TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - The Trump Tweet Ep: Marty, Matt and Murad Mahmudov

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

Marty, Matt and Murad breakdown the implications of Donald J. Trump and Federal Reserve Chairman Powell's comments on Bitcoin. Links discussed: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1149472282584072192 https://twitter.com/StopAndDecrypt/status/1149703537871355904 https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1149629984157261825

all right what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt this is a this is a like a sneak up episode we're doing here uh matt and i recorded yesterday on thursday around noon while that was going on the fed chairman pal was uh at a sending hearing i believe answering questions from the senate talking about bitcoin and then just less than 10 hours later donald j trump uh our orange president tweeted out uh about bitcoin and libra he does not like them uh we're joined by obviously matt odell and uh we've got a guest a special guest a reoccurring very special guest maran mamadov gentlemen how are we what's up freaks hey guys nice to be here once again um jen matt rod he fucking did the tweet we've been

talking about we've been talking about the trump bitcoin tweet for for so goddamn long it happened last night was not expecting it at all i was caught completely off guard uh and matt you you seem to be missing in action while this was going on what uh what happened yeah i was recording with you when powell was speaking the chairman of the fed and then we dropped that and then i so i saw we saw those comments afterwards and then i was recording with the boys from pov crypto uh our boy christian and uh david hoffman who's uh the resident eth head over there and we had like a great debate we were having a great debate about i mean my feeling is that if the u.s bans ethereum If they make it illegal or they try and force KYC, then Ethereum is fucked.

And basically his argument was that that would never happen. And then meanwhile, the president of the United States is like tweeting out this shit at the same exact time. So I think it'll be highly relevant. I'm excited for them to drop that episode. I think the freaks will like it. Yeah. So let's jump full into it. I got the Trump tweet up right now.

i'm not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior including drug trade and other illegal activity similarly facebook libra's virtual currency will have still standing will have little standing or dependability excuse me if facebook and other companies want to become a bank they must seek a new banking charter and become subject to all banking regulations just like other banks both national and international we have only one real currency in the usa and it's stronger than ever both dependable and reliable it is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world and will always stay that way it's called the united

states dollar gentlemen let's dissect the gravity of this moment of this these these string of tweets. Murad, let's start with you. So first of all, I think this is a lot more bearish Libra than it is bearish Bitcoin. That's first of all. And that's because obviously Bitcoin essentially transcends law in many ways and it transcends regulation and it transcends essentially authority and and various kinds of control so there's really no ceo or no legal department that uh or any kind of charter really that um people that the government could enforce against bitcoin and that's not to say that they can't do anything at all but i think in the short to medium term at least uh they definitely have orders of magnitude more uh avenues to use against libra and facebook

in any of these corporate shitcoins than they do against Bitcoin. That's first of all. Second of all, I think in the grand scheme of things, both what we saw from Donald Trump and what we saw from Powell, in my mind, is bullish. Because essentially,

we are seeing global scale acknowledgement, not only that Bitcoin exists, but at least that it is a money candidate. And this, to me, just means that Bitcoin continues to ascend on this evolution from being just this kind of digital toy to actually becoming a currency. Whether Trump supposedly on paper or believes that it is a viable currency or not doesn't matter. The fact that there's even words currency and Bitcoin in the same sentence coming from the mouth of who is arguably the number one most powerful person in the world. um is to me an acknowledgement um to a great extent and uh what we saw i guess that's a kind of a next topic and i'm running a little bit uh ahead of myself but what we saw take as

much time as you need is even is an even greater acknowledgement um because he essentially said that bitcoin is digital gold it's used as a store of value i don't know who or how else could have said what to sound kind of more bullish um and really they gave it a sign of of this great symbolic improvement really in my mind so irregardless of what happens to bitcoin in the short to medium term uh this is a huge stepping stone really and now it's kind of in the minds of the collective unconscious once again i think when it comes to bitcoin we've seen time and time again through the cycles any attention is good attention and this is essentially the greatest attention he could have received holy shit this is bullish as fuck right it's ridiculous it's

insane i couldn't the the powell comments alone he he literally called it alternative to gold he said it's a speculative store of value or his words i i kind of wonder if if the trump tweet was was kind of triggered by those comments um because you know it we've been waiting for this tweet for a long fucking time and uh it happened what 10 hours 10 hours after powell publicly said it yeah no it seemed uh too perfect almost to have that hearing into that that tweet thread so i wouldn't be surprised if it if it uh influenced the twitter thread and a lot of people are speculating whether or not that was even donald that wrote that or some advisor who crafted Yeah, do you think he wrote it?

