The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin BREAKS Towards $100K As Senate DELAYS The CLARITY Act!

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Bitcoin and crypto got a jolt today as headlines pointed to a massive $130B jump in total crypto market cap in 24 hours, even while the policy backdrop stays messy with the Senate crypto bill markup reportedly pushed back amid negotiations over flashpoints like stablecoin rewards—fueling frustration that’s now spilling into public pressure campaigns (including calls for Trump’s “crypto czar” to step aside if a bill doesn’t pass soon).

Bitcoin is breaking out with a move to 100K looking imminent. All this is happening while we're getting a delay from the Senate on the Clarity Act markup and a lot of pushback from the big banks, especially JPM Morgan, about stable coin yield. We're going to talk about all of that and much more, more specifically where we think the market's headed as it ramps up here with one of my favorite guests and people, Mr. Mike Alfred. Let's go. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to scenic Las Vegas. I decided to, you know, fly over from Tampa to join Mike in his hometown.

You noticed it right away, my fake Vegas background. I threw that up there for you. It seemed to work out. Yeah, my hometown's actually San Diego, and I did fly in from Texas this morning to be here with you. So it's great to see you, Scott. Yeah, well, have you ever seen? the Mel Brooks movie, History of the World, where he says it's good to be the king over and over again.

That's how I feel what I'm talking to you. It must be good to be the king. You had probably the best year of anyone I know in 2025. 2025 was a rough year for most people in crypto. People are going to forget this real quickly because that's human nature to forget pain. But MSTR was down like 48, 49%. Marathon Digital was down like 48, 49%. Solana was down 30%.

Ethereum was down more than 10%. Bitcoin was down. It was actually a really hard year to post returns. The one area that we saw some nice follow through was the AI Data Center conversion opportunity, something we've talked about a lot on your show over the years. I mean, we literally were talking about iron at $2.80, and it went to $75.

I'm old enough for ever when we called them Bitcoin miners. Yep. Yeah. It's hard to call them that anymore. They're basically large scale. energy capacity builders, right, who happened to built an expertise in these large-scale AI data centers as well. Again, people will say, hey, you couldn't have seen that coming, but in fact, we did. And we did talk about AI well before the market was focused on it. And I think what do you

look at the Bitcoin market now? I think with the benefit of hindsight, you can say we never had a bull market at all this cycle. So I don't believe with the benefit of hindsight, that that there's been any bull market in crypto over the last four years, I think effectively we've been in a prolonged bear market that started with the Fed raising rates, 500 basis points in quick succession, basically killing the market in 2022. And while there was some signs of recovery in various assets

like Solana and XRP for periods of time, like there's been no sustainable recovery because there's actually been no business cycle at all. There's been no ISMPMI over 50. Rates have been too restrictive. I don't necessarily agree with the approach that Trump's taking, but I think he's not wrong that the Fed has been wrong about the impact of tariffs and has been too slow to reduce sort of the drag on the economy from higher rates. And then I think for crypto in particular, we've never had something like AI that's so big and so powerful that it sucks the oxygen out of the room. So AI has effectively dampened the ability for crypto to pick up any liquidity from the broader economy the way it would have in previous cycles.

And so I just, I think it's just a totally different world. I think we're maybe in the first, second, third, fourth inning of a business cycle and a liquidity cycle. And for Bitcoin, that means we might only be in the fourth or fifth inning of the move. And I think what we're looking for now is gold and silver to cool off over the next quarter or so. I do expect silver will cool off sooner than anything else because supply, it's pretty easy to meet the supply there. So I've been just like shooting fish in a barrel. I've been taking shorts on the SLV ETF every single morning. for like a week now. And so like I'll do it again. I think it's at 83 something right now.

I'll take it again today. And I'll short it between 83 and 85 and by the end of the day, it'll be 81, right? It's just at 92, but I'm not looking at the ETF. Sorry, sorry, no, no, the ETF. Look at the ETF. The ETF's at 83. I think it went as high as 8330 or 8350 in the pre-market already today. But I think at some point today, it'll be 81 again. And it's been doing the same thing every day for a week. And so the shorts get the, The longs in silver gets so mad because they're like, how can you be making money in an upturn? I'm like, well, you obviously don't know anything about trading because there is a nice downturn intraday and silver every single day. Silver people who I did not know actually existed in this world are worse than crypto community members from dying altcoins.

They are so angry and aggressive. I posted a tweet saying silver looked cooked with a chart at some point in the mid-80s. It went a little higher, but like they freaked out. I did not know that they were angry, emotional silver people. And I don't want to know angry emotional silver people. I mean, it makes sense that they would be a little annoyed. I mean, they have not made any money for decades relative to anything else in the market. And then finally, it looks like they're going to have a sustainable break.

And then people like me are making money shorting the one time, like the one month or two in the history of silver where they're actually feeling good. So I understand. And a little bit of it is me poking the bear for fun, right? Because I guess you? You? No. No, you trolling people? That would never happen.

