The Pomp Podcast - #1292 Mitchell Askew | Will Bitcoin ETF or Bitcoin Halving Be More Impactful?

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Mitchell Askew is the head analyst at Blockware Solutions. In this conversation, we talk about volatility, bitcoin ETFs, institutions, inscriptions, miners, bitcoin halving, and more.  ==============...========= Auradine, a leader in web infrastructure solutions including blockchain, AI, and privacy, has unveiled the world's first 4nm Bitcoin mining systems, featuring breakthrough EnergyTune™ technology, setting new standards in performance and energy efficiency. The Teraflux™ product line from Auradine offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO), positioning it as the optimal choice for Bitcoin mining needs. With EnergyTune™, a patent-pending technology, Auradine's Teraflux™ systems enable rapid demand response and optimal energy usage, fostering a symbiotic relationship with electrical grids, and contributing to sustainable energy practices. Designed and manufactured in the US, Auradine's Teraflux™ product line not only ensures cutting-edge technology but also mitigates supply chain risks and provides increased supply chain resiliency. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.auradine.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information the Teraflux bitcoin mining systems. ======================= Cal.com is leading the charge of scheduling platforms in the open-source sphere, offering you the chance to harness the efficiency previously reserved for elite corporations and tech gurus. That's right, Cal.com is transforming sophisticated calendar management into an accessible tool for all via a user-friendly interface. Discover how countless users are optimizing their time in unprecedented ways. Use code “POMP” for $500 off when you set your team up with Cal.com. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Mitchell Askew is the head analyst at Blockware Solutions. In this conversation, we talk about why he believes the massive 50% plus bear market drawdowns are over,
Starting point is 00:00:39 how ETFs are going to create easy access for institutions, why they will remove unit bias, and the competition between ETFs and what it should lead to. We also go through inscriptions and high on-chain fee environments, what that's going to do for miners and for users, how you can use UTXO management to trade off between fees and privacy and what the Bitcoin halving along with new mining hardware is going to do to help these miners make up more revenue once the halving occurs. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mitchell. I think that he is one of the best analysts in all of Bitcoin. And I think that his audience is only going to grow over the coming months. So please tune into this conversation. Let me know what you think about it. And here
Starting point is 00:01:17 is my conversation with Mitchell Askew. 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. This episode is brought to you by Aradine. They are a brand new startup led by a number of Silicon Valley legends who just raised $81 million to build the future of internet infrastructure.
Starting point is 00:01:55 You're probably wondering what that means, so let me explain. There are numerous new disruptive technologies that are being adopted simultaneously, from blockchain to artificial intelligence to zero-knowledge technologies. In order to ensure that these technologies thrive in this new world, we need new infrastructure, and that is where Aradine comes in. They just launched their first product line called Teraflux, which is a Bitcoin miner powered by the world's first four nanometer silicon chip technology. These air cooled single phase and dual phase immersion cooling miners have unrivaled speed and efficiency. They have superior uptime and they leverage a brand new innovation called EnergyTune that allows miners to dynamically adjust the energy consumption and Bitcoin hash rate based on demand response needs of the electrical grids.
Starting point is 00:02:40 Auradine is an ambitious company working on hard problems. I'm really impressed with them. And if you want to check out more, you can go to Auradine.com. That's A-U-R-A-D-I-N-E.com. Go check them out at Auradine.com today. This episode is brought to you by Cal.com. What do I have in common with Chad Hurley from YouTube, Toby from Shopify, and Alexis from 776 and the co-founder of Reddit?
Starting point is 00:03:07 We all use Cal.com instead of Calendly, and we are all early investors as well. Cal.com is leading the charge of scheduling platforms in the open source sphere, offering you the chance to harness the efficiency previously reserved for elite corporations and tech gurus. If you like to have your calendar organized and be able to have an efficient exchange when scheduling, but you love all of the benefits of open source technology, then Cal.com is for you. They are transforming sophisticated calendar management into an accessible tool for all via a user-friendly interface. You can customize it and you can make your calendar work for you. Use code POMP for $500 off when you set up your team with Cal.com today.
