The Pomp Podcast - #1022 Adam Back On How To Get Through A Bitcoin Bear Market

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Adam Back is the Co-Founder In this conversation we discuss the macro environment for Bitcoin, navigating bear markets, nation-state adoption of Bitcoin, the building of Bitcoin's infrastructure, and what Adam thinks of all the chaos and collapse around the non-Bitcoin industry. ======================= Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 crypto browser. No extension required. Store, manage, and grow your portfolio, get NFT & multi-chain support, and more.    Download the Brave privacy browser at brave.com/Pomp, and click the wallet icon to get started. ======================= Today’s episode is sponsored by Abra. Based in California and backed by top VC firms, Abra is an all-in-one simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans using your crypto as collateral and earn interest with up to 14% APY on stablecoins and 8.15% APY on Bitcoin.    Join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App store. If you download the app today, you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account.    You came, you invested — now conquer. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Adam Back is a co-founder and CEO of Blockstream. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, past bear markets, the building of infrastructure for the decentralized digital currency, how he sees nation-state adoption, the various geopolitical issues, and what he thinks about the non-Bitcoin part of the industry and all of the collapse, chaos, and uncertainty that's playing out there now. I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors.

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With BraveWallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap assets, manage NFTs, even connect other wallets and dApps. All from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions. It's time to switch to Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash pomp and click the wallet icon to get started. Again, go download Brave at brave.com slash pomp and click the wallet icon to get started. Today's episode is sponsored by Abra. They're based in California and they're backed by top VC firms.

Abra is an all-in-one, simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans using your crypto as collateral, and earn interest with up to 13% APY on stablecoins and 7.15% APY on Bitcoin. You can join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App Store. If you download the app today,

you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account. You came, you invested, now conquer. Abra, conquer crypto. Go check it out today. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should

not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Mr. Adam, back. How are you, my friend? Hey, kids. Good to see you. Good to see you as well. I got a lot of questions for So we're going to just go rapid fire and see what's going on. Let's start with Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin's price has fallen 70% or so. It's fallen 80%, 85% in past bear markets.

At the same time that the price is falling off a cliff, it seems like many of the underlying fundamentals, hash rate, lightning node capacity, lightning network, everything continues to kind of move up into the right. Some are at all-time highs or some are near all-time highs. How do you balance price movement and then the underlying fundamentals decoupling over the last couple of months in the Bitcoin ecosystem? Yeah, I guess it's a mix of bleed through from the wider financial system. So some people will have leverage on their stock portfolios and get in margin calls. And so you get a phenomenon where sometimes people sell the more readily liquid part of their portfolio first. and so sometimes that's that's affected bitcoin and then the you know the more recent development was uh deleveraging in the uh defi part of the space um where it's turned out uh sort of more

um you know cross-correlated lending and uh you know precipitated by the lunar collapse of course but other people exposed to that and then three areas capital having issues and companies that turned out had made unsecured loans to three arrows. When you think about whether it's Luna, Terra, UST, or many of these other kind of high leverage or altcoin focused issues that are playing out in the market right now,

how intertwined is Bitcoin in that? Is Bitcoin just at the kind of whim of what goes on in the rest of the market? Or can Bitcoin actually break away, be immune, somehow separate itself? Well, I mean, it is, you know, it's connected in the sense that it's, you know, it's the investable asset class. And so, you know, there's a lot of Bitcoin that gets used for collateral in DeFi platforms via wrapped Bitcoin and other kind of wrapped mechanisms. But in terms of the exposure to Bitcoin and the drawdown, actually, if you look at the Bitfinex dominance index, it jumped 20% towards Bitcoin dominance during the price adjustment.

