The Breakdown - The Hallmarks of the New Bitcoin Cycle with Ian Rogers

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Ian Rogers, the Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, joins NLW to discuss the shape and texture of the new bull market, and what custody means in the wake of a Bitcoin spot ETF.  Find Ian online: https://twitter.com/iancr Today's Show Brought To You By Kraken - Go to https://kraken.com/thebreakdown and see what crypto can be Ledger - 5% to Bitcoin Developers When You Buy https://shop.ledger.com/pages/bitcoin-hardware-wallet Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

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. What's going on, guys? Today on The Breakdown, we are talking to Ian Rogers, the chief experience officer at Ledger. Before we get 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.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, back with another interview this week while I am traveling for my wife and mother-in-law's birthday, and today's conversation is with Ian Rogers from Ledger.

Ian is one of those folks who brings a really interesting and diverse background that's not just straight technology or finance to the crypto space, and because of that, I think, has a really interesting perspective. In this conversation, we talk a lot about what's changed and what hasn't in the context of the new cycle. Ian has a really interesting and simple argument about what the hallmark of this cycle will be that I think you're going to enjoy hearing about. We also talk about the state of self-custody in the wake of a Bitcoin ETF, so all in all, great conversation, can't wait for you to hear it.

All right, Ian, welcome to The Breakdown. How are you doing, sir? I am great, thank you. Happy to be talking to you. I feel like I'm supposed to say a longtime listener, first-time caller. No, I'm super excited. I think there's a lot to talk about. We're at this really, really fun from a like a big think, big talky kind of perspective, at least part of the cycle where it's so clearly, you know, into something new versus the end of something old. But the stuff that was old is still pretty fresh and we're still a lot of what's going to be new is up for grabs. And that's a really interesting time to explore kind of what's changing. And so, you know, that's a lot of the stuff that we'll be talking about today. And where I wanted to start just by way of kind of having a pretty broad jumping

off point is you recently were commenting. I think it was for another piece. And you might have written a little bit more about it as well, but it's sort of the how long the cycles are before new technologies get accepted. And you were mentioning that something feels significant to you about sort of Bitcoin at 15 reaching its time of acceptance. Did you speak a little bit more to that? Yeah. I mean, anecdotally, you know, I started working on the internet in the early 90s and I was always a tinker and a nerd. And I remember in the late 90s having a TV in my living room and trying to watch internet content on my TV and say 1990. And, you know, my friends were laughing at my, you know, grainy video and buffering.

But, you know, I was like, okay, this is obvious. You're going to get all your content on the Internet in the future. And, of course, then there was the dot-com bubble and bubble burst. And companies like digital entertainment network and entertainer ended up on company. com and everyone's like, ha, ha, ha, you guys were wrong. The internet's never going to work. That shit's stupid. You know, we're going to be, you know, watching cable television forever.

And I remember my mom. calling me in, you know, many years later. And one of the things she told me in passing was, I got rid of my cable subscription and I now only watched television on Roku. And I quick did the math in my head. I was like, how long did that take? How long was it from that moment when I knew it was inevitable to when my mom said, I actually do that thing. And it was 15 years. And now I feel like it's a pattern that I can't unsee. So to that end, I do think that Bitcoin being 15 years old is significant. You know, I mean, there are a whole bunch of reasons. There are tons of reasons that this is Bitcoin's year, right? But if you ask me, I'd go, yeah, well, 15 years. That's a, that's, that's,

one thing you could, you could say. It's just, it's been long enough. And that, obviously, it means a lot of things. I think if, if you've been around for 15 years, I don't care if you're a, you know, if you're a clothing brand or, um, or a technology, you've, you've seen a lot of cycles in whatever industry you're in and you've probably taken a lot of shots, you know, Bitcoin almost more than anything else, right? It's, um, think about like everyone has been trying to kill it for as long as it's been a lie, whether that means, you know, actually shut it down or hack it or laugh it out of town or whatever you want to say. And if you're still gaining value and gaining believers after all of that time and you have, you know, piles of books and podcasts about you and there are still

things to talk about, there's something there. I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist, um, to see that. So I do think that timing is significant. I also think that that means that many of the things that were the themes of the last cycle in 2021 say, you know, NFTs and culture and, you know,

will luxury fashion get into, you know, get into crypto. I think you could also say, well, yeah, the answer is yes. And it'll be roughly 2035 when those things kind of become, hit that inflection point and point of inevitability.

