The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Bleeding! What’s Next? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Be good if someone replies to confirm it's working. Oh, Scott dropped out. It's working, bro. It's working, bro. Brian, yo, you crashed the space yesterday. Let me see it go today. Man, I could never launch a token. Fuck that. Fuck the stress of it. Let alone a meme token. I mean, everything is down today. So I haven't even looked at the price, but I can tell you it's down. The whole market's down. Every single bubble and banter bubble is down today.

Literally every single one. Your side. I think, I mean, you know, sideways choppiness, sideways choppiness, sideways choppiness until eventually it goes up again. But I mean, for now, sideways choppiness sideways choppiness until eventually it goes up again but i mean for now sideways choppiness what i found weird was i found weird that the mario you got a hot mic and it's very loud um what i found weird was uh that the gdp numbers were lower than expected which means that powell would probably want to increase rates um and whoa mario i think you're my And, whoa, Mario, I think your mic, your mic. Mario, you're killing our ears. Yeah, Mario.

Somebody get this guy off. So, yeah, I mean, I guess people thought that if we get bad GDP numbers, it would mean that power could soon start reducing interest rates. We got that and the market's starting to factor less interest rate. Now they're forecasting not even one rate cut this year so i mean i don't know if any of the economists on the space or people that are economically smarter than i am may have uh uh any views around that i've been wrong about most things but i've been saying there'll be no cuts for over a year while everybody was smoking that's the only reason that's the only reason why i thought there may be a cut because you've been wrong about so many things and you said there was going to be no cuts. That's why I said, okay, look, they made the cut. Yeah. I'm like the boy who cried wolf. Yeah, absolutely. But there's just, I mean,

if you believe the numbers, there's no reason for them to cut. Generally, there has been no reason. Right. If you believe the jobs are strong and you believe that inflation is coming down, then like I said, that requires you believing the numbers, but those are the numbers that the government is giving. It would literally maybe now the GDP numbers are different, but as of yesterday, rationally, if we weren't in election year, it would make more sense looking at the data presented for the Fed to hike than to cut. If things are strong, if everything's strong, they should theoretically be able to hike.

But the GDP numbers came in much weaker than expected, which means the economy is actually slowing down. Right. That's what I'm saying. So yesterday, now you could say, as you said, you can make an argument now for cuts. But I just want to remind people that if you looked in December, we were supposed to get four to six cuts this year. And if you went to a year ago this time, we were supposed to have had three to four cuts in 2023. Still no cuts. And by the way, if you look at history,

anytime you do see a yield curve normalizing, which we haven't seen yet, but usually get a yield curve, uninverting or normalizing, then you get a Fed pivot pivot and then the stock market crashes so like everybody cheering for the rate cuts clearly hasn't looked back to know that when they cut it means something's broken and that precedes the drop in markets so i i just it makes my brain hurt sometimes when people get so excited at the idea of cuts because they're only getting caught if something's wrong they'll cut if the stock market goes down. I mean, Scott, is there any chance that the bull market's over, bro? I don't think so.

For Bitcoin, I seriously doubt it. Peter Brandt came on and actually laid out a really nice statistical case based on historical evidence for what that would look like. And he put it at 25%. He's smarter and a better analyst than me. So I will lean in his direction and say 25% chance at the top is in and that we don't see like a repeat of the cycle. But like he said, that means a 75% chance we have a repeated parabolic cycle and he's long and that's where his bets at. So I would rather just reiterate an expert's position on that. My case, the thing I've been saying the whole time, and once again, I have no better information or predictions than anyone else is that it would

make a hell of a lot of sense. If you do believe in Bitcoin cycles that we get really boring and time-based capitulation for the next four to six months. We sweep the lows, maybe make another new low, go back up to the highs. We're all going to make it. It's the lows. It's all over. I literally just posted a chart showing all the times that everyone was euphoric and panicked in this bull run that started at 25,000. Some would argue 17,000. It's just the way humans are. When you go sideways, they lose their damn minds. And when you get to the top of the range, we're going to new highs. And when you get to the bottom, it's over and we're going to 5,000. That's just how human minds

work. But you should expect four to six months after the halving if you believe in the cycle where it's really boring, low volume, crappy summer. All coins kind of slowly bleed out except for like certain sectors, like a DeFi summer type thing. And then you ramp up in the fall and in an election cycle, which by the way, has is the same four year cycle as crypto, would you be surprised to see them let the stock market fall, you know, into the summer? And I say let because we know that a lot of it is based on, you know, how the government reacts, let it fall and then ramp it back up, going into the fall before the election so that markets look good and they can win. It's not even conspiracy theory. I mean, this happens over and over again.

Yeah, fair markets don't happen during election years. The incumbent president will get totally smoked. It's in the best interest of the Treasury and the Fed to make sure that stock prices go up, which makes today's data all the more worrisome because now you have stagflation. And so it throws another hat into the ring. And so now the Fed has to keep rates high, but the president is tapping Powell's shoulders. So, I mean, I think stagflation for the remainder of the year is a pretty safe bet. And, you know, probably into next year could be a stagflationary decade, frankly, but totally agree on the asset prices front. They're not going to fall this year. Yeah, I mean, Joe, but would you be surprised, you know, to see them fall now far enough before the election, you know, a correction, I'm talking about a normal

correction, not, you know, necessarily a bear market and then ramp up when it actually matters and people are paying attention in the elections. That's a pretty safe bet for sure. For sure. Because right now the S&P 500 is down to what, five and a half percent. And that's totally par for the course with other historical corrections during bull markets. It's just because we've been up into the right so often like this. This feels very strange, but it's really not. I mean, Bitcoin's been consolidating for what, eight weeks nowK to $70K. I wouldn't be surprised if asset prices cooled off, had a bit of a correction before we had more clear guidance on what the Fed and Treasury were going to do. And then July, August, September, you see asset prices begin to rise again, probably even sooner, frankly. But I

think a reprieve right now, definitely nothing indicating to me that this is a trend reversal and we're going way further down. Yeah. And people who are panicking when we're going from 74,000 to the low 63,000s either weren't here or don't remember the 30% to 40% corrections that used to be normal in every single bull cycle. This has been a dream. We're getting 20% or sub 20% corrections on the way up, which should be way less panic than the 30 and 40 corrections of the past. I mean, anyone who was here, you might recall, like if you were here in 2018, for example, when Bitcoin was at 6,000, I mean, after the move to 20, it came down to six, then bounced back up to around 11. But then we sat basically with 6,000 as a floor from effectively June until I believe it was November, if I remember correctly.

