The Breakdown - Safe Haven From Banks? Bitcoin’s New Narrative Comes Into View

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

On this edition of the “Weekly Recap,” NLW combines two previous YouTube shows focused on Balaji’s $1 million bitcoin bet and the emergence of the mainstream narrative of bitcoin as a safe haven from banks. Enjoying this content?   SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=   Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8   Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW “The Breakdown” is written, produced and narrated by Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Michele Musso and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsor today is “Foothill Blvd” by Sam Barsh. Image credit: Nuthawut Somsuk/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.  Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.   Join the most important conversation in crypto and Web3 at Consensus 2023, happening April 26-28 in Austin, Texas. Come and immerse yourself in all that Web3, crypto, blockchain and the metaverse have to offer. Use code BREAKDOWN to get 15% off your pass. Visit consensus.coindesk.com.

In the wake of one of the most tumultuous years in crypto history, the conversations happening at Consensus 2020 have never been more timely and important. This April, CoinDess is bringing together all sides of the crypto, blockchain, and Web3 community to find solutions to crypto's thornyest challenges, and finally deliver on the technology's transformative potential. Join developers, investors, founders, brands, policymakers, and more in Austin, Texas, April 26th to 28th for Consensus 2020. Listeners of the breakdown can take 15% off registration with code Breakdown. Register now at Consensus.com and join CoinDesk at Consensus 2023. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the

Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, March 25th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap. On this week's show, we are talking about Bitcoin's new narrative. Before we even, we are even into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.L.Y slash breakdown pod. All right, guys, well, today we are doing something a little bit different. I am traveling this week, so I wanted to make sure that there were shows here and I didn't miss any episodes,

but I'm actually going to be putting together two YouTube shorts today that I did to make what I think is one complete story. For those of you who haven't caught it yet, I've been doing a little bit shorter, faster episodes just to keep up with the pace of news that are going up on YouTube. Sometimes I use them as a way to experiment with things that I want to explore on this show, and sometimes they're totally distinct. But today I'm going to put two together that I think are part of the same story. And the first one is about Balaji Shrinivasan's big million-dollar Bitcoin bet. Balaji Shrinivasa is obviously the former CTO of Coinbase, a preeminent thinker, in the crypto space in many ways. He was very early to the coronavirus calls and has built a lot of credibility

for having really interesting ideas about the future. He has sparked a huge amount of debate, discussion, acrimony, frankly, around his prediction that in the next 90 days, we will see hyperinflation, basically societal collapse on the back of Fed policies, and as a result, $1 million Bitcoin. He's even put his money where his mouth is actually betting on this outcome, and so over last weekend, I did a quick show explaining what the debate was, how people were thinking about it, and that's what you're going to listen to now. Forgive the roughness when I do YouTube videos, they're a little bit more from the hip. You'll see there's definitely a difference in style. And also apologies if I'm referencing anything that I'm looking at. Those videos obviously come with visuals where I'm looking at articles.

Bitcoin to $1 million in 90 days? That's what the former CTO of Coinbase thinks, and more than a few people are taking him seriously. All right, friends, welcome back to another Bitcoin breakdown bite. We are talking about obviously the same thing that everyone is talking about, which, as it turns out, might be the point. That is Balaji Shrinivasin, the former CTO of Coinbase and generally highly regarded, if out there sometimes thinker. He has predicted that Bitcoin will go to $1 million inside the next 90 days, largely because of societal collapse on the back of the banking system. So McKenna here sums this up. Bology thinks most banks are insolvent in the U.S. Bitcoin goes to 1 million in 90 days. Hyperinflation is imminent. Converted 99% of net worth to

Bitcoin. U.S. Civil War happens. Fing wild. All right. So we obviously today are going to get into what exactly Bologi is talking about and then all the responses. And I'll give you a little bit of my take at the end of it. So a few days ago, Bology put up this tweet called the BIT signal. He says, how do you ring the fire alarm on the internet? How do you show it's not a false alarm? I'm putting up the bit signal. Now, this first version of this tweet or this first tweet was basically a request for people to share the best charts, graphs, statistics that show effectively how screwed the current

financial system is the type of thing that biology argues you wouldn't get from normal mainstream media. And he was going to give $1,000 in Bitcoin for the best thousand tweets. He is arguing here that the existing system, the central bankers, etc., have hid insolvency from us, and they're about to print a huge amount of money in order to save themselves from that. And so Bitcoin is likely to be the recipient. But more than just Bitcoin, it's about the underlying story. So that went up on March 16th.

