably got their own system set up but i don't know yeah there's there's a portion of people that will matter for but i don't think it's that big but i'll i'll come back to you on that that's it's a good question somebody asked and i was like i definitely should know that but i my hunch is yes yeah and that actually brings up another point bring it back to the beginning of the conversation about the uh oh geez i think another catalyst was people recognizing that they could get a cheaper leverage vi bit and if you're living on bitcoin and you

and you just want to use a margin loan to to live your life i think a lot of people sold to or to give the bitcoin in kind to an etf to to um actually i don't think they could do that anyway they wanted to get cheaper margin loans one catalyst and one comment about something you said about the Bitcoin with guardrails with income, it will be interesting to see if that sucks some of the wind out of the sails of Stretch. If you get pure or maybe a limited upside exposure to spot Bitcoin, but also income on top of it, with Stretch being the hottest thing on the block in the last couple of months, it will be interesting to see if people like the combo of limited upside plus income more than principal at par plus high income yeah um that will be

interesting i i think there's probably room for both to succeed but i would i just would never bet against the etf i mean the the jeppy and jepp q just the two of them let alone the rest of the category uh are over 100 billion i call there's a whole group of etfs which include equity premium income and buffers we call boomer candy because if you're an older investor you have a ton of money but not a lot of time and you don't want to be in cash so these etfs come along and they they say hey look trade in some upside for downside protection and a lot of them like that deal it's a sleep at night anxiety killer and so i i think these will be pretty big i don't know if stretch will be probably a little i don't know micro strategy certainly has or strategy has been

pretty resilient even though the etfs have been big they've been done fine i don't know how many room there is how many dots there's room for but they're certainly like not going away and doing fine they're also very creative about it they're you know it's very what they're doing and it's very artistic really i mean it's they're very using the financial levers they have to make interesting ways to get bitcoin um and obviously some clients appreciate that and there's also some clients like for example who cannot use etfs like in the institutional world mandates but they might be able to use a fixed income instrument and so i think strategy will serve some of them because even if in that particular case the equity premium income

etf could not be used because it would be seen as an equity so like the idea of turning bitcoin into an actual fixed income instrument is pretty ingenious um and a way to get to certain investors who have like these rules and limitations so but um the existing etfs that are premium income i looked at some of them some yield like 10 to 20 percent but some yield like 100 and there's going to be a whole spectrum the one i looked at that came out the same day as the bitcoin 11 on january 2024 was the roundhill one and looked at the two years since it came out the numbers are pretty good it's yielded 80 and given you 11 total return per year so that to me it's it's about the same of what jeffy gave you but jeffy's yield is only nine percent um again that total return

honestly is all you're getting so in a way those are equal but some people just like to get the total return given to them in these bigger chunks um it feels good to have income so i don't know where goldman and blackrock will come out my guess is a little more conservative than 80 like they'll give you more upside you know what i mean that way they're not giving you know uh i don't know that's an interesting question to see where they come out my guess is they would be i don't know if i had to guess 20 30 percent that way you get a little more of that potential melt up we'll see yeah we'll be fascinating we'll be looking out and maybe later this year we can hop back on the mics and and uh do a retrospective on on their launches uh this was

a very fun conversation it's always a fun conversation when you get to uh delve into the the world of 90s grande bands so uh i want to thank you for uh tickling that fancy for me and uh everything else i think you're doing an incredible job i think uh in terms of uh for lack of a better term, TradFi entrance covering the space in the last five years. I think you and Jeff have been incredible bridges between the TradFi world and Bitcoin and doing a great job with your analysis and your coverage. And I'm certainly watching it like a hawk and get a lot of value from it. So thank you for that.

Yeah, no, thank you. we're uh this has helped us build our audience uh for our analysis so it's a win-win so appreciate that and thank you for having me on today awesome we'll do it again at some point in the future 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 whether That's YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Make sure you like and subscribe to the show.

And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that $5 a month, get you every episode a day early, ad free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time