So that's to say that Bitcoin is down, but the alts as a basket are down a lot more and so have a very high percentage growth to get back to where they were, if in fact they will. I think historically, most altcoins have reached a high point against Bitcoin and then individually never recouped that position again. When you start to look at leverage in the market, we recently talked to Caitlin Long, and she was talking about her efforts to build kind of a different type of financial institution out in Wyoming. How do you think about Bitcoin's ability to incentivize people not to pursue what many would consider the traditional banking model, which is rehypothecation and high leverage? Yeah, well, I think a number of people and funds will have learned some hard lessons in the pull down from 30 to 20, particularly that seems to tip some things over

or trigger some things. So, I mean, it transpires, and of course it was disclosed and suspected that many of the lending platforms were re-hypothecating. That is to say, somebody would take a Bitcoin collateralized loan, so they would put up, let's say, one Bitcoin and borrow half a Bitcoin worth of dollars,

assuming that the Bitcoin was held in a screw, but that's not actually what was happening. The Bitcoins put up as collateral were either in part or fully relent to hedge funds doing high-risk things with them, such as presumably the strategies that Three Areas Capital and others were doing. And so the sort of rehypothecation

by the lending platforms in some cases, obviously don't want to paint them all with the same brush because the risk management is quite different between these firms. And some of them do no rehypothecation, like HODL. HODL is multi-sig, it's grow. You can look at the coins not moving on chain because you have one of the keys. But the unsecured relending is sort of exposing the borrower to risk that they probably didn't understand or expect to be taking. When you think about something like Bitcoin, obviously there's the investment component of it, which many people will focus on because there is that price movement.

But it seems like we've already forgotten the Bitcoin Mining Council last quarter came out and reported that Bitcoin mining was becoming much, much more efficient. And we've obviously seen a lot of the ESG claims and what I would consider obstacles being put in the way of Bitcoin continuing to get more and more computing power to secure it. How do you think about the technology of the mining machines, the energy consumption, ESG claims, and still Bitcoin continues to get stronger and stronger, you know, kind of in the face of all of this? Yeah, I mean, it's actually a remarkably resilient mechanism, Bitcoin mining, because it creates its own financial incentives. So, you know, the biggest recent example of that was the banning of Bitcoin mining in China. you know, they've talked about such things for many years. Finally, they actually did something that caused the hash rate to drop in a meaningful way. And so, you know, there were all kinds of articles

in the mainstream media, and even in some of the Bitcoin-related media, wondering, you know, if it was gonna affect Bitcoin price, if it was gonna, you know, affect ability to transact. And in fact, you know, it made very little difference. The difficulty adjusted. Everybody who wasn't switched off in mining actually made more money,

contrary to people's expectations and within not too many months the hash rate had surpassed where it was before the crackdown because a lot of the miners relocated internationally some you know they drove into russia some got shipped internationally and transpires some of it found its way back online in china so some evidently some kind of gray market mining so so effectively bitcoin is sort of because mining is kind of anti-fragile right if if there's uh you know so mining that is pushed offline in one location due to policy or other problems the financial incentive becomes larger and you know if a lot of hash rate was taken offline the incentive would become enormous and so the free market then has ever more inventive ways

to put it back online you know via sort of small scale mining you know hard to detect mining so effectively it gets more decentralized because the mining is hidden in little pockets in different places and more geographically distributed and sort of naturally moves towards geographies that are open to business, basically. So when we start evaluating the current market, does this bear market feel any different than prior bear markets that you lived through? Well, I mean, it seems a little bit like the $200 drawdown. So there was a period where Bitcoin price was, you know, $200 for a long time that it ran up to $1,300 and Mt. Gox failed at that point.

And eventually it got down below $200 again, which took everybody by surprise. They never expected sub $200 again. So, you know, it spooked a lot of people, but the price only stayed there for a few days and never went back. So the $20,000, you know, it's 100 times larger price, but for people who lived through that, you know, prior prior spike, it sort of looks similar, right? You know, people are surprised that it got there and so forth. And another interesting metric, rule of thumb, is this 200 week moving average. And it's just a simple moving average of the last four years approximately. and um so it's a trailing indicator and i like to think about it as you know the sort of baseline

value of bitcoin and then the price above that is just volatility so if you you know if you if you try to develop a longer outlook longer term outlook and look at the 200 week moving average as your kind of approximately dependable price everything above that is short-term volatility and that just creeps up and you know it's never never gone down essentially it's currently around 22 000 so you know at this point in time bitcoin price is below that which has only happened a few times in the past um so we'll see we'll see where you know where the prices of bitcoin come the end of june and see if that's under this 22 000 approximately 200 a week level but you know You know, either way, I think it remains a useful kind of mechanism to think about things and take this sort of day-to-day emotion out of, you know, short-term movement.