Then the next day, on March 17th, someone says, I'll bet anyone $1 million that the U.S. does not enter hyperinflation. James Medlock is a neoliberal guy or whatever. I guess he says social democrat in the streets, market socialists in the sheets. And so he has this bet on Twitter. And Bologi says, I will take that bet. You buy one Bitcoin. I will send one million USD odds 40 to one odds as Bitcoin is worth about 26. Term is 90 days. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the terms and stuff. And this just set the internet on fire. Now, immediately, people were asking, like, what are you talking about? This seems insane, right? You have, you of Altcoin cycle saying, are you unwell? I'll take the same bet and give you two X better odds, meaning I think Bitcoin will not hit 500K in 90 days. I refuse to believe you're being serious. Radio silence, okay, I'll make it more interesting. I'll give you 4x odds. Bitcoin will not reach 250K in the next 90 days. This should be a no-brainer for you, unless, of course, you're just selling sensationalism to engagement farm. Now, keep in mind, Alkoyn is a guy who's in the

crypto space, right? This isn't one of the haters from outside. There's a lot of disbelief, which is pretty reasonable, right? The idea that somehow banks are going to collapse so entirely that in 90 days Bitcoin is going to get to a million dollars is a rather outlandish claim if you would ask someone who wasn't Bology about whether they think that that would happen. But the fact is this is Bology, and that is what makes it interesting to some folks. So Danny here says plenty of us are known for making outlandish and stupid calls. Bology is not one. He has always been measured and eerily prescient. And he's just predicted that bank failures and money printing will cause one million per Bitcoin

within 90 days. I think this was a really good representation of what a lot of the crypto industry their first instincts were. Ryan Selkis maybe even summarized it a little bit more. The three scariest words in the English language, Bologi was right. Now, why would this guy have this sort of credibility? Really comes back to the time just before the U.S.'s consciousness of COVID, of the coronavirus of COVID-19 hit. So this was January 30th, 2020. And I was doing a daily podcast then, so I remember this discreetly. And this was even before many of the folks who were paying attention to China were really, really paying attention to this thing that was going on.

The lockdowns had started already in China, but people weren't really paying attention. It wasn't even until February that people who were ahead of the curve started paying attention. So Bologi writes going viral. What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years, it would accelerate many pre-existing trends. Border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, his trust in governments. So this is, again, January 30th, 2020. And when biology tweeted this, no one or very few people took him seriously. Obviously,

the folks who were a little bit closer to him or to, you know, the crypto industry were a little bit more receptive to that. But by and large, it was sort of ridiculed. And you have to remember, too, at the same time, you had the Silicon Valley establishment who were saying, no handshakes, please, and they were putting up these signs on their venture capital firms that were talking about, you know, no handshakes and masks and things like that, very early. This is, again, before it had really hit the U.S., and they were ridiculed, absolutely ridiculed, lambasted by the mainstream media for doing this. They were called hysterical and fearmongering and all these sort of things.

And so ever since then, there has been a bit of a war between biology and the mainstream media apparatus. And I think, and I'll get more to this in a minute, that this is a part of what's going on. But anyways, the point is that this isn't just some random making this claim. It's someone who has at least established their bona fides as being prescient about a lot of things. Now, the regular mainstream establishment, any bona fides that it seems like Bologi might have established certainly have not given him the benefit of the doubt. So you have Joey Palatano here saying, for context on how insane a bet this is, at $1 million, the total Bitcoin market cap would be worth more than all the mortgage debt in the U.S. LMAO. Then he says, if you want to give me money,

I'll take it. I don't have any money, so I might as well. And then he says, I cannot understand how insane a bet this is or how wildbology's terms are. So this is, I think, just again, no hate on Joey here. He's representative of the mainstream establishment. Matt Levine is clearly gearing up for a piece about this in his Bloomberg column. I anticipate that as early as tomorrow on Monday. He says, wait, so a guy is betting that Bitcoin will be $1 million in 90 days by buying a Bitcoin at $1 million now. Do I have this right? There's a lot, a lot of skepticism. I also decided to screenshot this one that has Nick Carter's response. It's more like paying $1 million to be the main character for the next 90 days, which I don't think is entirely untrue either.

