TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: Growth Mindset

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

A white hat hacker just moved 4,000 bitcoin out of Blockstream's Liquid sidechain, and while that story unfolds, the G20 quietly made "growth" the only word that matters. Marty and John break down why debt, deregulation, and cheap energy are becoming the entire playbook - and why Bitcoin keeps showing up as the trade no matter which way the plan breaks. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: Why a white hat hack on Blockstream's Liquid sidechain has crypto on alert How the G20 quietly made "growth" the theme of the entire meeting Inside the Venezuela oil deal and what its 100-year structure really means Why AI data center debt could make or break the growth strategy Bitcoin ETF demand, gold's blowout day, and what it means for BTC's next move TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Monitoring an active situation on Labor Day 00:00:19 - White hat hacker moves bitcoin out of Liquid 00:01:20 - G20 meeting and the growth-obsessed statement 00:04:42 - Deregulation, private credit, and the growth agenda 00:08:06 - Venezuela oil deal details and long-term implications 00:11:24 - Is the economy actually growing 00:14:41 - Net migration decline and its economic ripple effects 00:19:12 - AI data center debt issuance versus Treasury bonds 00:24:20 - Is AGI here? Jensen Huang and OpenAI weigh in 00:28:51 - Bitcoin ETF inflows and River's allocation report 00:33:37 - Gold's massive one-day market cap gain versus Bitcoin SUBSCRIBE › Newsletter (free): https://tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ › YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TFTC?sub_confirmation=1 FOLLOW US › X: https://x.com/tftc21 › Nostr: https://primal.net/tftc FOLLOW MARTY › X: https://x.com/MartyBent › Timestamp: https://www.ten31timestamp.com/ › John Arnold: https://x.com/JohnArnoldTen31 › Ten31: https://ten31.xyz TFTC #MartyBent #JohnArnold #Bitcoin #Venezuela

Mr. Arnold, it's Labor Day, but the situation needs monitoring. No rest for the wicked here. Situation never sleeps. Never sleeps. It doesn't take holidays. It doesn't. Neither do we. It's a relatively quiet weekend, though. Outside of Bitcoin, Lynn, I mean, we were just mentioning it. We don't have it on the list.

So maybe bears acknowledgement at the top of the episode, Liquid, the side chain produced by Blockstream, which is a federated side chain of Bitcoin. Looks like some white hat hackers may have moved 4,000 Bitcoin out of liquid, which is, I believe, 95% of all the Bitcoin that's been pegged in. So a situation that is unraveling. We're monitoring the situation, but I feel like we should make the audience abreast of the situation as it's unfolding. Yeah. Active, active situation, unclear how it's all going to play out. We'll probably have more to say on it next week. Hopefully, if some of it gets resolved or clarified, allegedly a white hat hack. We'll see if that's true.

A very, very odd situation on a variety of fronts. But hopefully it does not end up actually being a long-term loss of funds scenario. Yeah. So we'll probably touch on that more next week. But that's situations unfolding right now. Situations have come and they've passed and we've got to talk about them. The G20 meeting, the second meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors was held in Asheville. last week and you highlighted Control F growth in the PDF of the minutes of this meeting.

Why did you do that, sir? Yeah, I mean, it's the story of the whole meeting pretty much, right? Like if you go and look in this statement, it's fairly short. It's got about, I think, 20 points in it, most of which were agreed upon by everyone, one of which was disputed by a certain member of the G20 that did not appreciate the groups focus on the unstainability of heavily export-driven economies that under-consume internally. We can let people guess who objected to that. But otherwise, you know, there's also an interesting reference in there.

One of the points that specifically carved out for digital assets, quote-unquote, and stable coins, which I think is, you know, maybe we'll talk about that at the end, but just an interesting signpost as well that they carve out space for that in a statement. But generally, this, you know, if you read through, there's, it's growth, growth, growth, all over the place. I went back and looked anecdotally just that a few prior G20 statements, just to see if that's like aligned with baseline. And generally it does not seem to be.

You know, these are these statements. Historically in the last few years have not foregrounded growth in quite the same way. So do you think it's notable that there, you've got 34 references here and what is basically just a few page document to ramping up growth. And Besson himself, the Treasury Secretary Besson, succinctly summarized it for everyone, everyone in the room that, as he put it, poetically, the world is a wash in debt. And the only way for us to get out of it is to grow our way out. So something that we've talked about for pretty much the last year that this is the, this is going to be the playbook.