Bitcoin, obviously, for years, was not very concerned with the macro environment. Frankly, there was more kind of engineers, entrepreneurs, people interested in open source software, or many of the ideals that surround Bitcoin. But over the last two to three years, there's been much more financialization of the asset, including more of kind of the Wall Street investment crowd holding it. And it seems like over the last eight months, it has very much been correlated to stocks and other types of assets. those new investors appear to be treating Bitcoin like a risk asset or a growth stock. Do you think that that is kind of a new normal moving forward and something that people have to pay attention to? Or do you think it's inevitable that because everyone will eventually adopt Bitcoin, yes, the Wall Street crowd will, but so will the average citizen along with every

organization and every nation state? Yeah, I mean, I would expect adoption across the board from funds. And certainly in terms of, you know, you talked about the metrics of retail adoption, country level adoption, country policies, and the news flow is continuing quite rapidly in a positive way with different financial institutions announcing, you know, new ETFs internationally or support for access to Bitcoin and more integrations and so forth. So all the metrics seem healthy in terms of adoption and personally I would expect the you know the correlation with tech stocks to to break at some point and I think you know if you look at it from a bit longer time frame Bitcoin has you know moved on quite different trajectory than tech stocks

you know even from the start of the COVID era where we're quite far up where they're heading towards losing some of the gains now of course it's interesting to overlay all of this with the amount of uh quantitative easing you know the amount of new dollars if you if you take that as likely to not be undone i.e all the printed money will just remain and work its way into the economy and therefore into asset prices you know there's more asset price inflation to come but essentially that's been propping up you know monetizing and flowing into other asset classes like houses and the stock market. So if you take the stock market and you subtract the QE,

there's not much actual growth. So that's part of the formula at present. Talk to me about Tether. Obviously, Tether is kind of the largest and also really the first mainstream stablecoin. There's a ton of people who think that there's concerns there. There's tons of people who say, hey, this is basically a nothing burger. And, you know, you all missed actually the stablecoin

that ended up blowing up while you were so distracted with yelling and screaming about Tether. How do you evaluate stable coins in general as a market and their importance, but also Tether specifically with its relationship to Bitcoin? Yeah. I mean, there's a clear difference in types to be drawn between so-called algo stable coins, which are based on illiquid assets such as Luna or other stable coins, which are based on collateralization that have a liquidation price and so those are you know it's kind of a transparent trading bot with a liquidation level and so it's a trading disadvantage in the minor in the market you know you've got on the one side you've got intelligent traders you know maybe hedge funds

with access to capital on the other side you've got you know a mechanistic simple trading bot with with all its figures laying out there so it's just fundamentally a disadvantage so i'm not really in favor of those kind of over collateralized stable coins because it can move very quickly sometimes they sell into automated market makers you know basically people see a problem coming and they move out of the way you know they sell bitcoin they buy it back after this event happens or they pull money out of the market maker liquidity dries up and it's all all exacerbates the same problem so i think the the collateralized different coins like you know tether circle Gemini and so forth are much safer. And I think the main concern with those is term mismatch,

you know, so they're placing the capital in short term access, cash equivalents, and sometimes, you know, commercial paper and other kinds of investments. So that's their business model, right, that they can make a return on the interest. So they have a lot of money, they can make a small return on interest, and make a viable business out of that. And so I think Tether is, for example said publicly that they shrunk the commercial paper exposure so now they have i think about eight billion out of 65 ish is in commercial paper the rest is in you know more cash equivalent kind of instruments um you know there's a real-time transparency it's actually slightly overcapped over the collateralized because teller has kept you know retained

prior years earnings inside the company as extra cash cushion and you know most of the stable coins i mean the the top three stable coins have some forms of attestation but not yet audits so apparently tether is working on an audit so i think it's pretty widespread misunderstanding so that people keep asking when's the audit and the answer is well just as soon as uh you know a big a big audit company will agree to take the work on right so it's uh it's it's difficult because it's a hard thing to audit it has a lot of transactions i think the other different chair in the stablecoin market is the use the types of uses so while you know the top the big two tether and then circle are i guess like say circle is like 50 tether or something in that range

in terms of market cap in terms of volume tether is you know 10x or more and that's because it's used very widely and has a history in helping smaller exchanges and not need a bank account basically for client funds right so people are moving tether around twin exchanges using it for collateralization for perpetual futures using it for bitcoin secured loans and using it even for non-crypto related uses like a faster more reliable international transfer or for real estate transactions and so forth so it sees all that volume as well when you start evaluating, um, these stable coins, you evaluate things like, uh, DeFi, uh, the whole lending space there, uh, even alt coins to some degree. There's really, I think three schools of thought.