That could never happen. So listen, you just kind of gave the summation of 2025. I agree with it. I think it's effectively no bull market, bit of grinding upward. I think we basically got a repricing of Bitcoin after Trump was elected, right? So you kind of pin it back to a year ago, November. he got elected, we jumped up into the high 70s and have sort of had a slight uptrend since then, a flat year, depending on when you look at it. What does that mean then if we actually do see a

business cycle and liquidity? And is that guaranteed? Because I've seen a lot, the Tom Lee's, Raul Powell's of the world saying, listen, you know, ISM is going to rage now. Business cycle's coming back. But it's been flat for years. There's nothing that says markets can't remain irrational and it remains flat. Yeah, but I think it's partially, flat because the Fed's been behind the curve. Because I think the Fed is actually a lot more political than people think it is, right? Or at least tradify people who want to believe the stories that are told, the narratives that are told by the mainstream establishment, the Keynesian establishment. So they're all saying Trump's messing with the Fed's independence. And I'm like,

thinking about it, I'm like, I don't think the Fed's ever been independent. I think it's basically been a lobbyist arm for the U.S. banking cartel the whole time. So I personally don't have have a problem with the end result of what he's probably going to do, which is going to shake things up and he's going to bring rates to a level that make the economy juice the economy a bit. You can run the economy hot if he wants to. I have to. There's an election coming. Yeah.

I don't think it's just that. I think it's also that a lot of mainstream people are struggling. And if things aren't working for those people today, then you've got to try something. And he's trying everything. He's like, let's go stop corporations from buying. homes and let's try to bring down rates by buying up mortgage bonds and let's try to cap credit card interest rates and I mean he's just on a rampage right now and some of those things are maybe not great long-term ideas but it sort of doesn't matter they will have the net effect

of increasing animal spirits much like the the fed's jaw-boning often without actually doing anything the fed's able to sort of restrict liquidity Trump is trying to reverse that by job-boning the other direction to try to increase liquidity, increase animal spirits, and get people spending. Now, remember, we also had all these sort of asinine and dumb policies like tariffs, for example. Tariffs net net mean nothing, and all they did was basically confuse everyone and stop economic activity, right? Immigration policy. How do we find out literally today likely if those are constitutional or not? The Supreme Court tariff ruling is coming in about 50 minutes. Yeah, and it'll take a while to, no matter what the

ruling is it'll take a while to to make adjustments around that. But my point is that that nothing good has really come out of those. Like forget about the mainstream narrative or his narrative that, hey, look at all this money we raise. Like it's a net tax on the economy when you consider all of the negative externalities of corporations and CEOs being afraid to invest. Like it's actually curtailed growths pretty significantly. And then immigration as well. Like I'm a fan of keeping criminals outside of the United States. Right. I'm a fan of respecting the rule of law. But I also am not a fan of putting guns into junior ice agents and having them rampaging around cities, including like shaking down actual citizens and scaring the crap out of ethnic minorities such that they stop spending. Some of it feels quite targeted, like from a political standpoint where like if you were really concerned about immigration, you would do something a bit more comprehensive that would capture illegal immigration from every ethnic group, not just people that look a certain shade of brown or speak a certain language, right?

Again, I'm not a fan of any of that, but at the same time, maybe the net benefit of Trump's presidency will still be positive for the average American, but I think he's got to stop doing things that cause the economy to sort of shrink up and shrivel, and he's got to start doing more things that get people excited and get people pumped up again. And I think his advisors have finally gotten him off the cliff on some of this stuff. And I think that's what will cause an actual business cycle. some interesting things that are aligning, which is very much in line, actually, with all the things you just said, which is that, so we have clarity, right, and the big fight is stable coins and

yield, and the banks are against that. But J.P. Morgan seemingly also against basically everything that Trump is proposing right now. You can see this one right here. J.P. Morgan says 10% cap on credit cards, which you mentioned, would be very bad for consumers. And then you have them obviously pushing back against the stable coin yield. And then you have Jamie Diamond, criticized. criticizing tariffs, criticizing Trump going after Powell. I mean, I'll show you exactly what Trump said. This is pretty entertaining. This is after Jamie Diamond said that he's putting too much pressure on Powell.

It's a good, good watch. Jimmy Diamond said today that it's not a great idea to be chipping away at the Fed's independence. Do you think Jamie Diamond's wrong about that? Yeah, I think it's fine what I'm doing. We have a Fed person. He was extended by Biden. And, yeah, I think he's wrong. I think it's wrong. He's done a bad job. We should have lower rates. Jamie Diamond probably

wants higher rates. Maybe it makes more money that way. I mean, that's a pretty funny comment because if you take a look when talking about clarity and stable coins, J.B. Morgan made $25 billion last quarter in net interest income. So you wonder why the banks don't want stable coins to have yield because, you know, then the customers might actually make some money and the banks might not be able to keep it all. Yeah. I mean, the Fed and the Treasury need the commercial banking sector in the U.S. to sort of create money. and get it out into the economy and to the extent at which the government cozies up too much with crypto and stable coins, it actually disintermediates the traditional commercial banking business.