The various administration officials, especially Besson, have not been shy about that over the past year. But interesting to see it takes center stage at this multilateral meeting where everyone is basically being told to get on board that this is the way that it's going to have to go. Yeah. That's a big question. Can we thread the needle? I think that's on everybody's mind is paying attention, particularly in the administration. And it is a high stakes game where you got to get a lot. You got to do it.

I recorded with Michael Ebery. Last Thursday, John helped me with some show prep with Michael Ebery, the chief strategist, head strategist at Rabobank. We talked about his reverse perestroika piece in the beginning of the year, which is, I think, probably like the best start of the year piece I've read in quite a while and has been like a lens through which I've viewed everything. I highly recommend you go back and read that. Not everything has come to pass, but I think directionally he's very, very on target there.

And one thing he said on our conversation on Thursday is they have to do everything all at once and thread multiple needles at the same time. And growth is imperative and it's refreshing, actually. I mean, it's obviously high stakes and a bit unnerving at times. But the fact that they're focused on growth after we had the era of ESG, DEI, net zero, It looks like during that period we're building up all this debt and now we're more sensible people in charge, or maybe not in charge, but in positions of power. They're saying, oh, well, that was probably a mistake. We need to grow our way out of that.

And one of the ways you can do that is by lessening regulation when it looks like Scott Besson. It's calling for less regulation to help small banks. President Donald J. Trump announced historic oil agreement to secure American energy dominance and drive Venezuela. as well as economic recovery. So we talked about this as well. So growth via deregulation and tapping into energy markets in our hemisphere. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think it remains to be seen if the people in charge now are more sensible.

But certainly we can say the degrowthers have been firmly shoved into a locker. And that's not where we are right now. So yeah, to your point, like if the growth agenda is going to play out, like what do you need? Well, two things that you need are you need credit creation. and you need cheap abundant energy. So that's kind of this past week, I think we got to, one of these was actually at the Asheville meeting, the G20 meeting on the left here, what Besson was saying about banging regulation.

And he's been on this soapbox pretty much since the day that the Trump 2.0 started discussing how the degree to which Dodd-Frank and other regulations and capital requirements have stifled private credit creation in the U.S. And frankly, I think he has a point where you can kind of see that the changes that took place post-08, whatever you think about them, you know, have certainly, it seems accelerated consolidation of the banking industry. You've had a lot of roll-ups, a lot of, you know, smaller banks, smaller community banks going out of business or, you know, getting absorbed into bigger companies. And you've also had this massive explosion that we've talked about on the show and other contexts of, you know, the private credit industry. And I think some of that is, you know, not to say it's all, you know, smoke and mirrors by any. means, but clearly that is a market response to filling a hole that was left to at least some

degree by the traditional banking system kind of operating with, at least to be your best until, you know, one hand tied behind its back. And so I think this goes hand in hand with the growth strategy here of enabling more credit creation to come back out of the private sector. You know, Besson points to ramp up in new, new banking applications and approvals under Trump administration. I think a decent chunk of that is. is in the quote unquote digital assets industry. And I think that is interesting by itself that those two threads kind of come together there. But, you know, reiterating with notably Goldman CEO, David Solomon, JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Diamond,

sitting kind of right next to him at the G20 meeting. I didn't put it in here, but there's a great photo of Bessent Warsh flanked by David Solomon and Jamie Diamond at kind of the big kids table at the G20 meeting, you know, talking about a lot of this stuff. And if you go back and look at prior meetings, that's it's fairly. notable and fairly, I don't know if unprecedented, it's the right word, makes it sound probably too momentous, but it's not necessarily a common course to have a kind of a setup like that where you have two, you know, members of private industry right next to the big wigs from Washington talking about all this

stuff. So it clearly tells you, you know, what the one focus point here is going to be to kind of make the strategy work if it needs, it's going to work. And then, you know, the other big piece that's going I mean, necessary here is abundant cheap energy. The U.S. is in a much better spot than it was in 20, 30, certainly 50 years ago during the 70s oil shock where we were, you know, much more energy dependent. Now we're, you know, net energy export. And we talked about that a lot on the show and how kind of meaningful that's been this year.

