TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: You Say Ceasefire, and I Say Escalation

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Markets are whipsawing between ceasefire hopes and escalation fears as the Strait of Hormuz becomes a geopolitical flashpoint, while Bitcoin shows surprising resilience amid the chaos. We dig into the energy leverage game between the US and China, the suspicious timing of the Mythos AI panic, and why Bitcoin makes more sense than stablecoins for toll payments in a war zone. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: Why empty VLCCs are racing to the Gulf of America while Hormuz closes China's sulfuric acid export ban targeting global food supplies Bitcoin holding $71k as traditional markets panic over Middle East escalation The Mythos AI narrative as potential cover for a private credit crisis Why stablecoins fail as neutral money for adversarial trade Bitcoin's emerging role in international oil settlement and Hormuz tolls TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Masters weekend and Middle East chaos 00:01:06 - Strait of Hormuz blockade and ceasefire games 00:02:58 - US energy leverage and VLCC redirection 00:06:18 - China retaliates with sulfuric acid export curbs 00:09:27 - Bitcoin's strength amid geopolitical turmoil 00:13:04 - Anthropic Mythos and the emergency bank meeting 00:19:35 - Private credit stress and insurance exposure 00:22:47 - Bitcoin tolls in the Strait of Hormuz 00:29:02 - Stablecoins vs Bitcoin for international trade 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 #Geopolitics #OilMarkets

mr arnold happy to be here as always coming off another great masters weekend as we were discussing in the pre here you know if we get into world war iii as it looks more and more likely every day we we know what we're fighting for as americans which is for the the right to sit around on a sunny sunday afternoon and watch an irish guy win our most important golf tournament two years in a row shout out to rory yeah hard fought victory thought he's gonna give it up it It got interesting there. I thought Reuss was going to make a push. I thought Scotty was going to make a push.

Not without drama. Never without drama with Rory, but he pulled it out. He did. He did. But alas, we're not a golf podcast for Bitcoin. I think we're a macro podcast now. I think I've gotten some feedback. Some of the brightest minds in macroeconomics globally have been listening week in and week out just to come and get your thoughts, John, because they're good thoughts.

And as you alluded to, things are chaotic. Like I was, I was away from keyboard. I had my phone and my birthday celebration over the weekend, not mine, but somebody in my family's and I kept my phone away from me all day Saturday. Obviously yesterday was the masters. So I was in bed last night. Like, okay, what happened this weekend? It looks like it was a bit chaotic.

Ceasefire on, off, on, off. We'll pull up the first slide that you put together today, which is a reference to the game show deal or no deal. Yeah. This was the most concise way that I knew how to summarize the events of the weekend. I feel really good that in what could be an emerging energy crisis for the world, that I lit a graphics card on fire, a GPU on fire to create this totally high value ad gym. But yeah, here's what we're looking at.

Interestingly, my projection for SPY does not look to have proven correct as we're basically flattish this morning, despite oil ripping on news of a decision to blockade Iranian ports with the Navy, the U.S. Navy, in the Strait of Hormuz in response to talks that lasted, I think, less than 24 hours between Vice President J.D. Vance and some faction of the Iranian contingency. And we can get into maybe who they were talking to and what that means. But in any case, that fell through. And so now we are definitively escalating. And not only is the Strait not going to be open, but we are going to make it even more closed than it was before. So an interesting uno reverse card being played here as always you know it's a bold strategy

cotton we'll see how it plays out but yeah big big implications this week after the market decided last week with the ceasefire announcement that everything was was gushy and we were heading back to all-time highs yeah but as we mentioned last week too let's not get immersed and succumb to the 24-hour news cycle and the changing of headlines and the ping-ponging of ceasefire no ceasefire deal no deal let's look at what's actually happening on the ground and one thing highlighted this week is that it seems that the oil the balance of power in oil markets is definitely shifting towards the us and i saw this map floating around over the weekend and we see a bunch of ships going around the horn of africa yeah so this is a map from i call it on the bottom

rory johnson which is a great kind of oil data analyst that everyone should follow on twitter the president is now apparently following him as he retweeted or quote tweeted or something on on untruth social this this map and um as evidence that uh you know the the u.s is is winning bigly um but i do think it's an interesting data point showing a bunch of large tankers headed to the u.s to the i was going to say the gulf of mexico but it's now i guess the gulf of america kind of on on the way in this caravan to these are empty tankers largely um you can see that because they're there's no outline in most of them or it's it's an outline with nothing filled in and showing them empty tankers coming to the U.S. to refuel.