So I, I just think, It takes a long time and a lot of, you know, in some ways, thankfully, a lot of questioning and trial and error. But I also think that that's just human, you know, your imagination gets ahead of reality. So when you see the Internet in 1997, you go, oh, my God, this is going to change humanity and it's going to come tomorrow. And then you're wrong.

But, you know, and that's been, I think Carlotta Perez's book, Technological Revolution and Financial Capital covers that almost better than anything else, written in 2002. and it's exactly how every technological revolution has worked in recorded history. Man, there's so much to dive into here. So I want to put a big pin in the some of the things from the last cycle, you know, the NFTs and fashion and all these sort of things. Because I think they're really fascinating to explore a little bit more. But let's maybe go stay on sort of more foundational, fundamental.

So as we're coming up into this bull market this time around, you mentioned some of this briefly in terms of, you know, what makes this Bitcoin's year? but like what is your perception early days about what's different coming into this bull cycle and what feels the same or similar or just sort of an extension of existing patterns? Well, I think that, you know, what's the same is the fundamentals are the same. You know, the fundamentals are the fundamentals. And, you know, they remain the same. I think what you have is you have, you know, a whole new group of people who, you know,

who have studied those things and are the champions and sort of the truth tellers. and bringing other people along for the ride. I think there are a number of things that are different, though. We have, you know, as humanity marches on, we continue to lead more and more digital lives. We continue to live in things which look more like a network state. And so we have, we understand that we will have digital value in our digital lives, I think, you know, better with each passing year. And then I think when you look across the entire crypto landscape, you know, you have more in cheaper block space than you, than you've ever had before. So a lot of the ideas about all of the things that can be done with digital ownership are more possible and more true. You know, they move from idea to reality.

And, you know, that's where Bitcoin sits for me. It sits in, in this ecosystem of digital ownership. You know, my fundamental belief is that we will have digital value in our digital lives and we'll have digital value of many forms. And, you know, but that, that's a vision. And that vision takes a lot of technical cycles to be realized. And that's why I think actually, you know, things like Ethereum and Solana, et cetera, they actually strengthen the Bitcoin narrative because, you know, they show, you know, why Bitcoin is so special, why proof of work is so special. But also, you know, they just sort of lean into the overall narrative that, you know, our lives are increasingly digital. We care more about what our network neighbors think about us than our physical neighbors. And of course,

we're going to have digital ownership and digital value there. I think the other big thing, that's changed before this cycle is, of course, AI. And, you know, AI brings digital abundance and blockchains bring digital scarcity. And, you know, if we have, if we're pulling our content or, you know, if chat GPT is writing the things that we're reading, then, you know, proof of humanity and proof of provenance is more important than ever. And you absolutely cannot have that if you don't have digital ownership and digital proof. So I think, you know, I think everything just sort of directionally moves toward more and more digital lives, therefore digital ownership, need for digital proof of humanity, etc.

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Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to U.S. and U.S. territory customers by Payward Ventures Inc. PVI, BVI, DBA, Crakken. Hello, breakers. Today's episode is sponsored by Ledger. As another cycle ramps up, it's another chance to think about your Bitcoin custody best practices, and of course, to help all the new folks do the same. Ledger is the global platform for securing Bitcoin and other crypto. Ledger combines both hardware wallets and the Ledger Live app to offer the best way to buy, sell, swap, and stake without sacrificing on security or self-custody. Ledger features cutting-edge technology in the form of a certified secure chip and a proprietary operating system, but also brings ease of use.

