The Pomp Podcast - #702 Bitcoin Will Protect Institutions From Economic Collapse w/ Greg Foss
Episode Date: October 27, 2021Greg Foss is the CFO and Bitcoin Strategist at Validus Power Corp. He has spent over 30 years of his career in various credit markets, where he has managed hundreds of millions of dollars. In this ...conversation, we discuss bitcoin, negative yielding bonds, institutional asset allocation, pricing energy in bitcoin, and why $2 million is Greg’s big number. ======================= My friends at Coin Cloud will give you $50 in FREE Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any of their 4,000+ machines. Use promo code POMP to get your free Bitcoin. For details or to find your nearest Coin Cloud machine, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp Coin Cloud has been serving customers since 2014 and has established itself as the world's leading digital currency machine (DCM) operator. More than just a Bitcoin ATM, Coin Cloud machines make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin and 30+ other digital assets with cash. To get your $50 in free Bitcoin, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= AG1 by Athletic Greens, the category-leading superfood product, brings comprehensive and convenient daily nutrition to everybody. Keeping up with the research, knowing what to do, and taking a bunch of pills and capsules is hard on the stomach and hard to keep up with. To help each of us be at our best, they simplify the path to better nutrition by giving you the one thing with all the best things. ONE scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food-sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multimineral, probiotic, greens superfood blend and more in one convenient daily serving. The special blend of high-quality, bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of AG1 work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet, support energy and focus, aid with gut health and digestion, and support a healthy immune system, - effectively replacing multiple products or pills with one healthy, delicious drink. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com/pomp today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. =======================
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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.
Greg Foss is the CFO and Bitcoin strategist at Validus Power Corporation. He has spent
over 30 years of his career in various credit markets where he has managed hundreds of millions
of dollars. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, negative yielding bonds, institutional
asset allocation, pricing energy in Bitcoin, and why $2 million is Greg's big number.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well.
Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.
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multivitamin multi-mineral probiotic green superfood blend and more in one convenient
daily serving the special blend of high quality bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of ag1 work
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digestion and support a healthy immune system effectively replacing multiple products or pills
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hot all right let's get this episode with greg i hope you guys enjoy this one 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. Real quick, before we get into everything,
remind everyone kind of your background and the perspective you're coming at it when you
look at Bitcoin bonds in the financial markets? Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me.
I'm a 32-year veteran of the hedge fund industry and institutional managing money for institutional
clients. I retired from that business in 2016. Subsequent to that, you brought up Cathie Wood.
I met Cathie as we co-invested in a company in Canada. It brought Canada's first Bitcoin-listed
closed end fund to the Toronto Stock Exchange. I've been involved in Bitcoin since 2016. I
believe it's the best asymmetric risk return trade I've ever seen in 30 plus years of managing risk.
Yeah, I come at it from a credit perspective. Again, I believe credit is the most important
market in the world. It is the dog and equity is the tail. And if you don't understand what's
happening in the dog, that tail gets whipped around pretty hard and lots of people get used
as cannon fodder. So congrats to Cathie Wood's Tesla call. Congrats to Elon Musk, who's half
Canadian and looking forward to having a good talk today. Awesome. Let's start first with the
problem in the credit markets. There are a ton of fixed income assets and other types of credit
assets that appear to not be doing so well. But given that the investment mandates that people
have had over the last couple of decades in this 60-40 type portfolio. They're very, very heavy
on bonds and various credit assets. But now that we have higher levels of inflation over 5% CPI,
many of those assets are actually producing very low returns or even negative yielding on a real
return basis. So maybe just outline for us, how big is this problem when we think of the credit
markets? Yeah, great question. So first of all, total global credit is $400 trillion.
OK, that dwarfs the equity market, which is approximately 100 trillion U.S. dollars.
So you can see why you need to understand and you need to understand what's happening in the dog, because it's just a much bigger market.
It's traded by very sophisticated institutions.