And then that 6,000 floor that nobody thought could ever break broke. And we were at 3,000 in a matter of a couple of weeks, right? 50% drop, doom, death, despair. I'm seeing that kind of sentiment in my comments. I literally just tweeted about it. I mean, Mike Alford and I just did a show where he based on a tweet, an article that he said he thinks 90,000 is possible in the next couple of months. In the next couple of months, I don't think I'd see angrier comments about how dare you bullpost. Like we're bleeding, everything's down and they're still bullposting.

And I'm like, dude, I've been bullposting since the bull market started at the bottom. So I'm not going to stop now. I still think we're going up. And so sentiment is just in the dust. I want to read two things to you. The first thing I'm reading is for those who don't understand what happened, first quarter GDP slowed to 1.6, which is less than half of the 3.4 of last quarter. This reading is 50% below Goldman Sachs' expectations, but it gets worse.

At the same time, U.S. core PC index soared from 2% to 3.7%. This crushed the estimates of 3.4%, which means inflation is on the rise while the economy is actually getting smashed. We have a weakening economy with rising inflation. This is the worst possible outcome for the Fed. What do you think? Yeah, it's true. That's stagflation right there. And it's the first period of, I think, what could be prolonged stagflation since the 70s. And in the 70s, you'll get home prices, they 4 or 5x, but you're right. So GDP, the estimate was for 2.5%. Goldman Sachs estimated 3.4%.

It came in half of that. So it came in at 1.6%. Very bad. And this is just the advanced print, by the way. So there are three prints. There's the advanced prints, and then the print, and then the revision. So this is just number one. This could change, but usually it's pretty accurate. And reminder, the Fed's GDP target that it sets for the US economy when it's

setting monetary policy is 2%. So this is the first decline in two years. This is the lowest level in two years, the first major, major decline below the 2% target in two years as well. And so this is not a good look. And so you'd think, okay, great, rate cuts are coming to be supportive. But then at the same time, core consumer prices, okay, so we're talking the necessities of the necessities, the stuff that people need to buy. The estimate was for that to accelerate at a 2% clip this quarter, and it accelerated at a 3.7% clip. And so in the same breath that GDP is low, it's faltering, it could go negative, it would make sense to cut rates now to support economic and financial

stability. Price inflation is still more than two times, almost four times the pace that it should be. And so this is exactly, and it's a terrible situation for the Fed to be in. And the Fed's going to have to stay right where it is. It's going to have to stay right where it is. And that's going to upset the U.S. Treasury. It's going to upset Joe Biden. But at the end of the day, you'd rather have you'd rather have prices come back down to target. Voters care a great deal more about that. But of course, the the balancing act here is making sure that you don't throw GDP into negative territory while you do that. You don't throw people out of work.

And so it's going to be a very testy couple of months to make sure that the unemployment rate stays right where it is and GDP doesn't actually dip negative. Yeah, Joe, how often do we see those revisions be positive? Right. We always see the job numbers print and then quietly three or four weeks later, you see a revision and it's always to the downside. Yeah, 12 of the last. There's both non-farm payroll supports that revise down now. That's actually totally not accurate. It's confirmation bias. You notice when they revise in the negative direction. You don't notice when they revise in the higher direction. It's been very consistent in the last year. I can't say...

Yeah, no, I have a... you can go back in my timeline. I won't pull it up now, but yeah, I have a chart of non-farm payrolls prints. Like 11 of the last 13 have been revised downward after the fact. And that is so systemic. It can't be an accident. Just looking at the data. And also, um, there was, uh, I think like a five Sigma beats, um, meaning that like, uh, uh, uh, there was, there were, uh, two, two Sigma beats and then a five Sigma beat on non-farm payrolls. Um, and the, the two of which obviously January and February

were revised on after the fact we haven't received the revision for March, but it's so systemic that it, um, it, it has to be data manipulation. Just looking at the data and being totally objective, you can't have that many beats to the very right of the bell curve extreme and have it be a total accident. I tend to agree. Mario, I think we're having trouble getting any co-host invites up. So it seems like I'm going to have to sit here by myself, but that doesn't mean you guys, I can't co-host.

But I think Ran, as you, I mean, as you look at this, are you starting, you asked me the question, do you think there's a chance the bull market's over? Do you think there's a chance the bull market's over now looking at this? Because we've all kind of remained, you know, bullish throughout the entire cycle. I mean, I said, you know, Peter Brandt put it at 25%. I put this to the whole panel, but I mean, does anybody believe that this, even in this election year,

that things are so bad that the top could be it? I'll speak. I'd say a thousand percent no. I'd say we've been crying for this cooling-off period, and it's never easy. I always look at my family and friends and sense the anxiety with these market moves and realize it's actually a good indication that when people start to get uncomfortable,

it's been up only far too long. No way, Jose. I do maintain, though, you know, some of these price predictions on Bitcoin are getting a bit out of hand. You know, and I'll think of, you know, chatting with a guy like Vinny, you know, putting 120 as a max. You know, I think personally he had a max of 150 with a conservative 120 target on Bitcoin. I think this is healthy. I think we're getting what we asked for. We're getting a slight cool-off period. And as they say, sell in May and go away. Let's hope that that continues. Juan, what do you think? I am very much in that kind of a camp as well.

I think, you know, right now, part of the concern is the macro picture, as you guys were discussing, is dimming a bit. The flows into the ETFs, which were all the rage over the past couple months, have started slowing. You know, we had $1.5 billion in inflows in January, 6 billion in February, March was 4.6. And now in April, cumulatively, we're at 170 million. So they're definitely slowing. But that's the first wave of inflows, which were the early adopters. And as we've pointed out, me and Matt and other people at Bitwise, there's a second wave coming that we think is going to start in the back half of the year, which is the wire houses. You know, Cetera, which is a big independent, the wire houses and broker dealers, Cetera is a big one. And they were the first ones

to approve the Bitcoin ETFs last month. But just today, I think there was an article out talking about Morgan Stanley. They've been in the news in the last couple of weeks about exploring them. And they're saying that they're being careful about it, but they're going to make it available to everyone. And they want to do it in a controlled way. So they're doing their process. They're taking their time. LPL said last month that they were planning to take three months to determine which Bitcoin funds to add. So again, all of these big wire houses and broker dealers are undergoing their due diligence

process. And so I think we'll start seeing approvals after the summer and the fall. And that'll bring a new wave of capital into the system, which I think will be positive. And then outside of those kinds of flows, we have the approvals from Hong Kong. They're launching at the end of this month, three Bitcoin ETFs and three Ethereum ETFs. I think that will be additive as well. And then outside of that, I'm focused on the innovation that's happening in this space. Tether just announced they're expanding the scope of the initiatives that they're pursuing. They're now establishing four different divisions, data, finance, power, and education, pursuing things in AI and P2P platforms in the data division, expanding Tether,

expanding USDT in the finance division, along with other blockchain-based solutions, financial blockchain-based solutions, including a tokenization platform. They're expanding mining, sustainable mining in their power division, and then launching a whole host of blockchain-based educational services. Mind you, Tether is a company that in January announced Q4 profits of $2.85 billion. So they're extremely well capitalized, and they're going to put a lot of money into this space. So I think innovation there. Block just announced a three nanometer Bitcoin mining chip. That's top of the line.