Then you have folks who are just in general totally off the Bologi thing. Nicholas Taleb, the Black Swan guy, says basically he went off on Bologi saying that he didn't understand anything about banking and blah, blah, blah, blah, which may be true, fine, whatever. I'm proudly in the camp of people who have been blocked by Taleb, so I wouldn't know. Point is, I'm just showing you that the sort of mainstream has a very particular set of feelings about this Bologi bet that are not positive. Cass here puts it the most succinctly I think I've seen. I'm sorry, but Bologi is a fearmongering asshole who literally made all his money off the corrupt system he cries about. And I think that

this fearmongering idea holds aside Cass is colorful language and the sentiment, which I think is broader than Cass. I do think that there's this interesting question, this tension that is, regardless of this system, is going to come up a lot. We saw it last weekend with the VCs who were talking about bankruns as well. This idea of the line between fearmongering and fire alert to use the word that biology literally used over and over again is one that may only be vindicated or not by what happens next. In other words, it's fearmongering unless you're right. So it's just worth keeping that in mind because I believe that part of the meta scenario that we're seeing here is a shift in how public communications around important issues happens.

And my thesis is that that might be the big point for biology. But again, We'll get to that in just a minute. Now, Rahm here really tries to just calm everything down and make it clear what we're really talking about, that in a world where Bitcoin actually hit a million in just 90 days, what other things would likely to be happen. He points out that the inflation rate would be above that of Zimbabwe. He points out that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates to 4,000 percent plus. He would talk about the U.S. bank system being nationalized and merging with the Postal Service. He talked about the convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold or crypto being deemed illegal and so on and so forth. And his point is that there are a lot of second and third order effects of this. And of course, he's not saying that it would be Bitcoin causing this. This would be sort of the underlying causes that would get Bitcoin to a million dollars in 90 days would create these very terrible situations, right? Border crises. Fort Knox emerging as a regional power. Regional wars. merging. He says, even if you see the promise of crypto, be careful what you wish for. And I think it is an interesting thought experiment, but it's a thought experiment with real implications, and I don't think that we should totally lose sight of that. Now, Bology continues to contend that he is serious. He joined Twitter spaces on Saturday night, and he said, the Fed has chosen to monetize the debt in the messiest way possible, an orgy of money printing and bank runs.

$150 billion has already hit the banks and more is on the way. My bet is a way to ring the fire alarm and help you get to the exit in time. Bitcoin, the only global safe haven. So let's get around to sort of where I think a lot of, let's call it the mainstream crypto opinion. So these aren't the mainstream media folks who are just going to be dismissive of abology out of hand, but the folks who actually pay attention and have similar conviction to Bologi about Bitcoin and other crypto assets. D.C. investor says, no, Bitcoin is not going to a million dollars in 90 days, but the media will pick it up on Monday and won't shut up about it because the number is big. They'll all be talking about Bitcoin and crypto. They'll

interview Bology and then they'll do it again in 90 days. So that is one interpretation. That is all just sort of a big media stunt. I think that Jason, though, uncover something important here too, where he says, I won't even be mad if Bologi comes out three months or now to say the bet was a social experiment. He got all of you to talk about hyperinflation

and crypto's mission with urgency again. And I think this is sort of the closest to my sense that I've seen as well. I think in some ways, Bitcoin at a million dollars is a rhetorical device. It is a hook. It is a, the lead line. of a pitch. It's the first line of this video that I did before I got into the substance. It's the thing

that gets people to pay attention. It is in some ways more captivating to say Bitcoin to a million dollars than just to say total collapse of the banks, right? It gives an outlet and expression. It gives you a direction. It gives people something tangible to feel connected to it if they have Bitcoin holdings. It gives people something to hate if they don't have Bitcoin holdings. And I think to me it seems like the fire alarm that Bologi is trying to, raise is less about the Bitcoin aspect of this and more about a concern. And I'm obviously reading into his thoughts a little bit and he's plenty vocal to give you his own thoughts, that in the wake of this new federal bank term funding facility, the bank term funding