But to do kind of what needs to be done here under the administration's framework, you know, you can never really have enough oil. You can never have enough energy. And you saw some additional detail come out this week from the Venezuela deal, which we talked about last week have more to say about it here. And I think, you know, there's a few, if you're watching on video, I think it's worth just checking out a few of these points that we've highlighted about just the nature of this deal that was just signed. I think a lot of caveats are at play here. Timelines are TBD. Five years from now, all of this could be torn up by, you know,

an aggressive anti-American government that nationalizes everything again. So you can only take so much from it. But the way that it's been structured is, you know, a hundred-year concession into fields providing 65 billion barrels of oil via a private company in which the Department of War has a 35% equity stake that will give that company the right to buy at cost, at production cost, the first 20% of production from all these fields, and then a rofer on the next 80%. So theoretically, like all of it, if we want it, although only the first 20% at cost. And then the government has veto power over the appointment of directors on the board of directors for this company. So this is like a very, I think the first past thing to say about it is just obviously

how potentially meaningful it could be for U.S. oil supplies, whether that's like an ethical deal, whether that represents like a degree of, you know, imperialism that we're comfortable with is, I think, one big question for people to think about. But the other point that I think is just worth noting is just how, like, we haven't had anything like this in the U.S. for like 100 years, right? That you go back, You have to go back to basically like depression era. Panama Canal. Like early, yeah, early 20th century programs, like the company that I believe was responsible for like building the Panama Canal, some different like public-private partnerships

during the Depression, which had, you know, varying levels of success. And so again, just kind of tells you like where we are in the imperial cycle. And I think this goes back to our discussion last week about the Standruck and Miller piece, you know, being written from a perspective of, It sounded like to me being written from the perspective of someone who, you know, has been trading in, you know, a time period that's very kind of like historically unique, like this Goldilocks time in U.S. history. And I think we are, this is the latest data point telling you, we're kind of firmly shifting into a market backdrop that looks very, very different. Yeah, I think it's important to know with the Venezuela oil deal, too. Again, talking about threading the needle.

This is more threading the needle in the long term because there will be a bit of a lag effect. in terms of the material effects it has on oil prices because you need to build the refineries to actually turn the crude into something that we can use in the economy. I think that's an important thing to... Yeah. And so it's got it to that point,

it has to survive changes in administration in the U.S. and Venezuela for long enough for all of this to actually, for any of this oil to actually flow to the U.S. and kind of be meaningful from a material perspective. So you got to think that's like what at least like a three to five year timeline and we'll have gone through presidential election cycle and other set of midterms, who knows what happens with Venezuela's government and, you know, how American-friendly or not they might be over time. So like I said, a ton of caveats

an asterisk on this one, but I think a major signpost for where we are. Definitely. And then getting into the question, is the economy growing? Why are yields going up? And we had a couple of Fed governors speaking this week, I guess sort of in tandem, a bit disparate in terms of the topics they were talking about. New York feds. Williams says yield surge due to strong economic prospects saying that a really strong U.S. economy and a strong economic outlook fueled by big investments in AI and data centers and technology in general is what's driving yields higher. And then you have Fed Governor Waller indicate that he will support holding rates steady at the September meeting saying traditionally don't raise into a supply shock unless you see second or third order effects.

And so talking about threading the needle. strong. We just had a really good jobs report. And I guess we should take a step back. And what are your thoughts on the question around is the economy actually growing? I'll let you start. I've got a couple things I want to add because they're not on the list. And I think people should really be thinking about the impact of the topic that I'm thinking about. But I'll let you guys, I'll give a little hanger there and then we'll come back to it. All right. Yeah. I mean, I think so maybe an a an asterisk is I think there's some data that Matt Dratch put out over the weekend kind of pointing out that, you know,

there could be some calendar timing quirks that led to like an abnormally strong report. That's in the timestamp this week if people want to go just take a look at that. But, you know, that's just to frame it all up. I don't know that we can necessarily take at face value that the jobs report was a blowout and everything's great. And certainly we've seen, you know, many, many quarters or many months of downward revision, both under Trump and Biden previously. So I think I take it all with a bit of a grain of salt when the first headlines hit.