And I think it's a combination. I think this includes everything from LNG tankers to other types of crude tankers. But in any case, if you scroll to the next slide, you'll see this is anomalous, right? This is not, at least relative to prior few months that you are seeing in the data, that's not just like a snapshot of something that's always happening. It does appear to be a large re-erection of VLCCs, which are very large crude carriers, to the Gulf here in the U.S., and that's in response to one of the main oil arteries and LNG arteries in the world, as we've discussed for the last month, getting closed off.

So yeah, I think it's an interesting kind of illustration of something that we've been talking about a lot over the past few weeks, which is just this all is a game of relative leverage, and it very much remains to be seen how durably the U.S. can benefit from from this situation that we're highlighting right here, this is going to have, you know, to the extent that this continues, like it's not going to be free domestically, right? Like we are a net exporter of most refined petroleum products. I believe we're about neutral, maybe a slight net importer on crude, but you know, we have, we do have levers we can pull and ways that we can benefit from the situation that other net energy importers, especially Europe. And to some extent,

China, you know, don't have. So this is, if you were Trump, if you were the Trump team, looking for ways to respond to, you know, being down pretty bad in the fourth quarter, right, on industrial capacity, where over the last 25 years, China has kind of eaten your lunch on all these critical industries, and they have kind of a chokehold on rare earth minerals, you know, this is kind of a button you have to push, right? Or you hope, you have to hope that you can push this button in some way, you know, whether all of this was kind of intentional from day one, and we should trust the plan or whether Trump is kind of just bumbling and stumbling into the situation. And this is just the natural course of events. You know, I'll let listeners decide on

that. But yeah, I think, you know, this this highlights what we've been talking about, that the U.S. isn't totally out of cards to play. And this is kind of the main card that you would think we'd have to play. And so, yeah, it's this this will be a key, I think, driver in deciding basically kind of who who blinks first here in the broad, you know, east west chessboard that has been set Yeah. And it looks like China is reacting to these leverage or some form of leverage shifting towards the U.S. And they're beginning to press the pull the levers that they have access to, particularly in the realm of sulfuric acid exports, which now are sulfuric acid experts now. But China is apparently curbing exports to sulfuric acid. This is the LNG chart.

so obviously europe's very dependent on our lng but china seeing what's happening here saying okay we're gonna ban sulfuric acid exports as the iran war hits supply as you can see on the right side of this chart sulfuric acid is a critical input for a lot of critical sort of inputs for metal processing phosphate fertilizers phosphates fibers and so you could see a strain on those critical materials that could lead to more inflation, particularly in food prices. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's even more than just kind of the inflation impact. You know, as you know, the figure I show here is 50% of sulfuric acid exports are used for phosphate fertilizers. And, you know, it's important because the first market and the

downstream kind of agricultural markets that globally that it depends on, that depend on it are already very disrupted from everything that's gone on thus far out of the Gulf. There are a lot of byproducts that come out of that region that flow into the first market. And so that's already seeing disruption even before this this China announcement. So that this these export curbs are outright and start in May. China is currently the largest net global exporter of these things. And so that's just going to make make that market even worse, potentially, if this if this continues and ramps up, you know, so then it becomes maybe a question of the oil impact is maybe a little more near term and obvious. And the first market impact probably takes a little longer to play out just because of planting cycles and the way that crop yields work and the way that agriculture markets work.

