The Pomp Podcast - Why Isn’t Bitcoin Pumping While Gold Soars? | Jeff Park

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Jeff Park is a Partner and Chief Investing Officer of ProCap BTC. In this conversation, we go on a global tour — from Argentina to China to London and back to the US — breaking down what’s happening in different economies, why the US dollar, gold, bitcoin, and global swap lines all matter right now. We also discuss market sentiment, bitcoin’s recent price action compared to gold, and whether investors should actually be worried.======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.======================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro1:59 – Argentina’s economy and dollar swap lines8:13 – Why the US is buying pesos before bitcoin11:45 – Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset13:39 – China’s trade war and capital flows18:43 – Lessons from the Bank of England and gold’s staying power24:05 – How bitcoin could follow gold’s path28:03 – Founding of America and monetary history31:37 – Market sentiment and crypto disappointment33:47 – Bitcoin adoption and trade-offs

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Insurance operations today are fragmented, and policyholders expect more. That's why leading insurers run on Adyen.

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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. 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. I think this is exactly the environment that I thought we would be in Q4 where Bitcoin would be unabashedly

ripping. It just turns out gold is. And so the question is, why is Bitcoin not participating? The conditions are all there. There's a rate cut cycle coming. Global liquidity has never looked better. Institutional adoption is strong. The conduits have been built. I don't think you could have expected or wanted a better outcome. And yet it's lagging. And at this time, gold is sucking all the air out of their room. And the more I think about it, there's really two things. One is. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Jeff Park. Jeff is the chief investment officer at ProCap BTC. And in this conversation, we take a little bit of a macro world tour. We go from Argentina to China and to London and then back here to the United States.

Talk about what's going on in all these different environments. Why the U.S. dollar, gold, Bitcoin and swap lines are something to pay attention to. And then we talk about sentiment and why people are so frustrated online about Bitcoin's price going down and not keeping pace with gold and whether people should be worried or not. All that and more in today's conversation with Jeff Bark. All right, Jeff, I thought a great place to start the conversation is there's a ton of stuff happening in the macro environment. We see Argentina, we see China, you recently went to London. So I figured we could just kind of go around the world, maybe start with Argentina and how the macro developments both for the U.S. economy are impacting Bitcoin and teaching us

maybe a little bit about money, central banking and what's going on in the future of finance. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do a world tour. Argentina is fascinating because it is an example of how dollar hegemony can also be weaponized to lead to political outcomes by the will of the kind of national sovereignty of a mission. And so I think a lot of Americans are kind of looking at what's happening in Argentina with some uncertainty as to, one, like, is this good for me because I live in this country? And why are we not getting domestic funding for our needs when the U.S. government is shut down and they're being war waged with financial warfare across the world? And two, like, you know, why is it happening? And some people are like, is it politically motivated? Because Argentina is actually not a big trading partner for the U.S. I think it's like less than 1%.

So why are we spending $40 billion out of the treasury to rescue Malay? And so recently what's happened this week is the swap lines have reentered the scene. Those may not be familiar with what swap lines represent, but swap lines at the core is like the plumbing of the dollarized economy. It's the thing that helps the dollar flow when there's system fractures that can happen because of funding issues. And so it's basically a cross-currency swap between central banks to provide the actual underlying currency when there's a shortage to help kind of provide a backstop of confidence. And then upon a fixed amount of duration, you swap it back.

And then you hope that the actions of the central banks have brought some stability to the system. And so the first tranche was actually unleashed earlier this week, and the U.S. government stepped in, the Treasury, bought a bunch of pesos. And the notional amount that they're willing to go up to is about $20 billion. And that's a lot or a little compared to Argentina? It's interesting. It's actually probably not enough. And at the same time, the $20 billion is a little bit symbolic because it's the last time the Treasury ever used this was actually in Mexico in the 1990s when they were having

their financial crisis. And they also used $20 billion back then. And I think that's kind of interesting because the absolute number of $20 billion has stayed the same after 30 years. So what does that mean happen to the currency on the other side, right? It's kind of an interesting question to think about. But I think the market generally thinks it's not enough, which is why the peso still hasn't actually found confidence and it continues to slide. And earlier this morning, there was an announcement that the US government, again, participated one more time. But this time, they actually didn't buy at the official exchange rate.

