The Pomp Podcast - Will Bitcoin Skyrocket When Iran War Ends? | Anthony Pompliano

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Anthony Pompliano explains why bitcoin is holding strong while stocks, bonds, and gold decline amid inflation and geopolitical uncertainty. He breaks down ETF demand, long-term holder accumulation, and why bitcoin continues to benefit from global liquidity and money printing, while addressing common risks and criticisms.=====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.=====================0:00 - Long-term holders buying1:09 - Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF2:05 - Why bitcoin is up during crisis5:44 - “Here is where you buy?” 7:23 - Reasons why bitcoin will win11:32 - Is quantum a risk?13:10 - Bitcoin hater says it’s going to zero16:55 - Bitcoin long-term conviction 

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Oil spiked. Everyone's worried about inflation. And people want to understand, why is Bitcoin still green? How the heck is it that the asset that's supposed to be a beta to all risk somehow up given the geopolitical conflict? Well, the simple thing is that we can just go straight to the data. First, let's look at Bitcoin long-term holders. Bitcoin Archive here shows that the Bitcoin long-term holders,

they've bought 308,000 Bitcoin recently. The reason why that's important is if you have a persistent bid in the market, then naturally you should expect the price to find a floor. Some of this is coming from strategy or other companies in the public market. but also you're starting to see the OGs, the long-term holders that have been accumulating for a long time. They were selling last year, starting to buy again. That's usually a pretty good thing. One thing to remember is that Bitcoin's volatility was like an 80 or 90 vol asset, but now that's compressed down to like 35 or 40. So basically got cut in half or so.

Well, that makes sense. If all of a sudden the drawdowns used to be 80%, 85% in bear markets, but now it's only been about 50. I don't know. I'm not a mathematician, but that seems to be working in our favor. Now, the other reason why I think that there is quite a bit of excitement and enthusiasm is that Morgan Stanley recently filed to actually publish a Bitcoin ETF. They see what BlackRock's doing. They see all the money that's being printed. BlackRock is now a Bitcoin company. They literally make more money from their Bitcoin ETF than any other product in their suite. Congratulations to them. Super smart of them to launch it. And obviously, it's been very successful. Fidelity, they're in the game. You got companies like Bitwise or VanEck. They're

all trying to get a piece of this pie. And guess what? Morgan Stanley, they ain't going to sit by and let this thing go without them. And so Eric Balchunis over at Bloomberg, he says that we are going to see the Morgan Stanley ETF go live this week. It's obviously going to be a very big deal. But if we have long-term holders accumulating, and now we've got a net new thing like the Morgan Stanley ETF, which has massive distribution due to their sales team, what's likely to happen. Well, in my eyes, it makes Bitcoin the shining light in a sea of red, according to Iran. Now, why do I say according to the Iran conflict? Well, if you think about what's been happening is investors are scared. There's uncertainty, there's chaos. When's this

thing going to end? Are we going to bomb away civilization? Are we going to take out every bridge, every energy facility? Or are we just going to say, hey, you know what? We win. We killed a bunch of people and we took out their regime and now we're just going to go home and let the rest of the world fight it out over the straight. I don't know what we're going to do. Frankly, it's way above my pay grade. But what I do know is that investors are trying to figure it out right now. And they seem to be flocking to Bitcoin because it is a digital decentralized non-sovereign asset that isn't tied to any one country. And obviously it's really invaluable. Now I went on CNBC recently and I talked about this. And so take a listen to how I described

it to Andrew Ross Sorkin. Bitcoin has been the shining light over the Iran conflict. I mean, stocks are down. You see bonds going down. You see gold going down. Bitcoin has been flat to slightly up. And I don't know if you can take a victory lap in the sense of over the last year, it's been the opposite. Bitcoin's been down and those assets have been up. But I do think that people are saying to themselves, well, I thought that Bitcoin was supposed to just be kind of beta to the rest of these risk assets. And so if everything else is selling off, why is Bitcoin not selling off? And so I do think that there's a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel for Bitcoin investors who have been taking a couple of beatings.