Do you think he wrote it? I would be surprised if he's as debriefed on the intricacies of Bitcoin and Libra to be as coherent as he was in that thread. I don't know. I don't know. It was at least edited heavily, right? Because, I mean, it was a pretty coherent tweet thread. um he actually said big time which is nice unlike uh unlike brian armstrong and crew who never say it we got a dog somewhere i think it's mirad's dog yeah so um sorry guys one second my dog is acting wild it's okay your dog's bullish obviously so i am pretty confident that trump doesn't uh

hasn't written this tweet i frankly i don't believe he writes his tweets like in general um he definitely writes some he definitely writes some but this one in particular first of all i think a lot of what he says on social media is carefully manufactured uh and deliberately in certain ways uh by a team of highly intelligent people um and i would also say that um this tweet in particular i'm close to 95 confident that he didn't write because it was way too nuanced uh to to be written by him and it it just showed too much knowledge um to to to be written by him once again yeah and it's uh i i would completely agree and to stay like on the topic of like having handlers and people tweeting for him it's like interesting to see uh what just being in the

office of president has forced him to sort of uh to posture like the way he postures now so here's a tweet from september 29th 2011 2011 september 29th 2011 from donald j trump at real donald trump the fed's reckless policies of low interest and flooding the market with dollars needs to be stopped or we will face record inflation um so somebody who and there's many other tweets of the sort throughout the years of donald calling out the fed and it's just funny that now he's a sitting president he has to posture this way uh for the sake of the country uh even though it pretty obviously if you go through the history of his principles maybe he's changed his mind i highly doubt it um but it seems that it's the exact opposite of what he's what he's been saying

throughout the years yeah i mean bitcoin well first of all he's known for his like 3 a.m toilet poll tweets right so like i was i was kind of hoping our bitcoin tweet was going to be one of those but i'm i'm like fine with a handler doing it you know like a nice coherent tweet about how bitcoin is a major threat to uh america's financial dominance like that's pretty good publicity yeah no like murad said all publicity is good publicity um and i think he left some room to like backstep right because he he told um zuckerberg to get a banking charter and that's what i said like and marad talked about this as well like there was like an overt omission of an action against bitcoin he's just saying he didn't like it he wasn't saying how he was going

to follow up or anything but with libra in particular it was get a fucking banking charter you're not going to it's not going to happen i mean this is what we've been saying about libra for a while now right it's like first of all the only way it launches is if they bend the fucking knee uh and then and it's that's why it's clearly not a competitor to bitcoin like this is why bitcoin shines um i'd like to touch on two points here i think the first point is uh does trump own bitcoin and then the second point is is is this bearish for altcoins you know there's so much more centralized than bitcoin uh if the u.s government decides to really do something here If they're really waking up, that could be an issue.

Does Trump own Bitcoin? I don't know. We definitely think that people within his family tree own Bitcoin. I would be very surprised if there's nobody hodling in his extended family and network. Is this bad for all coins? I would think so. i mean again like he there was an omission in his tweet about action that he could bring against bitcoin um and some pretty clear uh sort of actionable items that could be brought against

libra and yeah if you have like an ethereum foundation or um a very illiquid small market cap uh altcoin that is pre-centralized uh from from the beginning whether it was pre-mined or an ico probably not looking good for you thoughts murad um i think i'm so first of all like i'm pretty bearish alts in general irregardless of what trump may or may not have done it definitely adds a new dimension in the sense that decentralization will increasingly be tested and will increasingly be important and valued. No one cares about decentralization right now, as we've previously discussed many times. But once people actually start kind of attacking leaders of systems, then people will like the market will respond to that damage. Right. And

And I think alts will continue bleeding against Bitcoin for the foreseeable future. We may have these kind of tiny alt seasons, like a couple of weeks at most, I think, in the coming years. But I do think the market is maturing. I think there is a flight to quality. The last three or four months have proved that. I mean, really, we will see fewer and fewer cryptocurrencies that will continue to exist in my opinion.