they bought at what is called the blue swap rate um which for those who don't know uh argentina has actually two exchange rates have you ever been to argentina i've never been to argentina but i know a lot of countries that have two exchange rates kind of the official and then the uh gray one they call it the blue chip swap rate which i think is hilarious because it's actually the unofficial black market rate and it's a composite of what the actual market rate is based on the collections of different brokers in the space that really willingly want to transact that what is more market driven than the official government rate um it's funny when i actually i've been to argentina and i think the last time i went in 2012 uh there was two rates and i didn't know about that so i

brought my dollars to the banks to exchange it to the pesos and then my hostile owner like saw me like with like leaving her leave a dollar she was like come come here like i can do you better than the bank teller and i was like oh okay like how much better and it was much better it was like 50 better and i was like oh my gosh and she really wanted my dollars and so i was like i guess i'll yeah i'll exchange with you uh and and she loved it funny thing is even from that date to now the depreciation of that peso is more than 300 times at the current rate of 1450 when i was there was closer to six wow so it is incredible um the kind of things that argentinians are experiencing but um and why do you think they're in this situation like malay went in uh obviously

inflation was out of control there's i mean it's just a broken economy he was going down the street with this chainsaw you know saying hey i'm gonna cut government spending all stuff he did seem to go in and make a lot of very rapid changes and inflation did come down to some degree do you think the problems they're facing now were structural before he got there or do you think some of the policies he implemented are driving this? I think essentially one foundational step correctly done was to kind of live with the pain of the immediate devaluation that Malay went through, which is pretty painful. But the problem is society can tolerate a certain amount of pain. And if there's a will to do it with some national solidarity, it's entirely doable, but not for too

long. Because after a certain amount of time, you kind of need to show a plan for how you're going to grow out of it. And I think what so far hasn't really happened is there hasn't been a convincing story into how we're going to turn this into a pro-growth environment. And the problem in Argentina is not dissimilar from what we're seeing with global inequality in general across the world. Those who are actually well endowed in Argentina are generally still spending, but they're spending outside and there's actually not enough happening inside their own economy to close the current account deficit. So I think that mismatch is particularly like a sensitive problem when it doesn't feel like that wealth distribution or the pain is being shared broadly across.

And so I think there's a little bit of time running out and therefore we're now in the mode of another populist candidate coming back into the scene because the promise feels a little broken in the timeline that it wasn't delivered for. But as you know, these things take a long time. It's not really possible to do it in a few years, but you still need a convincing story of how you're going to start to become an export economy. And I just don't think there has been a clear story. Now, what we hear in the crypto world is people want dollars and Bitcoin. Like they want stable coins, they want Bitcoin.

And that has been driving that. By the U.S. stepping in, one of the things I saw somebody say online is, how crazy is it that the U.S. government bought pesos before they bought Bitcoin? Should we read into the fact that, you know, we're basically going in and by definition buying a failing currency? are we putting citizens taxpayer money at risk is this stupid you know just talk through some of this this is a salient question because we now have to go dig a little deeper into the mechanics of how the pesos was bought by the u.s treasury and these will touch upon some financial jargons

that some folks may not be familiar with but it's equally important in the central conversation of becoming a strategic reserve so it's absolutely true that the u.s treasury has a certain amount of funds, which is called within the exchange stabilization facility, ESF, that they can use to intervene in foreign markets to bring financial stability, usually in the FX market, but for other things as well, including the bond markets. So the treasury has an ESF facility, but what's inside this facility is actually not what people think. Some of it is dollars and some of it is other currencies, but the vast majority of what's in the ESF is this instrument called SDRs, which are special drawing rights. Special drawing rights are an invention. It's a Bretton Woods invention

that solved a particular problem at the time when there was a shortage of dollars as the dollar was becoming the main trading currency and needing to find a way to bring stability by having a co-op model. So if you are part of the IMF, you are able to receive a certain amount of SDRs and participation of your own quota to create a basket of five major currencies. And that SDR is a unit of account that can then be pledged to basically be the backstop of a swap line. And so the interesting thing about the SDR is if you think about what that represents as a co-op model, it starts to feel a little bit like what Bitcoin should itself be, right? Because SDR is meant to be a neutral asset because it's a basket of the five biggest contributors to the IMF.

