TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: You Gotta MOVE
Episode Date: July 13, 2026The Iran deal is dead again, ships are getting hit in the Gulf, and the ten year is back above four point five five. Marty and John sort through the latest Middle East escalation, why both sides actua...lly want the conflict to keep going, and what it means for oil, LNG, and bond volatility. They dig into Japan's thirty year yield highs and the delicate balance the BOJ is walking, Mohamed El-Erian vouching for Bessent's industrial policy in the New York Times, and why the MOVE index might matter more than the absolute rate level. They also cover Circle's bank charter approval, the OpenUSD consortium bringing Wall Street and Silicon Valley together around the digital dollar, and the growing turf war over who gets to run America's strategic Bitcoin reserve. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: Iran deal collapses again and the incentive to keep fighting Trump wants to be the paid guardian of the Strait of Hormuz Ten year yields jumping and what the MOVE index is saying Qatar pauses LNG ramp and European gas spikes Japan bond yields hit thirty year highs Mohamed El-Erian vouching for Bessent's doctrine Circle gets OCC approval despite bank lobbying OpenUSD and the digital dollar consortium Treasury versus Commerce over the Bitcoin reserve America's lead as the Bitcoin superpower TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Beach banter and summer grind 00:01:09 - Iran deal dead again 00:01:36 - Iran attacks ships and Trump ends the MOU 00:02:18 - Incentives to keep fighting 00:03:09 - Guardian of the Strait 00:04:05 - Ten year yields jump 00:05:25 - MOVE index and bond volatility 00:09:21 - Qatar LNG disruption 00:11:54 - Japan yields at thirty year highs 00:16:56 - Mohamed El-Erian on Bessent 00:19:32 - Circle gets bank charter approval 00:22:25 - OpenUSD digital dollar consortium 00:26:55 - Treasury versus Commerce over SBR 00:29:35 - America the Bitcoin superpower 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 #IranDeal #BondVolatility #Japan #OpenUSD #StrategicBitcoinReserve
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Mr. Arnold, I must apologize.
Apologize for what?
Two things.
First, last week, I used the wrong mic.
I was speaking through my MacBook Pro.
Audio still came through, but not as good as the shore mic that you're hearing me through now.
Second thing is, you're catching summer, Marty.
I'm at the beach on the weekends.
I wake up early, drive back to my desk by 9 a.m. Monday morning.
I haven't shaved yet.
I've got a little beach flow here, still rocking.
I've got the hat on.
So sorry, I'm not as buttoned up as I should be for the quality of the show and the analysis that we get.
You just got that European vibe, you know, hit that hit that out of office automated message starting right after Memorial Day.
Come back September. That's all right.
No, no, no. We're still grinding.
Drop in for a few podcasts. That's all right.
We get 48 hours of rest on the weekend here in the United States.
And even then you're still talking to your clanker on the beach like, hey, I got this idea for Monday.
But you get back to work on Monday.
the summer doldrums don't exist when we have the world unfolding as it is right now yeah definitely
uh no summer doldrums over in the middle east right now no well that's what i was going to say
i have to apologize for a third thing and that's to our audience because uh we said we weren't
going to be hermuse maxing much more but of course as is par for the course with this this incursion
into the middle east the latest incursion from the united states uh it's never ending it seems and
as we've said many times over the last couple of months, the incentives for both sides are
to keep this going as long as possible. And we have the latest escalation, which is back and
forth attacks from Iran and the United States. Iran attacked three ships in 24 hours. Trump
officially ended the memorandum of understanding for the ceasefires, calling the Iranian leaders
scum and iran has expanded attacks on gulf states after the u.s struck iranian iranian assets
in retaliation for the ship attacks what's your take on this brother yeah i mean look guys you
know don't blame me don't blame us we were on the horn with the ayatollah last week saying
don't do this we don't want to talk about it on the pod anymore please don't do this
you know to no avail so so here we are again when the uh this the story that seems to never end
And, yeah, I think it's interesting to consider what the incentives actually are for this to continue kind of on both sides.