That said, I mean, I don't have them into the slide today. We'll probably have them next week, but some good data came out over the weekend from someone was in the Wallster Journal and some was in the economist just basically showing the degree to which kind of the blue collar and then trades market is really picking up steam. And I think that's, you know, it kind of depends which pocket of the economy you're looking at. But I think that's notably ties into what Williams is saying here as kind of his justification for not being super worried about. about the direction of yields because that's directly related to, you call it reshoring in general,

but the big impetus for that, right, is the AI data center build out. So I think, I think that's also relevant, too, for as you consider what happens going into midterms and, you know, the relative popularity of the administration going into, you know, 28, there have been a lot of pockets of employment that have really been, you know, challenged under Trump 2.0, obviously the, what we might call maybe uncharitably the bureaucrat, bureaucrat, class or kind of academia have seen real headwinds, but if you're looking at kind of the base that Trump's poll posters care about, they arguably are getting a lot of tailwinds. You're seeing more and more of the data and based on this tailwind that Williams is talking

about here. So as to the question of, is the economy strong or not? I think the answer, as it has been over the past few years, is kind of it depends, depends how you look at it and what you're optimizing for and what you think is relevant, where you think it's relevant for the economy to be strong. I'll pause there and let you jump in with your secret surprise points. Well, going back to, it's not really secret surprise points, but I do think going back to like leading lagging indicators, I think a lot of the policy decisions that the Trump administration has made will have lagging effects. I think we're beginning to see a net effect

of one of them, which is like immigration. I think people have been surprised the upside. Again, just approaching this unemotionally looking at it. If you look at net migration, So total foreign-born population declined by 2.9 million people from January 2025 to July 26. So the first decline in net migration to the U.S. in many decades. And when it comes to growth and talking about those blue-collar jobs, specifically in affordability, I think what Waller was alluding to with the supply shocks, I think if you look at crack diesel spreads, they're at all-time highs. and that could definitely lead to a supply shock.

So you're managing, again, trying to do everything all at once, war in Iran, obviously creating incredible supply disruption that could be inflationary as the raw inputs of the economy, energy, particularly oil increases. And it's like, okay, how do you balance that out? And I do think not enough people are paying attention to net migration and the fact that if we are securing the border and getting illegal immigrants, all the country, opening up jobs

for a native-born Americans and then I think the bigger effect that would have an equalizing effect on something like diesel prices is rents going down in areas where illegal immigrants are being swept back to their home. And so that's one thing I wanted to highlight, like if you can talk about threading the needle, doing everything all at once, looking for equalizing effects with the negative and the positive. I think net migration is something that you do have to take into effect and could be a lagging indicator that we'll begin to show up more and more in these blue-collar job wages going up. Yeah, it's a good point.

And clearly has been top of mind, right, for the administration. You can kind of see, you know, there's like an ideological point behind that and there's like a, you know, red meat for the base point behind that. But there's also like a clear impact on exactly all these dynamics, right, as it relates to potentially giving, you know, blue-collar workers, native-born blue-collar workers the, you know, the lion's share of the benefit of that build. out and what it creates. But I mean, I think, so we've got, we flashed up here a vintage true social post that I think is interestingly aligned with the commentary that we just talked about from

Williams and Waller. You know, we came out, we didn't really talk about Jackson Hole much, mostly because we had other stuff to talk about and I really just am tired of dissecting FedSpeak. But, you know, the market got a little, you got its panties in a lot a little bit last week when it seemed like Worse was going to be more hawkish on inflation. And, you know, you get kind of the cleanup crew of Williams and Waller coming out. this week and saying, well, we don't really need to raise rates, and the rates are pro-cyclical, and that's why we're seeing yields pick up because the economy is so strong. And so I think that's notable, and you're getting a much more kind of like, you know, let's say caveman, you know,

grug-brain version of that here on this true social post in a way that only Trump can provide. I think there's a lot of, a lot of anti-consensus thinking in here that, you know, a strong country means a lower interest rate because it's a better credit and because growth is so good, should come down. I think there are dynamics we can talk about in there, some of which are maybe legitimate, some of which are more questionable. But I think all that is to say, like, this is telling you the same thing as the prior to, or the prior to quotes on the last slide, which is the just the ongoing countervailing forces pushing against aggressive tightening and an aggressive, you know, hawkish policy on the, on the Fed side, which is, you know, whether you get explicit

yield curve control is I think much, much less likely. But clearly, like, there's a variety of vectors of pressure kind of arrayed against, you know, hiking aggressively just because, you know, observed inflation is higher than, you know, the Fed might might like to see or the people might like to see. So again, just we'll have to test what the unitary power of the executive is to actually force an agenda like this through. But in, you know, if you want to call it a fourth turning or just some, you know, meaningful phase shift in U.S. history. I think it bears monitoring all of the little signs stacking up, pointing to, you know, the need to at least not hike aggressively here.