And it's also meant to be a funding currency of trade amongst the nations. And at the time, in 1960, 1970, this was the closest thing you can imagine to what a neutral asset can be. But now we have something like Bitcoin. And in some sense, Bitcoin replacing the SDR, to me, is kind of the right parallel conversation about what Bitcoin could represent. Because in this scenario. Now, what Besson has done is he's actually probably going to need to use the SDR out of the ESF to actually buy pesos, right? Because again, there's not enough dollars and not enough euros in the ESF otherwise to find a liquidity unlock. Instead of SDRs, what if you pledged Bitcoin? And that's, I think, the interesting conversation about the role of

how Bitcoin can serve in the plumbing of the dollarized economy through the SDR, through the exchange stabilization fund in the construct of the IMF that we're just beginning to scratch the surface for, which is why I think it's really important for crypto investors and Bitcoiners to pay attention to what's happening in Argentina. What is happening in Argentina is precisely the learning of the plumbing of how the dollar works and the role of a reserve asset and where Bitcoin one day might find itself to be more useful than the construct post Bretton Woods like an SDR would be. So in that scenario, our strategic Bitcoin reserve or some other pile of Bitcoin would now become not just an asset that we hold and hope goes up in value, similar to what really we've

done with our gold reserve. But now you actually get an asset that can be used as this pristine collateral. You can pledge it. You can lend it. You can borrow it. You can send it. I mean, You now start to use it in a weird way at the nation state level as a true currency, not just that store of value, which I think, you know, whenever I go on TV, people go, well, no one's using it to buy a cup of coffee. Like maybe actually it's only like a B2B use case is the first use case of Bitcoin as like a true, you know, liquid currency rather than individuals. That's right. That's right. I think the upside of the dollar being the export is great for the U.S., But the downside of it is that there often can be a funding gap between there just being a shortage of dollars that is needed to service the global economy. And so, the SDR is the backstop because it's one step beyond the dollar in which it's meant to really be that neutral reserve asset. And so, when people do trades in SDR, it's really because they believe in the communal risk-sharing model of being paid back in those respective currencies underneath it.

But it's not meant to be used for actual FX markets, right? It's a pledge collateral. Bitcoin, as you've pointed out, can be more than a pledge collateral. Bitcoin can actually be transactional. And so it removes that fiction layer of what the SDR can itself be, which truly is a confidence game. Bitcoin, however, actually, if you were to say, use it on behalf to rescue Argentina, you can imagine the collateral is actually more interesting and underwritable for somebody

who actually believes in the more kind of mechanism for what it represents without the other currencies involved. Let's go to China. China obviously is all over the news. Trump and Xi are locking horns. It seems like every day somebody's moving a piece on the chessboard. The latest one has been the export control over rare earths, but Trump is complaining about the soybean lack of demand. I mean, it's all over the place, right? How do you see that geopolitical and kind of macro impact? Yeah, it is now becoming a very prolonged trade war. And the issue, I think, is that the longer these trade wars stay in the conscience of the people, what you start to realize is that this isn't just about exports and imports and pricing differentials between

consumer goods and production costs. It's actually more than that. And the reason it's more than that it's because on the other side of a current account is the capital account. So by definition, a trade war becomes a capital war. And I think more people are starting to wake up to this, which is why we're seeing so many different noises at a bilateral level across the world. It's a little bit kind of sheer chaos where every country now is trying to negotiate some kind of deal about not just the actual kind of trade in itself, but the capital element, right like south korea is now requesting a swap line for the investments that they want to make here in the u.s on short it's literally tying in the construct of the capital and current account

and i think the more people start to realize that the more you get to realize that the thing at risk is then the capital account surplus of the u.s market right like the u.s market enjoys a very strong privilege of having been the source of return generation for its financial assets that foreign investors want. And that's the other side of this that is becoming untangled. And nowhere is it more clear in the way that China has been stepping into the scene. And at the core, this is part of, I think, why the conversation is getting muddier and muddier. It's not actually just about soybeans. It's on the other side, where the fun flow is actually coming through, that's becoming more abrasive. And it's being introduced more broadly into the conversation. That's why you see

China actually just becoming more open with their capital accounts too and letting foreign investors come in and use yuan denominated assets as a way to bring some financial leverage and muscle. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Listen up, this is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service military grade encryption and a vertically integrated licensed trust company it's no wonder more than 200 000 americans trust bitcoin ira to secure their financial future

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to upgrade your retirement today. What is the things you're paying attention to, both positive or negative, as this develops? Are there things you're worried about where you say, hey, if these three things happen, I would be a seller of assets? Or are there things that you're looking for that you would be a buyer in terms of managing money and thinking through different assets in the world? Sure. I think at the core, when the government is letting there be more credit creation and more liquidity, both on the public sector and the private sector, that's just good for risk assets, right? Because it's just more inflationary in nature.

