The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Flipped From FEAR to GREED in Just 12 Days - What Happens Next?

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Bitcoin is nearing $80K as sentiment flips rapidly from fear to greed, raising concerns the market may be getting too bullish too fast. Meanwhile, Japan, Revolut and LayerZero are all pushing more traditional finance onchain. Kalshi has also raised over $1.1 billion as prediction markets continue to grow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin sentiment flipped from fear to greed in just 12 days. So of course, the crypto media has to talk about how that is too fast. And it means that obviously the bull market that we just had for five days is over. I obviously do not agree with that. People should remember that we remained historically long in fear literally for months on months on months. And this could just be sentiment turning and things just getting started. We're going to talk about that and everything in the news today on the show with my friend Austin Campbell. Let's go.

Good morning, greedy people who were fearful just 12 days ago. It's nice to have you here and to share in your greed. As you can see in the last 12 days, I purchased a lakeside mansion in Thailand, where I'm obviously very live right now because that's a real background. So yeah, let's talk about what is happening right now in the markets. First of all, very important. We got some more LaCroix back in the studio. I got Grockbot, and I've decided to let Grockbot run my life.

And the first thing Grockbot did was send an email to LaCroix's marketing team to try to get them as a sponsor. I'm going to shock you here. They didn't respond. But it said Scott drinks LaCroix on your show every single day. It's organic marketing, and you should sponsor him. I'm drinking pommel mousse today, which is my favorite flavor. still don't know what it means, or if I'm pronouncing it correctly. But call me, McCroy.

Sponsor me. It's warm. I'd be honest, it just came 15 minutes ago. It's warm. It's just really bad today. That's fine. So listen, before I bring Austin on, I just want to very quickly, you know, take a quick look at the charts because I've got some thoughts here.

And, you know, every once a while, it's worth, I think, doing a little bit of technical analysis just to keep people measured. So just take you a look at the Bitcoin Daily chart, it went exactly where it should go if you believe in charts basically had that bottoming pattern and flew up there. I think that it's a good time for a healthy pullback personally, but I have no idea what will happen in the future. But I can tell you that I'm looking to buy some more if it happens down here in the low 70s and high 60s.

I'm not saying that it will get there. Bitcoin has a tendency to make people look like fools. But I will tell you, this is the most overbought. It's basically ever been on daily RSI. It's putting in some bearish divergence, the kind of things that you see when you're going to take a temporary top. And then, of course, you know,

I just think it's meaningful on the weekly chart. This is pretty much the line if you're an algorithm or a bot. That 50 MA on the weekly is exactly where this stopped. So listen, I am extremely bullish. I just think it would be really nice to see Bitcoin consolidate for a bit, chill out, and push up for the next move. It is only August after all, right? But I would just go ahead and bring on Austin.

I don't want to talk about charts. I want to talk about more important stuff. What do you think about this move, man? You know, like kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, did it? I guess what I'll say is this. I love that. You need to think about your long-term time frame as an investor or a trader, right?

So many people get into trades without thinking through, why am I in this? What's the time frame I'm looking at? should I be using leverage? Should I be buying spot? Here's kind of how I'm observing this move. You have the U.S. Treasury trying to engage in yield curve control. At the same time, Congress continues to spend like a drunken sailor. All of that just points to money, money, money, money, money, money, you should be buying like hard assets, Bitcoin and gold, right? Like both, quite frankly. And so if you're just dollar cost averaging in on a long enough time frame, I love how things look for you here. Now, if you're going to be a short-term trader on leverage, I agree with everything

you just said about the setup, like maybe be a little bit patient about your entry if that's where you live. But knowing which bucket you're in should tell you what you should be doing here. If you started dollar cost averaging at the all-time high, which, by the way, I did, because we literally launched like the, I was, you know, working with Arch Public. And I said, let's launch a portfolio publicly. And it was, Bitcoin was 125. Literally. I'm in profit. So theirs obviously buys better, but even people who didn't use smart algorithmic buying and just bought every Monday at 9 a.m. are in profit if they started the day that Bitcoin was at an all-time high because of how much time it's spent in the 60s. So just actively buying, you've actually

made money and we're still 30-something percent off the highs. Like math doesn't really lie. No, and it's something that if you're in investing long enough, you really learn, which is your worst opponent is usually your own emotions. And doing mechanical robotic stuff tends to outperform. Like there's a reason high frequency algos win, but also a reason that Vanguard wins. Right. And the answer to both of those things is take the human emotion out of it.

Again, look at the macro backdrop. We don't seem to be slowing down on the spending. So would you not just want to be long real assets? Yeah. I mean, you mentioned being robotic. And I have a very good video, I think, that aligns with that, which is a video of Bitcoin hitting 80K. Watch, oh, 80K, here it comes. Okay, that's real.