But within that market, you know, we have government debt.
We have municipalities, states.
We have corporations.
We have junk bonds.
We have structured product.
It's a it's a big animal. And in various parts of that animal, there's some weird things happening.
So let's start with one of the most weird things. There is over 15 trillion dollars of negative yielding bonds in the world.
Now, they're mostly sovereign bonds, but there are a few corporate bonds in Europe that they have negative yield,
which means the buyer of that bond is actually going to lose money by investing in that bond if they hold that bond to maturity.
A lot of them will say, well, I'm smarter than the market and I'm going to buy it now in anticipation of yields going even more negative.
And therefore, there's a price gain in those bonds. But that's like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Right.
It's a dumb, dumb investment policy. But many of these investment mandates have to own bonds.
So you mentioned the 60-40 traditional 60% equities, 40% bonds.
Those mandates were written, Pomp, when interest rates were at levels that you could make a
decent return.
So when I started trading bonds in the 1990s, well, late 80s, actually, US Treasury tenure
was double digits.
Now it's 1.6 something percent.
I mean, you got to understand that that's been a 40-year bull market in bonds.
And that is done because it's only mathematics.
You can't make excess returns over the contractual returns that are in bonds.
So first of all, you have these negative yielding bonds, which are not assets anymore.
They're actually liabilities.
So congratulations, you're investing in an asset that's actually going to cost you money.
Contractually, it will cost you money.
Well, that's $15 trillion of loser money right there.
Then you look at some of the bigger things that are going on.
So my expertise was formulated in the high-yield bond market.
High-yield bonds right now yield around 4%.
That's the Merrill Lynch high-yield index yields 4%.
And I need to point this out.
That 4% is before expected and unexpected default losses.
So you'll say, Foss, what are you talking about? I'll say very simply, look, high yield bonds have an expected component of default because over time, high yield bonds do default, not the whole industry, but a portion of it.
So there's an expected loss in that 4%. And then there's also what I call unexpected losses.
When you hit a recession, when you hit some sort of contagion, when there's a systemic risk to the market, you get unexpected losses.
So it could be idiosyncratic. I'm throwing out a lot of these technical jargon. At the end of the day, you are earning 4% before losses. So let's calculate some expected and unexpected losses in there and then account for inflation, which you correctly pointed out.
if you believe the CPI is accurate, you're earning negative return, real returns after
inflation and piddly nominal returns before expected and unexpected default losses. I've
never seen a worse risk return potential for fixed income in my 32 years. And I'm going to
add one thing, and this is the kicker. If CPI was actually measured the same way as the original
formula in 1980, CPI would be 14%, not 5%. Wow. 14%, Pom. We talked yesterday about the difference
between the cost of goods index and the cost of living index and how the numbers have been
manipulated. So to hear that the old way to calculate inflation would be over 14% is pretty
powerful. When you combine that with all of this negative yielding debt, one of my questions is
just what is the event that ends that entire part of the financial industry? And how long do we have
until we get that to essentially blow up? Right. And I don't think anyone's cheering for it to
happen, but the writing's on the wall. So how long do we have? And then what is that catalyst
that ultimately blows it up, do you think? So great questions. Look, you never know for
certain. I will say there's a favorite term I had in trading risk. Risk happens fast. You never
think it's going to happen. And then all of a sudden, it's all over you. But to be clear,
I agree with you. I do not want this to happen. And I don't want it to happen fast. I believe
in the long run, it will eventually happen. But what happens? What are the events? Well,
let's be honest. The United States currency as global reserve currency today will be the last
fiat currency to fail. OK, that's just how it works. You can look in the credit default swap
market. You understand that the U.S. Treasury market is the biggest, the most liquid. It's
got the most staying power. But what happens in credit markets is this thing called contagion.
And what contagion essentially is, is what you've seen happen with Evergrande in China
and it percolating higher in the credit spectrum to where it's actually impacted
the credit default swap rate or the expected default probability of the country of China.