So I think there's a huge rift that's formed with Trump and a lot of these establishment banking, economic people, and they're all connected via the Fed, right? And so it makes sense that there's kind of a battle playing out right there. I'm actually supportive of some of the stuff Trump is doing in that area. I don't think it's just Trump and just stablecoins. There's a whole kind of neobanking movement that's starting to play out to where consumers will get better deposit rates. They will be able to transfer money more cheaply.

They will be able to access more products and services. And I'm seeing that playing out of backed, for example, right now, where we just announced the acquisition of our CEOs company, bringing it fully into the fold. But that's really just to lay the foundation for what we're about. to launch in the coming months. So I see a lot of things that are coming for the banking sector. I would not, I see a lot of hedge funds that are like long JP Morgan and Wells Fargo and Bank of America. And that's been a popular trade over the last couple of years and people have made

money doing that. I still think in the long run those companies are going to face a lot of challenges. Yeah. I think that's very hard to short right now, but a very clear direction. Yeah. And also the yields are decent too. So like you're paying quite a bit to borrow. and then pay those dividend yields to the holders of the stock while you're short. So I'm not recommending a short on those names. I'm just saying I wouldn't be excited about getting long as like a long-term structural long. I'd rather be long something that I think has better longer-term tailwinds than the banking industry. I mean, in your mind, how much then does clarity matter right now?

There's been a battle between the crypto industry, the banks, and then obviously whichever side is donating more to any given politician between the politicians. on whether to sort of reopen this yield argument from genius by putting in legislation into clarity. Yesterday, we had a story that the new proposal out of the Senate Banking Committee sort of assuaged some of the concerns from Coinbase, but didn't go all the way. So we sort of met halfway on what would be allowed as far as rewards,

which they won't call yield. But now we have had the markup push back. Senate Cryptobil Markup moved to January 27th. It was supposed to be tomorrow, 137. amendments now to this thing. It does not seem like this is going to pass easily or that yield is a foregone conclusion. Yeah, I mean, look, the problem is the bill is probably so long that no one's actually read it. I mean, Chad GPT's probably read it and Claude's probably read it thousands of times. And maybe there's a good summary that someone's done. I've seen a couple of those.

But I'm not sure, again, since I focus primarily on Bitcoin and then more recently, right in the last two, three years, focused on the AI data center component. I'm not so focused on clarity in the very short term. Like I know there are some people who think it's super important. I'm just not sure that it's going to matter. I think, again, I think the factors that are going to drive Bitcoin are related to the business cycle and liquidity less so regulation. I don't think Bitcoin Bitcoin didn't need because we didn't have regulation

the last couple times Bitcoin went completely parabolic. So clearly, like, if you look at history, Bitcoin at least doesn't need anything in particular. And I think if you think about what's happened this cycle, you've gone from 16 to 126 to 70,

back to 80. You went down to 74 in April, 80 in like November. And now we're sitting right around 94, 95, like look, seem to be basing for another run at all-time highs. And maybe clarity happens around the same time.

But I think it would be coincidental, right? And sort of like something that's just happening at the same time, less so of a driver. I agree. I said the best possible news within approval, I think is priced in because there's an expectation that's going to happen. To your point, if you're focused on Bitcoin and miners or data centers, however we're re-skinned them these days. I don't think it matters at all. I think for the people who

want to build in crypto in the United States or who still have some hope that their altcoins may eventually make a move, they probably care deeply whether clarity happens or not. But I would even go as far as to say that Atkins at the SEC has made so many statements and has made it exceptionally clear that he doesn't view these things as securities anyways, which was likely the largest threat to a lot of them, and it hasn't really moved price. So what else is clarity going to really offer, you know, the crypto market as a whole? And the SEC has Project crypto coming, their whole push to give clarity on all of this. I think it's important, but I agree with you.

It's not the singular catalyst that many view it to be. Yeah, I think we're, look, I've been wrong in 2025, right? Because I thought any moment, any quarter of last year, we could have seen the beginning of kind of a broader crypto rally. There are signs now, right? Like if you look at Ethereum just over the last few days, if you look at the way Bitcoin's behaving so far a year to date, it was almost like the Algos flipped over on January 1. I mean, they were sitting, the Algos were sitting on all the small cap stocks and all of crypto for most of from mid-November, maybe the first to second week of November through

the end of the year. And by the end of the year, it was so obvious. It was like they weren't even hiding the behavior anymore. They were trading exactly the same. all of a sudden the calendar flipped over and you had a January 2nd on a Friday and boom it was like it was like they flipped the light switch and everything went the other way and so i think sometimes this stuff it's not pre-programmed necessarily but there are technical factors that are driving some of this stuff and flows where it doesn't matter what the news flow is like unsophisticated market

participants will sit around and and talk about stuff like this as if it's this is going to be the driver because unsophisticated market participants need narratives to understand price action, whereas more sophisticated market participants who've been around for a long time, understand that you don't necessarily need anything if an asset is sort of primed in position to move in a certain direction. Yeah. And I think Bitcoin over the next three, five, seven years is headed towards a million. And the question is only when.