program, that people and the mainstream media in particular are going to kind of gloss over what has happened in the banking system and move on to other things. I think that's what biology is trying to avoid. I think that he's trying to use the tools and techniques of social media to keep a spotlight on an issue which he sees as a crisis issue on the scale of the coronavirus, and the Bitcoin piece is really just the door to get people to walk through. It could be totally wrong about that. And I do think that it's a totally reasonable thing to ask. as, you know, more thoughtful mainstream commenters have, what the costs of this sort of, you know, fire alarm raising are if we're just going to stick on Bologis terms and not use other terms.

Cass called it fearmongering. There are costs. Even if it's not intentional fearmongering, there are real costs to this sort of discourse. But it sort of comes back to a question of whether you want to live in a society where people are allowed to ask these questions or whether you don't. And lucky or unluckily for us, we for now live in one where they do. No matter what, it's pretty clear that there are big moves afoot. And I think Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory, really captured this a couple days ago. He said, a forced wind down of credit suisse, a run on U.S. regional banks, the arrest of a former U.S.

president, the launch of GPT4. I was in the trenches in 2008, and it never felt like system shattering events we're advancing so quickly. And, and this is Ben's particular take, with the exception of GPT4 on so little substance. I think a thing that we should explore over the next couple months is the extent to which the medium has changed so dramatically that the way that we interpret, talk about, and think about these sort of phenomenon has to change as well. We just had our first bank run in social media world, and it looked very different than past bank runs. And I don't think we should ignore that. But hold aside even the so little substance piece of Ben's argument. I think that he undeniably captures here something that people are feeling,

which is just the absolute swirl of history around us. Bology is just trying to rip the line of history towards a direction that he thinks is right. Is he right? Is he wrong? Is he crazy? Is he fearmongering? Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm genuinely interested. And either way, I hope this gives you a little bit more insight into the conversation that is dominating crypto and mainstream finance Twitter this weekend. Join CoinDesk's Consensus 20203, the most important conversation in crypto and Web3, happening April 26 through 28th in Austin, Texas. Consensus is the industry's only event bringing together all sides of crypto, Web3, and the Metaverse.

Immerse yourself in all that blockchain technology has to offer creators, builders, founders, founders, entrepreneurs, and more. Use code breakdown to get 15% off your paths. Visit consensus.coindex.com or check the link in the show notes. All right, guys. So as you can see, even that first weekend, this was a contentious discussion and it's done nothing but get more and more heated over the course of this week. Indeed, the news that the FDIC was considering ways that it could actually cover all deposits in the U.S., not just the $250,000 that they're pledged to, sent that debate into only.

But alongside this debate has come another interesting phenomenon, which is something of a narrative shift. The narrative of Bitcoin as rising as banks fall is extremely appealing, not just to crypto bros, but it seems to mainstream media. In this next YouTube episode, I look at the role of narratives in Bitcoin's history and talk about how this new narrative is emerging. A new Bitcoin narrative is emerging, and that, my friends, is well. what we're talking about today. All right, guys. So yesterday I retweeted Bitcoin Archive,

who when they said new narrative forming, they had shared this screenshot of a CNBC article with the headline Bitcoin soars to nine-month high as investors weigh bank risks and interest rates. So this is super interesting. I have spent a lot of time looking at, thinking about and exploring narratives in their function in Bitcoin and in crypto more broadly.

And I want to talk today about the history of Bitcoin narratives, what they mean and why this one is pretty interesting and so important. We've talked a lot about over the last few weeks the extent to which the drivers for Bitcoin's price increase are narrative versus market structure versus, you know, CZ buying Bitcoin in the open market. But I want to explore specifically the narrative piece today. So let's dive in. Now, when it comes to Bitcoin narratives, there has been a long history. In 2018, Hasu and Nick Carter wrote this great piece called Visions of Bitcoin that actually went through and looked at how Bitcoin narratives had changed over time. They even had this great chart that showed sort of mentions of these different narratives