One is, uh, these are a complete waste of time and resources, uh, and we should, uh, disincentivize them or discourage them. Another is that actually it's R and D for what eventually will be brought over to Bitcoin and built on top of Bitcoin. And then a third one is, hey, I don't know what's going to happen. And so I don't have an opinion. And I think that it's always important that there are some people who just don't have the opinion. How do you look at a lot of this stuff, which, you know, one group of people who are the supporters and proponents claim it's innovation, claim it's pushing it forward, an industry around kind of automation and decentralization and finance. And then the critics are saying, no, this is complete nonsense. And actually, it's all going

to get built on top of Bitcoin. And maybe we'll use some of it as R&D. Like, do you think that altcoins and DeFi are just R&D for Bitcoin? Or do you see it as something else? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the first thing you can do is take out, you know, I mean, there's something like 20,000 coins, right at this point. So you can probably take out about 99.9% of them as not really having any R&D. They're kind of copies of other coins, copies of Bitcoin, copies of other altcoins. And so they are sort of more marketing casino chips, if you like. I mean, a lot of people who dabble in them, and I don't myself, view them as a lottery ticket, a meme stock or something like that, right? And then you've got the 0.1% that is

doing something interesting with privacy technology, with smart contracts, with consensus rules. and there the question is really and so that you know they are providing utility because people are using them to do things now unfortunately a lot of things they use use them for is to make altcoins i feel the casino but there's a market for you know there is a market to use casinos and that's that's what the altcoin space is but also for you know defying smart contracts and that has turned out to be a higher leverage probably and higher risk than people appreciate and also the technical risk is quite high you know some of the larger uh smart contract chains you know tend to lose about a billion dollars a year to to hacks and problems like that so it's a bit of an

a risk on environment and it's probably quite difficult to evaluate which is a safe defy platform or market maker and so on right because you never know and you know the fact that it's been around and it hasn't been hacked or rug pulled as they say yeah it doesn't necessarily mean that that is not in the future right so i think you know there is utility um but there's still a kind of fallacy about the the market valuation of i mean they they're relatively centralized typically so you can think of them like you know stocks in the company and um so or utility tokens to use a network and so john pfeffer is a xkkr investor has a nice investor report on value like a valuation theory for altcoins and his his view is that it doesn't

make sense to consider them an investment asset and as you know because technology gets cheaper and faster it wouldn't make sense to keep them as inventory you would just buy them as you use them my example being you know if you if you were excited about the internet in the 1990s during dial-up, and you had bought prepaid vouchers in bulk as an investment for one megabit of bandwidth, of course, the price of bandwidth has dropped 10,000 times. So it would have been a terrible investment. And so I think that's really the case. And so eventually, the kind of fundamental value and that economy has to work itself

out. As you look at many of the Bitcoin businesses that are being built, obviously, Blockstream has a number of different products and services. Can you give us an update in terms of how you think about building your company and why choose so many different products and services around the Bitcoin ecosystem? Yes. I mean, we just view Bitcoin as the best asset class and actually the home to a lot of the kind of dependable security first innovation in the space. And, you know, so we want to build on a dependable, robust base. So, you know, there are increasingly sophisticated smart contracts you can build on Bitcoin layer twos. But usually with a security first mindset.

And so they tend to favor simplicity, formal provability about security over kind of ease of programming for a JavaScript program or something, which then tends to create risks. And I think, you know, effectively, as Bitcoin gets monetized and adopted globally, there will need to be more layer twos, more applications, more financial services that are ground up, designed around Bitcoin. Because, you know, it's a shift in the monetary standard in the world, effectively. And so, you know, some of the things that work for fiat may not work in a Bitcoin world and different models are required. So we're trying to get ahead of the curve and do the thinking and do those things to market early and lead a trail, basically. Can you explain Liquid to everyone and give an update in terms of where you are with that? Yeah, so Liquid is kind of Bitcoin layer two. So if you think about it, Lightning for retail payments and micropayments.