Certainly, there's a hardline faction in Iran, which we wrote about a little bit in the timestamp over the weekend, that's getting a little more attention.
There's an IRGC group that clearly just isn't interested in any kind of deal at all.
There's a clear internal division there, which is now, I think, becoming more of a mainstream viewpoint.
And it was a little more the provenance of tinfoil hats a few months ago, but it's becoming a little more clear.
So there's definitely an incentive to just cause as much kind of chaos as possible and prevent a deal from happening in general.
Kind of the one major leverage point that the country has left that and arguably the nuclear program.
And on the U.S. side, we've talked, we've documented extensively on the show, maybe some of the downstream benefits to the U.S. strategic position that have come out of this.
Just this morning, it's not on the slide here, but Trump mentioned, I believe, on CNBC or maybe Fox Business that the U.S. is happy to be the guardian of the strait and we should be compensated for that appropriately.
So, you know, it's a little potentially groundwork laying there for where things may be moving.
But in any case, this is it. We're back in a spot where there's no clear off ramp until one side or the other decides to to blink.
And, you know, maybe midterms will be the forcing function for that.
Maybe the the Iranian oil situation, which, you know, the country was already having trouble moving a huge amount of its backlogged oil to anyone.
And now that's not going to be any easier. So, you know, we'll see if that causes enough pressure to cause a relief valve here in the next few weeks.
but yeah we're we're back at it again uh unfortunately yeah that means that rates are
reacting we have the 10-year jumping up yes or excuse me last week above 4.55 currently i guess
at the time of the screenshot was at 4.561 markets not as calm as they were when the medium or
excuse me the memorandum of understanding was in place and i think that's um that's one thing to
keep watching here is what are rates doing in reaction to these developments in the Middle East
and across markets. Obviously, we have it on the list too. We'll get to Japan, but I think a lot
of people are focused on the Japanese government bond markets as well. And you have this backdrop
of war in the Middle East, this re-industrialization here in the United States. Obviously, the AI
wave still pressing forward, new models, new frontier models being released that are
extremely impressive. But then you have this backdrop of the United States debt situation
and are tethering to these bond yields that I think everybody's keeping an eye on.
And when they get to these levels, this is when you begin to see things happening from the Trump
administration. Yeah, for sure. I think an interesting point or kind of wrinkle on this is
the this was the the leader the leading image the header image for the newsletter this week and i
just thought it's kind of interesting that you know you have seen uh this is the 10-year and
blue so the 10-year moved back up on kind of this news and it's it's over uh four six this morning
so it's gone up even more but the the flip side is you know you're seeing in the oil market this
morning i think we're back above 75 again when when these headlines started to hit kind of early
last week we got to we went from you know high 60 to 75 but then kind of fell back on at least
on wti i think brent had a similar kind of move fell back to roughly pre-war levels now we're
kind of back in that mid-70s range again we'll see how it continues to move but in the energy
markets at least in the oil market you weren't seeing kind of an immediate kind of gap up to
back to where we were a few months ago and you saw also kind of an interesting version of that
or something along the same theme with move index, which is what you have here in orange.
As rates have gone back to kind of what has historically been over the last few years,
an informal kind of line in the sand for the 10 years, so the 4, 5, 4, 6 level,
where it seems like generally the Fed and the Treasury get kind of queasy,
bank system gets a little queasy, and there's some sort of, you know,
taco event or some headline that gets yields back down typically over that period. When you've
gotten to that same level here, the move index, which is the bond volatility index for treasury
market, the BAML runs has kind of not gone up correspondingly. You've got this series of,
you know, if you were a line squiggler by trade, you would kind of call these lower highs.