This makes Ledger a safe and secure way to manage your digital assets without all the stress. Check out the link to the Bitcoin Ledger Nano in the show notes. 5% of all sales of the Bitcoin Ledger Nano go to support Bitcoin development. Thanks once again to Ledger for supporting the breakdown. Let's talk about the sort of the impact of the ETF. And I want to bridge off of kind of something that you just said. So one of the things that I've found very notable about Larry Fink as the new TradFi standard bearer for this is his total obliteration of the Bitcoin versus blockchain narrative.

first couple times he was talking about this or was asked about this stuff, you know, after they filed their application, you know, the Andrewsorgants of the world tried to get him to, you know, pin down on this question as, as media wants to do. And he just wouldn't do it. For him, it was so clearly all like Bitcoin was valuable in its own right, but it was also part of this larger thing, which he thought was an even bigger trend of sort of just like the mass. You know, he speaks in terms of tokenization, but it's very similar to what you just said in the sense that I think that, you know, he would probably be shaking his head, you know, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, nodding his head along with what you said in terms of just the inevitability of in a digital world, sort of these, you know, digital ownership comes along. I think for him, the part of that world that he thinks about is tokenization of real world assets. And that's clearly sort of like where they're trying to head. How much do you think that some of these new folks are thinking about it like that versus it's just Bitcoin's Lindiness. It's been around for long enough. It's finally available in a form they like. And so they're going to kind of dive in. It's a great question. I mean, obviously, you know, the ETF is, you know, the single biggest thing that has changed in the past six months. And what it's done is it's provided just easy access, right? It's like, it's like, you know, it's, it's like, you know, the freeway has been, has been opened and it's easy to get there now. You know, the, I always say, you know, because I think about user experience all day at Ledger and I always say that, you know, the user experience of the ETF is incredible, right? You

pick up the phone and you say, I want to buy some. And then you do. It's that simple. I have to say with respect to Larry Fink and his kind of belief beyond Bitcoin, I would have thought it was just the lindiness until I saw him on that clip of him talking about tokenization. And I did have the sort of like, wow, this guy really gets it well enough to riff on it very credibly. So for me, my conviction around Ledger came in 2018, long before I joined the company. I had known the company since 2015 through my friendship with Pascal Gautier, but it was 2018 after the ICO boom and bust that I called Pascal and I said, Pascal, I think your company is going to be huge. And he said, okay, well, you know, I do too. He was the first investor. He said, but why did you finally get the joke? And I said, well, because Ledger is like Cisco in the late 90s, right? In the late 90s, you had, you know, Microsoft trying to kill Netscape. AOL buying Netscape, et cetera, and Cisco sitting on the side going, ah, we don't really care

who wins. Because we just believe there's going to be more internet tomorrow than there was yesterday. And for me, I said, it's so hard to call this game. This game is crazy. This game of sort of digital ownership. You know, I started with a belief in Bitcoin, but now there's all these narratives and I don't know which one is real. You know, I can't, you know, I remember Novel Netware.

and token ring and all these other things that were, you know, it's the beta max versus VHS, argument, right? The better technology doesn't always win. We don't know what's going to play out. I mean, we were hoping for HTTP and what we got were app stores that take 30 percent, you know, so I don't, you know, I don't know which one wins this race. But, you know, I know that there is more digital ownership tomorrow than there was yesterday. And I think maybe Larry Fink actually gets that whole narrative, which digital ownership is inevitable. There's not a damn thing any of us could do to prevent humanity moving toward digital ownership. I actually think that's what makes Bitcoin so exceptional. You know, it's one of the only technologies, maybe the only technology, where the longer

I look at its actual design, the more beautiful it is. Right. I mean, who was it that said that, you know, Bitcoin lives in this very narrow design space where any change you make to it makes it worse. That's incredibly hard to achieve. So I would like to think that Larry Fink actually gets both things, right? One, the digitization of all value is inevitable. We live in a digital world. Therefore, all value will be digitized, right? Maybe he even gets the big narrative, which is without decentralization, you cannot have security. because you don't want all of humanity's data to live in any one database. Not Google, not Facebook, not the U.S. government, not the EU government, not the Chinese government, et cetera. But also maybe Bitcoin is incredibly special.