I think the most efficient ones right now are four nanometers. So they're going even better, even more efficient, which will help the miners as a whole. We're seeing the activity on runes explode since the halving. And then on tokenization, Tether announced an initiative, but we saw BlackRock put out their first tokenized fund. And they've been vocal about a tokenization roadmap. So I wouldn't be surprised to see more funds from them and then other big Wall Street players.

So I think tokenization is also going to invigorate the system. And then the VC ecosystem, VC capital is ramping up. Quarter over quarter, we're seeing increased VC allocations. And I think that will drive innovation further. So I think if you put more innovation and more capital coming into the system through the flows of the ETFs in the back half of the year, I think that's all very constructive for the price of Bitcoin, ultimately, over the next, you know, six to 12 months.

Do we have any bears? Is there a bear? So, Elizabeth, you raised your hand. Maybe you're just commenting. You're not the bear I'm looking for. I know. I know. That's super bullish. And I would love to just jump in and say I totally second everything. This is absolutely what we're seeing through X-Verse. So I'm at X-Verse, which is the leading Bitcoin wallet for the Web3 Bitcoin space. So all the fun stuff that's happening for Runes, Ordinals, BRC20, that's stuff that we're leading support on. And I have to say, just seeing all the innovation in the space, you know, as a wallet, you really get a seat at the center of all the action and get to see everything that's happening with DeFi and ordinals and also the liquidity on all the investors coming into this space. And I have to say right now,

it's really incredible to see all the L2s that are coming out. And all the TVL is just incredible. All the investment, I think many of them haven't even announced their rounds yet. And it's just going to take probably a month or two for this to settle in. And then we're going to see these demands being met and all the more value being driven into the ecosystem. And once the demands are met, we're seeing these already demands surging for new protocols, because of protocols, like runes, people are going to need to have more programmable capabilities, and the transactions are going to go up. So they're going to need these L2s. And then once that happens, we're going to see this kind of flywheel effect for more talent, more investors into this space. And ultimately, I think that is going to have some price action consequences in a positive way. So yeah, super bullish.

Fred? crypto forces in the US in November. I think if everybody that's pro-crypto just gets rolled and we have some of the really malevolent forces stick in there, I think that'll be bearish for at least a couple of months at that time. And does it change the cycle? I don't think so, but it definitely could be a big driving factor, which is why everyone's got to be on guard if you're in the U.S. and really do everything you can to make sure those pro-crypto people get elected. And I keep repeating, if that means just donating five bucks, you get these candidates get credit when they get more people that are donating, even if it's a low value. And we all know on the stage up here who are gunning for in Massachusetts, because if that goes the right way, I think it'll open the floodgates for the bull market. But that's the biggest bear case I personally see. To that end, just a quick plug. Well,

I'm very constantly in touch with John Deaton, who you're obviously alluding to there. We're doing a fundraiser for anyone going to Consensus on the 30th. So get in touch with John Deaton, who you're obviously alluding to there. We're doing a fundraiser for anyone going to consensus on the 30th. So get in touch with me if you're interested in supporting that. That is to me, if we're talking politics, Elizabeth Warren being unseated to me is almost as important as a wholesale change at the SEC or elsewhere, because I think that she's the linchpin in all of it. And it's the most fundamental, fundamental fight that we can, we can pick.

So, you know, he out, he out fundraised Elizabeth Warren, I think in the last report. And I intend to do everything I can to help him double and triple her fundraising in the coming months. So if you guys are interested in helping John,

please, please get with me. We're putting a very, very powerful machine behind him where we can. So go ahead, Alex. I would say all I heard right there, Scott, is that out of state dark money crypto billionaires from Florida are trying to undo democracy. Oh my God. I'm literally killed to be whatever you just described me as but uh unfortunately wildly wildly uh inaccurate so yeah i yeah i wouldn't say i'm

i'm definitely obviously more on the bullish side of the market here i think we're definitely going to see i think more correction and downside i don't think we'll get anywhere near. And of course, now I'm going to frigging jinx it. But like, I don't think we're going to get anywhere near the lows of like 17 or 25k. I think maybe 40 to 50 we see. But I think it's, yeah, to the point you were kind of making earlier, it's going to feel awful for a lot of people. Because I have never seen an industry with hedonic adjustment like crypto if you like hit a new high for a day and then drop five percent off of it people act like it's the end of the freaking world right um

it's just it's ridiculous how quickly people assume that any new high is the new floor so like yes it will go up it will go down um Um, I think to the point Elizabeth was making, there's a whole bunch of stuff getting built right now. I spend a bunch of time in the stacks ecosystem. We just launched the first step of a major network upgrade earlier this week. Um, and you know, saw a ton of traffic and response on it and ton of new inbound builders. So like it is,

Bitcoin is definitely like where things are happening where i think this next cycle will be based around but i think to that point like when exactly what exactly the pattern looks like exactly how it goes like nobody can really tell you i think it's it's strapping um i also don't think the elections are going to matter that much alex i want to before going back to the markets, I want to ask you about Runes. I did a panel with Cointelegraph and a few others in the ecosystem. Just about the, according to many, disappointing performance of Runes. I want to get your thoughts on the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole.

I know you're involved, so you've got some biases there. But I'm not sure if you could give us your thoughts, but also play devil's advocate because I'm as bullish as you, if not more bullish. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think Runes had, Runes was almost never going to live up to the hype, right, at the halving because If you go back and you look at what Bitcoin transaction fees were for the almost entire week after the halving, we were seeing two, three, four... I mean, at the halving itself, we were at 2,500 sats a byte. I mean, normally, Bitcoin has historically been at 5 to 10. So literally, 200x increases in demand for network and block space. So I think that's really one of the strongest arguments.

