The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - CBP Classics - Doomberg (2022)

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

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The Canadian Bitcoins podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice. So please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome to the first ever CBP Media, Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, Bear Cave episode. Len, are you nervous, excited, some combination of the two?

How are you feeling right now, buddy? I'm feeling okay. I look forward to this discussion. It's the first time we're doing anything like this is the inaugural episode of the Bear Cave. And we are very lucky to have a guest that is coming on that's going to be able to give his point of view. And it's going to be slightly different from our own in terms of Bitcoin. So it's going to be a great discussion today. So I'm looking forward to this.

What about you, Joey? How are you a little bit excited about this one too? I'm very excited. I got to be honest with you. I was thinking this morning about how this is going to look, the format and everything. I know you and I have talked about it. We've talked about it on the show before. There's a lot of, I think, common ground that Bitcoiners have with people who are not so sure about Bitcoin.

Not necessarily anti-Bitcoin, not necessarily against the Bitcoin ethos, but rather concerned about some of the distinct characteristics and the future of Bitcoin for a number of different reasons. So we're bringing on here as our first guest, a man who needs no introduction. It's Duneberg. Sir, first of all, thank you for coming on. How are you doing this morning?

I guess this afternoon now, I should say. It crossed over. Just barely. Joey, Len, real pleasure to be here and always happy to help other content creators when they experiment with new formats and when you reached out to me, just to gauge our interest in doing so, it was an easy yes and really looking forward to a fantastic discussion.

And as you say, we have some slightly different views, but what's the point of talking to people if they agree with everything you say? Absolutely, absolutely. So, Duneberg, before we start, give people a little bit of background on you and the team. What are you guys about over there at the Duneberg Substack and the Dubeberg Twitter account? Yeah, great. So yeah, we are a very small team of industry experts from the commodity sector. We have decades of experience in our team in that space with a unique specialty, I think, in the energy sector.

And so we write the Duneberg Substack from that perspective. And it's the thing that we do now predominantly in our business. We've stopped taking new clients because of the success we've been able to achieve with the Duneberg Substack, which we're extremely grateful for. publish six to eight times a month. We cover things like energy predominantly, but also some cryptocurrency work and some individual stock work and anything that's sort of interesting in the market, geopolitics, especially now with the war in Ukraine. And so, you know, we're in the doom business and business is booming. Good for you. And the fact that you've delved into a little bit with cryptocurrency. I know Bitcoin isn't it. We'll talk a little bit more Bitcoin and less

about the crypto stuff, give us your thoughts about Bitcoin, what you think of it today? What do you think is going to happen moving forward with it? Because I want to hear alternate viewpoints about Bitcoin. Joey and I, we talk about ours, but we want to see what somebody else has to think about it moving forward. So I would correctly partition our views into sort of the crypto universe and then Bitcoin separately. And our views like others who have sort of tackled the problem from a base of very little

knowledge to one of much more knowledge today have evolved over time at the highest level whenever we come on a podcast where the hosts are pro bitcoin we like to start with what we agree with so we agree that fiat money is effectively a Ponzi scheme we agree that money is a source of power for what we believe are now pretty corrupt governments in the western world and that they are exercising the power over money to remove the freedoms of the people that they should be leading as opposed to ruling. And in fact, that foundation of agreement forms the basis of one of our main issues with all alternative forms of digital money, Bitcoin included, is that too often times we underestimate the resourcefulness and the corruption of the people that will police it.

One should not expect that an easy solution to the problem of a corrupt government is a new currency. We have argued that the only sustainable solution to the problem of a corrupt government is a new government, because corrupt governments, which have complete control over the military and the monetary policy of the country, can shut down your new currency at will. And the behavior of your prime minister during the Freedom Convoy with respect to the retroactive freezing of bank accounts and, you know, banning of certain crypto addresses demonstrates that when push comes to shove, raw power is what matters, and the solution to a political problem is not a new currency, it's politics. Tangentially and secondarily, our main critique against

Bitcoin in particular has been the role of certain market manipulation in the determination of what Bitcoin should sell for. And we think and believe that the quote unquote tether problem until it's resolved, you won't have a full and fair understanding of what the true value of Bitcoin is. And I would separate the value of Bitcoin, which arises from its adoption worldwide and the power of its network and the performance of its network over the past 10 to 10 years, that the value and the price are two different things. And we think price is potentially being manipulated and that that manipulation will be a justification for an otherwise unwarranted crackdown on the sector if and when the powers that be decided to do so. So I think, you know, if we sat down at a bar