And so at any moment, when you're trading at 90 and you know it's going to a million within, say, eight or nine years, at it. any moment it will begin to rise and you'll come up with reasons afterwards to explain it. But if you were looking for reasons before, they won't exist. So that's how people miss it. They're drawing chart squiggles showing it's going down, right? Because it's the end of the four-year cycle and there's a having, you know, that just happened, you know, a year and a half ago, two years ago. And so now the market has to go down because we topped out at 126 and so we're going to 30. right? And it totally ignores all of the other factors that we've had in these previous

so-called Bitcoin having cycles that are different. I think this is, it's not even remotely like. It's entirely different. The only thing that's similar is it had at the local top in October. Everything else is different. The crypto market broadly was completely different. You've never got the Al-coin run. The Bitcoin all-time high was way too early because of the ETF. I keep throwing up quotes. But you can't just say, hey, there was a Reddit post. that said we'd get an all-time high in October, and we did. So therefore, the cycle. Listen, I know you're not a fan of chart swiggles,

but if you were, Bitcoin looks like it's going to 112 to me. You know, it's a classic ascending triangle. It just finally broke out on volume, above the levels it's been trading. So it's definitely out of the range at the moment. And to your point, you take a look at an XRP chart, Ethereum chart, Salon a chart. I've been pointing this out. Everything got back above the Daily 50MA, as this did.

and for the first time in ages, they're keeping up with Bitcoin or outperforming, which means that it's not just rotation. There actually is a bit of new money in this market. And you want to look at January 1st, that could be because of tax loss harvesting. If you need narratives, maybe all those whales finally got sick of selling or ran out of coins they wanted to sell because we were at 90 for so long, right? I mean, there's a lot of reasons it could be. But bottom line, most things look extremely good to me from a fundamental and technical

perspective at this moment and it looks ready to ramp up. I mean, think about how gold and silver has led the crypto cycle the last few times. It's actually rhyming. It's just it's so elongated that that basically anybody who has a short attention span hasn't been able to follow the threat all the way across. So they've already lost interest. They didn't make any money last year and they didn't make any money the year before. And so they gave up when actually we're right at the phase of like the second third inning

of the cycle where gold and silver rip pull back. liquidity starts to broaden. You get a full business cycle. You get liquidity flowing in. You eventually get retail FOMO. We have not seen, and you know this, we have not seen anything like 2017, 2013, 2021, nothing like it. So anyone who thinks that like because, because a Mag 7 went up, right, like Mag 7 went up, good. Like AI obviously is a macro super trend that we've never seen before. And so it makes sense that that would happen. And Bitcoin went up because of the ETF and treasury companies and forces that haven't existed in the institutional market in previous cycles. But everything else is sort of totally hostage to the lack of a business cycle.

So basically, in retrospect, 2022 was the steep part of the first leg of the bear market. 23, 4 and 5 were like bounce back periods where the rubber band had stretched too far away from fundamental value. And so the last three years was a rebasing, the rubber band coming back to the mean. So now we're just sitting at like fair value in a world where nothing is changing, right? Where the consensus is just that crypto is crypto and like it doesn't matter that much and nothing's going to happen. And so all it takes is to start to get the sense that say Bitcoin or Ethereum or something in that category is looking unstoppable, impulsive. Like it's just going to run and we don't know why, but it just starts to move up sort of the way Zcash did.

A month or two ago where people are looking at it in crypto and they're like, how when everything else is down, how is this happening? that's going to start happening elsewhere over the next six months. And later we'll go back and say, oh, well, that was the beginning of the actual real bull market. But we were so confused because it took so long from 2022 that we didn't realize that we were actually in a prolonged bare market. And then eventually came into a bull market. And so overlaying with the AI cap-back cycle real quick, because I think this is an important concept that most crypto people just won't get because they're not focused on it. The AI cap-back cycle is the biggest cap-back cycle in absolute terms in all of human history. it is in the first or second inning.

It is mostly powered by cash and cash flow from the largest companies in the world. And as of right now, it looks like it's going to accelerate at least into 2028 or 29 and possibly into the 2030s. And so you're not going to get any sort of prolonged downturn in an environment where every large company in the world is competing in an existential battle to preserve their core business. Whether you're Microsoft or Apple or Amazon or meta or Tesla, there's a reason why they're spending billions, tens of billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in capbacks. And as long as that continues, you have the right backdrop for eventually some of that liquidity and some of the economic growth that comes out of that to filter into crypto. So I could see a scenario where we actually run up for basically the next two or three years.