And so I am paying attention to some of those trends that are happening at the local level. So China, for example, is continuing to bring more liquidity into the system. Just recently, they've opened more swap lines where they deal with their state budgets. And so there was some capital that had been historically unused and untapped, but they reopened it. So if you're actually suffering at the regional level, you actually now have abundant liquidity. That's very good for risk assets because it's just, again, it's another kind of like fiscal dominance playing behind the scenes for China as it is here in the U.S. So I think those are the most important trends. I think it's also relevant to note so much of this chaos we're seeing across the world in Argentina to China to Ukraine and everywhere is showing you in these moments of chaos and uncertainty, like gold just has stood out as the most obvious and sure thing. And I think it just shows you how much people are looking for certainty because of the fear in the markets. And if you're able to be the source of that security, I think it's becoming a pretty powerful

meta. So watching gold kind of continually supersede on its performance, it's really driven by flows, but it's also really driven by this psychological investor where retail investors continue to pile upon the actions of the central banks too. So I think those are longer lasting trends than most people probably think. And I continue to look at, for example, the Shanghai Futures Exchange as to how much gold they continue to acquire on warrants. And the last time you and I talked about this, I believe it was like 70,000 kilograms or

so. It's at 85 now. So over in that short period, they've actually gone up another 20%. So it's not stopping anytime soon. So that's been great. What is a little bit unconcerned is Bitcoin hasn't participated nearly as much. And I think that has been disappointing for some people. I think there are maybe some reasons why that can be the case.

But we're going to continue to find out as we go. I think people in crypto are quick to tout gold being inferior to Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is digital gold and therefore it's perfect in every shape or form possible. And therefore, it doesn't make any sense that no one could otherwise see this. But I actually just don't think this is always true. I think gold is very special. And gold has had more staying power for hundreds of years for reasons that I think, if you understand the role of money in history, you can appreciate what it stands for.

And the punchline is this. for an asset that's a store of value to become profitable it's it's it's just so important that central banks get involved i think really there is no other way to imagine further adoption than that being the most important force um i was in london and um one of the favorite places i love going to when I go to London is the Bank of England Museum. And I found a little quick window to make a trip on this sojourn that the last time I was there was maybe about 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And I was re-appreciating amazing history of the Bank of England, this time with more in the context of what it represents for Bitcoin. And what you get to see is the history of the Bank

of England is really fascinating because unlike most central banks that people would imagine today, it first started off actually as a private company. The Bank of England was established as a private company. It was owned by actual private investors, including the monarchy, but anyone who wanted to kind of participate in the GoFundMe of the Bank of England at the time could own a little piece of it. And it was really a great bet. But the story of it starts with goldsmiths, right? Because without a central bank as a known entity at the time, banks were involved in creation and the asset it was used for was gold. And eventually what you see is that it becomes the government's bank at the private level because governments also have to borrow and they have gold and they

need to pledge their gold. And so Bank of England as a private company was basically the government's bank. And then eventually what you see in the arc of history is that when there's conflicts, uncontrollable conflicts like war, where the conflict is so important that it supersedes any kind of financial norms that you would expect, and therefore debt grows out of scale, then the banks basically have to assume the government's debt. Meaning the Bank of England as a private company now needs to assume the government's actual debt as their own. And that process in itself is usually how the socialization of a private entity becomes. And so it's not until 1946, actually, that it becomes nationalized. So for 250 years, the Bank of

England operates as a private enterprise. And it's only when the debt to GDP of Britain gets to 250% that they realize actually it's going to have to be a part of the national apparatus for social security. And so in that framework, if you really think about what is money, gold has had hundreds of years of staying power as a private asset for which banks were willing to do business with. And eventually the government then wants to do business with that private bank and take advantage of their reserve assets. And then it becomes nationalized. So to draw an equivalence of that in Bitcoin's term, the same would be if the US government actually acquired a bunch of Bitcoin, but eventually needs to borrow more than it can and needs to start pledging

Bitcoin somewhere to borrow that money. And then the debt actually then becomes kind of larger than anything that it can be paid back for. And then it becomes kind of like nationalized in the construct of like the role of that asset. And that's like almost like the central bank of Bitcoin that you can imagine in the arc of history. We're nowhere near that, right? Like actually like central banks have not accepted Bitcoin

as part of that dialogue, but they have with gold. So I keep going back to this notion of like, we should not as Bitcoiners look at gold's rise as an adversary outcome. Actually, gold has had staying power because it's, for hundreds of years, been able to be a part of that modern economy apparatus. The question is, how do you get Bitcoin into that mix? And what can we learn from history to insert ourselves into that? And this is why I go back to the ESF example.