and had a few drinks, we would probably agree on 85% of things and we would have an open and fair discussion on the other 50. I think that that's probably true, Duneberg. I think that number might even be higher than 85, to be honest with you, my friend. Let's start with the internal workings of Bitcoin and maybe the broader space, maybe with Tether. We've talked about Tether quite a bit on this program. I know a lot of our listeners and viewers have made comments during our live stream and on Twitter and other sort of mediums where we can be contacted about this Tether problem. In your view, what is the Tether problem exactly? So let's take out of higher level up from tether so that we can speak in generalities the the thing that a lot of people

don't understand when they dismiss tether criticisms as fud is the it's not sort of tether compared to the entire size of the bitcoin market but it's tether compared to the tradable float and it doesn't take too much of a thumb on the scale to dramatically affect price and anybody who has ever held a large position in an illiquid stock knows that if you just randomly dump 5 to 10% of the daily trading volume onto the market, you're pushing the price around, you know, to the detriment of the total amount of money you will receive when you sell your shares. So if you've ever had a large position in a liquid stock, you know what I'm talking about. There's a difference between sort of the market cap, the total number of shares, or in this

case, you know, Bitcoin outstanding, and the amount of it that trades freely on the open market. and since prices are set at the margin, you can radically impact price with a relatively small amount of volume. And in going from, you know, single-digit billions to over $80 billion of tethers issued with massive opacity into the mechanics of how those stable coins were issued and what is truly backing them, that essentially becomes free casino chips

for people to move around the price of business. Bitcoin. And the price of Bitcoin went from something like 3,000 to 65,000 that you guys would probably know the exact numbers better than I. As a percent of the float that moved that price, a mysterious stable coin that seemed to be able to be issued at will to certain insiders is a very reasonable potential explanation for that massive spike in price. Now, many people would disagree with us and dismiss that as FUD. We would argue that until Tether is resolved, you're not going to see substantial and institutional money flowing into the space. And, you know, until all the exchanges get, you know, on the right side of know your customer

anti-money laundering, which seems to go against the ethos of Bitcoin altogether, you're going to be at this regulatory standstill. And so, you know, the red flags around tether are numerous and others have pointed them out. And we just happen to fall into the camp that believes that that the tether question is a significant one that it substantially impacts price far more than people are willing to admit. And by the way, it could be holding down price. They could be manipulating it both ways by the removal of tethers from the market. And so I say, and we believe that the discovery of the true value of the Bitcoin network will be impeded until the tether situation is resolved. And there's many ways for the tether situation to resolve,

One of which is for them to open the books and do a full audit, which is actually pretty easy to do, and one that they seem heavily resistant to doing all of their sort of propaganda around the topic, notwithstanding. So Bitcoin, the way I look at it, there's two different sides of it. You have the network and then the asset itself. So we'll focus on the assets since you're talking a lot to do with the price. And the direct or indirect relationship between Tether and the price of Bitcoin, don't you think that as the market matured, that the price of Bitcoin will find its natural equilibrium, because right now we're only about 13 and a half years since the first block was mined. So in the grand scheme of things, for an asset that's traded at around, I don't know,

$500 billion right now is the market cap, it's still relatively young. And over time, as more people get involved, more institutions get involved, it's going to make the whole industry mature, and it's going to make it harder to make it to manipulate the price. Do you think that's the case or you still think that there's still going to be a lot of manipulation for the foreseeable future? So I would say yes. Directionally, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you just said. And I would only point out that one of the major things impeding the equilibrium establishment of the value of Bitcoin relative to its price, I believe, is the presence of these unregulated stateal coins that have relatively opaque disclosures, sketchy characters in their leadership. And, you know, for example, I mean, the Tether is not allowed to operate in the state of New York.

That's like a big deal. That's the financial capital of the world. And that's a pretty big red flag where we come from, you know. And so I agree with you. And again, Tether is not the main sort of pillar of our issue with digital currencies, I would say. And by the way, we wrote a piece that was very forceful against the U.S. Treasury's recent action against tornado cash called storm chasers we put out a couple of weeks ago behind the paywall. There are real freedom issues at stake and the sanctioning of software

by the U.S. Department of Treasury is a very scary precedent to be setting in an environment where we have precious few freedoms left and the digitization and the removal of privacy seems unidirectional. And so we were not sort of closed-minded in our analysis. We have a monthly webinar for our pro-tears. This is sort of a higher-tiered subscribers. And our last guest was Lynn Alden, who gave a masterclass on Bitcoin and crypto and mining and the Lightning Network and the future of Bitcoin. And we were open-minded. We had a great discussion. You know, we learned a lot and she served our pros subscribers quite well and it was a very active Q&A.