That's real. That's happening right now in China, like Robot Olympics. In this office, we cannot get past watching these Robot Olympic videos. That's how they stop. I was going to say that that's also a video of Scott Bessington team intervening in treasury markets. That's better. I'm stealing that. We tried to show on yesterday, but it was poorly formatted, but it was the weightlifting competition. Man, you got to look at that. Oh, yeah. No, I've been watching. Okay. So I'm going to give my hottest geopolitical take here right now, which is if you pay any attention at all to Twitter, it is very obvious that China and the United States are interested. the same shit and behaving the same way and should become friends with each other and then dictate

to the rest of the world. Because in China, we have all of these robots doing the Olympics, like running, jumping, lifting weights. And in the United States, we just had the DARPA heavy lift challenge, which is create the dumbest drones possible and have them try to lift four times their weight. And I'm about to say something that is true. Somebody took two RC planes, tied them together with a cable and flew them like a goddamn helicopter with the weight suspended in the middle. It's one of the dumbest things you have ever seen. But it's actually an incredible drone design. Like, we're doing the same thing.

Like, how are we not working together here? I'm here for it. Wait till Musk gets in on the action. Right. The optimist robots. Elon, DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge. Do it. I know he's listening.

I know he's listening. So, yeah, here is the kind of headline here. crypto greed gauge hits highest since just before October's $19 billion wipeout. I mean, what a title, as if those two things have anything to do with each other, right? Causation, correlation, coin desk. But yeah, here you are. So it's at 65. I would like to caution people and remind them.

I mean, if you look at it over time, look at this flat line down here. That was in fear. And apparently, if we go to greed for five minutes and not even, by the way, that was extreme fear a lot of that time. But if we go to greed, apparently for five minutes, it's over. Like, shouldn't we be greedy when you? you see Bitcoin go up 20% in a week? Isn't this the natural reaction to that? I mean, let's go back to the timeline thing. I would be cautious about my exact entry point if I'm coming in with leverage. But if I'm somebody who's been DCAing, here's the answer. Keep buying.

Keep buying. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm not stopping. Just let it happen. So it's speaking of leverage and people who no longer apparently have it, we've got strategy here. Strategy cuts net leverage near zero as cash nearly matches convertible debt. So there is a much to do, obviously, on Monday about the fact that they created a second cash bucket, right? And so they haven't been buying Bitcoin, as everyone knows. They've been diluting the hell out of MSTR, as everyone knows. But they've done it to build one massive cash reserve of over $5 billion, which can be used to pay dividends and such. And then they're creating this new bucket, which, you know, people are viewing as dry powder, which gives them some optionality for whether they want to buy

Bitcoin, whether they want to buy back shares, buy back more STRC, whatever it is. But maybe it's actually to buy back these converts that they, that they, you know, issued years ago. That was how that, by the way, all the fun on strategy started when they decided to use cash to close and convert. So that would be interesting. What are your take on this? I mean, I remember us talking about this previously, and I remain in the bucket of why would you bother with strategy when you could just do this stuff yourself? Like, you could buy an ETF, You can buy an ETF on leverage in your brokerage account if you want to. I think it's a question of do I trust Michael Saylor to manage this more?

Do I just want to do something vanilla? So all of this seems to me, let's be honest, like them accumulating a ton of cash to make sure they're not trapped in the position they were in earlier, which is the market seems to hate me at the exact same time I need cash to pay all these preferreds. One thing I continue to watch for, by the way, is if the preferreds continue to trade well under par, should strategy not just be buying those back and retiring them? All the old ones. Yeah.

I mean, even you can make the argument to STRC, but certainly STRK, SDRD, the whole alphabet. Yeah. And you just look at that. You say, step one, accumulate cash, clean up your balance sheet, like get back out of the position you put yourself into and then you have dry powder to buy Bitcoin. I think there's a pretty obvious play to clean up the balance sheet and then lean into the rip if they do their job correctly and, you know, knock, on wood, that's what they're doing. But, you know, I've been flummoxed by trying to predict what

strategy is going to do previously. And that's part of the reason that, like, personally, I just own almost all of my Bitcoin through ETFs. Yeah, I was on Yahoo Finance two days ago, not on my show. And, you know, I was a guest on their show. And she was like, you know, now that we have MSTR and all these things, like, how do you, you know, tell people to buy it? I'm like, I don't tell people to buy Bitcoin through MSDR or coin or any of these things. You just buy Bitcoin. But how is this still a question? No, and there's no reason to buy micro strategy. That's up to somebody. But like, I'm just saying, like, if you want Bitcoin exposure purely, which was the question, in what world can you not just buy Bitcoin at this point? That to me, there's, yeah, if you're truly into Bitcoin, there's two ways to do it. Right. Like, and again, this is, you know, my smooth brain, like former repo trader trying to simplify this. But number one is buy yourself and hold it in self-custody. That's the play of I genuinely.