Each time you're not really getting a blowout thus far in volatility with any of these spikes.
you had the biggest one was obviously in the spring right before the ceasefire was announced
you had bond volatility going up the whole month we had a ceasefire that kind of brought everything
down you had another big spike in like uh mid-may maybe early june and you know move did go up then
but not not quite as much and now over the last like week you've really seen like it's kind of
bobbing along in this range not you know too early to call whether that's going to continue but
there's i think there's a lot of interesting analysis especially from guys like michael
Howell suggesting that Treasury is much more, not much more, but at least meaningfully concerned
with bond volatility as much as the kind of absolute level of rates. And if that's the case,
and if volatility is in one way or another sufficiently managed, either through just
market expectations or Treasury operations in the background, that maybe gives you more headroom
to kind of deal with rates at the current level for at least some additional time.
We've done math in the past and in the newsletter showing that this level of race is probably over like a meaningful time frame about all you can really handle.
You really can't get into like the five plus five plus range without starting to really crimp the fiscal math meaningfully in an extremely uncomfortable way.
But if you can kind of keep it in this level with volatility, also manageable such that you're not getting big collateral haircuts or, you know, forced unwinds, that that could be an interesting way to way to manage this.
And moreover, I think it's just telling you thus far, if something like this chart continues, I think this is kind of telling you like investors up to this point are not necessarily that queasy, that worried about months and months more of what we've seen over the last week.
Maybe that'll prove wrong.
But I think a notable kind of set of two lines you're going to watch, we're going to want to watch closely over the next couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can they maintain the volatility?
and like because that's i mean the 10 year 30 year drifting higher i mean it seems structurally
again going back to line squibbles on a chart that the the long term the new long-term trend for
for yields is higher and i guess that maybe that's the sort of fallback option that the fed and the
treasury have is like all right if that's the case let's just manage the volatility so markets can
adjust on the go now speaking of volatility obviously bombing in the straight from news is
going to lead to volatile reactions from the Gulf states, one of which over the weekend is Qatar
pausing the push to ramp up their LNG production after Hormuz tanker attacked. And so we're seeing
disruption in energy markets, in this case, LNG in Qatar. And when we first began covering
the saga in Iran, I think this is one of the biggest things that people were worried about
is the refineries, the natural gas and LNG refineries
in Qatar being hit and creating a cascading effect.
So it looks like that variable is back in the equation,
which is disruptions to Qatari LNG production.
Yeah.
So this is, you know, this is kind of the opposite story
of the oil market, where you pretty much saw,
have seen after the big spikes in WTI,
as we just mentioned, you saw kind of the prices returned
to roughly pre-war levels,
and we're still kind of bobbing around there.
You can see on the right side here, this is kind of the basic, the European kind of natural gas benchmark.
And all the charts over the next like six months kind of look like this from August out to January of next year, where you didn't really get the same retrenchment anywhere close to pre-war levels.
And now we're back, you know, up moving much more meaningfully toward kind of recent highs.
And so if you look at U.S., the U.S. benchmark for this is Henry Hub.
And that's basically just bobbing along like a recent bottom.
It's because of our relative kind of positioning that we've talked about on the show, much less problematic.
But this is what the Europeans are kind of looking at right now.
And I think a similar dynamic is prevailing in Asia, which we'll get to maybe on the next slide and kind of the downstream impacts of that.
But this is kind of one of the big things that from a global perspective, not as much a U.S. perspective, but a global sovereign debt perspective and a global positioning perspective that I think will be important to watch as we get closer and closer to the fall and the winter where natural gas becomes very, very important.
You know, what do these charts do and how much pain can kind of the countries that are dependent on and most affected by this kind of disruption?
You know, the Rosloff facility, I believe, is the largest LNG facility in the world.
And if that continues to be disrupted for longer than the market currently thinks right now, at least if you look at kind of the move index, if that goes on longer, what's the downstream impact for kind of non-U.S. countries that are more dependent on this infrastructure?
And right now the charts are not looking great.
So this will be, I think, one that we definitely keep an eye on.