Starting point is 00:03:50 Again, go to Cal.com, C-A-L.com and use code POMP to get $500 off when you sign up. Cal.com, an open source tool that allows you to take back control of your calendar, be efficient when scheduling, and make sure that no one can steal your time. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mitchell here. Mitchell, I thought a great place to start the conversation is you believe that the 50% plus drawdowns, maybe even 80% multiple times in the past for Bitcoin, those are over. Those days are long, long gone. Why do you believe that? Right. So a lot of the capital that's waiting for the ETFs to come into Bitcoin, this is very sticky capital. These are pension funds, 401ks, retirement accounts. These are
Starting point is 00:04:32 the types of investors that they buy assets for the long-term and they do not sell. It's not the sort of retail crowd that came in in 2021, just speculating, looking to make fiat and get in and out of the Bitcoin market. These guys, they don't sell. They have a really long time horizon. And I would put a caveat there. If we get sort of a massive FOMO-induced blow-off top, sort of like in 2021, we could get a drawdown. But really, that would have to happen after a massive swing up. But generally speaking, I think the types of investors that are going to come into Bitcoin through the ETF, they don't plan on selling anytime soon. And that sell pressure is what really causes the massive bear markets. Now, when you see those people holding,
Starting point is 00:05:13 How many of them are just holding until we get back to kind of an all-time high? And how many of them you think are holding for the next 10 years? Is there a way for us to unpack that? Yeah, I think a lot of them are holding for the long term. When you look at the HODL waves, so it basically measures each Bitcoin on the network, how long since they last moved. And typically what you see when the price starts to run back up, you see the HODL waves go down. You see some of those longly held coins get distributed back in the market. But in 2023, we saw the exact opposite. Bitcoin ripped 160% off the lows and the long-term
Starting point is 00:05:49 holders continued to just accumulate more and hold more coins. And we've kind of seen some resistance right here around like the $45,000, $44,000 price level. And funnily enough, that's like the aggregate cost basis of coins bought during the bull market. So coins that last moved two to three years ago, their cost basis is around $44K. So I think you are kind seeing some of that like people just wanting to get in uh and get out at their break-even cost but a lot of the the people that are left holding right they held through ftx they've held through the massive bull market of 2023 these are ideological bitcoiners they fundamentally do not want to sell to blackrock fidelity and the other institutions so it's going to be interesting
Starting point is 00:06:28 to see how much the price has to get bid up for some of these coins to start going back into the the market. The ETF is coming. Everyone is speculating that it's going to get approved in the next couple of days. One of the ideas is around this unit bias. Why do you think the ETF could really help bring more capital into the market through unit bias? Right. So unit bias, as silly as it may sound to you and I, some people, they don't think they can buy Bitcoin because it's $44,000 a coin. They think they have to pay $44,000. And so that leads a lot of that capital to either not go into Bitcoin period or to go into some of the altcoins. But the way the ETFs are going to be priced, it's going to be a share, right? So it's not going to
Starting point is 00:07:10 be $44,000 for the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. It might be 20 bucks. And that 20 bucks represents 0.0005 Bitcoin or something like that. So a lot of investors, psychologically, they're going to be more inclined to buy 100 shares of a BlackRock ETF versus a third of a Bitcoin or whatever the math breaks out to be. So a lot of that hesitation that we saw in 2021 and in the previous bull markets, I think that subsides with the ETFs. And there's also sort of a game theory component too, right? Maybe if you're Fidelity, you want to have your share price less than the BlackRock ETF share price. So it'll be interesting to see how all the different ETFs shake out in that regard. Is that a reason for the ETFs to do everything they can to keep the unit price as low as possible,