So maybe you don't see the impact of this immediately, but, you know, there will be like early pull forward impacts. And you will see, to your point, inflation in a lot of different food prices and also probably curbing of supply in, you know, more marginal regions that, you know, outside the U.S., outside Western Europe that are a little more kind of on the cusp and on a knife's edge with food supply. So this is, you know, this is, again, if you flip it to China's perspective, this is exactly what you would expect to hit back, right? You play the cards that you have, and I think it just comes back to the same question we've been pointing people to over the last month of it's all a game of relative leverage and who's going to blink first when you play these different types of very sensitive cards that are going to affect pretty much every market around the world. Yeah, we'll get some feedback. It's probably the most uncertain time. I'm just thinking like COVID was very uncertain. But no, I think the scale of this, because COVID was, we're comparing the supply chain disruptions to COVID.

COVID was obviously a black swan and the world basically shut down to try to prevent the virus from spreading. But now the existential threat is World War III and you have all these levers being pulled that really sitting back as an observer, it's like, why are we doing this? Why are we thrusting the world into this type of disruption right now? And it is incredibly uncertain and i think what has been interesting to watch throughout all this uh the pulling bitcoin is bitcoin's relative strength in in this environment and pumped to 73 000 over the weekend i believe on saturday came off of those highs yesterday but currently floating i believe around 71 800 so bitcoin throughout all this has has been reacting in a way which is actually for lack of a

of a better term, a pleasant surprise, because it's not selling off the way it has in cycles past when a potential liquidity crisis arises in markets. It's actually acting as a risk-off asset right now. Yeah, look, it's extremely interesting. And I think, you know, this is still primarily, despite our, to your point, becoming sulfuric acid and VLCC experts, this is still primarily a Bitcoin-oriented show, a show with a kind of a Bitcoin lens. But I think all of the stuff, all of these headlines we've pointed out today and in prior weeks around the situation flow into and our inputs into that ultimate view about Bitcoin, right? And to that point, like as we see a progressively more fractured, perhaps multipolar, perhaps just

kind of disconnected global order where, you know, just in time, inventory and supply chains just are a thing of the past and nations no longer implicitly trust one another. And, you know, The U.S. Treasury market ceases to be kind of the default store of value for sovereign reserves. And in general, counterparties grow to trust one another less and less, especially between these different kind of emerging trade blocks, right? Like that is the environment where something like a neutral sovereign store of value without a counterparty that can be moved in arbitrarily large size essentially instantly around the

world whose supply cannot be arbitrarily diluted by any counterparty, corporate or government or otherwise, this is the environment where you would eventually expect something like Bitcoin to thrive. It's still a baby, like an infant, a zygote relative to gold, which is the other kind of main theoretical beneficiary of an environment like that. And so I expect to see gold certainly continue to be the default way that sovereigns and corporations, big international corporations express an awareness of that view as it becomes more and more consensus. But I think we talked about on the show before, I think that only further and further paves the pathway for bitcoin to gain you know a progressively larger percentage share of global wealth and global

sovereign store value balances over time as that thesis gets gets more and more obvious and more clear and yeah i mean i think we might have said it in prior episodes as well but like this is the kind of price action that you look for for like bottom formation in any asset not calling a bottom because like if we wake up tomorrow and trump decides you know we're actually just going to unload the nukes on on tehran like who knows what's going to happen and certainly pray that that does not happen. There are a lot, you know, there are a lot of fat left tails here now that have to be considered. So who knows what's going to happen week to week, month to month. But in general, when you see something, a price on something get absolutely nuked, everyone's

puking, running away from it, it gets out of favor. And then like really bad headlines start to hit. That should be really scary. And, you know, the thing kind of does nothing or even goes up a little bit like that's what you want to see for bottom formation. So, you know, I definitely think if you're looking just at the Bitcoin lens, this is, this has been, I think, a very constructive environment for Bitcoin's fundamentals. And I don't think that's lost on, you know, big banks, big corporations, and importantly, you know, sovereigns who are kind of dealing with this. Yeah. And we'll, we'll bring it back to, to Bitcoin, particularly in this environment, because there's some speculation about how it's being used in the straighter