OK, now China's credit rating is single A, but it's the credit default swap market is telling
China, you know what, you're trading much closer to a triple B. You better get your acting gear,
kid, because you know what? A triple B credit is right on the cusp of being high yield or junk
And using the pejorative junk, I was a junk bond trader for many years. All it takes is a few downgrades into the junk spectrum and there's a cascade of selling. And this cascade of selling then causes contagion into other markets.
So China being the second largest economy in the world, if all of a sudden the debt markets say, you know what, China, you're sort of ugly, you're a junk bond borrower equivalent, they'll be contagion to other economies.
pop that it's, you know, even though, you know, China would be a G8 country, absolutely, it'd be
a G2 country, but it'll fall down the credit quality spectrum, something I call the risk
ladder, and it'll impact countries like, you know, Argentina, which is a G20 country, but it's
defaulted four times in my life already. Now, I'm not predicting that I want to see this contagion,
but that's what happens in credit markets. Okay. One guy seeks protection by shorting another
market. And that guy who's shorting that market causes a cascade of selling in that market.
And it's just like we saw in the great financial crisis. Okay. It starts to accelerate. The second
derivative is the most important. Okay. The acceleration of the change will cause,
am i saying this a u.s treasury bond auction to fail highly unlikely but what about a canada bond
auction failing oh and canada's a g7 okay so look i don't want this to happen and this is why we need
this parallel network we need to develop the bitcoin safety net we will have a bitcoin store
of value savings account and we will have a fiat currency checking account but don't save your money
in a fiat currency checking account. So when you think about all these pension funds and
financial institutions that are holding so many bonds, what happens when they all drop it? Is
that the acceleration you're talking about? Do they start to say, hey, look, there's, you know,
14% inflation based on the old calculation. There's 5% on the new calculation. I can't
possibly continue to hold these treasuries because I'm actually losing purchasing power
and not protecting my assets. I have a fiduciary kind of responsibility to protect these assets.
So I've got to get into some other asset. Does that just accelerate everything? Once one starts
to do it, they all start to do it? Yes and no. These are investment mandates that have been
written over time. There's investment policy committees. These things don't change on a
dime. Now, maybe the smart people are sitting there, much like the Houston Fire Department
or the guys in Chicago, if you haven't heard of them, the blue collar Bitcoin team that is
a bunch of first responders in Chicago who are very concerned that their pension plan owns a
certain number of fixed income securities because it's in their investment policy guideline. I mean,
if the pensioners rise up and say, what are you holding these things? You're guaranteed to lose
money on a real basis. Maybe it percolates to the investment policy committee. But remember,
these investment policy committees are dominated by people who want to cover their ass, right?
They don't want to make these decisions. What happens, though, is if one person, a big fund, let's say CPPIB in Canada or CalPERS in the United States says, you know what, this 60-40 model is pooched.
uh, I'm going to go 60, 20, and then 20 in alternative assets that do include a certain
amount of, uh, Bitcoin that really gets the ball rolling because it, it, it takes the, uh,
pressure off of the theory of agents. They call it, you know, as long as one of the big guys moves
in that direction, then I can cover my own, uh, investment policy decision. When you start to
think about the timeline for this to occur for them to all start trying to move a capital because
of this uh this mechanism is this a five year a 10 year or 15 year thing how long do you think it
takes yeah uh it's it's a process so some will move early and some will be the last and uh as
a canadian i can almost certainly guarantee you that the canadian knuckleheads will be uh one of
the last ones to move okay so that that pains me because you know canada we've sold all our in our
central bank we've sold all our gold uh canada does not have the safety net that the u.s does
we're not as big a country. Obviously, we don't have the vertically integrated and
horizontally integrated economies that you guys do. Listen, it happens because out of necessity.
