TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: The Empire Strikes Back
Episode Date: April 20, 2026Term 2.0 is trending imperial as the US flexes financial and military muscle across the globe, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Panama Canal. While ceasefire headlines whipsaw market sentiment, Bitcoi...n is quietly decoupling from tech stocks and showing resilience against a backdrop of great power competition with China. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: Empire vs Republic: Are we entering the decline of the republic or the rise of the empire? Middle East ceasefire chaos and why oil prices aren't reflecting the full strategic picture US-China leverage game: Who blinks first on gas prices and supply chain disruption Rare earth industrial policy: The Sierra Verde acquisition and Indonesia partnership Bitcoin diverging from software stocks after months of tight correlation Strategy's STRK preferred stock and the risks building in DeFi derivatives Institutional pressure for quantum resistance by 2029 echoing the 2016 block size wars TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Empire Strikes Back: Term 2.0 going imperial 00:01:06 - Oil prices and ceasefire volatility 00:02:11 - Bitcoin decoupling from software stocks 00:04:18 - Market positioning and the taco trade 00:07:26 - US vs China leverage thresholds 00:11:06 - Mark Carney and Canada relations 00:12:57 - Rare earths and Sierra Verde deal 00:13:58 - De-dollarization narrative reality check 00:17:13 - Indonesia and Brazil geopolitical moves 00:19:31 - Panama Canal strategic importance 00:20:47 - Strategy STRK preferred stock mechanics 00:22:17 - DeFi hacks and derivative risks 00:25:15 - Quantum computing institutional panel 00:27:20 - NIST criticism and 2016 parallels 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 #Empire #Geopolitics
Transcript
Discussion (0)
all right the empire strikes back that's what you titled this week's time stamp i was i was
waiting for you to do the whole thing i was just gonna sit here and enjoy it or rendition
uh yeah empire strikes back you know i think this this this week this month this year this
trump 2.0 has just been trending firmly in one direction and we've called it out more and more
over the last you know handful of months doing the show you've called it out on tftc we've talked
about in the time stamp but you know imperial is like the the word that kind of comes to mind
increasingly with what we're seeing um and they're uh not to apply any value judgments one way or the
other to that i think we can agree that that is not our ideal direction of travel for this country
But as objective analysts of what's going on, increasingly, it looks more and more that way.
I think there's a question of, you know, a lot of us have, if you're interested in Bitcoin,
if you're interested in financial markets, generally, world history, you look at the U.S.
and you say, you know, over the last 20, 30 years, we've displayed a lot of trademarks of a declining great power.
And certainly, I think our commander in chief has given us many of those of his own over the last year or so,
especially with his tweets. But, you know, I think it's worth asking, you know, if we map
ourselves to Rome, as many people often do, are we entering the decline of the Republic stage or
the decline of the Empire stage? Because those are very different phases of the history of that
great power and of a lot of great powers that follow similar cycles. And, you know, a lot of
people are ready to stick a fork in the U.S., but they maybe should be sticking a fork in the U.S.
republic not the u.s empire so yeah that's kind of the theme of this week yeah and it's we were
talking before i hit record but i was in new york wednesday thursday and friday at the up next
conference and events around it and was happy to have a few days where i wasn't bombarded by
by the headlines i mean they were happening behind the scenes but i was busy i felt like it was going
to be busy last week over the weekend went to a monster jam four-year-old birthday party monster
jam low-key one one of the best parts of americana very americana and then had a family dinner
yesterday so i've been relatively unplugged for the last five days and from what i can tell one
thing we've been trying to do and maybe we'll play a quick game here is just actually not look at the
headlines because they just ping pong your your emotions and just focus on on the data and the
data particularly if you look at wti is showing that oil prices are down it looks like ceasefire
on ceasefire off ceasefire on maybe gas prices at wti oil prices excuse me would signal that maybe
this is at least de-escalating to a point of relative calm that will allow markets to function
again sitting at 86 per barrel right now yeah look it you know your instinct is right i think
everyone should be off the screens frankly as much as they can um it's increasingly low return on
on time and increasingly a DOS attack on your attention to really follow the headlines closely.
I think the first slide in that chart pack for this week illustrates it nicely that in only
the last week, every week feels like a year. And only the last week we've gone from the ceasefire
to advances going out to Pakistan for negotiations to actually there was no deal.