And this is the reason we've been talking a lot about Bitcoin L2s and why they're necessary is that if it costs you $100 to send a Bitcoin transaction, you're not exactly going to be using that to pay for copy or anything else. Right. And I think that's a big part of what has driven me. Maybe Alex making us like a just a TLDR on the latest developments to the Bitcoin ecosystem, everything from from Runes and Ordinals to Merlin. Is that very basic high level overview of what each of them is and how important it is to the ecosystem? Sure. So Ordinals for folks who don't know is basically storing data

on the bitcoin chain um roughly speaking non-fungible tokens except they're actually stored on the chain instead of off the chain came out about a little over a year ago is when they started popping off and has led is really the thing that drove the entire resurgence of building on Bitcoin. Elizabeth has spent a lot of time on this and can talk about it really well as well, but just brought in a ton of new builders, a lot of excitement, because basically, if you go all the way back to 2017, what's called the block size wars on Bitcoin, when basically people were fighting over, hey, should blocks be bigger than four megabytes on Bitcoin? It was decided they should not be. That drove a lot of builders out of the ecosystem. It's part of the reason that Ethereum took off the way it did and had the cycles that

it did in 2017, 19, 20, 21, is because people kind of gave up on building on Bitcoin. And what Ordinals showed is, hey, we can actually take the technical standards that exist on Bitcoin today and build an ecosystem based off of that. So that brought a bunch of builders in. A few months later, you saw BRC20s come out. Same thing, taking advantage of the technical standards that were already on Bitcoin, not having to change the L1 and introducing meme coins. So the largest of that is called Ordi. There's, again, hundreds of other ones. I think the total market cap on BRC20s is like in the middle.

So Ordi knows his NFTs. I'm oversimplifying. BRC20s are just fungible tokens. Yeah, I can simplify it real quick. Like Bitcoin has become the top chain for NFTs. Like right now, Bitcoin is number one chain for NFTs. And now Runes is basically... Elizabeth, volume is more than Solana and ETH? Then yeah, more than ETH, more than Solana, at least from yesterday.

And now Runes are like, excuse excuse my french but shit coins on bitcoin this is this is so we have nfts and now we have the meme coins and shit coins so shit coins could be anything from meme coins to actually tokens with utility and obviously how you define utility everyone disagrees and debates that but essentially just allowing erc20 tokens on to on bitcoin you've got all these different ideal like launches now on the bitcoin ecosystem correct yep that is that is correct and we could go we could go really deep on technical standards and how it differs and and where some of the limitations are but fundamentally that's right and again just comes to this idea that sorry one more one more question there what's merlin chain how would you define that i would all right i'm just gonna be provocative that one's very polarizing

um yeah so so here's the deal what you have is earlier this year starting being the year when it became very clear that the next cycle was going to be bitcoin focused since january of this year you have probably seen 50 bitcoin l2s and i'm going to use the word L2s in air quotes, launch. That's not an exaggeration. There's literally been 50 of them. And a lot of them are just basically fake. They're like, oh, come run Ethereum smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. And all they're trying to do is generate

TVL to generate hype. And the general way that this works is that they create their own token, and then they say, hey, you can now stake on our token, you know, stake on our network, and you'll win rewards. And what that means is you send some Bitcoin to yourself using a Bitcoin opcode for time lock. So basically, Mario, if you have a Bitcoin, you just send it to yourself with this time lock on it. And then they consider that staking the Bitcoin on their network. Keep in mind, it never left your control. It never went onto the network. You're not doing it for anything on the network. but you are earning points for the airdrop farming. And then they go and they say, oh, say, see here, there's TVL on our network, even though it's not actually going anywhere. hundred million dollars of investment through a smart contract over and over and over again you'll remember a couple years ago on solana there were a couple brothers who basically got

called out for doing this and generating like eight billion dollars in tvl off of the same like hundred million of original investment and people are just taking that same playbook and running it over so one of the things i've been telling you they'll get that same hundred million dollars and put it through a time lock to kind of multiply it to whatever billion yeah basically they'll get that same $100 million and put it through a time lock to kind of multiply it to whatever billion? Yeah, basically, they'll create just a series of smart contracts on this new network. And they'll, you know, it's almost like liquid staking works where they can take that same $100 million, put it into the smart contract, generate a liquid token, and then reinvest that again. And it's just like one investor's money being rolled over and over again. Hold on.

Okay. That sounds pretty fucked up, unless there's something I'm missing here. But then there's... Yeah, it's a marketing scheme. It's a marketing scheme. That's all it is. So going back, and before Scott kills me, but just going back to something like Merlin Chain.

So when you say it's an L2, but it's on Ethereum, how does that work? So what they're doing, you know, one of the questions, so all smart contracts on Ethereum are based on solidity and running, you know, what's called EVM, the Ethereum virtual machine. Other chains, for instance, Solana, you know, it's a Rust-based system. It does not use EVM. Stacks, where we're building, uses Clarity and Clarity EVM. A lot of the debate is, hey, what should this stuff get built in? The easiest thing to do is to just create a layer that is basically its own chain, runs EVM contracts, because there already are a lot of EVM contracts, right? If you make a quote unquote Bitcoin L2 that runs on EVM,

you don't have to convince developers to actually rewrite their code into something else. You can just get them to come over and use their existing smart contracts. And again, for someone who's just trying to kind of attract a lot of momentum and attention upfront

to generate more investment, that's the lowest barrier to entry but it's also the least sticky the least steady why oh sorry at least sticky because like people aren't actually really investing in the ecosystem they're just like trying to generate airdrop points so they hopefully get you know some coin given to them that becomes worth something and they can dump on retail. Scott, sorry, man. I just wanted to kind of geek out on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Go ahead, go back to the markets. It's cool. You sound like you're in the middle of a car engine, which is cool. I know that you're biohacking your brain or something.

I just started the PEMF machine, which is like zapping my body. But yeah, I just, I think we should do a whole- Zapping your body? Let's do a space on zapping your body. but yeah i just i think we should do a whole zapping your body okay wait let's do a space on zapping your body what the fuck are you doing my wife my wife does the pmf she swears by it's like it's amazing it's yeah it's it's it's pretty damn good i was just in the red light earlier if you hear a thumping that's me punching myself in my face repeatedly to get the blood flow going uh d, you've been waiting for a while. Yeah. Wait, real quick. Sorry, Scott. Let me just... Real quick, I just want to jump in because I did just say there's all this stuff you got to be suspicious of. The one thing I want to call out is there is a lot of legitimate stuff getting built on Bitcoin. And the one thing I'd encourage