Yeah, I explicitly mentioned them earlier and John just alluded to them in Japan. Their benchmark bond yield is extending its rise after hitting a 30-year high. And so I think this has long been stated. Japan has long been stated, their bond market has long been stated as the canary in the coal mine.
They were the first country to really go out and do a QE-like experiment in the 90s, and they've been riding that wave for 30 years, give or take.
And many people have been looking at Japan for many years saying if they lose control of their yield curve, that's when things are going to get a bit hairy for the global financial system.
because many people have been dependent on the carry trade,
taking out cheap debt in Japan,
buying other sovereign bonds, ripping the yield,
ripping the arbitrage there, and then pouring it back in.
And if that unwinds, it could create a particularly hairy situation.
And as John just mentioned, Japan is one of these countries
that is very dependent on oil and gas from the Middle East.
And if those input costs are going to go up,
it's going to put a lot of pressure on the Japanese economy.
yeah for sure there's a lot there's a lot going on in japan and i i want to resist the the urge
to you know do the the something is breaking all caps headline because i think the the energy piece
is is huge growing kind of inflationary pressures in the country are huge the and i think this has
always been you know the poster child for kind of uh a long-term qe insanity and i think that
that's meaningful. The flip side is, you know, Japan has been, the BOJ has been embarked on a
rate hiking cycle now for, I think, well over a year. And if you look also at what, you know,
Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the U.S. has said, generally he's been, you know,
endorsing this kind of rate hiking cycle. So, and I think there are various policy reasons and
strategic reasons that the U.S. might want, you know, more normalization of Japanese monetary
policy. But the flip side, of course, is you kind of manage it against the in-carry trade that you
alluded to. It can't get disorderly, right? It's got to be something where you're not seeing crazy
volatility spikes, people getting blown out of positions, needing to force sell, force liquidate
US assets. So it's a delicate balance. But I think this is obviously a key chart that is a bellwether
for a lot of different things we talk about um and i you know i think the trend here is pretty
well established but the boj looks like it's going to you know continue its rate hiking cycle
and i think the question will be can can that happen can they walk and chew gum at the same
time relative to all of the objectives that the u.s wants to achieve or you know do you get into
a much more kind of hairy situation much more quickly but i do think it it would behoove all
you know bitcoin holders all people who are or gold bugs or anyone who's been watching this for
a long time to pump the brakes a little bit on the something is breaking narrative. Because I
think there's a very fine line trying to be walked here between the US and Japan. And we know what
the pressure points are. We know what the failure modes are. Obviously, this is going to have massive
ramifications when you look at a key marginal buyer and a key holder of US treasuries in a
situation like this where domestic rates are now becoming relatively much more attractive than
they've been for like 30 years, getting these 30 plus year highs. That's obviously going to have
meaningful trade-offs and impacts, but I would just kind of benchmark it against and comp it
against, you know, what Besson has been saying and kind of endorsing as it relates to this rate
cycle. And, you know, ask yourself if you think that that line can be walked and that needle can
be threaded, because I think that there's a lot going on here under the hood. Yeah. And it's
something that we've all been aware of. I mean, it's famous now, the Manhattan Institute
fireside chat that Scott Besant had in the lead up to the 2024 election in which he said there's
a global monetary reordering happening. I want to be on deck in the captain's seat with the
president as we're managing that. And to your point, you have to imagine that over the last
year and a half that there has been some reshuffling and some sort of reordering behind
the scenes in terms of what's happening between the treasury and their counterparts across the
world and maybe it's a setup to allow these yields to to rise without the volatility that you
mentioned john so maybe they got the infrastructure in place under the hood and um behind the scenes
like it's okay we can we can let these things rise now who knows yeah i think it's one of the
reasons you're seeing things like you know the slr loosening right of trying to bring more um
private banking capacity into the treasury market again.
But I think that all dovetails nicely into this next headline.