Now we're going to blockade you. And actually now talks are going well. Iran's going to give up
uranium no nuclear program straights open it's all great market rips to literally all-time highs
fully erasing all all the drawdown from start of the war so actually over the weekend well you know
on second thought it's closed again and talks are not going well suddenly so it's it's it's
michael scott snip snap snip snap basically every day of the week and so i think this is just a
great illustration of how little the average market participant knows or can really rely on
anything that they're seeing come across their their bloomberg or cnbc on any given day yeah
And again, looking at pricing signals in the market, that was another thing.
Bitcoin screamed up to $78,000 on the 17th, so last Friday.
And it's held up pretty well throughout all this.
I know you mentioned markets at all-time highs.
Haven't even looked at where they are today, but it looks like markets opened down today slightly, flat to down.
But Bitcoin's been holding a trunk throughout all this.
I sent a tweet out when I hit send.
I was like, ah, maybe this is too early.
there's only a month of of data here but you had bitcoin on the one month chart really diverging
from the software uh stocks index from from bangor i think what is it ivg um yeah there was some
sharp divergence there bitcoin up six percent software stocks down about a percent and they've
been trading in tandem since the middle of last year yeah yeah look like it this is not a data
a driven viewpoint. But as you look at everything, it feels like it feels like the market wants to go
up. Right. Bitcoin, certainly stocks, you know, back to all time highs. It definitely, you know,
treasuries have yields have retrenched to maybe a somewhat more manageable level. Treasury
volatility is down. VIX is down on any semi positive news we rip and on any, you know,
meaningfully negative news like this morning, we're kind of just flat. Right. So the positioning
is such that for various different reasons, it definitely looks like market wants to go up,
which is a problem. And that may, that may reverse, but it's a problem for the taco trade,
right? Or at least your, if your view is Trump has to chicken out, this is he's, he's sensitive
about stock market. He's sensitive about treasury yields, all these different things. Well, maybe
that may be true, but if that's the case and that's his primary Achilles heel and primary
constraint, even after he sent 10 destroyers, 12 destroyers, whatever into, into the Persian
gulf to turn away dozens of ships and kind of imperially take control thus far of of that area
and stocks are all-time highs i mean that says something about where the cards are sitting right
now right so if your entire bed if your entire philosophy if your entire worldview is it's it's
just a matter of time before the u.s has to pull back because trump's so worried about the stock
market well you know he's got a lot of leeway right now and you could say it's because of market
manipulation you know what yeah probably like probably but like that's the game you get to play
when you're the the currency hegemon when you're the for now the largest military power in the
world so yeah i think just a lot of a lot of narratives being challenged this week all over
the place for better and worse yeah and one that we've been as a sub narrative that we've been
following for for many months now is this sort of maybe not a proxy war but a meta war of the u.s
versus China and the effect that everything going on in the Middle East has on the relative leverage
between the two superpowers. And you touched on that as well, again, highlighting the fact that
it seems like Trump is willing to stomach elevated gas prices at the pump because I would imagine the
calculus that's being run at the administration level is that the damage being done to China's
economy far exceeds the damage to the American consumer. Yeah. To quote Rod Bramblitt, the late
grade announcer for Auburn Sports, not an Auburn fan, but a big fan of Rod Bramblitt for his kick
six call. Here's your ballgame, right? Like, I think this is kind of what it ultimately comes
down to, like who blinks first on these metrics? Like, can Trump and the Republicans manage
midterms with somewhat elevated gas prices in such a way that they can grin and bear it relative to
the eastern side of the world that is much more directly impacted by flows out of the
strait.
Very much CBD.
Like, I don't know.
And, you know, if if this situation plus various other domestic issues collectively cause the
Republicans to lose significant ground in Congress in the midterms and things get deadlocked
and Trump becomes a lame duck like that changes the calculus of a lot of things.
So it's not like he's, you know, without constraints here or it's not like the the
U.S. faction, the U.S. imperial faction broadly is without constraints.
but i think this is really like the this is the game right and this is what we'll have to be
watching over over the next six months more than anything yeah completely agree and i think there's
a lot of games within the game the game in which we alluded to at the front the front end of the
show and which we'll probably talk about a lot moving forward and i want to give you props
because you've been banging this drum for the better part of a year now i believe since the
intel chip deal was made or the the investment in intel by the the federal government was made
last year but this this imperial nationalization industrialization in the u.s and very heavy
sort of trade deals with countries that are in our hemisphere yeah i mean and this you know this is
really like i think the crux of like the the imperial threat of this week is just how many
of these things came across the wire you know this week perhaps coincidentally perhaps not
but you've got you know this indonesia partnership which tbd what it ultimately will mean but
Indonesia's relevant if you haven't been kind of paying attention to the map for its influence over
the Strait of Malacca, which is broadly considered the most trafficked strait in the world. So we've
been talking about the Strait of Hormuz for months on end now, but Malacca is very important to
the eastern part of the world, especially China. So interesting timing for a partnership here.