It's not my baseline scenario right now, but it is a plausible scenario that I think most people have discounted to zero and therefore makes it more likely that it could surprise. I do think 2026 could be, I mean, we're already seeing it. halfway through 26 and people like me are up almost 30% for the year already on large dollars, right? And we had something similar last year in the AI data center space, but it immediately sold off into February March and then we have the low in April. If we don't just sell off from here for the rest of January or into February, like this year is setting up to be bigger, much bigger than 2025 across the board because remember last year was actually not that great of a

year for most people. And if you go back to 2024, it wasn't actually that great of of a year for like the Bitcoin mining AI data center space. It was a good year for MSTR and a couple treasury companies, right? And then the year before that, 2023 was really good year for the miners, but wasn't such a good year for MSTR. And in aggregate, like Ethereum hasn't had a new all-time high, right? Salana has not made a new all-time high as far as I know, right? And Bitcoin's one of the only ones because it's on its own S-curb. So I just, I think this cycle could be like turning over into the bull market now for the first time in four years. swiggles for you that I think are interesting. So you obviously talked about the mag

seven. That's where the focus has been, I with you agree that there's still a lot more money coming into AI and that those are likely to go. But for the first time, once again, this is the IWM, the Russell, this is small caps. This rhymes to me of if you look at Bitcoin as the Mag 7, right, kind of the big one. And if you thought that money was leaving the market, there was going to be a bare market, you would expect that as people sell that cash would go out of the market. well, it's going actually into riskier things like small caps. I think that aligns with seeing XRP and Ethereum and Salina performing well, even when Bitcoin is going up right now.

I mean, take a look at Iron. This thing looks like it's going to rip through all-time highs in a few days. But you take a look at this chart. This is one of my longest positions from the bottom. And micro strategy, this is my largest position right now from the 150s. Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, I like. People, and I posted it and I got the.

predictable response I wanted, which was that I'm retarded. And there's something wrong with my brain and I was dropped on my head as a kid and it's going to zero, which is exactly what I want everyone telling me when I post that this is a generational buy for micro strategy. But all of this stuff aligns with the market ramping up. I mean, what was that? Micro Strategies at 178 pre-market. It closed at 172.

You could have bought this in the 150s two days ago. Yeah, and it did bounce from 155 to 180 once before, right? And I actually tweeted at the first time it went into the 150s saying, hey, we're getting to the levels now. Where even though I was selling in the 500s, yeah. And I was one of the only large-scale commentators on this space who was correctly bearish in the weeks leading up to the November 24 mania. But now I'm quite positive. I still own my MSDR and my IRA, but my bigger sizing now is going into to strive because I think strive has the potential to surprise people more. than MSDR.

I think, and I made this argument on Twitter last week, like MSDR is going to be the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin forever. People don't understand the scarcity of Bitcoin. Like, there's no way you could catch them right now because anybody who's big enough to try to catch them is going to move the market. And moving the market basically enables Saylor to accelerate the strategy. So you move the market to 120 or 150, Sailor's going to buy a shit ton more Bitcoin. But the Russell 2000 is something that I've been talking about for a couple years now.

I've been looking for that rotation. I've also been looking and I started talking about this two, three years ago. And I think a lot of people in my spaces are like, what the fuck is Mike talking about? But I was like, hey, the equal weighted S&P is what you want to watch because the market cap weighted S&P is not really telling you the full story of what's happened in the economy. And only very recently have we started to see international outperforming U.S., the equal weighted outperforming the market cap weighted and small caps year to date outperforming the S&P. Those are exactly the conditions you'd want to see if you're going to start.

start to see money flowing into crypto, money going out on the risk curve. And as it relates to the Treasury Company thing, yeah, I agree. You were a little early. When you were buying NACA over one, I said, hey, it could go to 60 cents or 50 cents or whatever. And, you know, I didn't, I wasn't. I was more right about being bearish on Treasury companies from April until that. You were, but actually only very, you two, but I was a very vocal in the hype cycle

when everybody also told me that was stupid. You were correct about treasury companies being a problem, but I was also correct in sort of poo-pooing it a little bit and saying, Scott, this isn't big enough. You're like, wrong. I just said, look, you're right, that treasury companies are overvalued, but I don't think they're going to cause like a cataclysmic decline in Bitcoin. And that's exactly what's happened. We went from 126 to 80 and now we're at 95 and the treasury company mania has been wiped out.

Now, there are still good treasury company opportunities. MSDR is going to be the biggest digital capital issuer over the next couple decades. It's going to be one of the biggest financial institutions in the world of any type. I think that's pretty clear because if Bitcoin goes to a million or $2 million, they're going to be the largest holder of that asset, which is great. It's not a monopoly position, but it is a number one position in a market that probably matters substantially. And as you said, the higher price goes, the harder it is for anyone to catch up.