was just a Bitcoin winter and we're now in some kind of pseudo summer? I think that volatility has significantly compressed in Bitcoin. It was, you know, an 80, 90 ball asset. Now it's like a 40 ball asset. It drew down 50 percent. That's kind of what you would expect in that kind of volatility environment. And I think that there's just a lot of people who hold Bitcoin who say, look, I like it at 60 plus thousand dollars. And the geopolitical uncertainty and chaos actually makes me want to own more Bitcoin rather than less because this thing is neutral and isn't subject to any one country. Is it happening from individuals or do you think it's through ETFs or what do you think is happening? I think it's a little bit of everything, right? One of the

things that people have long talked about with Bitcoin is how do we get mass adoption? And that was the kind of the phrase everyone used. And this is what mass adoption looks like, is you have individuals, you have companies, you have ETFs, you have countries. But does that mean that the price discovery suggests that this is not on its way to the moon? Well, I think that maybe arguably has been more stable than some of these other things you're describing. But at the same time, we've had Cathie Wood and so many other people, by the way, including yourself, I think, who've talked about, I was thinking about Tom Lee talked about, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars of Bitcoin. And we obviously have. Yeah, I think if you look

at gold as a good example, people used to talk about five thousand dollar gold price and it was at eighteen hundred dollars. Everyone kind of thought it sounded crazy. Right. It will get there. I think Bitcoin is a very similar thing. What the time frame is, is very, very hard to nail down. But what I will say is just look at the compound annual growth rate. You know, if the stock market compounds at eight to 10 percent a year, Bitcoin should do something that is multiples. But are you seeing the corporates? I mean, there was a whole argument that corporate sovereigns, the sort of big institutional money was going to end up in Bitcoin. And we talked about that almost endlessly around this table about a year ago. And that was

what was going to drive the price. And that doesn't appear to be happening. There's two things that have happened. One is I think that there are a lot of countries who are saying, hey, how do I participate in this without explicitly going and buying Bitcoin itself. And so you see them doing things like JVs on the mining side and stuff like that, especially the Gulf countries. But also you've seen a number of disclosures where country sovereign wealth funds have gone and taken positions in the ETF. And so I don't think it's, you know, kind of this like chaotic, enthusiastic hand over fist buying of Bitcoin that people thought they were going to do in their central bank. But I do think that there has been, you know, allocations that we didn't have just two

years ago. And that, you know, it's kind of like a slowly and then all of a sudden. And I think that's probably what we'll see here. Now, the reason why I think that this is interesting is because my friend Mel Madison, he recently said something pretty interesting. He said that narrative follows price. A lot of people think that the price goes up once the narrative changes, but everyone's been through the euphoria phase. All of a sudden price is down. Everyone feels real bad sentiments in the toilet. Then price starts a little jump. Everyone starts to get excited again. So narrative follows price. And so the way to think about this is that there's no great Bitcoin narrative, according to Mel, right now. And the chart tells a very different story.

He says, here is where you buy. Only four times in the last five years have you had this opportunity. I've kept my mouth shut, he says, on Bitcoin in recent months. But this is it. What a big statement from Mel. It was clear on Sunday as futures opened, everything was down, but Bitcoin, then all the other markets followed Bitcoin up. Bouncing at this level for six to eight weeks is normal. That bouncing is done. Time to move up. Bitcoin futures, iBit call spread, etc. I've added to all of them today. Now, Mel Madison is a smart guy. And obviously he does a lot of technical analysis. He thinks that we are at the breaking point, that Bitcoin has had enough, the bear market, he's declaring it over. Let's see what happens. I'm not sure. I don't know if it goes

up, down, sideways or backwards. What I do know though is I like Bitcoin over a long period of time. Now, if you also go and you take a look at Binance, again, Binance has really called out the fact that Bitcoin has been the shining light. They say that since the conflict began, Bitcoin and Ethereum both, but I know we don't really like Ethereum over here so much, but Bitcoin and Ethereum both are up positive somewhere in the single digits. That's through 32 days of the conflict. But at the same time, the S&P that's been down 8%, MAG7 down 10, semiconductor stocks down 12, and gold fell 13%. Those are big, big numbers. But maybe more importantly to me, what I find more interesting is DaVinci Jeremy. He's been an OG. This guy's got one of the most

gangster videos I've ever seen on the internet, telling people, go look at Bitcoin, go buy Bitcoin at like a dollar. He tweeted out and said that Grayscale tracked the top 15 cryptos every year since 2018. Every single coin got replaced. XRP, Ethereum, Cardano, Litecoin, IOTA, NEM, Dash, all rotated out. I don't even know what some of those are. He says new names show up every cycle. Solana, Tron, Hyperliquid. They come and go. Only one has held the number one position for eight straight years without ever moving. Hashtag Bitcoin. There is no second best. There is no competitor. There is no next Bitcoin. There's Bitcoin and there's everything else. And it's not just DaVinci. DaVinci's a smart guy, man. I really, really like him. But guess what?