Let's do some quick math. If CalPERS has a 8% return bogey and it's a 60-40 mix and 40% is in
bonds and those bonds to be generous are earning on average over their whole asset mix. Let's say
it's earning 3%, right? So 3% times 40%, that's 1.2% they're getting in their whole portfolio
from bonds. That means the 60% that's in equities has to earn the difference. 8 minus 1.2 is 6.8%.
6.8%. So 6.8% divided by 60% of the portfolio means equities have to return 10% forever going
forward in order for CalPERS to make their bogey. I don't know. Yeah, there are going to be some
good years, but over time, you don't hit that 10% bogey, especially when you're at all-time
highs in the S&P, which you just pointed out. So there's a lot of stuff going on. It's absolute
certainty, the mathematics of it, almost certainly unattainable. And if it is attainable, it's only
because the fiat currency is pooping the bed so bad that it appears that your equity markets are
actually going up when in fact, it's just the unit of account is going down, right?
So you and I, I think, see eye to eye in terms of Bitcoin being a way to protect a portion or
a material portion of a portfolio, whether it's from economic collapse or just high levels of
inflation, regardless of how severe you think the problem is, Bitcoin can serve as a piece of the
solution. It also can do that for an individual or an institutional investor. And so talk about
what are the properties of Bitcoin that you think protect that portfolio? And then how do you see
institutions starting to really flood into Bitcoin? Wow, man, I love your question. So
here's the cool thing. I've been trading risk for 30 years and every single asset class out there
is essentially short volatility, which means when vol explodes, equity vol is the best way to look
at the overall volatility in markets. When equity vol goes from its current sub-20% annualized level
and some catastrophe causes it to spike to 85% or even over 40%, markets cease to function.
when equity vol exceeds 30%. By that, I mean no new issuance comes to market. Markets are
collapsing and all of your assets are generally getting crushed. Why? Because you are short
volatility in those assets and volatility has just skyrocketed. So you're getting killed.
What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the quintessential long volatility asset. Okay. It means you own
insurance. It's the insurance against the system unraveling, which means more and more people will
begin to understand they need this asset in their portfolio because it hedges all the other exposure
they have, which is basically being short volatility. This is like owning options on
things exploding. Now, you don't like to think that things explode, but on a regular basis,
they do. OK, so my opinion is Bitcoin is credit default swap insurance on a basket of sovereign
currencies. The more that those currency and the credit quality of those currencies like China
deteriorate, the more intrinsic value you have in Bitcoin. Everybody needs that insurance.
Don't mess around with your fire insurance when you live in a fire zone. Own the insurance and
by God, don't sell that insurance once you see the fire coming down the mountain. You should
actually buy more. So Bitcoin is the perfect asset for everybody who needs insurance against
the inevitable unraveling of the fiat system. When you think about individuals, corporation
balance sheets and then institutions. Do you think of a kind of asset allocation differently
for those three buckets or is it all a portfolio and they should all think about it similarly?
Yeah, I do actually believe they should all. There's no difference, right? I mean,
if you're managing your own money, your incentive is to achieve high Sharpe ratios to get
better risk adjusted returns. Measuring measuring risk is is as much a subjective as it is or
it's a qualitative exercise as much as a quantitative exercise. Every single asset
allocator out there needs to do their homework on Bitcoin. Because just like myself in 2016,
my first thought was, oh, Bitcoin has to be a Ponzi. The reality, though, is you do some work,
you see the blockchain in action, you see the beauty of math and code and decentralization,
And you're like, my God, this is something I've been searching for for 30 years. Why? Because the real Ponzi is the fiat. The fiat currency has consistently been bailed out by Fed printing and quantitative easing. Now, that's the exact definition of what a Ponzi is. Bitcoin is not the Ponzi. Bitcoin is the solution.
And again, you got to have two parallel networks. I like talking with Jeff Booth about this. We don't want it to happen quickly, but we both believe over time it is inevitable and you need to start this network transfer.
And when you do a network transfer, as you know, you don't turn one network right off. You transfer the network over time.