So it's impossible. I don't think he could be caught. Yeah. Like unless he dies. $5 billion this week. That's more than most treasury companies bought, period. Yeah. And anybody who tries to do it quietly, you can't go big enough to catch without the market impact.

So we'll know, right, people will say, well, why is it going up? Well, the real answer is that a couple of governments decided to get into the MSTR game. And they didn't tell you, right? They're not going to come out and be like, hey, we're running a neutral reserve, you know, asset treasury strategy over the next five years that we just started. today, but you're just going to see it in the price action. And people are going to make up reasons. Well, the whales are doing this.

And it must be their legislation or it must be Trump. No, it's just like a bunch of big players came to the same conclusion as strategy. And the price of Bitcoin will move up before we know the whole story of what happened. There'll be an expose years later saying, oh, here's how the central bank of XYZ country decided to get into the Bitcoin game. And here's where they started and you show the chart. And it'll just, the chart will be like this. They don't have to file quarterly like an American quarterly. like an American corporation to tell us exactly what they're buying and selling or what they did,

right? I mean, you can have a central bank in a Middle Eastern country either buying or mining for years before they announce that they're holding a massive. Strategy and strive and companies like that have to broadcast their intentions because they're trying to manage their cost to capital. Their whole game is that as long as Bitcoin outperforms the cost of capital over a period of time, then their business model works. So they have to manage their cost of capital as low as possible. A government just collects taxes. So there's no, the cost of capital is you have to live in the borders and pay taxes, right? And so like they don't have to, I mean, maybe they provide reasonable defense and they provide, you know, reasonable services to the citizens of that country.

But it's not the same sensitivity that you're going to have as a corporate Bitcoin owner. So they don't have to play the same game. Anybody who's a corporate holder, Bitcoin has to do what Saylor and Stryver doing and try to convince people to buy their preferred securities and to brought provide their convertibles to the extent they do that and buy their ultimate equity right as sitting on underneath all that stuff governments don't have to do that they just keep collecting taxes and if they're smart they convert fiat that they can just print into an asset that can't be printed and i think like one one comment that i think a lot of silver and gold people still don't get is that bitcoin's the only asset large-scale asset in the economy where the demand for that asset

can't change the supply curve silver is a perfect example of an asset who's who supply curve changes directly because of the demand. As the price goes up, the best cure for high silver prices is high silver prices because you just mine and convert more silver. You can't mine Bitcoin faster because you have more demand for Bitcoin. You can only make $450 a day. In a couple of years, it'll be $2.25. A couple years after that, it'll be $112.5.

So it just keeps shrinking asymptotically, irrespective of the demand. So all it takes is demand spikes every few years. is to send Bitcoin to price discovery, but because the number of coins on an absolute basis that's being emitted by the protocol is getting so small, a small increases in demand as you go further out that curve can cause bigger price action. Contrary to what everyone's saying with all, there's all these institutions and futures and options out. It'll never do what it used to do. Scarcity is still scarcity. And at certain points along that curve with the right demand environment, Bitcoin will still do things that surprise people. And it hasn't done anything to surprise people in so long

that I suspect the next time it does something could be quite dramatic. Bitcoin never remains boring forever. We know that there's going to be something huge, and we all know that one big green candle to the upside is going to change the entire narrative and sentiment. It'll take five minutes. It always does, and it will. I want to talk about what you said about the cost of capital for these companies.

Clearly, Saylor thinks it's worth borrowing it over 10% to buy Bitcoin, right? What do you think moving forward is an accurate, assessment of the worthy cost of capital, what interest rate you would pay on capital to buy Bitcoin? Well, I think they're targeting, you know, sub 10% in the long run, right? I would say STRC is paying 10%. It was just sort of the, my base case at the top. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, look, if those products become more successful, the yields will come down. They're pricing them now to try to attract capital. And probably you're getting a decent, But if you understand Bitcoin and you believe Bitcoin is going to go up over 10 years,

and you look at MSTR's balance sheet right now and you realize, like, there's no way for them to get liquidated. And they've got the cash to pay the yield for a couple years now. Like, it's probably a lot safer than most people think it is. And so you're probably getting a decent yield. I mean, if you go into the dividend yield market for traditional corporations, like to get a safe yield, you're talking 3 to 5 percent and a slightly riskier yield. I mean, there's some good MLPs that are at 6.