people to do is just look at the history of the team and how long ago they started working in the Bitcoin space. If someone started building on Bitcoin in January 2024, or later, certainly, just be like really suspicious. If it's someone who has been in it since at least mid 2023, let alone, you can find people who've been building in Bitcoin for 10 years. Those are the more reliable projects. Folks who came around in the first few months after Ordinals when it got like like those are the people who you know you can be a little more trusting if it's if they've been around for two months just like anything in crypto be fucking suspicious of those yeah so alex i've just sent you through um my my whatsapp number i'd love to talk to you off offline just about this because i'm and elizabeth the same thing i've just sent it to you now on

whatsapp um just because i'm i'm really fascinated by fascinated by the ecosystem and I'm still, it's a lot for me to learn as well. And I think for the audience as well, because obviously you guys care about what you learn, not what I learn. So we'll do a space on this and kind of just go do a much bigger deep dive into the Bitcoin ecosystem because there's a lot happening that is not being talked about. But yeah, Scott, I think you're going to DB. Mario, I was just going to say to that, and also, as you know,

since we are partners on my YouTube channel, Beyond Yago is actually launching a show. It'll either be this Saturday or next Saturday that's going to be weekly exclusively about covering everything that's happening on Bitcoin in general. So that's going to be awesome. Yeah, Yago.

More information for both you and I. Yeah, exactly. Iago, I spoke privately to Iago even before my Cointelegraph panel as well. He's going to ask him a few questions. He's been in the Bitcoin ecosystem, well-respected, been in the ecosystem for a long time. So yeah, he does a show on Scott's channel, The Wolf of Wall Street. I think

it's launching or launching. He started a space as well. Yeah, we're going to either launch or we're editing the first one. It's awesome. So that'll be done hopefully for this saturday if not it'll be next saturday but it'll be weekly on saturdays on my youtube yeah it's gonna be yeah so check out scott's youtube channel i think he does spaces at weekly bitcoin space with us as well so elizabeth and alex if you want to join that bitcoin space just um um just message me and the team will more than gladly bring you on onto those panels. But yeah,

I think Scott's channel would be good for anyone wanting to learn more. Cause it's like just general news updates, but also explaining different things in the ecosystem. That can be very useful for everyone listening to learn. We make the content, we, we, we build the content that's for ourselves and hope that it's beneficial to everyone else. So like, what do I want to learn about? Who do I want to learn about it from? We do that.

We go pitch them and then, you know, watch the videos so we can speak intelligently. This is actually genuinely true. Like I listen to your channel, Scott, whenever I want to get the updates for the day or Ran's channel. It's a bit too gummy-ish for me now. But Ran and your channel are probably the two main channels I listen to right now. And then in terms of news, I look at my Twitter account account for news so my team posts the news on my account so i'll see what's happening today i look at my account but also the space is a bit more bit

longer form uh but yeah sorry we've just kind of blabbered about this too much but um yeah again anyway learn learn about bitcoin i highly highly highly recommend it and i think when i was doing a panel scott you were there remember when brock said something on the yacht in 2049? He said... Yeah, we were doing that together. Yeah, I know. But remember when he said Bitcoin is king, and when you're king, you don't need to hurry. You just wait for everyone else to do all the innovation, and then you can come in late because you're king. You don't give a fuck. So this is probably a good explanation of where Bitcoin is at right now.

Yeah, that was basically the everything else has been a testnet for building on Bitcoin argument, right? Which was unintentional, obviously, when Taproot sort of changed things. But now you can see, hey, what completely failed and what was a complete scam or what was a complete disaster elsewhere and try to filter it out. But sadly, as Alex's point, people don't learn those lessons. They just roll with what's hot. And so half those same people just see the Bitcoin narrative and go try to pretend to build something there. So once again, separating wheat from chaff there, I think really difficult, but DB, man, I got to go to you. We've been like, we've interrupted like 15 times.

So DB, then Richard, go ahead. Hey, go ahead hey yeah yeah no worries i love this chat i'm actually looking forward to the chat you guys have with them so you got brilliant people up here i actually have a question for liz and alex in just a second but back to the markets real quick i have the same sentiment as pretty much the entire panel. Fred's dead on. I think this November could make or break things, too. It's going to be crucial. And Juan is pointing out that innovation, it's all over the place. We've got interoperability and chain abstraction, which is going to really lead to bringing in the masses. that, I wanted to point out something that I pinned up top that I just found this morning from the head of crypto from Visa showing still how early we are and how there's still not much usage in capital in space. He was able to break it down using metrics to see that 10% of the stablecoin

volume is actual users and not just bots trading back and forth. So I'd say that's still a sign of how early we are, I'd say, and how big this year and next year is going to get because the big money and the retail hasn't even stepped in yet. Yeah, thanks. I see my fellow countryman, Vinny's online. So Vin's been a contrarian for the last couple of weeks, calling local tops. So I suppose not to fuel his contrarian views right now. My question is, Vin, what's your actual bull case, if any?

Because I'm curious to hear, being someone who's been in crypto and remains in crypto for quite some time, what's your outlook for the rest of the year? I mean, I think most of the people here are relatively bullish, but you took some flack over the last couple of weeks with some of your price predictions and macro concerns so yeah what's your bill case we know what your contrarian case is vinnie there wait see you gave him the softball of the century there, Richard. You threw it up. You teed him off and nothing.

Nothing. Ghosted. Anyone else want to take the same question from Richard? I mean, I also, honestly, Vinny and I have talked quite a bit kind of behind the scenes. I also thought, you know, around 74k was going to be a local top for quite a while and have been saying it for a while. And you know, the same kind of comments, I think, from the euphoric straight to 100k crowd, who I don't blame, that I was getting when I said, hey, calm down, when meme coins go this nuts, when there's this much broth, when people are sending

$30 million in 30 minutes to an anonymous person's random Solana contract right before the tweet gets deleted, it's usually a pretty decent sign of froth. And if you look at the halving cycle, things should calm down for a few months before up. But the same kind of anger I got it even implying that we were still going to go up, but not yet, which was my case. Like, yeah, we're still going way up. It's just going to take a while. We're getting the same kind of anger now, in my opinion, saying that if you say not here, because everybody seems to be very bullish. But just in the comments, I think with retail that like it's possible that we're just ranging and it's not all over. So, yeah, DB, go ahead. Yeah, I forgot to ask my question to Liz and Alex

and about the whole runes, ordinals, inscriptions narrative. And I'm curious to see where you think it's really going to end up going. Right now, I kind of look at it like Bitcoin Maxi is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. And we've got Bitcoin, which is a great store a square peg in a round hole. And we've got Bitcoin, which is a great store of value and has a certain purpose. And we've got all these amazing smart contract platforms. Where's this going? What's the intention of all these inscriptions, ordinals, runes, everything? Yeah, I can touch on this. I mean, I think it's interesting. We've had NFTs