And we'll talk about some other reasons. That's the case in a second, too. Well, yeah, I mean, guerrilla in the room, threading the needle. I think the biggest needle to be threaded is reshoring and winning the AI battle. And I think this is probably the most white knuckle variable that we have. There's a ton of money, a ton of capital, and a ton of debts now building in this AI build-out. And it's can we keep the plate spinning on the stick without them falling and breaking while we're trying to do all this? Yeah.

I think this is an interesting chart. I would, it's for anyone not watching, we're highlighting a chart of hyper-scaler and Nvidia debt issuance as a percentage of treasury bond issuance, which I think this is computed as it says, net change in 10 year equivalence. I don't know if this is intended to be, I haven't seen the underlying data set intended to be just the 10 year or like 10 year equivalence relative to the overall base of issuance. In any case, the relevant thing is it's up into the right. It's kind of hockey sticking from a couple years ago.

It was under 10% now hitting close to 70%. So clearly meaningfully moving higher as this build out starts to transition into a new phase of funding. You know, we talked about on the show in the past that up until pretty recently, the biggest driver of funding here was basically just the enormous free cash flow and the existing cash balances of the hypers, you know, some of the most cash generative businesses in the world with fantastic returns on capital that, you know, previously spending the last decade, basically just, you know, buying back stock with all that free cash flow, didn't really have anything, you know, didn't have enough internal investment opportunities to actually use it.

And, you know, we've gotten to the point where that's getting more and more or less exhausted now and you're moving into needing external financing for more and more of this buildout. I think probably the better way to actually think about it is not just debt as a percentage of like treasury bond issuance, but debt as a percentage of kind of total spending on the buildout. And as of right now, I believe a majority is still funded effectively from operating cash flow from these companies. So the question for your, the plate spinning question is, you know, can operating cash flow continue to inflect and ramp up quickly enough to continue to be unmeaningful? portion of the overall funding so that you don't need to really rip debt issuance just to keep it all going. And also, like, you kind of need to see that to even have ongoing debt issuance at a

certain level because, you know, creditors are going to want to see, you know, clear evidence of RIC on the buildouts thus far. So it's a big open question. I think you and I are both of the mindset being, you know, using this stuff day to day, you know, especially you as a Hermes power user, just seeing how it's changed our workflows and how much we can still be doing with it. You know, I think we can say the product is real. You know, we're just scratching the surface of, you know, what the actual technology can do. So I think there's still a very strong bull case that operating cash flows do ramp up enough to, at least for the next few years, sustain this. But as you get more and more debt funding the build out on the margin, that goes back to our rates question of can you really, if this chart needs to sustain where it is and if this kind of build out needs to continue with some.

meaningful level of kind of debt financing behind it. Can you, if that needs to happen for the overall strategy to work, if this is kind of a linchpin or a major linchpin of kind of getting the growth that we need, then can you really sustain an environment where, you know, rates go up to too much higher and, you know, the tenure and the long end blow out and, you know, now hyperscalers and neoclods, et cetera, are instead of paying what like mid to high single digit rates, now they're paying double digit rates or whatever, right? can that really be allowed to happen for the strategy to move forward as it seems like the administration wants?

And I think you probably have to take the under on that. Yeah. I think I'm getting some echo. I think we're good now, though. But I mean, at 1031, I mean, we have a portfolio company that has really proved that you can scale with operating cash flow with giga. I mean, I don't think we talk enough about them. And they're one part of this buildout stack on the infrastructure, on the power infrastructure. your modular data center side.

And I know Matt has been on TBPN. He's spoken very publicly about this, but I think they're an incredible example of a company that's been able to scale pretty massively leaning heavily on operating cash flow. Yeah. I mean, I think it comes down to, like, we've talked about the, we've talked about in the past, like, how a lot of it

just comes back to like our scaling laws holding, right? Our capabilities of the models at a technical level, like continuing to get better and better, you know, commensurate with. the amount of spin that's going into training them. And then also, I think, increasingly on like the, you know, the product application layer two are like harnesses getting more and more capable and our new kind of, especially enterprise use cases, getting more and more unlocked to justify further and further build

out and, you know, the economics on, on inference being held up. And I think, you know, the right now, again, like the inputs suggest that they are and maybe we can we can flip to not the next slide, but the slide after to talk about some of that because I think it's also very relevant to that question. Yeah, AGI is it here. I mean, talking about the meta sort of proxy war behind all of this, I think is U.S. versus China who's going to win the AI battle on many commenters and people in the know on the frontier of building out this stuff.