So to us, the two main articles, thrusts of our beliefs are this regulatory response is coming and tether needs to be resolved. And then the third one, which I think you would probably agree with me wholeheartedly, is this the sheer volume of grift in the crypto space needs to be cleaned up. And, you know, people need to be perp walked and people need to go to jail. And, you know, we find it interesting that they rapidly arrested one of the developers of Tornado Cash. because what they were doing was giving privacy to people. But none of the big names who have pilfered billions of dollars from retail investors has yet been arrested. And that shows you, I believe, quite definitively, where the priorities of our regulatory overloads lie.

Yeah, I think that's without a doubt true. I was really dismayed to see that arrest. Whether or not you agree with the tornado cash mission ethos, it's clear that privacy is, like you mentioned, a higher priority for the regulatory powers that be. Duneberg, I want to give you a chance to talk a bit about this stable coin ecosystem a bit more. There's some comments in the chat here, and it's a question that I've thought about asking as well. USDC is presumably, I don't want to speak for you. So tell me if I'm saying anything that you find to be, you know, not quite your view.

USDC presumably is a more transparent state coin product given its institutional backing than Tether is. And tether is, I think, now just about at the same supply as USDC and USDA volume and sort of transactional uses outpacing tether. In your view, is that stable coin ecosystem sort of the same across all verticals or is one, you know, presumably tether sort of the worst of the bunch by a long shot? And then these other ones are, I don't want to say better, but, but, you know, certainly more palatable for someone in. in your boat? What do you think? On abashedly better, if you look at the difference in disclosure from USDC and Circle as they attempt to go public via a special purpose acquisition company, they have literally released down to the Q-SIP number all of their holdings in the reserves.

And we wrote a piece very early on, you know, back when it makes us cringe to read our pieces from back then because we pride ourselves on how much better we've gotten. but we wrote a piece based on credit where credit is due. You know, in circles desire to go public, it will have to make massive disclosures to regulators. It is trying its best to do that. But having said that, then you sort of slip away from the decentralization ethos and into the regulated ethos. And, you know, they were very quick to freeze, you know, wallets associated with tornado cash. Because now that they are trying to come in under the regulatory umbrella of the U.S. authorities,

they are, of course, subject and beholden to them. So there's no free lunch in life, but I would say from a quality of disclosure of the nature of the reserves that backed the stable coin, there is a chasm of difference between USDC and Tether. And credit to Jeremy Aller and his team for being so willing to publish, again, down to the Q-SIP number. And for those that aren't familiar, QCIP is just sort of a, you could literally just open up the security on your Bloomberg terminal with a QSIP number and see how it's trading and how it's pricing. And this is not uncommon for money market funds, you know, the Fidelity of the world release down to the QSIP numbers, everything that they hold. This is not some special secret sauce, as Tether likes to describe it. There's no proprietary information in Circle's reserves. But as we wrote about in a piece that we wrote on Celsius, you know, it's pretty amazing to find out.

that Celsius basically was able to create 900 million worth of new tether by pledging Bitcoin as collateral, which then they could turn around and buy more Bitcoin with and move the price of Bitcoin higher, which frees up more collateral to get another loan. And we sort of call it a digital currency perpetual motion machine. And so if the backing of tether at least partially is bitcoin and then the issuance of tether is affecting the price of bitcoin you can see where one might imagine and it doesn't take much volume of the float you know to affect price this is what we were talking about earlier and so i think the fact that tether which had previously claimed that was backed one to one by u.s dollars in a bank is now backed by bitcoin collateral

from an outfit of sketchy as celsius that makes should give you pause as to the quality of the backings of tether. And you don't see, you know, commercial paper backed by digital currencies in USDC's disclosures of its reserves. And kudos to them for taking advantage of that market inefficiency and being the first to do so. So you've been talking slightly fondly of USDC. I'm not going to say you're favorable in the product or you're trying to say it's good. But I'm just wondering if you could see a case use for using it moving forward. because the way I look at it, there is a purpose for it in some countries where there's a lack of U.S. dollars floating around and U.S.D.C. kind of fills that void.

So I see the case use of it right now, but I don't know what's going to happen moving forward. It's hard for me to predict. In your mind, do you think that this is something that there is some future with U.S.D and the using of that asset? Or is this just something that's going to eventually fizzle out over time? Yeah, so just the way you pose that question makes you want to sort of state something up front. which is, it's not like we wake up in the morning and look for negative things to say about cryptocurrencies. We wake up in the morning and study the landscape of the universe through the prism that we are familiar with and try to draw sort of intelligent independent conclusions about what we think is happening.