Starting point is 00:07:53 like doing stock splits and things like that to continue to press down that unit price i think so i think more than likely though what we'll see is competition for transparency right because why would you want to buy one etf over the other well first it'll be low fees i think there's going to be a race uh for fees to get to zero but second it's going to be transparency you want to know that the bitcoin that your each share of the etf is backed by is actually there you want to make make sure they're not re-hypothecating it out, lending it to other people. And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is it's a transparent ledger, right? So if I'm Cathie Wood running the ARK spot Bitcoin ETF, I'm publishing my addresses on chain and showing like, hey, this is the Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:08:36 that backs it. And maybe some of them even offer redemption, right? So you can redeem your shares and take self-custody of the Bitcoin if you so choose. Now, granted, I don't think a lot of the people buying the spot Bitcoin ETFs would be ready for that, at least not in the short term, maybe in the long term, they get more comfortable. But I think the real battle is going to be for transparency. Now, when you see the competition among all of these different ETFs, you talked about fees and stuff like that. Are they competing for capital from retail or are they competing for capital from institutions? Who do you think is the buyer of these ETFs? The buyer is definitely institutions on behalf of their clients. So I think the big deal with the ETF, whatever happens
Starting point is 00:09:20 in the short term price action wise is anybody's guess, but it is kind of a fundamental shift. Part of it's because one, the ETF, it's easy access to Bitcoin exposure, right? You can go through your traditional broker, but two, it's the validity that Wall Street is giving it, right? The narrative from Wall Street that Bitcoin is a bubble, it's a Ponzi scheme, it's going to die, the government's going to shut it down. All of those are kind of put to the side now because now Wall Street has a way to profit off of Bitcoin. And so they're giving it the thumbs up. And I think you're going to see a shift from the traditional 60-40 portfolio to maybe 60-39-1, 1% into Bitcoin. What the exact number is, we'll have to find out. But even just a sliver,
Starting point is 00:10:02 even if it's a fraction of 1% of the hundreds of trillions of dollars that are into stocks and equities going into Bitcoin, that's going to push the market cap up tremendously. And another thing too, tying back into this idea that bear markets won't go away, is a lot of these institutions, they're not going to immediately allocate like a massive spot buy. It's going to be the passive inflows, right? When people get their 401k and they get their paycheck every two weeks or whatever, and they put some percent into assets. So it's going to be passive inflows into Bitcoin. So I think we sort of see this steady climb up and not a sell the news event or a God candle, either side of the spectrum. I think we see something in the
Starting point is 00:10:43 middle where we just sort of slowly grind up. Let's talk about ordinals, inscriptions and transaction fees. Right now, transaction fees have spiked recently. You all put out a report recently that said after the halving, you expect transaction fees to be larger than the block subsidy. Is that something that you think will persistently stick? Correct. So we know long term that that will happen, right? Because Bitcoin has programmatic monetary policy. So the block subsidy gets cut in half every four years, it's trending towards zero. So at some point, transaction fees will make up a larger chunk. And I think that's going to happen consistently during the next epoch. One, because the subsidy is dropping to 3.125 Bitcoin. And over the past
Starting point is 00:11:24 few months, we've already seen periods in which fees are higher than that 3.125. Now we've even seen fees in certain individual blocks be higher than the 6.25 current block subsidy. That hasn't lasted long enough to manifest in when you're looking at any sort of moving averages, but it's been one or two blocks here or there. And the inscriptions and ordinal stuff, it could be argued that it's just a craze and it's going away. But I think it points to a more broader idea, which is what happens when demand for block space increases, even just on the margin, because there's only four megabytes worth of data that can be squeezed into each Bitcoin block. So if we get this massive wave of adoption that we're all sort of expecting to happen
Starting point is 00:12:04 in the next cycle, then block space isn't getting any bigger and transaction fees function like an auction, right? So if you want your transaction in the next block, you have to bid a higher transaction fee than everybody else on the network to incentivize miners to include your transaction over the others. And so I think we see fees really make a powerful move up. And another point on that is layer twos like Lightning are not in the position right now to really service the demand that's going to come in. So layer one is still going to be the dominant method of transacting Bitcoin in the sort of short to medium term. And so as a result, fees are going to skyrocket. And I think that's really a dark horse when you're looking at