7%. So 10% is a really good yield. You're taking Bitcoin risk, right? But if you are comfortable with Bitcoin and you're confident it's going to grow at even 20 or 25% Kager over the next 10 years, it should be able to outrun the cost of capital for those companies. So the more I look at it, the more I go, okay, like maybe there is something sort of long-term sustainable here. The issue is just that, as you know, for periods of time, the sequence of returns can throw you off because Bitcoin can be up 200% in a year. It could also be down 50 or 80% in a year. And so not every company is going to have like a fortress balance sheet that allows them to ride out that volatility. And so some of these smaller companies that are getting in trying to emulate

Sailor, they're going to have more issues than the large player who can basically ignore volatility most of the time. And that's why I like, again, strive because they don't have any convertibles. They don't have any exploding or liquidation type of things on the balance sheet that could cause them to, you know, have the equity go to zero or to have to sell Bitcoin in order to survive. And so it's basically like a call option without an expiration, right? Because if you don't have to liquidate and there's no, there's no source of liquidation pressure, then you can just wait until Bitcoin goes into more, you know, significant price discovery. And when Bitcoin goes into significant price discovery, these companies will work again.

I think the mistake that everyone makes is they get too bullish when they're working really well, like November of 24 or Q1 of 25 when even Nakamoto was like flying at that time. And then they get too bearish over the last month or two when like now is actually, if you really understood this model, now is when you actually pick through the rubble and find stuff. This is what I was doing with the Bitcoin miners in December of 22, Q1 of 23. I was picking out iron and cipher from the rubble because I said these companies are not like marathon. This company is not like riot. These companies are better.

There's something different. And it may take the market two to three years to figure that out, but that's how you make money as a value investor. You don't make money by chasing the thing that everybody's in a mania about and then selling it after it's already gone down 95%. Like these companies all went down 95%. If you're selling them there, look, I can't help you. You're probably never going to make money in markets.

You should keep your day job. How do you think the Treasury market then shakes out considering what we've seen? you know, is it a merger and acquisition situation where people with bigger balance sheets buy the companies that are trading at a discount because they get their Bitcoin effectively a discount? I mean, Nakamoto is trading at a massive discount even to the Bitcoin on their balance sheet, right, even when you account for the debt. So is somebody going to sweep in and say, these are just a great deal? I want this Bitcoin or, you know, let me frame that better. You were great at picking through the rubble and finding iron and cipher. You've already mentioned

strive, but how do you pick through the rubble and the ones that you don't pick where they head it? Yeah, look, the reason why I got iron and cipher right is because I focus on management quality and balance sheet first. And other people are focused on brand and marketing. So like marathon's a great Bitcoin miner. And it's like, well, actually look back in the last three years, it's been one of the worst performing equities in this entire space. It was down almost 50% last year. It's only up two or three X off the bottom. I earned one from a dollar to it's whatever it is, 53. It's up 53x and it was up as much as 75x and marathon's up two or three X, right?

And riots up a little bit more than that. And so I had a view back then as I still do now that like the best management teams with real operational chops would deliver more shareholder value than teams that were pivoting into the space to try to take advantage of excited capital. Basically, dumb capital who wants exposure to Bitcoin, which is what Bitcoin miners were four or five years ago. And so they never had to be graded at anything because they were still better than being a pharmaceutical company or a patent troll or whatever. Contrast that with Iron where iron literally was only founded because they wanted to be the best infrastructure developers in the world. They wanted to be the best infrastructure development, building and running data centers.

Bitcoin was just a component of off taking the energy into revenue as you were growing. right? And so if you understand from first principles like what these companies are trying to do and who the teams are and what their backgrounds are, it can help you cut through the rubble. So right now, there are a bunch of like pretenders, in my opinion. There are a bunch of like event planners and social media influencers who somebody gave $100 million and who don't have a track record of being business builders, don't have a track record doing other than tweeting. And so yeah, like they're going to struggle even if Bitcoin turns around relative to people who. who have the operational chops or the financial acumen in order to really figure this market out. Again, I think Saylor is the godfather. His balance sheet is so big that you'll never catch him. The challenge there is just consensus expectations are that he's going to be number one. So if at any point it looks like he's not going to be number one, then you have the chance of underperformance. I think it'll do what I think it'll perform like Bitcoin.

So if Bitcoin's a 30% kegre, I think MSTR will be a 30 or 40 or 50% kegher. I think the where you get the surprises is when you have companies that everybody discounts, because they think Strive and Nakamoto and Anthony Pompeiano's company, et cetera, are all the same. And I would argue that one of those three is not like the others in terms of quality. And that'll prove out, if I'm right, over two or three years. And you'll see substantial differences in quality over that period based on the starting characteristics. Just like Iron and Cypher, like was not visible to very many people because most people hadn't spent the time with those teams, didn't understand their culture, their ethos, what the

management was focused on, how it was different than what everyone else was focused on. And so, look, people keep asking me, well, why do you like strive? And it's like, well, I like teams where I can look in the CEO's eyes. And I know that they really care about creating shareholder value, that they care about protecting my capital. And I look at some of these guys, and I think they're just into it for self-enrichment. It's the same problem we had in the mining space and the companies that were easily sort of found out early, in my opinion, to be sort of focused on management enrichment over shareholder value. Those companies have just dramatically underperformed over the last three years. And I don't think the treasury

company space will be that different. Yeah. I'm going to let you go in a minute, but I just want to show you to the point you made about the markets and it feeling different. We got Bitcoin sitting now at 95-787. If this was December, we would have had a thousand dollar sell off by 9.45 a.m. every single day. Yeah. And we sell. have 18 minutes before Jane Street. They'll sell it back down to 95, probably one more time today. In fact, I got a text this morning saying watch for a redux of the 10 a.m. Eastern Time Slam. So look for one more balance at 95. But I think we're headed to 110. You said 112. I've been saying space is the last 48 hours. I think the next stop is 110. And then we'll see how Bitcoin responds at all time highs.