I think we have five years, Pop. But in Jeff Booth's words, we are going to see 100 years of change in the next 10 years. So who knows?
How do you think about your portfolio? What's your portfolio allocation? How do you think about Bitcoin versus everything else?
I own about 40% exposure to Bitcoin, but that's because when I first got into it, it was smaller and that little nugget has grown.
But I also have other hard assets. I need to be honest. I've never gone all in on one asset. Why? That's not the way I manage risk. I believe that my price target for Bitcoin and here's a neat segue. I love the guy you had on earlier, Colton. So he 250. I think he's meant 250. Right. That's his year end price target. I'm not up to the to the kids, the kids talking, you know, 250.
but if he's 250, my long-term price target on Bitcoin is over $2 million in today's dollars
of Bitcoin. I'm going to be just fine. I don't need to go all in for my portfolio to go where
I think it's going to go. That being said, I mentioned to you, I own hard, other hard assets.
Why? Well, I own real estate because I have a house that I live in and I have other real estate
investments. I do own gold. Oh, God forbid you own gold. Fox, what are you a knucklehead? No,
you know what? I love Larry Leopard. Lawrence Leopard is a beautiful guy who knows how to
manage risk. And we both think about risk the same way. OK, sometimes when Bitcoin is getting
crushed, you can sell some of your gold and buy some Bitcoin and you can trade that delta all
the time if you're a trader like I am and Larry is. I also own silver, but I don't own any bonds.
absolutely don't own any bonds. And in fact, I would encourage people, if you are not
properly levered, you're supposed to go out and borrow money, provided you are not excessively
leveraging yourself and borrow money at historically low levels and invest in these
hard assets. So what does that mean? Don't run to pay down your mortgage. Actually, make sure
you're fully levered to your mortgage and take that money and put it in other hard assets. Why?
I don't know. Just because interest rates are the lowest they've ever been in history. So you're supposed to take advantage of that. So, you know, manage your own personal portfolio like you would manage a hedge fund or a company or Michael Saylor. Look, the guy is rewriting capital markets and he didn't just fall off the turnip truck. That's for sure.
But he certainly understands when people are throwing money at him on a contractual basis that he can easily meet with free cash flow from his company.
Yes, I'll take that and I'll put it into Bitcoin.
Brilliance.
I've got two of my brothers here with you.
What questions you guys got?
Hey, Greg, that was hilarious, by the way, the 250.
That was great.
So you mentioned that you believe Bitcoin will eventually be at or greater than $2 million per Bitcoin in U.S. dollar terms.
My question would just be, how do we get there?
You know, the chart that Pomp was showing, right?
That's cool.
Like Bitcoin's moving up on the, it's too, it is now too important an asset for most
of the world to ignore the investing or asset allocating world.
And very simply, total global assets are 900 trillion US dollars.
So just do some sensitivity analysis if Bitcoin captures X percent of that market.
What does that equal? 900 trillion means it's 900 times the size of Tesla. So that means there's an awful lot of money out there in other assets like real estate, like bonds, fixed income, like commodities, currencies, fixed, sorry, fine art. You got it. Equities, I mentioned 100 trillion.
Bitcoin's going to eat a portion of all those assets.
The biggest one it should be eating right now is the bond market because it's the most
mispriced.
But over time, if you get 5% of $900 trillion, that's $45 trillion in today's dollars.
What's $45 trillion divided by $21 million?
There's your $2 million price target.
John, what questions you got?
Yeah.
Hey, Greg.
Nice to see you again.
Hi, guys.