Starting point is 00:12:42 Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin mining profitability, because a lot of people, they anticipate as the block subsidy goes down, it's going to be less profitable to mine Bitcoin. But I actually think we're still entering the golden years, especially given the surge of demand that's going to push up transaction fees. You mentioned the Lightning Network. A lot of critics would say that the Lightning Network doesn't work and it never reached its full potential or the promise of Lightning. How do you evaluate it? I would say just lower your time horizon, right? Today, as we're recording this, it's Bitcoin's 15th birthday, and we've already seen nation-state adoption. We've seen the network process, trillions and trillions of transactions. We've
Starting point is 00:13:17 seen the market cap go over 1 trillion at one point. It's done a lot in 15 years, but that's only 15 years. Bitcoin wouldn't even be old enough to have a driver's license. So if we sort of extrapolate out over the next 15 years, a lot can change. And Lightning is still pretty young, I wouldn't say it doesn't work. It works if I'm going to send you a few bucks. If I was trying to send you $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, that's going to be a challenge for it. But you just have to lower your time horizon. There's going to be other layers, other layer twos besides lightning, things that we can't even comprehend. And as Bitcoin's market cap grows, the financial incentive for developers to put all their focus into Bitcoin scaling solutions is going to
Starting point is 00:13:55 increase. So if Bitcoin's a $100 trillion asset, all the brightest minds in the world, especially from a developer and coding standpoint, they're going to be working on fixing these problems. When you see the block subsidy going to get cut down here, you talk also about mining hash rate will continue to rise, difficulty will continue to rise, and you're going to get that block subsidy cut in half. So are miners screwed? Will they not get enough transaction revenue to make up for the lost mining revenue? Or how are you all thinking about minor revenue over the next three to four years? I would say quite the opposite, right? So first and foremost, the biggest determinant of minor revenue is the Bitcoin price. So all of these sort of models and projections can get
Starting point is 00:14:36 thrown out the window if Bitcoin rips and goes well into the six figures. But let's imagine that Bitcoin is still at the same price it's at now going into the halving. A bulk of the hash rate comes from these publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies with the most efficient machines and low power costs. So even the subsidy getting cut in half, they're not necessarily going to have to unplug their machines. And in the 2020 halving, we saw a slight drop in difficulty. We saw two consecutive negative adjustments, but they were fairly insignificant and difficulty recovered quite quickly after that. And especially given the bull run we've had in hash price over the last year due to the transaction fees and the Bitcoin price going up, I think the golden years
Starting point is 00:15:16 for mining is definitely in front of us. And a key point to make as well is that I don't think hash rate will grow at the same rate it did in 2023. So we saw hash rate more than double in 2023. And the reason for that is a lot of the investment that was made into Bitcoin mining during the bull market, it takes time to get online because these ASICs have to get manufactured. They have to get sent over to the United States. Energy sources have to be created. Physical infrastructure has to get built. So there's a lag. And during 2023, since the price was low for much of the year, not as much investment was made into mining. So we're not going to see that lagged growth in hash rate. And a second point there is that the new generation ASICs are about
Starting point is 00:15:58 to hit the market, right? You've got the Bitmain, their S21, and then what's mine are the M60. But infrastructure kind of remains the scarcity, right? There's a premium for rack space, physical spots to plug in these machines. So it's not going to be a net increase in hash rate. A lot of the mid-generation machines are going to have to get unplugged to make room for these new generation machines. So I still think hash rate goes up, but I don't think it goes up quite as significantly as it did in 2023. And I certainly don't think it'll be able to keep up with the way price will increase. Because if you think about it, price can go up 50% in a couple of days for hash rate to make the same sort of move, that takes months because literally it's in the
Starting point is 00:16:40 physical world, right? It can't go up at quite the same rate. And that's really what bodes well for miners. So the miners that are already plugged in right now, they'll get to benefit from the increase in price before hash rate sort of catches up there. How do you think about mining hardware at the moment? And it seems like there's a bunch of different kind of optimizations. There's new hardware coming out. There's a company called Auradyne that we've worked with before that does a lot around like software management. What do you see there from an innovation standpoint? Yeah, there's a ton of interesting innovations going on.