on Bitcoin before. You've always been able to put data on the Bitcoin chain, but it's more than just hold their Bitcoin. And now they can do more. It's really shifting this narrative for Bitcoin and bringing a whole new wave of builders to the ecosystem. And I would say also lending integrity to those who are already there building, because I think people who are here building have this conviction to build on what is the strongest and most secure settlement layer. So it's really a huge renaissance moment for Bitcoin. And it's so perfect because art is the most powerful medium to enact change. And so if we want to see change in this ecosystem, I think Ordinals is probably the most appropriate way, which is a bit ironic. I mean,

some of these D-N collections are pretty, pretty out there, but they're fun and it's rallying people together. It's rallying communities together. And I think there's a lot to be said around this attention economy and, and what holds people's attention. And, and I think that's what the art is there for. And that's what the entertainment it's, it's it's fun and it's easy for people to wrap their heads around. And I think that's, what's driving a lot of the value there. And then on a more serious tone, that's also what's creating this, you know, the pain points around the transactions and understanding, okay, you know, Bitcoin's a more clunky ecosystem to navigate. So how do we make this super easy for people and a more smooth experience? And that's where the whole L2 narrative comes in.

Speaking of that, just really quickly, because I just saw it. Speaking of NFTs, just in CryptoPunk number 635 has been sold for 4,000 ETH, aka $12,405,000. That's money laundering. That's money laundering. I'm sorry. There's no way. There's no way. Uh, anyways, uh, I just saw it and had my own knee jerk reaction in real time. Uh, maybe I'm wrong, but yeah, come on. Go ahead. Fred, you can, uh can feel free. I was just going to say one thing on the market side. I know I had my bear take earlier, but we talk about the cycle, and you've talked about the month-time period. I think the bull cycle doesn't get off to the euphoric part for another five to eight months. Things always just line up and sort of happen when they're supposed to happen. And, you know, on the law front, we've got two big things that will start happening August, you know, September-ish, which is we'll get a ruling that should conclude the district court case and the Ripple v. SEC matter.

And that's important because one of the things they're trying to figure out is what is Ripple going to be precluded from doing? I know the channel posted something about the response that the company filed yesterday. So I don't think you guys covered it. But what's at play is, is Ripple going to get an injunction from doing certain core business practices? And their liquidity tool is what's being evaluated by the judge. And it's unique to Ripple in one sense, but it also can be generalized enough where other large corporations can say, oh, how we use these assets in our treasury or in our business operations. This is what the ruling was from the SEC here. So if that's favorable, that's a catalyst. And then Coinbase is fighting the SEC and they're trying to bypass right now, everything happening at the district court level to go right to the second circuit. And if that's allowed to go to the

second circuit, that'll kind of fast forward everything by a couple of years and could change the narrative as well. So we've got these things that are lining up that, you know, I'm still a bull, but, you know, keep in mind everything's going on. But we've got a lot of events that could be happening end of summer, fall. Richard. Okay, I'm going to throw out a question. You know, we've got so many varying external factors, which, you know, we're weighing up on a daily basis.

These things come at us hard and fast. But if, you know, putting the question out to each speaker, if you had to name one concern that you had for your positioning in this industry, what would it be? I mean, I'll say going off of what fred was saying i'm far more concerned and focused on the court cases um than i am on the elections like who's president fine affects who's like running the sec which is some of the short-term stuff but given that it just seems impossible to get congress to actually write a damn law and and put a new proper market structure about things. And there's obviously a new stablecoin bill that came out a couple weeks ago, but needs a lot of revision despite it coming from people who believe in the future of crypto.

Anyways, it's just the thing that really matters. We've got to take our eyes off these three or six month cycles. They don't matter. What matters is the 10 year cycles, right? What are we actually getting built? What is the infrastructure that is, I mean, this is true in the normal world too. What's the infrastructure that's getting built that's going to lead to the next generation of companies. And so to that end, what the actual policies and laws are will affect far more what companies are able to exist and able to build, which means if Congress

isn't going to pass the laws and, you know and a few different senators or house reps getting elected isn't going to change that, isn't going to change the fundamental dysfunction that we have, then it really comes down to the court cases. Unless we get rid of Elizabeth Warren. Dude, Elizabeth Warren's never passed a bill in her entire freaking career. Like she introduced. It's not about, it's not about, it's not about her litigation. If you ask anybody on Capitol Hill or have a conversation, it's very publicly known. She's, you know, her, her deal was that she got to effectively create, uh, control, you know, uh, finance in the banking industry and crypto policy.

She's the one who pushed for Gary Gensler. She's the one who implanted people in the white house and crypto policy she's the one who pushed for gary gensler she's the one who implanted people in the white house that have given us the policy from the biden white house and if she's gone there's a better chance than not that that will be gone as well and things will soften so we gotta be here like i said i'm not saying there's no i'm not saying there's no difference to it certainly again not having, not having like Gary Gensler in charge of the SEC would obviously be better for crypto. But like a lot of the moves that are made using executive power are so blunted by court, you know, short court actions and, you know, restraining orders and things like it's less of a big deal than the cases that actually get settled out and the laws that actually get settled out. And that's provable by what we've seen with the SEC over the last year, right? Because if you looked even a year ago this time, the sentiment was that factually that the SEC never loses, right?

They don't bring a court case that they lose. They win 99% of the time. Gary Gensler can do whatever he wants. And he's just gotten his ass kicked by the courts for a year straight. So, you know, their power becomes less and less each time the courts push back. And anyone who wasn't paying attention to Debtbox recently, or saw that in the past few days, two SEC crypto lawyers resigned as a result. But if you didn't see the insanity of the debt box scandal, we can call it fraud, perjury, whatever you want, where the SEC literally made up information and data and pushed and froze debt boxes assets and the

individual's assets without debtbtbox even having the opportunity to defend themselves. And then a judge takes 81 pages, I believe it was, to talk about the criminality of the SEC. And now we actually see two of them resigning. I mean, it shows everything we need to know about that agency. I would love to have met a lawman here again, James Murphy, to go over it. But I mean, he made the point that Congress shouldn't even be funding the SEC's crypto efforts anymore based on. Yeah, I was just going to add on that, Scott, the lawyers in that case were like, you owe us 1.8 million SEC for all the legal fees. And so they're going to take a huge chunk out of the SEC for that. And it's going to be glorious. And by the way, who pays that?