Which is the dissent doctrine.
The days of America being played are over.
We're not going to get bullied anymore.
We're not going to get pushed around.
We're not going to be taken advantage of.
This was an opinion piece, a guest essay in the New York Times released last Tuesday.
So a day after we recorded.
Yeah.
I mean, I think this is an interesting vibe shift to me to see this in the Times.
Now, it's a guest essay, right? So you could argue like it's not necessarily the direct endorsement of the paper. But if you read through it, it's Mohamed El-Erian, who's a famous macro commentator, fixture of CNBC and all the business shows.
Um, but, you know, he, he basically walks through the speech that Besson gave, uh, about
a month ago, um, at, I can't remember what it was, one of the institutes in New York
economic club forum.
Yeah.
We talked about it when it happened, uh, give, give quite a lot of airtime to it right after
it on one of the shows.
But he basically just kind of walks through everything that Besson laid out and laid out
in that speech and encourages analysts and readers to think of everything that he lays
out there as permanent and kind of systemic and all working together within a framework that
Besson has, not just kind of these ad hoc random measures that Trump is kind of throwing out
without much thought. You know, he frames it very much as something that's intentional and kind of
here to stay and that other countries will borrow too, right? Other countries will start doing
similar kind of industrial policies, similar tariff policies to protect kind of domestic
champions. And I just think this is like, if you read it, if you've been listening to the show,
nothing in it is going to be super needle moving to you. Um, and if you, if you watch that speech
from a month ago, you know, it's largely kind of a summary of, of everything Besson was saying
there. But I think again, this is, you know, the times is whatever your, whatever your opinion of
the failing New York times is, um, clearly, uh, a, a widely read and widely respected, uh, outlet
still for uh tastemakers and opinion makers all over the world and for this to be for this kind
of headline to be primarily featured in the times is i think an interesting bit of not necessarily
predictive programming but i think it's there's maybe some ideological pump priming going on here
to get opinion makers and and opinion leaders throughout the world to maybe be a little more
on sides as to where the major where the puck is going for a lot of uh key key policy you know
worldwide memetic seating is how i would say memetic seating that's good and to your uh to
your point i think that is going to dovetail directly into our bread and butter which is
bitcoin and it's not really our bread and butter but we're forced to cover a crypto and i think
what you're highlighting here on this slide is a validation of what you just said is that there's
a concerted effort to remodel the global economic system and it's been pretty trans the trump
administration has been pretty transparent they believe bitcoin and crypto have a part to play
there and they are going to do everything they can to make sure that the industry is primed here in
the united states to to go out and build the the new infrastructure that is necessary and i think
you highlight two headlines here on the left that that show that there's there's actually action
happened the first coming from february 11 2026 so earlier this year aba urges occ to provide
stronger safeguards, clearer rules for charter applicants. And then less than five months later
on July 10th, so last week, right before the weekend on Friday, Circle received final OCC
approval to establish a national trust bank. So it looks like they're moving pretty quickly
behind the scenes to grease the skids to make sure that the crypto and Bitcoin industry can
do what it needs to do. Yeah, I think that on the left, the really interesting nuance to me is
The ABA, the Bankers Association, the Bankers Lobbying Group, has been, I think, doing the opposite, not creasing the skids, trying to get in the way.
And if you recall, I don't know if we covered it, but earlier this year, a letter went out to the OCC and other regulators basically saying,
stop moving forward with granting additional regulatory approvals to Coinbase and Circle and Kraken and all the companies that had applied for different charters.
We need to pump the brakes on this and have clearer rulemaking timelines and basically the classic run out the clock type move to just throw sand in the gears and make things take longer.
And a few months later, the OCC, which is part of the Trump administration, effectively said, no, I don't think I will, and continued to move ahead.
And I think we've also gotten, Circle wasn't the first, we also got Kraken, I believe might have been the first within this overall process to get the same designation.
Someone who's more familiar with the regulatory plumbing might be able to correct me.