Starting point is 00:17:10 So the strategy sort of during the bear market, you want to maximize energy efficiency. So when you look at Bitcoin mining hardware, there's two metrics to measure their performance. There's terahash per second. So how many hashes is this machine producing? And then there's joules or watts per terahash. So how much energy is it consuming to produce those hashes? So the second one there is the most important because that measures your cost. And what we've sort of seen the trend is each new generation ASIC, it's more efficient, right?
Starting point is 00:17:39 It has better watts per terahash than the previous machine, but only by a marginal amount. So in the early days of ASICs, when we were just sort of figuring these out, and they're very brand new, each new machine basically made the previous one obsolete because it would be orders of magnitude more energy efficient. But we're seeing the trend diminish there, right? So the Antminer S21 is 17.5 joules per terahash. Well, the XP was 21.5 joules per terahash. So it's better, but it's not so much better that the XP is just going to be completely obsolete. And so what the net effect of that is, is these machines are having a much longer usable lifespan. And then moreover, the sort of older and mid
Starting point is 00:18:21 generation machines, they can get resold onto the secondary market. And what you tend to see is they get sort of migrated to the lowest energy costs. So if you're paying 10 cents per kilowatt hour, you need the most energy efficient machine. But if you have one cent per kilowatt hour, or if you have free energy that would otherwise get wasted, even if there's negative price energy, then you can mine with an S9. And it almost makes more sense because you can have a lower capital expense. And because on the margin, you're making bigger profit margins, you can get away with using those lower efficiency machines. Robert Leonard Now, as we see mining and a lot of public companies there continue to invest and build out
Starting point is 00:19:00 all types of infrastructure. In this report that you guys recently released, you also talked about the ETF is going to send Bitcoin to a new all-time high. I disagree with that. Why do you think that the ETF is enough to get it to an all-time high versus probably what my belief would be is you're going to get the ETF plus the halving plus interest rate cuts. And it's like the culmination of those three things gets us there, not just the ETF alone. I would agree with that. I think there's a storm of factors. And a lot of people, they say, so you got one campaign of people argue that Bitcoin halving is a bullish catalyst. Other people say it's monetary liquidity cycles. And I would agree it's the combination of all of them. I would say the number one catalyst though,
Starting point is 00:19:41 is the hodl waves that we've mentioned earlier. So the supply getting held by extremely convicted Bitcoiners who are unwilling to sell, and then all the other factors just sort of multiply on top of that. So when 72% of the Bitcoin hasn't moved in at least one year, and that number continues to rise. Then you throw in the halving. Then you throw in the likely quantitative easing and stimulus that we're going to get in 2024, rate cuts. And then you throw in the marginal new demand from the ETF. I think that's what pushes us to an all-time high. Now, granted, the dark horse is how much demand truly comes in from the ETF. Because when you look at the market cap of Bitcoin, it's less than $1 trillion. But the global bond market
Starting point is 00:20:24 the global stock market that's hundreds of trillions of dollars so it really only takes a sliver of that to send bitcoin soaring because even if you break down bitcoin you know the 30 that has moved in a year what's the market cap of that it's a lot lower than the 850 billion of the total market cap right so it it really only takes a sliver of global assets redirecting from equities and bonds to bitcoin for price to just absolutely go parabolic talk about utxo management Right. So as Bitcoin transitions from a low fee environment to structurally higher fees, you have to optimize for UTXOs. And if you've been sort of doing the right thing, people will tell you to dollar cost averaging to Bitcoin and take self-custody off the exchange. If you've been
Starting point is 00:21:10 doing that regularly, you're going to have a bunch of UTXOs. So UTXOs, it stands for unspent transaction output, and it's essentially a chunk of Bitcoin. A good way to think about it is if you have $100 in your wallet, you could have one $100 bill, or you could have a combination of fives, tens, twenties, et cetera. And how Bitcoin works is the fee you pay is not based on the amount of Bitcoin that you send, but rather the amount of data in that transaction. So if you have a bunch of UTXOs as an input, it's going to cost more to get your transaction into the block, right? So it's like if you spend the $100 bill, that costs less than if you spend 10, $10 bills. So what you can do is you can basically send your Bitcoin to yourself and it does what's
Starting point is 00:21:54 called a UTXO consolidation. You take all those inputs and you convert them into a single output. Now, the caveat there is you lose a little bit of privacy, right? So for example, if you were going to the grocery store and instead of paying just with a $20 bill, you gave them a check for like $20,000 and then they sent cash back, you don't necessarily want the other side of that transaction, knowing how much Bitcoin you have, right? So if I was going to send you a fraction of a Bitcoin and I used a 10 Bitcoin UTXO, you can look on chain and see that I have that 10 Bitcoin and I might not want you to be privy to that information.