Taxpayers. You pay that. Yeah. It's really fun to watch the SEC have to pay money that's ours. Great. Terrific. Awesome. Wonderful. Dave. Yeah. I mean, look, we're not going to get anywhere until after the election for sure, and then we'll see if any of these issues shake out. The truth is that the Republicans, you know, talking about trying to depoliticize the SEC, you know, maybe that can gain traction, but probably not. The reality that this SEC has done is they've kind of defied decades of precedent to not care and ring up lots of legal fees and do regulation by enforcement without, you know, any implication of harm. It is coming home to roost, but it's going to take a while before any of that changes. So the reality is, you know, the courts are the only thing that's keeping, you know, the market, you know, them from pushing the market outside the U.S.

And it's very clear what they're trying to do. But it's equally clear that they're not winning. And, you know, we're just going to live in this world for a while. I wish to God it wasn't true. But it's why every crypto entrepreneur, every crypto firm is moving more and more stuff overseas. It's because we have no choice. But the good news, Dave, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but the good news is that we would have made those same comments a year ago in a much worse situation than where we are now, just because the courts have pushed back and the industry has

won here and there. So some of the precedents that the courts are setting, at least, if we're not getting policy, give us some wiggle room, right? Now, the one point I want to make, and I can't give up individuals because it's not fair to them. But, you know, I was in DC a couple weeks ago, I think I told you this, and I talked with multiple people who are at the senior senior but at the staff level at the SEC. And they're miserable. I mean, the number of miserable people in that building because they're being forced to do things in a way that is not the way they would want to do them is significant. Now, why am I saying this?

I'm saying that if a regime change happened and it went to, forget the politics, if it went to a centrist, somebody who wasn't, who was more back online with policy, which is, you know, hey, we're supposed to protect investors. Hey, we're supposed to work with the industry. And there's all sorts of good reasons why that's important. And, you know, the whole self-regulatory structure is built upon the idea of regulating using industry expertise. Yet, we've now had two SEC set basically between Clayton, which is inexcusable in my mind, and Gensler. We've had the SEC literally not be willing to engage with the industry unless your name was Sam Bankman-Fried. And you can't possibly say it any other way, but that is the absolute truth.

So the only person in the industry they engage with was a sociopathic criminal on almost a Bond villain scale. That's literally the only person they engage with. So, I mean, that's the world we live in. But what the bullish part is, if you did get a regime change, the staff actually does want to work with the industry and does want to do the right thing. So it's not like the organization can't be saved. It really just needs to change. Sounds like America in general. So, yeah, we did want to circle.

I don't know, Vinny, are you back? Yeah. Nice. Yeah. circle i don't know vinnie are you are you back yeah so vinnie's nice yeah i did want to circle back because uh richard had asked you a question you may have missed earlier richard you want to ask him again i had a phone call come through sorry yep evan um yeah i was just pointing out you know obviously been tracking your comments on spaces or online just uh contrarian views calling local top but i mean we know what you've had pretty strong views both macro and crypto related what's your actual bull case for the next 12 to 18 months um i mean the the bull case really is um that the u.s government basically prints a shitload of money,

more than they have in the previous years, because something breaks in the markets, whether it's the treasury market or something else. Because look, fundamentally, Bitcoin and then the rest of crypto is all a function of global liquidity. If liquidity is in the system or comes back into the system, it's going to pump. And when liquidity gets drained, it goes down.

Bitcoin gets affected. The, you know, so the alts, the alts, the way I look at it is alts are basically a function of Bitcoin's liquidity. And Bitcoin is a function of global dollar liquidity for the most part anyway. And so you always, and this is why the alts always run after Bitcoin's stepped up. Until Bitcoin gets to like 60, 70, 80%, if and until it gets to that sort of level of dominance, it's always going to be kind of a downstream effect. It's like a champagne tower. So the money always goes into Bitcoin first and then it flows down. So if you're looking for the bull case, it's just basically some global market dysfunction that forces them to just keep printing more money.

And then you see Bitcoin going up and gold going up. But the downside is that there's probably still a little more ammunition and more options that they've got before they actually get to that point where they have to go sort of unlimited printing. And that's what everyone mistakes. Everyone thinks it's going to collapse next week, next month, this year. The U.S. has got a lot of ammunition. I don't mean the war type. Financial ammunition. I don't mean the war type, financial ammunition, right? So there's a lot of things that the Fed can do when it comes to providing liquidity to banks, the stabilized markets, local markets, global markets.

The most concerning thing right now for anyone watching should be that, you know, the yen, and I was in Japan, geez, a few weeks ago. I was at like 144, 143. It's 155 today, last I checked. That's a serious depreciation of a major international currency in a short space of time. So what does it mean? It means that the Japanese, and they've already come out today

saying this or yesterday, saying that they have to defend their currency because they're an island. They import a lot. They can't afford to have a weak currency for lots of reasons. And they're going to have to sell U.S. Treasuries. And the last I checked, they were hovering around a trillion dollars in U.S. Treasuries, most of them long-dated, you know, 10 years, maybe some 20 years and stuff.

But they're going to have to sell that. So that's why you're seeing today, you're seeing the markets, you're seeing the yields are just up sharply. They have to go and raise dollars to go and buy back the currency or at least defend the currency and prevent it from going down. Anyway, this stuff doesn't play out as – it plays out much faster in our minds than it does in real life. So even though you can look forward and say this whole thing is going to collapse,

endless printing, hyper-Bitcoinization, yes, yes, yes, whatever, whatever viewpoint you have, it takes a long time to play out. And yes, you can use the whole slowly then instantly sort of moniker. Yeah, maybe it works eventually. But for the most part, I think we're going to be sitting and watching how it's a kind of watching a train wreck in slow motion. And, you know, but it's not it's kind of watching a train wreck in slow motion and um you know but it's it's not it's not quite wrecked yet so it's like it's a kind of a schrodinger's train is it is it a wreck or is it a train wreck in motion i mean yeah i was just gonna say just just listening to everyone's comments we we just really seem to have hit like yeah okay well when when is when is the point

of something bad happening but the only things that we seem to be talking about is just corruption lobbying money printing government excessive size excessive control, excessive debt. We have just hit a real dark point where we're relying upon, we think we have capitalist free markets and all we have is a request to print more money so that everyone can keep their bags going. And then we have governments that just literally, the regulators and governments are just a function of who's lobbying hardest. Is it the banking lobby? Is it the Sam Bankman

Freed lobby? Is it the Israeli lobby? Who is it? The one thing I will say is that I think there's too much focus on this global coordinated, you know, Illuminati sort of environment that everyone thinks is some big coordination by the global bankers. I think they're all so fucking stupid they couldn't coordinate the way out of a paper bag, to be quite honest.