But in any case, a very interesting headline as it relates to which side kind of the broader regulatory apparatus is on right now.
And, you know, your latest data point showing that the government is, you know, moving more and more to work hand in hand with the, you know, I'm not going to call it the crypto industry because I just, you know, I can't bring myself to dignify that.
So I'll call it the digital assets industry broadly.
But, you know, this is despite a contingency, a major contingency of relevant lobbyists from the banking industry trying to throw roadblocks in the way, you know, the OCC has moved forward with this.
And your latest version of that, your latest indication of that was Circle this past week.
And, you know, that maybe dovetails over to the thing on the right, which is OpenUSD, which was in the last timestamp newsletter.
We didn't get to talk about it last week.
We ran out of time.
But I thought we should bring it up just because if you look at the we don't have to go into the kind of all the architecture of this, but basically a new stable coin, quote unquote, for a new dollar stable coin.
And it's run by a run administered by a consortium of companies that you can see here on the on the right.
And if you look, it's just like an absolute murderer's row of like all the biggest payments companies, traditional payments, traditional financial services, fintech, you know, custodians, BlackRock, BNY, tech companies like Google, you know, you've got Stripe.
Obviously, you've got your digital assets, whether it's like Coinbase in there.
But this is, I think, a really interesting update to your latest data point on stable coins, which I think is a term that's ultimately going to be very outdated in just a few years.
But let's call them digital dollars, having a certain look and a certain architecture and specifically moving forward under the guise of and the guidance of some very well-connected and important companies domestically.
and i think to to just tip our hat or to to toot our own horn like a little bit i think if you look
at what's available on open usd right now there's not a ton available in the docs yet but um this
all looks very very much like everything we were outlining a few months ago as it related to
the future of stable coins so if you go to 1031 timestamp.stablecoins you can read way more than
you probably ever wanted to about why we thought it was going this way but i think this is like
showing you the puck going like in exactly the direction we were talking about which is ultimately
like, you know, there's no long term meaningful role for blockchains here with this this consortium
of financial services, heavyweights kind of running the show. And if you go look at the
website, you'll see kind of the way they talk about it validates that. But I think most importantly,
even outside of, you know, the the debate over blockchains and their use here, I think it's just
a really interesting on latest data point on the trend of we've talked about reshoring as it relates
to manufacturing and U.S. industrial capacity.
I mean, I think this is, you know, a big piece of the kind of reshoring like U.S. control
over the dollar, like what it means to have a dollar, to use a dollar.
And we've talked about the massive euro dollar market and the offshore dollar market on the
show many times before.
You know, Besson has made comments about, you know, wanting to reassert, you know, U.S.
supremacy over that.
And we've talked about different ways that could happen.
And I think OpenUSD is, I don't know who the winner is going to be.
Maybe you'll have many winners.
You'll have OpenUSD, Circle, Tether, other constructs we haven't thought of yet.
Or maybe OpenUSD will be the absolute winner.
Don't really necessarily care so much about that.
But I do think if you could pull off something like this and you could have U.S. domicile institutions running a digital dollar effectively that slots into the way that effectively the banking system, the payment system, all the different tools people already use.
You can make it kind of invisible under the hood of what the dollar system is. And effectively, if then what it means to hold a dollar is to basically hold a digital balance that is itself holding treasuries as collateral. And that's the way that a dollar is getting defined. That moves treasury much more kind of front and center into controlling what we think of today as monetary policy.
This is all very embryonic, and I think it can fail in a lot of ways.
And I think it's not necessarily totally clear exactly how it will all line up.
But everything that I think we're seeing here on this slide and that we've talked about over the last few months is pointing in that direction, right, of kind of reshoring U.S. control over the dollar system and what it means to have and to use a dollar.
And I think that'll maybe have some very interesting implications for financing headroom for the Treasury going forward and also what we have on the next couple slides.