Maybe he read Lin Alden's book. I would like to think that Larry Fink read broken money. Because if he did, I mean, you know, then he really would sort of see it for the beauty. He would see why proof of work does matter and is special and has, you know, credible value, you know, but there is something else. There is digital ownership. I think, you know, NFTs, I don't really think of them as, you know, digital diamonds, right? I think of them as digital plastic. And that's not a slight. That's just to say it's a technology that allows for something very basic. You know, when my mom was born, there was very little plastic on the planet.

And now, you know, you look left and you look right and all you see is plastic. I think that's what our lives will be like with digital ownership in the future. You know, there's very little digital ownership when I was born. And I think that, you know, when I am a much older man, you look left and you look right and you'll have so much digital ownership in your life. You'll be, you will pay with digital cash. Your membership will be a digital document, et cetera. And, you know, does your gym membership or even your passport need to be decentralized? Well, not necessarily. They're issued by a centralized authority and they can be revoked. But things like property rights and speech need, must in a free society be decentralized.

So I think that, you know, look, I don't know. Does Larry Fink understand all those things? I would love to have that dinner and that conversation, but I don't know the answer. Yeah, it's fascinating. I've always thought that I've always been surprised, I guess, is maybe how I put it, that the tokenization stuff didn't click faster for a lot of the Wall Street folks, just because it does, like, it's so clearly just this new sandbox for them to create new types of derivative.

like it just is so obvious in some ways. I think it's the connection to like all of these pieces coming together that's that's really palpable with this. So let me ask you. Obviously you live in sort of thinking about custody, self custody in particular, you know, professionally. What does custody mean in an ETF world? How does the presence of ETF change the discussion around custody?

And I'll sort of contextualize this with, I've had a couple conversations this week as I'm recording, you know, shows for next week that have wildly divergent answers to question. So I'm really interested in your take. I'm really looking forward to hearing that. I mean, I really do see the ETFs as a gateway drug, right? I mean, everybody who becomes a ledger customer, the way they become a ledger customer is they get some value. Their value goes up. They get more educated. They get more concerned. And they get the joke at the end of the day that if not self-custody, why crypto? And I do think, I mean, look, Bitcoin is special, right? Bitcoin is something that needs to be used to have value. If it all just sits there dormant,

then the network actually doesn't doesn't function in the same way, right? So I think that I don't think that we'll be in a world where, you know, BlackRock and, et cetera, holds all the Bitcoin. I think it's a gateway drug and, and, you know, and there will be, you know, and individuals, you know, will hold and custody their own crypto. I think that the great thing about the ETF is, you know, that it is actually ownership of Bitcoin, right? There is, you know, there is underlying Bitcoin to go with it. It's not, you know, it's not simply, you know, an index. You know, in other words, buying the ETF does mean that someone is owning that Bitcoin. It's just an interface, you know, within, with an intermediary to owning that Bitcoin.

Like, in some ways, it's, it's more ownership of Bitcoin than using a custodian, right? You don't know, you know, what assets are behind, you know, your lines in the spreadsheet, you know, and an exchange. Whereas if you buy an ETF, you know that one for one, there is Bitcoin to go. with what you've purchased. So the future is heterogeneous, just like in your wallet. You know, with your wallet, you have all kinds of custody. In my wallet, I've got some cash. I've got some, you know, Paris metro tickets. I've got, you know, driver's license. I've got a credit card with a high balance. I've got an ATM card with a low balance. You know, it's a mixture of products that have, you know, different kinds of custody. And I think that's what the future will look like in

our lives. You know, you will have, you'll have a ledger that you use for your logins and your pass keys. You'll have a legend, a ledger that you use for doing D-Gen things, you know, the more promiscuous. You'll have, you know, a one, a vault wallet, a bag wallet, one for your, one for your kids college, et cetera. You know, the same way you segregate accounts, um, are ways that you can, that you can segregate with self-custody. You also may use custody for a variety of things, you know, I have a ledger credit card. And with the ledger credit card, I give, you know, a small amount of crypto to banks at which acts as a custodian so that I can I can off ramp with them using the credit card if I want

to. And that's, you know, that's a mixture of custody and self-custody, you know, in my life. So I think the future is heterogeneous. The ETF is, you know, a gateway drug for people to get in and understand the why of, of, Bitcoin and digital gold and probably ultimately Ethereum and tokenization. And I think that many, many people will use a mixture of custody and self-custody in a variety of ways, whether it's ledger or an exchange or an ETF. I mean, even for me, I have an IRA in the U.S.