These various other deals, I don't have to go through each one, but you can just see the
administration getting more and more heavy-handed and explicit in all of these little leverage
points as it relates to either kind of our relationship to China or our relationship to
kind of Chinese proxies. You know, the Brazilian presidential election, Polymarket now has
Bolsonaro, the former president, who is very MAGA aligned and Trump friendly, who I think was
polling on Polymarket like three months ago at like sub 1% is now either tied or like either
ahead or tied with the incumbent Lula, who's very aligned. And, you know, maybe that's a CIA,
Maybe it's not. Maybe it's totally grassroots organic. Who knows? But this past week has
definitely seen a lot of examples of the US flexing its muscle in different spots and
consolidating leverage around the world. And again, I think there's a big game being played
here. And this is a Bitcoin show. We'll get to Bitcoin. We talk about Bitcoin. That's our primary
lens for everything. But there's clearly a great power competition going on here. And the events
we're seeing are not random they're not just trump being insane lashing out that may be part
of it he may be leveraging that insanity i don't know but there is a broader kind of deep state
competition meta narrative here between two two factions of the world well i picked up on uh
on it over the weekend because the tftc account covered it but mark carney's comments i guess in
in reaction to trump's posturing towards canada specifically and if you're thinking like deep
state actors placing mark carney in the prime minister role of canada seems to be very strategic
for for the incumbent power structure if you know the history of mark carney at the bank of england
at hsbc and his involvement in the the cartel the cartel money laundering case with hsbc where
they're putting duffel or excuse me briefcases full of cash through teller windows they designed
to tell her window he's he's had his fingers in everything many would consider him a a davos class
economic actor and it seems like he i'll put my tinfoil hat on and i'll just say i won't speak
for you but i think he was placed in canada for for a reason and it seems like he's trying to
to enter the narrative battle and say that the relationship with the united states is not what
it used to be and won't be as beneficial moving forward if the powers that be in the united states
for maine as the powers that be so i think that that was very interesting over the weekend to
see as well it will be fascinating to see if mark harney in canada which is a fledgling
economy to the north of us has has any any leverage here yeah i mean i can hear i can
hear tom luongo somewhere in in the in rural florida yelling about the city of london uh
so yes i agree with that and it seems like our commerce secretary on the top right here
Howard Ludnick also agrees that the relationship is going to require some serious restructuring,
which is something we've been writing about for a few months as well with the USMCA agreement
between US, Mexico, and Canada coming up for renewal in summer.
So yeah, all of a piece with the great game that I think we're seeing play out here.
Yeah, great game continues.
We'll get to Bitcoin, but rare earth metals at the center or part of the center of this
great game, especially considering the AI race that we're in, these rare earth metals
that are necessary to build the compute infrastructure that will bring us AGI is something that many
people have been, many countries have been making a land grab for over the last 18 months.
And there was a deal this morning.
U.S. Rare Earth announces definitive agreement to acquire Cerro Verde Group for $2.8 billion,
creating the global Rare Earth leader.
Yeah, yeah, this wasn't in the issue this past weekend, but it hit this morning.
I thought it's, you know, exactly aligned with everything we've just talked about and
stuff we talked about over the past few months as well. I think, you know, the headline kind
of speaks for itself. We know rare earths are important. We know the U.S. is behind in rare
earth refining capacity relative to China, which has thus far a relative chokehold over the whole
world. And we saw that, you know, how that could play out last fall when they announced some major
export restrictions. So it's clearly been a priority of the U.S. and the Trump administration
to ameliorate that and address that. And I think, you know, the most interesting piece of this is
related to industrial policy, which we've talked about on the show before. You mentioned me kind
of starting to talk about that more with the Intel deal. I think the thing that really first just
like tipped me off to it was last summer with the MP Materials deal for, you know, an equity,
massive equity stake in MP Materials and other rare earths producer in the U.S. with offtake
agreements as well and price floors, which is very industrial policy, very, you know,
World War II preparation style, unfortunately, kind of central planning flavored policy.