Starting point is 00:22:29 And any sort of analyst can go through the Bitcoin blockchain and see the history of UTXOs and all that. So it's a balance between fee optimization and privacy. What do you think people will end up choosing? I think a good mix of different size UTXOs is optimal. So a good rule of thumb is don't have any UTXOs smaller than 1 million SATs, so 1% of a Bitcoin. And it all sort of depends on your unique position and where you are, how much Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:22:59 you have. And I think, yeah, keep a minimum of 1 million SAT UTXOs, but then just have a different mixture, right? So maybe have one really large, maybe have half your stash in one UTXO, maybe have some medium-sized UTXOs and then some smaller ones. And if up to this point, you haven't done any UTXO management, you don't label your addresses, you have no idea who sent you Bitcoin, where your UTXOs are all scattered, I don't think it's a terrible idea to just send them all to one. And then you can sort of deal with the privacy aspect at a later date. And then just going
Starting point is 00:23:32 forward, your future dollar cost averages, definitely keep track of those UTXOs and manage them. And this might get me crucified from some of the Bitcoin maximalists, but if you send all your UTXOs to one, and let's say you want to do a transaction, you want to be private, just send a little bit to an exchange and then send it back to yourself because they're not going to be able to track through the exchange addresses because there's so many different inputs and outputs and then see your original stash. So yeah, the exchange, they'll know how much Bitcoin you have, but is that really a nightmare? If Coinbase knows about your 0.4 Bitcoin or whatever, if you're some retail guy, that doesn't matter on their radar because they're
Starting point is 00:24:09 dealing with really big whales. So that's a good way to do that. If you want to just consolidate to one, send a little bit to the exchange and then withdraw, and then you'll have a smaller chunk that you can send to someone else. So we've seen the miners outperform Bitcoin. We've seen Coinbase outperform Bitcoin. We've even seen GBTC outperform Bitcoin, MicroStrategy has outperformed Bitcoin, all in 2023. Do you anticipate the underlying asset of Bitcoin to lag the performance of some of these other public companies or kind of public exposure? Or do you actually expect maybe Bitcoin will be the outperformer? How do you look at the comparison? It's an interesting question. I think it has the potential to outperform, right? If
Starting point is 00:24:53 these spot ETFs are the main driver, I think that'll push spot Bitcoin up much higher. But then again, the market caps of these other assets don't need as much capital to send them soaring. I think fundamentally, what you want is you want Bitcoin in cold storage, right? Number go up is cool and Bitcoin increasing and purchasing power is cool. But the true revelation here is having an asset that nobody can seize from you. So when you hold your own private keys to Bitcoin, you can take that wealth with you anywhere in the world. And that's truly the innovation here.
Starting point is 00:25:24 And if you hold MicroStrategy stock, if you hold public miner stocks, if you hold GBTC, you don't have that benefit. And I think fundamentally, I'm a little tinfoil hattie. So I think the government could do some shady stuff, take people's assets or whatever. It's not unreasonable to think that. In the 1930s, we saw Executive Order 6102, gold got seized. That was in vaults. I don't think it's unreasonable if we went down sort of a more totalitarian route, which
Starting point is 00:25:52 I don't think it's likely, but it could happen. You're going to want spot Bitcoin in cold storage. You're not going to want these other assets. And on the flip side of that, you're sort of gambling in a sense when you buy those other assets because yeah, they may outperform Bitcoin in the short term, but over the long term, you see everything trends to zero against Bitcoin, even Bitcoin exposed assets. What are areas that you're most excited about that other people aren't talking about going into 2024?