And so if the question is, as asked in the chat, how would you compare, you know, USDC to Tether? I would say unabashedly, there's a world of difference between the two for the reasons I just articulate it. Per your question, of course there's utility for a U.S. dollar sort of substitute that can be readily accessed around the world. If you are in an emerging economy with questionable leadership and in the middle of hyperinflation, parking some of your money in a U.S. dollar stable coin that you believe is backed one to one with relatively liquid sort of cash equivalents, short-term U.S. Treasuries and whatnot, what a wonderful opportunity for you to be able to preserve some of your wealth and to get it out of the system. Look, the use cases for digital currencies. Again, I started this interview by trying to state many of the things that we agree upon. And if I was in a developing country and I had some semblance of wealth that I would like to preserve in the face of sort of a government veering towards totalitarianism, I can't say the word,

right now but totalitarian instincts how about that you know i would be more than happy to have the opportunity to park some of my wealth in something that i knew would preserve its value in us dollar terms which is of course the global reserve currency and and is extremely valuable you know as the rest of the energy crisis plays out around the world the u.s. dollar is strengthening against those economies because the u.s is you know energy independent to a rough approximation and so if i was in europe or japan i'd be interested in parking so of my money in USC as well, because, you know, Europe is going to go through a hell of a winter and we expect the euro to weaken. And so, yeah, of course, there's a use case for it. And to the

extent that it is well regulated by the U.S. government, then, you know, that only bolsters its position in the crypto world. And, you know, to be totally honest with you, I'm very curious to see if the SEC he approves the public, you know, the application on the behalf of the SPAC and Circle to combine and to trade on the U.S. public markets under the regulatory purview of Gary Gensler and the SAC. If that deal goes through, I think that's a very interesting milestone for the crypto space in general and for Bitcoin slash, you know, stable coins in particular. Tomberg, talk to me a bit about your views on the spot ETF. You had a thread, I believe, a few weeks back about the nature. It was either you writing it, your team writing it, or you retweeted

someone else's. I wrote it, yeah. Yeah. So that thread, I think, sparked my interest quite a bit because I think people don't understand, and we talked about this on our program, the sort of closed loop for U.S. dollars and how a Bitcoin spot ETF that settles in another currency, in this case, Bitcoin obviously creates a problem that most U.S. regulators don't want to see. I mean, to put it lately they don't want to see it. Talk to me a bit about that. Yeah. So great question. We both originally wrote a piece on this called A Spot of Bother for Bitcoin, and then we several months later reformulated that piece into a 20, 25 part thread that we posted on a Saturday morning to Twitter. So what is the difference between a futures Bitcoin ETF and a spot Bitcoin

ETF. And once one begins to understand the critical difference between the two products, you can begin to realize why it is that the SEC has in fact approved a futures Bitcoin ETF, but consistently and relentlessly denies each and every application to create a spot Bitcoin ETF. And the answer is as follows in our belief. So you can say many things about Gary Gensler, but Gary Gensler understands digital currencies. He taught a class at MIT, like he knows the score in digital currencies, right? So a Bitcoin futures ETF, and one exists, it trades under the ticker BITO. It uses futures contracts to replicate the price of Bitcoin. And there's some minor cost to that, you know, rolling costs and things like that

as the contracts sort of need to be rolled over. But by and large, the average investor today, in their trading account, in their retirement accounts, in the U.S., if you have a self-managed retirement account, you can get direct access to the price of Bitcoin by buying BITL. It has a 97% correlation with the price of Bitcoin. But in a futures transaction, what essentially happens is two parties deposit U.S. dollars in their trading account and then bet with each other on the future price of Bitcoin. And then if Bitcoin rises, the party who bet long collects more U.S. dollars. And if Bitcoin falls, the party that bet long pays U.S. dollars to the other counterparty.

But at no time, do U.S. dollars leave the heavily regulated, know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, clean world of futures trading using brokers who are regulated. and everybody's regulated. Everybody knows everybody, your business is known. You're basically gambling on the price of Bitcoin using U.S. dollars. In a spot Bitcoin ETF, as flows go into that ETF, U.S. dollars will leave the regulated world and buy Bitcoin with it. So then, in a sense, those fresh U.S. dollars become exit liquidity for somebody on the other side of the trade. And given the nature of the way in which Bitcoin exchanges are off,

it is impossible for the regulated world to know who's doing the selling. And so because almost all crypto exchanges have what the U.S. would characterize as radically inadequate know-your-customer anti-money laundering protections, Gary Gensler is not ever going to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF because that would result in U.S. dollars from American retail investors flowing into a universe that he thinks is the one. Wild Wild West, and perhaps those unknowing and unwitting U.S. retail investors might be exit liquidity for money launderers or pick your favorite, you know, worst, bad actors. And if you think that this is an exaggeration, I mean, I would argue that the dominant use for tornado cash