well you're seeing that here as well with this deal and so a major financing package for the
deal from the development finance corporation which is uh government pentagon aligned uh as
well as a long-term 15-year 100 offtake agreement with with price floors largely it looks like
subsidized by and guaranteed by the government so yeah just even an even more explicit i think
version of of what we saw before the u.s kind of flexing its its financial might and its ability
to subsidize deals like this to go out even into other countries and you know go acquire strategic
assets for that'll be you know key leverage points for for ai and for advanced you know military
applications as well so you know you you gotta be careful because you can fall into what's the
what's it called it's like botter meinhof complex where like you kind of adopt a lens for something
or you think about something and then you just start to see it more and more everywhere so you
don't want to like fall into the trap that like just because you're seeing a lot of data points
stack up that favor a certain thesis like that necessarily means that like you could be falling
into confirmation bias right so gotta be careful about that but you know it certainly seems in the
last few months just like every single week it's like more and more headlines like this the
snowball is rolling faster and faster on this theme and you know personally i'm in a place where
i don't really expect that to slow down anytime soon yeah because we did a deal like this in
brazil not too long ago right because i remember there were headlines about a european sort of
coalition going down to brazil to discuss um a deal for rare earths with that country and they
got there and they said well the us just came and locked it up for the next five years yeah
this is a few weeks back the terms on this deal 15 year 100 off take is pretty incredible yeah
and again like that's the kind of game you can play when you for now have the dollar infrastructure
right when you when you have that stick it may not have forever right many many empires in the
past have uh ultimately lost control of it um but that's the the situation that that we are at least
you know currently in and the u.s looks very willing to to flex all that right now which gets
to the next topic that we have to discuss which is the de-dollarization narrative which has been
a big one hand up i've i've uh i've highlighted it many times over the last year and throughout
the years but it seems like the de-dollarization narrative is being challenged in real time as well
yeah look like it's not i think it's a reasonable and defensible narrative on a long enough time
frame for a variety of reasons that we can go into and that you've discussed extensively on
TFTC. But I think the path to get there is a lot more jagged than people often think. And thus far,
you know, this week, I think we saw two really interesting data points where, you know, time
when we're hearing about, you know, the petro-yuan and the fracturing global order, moving people,
moving countries and sovereigns, you know, away from the dollar and more into, say, China's orbit
or like a, you know, a BRICS currency orbit or some other competing power.
You saw Norway, the head of Norway's sovereign wealth fund saying, despite all the volatility,
despite disruptions in the Gulf, despite the, you know, U.S. deficits blowing out and, you
know, Trump tweeting pictures of himself as Jesus Christ, they have no plans currently
to reduce holdings of U.S. assets.
And in the midst of all this turmoil, several Gulf states also launched a fairly large collective
offering of dollar backed or dollar denominated bonds to to shore up finances you know as they
wait for the the storm to pass with oil revenues um and so i think it just shows you like the the
us still does have cards to play on the financial front there is still a significant network effect
built up around the dollar and the dollar system we've seen thus far in in this in this conflict
countries do respond still to heavy heavy-handed sanctions activity for better or worse
um and so i think it's it's worth asking like and i tried to do this in the time stamp this week like
if the us is going imperial and moving in that direction i mean it has cards to play with a
coalition of you know let's say the gcc japan south korea um a few other east asian states
if it can also gain some influence in various south american states you know we've seen that
in argentina already right with the malay relationship maybe increasingly moving that
direction with brazil venezuela various other cuba various other regions that trump has expressed
interest in if we can gain you know maritime control over stratoform moves potentially over
straight malacca greenland right on the northern sea routes like that starts to potentially stack
up into a world where maybe you kick the can down the road on the dollarization um maybe you have
enough captive buyers of u.s dollar linked assets treasuries equities etc to kind of keep the system
spinning and running for who knows how long but i think you you could believe that and still be
incredibly bullish on bitcoin and neutral reserve assets right because i think the world where that
happens is the world where necessarily there's a lot more headroom for dollar claims issuance
right at both the public and private level and if we've learned anything about u.s history over the
last 100 years it's that that headroom gets used like it will get used aggressively and i think
that's that has a one-way function for the scarcest asset in human history particularly in a
world where you know whether the dollar network gets locked in more or not i think people have
gotten the message that countries have gotten the message that sovereign sacks across every metric
are very uh incredibly important strategically important and so i think that message will will
flow to understanding of bitcoin as well over time so yeah just i think just ask yourself like
does the dollarization need to happen does the petro you want need to happen do we need to enter
into a thousand percent hyperinflation or you know massive unprecedented big print all of which is
possible but do we need that for bitcoin to be an attractive investment for bitcoin to be an
attractive technology to use for for payments at the sovereign level the institutional level
and i think i think the answer is definitively no agreed another important uh country in our
our hemisphere that we start getting more control over panama as well like owning the panama canal
right big part that was probably the first domino to fall and to your point i think another way to
say what you just eloquently expressed to distill it is in in a left side of the bell curve sort of