My friend Jordy Visser, he recently told me why he thinks Bitcoin's going to win. He thinks that this is going to be a massive year for Bitcoin. Take a listen to what Jordy Flogic is. In the 1970s, do you guys want to know what the debt to GDP of the country was? Well, at that time, it was 30%, between 30 and 35. The equity market was 40%. So now we are at 120 on the debt side. So we're three times the 40. And on the equity side, we are seven times the size. So what that means is they may want to do something. They may want to fight inflation. they cannot. So for Bitcoin, it is going to win for all of the reasons. We need cryptography. We need something that doesn't have a moat. I'm just telling you, when they make that decision

to cut rates while inflation is high, I don't want to be the one sitting. That is the moment to me that they're going to have to come with something. You've got pressure from the White House. Isn't an independent Fed? All of the things there. And I don't think there's going to be a recession. So no recession, inflation on the higher side, run it hot, debasement happens through a stock market, which kind of burns off that 220%. And my ultimate vision is that through multiple compression in 10 years, the equity market relative to GDP gets back to 100%, which used to be the cap. Now for that to happen, if we compound GDP at 7% anomaly for the next 10 years, for those

of you playing the rule of 72 book. That means we will have double GDP to 60 trillion, which is right where the equity market is. So if the equity market is unchanged for a decade, we've had debasement of the stock market. The money is still going to look for returns. And the reason I say this, we can't have it collapse, but we can have it go sideways. And the transfer goes from wealthy people that own assets and it goes to people who own Bitcoin. And the reason Bitcoin will go higher is because pension funds and endowments and all these places, they still have liabilities they have to meet. And to meet those liabilities, they have to invest in whatever is going higher. and layers as it reclaims all-time highs?

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Go to archpublic.com and tell them I sent you. Now, I get the fact that everyone's super excited about Bitcoin. I'm excited about Bitcoin. I think it is going to have a pretty big year here. Now, does it mean it's going to go to $300,000? I wouldn't say that, right? But Bitcoin went back to an all-time high this year. I'd be happy and probably so would you.

And definitely your portfolio would. But there's risk. there's always risk of course nothing is risk-free and that risk the latest you know thing that all the bears and critics want to lob onto and say hey this is why bitcoin sucks it's going to go to zero that's called quantum quantum computing now all of a sudden is a big bad threat to bitcoin i don't know i'm not a quantum physicist i'm not some crazy computer scientist but what i do know is studies that are coming out that are saying that quantum is making a lot of leaps there's also studies coming out like this one that bitcoin news highlighted that says while quantum may pose a

threat to Bitcoin's signature sometime in the future. New research finds quantum computers are no threat to Bitcoin mining. Even a best case quantum miner would need 100 million qubits and 10,000 megawatts of power, roughly the electricity use of a large country. At today's Bitcoin difficulty, the requirement explodes to near star level energy. That goes hard. Star level energy. Quantum cracking mining is more than hard. It's physically unrealistic. realistic. Hey, I don't know. They're smart. That study says that. So let's take it at face value. I guess it's going to be hard to crack Bitcoin mining. Cracking Bitcoin, well, that's a different thing. Mining and Bitcoin, two separate things, although they are related. So I'm not a big

believer that quantum is going to be some catastrophic event, obviously. I still hold Bitcoin. I like Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will do very well in the future. But I think Bitcoin's kind of like everything else. It's a technology. It's got to evolve. It's got to improve. It's got to keep up with times. And so naturally, just like everyone else in the world that relies on encryption, they're going to have to make sure that they're quantum proof as well. And so guess what Bitcoin's going to have to do? Make sure quantum can't disrupt it. And I think that we'll get it done as a community. Now that's not going to stop the Bitcoin haters though. They are out in full force. There's this guy, Professor Steve Keen. He's predicted the 2008 financial crash

and he went on diary of a CEO and he is now warning people that get ready. Bitcoin's going to zero, folks. Pack it up. Let's go home. Steve Keen says it's going to zero. Take a listen to what Steve's got to say here. I wanted to come back to something you actually said earlier. You talked about Bitcoin briefly. I've heard you say that you think Bitcoin's going to zero. Yeah. Okay, this is worrying. I think I have some Bitcoin. You're an economist. You're saying that Bitcoin is going to zero. Why? Because, ultimately, because of its reliance upon energy. I mean, you know, you have Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert. Have you met them