It's not enough to have a senator tell everyone that we need to buy Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the treasury if there's no reason to do it. the reasons usually come from something like something very climactic uh and and in the scenario of like an esf this is kind of i think one of the wedges you can drive a conversation about and in that scenario maybe the counterparty like an argentina would want to have like gold not gold but like bitcoin as part of the conversations in these counterparty arrangements well i wonder yeah if you're argentina you probably the sdr stuff like sure it's kind of backed? Kind of not. Like, you know, are you kind of being duped to a degree? Bitcoin does feel like the thing that is, you know, much more kind of sovereign, right? And yeah, I don't know. It's

just fascinating how this is all changing right before our eyes. It really is. But, you know, we can't lose sight of the fact that if you want Bitcoin's TAM to grow and follow the path of it being digital gold, then you have to study gold and learn from that history and why it is actually have been adopted as part of the central bank's reserve asset when central banks themselves were not a thing, when it was actually private enterprises. So in that same way, sometimes it's hard to imagine. People talk about microstrategy becoming nationalized one day or whatever, and it sounds crazy. But really, at some point, if you study the arc of history, it doesn't sound as weird as it might in how private companies, once they're big enough as

the lender ultimately do become subsumed by the government for the national interest. Not saying that's going to happen in MicroStrategy, but more people should be aware of the history of the Bank of England to then think about what the role of MicroStrategy could be for Bitcoin. Do investors win or lose in those scenarios historically, right? Like if you're the holder of equity in what is now the Bank of England, does the government buy it for pennies on the dollar or do they pay premium like a takeover attempt? So let me tell you a very fun trivia fact that I also rediscovered on this trip to the Bank of England Museum.

One of the owners of the Bank of England private stock at the time was George Washington. George Washington actually, through Martha, inherited a fairly large stake of the Bank of England through her father. And if you go to the museum, there's one section where you can actually see this receipt that George Washington signed on behalf of the family to receive the dividends from the stock. That's pretty cool. It's not only cool, but it's actually crazy if you think about it,

because here's the man who's the founder of this country waging war against the monarchy to which he's privately collecting dividends from the central bank. This has been going on for a long time. I mean, the meta here is incredible. Like, and, and, and I think it's like one of those like fascinating trivia facts that like gets a little bit swept under the rug, but at times of great change, I mean, these

kinds of like dynamics are always possible. And so the other thing I always try to tell people is to have a little bit more grace when we navigate the uncertainty of the political agenda and arenas. Like it's hard to question every motivation of why someone does anything, but usually like things are not that black and white. there's grayness to how these things can get done and co-opted i do believe that um so much of the intentionality of the founding of america was because they actually although they were young uh and i like to say you know they're kind of like shit posters a little bit and they had the

pseudonyms and you know they're doing the whole thing um i do think that it was rooted in an expertise uh and an understanding of the system that they came from and yes there was this you know battle and kind of the freedom from the monarchy and all that stuff but they did recreate or borrow a lot of the ideas when they kind of set up so it was like they took a lot of good things you know idea wise and then they made some tweaks to the things they were unsatisfied with but you kind of can't do it unless you understand how the system works that's right right and so i think people don't put enough credit on uh maybe just how uh prevalent you know that the experience and knowledge was of the system in order to be a um kind of a competitor in the

marketplace to critique them. Yeah. And the devil is always in the details. And to have an appreciation for details means you have to have a nose for nuance. And the other thing that's really interesting is when the Bank of England was nationalized in 1946, there is actually a footnote, which is an incredible language inserted that would baffle all modern economists. It actually says that the treasury from time to time may consult the bank to work together makes sense it's never been invoked yeah but it's in there yeah it's in there as a backstop to what the relationship between a central bank and the treasury ultimately is because one is ultimately motivated by lowering the debt interest burden right that's the treasury's function