was not, in fact, money laundering, but that money laundering could be done on tornado cash was enough for it to shut it down and to blacklist all of those wallets. And so I believe that the key difference between futures and spot is, as we articulated both in the piece, a spot of bother for Bitcoin, and in the thread, is the reason why Gary Gensler allowed a futures ETF to get to market, but has steadfastly denied dozens of applications to bring a spot Bitcoin ETF to the market. I'm going to use an example of Bitcoin mining and publicly traded Bitcoin miners as something that is kind of on par with a spot ETF, spot Bitcoin ETF, because they kind of mirror each other in terms of price,

although Bitcoin miners, they seem to be more leveraged in terms of going up and going down versus a spot price of ETF, spot price of Bitcoin ETF. But ultimately, there are some Bitcoin miners out there that they mine Bitcoin and they hold on to it. I'm going to use Marathon and HUDAid as examples. They have thousands of thousands of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So fundamentally, then, what is the difference between a spot Bitcoin ETF and a Bitcoin miner? Because as an investor, you're going to achieve ultimately the same result.

You're going to have your investment fall to the price of Bitcoin. But fundamentally, what are the difference between the two of them? Well, once I explain the difference, you'll realize why it is that our hypothesis is probably correct. If I may on my Bitcoin miner, okay, I have bills to pay and I generate revenue, okay? The bills that I pay are basically the cost of my power, and by and large, those bills are paid in fiat currency. Once the Bitcoin is mined, the company can sell it and get U.S. dollars out of the ecosystem to pay their bills and to remunerate their shareholds. holders and to issue dividends and pick your favorite, buy back their stock, all of those things. With Bitcoin miners, retail money does not flow from the U.S. regulated system into exit

liquidity for unknown Bitcoin holders on the other side of the trade. With miners, they are predominantly selling their Bitcoin and bringing U.S. dollars back into the regulated world. And so, again, I think that's a critical difference between a spot ETF and a Bitcoin and miner it's the flow we like that we have a we have a model that we use called follow the fiat and if you could follow the fiat and where it goes then you could better understand why some of the behavior in the crypto slash digital currency universe is acceptable to the regulators and much of it isn't and in this case the flow of fiat goes from the bitcoin world back

into the regulated world predominantly, and at no point do retail investors have their funds used as exit liquidity in the wild, wild west of the Bitcoin ethos. And so that is the big difference. And I think it's further evidence of the validity of our hypothesis that we believe explains Gary Gensler's behavior. Yeah, I think, man, that that ETF, like I said, that ETF, the spot ETF thread was really, really good. We got a comment in the chat here that explanation was worth the price of admission here already there, Duneberg. So yeah, well done. I want to move now a little bit over to the commodities world, specifically energy, where you know, you and the team have very clearly, you know, very, very, very, very great, you know,

levels of expertise. How do you view the relationship between Bitcoin, the miners, and energy, maybe through the lens of grid stability or through the lens of, you know, whatever you, whatever you view or if you have a view on that synergy, what is it? So there are, I would say, limited use cases where having a large user of power be willing and able to quickly shut down is useful for the overall management of a grid and its stability. So as Lynn Alden pointed out in her, excellent presentation to our pro subscribers there are times in parts of the country where the price of electricity goes negative because they are looking to pay people to take it the management of a

grid is a complex dance and you know i don't i don't envy the operators of grids because you can only screw it up right you know everybody expects the light to come on when you hit the switch and they get angry really quickly when the lights don't work and so to the extent that flexible capital light mobile Bitcoin mining operations can take advantage of stranded natural gas that would otherwise be flared or burned or even worst case released into the environment. So to the extent that Bitcoin miners can enable incremental production of natural gas because they're able to handle what is otherwise a very expensive impurity, so to speak, for

the operators of those fields, there is certainly positive. value to be had, which is why you see more and more E&P companies looking towards doing collaborations with Bitcoin miners. But again, all the value of this and the net present value of such projects depends on the price of Bitcoin and your ability to sort of sell that Bitcoin and bring US dollars back into their balance sheets. Now, they could hold the Bitcoin. The US government doesn't care about that either.

But as long as they're sort of predominantly selling Bitcoin. And they could use those dollars to tip the net present value calculation of their projects from, you know, questionable to distinctly positive. And then that's why you're seeing sort of spontaneous uptake in those sectors. I'd say those use cases are relatively limited, driven by the instability that intermittent renewable power sources like wind and solar bring to the grid. The way that the Bitcoin community messages this is that Bitcoin mining enables the rollout of renewables. I would counter that it at the margin sort of softens some of the negative aspects of it. But that's certainly a legitimately positive thing. And there's a use case for it for sure.