moves by, by the IRGC. But before we get to that, I think another shifting back to, to the East-West dynamic, the levers that are being pulled. And I think it's very clear that at least between the United States and China, this race to win the AI war is considered existential by both governments, if you will. And I think one of the sort of sub themes of the last week is Anthropics model mythos, which they have not released. They've released it, I guess, to enterprise clients, Google and others in an attempt to try to make sure that systems are prepared for when it does get unleashed on the public because they're positioning it as something that is more powerful than any LLM that's ever existed. There was a report out there that it was able to find

zero-day bugs in many of the critical software libraries and operating systems that exist out there and that people depend on. And so Anthropic sounded the alarm bell last week, like we think this model is a step function improvement on Opus 4.6. And it's too dangerous to unleash. And that has caught the attention of the government. And there were many sort of meetings on the Hill last week about this. And one of which was Scott Besant summoning Wall Street leaders for an urgent meeting concerning mythos and how they should be preparing for it. And so you can begin to see a narrative an ai narrative bubbling into the the scene as well uh and it looks like we're getting to a point where the governments are saying no these these tools are very powerful and we'll

get into what could be happening here so what are your thoughts on this yeah for sure i mean i totally think that the basic narrative that you outlined is all legitimate and potentially like i think that's how it's been generally received in in the media and you know it's it's not in any way beyond the realm of reality that everything that anthropic is saying or like leaking out whatever through trusted media sources is correct about mythos um you know i don't doubt that like we see every day ai is making crazy gains and eventually if not already like that will have like meaningful cyber security implications and certainly that flows into kind of if you're trying to you know pull certain strategic levers against you know a geopolitical adversary

right now, you know, pending further distillation. We'll see if that can continue. But right now, the U.S. does have a lead in the frontier models. And so we saw it a month ago or two months ago with the rift between Anthropic and the turn of war on how the models could be used. But this is becoming more and more of a legitimate national security conversation and, you know, a key kind of weapon in the what Washington, I think, sees as this decoupling to, you know, a soft or hard decoupling is kind of up to you to think about but i think that's all legitimate i i found the story really interesting though this week because it's like when i when i just came across the wire it just kind of didn't fully pass the sniff test for me and maybe it's just after years of you know

being manipulated by every form of you know being like the most propagandized generation like in history right and so maybe i'm just my tinfoil hat's gotten too much use but you know for for the treasury secretary and the fed chairman so powell and besant to have a joint meeting that was you know allegedly apparently like an urgent emergency meeting with basically the heads of all the usg sibs so the globally systemic important banks jamie diamond interestingly was not there um i don't know if that means anything but in any case you know city you see here city morgan stanley bank of america wells fargo all kind of summoned the heads of those banks summoned to and Golden summoned to DC to have this joint meeting. And you see that it's about cybersecurity and it's

like, okay, maybe, right? Like it's definitely possible that, that, you know, there's some zero day in, you know, the, the core elements of like banking tech infrastructure that, you know, they need to be aware of and need to quickly find patches for, and it's going to have this major, you know, it's this major systemic risk to the U S and their customers. Um, and you know, U S financial infrastructure, that's definitely possible. But our, our buddy Matt Dines at build, you know, had an interesting tweet that I feel like, you know, really resonated with me over the weekend. It was aligned with kind of my thinking that if you were going to, you know, perhaps leverage mythos where you have this kind of geopolitical lead right now against your

adversaries on something like financial infrastructure, you know, might you want to read in the heads of the biggest banks in your country? And I believe also the Bank of Canada was was later kind of briefed on this and brought into brought into the circle you know might you want to brief these guys on something that you were about to do or that you wanted them to do right um and i think and then would you not kind of you know allow the the narrative to percolate that you know it was just about kind of informing them about cyber security risks you know as with a lot of things we talk about on the show maybe that's only a 10 or 20 probability but i think the the market was reading it as like a zero right last week it was pretty hook line and

sinker type narrative that exactly what was presented was was correct what was happening and i think it's worth thinking about again as we like consider where we're going in you know this world that we're heading into the the assets that you want to be allocated to in a case where something like that you know were to happen um and i think even more generally like putting putting the tinfoil hat on even more if if i were looking at as the fed and treasury if i were looking at the systemic breaks that might be coming down the pipe from everything that we're seeing just like generally in energy markets and how that flows through to all these other markets to food to metals and mining to ai to government tax receipts ultimately in government finances

