TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Term 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)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:53 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
Starting point is 00:01:37 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
Starting point is 00:02:19 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
Starting point is 00:03:07 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
Starting point is 00:03:50 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.
Starting point is 00:04:28 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
Starting point is 00:05:05 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
Starting point is 00:05:47 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
Starting point is 00:06:28 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
Starting point is 00:07:14 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.
Starting point is 00:07:49 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
Starting point is 00:08:21 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
Starting point is 00:09:01 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
Starting point is 00:09:38 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
Starting point is 00:10:21 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
Starting point is 00:11:02 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
Starting point is 00:11:46 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.
Starting point is 00:12:25 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.
Starting point is 00:12:58 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
Starting point is 00:13:33 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
Starting point is 00:14:09 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
Starting point is 00:14:48 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
Starting point is 00:15:23 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
Starting point is 00:16:06 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.
Starting point is 00:16:45 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
Starting point is 00:17:24 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
Starting point is 00:18:06 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
Starting point is 00:18:48 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
Starting point is 00:19:31 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
Starting point is 00:20:13 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
Starting point is 00:20:58 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
Starting point is 00:21:38 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
Starting point is 00:22:19 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
Starting point is 00:23:01 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
Starting point is 00:23:42 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
Starting point is 00:24:29 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
Starting point is 00:25:15 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
Starting point is 00:26:05 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.
Starting point is 00:27:25 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
Starting point is 00:27:49 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
Starting point is 00:28:29 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
Starting point is 00:29:13 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
Starting point is 00:29:53 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.

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