I just want to follow up there because you mentioned it. And I've given this some thought, too, that there's a conflict between the messaging Bitcoiners put out there about the sort of invalidity of renewables and intermittent energy. While they also talk about the value that Bitcoin miners bring to grids. But as you mentioned, it's really only the grids that embrace that technology that Bitcoiners use inferior. And to be honest with you, I think is inferior where that stuff works. I don't think you can have it both ways. Do you have a view on whether or not Bitcoin mining vis-a-vis these sort of less reliable grid sources is going to be an angle of attack for governments at some point? Do you think that that's a likely sort of thin end of the wedge?

so to speak, into getting Bitcoin or making Bitcoin more vulnerable in Canada, the U.S., Europe, et cetera? I doubt it. I think it's a bit of a side issue. I think there is no doubt that the proof of work nature of validating Bitcoin transactions necessarily comes with a substantial energy drag, which is the price you pay for the ultimate decentralization. and privacy.

And so I suppose they could attack the energy angle that if they wanted to shut things down, there are far easier ways for them to do it. They could just decide to because they're, you know, aspiring dictators like your prime minister. And so, but, you know, the energy penalty of Bitcoin is just the natural consequences of the nature of the coin that Satoshi designed. And it put a heavy emphasis on decentralization and autonomy. And because they went with proof of work instead of proof of stake, you have this necessary energy penalty. And so that's why, of course, the price of Bitcoin matters so much because that allows for, you know, the mining to be economically value add,

especially if there's sufficient exit liquidity for the miners to be able to sell their resulting and newly minted Bitcoin in order to pay their bills. Well, the price of Bitcoin, too, it's correlated to the utility of the asset, but also to what's going on in the economics of the world is look at the U.S. dollar, what's happening, and moving forward, there's going to be a lot more U.S. dollar looks like that's going to be added to circulation moving forward. So doesn't that give some sort of credence to Bitcoin moving forward? Because you do know that there's only going to be $21 million in existence once it's all said and done. And with the U.S. dollar, hmm, We don't know what's going to be the end result, but I could tell you that there's going to be more tomorrow than there are today. So doesn't that give any credence to Bitcoin as an actual asset? You know, I'm sitting here as you say this, and I'm staring at a tweet from Brent Johnson at Santiago Capital. And literally, you know, because Twitter's listening to us and deciding what they put in front of me in real time. And it says, you know, the dollar always rises when there's a global economic shutdown or crisis. Many believe it will be different this time and the chart simply says, I don't.

One of the things about the U.S. dollar, which was sort of an insight for me, which I still haven't fully worked out on my head, but makes a lot of intuitive sense, is we're constantly sort of measuring the amount of U.S. dollars in circulation relative to the U.S. population. But the number of people for whom the U.S. dollar is, in fact, that a facto currency is much, much, much, much bigger than the U.S. population. And so it's not clear to me that the money printing, quote unquote, that has led to the inflationary pulse that we're now, suffering with is really all that large in historical terms relative to the ever-growing number of people in the world for whom the U.S. dollar is critical. And that's not something I can claim that I fully understand, but it is a unique and different way to look at that problem that has given me pause for thought. And so, you know, one of the sort of embedded assumptions in your question is that, you know, the number of U.S. dollars will grow indefinitely. Well, there's a denominator aspect

to that equation, which is the number of people who are using it. And it is true. that it is far larger than the population of the U.S. That's a very good point. I hadn't considered that lens of the sort of, you know, growing number of users as far as U.S. dollars being printed. Duneberg, let's talk a bit about these other, some of these, you know, as you mentioned earlier, grifters will call them. That's a kind word, honestly, for the people that are making money

and stealing from civilians, I think, in a lot of cases in the crypto space. But there's, you know, I think with the grifters, there's people who I think are making good faith arguments for Bitcoin and trying to quote unquote sell the asset and the network is something that has value. I'm thinking of, you know, podcasts you've been on. Marty Bent, he's been on our show. You were on TFDC not too long ago. And there are others in the space who are running programs where they talk about the benefits of Bitcoin to the average person, whether it's first world, second world, third world. You know, you sort of pick your, pick your ideal customer, let's say. And if you had the chance to get, you know, let's see the top 10 Bitcoin content creators, Bitcoin influencers, I hate that wherever I'm going to use it, influencers into the room, what would you tell them they're doing right and what would you tell them they're doing wrong? Well, I think we can start with what I think they're doing wrong, which is not enough of them are as loud as they need to be about tether when it mattered because price was going up.

and the seductive nature of price on the screen and translating what that means to your perceived net worth and the value of your holdings and the validity of your underlying thesis was very seductive. And I think by failing to loudly and openly confront that problem, they gave the regulators the opportunity to come in and stomp on the party a little bit. And again, back to my original comment, I do think that the problem, the solution to a government problem is not a new currency, it's a new government, but I do understand. And Marty and I, again, I really enjoyed my appearance on Marty's show, a really great guy. We had a very civil debate. We both learned a few things. I think we agreed 85% of the time, much like we're doing here. And then we opened each other's eyes to some things, again, much in the way that we're doing here, which is the way, you know, civilized society should work.