And I think they're basically all in it for themselves. They're all trying to figure out what each of their countries are going to do. And they're all sitting now going, shit, we screwed up. How do we fix this? And then they keep looking at the U.S. and what the U.S. is doing. The U.S. is just saying, look, we screwed up. How do we fix this? And then they keep looking at the US and what the US is doing. The US is just saying, look, we're going to do what's

in the US best interest. And that may even be, and I've said this like two months ago, raising rates again, because guess what? I don't think Powell is going to like what he sees tomorrow when PCE numbers come out. And I think they may have to opt for it. And here's the other thing, because they're well aware that the US is in a state of fiscal dominance right now which really means that even a slight raise in the interest rate is going to be stimulating the economy especially since we saw the gdp numbers today so i think there'll be even more uh more impetus to raise rates now and not cut um and let the rest of the world feel a bit more pain and that's what's going to get everyone's back up so i i just don't believe in the coordinated law i don't think the world's a bit more pain and that's what's going to get everyone's back up so i i just don't believe in a coordinated i don't think the world's governments can coordinate on anything quite

frankly yeah no i definitely don't think it's coordination but every single fiat currency is a ponzi scheme and it's been co-opted by central banks that that is a fact there's more debt there's more debt than money so the only the only outcome of a ponzi scheme where there's more debt than money so the only the only outcome of a ponzi scheme where there's more debt than money is is more debt if you want to make made of didn't have an army man made of did not have guys and guns and and jails and police stations and whatever else and that's the rest that's how the world works so governments can run ponzi schemes because they're not the ones that get arrested and get put in jail they're not the ones that get arrested and get put in jail. They're not the ones that, you know. They can, but they can't run them forever.

Like, maths doesn't change. Even if you've got guns. If you put guns to maths, it still doesn't change the maths. I'll challenge you on that. So what happened in Zimbabwe? They ran it up. They Ponzi'd the currency to nothing and then basically said, well, fuck it. This currency doesn't work anymore. We'll just go use a proxy currency and we're going to

still function as a nation state. And even though that currency doesn't work, we'll force you to use this one or we'll use rands or we'll use dollars and I'll just proxy in. But it didn't change the economy. They didn't go and use Bitcoin, for example.

They went to use a trading partner's currency. But there is a major side effect, and that's wealth inequality. And wealth inequality creates civil unrest. And civil unrest creates change. Zimbabwe's been, I mean, Richard and I are both South African. I can tell you, Laos and Johannesburg at the time, when Zimbabwe was collapsing and all the civil unrest. And guess what?

Mugabe was still in power for another 10 or 15 years until he died. Civil unrest doesn't guarantee change. No, because you've got a dollar, so you can function on a dollar. But what happens when the world reserve currency is the one that's changing? We've been here before. No, that's my point. The U.S. is only sitting on a debt-to- to GDP ratio of like 130%. Japan's sitting at over 200, the entire world sitting at 375% right now. When you look at the dominoes fall, the U S is going to be the last to fall because the U S will

export its problems to the rest of the world first before taking it on the chin. And then it's Mad Max. Well, that's when you have a war, right? When you externalize inflation across the world, you get the world addicted to IMF there. And then that creates the situation that we're in right now, where everyone's an enemy, because they're using their central banks to pay off their dollar reserves

and destroying the welfare of their population. But how long do you think that takes i mean even with even with the sdrs and everything else and how integrally linked every other currency is you have to wait for a lot of currencies to go bang at the same time for this to happen i'm not happening now no this is my point it's the like our time scales as humans watching this unfold over time it's distorted. You think it's going to happen this year, this month? It'll only happen when there's some global financial crisis with massive dysfunction on a global scale. Think of it as like whack-a-mole. Even the US banking

situation last year in March, they plugged it. No problem. Let's move on. We'll just close on four or five banks and we'll forget about it. And the world just carries on. And so it'll keep happening until it gets to a point where it's untenable. The U.S. has still got probably $15 trillion more, in my opinion, in reserves, phantom reserves, before it becomes a problem. It's going to cause inflation. It's going to have issues. But that's before we see the end of the world sort of situation with the dollar.

But in the interim, you're going to see other smaller countries who are just really indebted go down first. And that's going to happen very soon this year. But it's not going to be the U.S. Dave, really quick, and then we got to wrap. Vinny, you can finish up, then Dave. But, yeah, we got to move to wrap. Go ahead. Dave can go.

Yeah. Vinny, you can finish up, then Dave. But yeah, we got to move to wrap. Go ahead. Dave can go. Yeah, I mean, I think that Vinny, I agree with both what you and Simon are saying. I know that that sounds crazy. I think Simon is right in a sense, in the fourth turning sense, that we'll go somewhere. I think that it's a long way off. I think that we have expert can kickers running most of the governments of the world that matter. So, you know, and so, Vinny, your point on timescale is absolutely right. The thing that's interesting about, you know, tactically is the narrative shift to people saying that the best way to decrease inflation is by cutting rates because

that will decrease owners' equivalent rent. That narrative is gaining a lot of traction. And as a result, I strongly suspect that I don't know whether they'll be able to cut rates at all this year, maybe a little bit. But I really doubt they're going to raise rates. I think going into an election year, I would be beyond stunned if they did that. And the flattening of the yield curve is kind of important. But look, as long as they can keep the long end below 5%, they're not going to panic. The long end at 4.7%, which is what you refer to today, the 10-year, is troubling. But if it gets towards 5 again, which it did briefly six months ago, that's when you think the big cannons come out. And that's when you'll get another round of QE. They may not call it that, but it'll happen. And people should be looking for that. And I think that people like Arthur

Hayes and others are sniffing around saying this is inevitable, because basically it is inevitable. And that's where the rally will come from in Bitcoin, at least, you know, toward the back end of the year. But right now we're in a range and, you know, we keep talking about it. But I agree with you, Vinny. I think the timescales of people who expect some, some action to happen at like some fulcrum point, like now, I just don't think that's true. What a conversation. I absolutely love this show that we get to show up every day and can have such a wide breadth of topics from such incredible speakers, man. I don't say it often, but it's really an honor to be able to show up here and ask questions and shut up and learn from people a hell of a lot smarter than me.

I really, really enjoyed today's conversation. Of course, we'll be back tomorrow morning at 1015 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I'm still laughing internally that Alex implied that I was billionaire dark political money from Florida trying to engage in a Massachusetts election. If only man, now, now at least Alex, you've given me something to aspire to. Thank you. Otherwise guys, one day, one day, man, one day you, you and me together, buddy. 10 15 AM Eastern standard time tomorrow will be the last show of the week. Don't forget to tune in. Bye everyone. Have a good one. Cheers.