and how they acceded from one to the other. They talk about the beginning was e-cash proof of concept. So in the early days, bitcoiners or the cypherpunks, rather, who were just being introduced to this project, judged Bitcoin in the context of all the other experiments that had happened so far. Then it became this sort of cheap P2P payments network. This was close to what people imagined Satoshi had in mind, right? A straightforward currency for peer-to-peer internet transactions. From there, it went into the censorship-resistant digital gold. Obviously, this has been a big part of the narrative ever since. From there, private and anonymous dark net currency. This was

the era of Silk Road, right? And Bitcoin being used as a way to buy drugs and all of that. Then, and this gets kind of towards, call it the modern era, we started to see Bitcoin as the reserve currency for a larger industry. Ethereum was introduced. It begat the whole ICO period. And Bitcoin was the sort of asset that sat underneath. From there, programmable shared database, uncorrelated financial asset. That's where they left off in 2018. In the middle of 2018, we were only just starting to see the idea of Bitcoin as part of a larger function in the financial system, not just something that was for itself in the cryptosphere, but for people who are outside the crypto world as well. You can see here that they write, proponents of the

view are generally not too concerned about owning spot Bitcoin. They're interested in exposure to the asset. Put another way they want to buy Bitcoin flavored risk, not necessarily Bitcoin itself. This was a thing summed up by someone like Chamoth who called it Schmuck Insurance, right? So this was where things got to by 2018. These narratives had sort of moved from one to the other, never really going away, but always kind of changing. And I think here's an important point to note. People cynically say, isn't this just an example of Bitcoiners finding new explanations when one doesn't work. And I don't really think that's the case, or at least that's not always the case. Instead, it's people uncovering or discovering what value Bitcoin provides to them most

discreetly. And that changes, that understanding changes over time. Now, fast forward to the COVID-19 period, and we get a new Bitcoin narrative, not unrelated to the ones that we just had, but I think distinctly important. In May of 2020, Paul Tudor-July, Jones, famed hedge fund guy, writes the great monetary inflation thesis. He says COVID-19 is a one-of-a-kind virus that has triggered a one-of-a-kind policy response. And he says, we are witnessing the great monetary inflation, an unprecedented expansion of every form of money unlike anything the developed world had ever seen. Now, there are two really important pieces of this document. The first was that Paul Tudor Jones put name to a thing that many other prime

primarily traditional investors were feeling that the response to COVID-19 was likely to trigger a huge inflationary period, and that in that period, assets that could sort of compete against that were going to be extremely important. The other point, the second point that was extremely important about Paul Tudor Jones' great monetary inflation thesis was that he identified, frankly, much to his surprise, that his team and he had decided, after much research, that Bitcoin actually score pretty high as an inflation hedge. Now, this idea of inflation hedge, I think, has been a little bit confused in our discourses and certainly in the mainstream media discourse.

You'll often see people say, well, look, Bitcoin trades just like a risk asset, and it goes down when inflation is high and monetary policy is changing. So doesn't that mean it's not an inflation hedge? I think what people mean, what real Bitcoiners mean when they talk about inflation hedges, they're actually talking about a currency debasement hedge. Bitcoin exists as a currency that can't be debased, so over the long term, it is more likely to keep its value relative to the fiat currencies that it nominally competes with. In any case, the Great Monetary Inflation thesis begat a number of additional sort of related narratives. Of course, Bitcoin as a treasury

asset, the melting ice cube image of Michael Saylor, when MicroStrategy became the first public company to buy Bitcoin. That was then followed by Tesla. which really sort of accelerated Bitcoin 2 then its all-time highs above 60,000. Then on top of that, we got Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador, which as we've seen is very controversial, is still an experiment, and might actually be something that's sort of a little bit more political than maybe it first seemed, something that was a middle finger almost to the traditional IMF World Bank Order. All of these things were happening during the bull market that followed the COVID-19. lockdowns. But as we know, that would not last forever. What happened next was

massive, massive institutional failures across the crypto industry as 2022 happened and the fastest rate hiking cycle in 40 years changed the underlying monetary landscape in huge, huge ways. So much so that by the end of last year, it was a very different narrative that was popular. Most read 2022 from The Spectator, Crypto is dead. Now, this wasn't just necessarily an indictment of Bitcoin. In fact, it was much more about the types of people who surrounded Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This was more an FDX phenomenon than a BTC phenomenon. Let's put it that way. But this is really where things were going into 2023, and so it's been remarkable over the last few weeks to see such a dramatic shift. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, when it started