But what they're doing well, of course, is articulating the corrupt nature of our ruling elite and the threat to individual freedom that the corruption of money irresistibly presents to people who would rather rule over us than lead us. And that resonates, but that, you know, your strength is your weakness. That also means that it is seductive for people to think that they should put all of their funds in Bitcoin and that this is going to be their path to free. are more riches, you know, like broadly speaking, those types of behaviors don't work out very well. And one of the things that, for example, recently we've been writing about this whole AMC ape split. And one of the things that really frustrates us is when, you know, sophisticated investors on Wall Street and executives who enable them take advantage of retail. And, you know, the vast majority of retail players in this space have no idea what's actually going on.

And we try our best to warn them and to write politely about it. And sometimes it angers them because they think we're just riding FUD. But in reality, we are genuinely interested in their well-being and trying to stop a train wreck from happening. And so the danger in articulating the powerful message of the need for, you know, censorship-resistant currency is that you can lead retail investors over the edge. You know, everybody who bought at $65,000 is staring at, you know, substantial loss. Maybe they'll make it back someday.

God knows the price of Bitcoin is very volatile. But, you know, that's the only sort of caution I would give is always be mindful of the relative sophistication of the people on the other side of the conversation who might misunderstand what you're saying. And always be careful to try to speak in measured tones with risks identified and so that people can get both sides of the equation. You've mentioned on this show a few times a new government replacing an old government. And is this something you mean just simply a revolution? or just replacing the existing people in there, or even also talking about replacing the existing financial system that's currently in place.

And, you know, we have the Fed that's the buyer of last resort, the fractional reserve system, all this bailing out and lending that's going on that created this mess. Is that also that you're thinking that should be perhaps changed if there's any sort of change in government? In an ideal world, governments would be elected by the voters in fair and open elections.

and the people's will could be represented in the halls of power. And then once these people were elected with the mandate that the voters gave them, they would stay true to that mandate and they would execute against the wishes of the population. Unfortunately, in the G7 countries, we're seeing less and less of that. And we're moving more and more towards sort of uny-party systems where it doesn't really matter who you vote for, you end up with the same policies. And so we would much, much prefer to fix the system from within. Revolutions are hard.

They're destructive. People die. Business is closed. People starve. Economies collapse. People get shot. Like, that's not good. Nobody wants any of that.

We certainly don't want any of that. We still believe in the power of individual citizens to express well-articulated views and convince leaders that other, would be better than the one we're on, recognizing that there's always going to be a certain amount of corruption and grift, even in government, especially in government. But no, when we say the solution is a new government, we're not talking violent revolution slash insurrection. We're talking about legitimate protest, citizen advocacy, voting at the voting booth, and convincing politicians. You know, I would argue we've had some impact on the energy debate, right? I mean,

we've written some pretty good pieces. They've gone viral. We know. We know. for a fact that certain advisors to powerful U.S. senators read our stuff. We've had a few reach out to us, genuinely interested to try to learn. Most people in government are well intended. Most people in government aren't corrupt grifters. And most people in government would like to leave a legacy of positive change for the people that they want to lead. And that's, again, come back to this main theme. Are you a ruler or are you a leader? And to the extent that you can support leaders that implement policies that drive the greater good. You should focus your efforts on citizen advocacy, politely expressing your views

in compelling ways that make people say, hey, just like you did earlier, like, I never really thought about it like that. Well, then that's great. We've had a civilized discourse that changed your view on something that matters to you. That's how society and democracy is supposed to work. And to the extent that we can lead by example, that's what we try to do. Doomburg, you've absolutely crushed. We have one last question related to Bitcoin, and then I have one follow-up, fun one that Len doesn't know about yet because I haven't decided what the fun one's going to be until just now.

So you've made a lot of good points today. The chat has a lot of comments, not all of them very nice, but we'll deal with that another time. But in terms of this sort of civil discourse and changing minds, or at least presenting new viewpoints that, that turn people on to other possibilities. For you, Duneberg, what would it take for you to change, I don't want to say change of view because like I mentioned in the lead up to the show and for people who watch on this and for people who are anti-Bitcoin, and I don't think you're anti-Bitcoin. I think like you mentioned, 85% is sort of the number where that's the general Venn diagram

between your views and the average Bitcoin maximalist. What would make you maybe invest in Bitcoin, if that's a question, can answer or change your view on the sort of likely outcome for the Bitcoin asset and the Bitcoin network? What things would have to happen for you to flip that switch? So actually, one of the things we're contemplating, although we haven't decided to do it yet, is to accept payment in Bitcoin for our subscription. And so that would be sort of what we would, and the piece that I have in my head that we would write announcing that policy would be a Bitcoin minimalist.