It said you need to get to whoever gets the AGI and recursive self-improvement first, wins the game. And many people are looking at the Astra 6. release last week and looking at the benchmarks and using it in practice and claiming that that AGI is here. We have Jensen Huang responding to a chase from a Crusoe energy, I believe, coming out and saying that AGI has arrived and congratulating Open AI for the feat. So I would say, I guess it's yet to be determined. I don't know if we can say AGI is here, but Jensen is much smarter than I am. And so maybe we do have to concede that it's here or is it.

is it posturing by the American industry to basically claim AGI first. So they can do what is, or just take a victory and hold the adversary at bay, if you will. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe the answer is kind of both. There's obviously significant incentive for your book talking by both OpenAI and Vyria and kind of anyone involved in the supply chain that, you know, things are constantly getting better. And we're right. We're seeing massive new gains.

every week and we're right on the cusp of, you know, this totally new phase shift in American industry. So you got to caveat out with all that on the flip side. And I haven't used Astra enough in my workflows to really know if this hold water. But I mean like it's not, I think like, again, absent some breakdown in scaling laws or some like massive wall that we hit where, you know, for some reason you can only productize this stuff up to a certain point. Like you can kind see where the trend's going and whether this is AGI or what that even means. I mean, I think that's like, there's maybe a philosophical argument to be had of like, is AGI as such, like, even achievable? And that gets into, you know, philosophical territory that we're not equipped for on the show. But either way,

like, whether this is the industry's definition of AGI or whether that's going to take longer, I mean, the point is, like, you can kind of see where the line's going. And I think this will, that'll ultimately be the, what it all pivots on, right? What a lot of this, the whole strategy we've been talking about, you know, what Michael Everettico calls kind of grand macro strategy, the impetus for it and the thing that from the U.S.'s perspective, I think, makes it work or not, is whether, you know, this trend line generally continues. We can ask if it's desirable to live in a world where this is increasingly true. And I think there will be a lot of, you know, destabilizing social effects if this continues. And I think those are all worth talking about and thinking about. But in general,

just for the purpose of, like, can the plan here to the extent there is one work? I think that a lot of it pivots on whether this is credible or not, whether you think this is a GI or not is not super relevant. But like, is this is the line going where you think it's going based on what we've seen? And, you know, thus far, like it all continues to move kind of roughly at the pace that you would kind of expect if you had been paying attention to this stuff for the last few years. Yeah, I haven't taken Astro 6 for a proper spin yet either. That's all my plan this afternoon to really dive in, but I know a number of people who have

and I've had multiple side conversations over the weekend of people sending me what they've done with Astro6. It is incredibly impressive. And so I'm actually looking forward to this afternoon to sitting down and spending my Labor Day diving in and pointing Astro 6 and everything I've built and ideas I have that haven't been possible to accomplish yet up to this point with the models before. or six. So, I mean, it is a strange new world. To your point, I think there are a lot of important conversations that we're not going to have on the show right now, but you look at the, um, the hugging face

agent swarm attack and the reaction to that. And again, that could be K-Fob. It could be sort of the rhetorical positioning by open AI and the, the Waldgarden frontier models looking for regulatory modes where it could be legit. We could have just unleashed sky net on the world. But, um, I think, uh, to John's point, for the context of the unemotional sort of economic ramifications conversation we're having here, it does seem like things are up into the right, at least for now. Speaking about up and to the right, many people saying Bitcoin could do that as well. We had River come out with a research report last week, basically diving into the allocation recommendations from many of the world's top asset managers and basically projecting forward looking at how much of

the average portfolio has been allocated to Bitcoin to date and based off of the recommendations from those asset managers where it could go if portfolios start moving towards those allocation percentages. Then we had Eric Balconis come out highlighting that iBit inflows are hitting the over. And so we have a kind of capital flowing into the Bitcoin ETFs at the same time. Yeah, I think the most notable thing to me about Eric's post was, He says only one billion away from fixing the hole in year-to-date flows. So which is to say, you know, they took in, the ETFs took in close to a billion dollars on the day that he posted this just a few days ago.