Starting point is 00:26:20 Definitely mining. I mean, I think if Bitcoin really goes from, what's it at, $44,000 now to a million dollar asset, there's just a huge opportunity there because you can produce Bitcoin for an electricity bill rather than having to buy it on the spot market. And a good framework to think about it is if you want to lock in a certain price that you're acquiring Bitcoin, right? So if it costs you $20,000 worth of electricity to buy Bitcoin, and it costs $40,000 to buy it on exchange, that's a pretty big opportunity right there. Now let's say it costs $20,000 to produce a Bitcoin, but it costs $100,000 to buy it on exchange. That miner you have is also going to appreciate
Starting point is 00:26:59 in value alongside Bitcoin, right? So it's not just about consistently mining to pay off your capital expense. The capital you put into the ASIC is likely going to increase as well. And that's what we've seen during past bull markets. Got it. And then what are the areas that maybe you think are overhyped areas that people are really excited about, but you think people, they shouldn't be paying as much attention to? I would definitely say like ordinals and inscriptions. I think that's more of kind of a craze, but it is telling to what can happen to the fee market. If you're buying one sat for multiple sats, I think that's likely a bad trade and you're sort of speculating. I will caveat that. If you could buy the original inscription,
Starting point is 00:27:41 what was it? The Times Chancellors on the Brink of Bailouts for Banks, that would be pretty cool. And that would likely actually retain value in the future, right? Because when you think about art in general, you want the Mona Lisa. You don't want my five-year-old niece's handwritten copy of the Mona Lisa. It's the true scarce art that maintains value. And you could sort of, I would think of UTXOs in the same way. So truly special UTXOs like that one from the Genesis block, you're still speculating when you buy it, but I think it's a more wise speculation than just sort of buying some random picture of a monkey that happens to be inscribed on the blockchain. That makes sense. When you look at the sentiment online, it was really bad at the end of 2022,
Starting point is 00:28:23 going into 2023, it seems like now maybe we've almost completely reversed it and people are like ultra bullish. And I even see, you know, leverage picking up in the system and people are just like up only. What is your thought process around kind of maybe the crypto community and Bitcoin specifically being able to actually understand, like, are we in an up or a down cycle? Right. I think it's important to remember that we do kind of exist in a bubble on the internet. I try to gauge sentiment based on people that aren't fully immersed into the Bitcoin world. So I talk to my cousins or my friends and gauge where they see Bitcoin, because at the end of 2021, they're all coming to me, calling me, asking me, what's this NFT thing? What is this?
Starting point is 00:29:08 That's when I know the market's getting a bit overheated. And right now, I've barely received any sort of input or inquiries from people outside the Bitcoin community. I've had one person reach out to me, but he works in traditional finance. So it's not necessarily a surprise. He's sort of looking at these things. But the broader landscape of people who just head down and focus on their job, they're not really interested in Bitcoin or markets in general. Bitcoin is still not on their radar. I don't think many of them even realize how well Bitcoin performed in 2023. They've still got a sour taste in their mouth from 2022 and what happened throughout that year. So I think that's a better way to gauge sentiment because Bitcoin is always going to be bullish.
Starting point is 00:29:48 There was peak fear at the bottom of the bear market, but generally speaking, Bitcoiners are pretty optimistic and bullish about the future. And yeah, so I just try to look at sort of the normie landscape when gauging sentiment. That makes sense. Where can people find you online or find out more about Blockware? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Mitchell Hoddle. And I have a podcast and a newsletter through my company, Blockware Solutions. If you want to find more about Blockware, go to Blockware's website. We have a cool marketplace where you can buy Bitcoin ASICs through the Bitcoin network and
Starting point is 00:30:19 it's turnkey. So as soon as your transaction is confirmed on chain, you're hashing right away. All right. I appreciate it. I learn something every time we talk and we definitely do this again in the future in the bull market, my friend. Yes, sir. Thank you, Pop.

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