Like we would, we would not put our fresh, you know, fiat currency into it as an investment, but if people would like to pay us in a form of sort of a commodity barter in a sense, because, you know, under U.S. tax law, Bitcoin is viewed as a commodity. We're still working through the mechanics of how that would happen and what it would mean for us and for the brand. And, yeah, if, you know, I don't think it is unreasonable to have. have a small allocation of your net worth directed towards more speculative and perhaps

experimental outlets for people's creativity, I totally concur that there is inherent value in the network of Bitcoin. And as the grifts in the crypto space blow up, the persistence of the Bitcoin network only becomes stronger. So we wouldn't probably put fresh money into Bitcoin, but we would probably experiment in accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for our subscribers. We have many Bitcoin Maximus who subscribe to Dumburg. It's one of our points of pride that they stuck with us when we went behind the paywall. Again, like the comments and the feed that you're worried about, don't bother me in the least. People are free to express their opinions, even if they're dead wrong. And we recognize people's right to do so. And at least

one of the things we did when we went behind the paywall is we limited comments to our pieces to only paying subscribers. And our view is, we're more than happy to have you troll us, but if you pay us, and if you pay us, then troll away because you're a paying customer and we're more than happy to hear your critiques. And by the way, we've been ripped in our comments

from some of our subscribers and we try our best to honestly and steadfastly reply to those in the same tone that we write our pieces. You know, our view is that we shall be provocative without being polarizing, we shall be funny, without being silly, and we shall teach, without being self-indeligible.

And those are the three brand pillars for Dumburg, and to the extent that we do that and everything we do, including Twitter threads, podcast appearances, and written pieces that we had succeeded in our brand ambition. And there's always going to be trolls. And that's just the nature of life as a content creator. You just open the door. I am a godly-level troll, so be ready for it when I teach them back.

Hey, 30 bucks a month and you can troll to your heart's content. Listen, when you're ready, when you accept Bitcoin, you got to tell me, I'll be the first person who pays the subscription fee in Bitcoin. But I should mention, Len, I'm going to sub to the newsletter. I don't want to call the newsletter. The substack is like the stuff that's not behind the paywall from earlier in the Duneberg days is fucking great, man. It is so good. And the Twitter stuff and like when you're in spaces, I always try and listen to Duneberg. You did a great job here today. I really appreciate your time. But before you go, Duneberg, do you know who the next guest for the Bear Cave is? Did I tell you? I don't remember if I told you. not you have not told me it's tomorrow night we're having mike green uh at seven o'clock right and so i want to know if uh you know i don't know how old you are i don't know if poultry is really a foot speed game but uh do you think you could beat mike green in a 40 yard dash um so i know mike green we had mike green as a guest on our duneberg pro tier uh he was the first outside guest we had Mike Green is one of the smartest people in the world.

And I observe on Twitter that Mike Green is both rather fit. And his son recently started at, I believe, the Naval Academy, which is an amazing accomplishment. And so my projection is that Mike Green would almost surely be in better shape than I'm. I'm relatively lean and not overweight. But I would guess that I would probably partake in more glasses of wine than he does. And depending on the length of the foot race, how long did you say? It was 40 yards.

Everything's 40 yards, Duneberg. It would be close, but I would have to be humble enough to predict that Mike Green would win that race. Okay, okay. I'll tell him tomorrow. You can tell him, I said that. Yeah, and tell him I'm a big fan of his work. And he really is, you know, he's over at. Oh, God, what's the name of his firm?

He's doing Simplify now. Yeah, Simplify, that's right. Simplify and Asset Management. And really great guy. We were really honored to have him as a guest, and he did us the favor of delivering a really wonderful presentation to our pro-subscribers. And so really great guy, and congratulations on getting him. It's a good get.

Hey, we're looking forward to it. So, Duneberg, before you go, one more time, tell people where they can sign up for the substack, where you guys are doing your thing, Floreslaw yours, my friend. Yeah, so duneberg. subsect.com, it's important to note that we are 100% subscriber supported. We do not accept ads or we do not accept sponsorships, which we believe gives us complete editorial control over the things we write. We are more than happy to take the opposite opinion than what we believe in when presented with sufficient data. We try to be provocative. We try to be funny and we try to

teach. Those are the three brand attributes. And our objective is when you get an email from Newburgh, you say to yourself, ooh, I get to read that. And so that is the brand ambition. It's the work of our lives. We're thrilled to be doing it. And I wish nothing but the best to everybody who is listening, even the trolls. Thanks for coming, everybody. We'll see all y'all tomorrow night.