So basically you're one or two days away from kind of being neutral on year-to-date flows for the ETFs, which I think is just a real testament to the demand and the resilience of kind of the ETF buyer, not even just of Ibit, but if you look at just like the passive flows dynamic of, you know, retail and. and retirement accounts and even institutions just being trained to consistently like, you know, buy the dip, plow more in on a kind of recurring basis into, you know, whether it's SPY, the QQQ, whatever, like this is a muscle that's very familiar to the average American brokerage account. So kind of seeing that with Bitcoin, even though we've had, you know, very atrocious and like disappointing price action this year is I think just a pretty notable indication of the regime shift, the market regime shift that Bitcoin is experiencing right now. And I think when you look back at everything we've discussed on the prior slides, like you're looking at, you know, is it, if the plan works, like you're still going to need like we've discussed, a meaningful improvement in the collateral base of that ultimately underpins, you know, U.S. debt.

So I think there's a, there's a world that's very bullish for Bitcoin in that scenario. The world where it doesn't work and, you know, we have a nonlinear break of something that requires, you know, the big print. Okay, well, that's obviously quite positive for Bitcoin as well. You look at the, we didn't get to talk about it, but Bernie Sanders came out with a, introduce a bill to ban artificial superintelligence and institute significant, you know, new controls over data center buildouts. And I think, interestingly, there may be some horseshoe theory there where increasingly I think you're going to see the Trump administration also, we've already seen elements of this in the past this year, wanting kind of more and more of a stake in the buildout

and control over the buildout. And it's becoming more and more of a national security issue. So, in a world where you're having that much more top-down control and potentially, you know, interest in, you know, maybe not nationalization, but kind of outright, you know, government ownership of certain strategic assets. Like, again, that highlights a world where I think it may be interesting to have, you know, exposure to and control over, you know, sovereign asset that can't be seized as easily, although I bet doesn't really check that box. So think about that. But I think ultimately then that just boils down to while you ask the question, like, what does it actually mean for Bitcoin if all those demand drivers and all those kind of tailwinds come to fruition? And I think the River Report is just a really good overview of where it could go and what we could see in terms of net new capital inflow on some fairly conservative and reasonable assumptions. And I think a question that they raise that I'll just kind of leave everyone with is, you know, there's the capital flow itself as the kind of the base question. But then also like, what's the multiplier on that, right? I mean, you know, price is set at the margin and you have a perfectly in elastic supply base in Bitcoin that's going to eventually potentially be met in any of these scenarios with meaningful incremental incremental capital flow. lows. So, you know, last couple years, we've seen gold's market cap effectively, you know, grow by $15 to $20 trillion. That didn't happen because, like, you know, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, you know,

liquidated $15 trillion elsewhere and came to the gold window and said, I would like this much gold, please, right? Like, there was a substantially smaller amount of capital that actually flowed into gold to get that level of market cap increase. And so there was some multiplier that you can argue about. Well, the same thing is going to be true true here of Bitcoin. And it'll depend on, you know, relative willingness to sell of existing holders who may revival coins and come back to market. You know, that's always a dynamic in any bull market. So you have to ask yourself kind of how how strong is that effect? But all that is to say, like it doesn't necessarily take a lot of, you know, actual capital inflow and doesn't necessarily take a lot of, you know, a multiplier assumption

to get you to a point where everything we're talking about here and all these tailwinds kind of converge into a meaningfully, meaningfully higher Bitcoin price. Yeah. I mean, to your point, gold had a one 1.1 trillion intraday inflow last week. And in terms of market cap, market cap grew by 1.1 trillion. It wasn't, it actually wasn't a 1.1 trillion inflow. But it had a massive inflow. And that pushed the market cap up 1.1 trillion. And that's what Bitcoin's competing with. And if we're, I think that's what 80% of Bitcoin's market cap right now in one day for, for gold. Bitcoin's at, let you see where we got here. 1.590. trillion yeah so about 70 to 80 percent of bitcoin's market cap gold just added in one day

it's early it's early yeah a lot of ways to win and one day it's going to hurt to be sidelined yeah we'll see you guys next week