But the central bank is on the other side of it. And it's so obvious to anyone who's understood history that those two things and functions are absolutely related, which is why I think this notion of Fed independence too, we need to kind of move beyond it. I think it's silly that people are still defending Fed independence as if it's meant to be a line that is not in itself completely backwards of its original intention. It's literally in the charter from its nationalization. Well, I think it's Besant has said, or Powell, like they get, I think they get breakfast once a week or something. Right. I think that Janet Yellen and Powell used to also meet, you know, on a weekly or biweekly basis. Like, what do you think they're talking about? You don't think that they're, you know, trying to figure out how they can help each other? Like, I don't know. The whole thing is crazy. today's episode is brought to you by core you can earn yield on your bitcoin by just holding your bitcoin it's simple core the leading bitcoin scaling solution will reward you for not selling your bitcoin it's not magic here's how it works core is a protocol secured by elected validators you can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking up your bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain no bridging no lending and just holding when your validator secures core it earns rewards fueled by network activity and passes them back to you as yield with a minimum

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Why do you think it is so bad out there right now that everyone is so negative and so pessimistic and just like the market is disappointed us and everyone needs to go home because it's over? Yeah, I'm personally disappointed too, because I think this is exactly the environment that I thought we would be in Q4 where Bitcoin would be unabashedly ripping. It just turns out gold is. And so the question is, why is Bitcoin not participating? The conditions are all there.

There's a rate cut cycle coming. Global liquidity has never looked better. Institutional adoption is strong. The conduits have been built. And there's real demand coming from treasury companies. I don't think you could have expected or wanted a better outcome. And yet it's lagging. And at this time, gold is sucking all the air out of the room.

And the more I think about it, there's really two things. One is, exactly as you pointed out, crypto, because it's so open source, can sometimes be a little bit of a disservice for those who are on the outside because they don't know all the details of what's happening on the inside. But when they peer into it, they don't like what they see. Oh, you mean all the tribalism and battling and shit talking? When Bitcoiners fight other Bitcoiners about the spam filter, for example, even if it's coming from a good place, it exposes an open attack vector to which the notion of Bitcoin being this infallible code gets corrupted a little bit. And I'm not saying

that we shouldn't embrace it. We must recognize what Bitcoin represents, which is, again, a living, breathing software. But when it happens at that level that puts real believers against each other, as an outsider, as a financial advisor, or as someone's grandma, it's kind of hard to look at that and say this is like investable right a goal doesn't talk so it's really just nice to know that it is what it is that you hold in your hand so you're almost saying there's like a trade-off right you're saying like the thing that makes bitcoin bitcoin and so amazing and and the like constant testing of ideas and and the uh the debates and you know all this kind of stuff can actually be the thing that the outsider doesn't understand the importance of and therefore

shies away from because conflict may be uncomfortable. Yes, yes, exactly. I think decentralization itself is a very powerful thing, but it could also be heavily distracting, especially from like a governance perspective. We've seen this all the way through time and time. And so that's the second thing I was going to share, which is, you know, this institutional era in 2025 is being represented by a co-op by kind of centralized entities, right? It's actually about kind of, you know, stablecoin being adopted by Stripe or Circle or things where like it's actually not the original like cypherpunk vision of like decentralized ownership.

And there's like enterprises that are trying to use crypto assets for what historically would have been made fun of as like, you know, blockchain technologies. And so that too, I think, has caused a fracture amongst kind of the crypto community. like there's true believers of permissionless decentralization and then those who are more kind of fighting for the business building of broad-based crypto adoption but sometimes those missions don't mix or they they may they may look adversarial in the short term but in the long term it could actually be a win-win but but along that journey is a lot of room for error and misunderstanding and so it's not just the infighting amongst the bitcoin community but now also what I've observed is non-Bitcoin crypto communities also fighting with each other and

with Bitcoin. And that's like inter-dispersion of more chaos. And I think what sometimes those investors and the crypto community away from Bitcoin fail to realize is there's no world in which your token will ever succeed if Bitcoin fails. In my mind, there's no world in which Ethereum succeeds if Bitcoin fails. There's no world in which Solana succeeds if Bitcoin fails. it's a bayesian probability if a then b and b is bitcoin bitcoin has to succeed first and foremost for everything else to work it doesn't work the other way around and sometimes i think people forget that big picture um and and uh that too has caused a lot of noise i think on sentiment and it's probably going to continue to affect some of the mood for the time being but at the