Really? Yeah. I mean, I think, so I think like when it comes to like, when it comes to like websites or standard centralized companies or any of those other phenomena, like as time goes by, you get more and more of them, right?

But I think when it comes to money, really like time is valued by the market as inefficient as it is. And really, a lot of people think, oh, it's the next thing that we should find. It's the next big thing we should find. But really, I think when it comes to these kind of store of value candidates

being in existence for years with few bugs and standing the test of time, I think people who control money around the world are, at the end of the day, very intelligent uh and they will appreciate kind of qualities like this no yeah i definitely agree with that in that respect i just i guess it matters what your definition of existence right like if there's like i guess like a meaningful like a meaningful level of like liquidity or usage like yeah then then they definitely there won't be as many this is um this is something i've been harping on all

year like mirage just alluded to uh 10 years in the wild i think is a huge mile marker for bitcoin it was a huge mile marker and the fact that we hit the 10-year mile marker at the bottom of a bear market around like 3500 3300 wherever it was uh and then have since rebounded from there we're at 400 this year um i think that's signaling to the market like all right this thing is not going anywhere and then you look at the the overarching landscape of its competitors and you see where they are in a state of uh in regards to how far along they are in decentralization network affects liquidity and almost i mean i don't want to jinx it or or like jump like jump the jump the gun here but it's like almost like is it worthwhile to even to attempt to bootstrap

network against bitcoin like what point at what point does that happen and are we getting close to that um who knows yeah i mean i think 10 years is a huge mental mental thing for humans you know it's like nine and a half versus nine and a half versus ten and a half years is like a major difference um you know i i just think that the cost of entry is is like really low for a shit coin like you anyway i could just spin we could spin one up during this episode if we wanted to right the hard part is actually getting usage which they never get but uh to think that like people aren't just going to like keep generating shit coins like i don't see why they wouldn't like you there's there's literally there's very very little cost unless you're doing like a

you know like a pre-mined ico all this garbage that you have all this organizational overhead and you're like based in the united states and you got a bunch of hedge funds investing in you like that'll probably all go away but like if you're just launching like a pow shit coin like well there's nothing to lose there you might as well just launch it yeah we'll see let's um yeah we'll we'll see how this plays out right now alts are bleeding uh against bitcoin ethereum just broke the uh the 20 the uh 250 bit floor against bitcoin so it's trading at 0.0236 right now i believe so that 0.025 area was heavily watched by um a lot of people looking at that chart and it crashed through there and ethereum's sort of the leader of the alts so we'll see how

how low it goes but let's bring it back to the trump tweet and like the the sort of implications of him mentioning bitcoin and pal mentioning bitcoin do you guys see any other state leaders or central bankers sort of racing to comment or posture and if so um do you think anybody comes out against it obviously china's banned bitcoin a bunch of times but um do you think anybody reacts to trump's trump's talking about bitcoin so i mean i i think this is like really the the it's going to be looked back as like the first entrance of bitcoin like in the like the global political landscape and like for posturing and these trade wars and whatnot um i do think just to go back i do think that trump owns bitcoin still i think he's at like i'm like a 70 to 80

percent sure i'm like 98 sure jared kushner owns bitcoin um and i i think that if you do own bitcoin in your trump like this is exactly like the type of posturing you would do right you would like shit on it you'd see if you could crash the market a little bit maybe throw some bids in and then when you realize like you can't like he won't have bitcoin until he has bitcoin right and then all of a sudden he has bitcoin um but uh i mean look we look at other world leaders they're already like kind of hidden posturing around bitcoin um you know like a putin probably owns some bitcoin uh i wouldn't be surprised if some of the chinese leaders own it whether it's speculated kim jong-un owns some um that they have some major operations there where they're trying to accumulate as much

bitcoin as possible iran is another big one venezuela probably has a decent amount at this point so like it should be really really interesting especially if if you're dealing with trump and trump goes against it then maybe you're even more incentivized to publicly broadcast support for bitcoin yeah that's what a lot of people were uh um joking about on twitter yesterday is that uh the libs are going to start buying bitcoin in spite of trump yeah if you hate trump you should love bitcoin fight back your protests don't matter as much as buying bitcoin just buy bitcoin fuck trump it's a peaceful protest too exactly thoughts murad yeah i mean i totally agree um it's i i think if you are one of those people who hates trump then i guess