Liquid is a different type of layer two, which is a sidechain. The only kind of native asset on it is Bitcoin, which is, you know, pegable. you can move it between a Bitcoin chain. And Liquid is somewhat analogous to being able to open and close channels between Bitcoin and Lightning. And then Liquid gives a different set of features. So it's not for micropayments, but it's for trading and assets and shares and stocks and different kinds of assets and being able to transact on them trustlessly with atomic trades, automated market makers, we're part of our wallets and there's an ecosystem of about 60 different exchanges, market makers and participants in the liquid network at kind of

company level and of course many users and lots of different assets you know say Bitcoin, stable coins, exchange tokens and we have a security in the network itself which is a securitized version of kind of mining contracts that we sell to public companies like Fidelity and Galaxy, but in a kind of securitized format. So that's, again, autonomically tradable and tradable on exchanges as well. When you think of Taro, Lightning Network, are these things competitive with Liquid?

Are they all going to kind of coexist and are all necessary for the success of Bitcoin, you know, kind of in the steady state two decades from now how do you view liquid as a side chain a layer two like lightning and then a proposed uh i guess layer three if you will uh in tarot yeah so um i mean blockchain is active in lightning so we have uh core lightning which used to be called c lightning and it was actually the first lightning implementation to go live um and the lightning protocol actually works you know potentially on top of different chains. So we've had it working for a number of years

on top of Liquid as well. And so it's possible to, you know, make a Lightning channel on Liquid Bitcoin, like Bitcoin existing on the Liquid network. And, you know, one path for high-scale uses of blockchains is Lightning on top of them. So, you know, we're expanding the capabilities of Lightning on top of Liquid

to include, you know, Lightning channels that involve stablecoins. let's say tether is a is probably the highest volume example and there are you know different ways to do that it's like three or four different variants the tarot proposal is like relatively new it's uh color coin based and there was another one which was a similar design called rgb and there's something else based on omni omni bolt which is kind of lightning on top of omni on top of bitcoin um and so those i mean i think that's you know that's fine like we'll see which approaches work in the market. Ultimately, we just want to see

effective and reliable ability to do layer two things on top of Bitcoin. So whichever one wins, I think that's fine. My view is that doing it on top of Liquid is a little more efficient because you're not directly creating load on the Bitcoin network for non-Bitcoin transactions. As you see it, what's the biggest risk to Bitcoin over the next five years? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think, you know, the risk perception has receded a lot, you know, Blockstream started in 2014. So we've been around for quite a long time in kind of

crypto company terms. And, you know, at that time, we were quite, you know, wary about geopolitical risk about, you know, whether major countries would outright ban Bitcoin. At that time, essentially no financial institutions wanted to hear about bitcoin um and of course that's all changed around you know so now many big financial institutions are queuing up to offer bitcoin related products offering bitcoin financial instruments bitcoin deposits purchasing derivatives and so forth and you know it there's become a lot more clarity in terms of regulation So it seems that the risk of a country-level ban has greatly receded. So the risk perception has largely fallen off, I think.

So apart from the usual market cycle, I think it's on an interesting track at this point. When you also begin to consider nation-state adoption, like in El Salvador, like in the african republic is this just the early days and we should expect one or two people to kind of broach the uh the topic now and then it'll take years to get others or is this now in the okay we should expect this to pick up quickly and maybe you know one two three different countries per year uh at a steady pace for the coming decade yeah it's it's hard to say but i mean i think what is fair to observe is that things have progressed far faster over the long term than people expected you know so if if you'd have asked anybody in 2014 if you'd see a nation-state adopt bitcoin

they would you know they would have been incredulous or you know if if they'd see the price pass ten thousand dollars that seemed completely far-fetched right um and so you know And banks adopting it, offering financial services related to Bitcoin, you could see that playing out positively for El Salvador already in a sense that apparently their revenue at country level from tourism has jumped like 20 or 30% in the first year. So you can see that as that works for one country, other countries with the interest to attract global workforce may try to replicate it. As we look forward, what do you suggest to the average person? So there's a lot of people watching this or listening to it, and they want to know what can they do to help propel Bitcoin forward? Obviously, they've likely gone and bought some Bitcoin. Is it run a node?