if i saw that coming down the pipe i might want to urgently gather all the heads of the g-sibs and like you know read them in on hey here's here's what's going to happen here's over the next month like what we see coming here are the new facilities we might want to put in place We need to have you guys ready to do X, Y, Z thing. And inevitably, that meeting is going to get leaked, right? If all those guys are there in that same room at one time. So I might also just want to float the cybersecurity mythos narrative as a complete red herring and redirect from, you know, what people would otherwise be speculating about, you know, this kind of meeting, right? So this is like definitely tinfoil hat territory. It's definitely speculative territory. But, you know, we've seen much crazier things. And it's, I think, definitely not outside the realm of possibility that we're about to hit some sort of like systemically hairy event in, you know, Western financial infrastructure or just global financial infrastructure in the next like month. And if so, like, this is exactly the type of meeting that you would expect to see, right? Well, I mean, I'm picking up what you're putting down. I'm picking up what Matt's putting down. The whole mythos narrative, it was very, very obvious.

I mean, I think the first day they released the research on the zero days and wrote the blog post and said, hey, we have this model. We're not releasing it. We actually, what do they call it? Operation Glasswing, which is giving it to all the enterprise clients so they can prepare their systems. That narrative hit. It was scary.

But then two days later, somebody released another report. Well, actually, they could have used Opus 4.6 to get 80% of the way there, and it's actually not that big of an improvement on Opus 4.6. And then I was saying, I don't know if you saw this commentary from some hardcore white hat hackers. They're like, hey, we all know these zero days exist. People can find them if they want to, but it's legal to actually execute a zero day bug on these critical systems. You would go to jail, you'd be found out. So people have known that these zero days exist. They just don't take advantage of them because it's very illegal.

And we're talking federal prison. So it's not as groundbreaking as Anthropic was making a mythos to be. And then another meeting that was on, I don't know if it was a meeting or just a warning, but I think the Treasury warned about private equity and private credit or exposure to insurance companies or vice versa, insurance players sort of exposure to private credit and private equity, which has been bubbling behind the scenes. I had Nick Namath, who's a young analyst who's diving into this, doing research in parallel with Tom Gober, who was on Steve Eisman's podcast about a month ago, ringing the alarm bell about insurance's exposure to private credit and the mismatch in liabilities that may emerge there in a potential trillion dollar hole. and so to your point maybe there is a liquidity crisis as private credit um i guess bubble popping there were more redemption gates last week i forget which fund was it apollo yes it was carlisle carlisle yeah and so you have this private credit complex it seems to be slowly blowing up and to your point like it would not be shocking at all to learn that mythos was a red herring used to get all the banks in the room to say hey this private credit thing

is actually pretty systemic like you guys need to prepare yeah absolutely i mean i forgot to put that in the slides but yeah we had it in the newsletter this past week but with in addition to everything else going on in global supply chains and all the implications that you know can and will have you know we've got a trillion dollar kind of what appears increasingly to be like a slow-moving train wreck in private credit especially as it relates to the insurance industry's exposure to it and there was there was an am best report that was released over the the weekend about how basically diagnosing that the annuity selling uh insurance funds are significantly worse off in their words than in terms of financial positioning than they were

on the eve of the financial crisis because of this private credit exposure so yeah look i don't know if it was that i don't know if it was something we're completely missing or misdiagnosing but yeah in general i think worth asking yourself like does the mythos narrative for that meeting really kind of hold water and if not what might it suggest that you know that that was happening last week yeah such uncertainty uncertainty risk bad credit exposure crazy times crazy times but moving on moving this back to bitcoin like we're saying relative strength and there is a narrative forming in the straight of her moves about tolls being paid and who's controlling the streets obviously trump over the weekend said we're going to put tonight we're putting a blockade but before