phrase is a melt-up maybe on the table uh you're going to win hard assets if a melt-up's on the
table i'm becoming more convinced of that actually going to record with capital flows later this
afternoon to talk about his his thesis of the melt up on the table so be on the lookout for that but
now we can get to bitcoin talking about what if any effects this has on bitcoin i think like you
said without the dollarization bitcoin is well positioned to succeed in a world particularly in
a hyper digitalized world with the negentic economy emerging but the other thing stretch
so hot right now i hope you're stretching stretching your legs because michael saylor
the team over at strategy are putting together a pretty memetically powerful preferred stock option
with with a dividend and a stretch really took over the headlines and took a lot of took a lot
of the the mental space the the mental bandwidth of the industry last last week yeah you know as
as as mstr linked things or want to do you know became the the main character once once again um
and you know here here you see just really quick like the a lot of green flags going up a lot of
checkered flags going up and being waived in the institutional space for bitcoin adoption um i'll
say adoption air quotes because a lot of these you know it's are arguable how how much this represents
true sovereign bitcoin adoption but regardless a lot of conduits being opened up for capital to
to flow through more traditional routes into bitcoin which is an interesting thing to see again
with a lot of analysts calling for world war iii and you know the end of the us and you know these
massive unprecedented changes that suddenly institutions would want to provide massive
access to to bitcoin so you know more data points on that front and yeah here you've got the stretch
chart pulled from strc.live coming up on looks like 100 000 bitcoin acquired through the stretch
vehicle strategy announced this morning that they're now close to 120 000 bitcoin held and
again the stretch has been a big piece of accelerating that it probably merits its own
episode uh 1031 partner matt odell and i spent a good part of friday morning blowing up the the
team chat uh friend having a friendly debate over you know whether stretch would would ultimately
lead to a massive uh crash in the entire bitcoin ecosystem i'll say i'm directionally more bullish
than matt with with some ongoing reservations primarily related to all of the defy dad
yeah all of the the second derivative is being built on top of of stretch certainly maybe some
uh uh questionable fundamentals there long term but you know we felt like we had to put this chart
here and then have to acknowledge that it's happening i think again we're coming up on time
here so we don't have to litigate at all but maybe we'll spend a little more time on it next week
thinking through the mechanics and sustainability or lack thereof uh from stretch a little one
comment i'll add that that's the thing that scared me it's like a because i think a lot of the volume
that we saw last week was driven by these d5 protocols spinning up to to take advantage of
of the 11 yield and the memetic power of stretch we've seen publicly traded entities offering their
own preferred products that are they're using stretch as a treasury asset and particularly on
the d5 side of the protocol side i'm sure you've been following it so one of the few things i've
been following over the weekend because it's just so fascinating and validate something that we've
been wearing or warning about in the space for for many years is the the draining of multiple
DeFi protocols by hackers because the virtual machines that they're running on aren't as secure
as many people were led to believe and are not as decentralized as many people were led to believe
either. So that like if you have a bunch of DeFi actors going aping in the stretch and they're
doing it on insecure protocols or using insecure smart contracts could get interesting there as
well. If only there had been signs. If only there had been 5,000 such incidents before this,
maybe we would have learned but maybe but we wanted to wrap it up as we mentioned at the
beginning of the show i attended the op next conference in new york city last week shout out
to everybody at block space media will charlie colin and team it was an incredible event and as
one can imagine one of the more pressing topics really the the dominant topic of the week was
quantum. There were a ton of individuals on both sides of the argument of Bitcoin's preparedness
and whether or not it should be prepared by 2029. We're in attendance at the conference. And
this tweet that we have up here is from me. I'm quote tweeting Alex B., who was in the room as
well. But there was an institutional investor panel that included BlackRock, Coinbase, Anchorage
Digital, and one other institutional investment firm whose name is escaping me right now. But they
were talking about their perspectives on quantum. And I thought it was quite interesting and for
lack of a better term, a bit tone deaf and maybe not tone deaf, but very naive. It seems like
Coinbase, BlackRock and others are saying our investors are very worried about the quantum
risk in Bitcoin to the point that it's keeping them off the sidelines and we need to do something
about this. And even though this is in quotes, this is a paraphrase, I try to get as much
verbatim as I could, but I was typing on the go as the panel was going on. But I think the tenor
at the end of the panel was that these institutions were going to ensure, I mean,
again, paraphrase, but the gist was they're going to ensure that Bitcoin is upgraded and
quantum resistant by 2029, aligning with the sort of NIST protocol upgrades and what CloudFlare and
google have announced in terms of their moves to quantum resistant address structures or excuse me
cryptographic structures cryptographic cryptographic algorithms by 2029 and i think for those of us
who've been in the in the industry for a while we're in that room it was very reminiscent of
the new york agreement in 2016 that led to the fork war where you had a bunch of larger institutions
get together and say that they were going to push for a change to back then the block size
um of bitcoin blocks and this time around it's we're going to make sure that we
upgrade in a timely manner to prepare for quantum so um making sure that a post-quantum
cryptographic signature scheme is is live by 2029 uh so it was very interesting i think my
My take is that there's a lot of, I don't think, I think the institution should eat some humble pie and understand the ramifications of trying to push something like that.