Is it go work at a Bitcoin company? How do you think that the average person can help Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, I think there are many, many ways to help. Education, word of mouth. A lot of Bitcoin is via word of mouth. And, you know, within the companies, there are many different types of roles, you know, documentation, business development, technical support, accounting, finance, you know. So there are things to do for people from all skill sets, effectively. And, you know, Bitcoin growth and investment in startups comes in waves and over the long term has only been getting bigger.

and then in terms of talent have you seen a change in talent since when you first started uh in the industry until today um you know you've been doing this now for what probably almost 10 years what's the change in talent quality or experience yeah i mean it seems that bitcoin attracts uh you know a great number of very technically gifted people on the technology level but you know once people get the bug and you know fall down the bitcoin rabbit hole it seems to pull in uh people that are they're more likely to ask questions or develop their own opinion and you know want to make a difference in the world and sort of you know step out of other areas of business and want to see the see the world benefit from bitcoin

adoption. So it seems some pretty clever and interesting and resourceful people join in a Bitcoin effort in a kind of organic and decentralized way. Bitcoin has no marketing department, unlike some of the altcoins, which are more like startups. So it's pretty impressive to see as a kind of very decentralized economic group action, if you like. And then my last question is the United States. Obviously, we've got a ton of different challenges that are going on. What do you think the United States should do if it wants to remain not only relevant, but a leader on the global stage from a macro economic standpoint, financial market standpoint, when it comes to the relationship with Bitcoin? Are there specific things that you say,

this is what is likely to lead the United States on that path? Yeah, I mean, there are a few impediments. I mean, some of them are probably harder to rectify. I mean, one being the fragmented nature of regulation, because there's slightly different regulations in each state for example so some types of businesses have to get licensed per state um the uh kind of feet dragging on the bitcoin etf is another one like you know many major countries with highly respected financial regulations have had bitcoin physical etfs for quite a while us is lagging on that so we'll see i guess it's 6th of june decision time for the gbtc one we'll see if that one what happens with that one um and i think another one which may be less widely known

is the accounting basis for Bitcoin on the company balance sheet. So it's a bit deficient in the sense that it causes the company to write down a realized loss if the price falls, but not to be able to mark to market when the price rises again. So it kind of makes it unattractive in the sort of standardized accounting method. Quintel's rules and a number of people, including MicroStrategy and others have been trying to work with the accounting standards bodies in the US to get a better formulation for that. That's more representative of the value of a company holding Bitcoin. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Blockstream? Yeah, for Blockstream, it's at Blockstream

on Twitter or Blockstream.com. Myself, it's at Adam3US on Twitter. Awesome. Adam, if you had one message for folks over the next, I don't know, six months of a potential bear market here in a continuation. What have you learned in the past bear markets that you think would be helpful for them? Yeah, I mean, I think people get sort of stuck in the moment. And, you know, if you sort of zoom out, it's the usual advice, right?

You know, look at past bear markets and the, you know, there's a period and the price tends to recover in the longer term. So I think, you know, for most people, as the sort of the origination of the HODL meme goes, that short-term trading is highly dangerous and is actually quite risky. And actually, just for a statistical reason, that if you take out the 12 most successful days in Bitcoin's price movement,

out of the equation, it loses money, which is to say, if you were trading, your biggest risk is to be out of market during one of those 12 days. And so the lowest risk thing to do generally is to hold and dollar cost average, figure out how to cold store, your own coins so you're not exposed to platform risk and pay attention to you know uh interest product risk too as we've seen with some of the products now where which have limited withdrawals due to exposure to other high risk parts of the sector yeah i think that is uh um words that come

from years of experience uh i appreciate taking the time to uh talk today i know that uh folks Always enjoy hearing from you. And we definitely will have to bring you back as you guys continue to make progress at Blockstream. And you guys are working on a ton of very important things. So please keep it up. And thank you from the audience, from myself, and from many other people across the industry

as you guys continue to push Bitcoin forward. Yeah, thanks for having me on. All right, see you later, Adam. Bye. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.

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Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.