trading on Friday, the day that it was put into FTIC receivership, Bitcoin was around 19,600. Over the next weekend after Silicon Valley Bank was shut down, it jumped up to around 20,000. And then over the next week, it just started to climb. It has continued to climb. It's now currently sitting around $28,000 per Bitcoin, and many people are wondering why. If you listen to Hidden Forces this week with Dmitri Kofenis and Jeff Snyder, they discuss why Bitcoin is going up. And Jeff Snyder puts it pretty clearly. He says, you know, you look at the founding mythology of Bitcoin, this sort of chancellor on the brink of a second bailout for banks, and people, retail investors looking around seeing these banks failing and being bailed out, and it just feels like history is, if not repeating, at least

rhyming. And I think the important thing to note is that it's not just crypto people and Bitcoin people now saying that this is Bitcoin's moment. It's mainstream media. Just a few examples, Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin climbs to nine-month high as bank turmoil sparks rally. Bitcoin at redemption arc as banking pressures rise. Bitcoin surges above 28,000. Is it a safe haven from banking? CNBC writes, Bitcoin briefly tops 28,000 for the first time in nine months after bank crisis weekend rally. The point is that you're seeing all of these mainstream publications connect the dots between the bank turmoil and the Bitcoin rally. And I think this is hugely significant. A couple weeks ago, maybe a week ago, I don't know, we've lost all track of time, I did an episode asking,

is this Bitcoin rally based on this sort of narrative of banks failing, or is it based on something else like finance buying, converting all of its BUSD to Bitcoin? And I think it was a reasonable question to ask. But I pointed out in that episode that even if it was caused by something different, that narratives can have a sort of slingshot effect where all it takes, whatever the thing that starts the ball rolling down the hill, it matters more what keeps it rolling. And right now, we are seeing Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Market Watch, CNBC, all these publications, adding fuel to the narrative fire that Bitcoin is doing what it was meant to do, to be an alternative, a safe haven, in the context of broader traditional bank turmoil. Now, there are a lot of people who are really

investing in this narrative now. Obviously, we have Balaji Shrinivasa's huge million-dollar Bitcoin bet, which we talked about a few days ago. And I think that the narrative battle is going to heat up, right? It'll only take Bitcoin going down a little bit for people to retreat and say, nope, just kidding. It's just a risk asset. But I don't know how much that will matter in the sense that the longer that this narrative goes on, the longer that it is perpetrated by mainstream media especially, the more kind of regular people are going to pick up on it. And of course, we're only a year out from the having now, which is always sort of a narrative renewal moment for Bitcoin. And we've got a situation where Bitcoin seems to be doing well defiantly in the face of bank failures. And I think

that that's going to be hugely resonant with a lot of people. So to sum up, we are seeing the birth of a new Bitcoin narrative that is in the same way, or in many ways, just to return to the original Bitcoin narrative. Bitcoin banks on the brink of a second bailout. Huge, huge. huge emotional resonance. So anyways, guys, that's how a narrative is born. That's where we are right now. I think it's pretty fascinating to watch and certainly exciting for those of us who are invested and who have never really lost sight of this particular narrative. All right, guys, back to me. Just a quick wrap up here. I really do think that this particular narrative has legs. I think the narratives don't need to convert everyone and they don't need to be dominant for long

to really get under people's skin. I believe that some meaningful number of people's people's Maybe people who have been interested in Bitcoin before, but who fell off, through all the chaos of last year, or people who have been on the borderline but are sympathetic to the idea of a monetary system that is outside government control, are going to watch Bitcoin's performance right now as these big bank failures are dominating the news and say, hey, maybe that's something I should explore again. In other words, it's a door to walk through for the interested out there, and I think some number of people are going to take the opportunity. That on its own is enough to get me excited, and I bet many of you feel the same way.

Anyways, guys, thanks for this slightly different type of episode. Let me know what you think. Go check out the YouTube channel. And until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.