I called my business manager and I said, hey, can you flip whatever equities and earn that IRA to the ETF? And he said, yep, hung up the phone. So, you know, even, even as a guy at Ledger, I have, you know, I have a mixture of, of custody. Do you think that the perception that the conversation, like the binary nature of the conversation to date has actually been a hamper on self-custody adoption? What I mean by that being like, I think that the, you know, broadly people in crypto tend to discuss, they don't tend to discuss it the way that you just did, right? It's like either self-custody or not, right? There are two options.

I think, I mean, I think, unfortunately, I think many things in crypto are like that, right? They become religious arguments. I think, though, that, you know, again, my pin tweet is, if not self-custody, why crypto? I think that's a, it is an important thing to understand and how many people got burned by that in the last cycle. How many people, you know, would have, you know, walked away with everything that they had start, you know, that they had started with had they kind of understood that going in and understood it more clearly. You know, we had a very hard time prior to FTCS, you know, convincing

people that using ledger for a swap transaction was a good choice because they would say, oh, well, why should I pay on-chain fees to, you know, to do a swap when, you know, there are so many, you know, great exchanges out there, you know, okay, well, because if, you know, not your keys, not your crypto. And afterwards, people said, wait a minute. It was like we had invented something new. They said, you can swap from self-custody to self-custody? Wow. So I think it is an important conversation. I think with everything, what's important is that people just understand the risks. You know, if people are playing with eigenlayer right now, that's great. I'm happy for them doing it. I hope they deeply understand the risks. You know, you're, you're, you're, you're,

you're playing with, you know, something that is incredibly exciting and also brand new. And anything could happen. So I think, you know, I think it's just to me, the conversation, you know, I don't love the religious conversations. At the same time, I do want people to deeply understand the technology and the risks. So I think that's, that's the place we have to live. You know, you had mentioned AI previously just in passing. And what I was asking is how much you think that the nature of some of these conversations around private keys, around privacy in general, that we've been having in crypto for a very long time are going to take a much broader stage and have a different context in sort of like the world that we're heading into

that is, you know, AI mediated and sort of reshaped, you know, as we're seeing it happen now. I think it's, I think it's really interesting for a number of reasons. One, you know, security is, you know, you could say this year is going to be the worst year ever for cybercrime every year for the rest of your life and be correct. Right. So first of all, just a world of digital value is a very high stakes game, right? You know, stealing $5 billion in gold bars, very difficult. Stealing $5 billion in crypto, you know, relatively easy to move, you know, to move that,

to move that product if you can get access to it. So, you know, one big thing is simply security. But then, you know, if that starts to apply to your identity, that's, you know, then that becomes incredibly dangerous, right? Stealing kind of identities at scale. And we're seeing identity theft take on a completely new, you know, new profile. You know, there's a lot of reporting in the Wall Street Journal by Joanna Stern over the last year about, you know, iPhone hacks. And as a result, iPhone has, or Apple has changed some security features on the iPhone.

But people, you know, when they lose their ICloud account and they would lose it and never get it back, which is something they had never considered. They never considered it was even possible to lose your iCloud account. And then they lose it. And not only lose it and never get it back, but it's not just that they lost some money. They lost, you know, 15 years of photos of their life, right? So it takes on a completely new dimension, you know, when when the value that you hold is digital and digital things are much easier to steal at scale than physical things.

And that's, you know, not only some money, but also, you know, maybe your memories, you know, It's just a completely different thing. And then you add to that the conversation around AI and what is the input to AI? There's that great New Yorker article from last year that's called, you know, what is it, chat GPT? It's like a fuzzy JPEG of the internet, right? And what you really get out of that article is, is, you know, a very clear notion that, you know, garbage in, garbage out.