It's what's logical for you to do right now is to go out and buy some Bitcoin because apparently he opposes it. Right. So I would also say that I don't think that this is going to have any geopolitical implications quite yet. I think a lot of kind of the powers that be right now still think that Bitcoin is kind of a joke. But this is definitely, as I've said, a huge stepping stone in that direction. yeah matt if uh what you're saying is true and he was just posturing to see if he could crash the market and i actually think like the way he phrased it sort of left uh left it open-ended like i'm not a fan of bitcoin and i was just thinking not yet you aren't um and maybe this was like his like actually let's not give him credit for playing like 40 chess or anything

but like just strategically uh making it known that the u.s is thinking about bitcoin um and maybe posturing to citizens that they're forward thinking and and may uh well it's it's really quite um it's really quite uh interesting how on one hand he says that the united states currency is the strongest currency in the world but on the other hand every single day he calls for fed to ease more right which is like how do you reconcile that yeah no but it's it's crazy that monetary policy is getting i mean obviously it's been talked about for well over a decade now since the uh 2008 crisis but it's beginning getting more critically um talked about in the mainstream like this morning cnbc they were like joe joe squawk was talking about bitcoin and shitting on libra again

um but it goes like brought up the fact that all central banks in the world are are working to devalue their currencies so like a sound currency like bitcoin in this age sort of makes sense um so like even on cnbc they're they're bringing up these ideas that were taboo to share on the mainstream that was the most bullish mainstream media segment i have ever seen on bitcoin they even they even showed the price chart they were like it's up two percent since he made the tweet like the bitcoin not not only didn't give a fuck it's going up on it you know and then they and And then Joe is just completely, completely woke now. I mean, that's the kind of knockoff effects we get from this Trump tweet, right?

Because not only was Bitcoin trending last night, but now all the mainstream media needs to talk about it. A lot of the mainstream media hates Trump. So they're like kind of a pigeonholed where they have to talk positive about Bitcoin, which is kind of fantastic. And then like the conservative media is already like pro-Bitcoin, right? So all of a sudden, Bitcoin just like jumped up a bunch of notches in terms of public appeal, just from this one tweet. Now, we've been talking about this tweet for a while now. And again, dude, when it went off, people were reacting to it and 10 minutes went by and I hadn't seen anything from you. And then 20 minutes went by and nothing was going on.

And then it got to almost an hour. I was like, whoa, this dude. I felt bad. i felt uh felt like you were missing your moment almost you know uh they should have they should have done what happened earlier they should just shut down twitter until i got back online you know it was a little bit ridiculous that i like i opened up i opened up twitter and like a ton of people including you were like tagging me like matt where are you what's going on and then i saw you sent me a telegram message you were like matt are you okay is everything all right

You're looking hilarious. It is pretty crazy that we are right off a bear market. We're up 4x off the bottom. A bear market that was so brutal to some that Murad made a bet with us that August 1st, the price wouldn't be above $3,500. Now it's sitting at $11,500. the most powerful person in the world arguably tweeted out negative things about bitcoin and the price didn't fall at all like that is the most bullish fucking thing ever yeah this is you guys are definitely winning this one i'll be is it is it august 1st that it matures yeah yep august yeah yeah i guess you win some you win some, you lose some. I guess you paid for the previous Korean barbecue, which was remarkable,

by the way. But I guess the sushi is, I'm going to be the one putting the bill. Murad, what do you think about the price action? Because you're a resident chart watcher, trader type. What are you seeing out there right now? um well well well i think the collapse from 1300 sorry from 13 000 to 11 000 definitely broke some market structure i think what's likely right now is that we're essentially going to go sideways for the next couple of weeks if not the next couple of months even uh but really i think um only off chance that we we go below 10 000 i think it's a buy uh for the time being um i'm kind of watching the situation probably be buying a little bit in the mid 10 000s to start uh but for now we're