But I think at this point, there's so many more reasons for it to be higher than to be lower. and so that's probably the path of least resistance. There's so many people that I talk to. They're planning to sell at 100, 101 when we get there. It feels like that's just going to get squeezed right through. That's what's going to cause the run to 140 is the people once they, they already should be nervous because they didn't think it'd go above 94. Then they should be really nervous when we're near all-time highs.

And then we push through all-time highs. There's going to be a bunch of people who are out of position because of dumb analysis and chart squiggles that have nothing to do with making money in the long run. and they'll be forced to chase back in. And it won't be dumb to chase. If you chase at 130 or 140 and it goes to 200 or 300, it'll still be a good idea to chase back in, but it would have been better to do nothing this whole time

and just keep stacking. But again, most people are not long-term fundamental investors. They're closet traders that periodically, when they get into bad trade, they start to convince themselves their long-term investors. I call them passionate community members. Well, just be glad to you own Bitcoin and not one of the over 11 million crypto tokens that failed in 2025.

That's called survivorship bias right there. Just absolutely insane. So good job, not chasing one of the six million tokens launched in a day on Pump Fun or a month. Yeah, good job. Anything I might have missed before I let you go, man? No, I would say there's two vortexes right now in the market. One of them is the gold, silver complex with a particular focus on silver because I think that's an absolute mania already.

the other one is AI, which is much more sustainable and much bigger. But both of those things, to the extent at which they are drawing mind share and capital away from crypto, as they diminish a little bit, that should boost crypto up. So crypto is going to have its day again over the next year or two. And I suspect it will surprise a lot of people because there's been so much negativity over the last few months and over the last year or so. So I think we're set up really well. It's a highly asymmetric environment.

It's exactly the kind of environment I like to invest in. This is where you can actually get some of the most significant returns. You need the doubt and the fear to be pervasive in order to get pricing that allows you to enter, let's say these prices here to ride to wherever we head to. And I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin goes to 300 to 500K before the next major drawdown. And that may take two years. And again, most people think the cycle's already over. So they're going to be like, what the fuck is Mike talking about?

but as it goes higher, it'll build its own momentum. We still haven't even had the wealth space participate. I'm seeing signs, I think Eaglebrook where I'm on the board, they had their best quarter of flows in years. In an environment where Bitcoin went from 126 to 80, they had their best inbound flow year. And this is all top tier RAAs allocating directly to Bitcoin and Ethereum. So there are signs under the surface that this market wants to get more exuberant,

but it needed that foundational layer of like a bunch of sticky capital. building these positions and these wealth managers want lower they don't want to buy 150 they want to buy 80 so they got their 80 and now we're positioned for 150 um so anyway i'm i'm quite bullish i'm not going to make any predictions on timing anymore because people get so angry but i think i think it's going we're going higher and the question is only how high and how fast so we're at 96 right now 96 038 uh pushing that's the fourth that's the fourth or fifth time we've tapped in the last 20 less than 24 hours So one of these times it'll break through and we'll be at 97, then 98, and then 1, 105, 110, right? So that's where we're headed.

Well, I might just cost you a lot of money because we kept you 15 minutes past your inevitable silver shorts. So I'm going to let you go do that. What's the SLV at? Let me just check real quick. I see it at not 82. It already came down. I actually had some limits at 8330, 8340, 83, 80, and now it's at 82.

So it's going to do exactly the same thing as it's done the last few days where I'll be able to to cover some over the next few hours and turn a green day again and an up silver day. And the best part about it is not that I've been making money every day for like seven or eight trading days. It's that people get so angry that I could actually figure out a way to be green, shorting silver when it's up. It's even more fun than making the money. So I'm going to, I got to get to it right now, though, because it looks like I got a little

opportunity to cover here. Shots fired at the silver community. Coming to me, guys. XRP is coming for you guys Digital Silver I've heard that narrative All right guys that's all we got you have to give Mike Alford a follow he wakes up early here in Vegas

to do these shows with us and as the most incredible alpha and insight gotta keep doing this more often man Mike thank you so much I appreciate your time Have a wonderful day All right you too buddy talk to you later Bye guys everyone's looking for smarter ways to build their Bitcoin stack Well here's one most people overlook

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