that last week one of the big narratives was that when the ceasefire was on and you have the list of concessions that each side was making for a period of time of a few days last week. One of the concessions was, okay, the IRGC will have control of the straits and will be able to charge a toll for ships making their way through the streets. And one of the narratives that formed was the Financial Times reporting that the IRGC is only accepting Bitcoin for payment in the strait of Hermes. And many Bitcoiners picked this up. We talked about it in one of the Bitcoin briefs last week at tftc matt and i covered it extensively on rabbit hole recap last week but i think um whether or not it was true i think i think this is a good way to sort of just talk about this

because who knows like we're saying the headlines are switching every 12 hours at this point and who knows what's actually happening but let's just talk about the theoretical the idea of iran having control and then only accepting bitcoin as payment and why that makes sense yeah for sure and yeah all the caveats like that you guys have talked about you know apply like maybe he you know misspoke maybe he meant stable coins maybe he this guy was just completely making it up maybe he's not authorized to speak for it totally can buy the idea that this would be a really hacky kind of way like what the way they're describing how they would do it like could you ever would that ever sustain would they have any ability to actually enforce anything like this like all

those questions are legitimate alex thorne at galaxy did a really good article last week about that i recommend people read about this and answering kind of questions about its validity So, you know, put that aside. But I think it was like it's a very interesting and meaningful little kind of item in Bitcoin's history and growth is it's it's mainstreaming, right? Like that this would be reported, taken seriously and, you know, legitimately considered by a lot of people, you know, last week, well outside kind of the Bitcoin echo chamber, you know, I think speaks to a growing diffusion of awareness of understanding of Bitcoin's properties. And I think you guys at TFTC did a really good graphic that I put on the next slide about, you know, what Bitcoin can do as money. And, you know, there's a you, of course, got all the reply guys who wanted to score their Twitter likes, you know, when this this headline hit about how Bitcoin is so slow or it's it's bad for payments or, you know, how terrible it would be for that for Iran to actually try to use it. And I just I like this this taxonomy that you guys put out of the different ways that Bitcoin either natively or with layer two solutions or, you know, layer three or kind of the application layer, however you want to think about it for these different use cases. bitcoin can kind of slot into a bunch of different areas on the spectrum between you know the need

for very fast quick cheap micro payments to something more like your your coffee payments to some something more on enterprise level to finally like you know providing money for enemies right the the classic meme that is becoming less and less of a meme and more and more i think obviously acknowledged for for what it is which is you know bitcoin as this this neutral asset that is ideally suited for highly sensitive, large settlements between untrusted counterparties, which is to our point from the start of the show today, you know, exactly what we're looking at more and more, you know, whether regardless of what happens with Hormuz, like that seems to be the world that we're heading in. And, you know, I think this week with that headline was a great

little kind of test case or dry run for people to think through the properties that would make a story like that plausible, you know, in the first place. Yeah. And just to really dig into So this is something that I've been saying for probably like five or six years now. Back when I was working at Great American Mining, it's funny, I've got my Great American Mining coffee mug today. But for those who are unaware, I helped co-founded a off-grid Bitcoin mining company where we mitigated flare gas using Bitcoin mining in the Bakken. The company started in 2018, early to the game. But back then, when it was close to that part of the mining industry, it became very obvious to me. like obviously you have the the function of mining using wasted trend and energy to monetize those

assets but then you think about bitcoin as the monetary good and always like made sense to me like we'll know that bitcoin has made it and it is a sort of well-recognized reserve asset global settlement network when international oil trades are being done in bitcoin and to your point like thinking about the scale of that type of transaction you're not going to want to do that through the lighting network or probably using an e-cash mint you're going to want the assurances of protocol level bitcoin on-chain bitcoin and the the properties that exist at that level and i think the main properties are number one final settlement that is basically buried in energy in the form of blocks being produced on top of the block that includes your transaction and then

sort of the the smart contract capabilities of bitcoin particularly multisig where you can you can envision a future where you have international oil trade you have a buyer who says okay i want to buy oil from you and the seller says okay i will bring you the oil but i need some sort of assurance that you're actually going to deliver the money at the end of the day so the buyer puts bitcoin up in a multi-sig escrow or maybe they hold a key the the seller of the wheel holds a key in the impartial third party holds a key the oil get gets delivered and the receiver says okay okay, I got the oil. You can disperse the funds to the seller. The straight of Hermes toll is not that exactly, but it is a step in that direction. It's not settling the oil trade. It's enabling it