really kind of in the no no man's land in terms of the trading if you if you put a percentage on on falling below 10k what are you thinking um i would say 55 oh shit so i think so we've been seeing have you noticed lately we've been seeing uh that as soon as the cme closes the price price pops yeah so there's someone there's someone's playing games right or a couple people are playing games together uh and what the cme closes for 24 hours every friday right uh yeah they're about to close they closed in what four hours five hours for 24 hours uh let me check i'm pretty sure so i'm kind of you know maybe i'm a little bit too bullish i'm always fucking bullish but i'm more bullish right now than i usually am and i feel like 13k by

monday that's what i feel like cme closes we're gonna gap that motherfucker and you know we're just gonna go matt why do you think that um why do you think the trump event is bullish in the short term i i think a lot of people we've been talking a lot recently on both this pod and and other conversations about how it feels like we don't have much new retail coming into the market um it's it's mostly people that have stuck around um and have bid up the price to this point uh you can see that by both like google search trends and also um just in general like i think that's probably one of the reasons why like the shit coins haven't had any kind of real action um so this tweet is is going to remind a bunch of people like bitcoin exists and then they're

going to look at the price and they're going to be like oh my god i can't believe that it's this high like that i thought it was dead like i didn't think it existed still and and now it's still alive and thriving i gotta i gotta text okay fine i'm buying a bitcoin today after the trump tirade there you go that's uh yeah so it has piqued some people's interest um yeah like so it's really hard to it's really hard to say because on one hand you like as a let's say like you're a large portfolio manager at an institution right you don't want to you don't want the american government to like be very to suddenly become anti-bitcoin right you don't want that either but uh at the same time like still where we are right now that may just create a little bit

more hype yeah i mean i don't think it was really an anti-bitcoin tweet like you said like he he was it was just like it wasn't like a we'll ban bitcoin type of thing it was like oh it's no threat it's not a good money um you know that was like kind of the route he went down and i feel like it's kind of a validation that the price didn't collapse right so like a lot of people that are sitting on the sidelines are also like not even new people just people that have been watching are looking at and they're like you know i thought i thought maybe like me personally obviously when we see bitcoin go up up up really quickly in a short amount of time um there there's less perceived support there right like the price can come back down just as quickly as it goes up

and in this case it's like a perfect example of there being real support there because i mean immediately when the tweet happened it dropped a little bit the price dropped a little bit and but like not much like what it dropped like 200 300 and then recovered and now we're sitting like pretty much back where we were like that's a pretty insane validation of of that there's support at these price levels it seems pretty bullish to me um i'm not a chartist uh or going to predict week to week price but um i think this is definitely i don't know i don't even want to say bullish it's just further legitimizes bitcoin in the mind of the masses like you said retail is going to be it's going to be more on the top of their mind on top of

the collective consciousness slowly but surely uh bitcoin creeps further into the psyche of the masses and we i believe all three of us here believe it's somewhat inevitable because it's It's a better technology and it is a better way of organizing a monetary system in the digital age. So it's just a matter of time before people come to understand it. Bitcoin is going to do what it does and people's understanding is going to adapt to the way Bitcoin works. And the more we have presidents tweeting about it, the more people who are aware of it and are looking it up and trying to learn more about it, the better. every single major publication today had an article about the bitcoin tweet or a segment or whatever every say everybody was talking about it that is insane that is absolutely i

yeah i can't i i can't my this is where the stay humble part becomes important trying to stay humble yeah mirab before we wrap up here do you have any parting notes for the freaks out there um you know to be completely honest i think that this isn't um going to have a huge effect on price action in the short term i think kind of essentially the whales who um affect the price the most they're gonna chat and joke about it on telegram for a day or two and then essentially i think price is going to end up doing what it was going to do anyway bang bang 13k by monday some sober analysis there from rob mamadoff before we leave we've got to give uh give some credence we got a shout out uh and our a buddy from twitter

wants to remain anonymous said tim leary left us with the meme turn on tune in drop out and find the others shout out to bitcoin for better facilitating step three for all of us which could be drop out or find the others i think it's i think step three and step four it helps you to opt out and then find other like-minded individuals so that's a very very good shout out thank you to our anonymous friend gentlemen thank you for joining us um that was the uh the episode on the trump tweet and uh chairman powell's comments hope you freaks enjoyed peace and love see you guys