But also, you know, AI in, AI out is not really what we're looking for. for when we're using, when we're using a tool like chat GPT, we're assuming that the sources are, for that are, you know, something reasonable. But if we look at even the web today, we know that there's no way that's true. I mean, the web is kind of increasingly, you know, created by AI. And then, you know, if that's the, if that's the case, then chat GPT is just a fuzzy JPEG of, of the internet, well, what is it even a fuzzy JPEG of, right? So provenance on, you know, exactly who created content. I envision a world where in the future, the microphone that you're talking into their NLW has a chip in it that allows me to verify that it did indeed come from your mic.

And when your editor makes an edit, they sign that edit so that we can on-chain verify that edit was made by your editor. And I can then programmatically look at the thing I'm receiving from you and say, yeah, there's a very high likelihood that NLW actually said that. So I think that these are really fundamental problems that we're already dealing with. Again, AI brings digital abundance. Blockchains bring digital scarcity. They are two sides of the same coin.

And those are really on top of the fact that we live increasingly digital lives and more and more of the value in our life. And I'm not just talking about your Bitcoin. And I think I always joke that my Tazos art collection, okay, it's not. that valuable, right? But it's like if you broke my window in 1991 and stole my CD wallet, okay, I can still buy dinner, you know, I'm not going to go hungry, but man, that was a lot of value. And I'm not talking about monetary value. It took me years to build that CD wallet. That was my life, you know? And that's that's what we're talking about as well. I think we forget that, you know, in our digital lives, we have a lot of digital value, not just, you know, Bitcoin,

our logins and everything behind them. Actually, remember the Rabbit R1 that was the hot device at CS this year? You see it, a little AI device. Okay, that they, you know, they say, you know, one of the examples that thing's going to, you know, you say, buy me a plane ticket to Miami. It's going to, like, I call bull's shit, right? I mean, really, we know, like, the web two hoops you'd have to jump through, you know, to, what are you going to, I'm going to load my credit card into it.

I'm going to give you all my logins, including, you know, all my airline accounts, et cetera. All right, now turn that around and just start that device from the starting point is digital ownership. I have digital value. And if I, you know, approve that transaction, then I can easily, I can easily move that value. I have my, you know, my identification for AirFrance.com and delta.com. You know, those are, you know, those are digital identities that they aren't, it's not like all of

my personal preferences are stored in 2,000 websites across the internet. My personal preferences are owned by me and I can federate them to whomever would like them. That is a, that now you could build the rabbit R1. Now the device makes sense. Without it, I don't think you get very far. Yeah, I have, I could, I could, I could go on a tangent about how far off I think, uh, the agenic attempt to create personal assistance for stuff that's not all that hard like buying flights is, but everyone has to start somewhere. Plus, I think the real, the real thing for the, the, the rabbit R1 did right was work with teenage engineering on the design. Totally. I totally agree. I'm a big teenage engineering fan, you know, all the way from the little pocket pocket operators.

But I think, but I think that's the thing. So, you know, rabbit R1 is 15 years away. And you know what is a prerequisite for the rabbit R1 to work? Digital ownership. This is an interesting segue for kind of bringing back something that I wanted to ask you about before. You know, you mentioned NFTs at the beginning of the conversation and, you know, some of the things that were sort of hallmarks of the last cycle and they might need more time to, to marinate. What's your sense of, I guess, one, do you have any instincts around what the new thing this cycle is poised to be? You know, is it meme coins? Is it, you know, I don't know, tokenization of real world assets? Is it a resurgence of defy that's doing something different? Is it something that's not that?

And where does that leave the things that were, you know, sort of big and important parts of the cycle last time. What is the story of NFTs in 2024 as opposed to 2020? Well, to me, the big fundamentals for this cycle are tried-fied recognizing Bitcoin and abundant block space. So I think, to that degree, I think Bitcoin is the main event. It always has been. And I think it'll be the main event this time more than ever. I think then that abundance of block space will lead to many things. Sort of, you know, I mean, I think that you're kind of, you'll get this obviously, you know, L2 War, you know, Eigenlayer type of products, et cetera.