Can you just talk about why aren't you 100% allocated to Bitcoin if you see that $2 million
price going, right? So it's $2 million is about a 33X from here. Great question. Listen, man,
I got to put a probability on it though. I'm not 100% certain, right? I mean, I'm highly confident
and this is where I'm going to use some math to back out how if I was going to the racetrack,
how I would play this, okay? So I've been studying this pony. This pony is the most
beautiful pony that i've ever seen in my life i've watched it run in kentucky uh you know in
the kentucky farmland it absolutely rock and rolls okay and i think this pony has a chance of winning
the kentucky derby the problem is i go to the race store it's not the problem i say in my head i think
this guy has a 25 to 1 chance of winning okay i go to kentucky derby and the odds makers which is
basically the guys that are taking all the bets say it's 101 odds i'm like these guys haven't
done their homework. They haven't been sitting there watching this guy go around the track,
watching tradeblock.com. They haven't seen this. So they're laying 101 odds, and I think it's 25
to 1 odds. Sold to me, sold to me. And imagine I had so much money that I could impact the amount
of bets so that it would go from 101 odds down to my target of 25 to 1. That's how much money I
would lay on it where I was getting an expected return based on the risk. So backing that analogy
out of what the high, excuse me, what the Bitcoin market is, odds of me getting my price target
right now is if it's at 60,000 US a coin today, that's effectively telling me that there's the
the market only sees a 3% chance of it getting to my $2 million price target, right? 3% times
$2 million is $60,000. Look, I'm not 100% certain, but I'm way more than 3% certain it's going to my
price target. In other words, if I had all the money in the world and I thought it was at least
a 20% chance that it was going to my $2 million price target, I would be buying Bitcoin and making
the price of Bitcoin go up until it was at $400,000 of Bitcoin today. Then I would sit back
and I'd say, I've laid my bet. And that's a pretty big ass bet, isn't it? I don't have that much
money. So that's why I don't put all of my money into it because I'm not 100% certain. But do I
continue to buy it when it's anything less than $400,000? Of course I do. But I don't have the
ability to put everything all in one, in one, uh, uh, on one bet. Why? Well, I got three kids.
I got to pay expenses. I got other real estate assets. I'm supposed to be retired, but I'm
actually working in a pretty exciting company. That's, uh, actually that, you know, providing
electricity to Bitcoin miners, all that to be said, I've never managed risk by going all in
on one bet and i won't do it now appreciate that greg one of the things that's uh uh just blowing
me away right now while we've been on this conversation uh the news just broke that the
fdic chairman said that the banks and the oversight of fdic are working to come up with a framework
so that banks can hold bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and also trying to figure out how they would use
it as collateral hold it on the balance sheet etc holy moly holy moly seriously i swear and this is
a real headline, right? This is what this is. Reuters put it out, not TMZ. So what's your
thought process in terms of U.S. banks if they start to hold Bitcoin and use it as actual
collateral? It's the it's the pristine collateral of the world. Like that is why I think the U.S.
has been served up a gift by China, by China pushing Bitcoin mining to the Western
countries this is a gift for me and my children and for you and your i know you don't have kids
i i don't think you do but anyway at the end of the day your future kids right this is why we need
to take this gift and embrace it because you will have a store of value pristine
savings account and you will still have the u.s dollar reserve currency or checking account
for the world. And together, these dual networks will allow the U.S. to remain supreme freedom and
it will be a supreme economy of a global economy. This is what the world needs. This is certainly
what Canada needs. Canada needs the U.S. because we're your second largest trading partner and you
are our most important trading partner. I need that for my kids. So I love the USA. I don't ever
want it to fail. This is good for business. It's even better for freedom. And I just want to
summarize with one thing here. I do believe there will be a time when energy, oil, and natural gas
is priced in Bitcoin. I think Vlad Putin is thinking of that right now. And to do that,
he's basically think, how does he get out of the petrodollar? He doesn't want to hold US
treasuries in reserve. Those are fiat contracts that are programmed to debase. What if he took
Bitcoin in payment for his energy? Wow. Then he's starting to build up a reserve of the most
pristine collateral ever. Digital energy being paid for natural resource energy. I think it's
inevitable. I'm an engineer like Saylor. I'm just playing the odds. And then if that happens,
5% of 200 or of 900 trillion quickly becomes 20% of 200 trillion. And all of a sudden my price
target for Bitcoin isn't 2 million. It's something like 20 million a coin. Play the odds guys. This
is the racetrack. This is how you manage risk. Talk to me about how energy gets priced in
Bitcoin. Like what would that sequentially look like? All it takes is one of the big
non-OPEC guys like Russia to just say, hey, why don't you start paying me in Bitcoin world?