at all? No. They were sort of the original proselytizers for Bitcoin, and they're now living in, I think, El Salvador, which has adopted Bitcoin as a form of currency. When they told me about Bitcoin, I could have bought it for a pound of Bitcoin, which would have been, I would have been a bloody, would be wealthier than you if I'd done that. The reason I didn't was they explained that the way that the public ledger is kept safe is that it takes too much energy to break it. So each transaction requires 10 minutes of computer processing time globally, by the looks of it, to actually create an extra Bitcoin. And that means it's too expensive for somebody to try to break the ledger. That means it's got a huge requirement for energy use.

And I believe, knowing what I know from climate scientists, that at some point we're going to realize we're using far too much energy on the planet. We've got to cut the energy consumption. And the two easiest things to cut out to reduce energy consumption are cryptocurrencies and international travel. Now, here's my thing with people like this. This professor, I actually like him. He seems a pretty smart guy. He seems like he's actually trying to have a logical conversation. I like that he knows Max Keiser and Stacey. He's part of the early days. But it's kind of like a Peter Schiff, it sounds like. He could have bought Bitcoin for like a dollar. He didn't. And so, maybe that's playing in a little bit to his analysis. But the real thing is don't play the

man, play the ball, play the argument that he's making. And he says Bitcoin's going to zero because of an energy argument. Well, Professor Keene, although I might like you, there's no low energy country that is considered a wealthy nation on the entire earth. If you are a wealthy nation, you need to consume energy. And so guess what? Bitcoin is valuable because it consumes energy. It may be counterintuitive to the academic world, but consuming energy actually means that there is value. Consuming energy is not a negative thing. It's a positive thing. Same way that a wealthy nation consumes energy, an asset that consumes energy. And one of the ways that I've grown to talk about this is when somebody says to me, what's Bitcoin backed by? And I think they

get like, I got a gotcha question or something. Like I'm going to have to say, oh, you got me, it's hot air. No. When somebody asks me what Bitcoin is backed by, what do I say? Very simple. Bitcoin is backed by the most valuable commodity in the world. And they kind of scratch their head, they cock their little eye, and they say, you know, what do you mean by that? Well, right now, what is one of the most scarce assets in the world? Computational power. Look at all these companies that are running around the world trying to find it.

We see everyone from Google and Meta and Amazon to OpenAI and Anthropic and Grok and XAI. We see Tesla. We see SpaceX. we see everybody from NVIDIA to AMD to TSM, everyone wants power. The thing backing Bitcoin is power. And ultimately that computational power means that Bitcoin is valuable because Bitcoin is backed by the most valuable commodity in the world. That is computational power. So I get it. I understand that people still think Bitcoin is going to zero. I get that they think quantum is a threat. I get that they think that everyone left Bitcoin to go

play in AI land. I get that everyone thinks that all of a sudden Bitcoin is going to get regulated out. Or once the Republicans leave office, the Democrats are going to come back in with their crypto army and they're going to crush the industry. La la la, la la la, la la la. Just tune out the noise. Keep your blinders on. Bitcoin is simply going to appreciate in price for one reason. The United States government and countries around the world cannot stop printing money. they may slow down they may speed up they may do a lot or they may do a little at certain times but they cannot operate their economies without printing money and as long as the money printer is turned on then scarce assets like bitcoin which mathematically has the highest sensitivity

to global liquidity than any asset in all the finance bitcoin will continue to go up as long as that money printer is on and so people can have every single complaint they can have every critique. They can attack Bitcoin. They can ignore Bitcoin. They can fight Bitcoin or they can love Bitcoin. None of it matters. Bitcoin as an asset is simply going to continue to appreciate because the government cannot stop printing money. So one of my favorite quotes in the entire Bitcoin world, Bitcoin has no top because the dollar's got no bottom and everything else pretty much is noise. so ladies and gentlemen the long-term accumulators they're back morgan stanley's about to shove the bitcoin etf down the throats of every financial advisor every wire house every salesperson in

this country and ultimately bitcoin will come back bitcoin will have its day in the sun again and all the critics they'll just crawl back under their bridges like the trolls that they are and they'll simply say i'll wait till the next bear market and maybe then people will start listening, but it won't be me because Bitcoin is Bitcoin. It's an end of one asset and it's simply going to continue to benefit from the undisciplined monetary policy that runs the central bank of the United States.