But I think that all of that becomes, all that comes from, you know, this abundance of block space and the desire to try to, you know, find something, you know, really meaningful to do with it. I think for these things like NFTs, you know, they definitely went way, way too hot in 2021, but there is something that's real under there. I often say that having spent five years at LVMH and thinking about that world a lot, I think that fully 50% of all luxury goods will be digital 12 to 15 years from now. And 100% of luxury goods will come with something digital. So I buy something and then I get digital provenance. I get a proof of purchase. I get a digital

twin. I get a membership. You know, I get something that shows I'm, I'm a, I'm a part of this, I'm a part of this club. So I think in that same way, you know, that digital video on the internet wasn't wrong in 1999. It was just early. I think a lot of those ideas are the same. They weren't wrong. They were just early and overheated. So I think we do get incrementals on that. For example, I think in the world of NFTs, I think probably what you'll get this cycle is you'll get this notion of, hey, thanks for buying a pair of Dr. Martin boots. Here's your free collectible. It's in your customer account.

So, you know, you didn't have to bring a wallet. We actually created a wallet for you. If you'd like to move it to your self-custody wallet, then, you know, we have a facility for you to do that, but not very many users will. And you get that kind of, you know, inching into the notion of digital ownership and digital collectibles. So I think in this cycle, you probably get apps which are easy to use, don't require you to bring your own wallet, but have the concept of digital ownership underlying them. But I do think that's also something that's slightly orthogonal to crypto overall.

I think that's just a part of us kind of living our more digital lives. I think if you look at what meta label has done, as an example, it's created by the former CEO of Kickstarter. You know, they've built a platform for creative projects with a concept of digital ownership. But, you know, you don't know if there's digital ownership underneath and you don't care. The same way you don't know if Spotify is still a P2P product or not, and you don't care. You use, you get the value from the product and the value of the product is not the technology. It's the service. So I think that we just continue to move into that direction.

I think, you know, I think I do think that, you know, P to P is a great example. If you had P to P peer to peer in your business plan back in 2003, 2004, ask Daniel Eck, ask Travis Kalanick, then you could get funding, right? But today is the app you're using peer to peer? I don't know. It doesn't matter. You get the value out of the app and the bits, you know, transfer between one place

and the other without you having to worry about it. And that's what matters. And I think that's, you know, ultimately, you know, what we're building. You know, we're building a world with digital ownership. And ultimately, the technology needs to be transparent. We're really far from that today. You know, I mean, you know, switching networks, you know, bridging. It's just, you know, all of the hoops, you know, have to jump through.

You know, I want to, you know, I was trying to, you know, bid on a Bitcoin ordinol the other night, I had to move from my ledger to a different wallet because, well, that wallet had Segwit, Bitcoin, and that wasn't working on the site I was trying to bid on. I mean, come on, we're so far from this transfer of digital value being, you know, actually just transparent for the customer where it's easy to use, but also secure and also self-custody. And in every cycle, it's predictable that people will compromise on security. security, self-custody, or both.

And they'll always, they'll have a very rational reason for it. It'll probably contain the phrase onboarding the masses. And we know exactly where it leads, right? But that to me is the work that we have to do collectively, because we have to build a better user experience without compromising on security and self-custody. And that's genuinely hard. It takes a lot of, you know, a lot of lines of code, a lot of testing.

And the stakes are high. You know, failure is costly. in, you know, much more costly in a world of digital value than it was in a revolution of digital information. You know, stakes are simply higher. I think that, you know, everything in this cycle, just like everything in the last cycle, they are, you know, waypoints on the way to the eventuality of digital ownership. Very, very clear theme, I think, through this whole conversation, uh, digital ownership, which is great. Now, I think, uh, we're going to wrap it here, but I want to how we'll come back in six months and see how the cycle is proceeding and uh and whether these themes are

still sort of screaming at you at the same way but so appreciate you taking some time to hang out today really man i appreciate i really appreciate the show i uh i got to tell you like i i really listen absolutely every single day um and i just uh it's it's a real service that you do and and in giving us the news in a measured way that's never a clickbait headline and you know thoughtful great analysis. To me, what you do is invaluable. And so it's a real honor to get to appear here because I listen to you every single day. It's the truth. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate it. And I'm sure the listeners do too.