same time as you pointed out it is also its greatest asset because it drives attention and i think ultimately attention means more people get in and start learning and so eventually we're just all leveling up everyone's leveling up at different speed and different places where they're starting from but the hope is eventually that you know our grandma can actually appreciate the living code right not be scared by it but it takes time and we have to do it in like a thoughtful way that isn't going to turn off people from the outside too yeah i think it's a very uh prescient point right of we want to embrace what makes bitcoin special we need to be aware of the trade-off and maybe that's why there's kind of different groups of people who are needed for bitcoin to be

successful like i don't know if i could sit down with many of the people who are highly technical and have a debate at the same level with the same intensity and conviction as they could they're experts on a certain part of bitcoin that i understand you know kind of at a surface level it may be better than, you know, many people who are just kind of a tourist viewers of Bitcoin, but it's kind of like, you know, we have companies where if I go and I talk to the engineers, I can talk about the product. If we start getting into the code base, you know, very quickly I'm on their turf. Right. And so you just kind of, Hey, at some point you kind of know what your limitations are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, there's financial advisors or there's people

who, you know, have gone and spent the time talking and they kind of like obfuscate away all that stuff and they just say hey like here is the thesis for bitcoin as an asset and they're not talking about code or different trade-offs of on technical basis they're talking about portfolio construction and you actually need both of those groups and maybe it's weird when you know they allow each other to see you know uh the different group all of a sudden you're like oh wow that's a lot of you know technical talk there i i'm uncomfortable or vice versa it's like why are you guys talking so much about money and portfolios and stuff right right it does feel like uh in a weird way everyone's working together but has you know kind of their own expertise to to kind of

help bitcoin yeah i i fundamentally agree with this and you just helped me remember when i was at london um one of the panelists um was talking about how to get crypto more broadly accepted for mainstream use and adoption it needs to be invisible right like you kind of don't want to know that it's being used in the back end and i struggle with this a lot because on one hand i do believe what the intention of that is which is like crypto is just so complicated and so noisy and hard to use that you just almost have to make it like kind of non-existent for people to to get adoption but really the paradox here is if it's invisible it i think also means there's some level of centralization right because to be that seamless on the back end where you're not paying

attention is the kinds of things that are happening more at like the enterprise level for which that user experience comes with that trade-off so people will say things like you know you know stripes coming into stablecoin is like a good thing because like they're going to make all of this really easy and you won't even know what's happening behind the scenes and there's a part of it that like i agree that's a good thing but then the question is like well then where is the value transfer going? Do we fundamentally understand what that trade-off might be if there isn't actually people caring about the things in which the value crawl is happening because of that ease of use? I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong, but it just is one of

those perennial conflict of crypto where conflicts come at the source of decentralization where people are individualistically participating. So that's a good thing. It could also just be confusing but i come back to the thesis that volatility ultimately arises out of this dispersions of opinions and people's views and i think that makes crypto more powerful than almost anything else so you almost don't want it to be totally invisible yeah i completely agree again it goes back to the trade-off like what are you optimizing for right um and i think bitcoin is doing just fine uh in the path that we've been pursuing yep and maybe it's the people who are making it invisible you know in terms of putting it in a portfolio or something versus um bitcoin becoming invisible to

the technical community would be very negative and people were posting pictures of like you know people queuing up to get gold in like all parts of the world in australia and hong kong and you look at those pictures and people are like wow this is like weimar republic kind of like vibes and um and uh i i i've shared that equivalent picture for bitcoin is when bitcoin vol goes up. Because there's never going to be a queue for Bitcoin. You don't have to wait in line to get your Bitcoin buying or selling. But where you're going to see that pressure is represented in the volatility of Bitcoin. In October, for how horrible it has been for price action, the one thing that I'm just very happy to see is that volatility has been rapidly picking

up. And today we cleared the 50s. And so you think the gold lines are good for gold, like rooting for Bitcoin vol going up is the equivalent of that outcome for Bitcoin, which is ultimately how it's going to go higher. So path dependency, if Bitcoin vol goes higher, we're all going to be in a better place. I've always made the point, if Bitcoin's vol is lower than gold's vol, we will fail. It cannot work. Bitcoin is valuable because the volatility high is because you don't have to queue up. And if people embrace that and see that big picture, we're on the way higher. Gold with wings, my friend. Gold with wings. All right. Where can people follow you on uh on the internet you can find me on x my handle is dgt10011 and you can

also find my sub stack in my profile for deeper readings amazing all right well thank you very much we'll do it again next week let's do it