And the other thing I'll say is that this is this sort of, what's it called, sort of just leaning on the authority of NIST or the perceived authority of NIST.
Everybody's pointing at NIST and saying, well, NIST is saying that, NIST is doing this, and we need to do what NIST is saying.
I think it's, again, tone deaf and naive because Bitcoin, Satoshi picked Libsec P256K1, that cryptographic library, because he looked at a lot of the NIST approved and recommended cryptographic signature schemes and found that a lot of them had embedded constants, which ultimately led to backdoors.
And so this whole appeal to authority with NIST specifically, I think, is dangerous and something that people shouldn't look at NIST and say, oh, well, whatever they say, we should do.
Satoshi actually looked at what they were doing and did something else because their cryptographic library scheme, some of them at least, had backdoors.
Yeah.
Look, I wasn't in the room.
I wish I had been able to go.
It seems like a great high signal conference.
And this is obviously something we've been talking about a lot for the last few months.
we'll probably continue to have occasion to to talk about it you know i continue to to think
there are times in your life when action bias is a positive and a lot of times in your life
when action bias you should fade action bias and i think this is certainly one of the times when
it's the latter and the last thing i'll maybe say just to frame to frame things up how i think about
this this conversation very high level um a lot more could be said but in you know public company
investing and Bitcoin is not a public company, but a public company investing. One of the key
hallmarks of a CEO and a management team you want to avoid is when they're overly focused on short
term gyrations in stock price, like they just got to get the stock price up. And they're really
freaked out when the stock price goes down one quarter, when the market misunderstands a quarter
and sells the stock on earnings or something. And there's hyper-focused on, you know, not long-term
five, 10 year shareholder value, but like, did the stock price go up today? And I see a lot of that
in the conversation about quantum, both from the institutional side, but also from some
technical people as well. And it is absolutely important for Bitcoin to accrue economic mass
over time. But anyone making a decision on a basis of not wanting the price to go down
on some perceived or feared sell-off event related to some hypothetical scenario where a quantum
attacker steals Satoshi's coins and dumps them all in the market immediately and causes some
huge drawdown um i would just encourage people to fade that type of thinking because that is a
great way to optimize for decisions that will not help and will not drive value and will not drive
stability and sustainability in the long term for any system right for a company or for bitcoin so
yeah that's just something out there out there you don't have to co-sign that but uh generally
that's proven to be a good heuristic uh in my life and my investing as well no i co-signed that
and that was another thing i mean we'll end it on this but the black rock representative the head
digital assets of blackrock forgot his name but he's saying investors are not going to come in
the price will not go up unless we figure this out and it'll be funny if we're sitting in september
and the price is well north of where it is now potentially if it is at a new all-time high like
how does that argument change i just want to put a pin in that market it was said on this date that
the price would not go up because of the quantum risk if the conversation around quantum has not
progressed at all but the price is well above where it was last week when that comment was made
i think we should hold these people to account and say well it doesn't seem like the market is
really pricing this in as as much of a risk as you were saying back then so have you have you
thought about maybe you're wrong and we should approach this in a different way so just mark
that put a pin in that marks notice see you guys next week
Thank you.