You can either pay me in Bitcoin or you can pay me in the US dollars and I'm going to buy Bitcoin,
but it'll be, here's my price of oil in US dollars and here's my price of oil in Bitcoin.
And what if it's a 10% discount to get it in Bitcoin? I don't know, pretty smart people in
the world will say, well, okay, here's your Bitcoin, Vlad. And then all of a sudden it
becomes a basis where there is a market much like, you know, you have Brent North Sea Oil trading
against West Texas crude. It's different markets trade on different at different prices for
different reasons. And again, as an engineer, why wouldn't it be that way? Why would you be selling
beautiful natural resource energy for useless fiat dollars in the long term? Fiat is very valuable in
the short term. What does it do? It facilitates international trade. It eliminates the need to
barter. But what it is not good at is storing value over time and space. That is what Bitcoin
is. So it just takes a step away. Listen, I tend to think that you understand this pretty well.
And I think that you're more right than wrong on a lot of this stuff. And without disclosing too
much. I've seen a number of very large companies say, well, if we bought some of this and then we
priced our goods or services in it, that would probably have a material impact and would lead
to our balance sheet growing. And I think you see that, you know, Tesla is kind of the elementary
example where, hey, if we accept this for payments and then we also put it on our balance sheet
and the price goes up, that our balance sheet expands and we're acquiring more of it from
customers, that could be pretty interesting. And so we'll see how this all plays out. But
but it's absolutely fascinating to kind of watch it.
Where can we send people to find you on the internet
if they've got more questions or want to follow along
as you keep talking about a lot of this stuff?
Sure, I guess my best platform is Twitter.
I've just sort of found it.
I met Foss, Greg Foss, there's me.
That's actually my granddad in World War I
beside his fighter plane.
So yeah, my granddad would have been a Bitcoiner.
I just want to take this chance to shout out
all the great work you're doing, Pomp,
and talking yesterday about the Lightning Network
and how it exceeded everything.
I'm in touch with Jose Lemus from Ibex Mercado in El Salvador.
I love the guy.
I've made a commitment for a personal investment in his company.
They are doing unbelievable things for a country, okay?
This is good when companies get involved,
but now countries are leapfrogging companies.
Come on, USA.
You know, you guys in your PGA or your Ryder Cup,
USA, USA, USA. Come on, USA. Embrace Bitcoin. The world needs it. Thank you.
I tend to think so. If you weren't Canadian, I'd tell you to run for U.S. president, my friend.
We ate on that note. I gave a presentation to 45 members of parliament in Canada on Bitcoin.
Not every single political party is asleep at the wheel in Canada. OK, 45 members of parliament
led by a good Canadian, Pierre Poilievre, okay?
He understands Bitcoin, he owns Bitcoin,
and he is challenging Canadians to do more work
on this pristine asset.
So well done, both sides of the border.
This is a process, but it's only 12 years old
and it's the fastest entity to achieve
a $1 trillion market cap in history.
And it is going higher, it's only mathematics.
You guys got any last ideas, thoughts, comments, concerns, complaints?
No, I like, I like Greg's energy and the 2 million price target.
I heard 20 million. Just, I'm just saying.
Here's the funny thing.
It's got to get through 400,000 before it gets there too. Right, boys.
So lots of, lots of work to be done. Okay. This is a,
this is a learning process and your platform is teaching an awful lot of
people, some really good stuff.
So I appreciate you having me and I look forward to our next chat.
Sounds good, buddy. Talk soon.
Thank you.