to happen in the first place in this war time, in this war footing that we're seeing right now. And I think to your point, it is a validation of something that Bitcoiners, myself, yourself, have been talking about for many years now. And throughout all the noise, I think that's one signal the fact that it's even being considered or talked about who knows if it's actually being considered but the fact that it's being talked about and recognized as a mechanism to facilitate this this particular toll use case between enemies is is a validation of why bitcoin exists and on that note i know we're running long here this will probably be a longer episode i think juxtaposing why bitcoin is perfectly suited for this and something like stable coins

is not in dovetailing into the piece that you published over the weekend. Yeah, for sure. You heard a lot about when this headline hit, there was this debate, like I was referring to, between whether it was, what did he mean? Did he mean stable coins? Did he actually mean to include Bitcoin? And I think that whether he did or he didn't, I think there's, it brings up an interesting differentiation, an important differentiation, which is if Iran truly wanted to take some form of digital currency for this hypothetical toll booth that i think we all agree probably like isn't going to exist at scale if any country wanted to do that in an untrusted environment particularly if they were an adversary of the us they really wouldn't want to do it with

stable coins with which are basically uh you know wrappers for the us bank system and i i wrote a piece digging into that kind of at great length you can find it at 1031timestamp.com stablecoins um you know most of it is not definitively not about iran or the situation but just kind of of going over a taxonomy of where we sit with stable coins and some of the consensus narratives that have emerged around them. I think the piece and we at 1031 are directionally aligned with the idea that there will be a future for and probably a thriving future for some form of a digital dollar. But I think there's been a belief that that's going to mean significant benefits for public blockchains on which these stable coins currently ride. And I think the essence of the

piece you can kind of see roughly distilled in this very complicated table that we don't have to get into. But basically, you know, the thesis is blockchains are not really purpose-built for facilitating high volume, especially sensitive dollar-denominated commerce or fiat-denominated commerce. If you, the things that people want out of stablecoin payments are, you know, better suited for just being run on a database, you know, centralized, very fast, highly optimized database, which because blockchains don't scale natively, you're going to end up with some form of significant intermediation and, you know, trusted third parties kind of regardless of what you do. Like that's that's where the incentives skew. That's where the technical details can ultimately

skew and push you. And so in that case, you know, if you're just going to use a database for which for sensitive dollar denominated commerce, the future, I think, is going to look very different for what we think of as stable coins today. And, you know, the whatever benefit they might see is not going to flow through to public blockchains. And so there's a lot that we're not going to get into today, but recommend people go check that out as they think through, especially like what the future of international exchange look like you know is is the oil trade going to run on on us uh usd denominated stable coins on ethereum um as you think through questions like that with everything we're seeing today hopefully that piece is helpful and maybe answering why some of those

instincts are misplaced yeah everybody go read it and on that note too i don't know if you saw but i think a headline hit the tape this morning that the trump administration is floating a one percent remittance tax as well and so that's like just another example of like okay if they do that remittance tax and people are choosing to do that via stable coins or the traditional banking system the likelihood of them having to pay that tax is far higher than if they were to use something like bitcoin which can be sent and received relatively pseudo-anonymously so if you want to route around that bitcoin is better suited than stable coins or the traditional banking system which to be clear we're not promoting or endorsing anyone trying to get around

u.s laws and regulations just identifying the likely describing the landscape that exists john this was great almost 40 minutes the longest one yet but i think it was important to go as deep as we did today considering everything going on and really ending on your piece which again everybody should go read i think i said this over a year ago was my pinned tweet for the better part of the last year which is i think the noise of this cycle within bitcoin and broader cryptos stable coins real world assets this the signal is going to be bitcoin um its integration to the energy sector and its emergence in international commerce i said that i believe in july of 25 um and it seems to be playing out june of 25 i think so here we are

Until next week, see you guys.