Yeah. Sorry for butchering that transition from the ABA headline to Circle, but you corrected it correctly. And then you're very humble saying we wrote, you worked on that stablecoin piece. That was all you. So go read John's stablecoin piece. I mean, we gave some feedback, but you did a lot of the legwork there to put that thesis out there.
extremely thorough go check it out 1031.xyz stable coins but as john said bitcoin may not be front
and center with these policies uh in most people's minds but in in the background again uh it does
seem like the the push for bitcoin strategic reserve is very real it's happening and what
we're seeing now is that the the hurdles that we're facing come down to who's actually going
to be running the bitcoin strategic reserve reserve which department is going to be treasury
Is it going to be commerce? Who's actually going to steward the United States Bitcoin strategic reserve?
Yeah, I mean, I think this headline got played, you know, if you saw it on like a Bloomberg terminal or something, you know, I think it got played as pretty negative.
And certainly, I think if you wanted this to happen or if you thought it should move forward, then any incremental hurdles for the SBR would be a problem.
And that's that's all fair. But I think the more interesting piece of it is just the way that this is framed as two government departments vying to run the strategic Bitcoin reserve and kind of this turf war between Treasury and commerce that to me signals that a all the people that are the architects of what we just talked about with reshoring the US dollar system and kind of reframing what it means to kind of use a dollar and interact the dollar system that they continue to care enough about the SBR to be the ones to.
to further wait around and try to be the ones who run it and administer it, I think is pretty
meaningful. And it tells you, I don't know how long it will take to sort this out and what the
various kind of statutory questions that have to be resolved ultimately will be. But I think the
much more meaningful piece of this headline, in my view, was that all the relevant decision makers
who are at the controls of everything we've just talked about are continuing to push to get this
done just you know in in the way that they want for the to benefit their their department's
fiefdom but that probably doesn't happen if uh this is either fully on ice or just completely
irrelevant to them and it's funny is there an ego battle uh between besant and howard lutnick
i can't imagine eking in because we know they've they've had a very good relationship uh at the
beginning and the lead up to wasn't lutnick buying for treasury yeah sort of boxed out and then uh
i think i think besant has had some choice words for for lutnick or at least reports have said that
he's had choice words for Latinx. But we're not here to gossip. We're here to talk about this is
the last slide we have, which I think is positioning and reinforcing and laying out the
thesis for our listeners here of why a Bitcoin strategic reserve makes sense for the United
States when you consider the incredible lead we have in terms of Bitcoin adoption in the United
States and the amount of Bitcoin that the government currently has domain over. Yeah,
Yeah. You know, this is pretty self-explanatory and I think we've talked about it on the show
before, but just to wrap up, like this is, River put this out last week. I think this is their
update of a series of slides that we've talked about before, but just showing, I highly recommend
people go look at this. I think it's called America is the Bitcoin superpower. You can just
see the US government has basically an uncontested lead in Bitcoin holdings. And we can talk about
the provenance of those holdings. And I think as Americans, we should maybe be concerned with
how some of those holdings were attained. But nevertheless, just thinking about it from
the government's perspective, the strategic implications perspective, that advantage,
as well as just the amount of Bitcoin that's held privately by both individuals and companies,
and one company in particular in the U.S., I think, positions Bitcoin as, or positions the U.S. as
uniquely advantaged in the Bitcoin sphere to the extent that, you know, it wants to
exercise that advantage. And I think if you look at what we've talked about for the last 10 minutes,
all the incentives point to the U.S. and the Trump administration having every reason to kind of
move forward and press this advantage to the extent that, you know, it's interested in kind
of re-architecting the dollar system, the financial system, and what it means to kind
interact with us productive capacity kind of through the dollar system so again i i don't
want to overplay this one it's it's uh pictures worth a thousand words pretty clear to people but
we can leave it there you might want to get something just in case it catches on
wise man once said don't sleep on bitcoin we'll see you guys next week