don't trust institutions and I want to have the thing. That would be my core recommendation for a lot of people in parts of the world where you don't trust your local system. The other option is if you don't want to think about it at all, just buy the ETF, exactly as you said. You can't be wrench attacked for an ETF. Like nobody can get it out of a fidelity brokerage account or something like that quickly. So just buy it in the ETF and move on with your life. Again, that's the purest form of Bitcoin exposure. Just do the thing. Yeah. I mean, it's been hard in a world of self-custody crisis to make an argument otherwise. Even though like most staunch self-custody people now, I'm seeing some of them saying, well, maybe you should have a

little bit on an exchange, a little bit in an ETF and a little bit in self-custody so that you're diversified. I mean, there's definitely cracks here. I've, I've been saying basically since 2020 to people that I think self-custody is probably a net negative for most average people. And I used to catch a ton of flack for that. I think only after Cold Card are people coming around because, you know, that was kind of the perfect storm of a hack where people did everything right from an outsider perspective and lost their Bitcoin anyways. And you just need to understand when you're holding assets, the only true defense is diversification. You should have some in various ETFs. Don't put it all in the same ETF, like diversify across those. They hold things differently. You can leave some on an exchange.

doing self-custody, don't do it all in the same way. Right. Again, assume wherever your biggest pot of money is is going to be exploited and then ask if you're okay. And if you are, then you're doing a decent job. Yeah. I just think about like how, you know, somebody asks you and you're like, well, you need to buy three ETFs, put some on Coinbase Prime, maybe throw some on an exchange you've never heard of it. Also, you should self-custasy on three different wallets with a multi-sig and a scavenger hunt. It's, it's it. I mean, listen, I'm a self-custody guy, but It ain't for everyone. It ain't almost for anyone. No, for the average American citizen, right?

Like, and let's start with America, you should probably just buy one ETF at a percentage of your portfolio between zero to five and then move on with your life. That's good enough. If you're starting to go down the rabbit hole of like, I'm a political dissident in Russia, then yeah, you're going to have to do everything you just said. But also, that's the cost of that lifestyle and those choices. so you just got to own it. We're not all political dissidents, apparently. Yeah. Russia.

You know, listen, I just don't think, like I said, I'm a self-custody guy, but like I don't think there's much risk that Black Rock blows up and you lose your funds. And certainly if there is, like I'm going to say this, the self-custody people are not going to be doing too much better because Bitcoin is going this way in that sort of event. Yeah, we got much big. If BlackRock blows up, we got much bigger problems than the custody of your Bitcoin, by the way. I mean, they're like the other, they're the fourth branch of the government, as I like to joke. You know, executive legislative judicial BlackRock.

I have BlackRock and J.P. Morgan, if you want to, you know. Well, okay. So as a former J.P. Morgan person, I have a friend who will remain unnamed who still works there. And we were having this discussion at one point when he had started buying gold that I told that my dude, you're like a trader at J.P. Morgan. Buying gold is not nearly far enough because like we work at the place that is in many ways the gold. If you want to go that far, you should be stockpiling like guns and ammunition and canned food and water, right? And like building a bunker.

And this is the problem with people who are sophisticated like thinkers in this space is I said this to him as a joke. And then three months later, he comes back to me and tells me he's put a plan in place to start. start accumulating guns and ammunition and canned food and water and building a bunker. And I'm like real money in 2035. Yeah, I'm like, you know what? I want to be bad, but I can't be because you are being intellectually honest about the discussion we just had. But like real talk, if you're truly worried about the collapse of the entire system,

shiny rocks, be they digital or physical or not going to save you, you actually should be taking a step beyond that. Ammo. Yes. The currency of the future will be. You know, if traffic's down on a day, we're just going to start an ammo show on Saturdays. You know, that would probably do pretty well. You know, I would have to start a new channel for it.

The Algo would be very confused, but I feel like we could crush there. I'm going to give you all credit when I steal that. Let's just start. If we just get here, it's like 22, 38, 45. Yeah. People would watch that. I mean, my kids will literally watch someone do anything on YouTube if I allow it. So I'm sure there's someone who will just watch as sort ammo. YouTube shorts. You and me sort of ammo for an hour. The stupidification. That's not a word. That's why I said it.

Of America is a really astounding thing. So listen, I would like to just going back to the market. I mean, having seen that move, how do you like view it as far as, you know, markets beyond sentiment of other people? but for you having watch markets for so long, you think, you know, bottoms in, bear markets over, or massive trap or just kind of sitting on the sidelines don't care because you're DCAing and you'll just see what happens. So I think it's important when you look at these not to look at one data point. Like advice I often give to people in crypto is zoom out and try to figure out what's causing this move. Go look at the long end of the rates curve, right, which is like stubbornly above 5% in the United States. And you can see what's really going on here, which is monetary debasement fears, right?

We have debt to GDP over 100%. Congress is spending a ton of money. Nobody seems to want to like pull that back in. And there's two ways that ends historically. One is default, which for the U.S. is not really a thing because we can just create money. The other one is inflation, which by the way is what happens when you just create money. All of this is being driven by inflation fears, which tells you zooming back in on crypto, that the market has probably misinterpreted this move. I feel pretty good about Bitcoin.

I feel pretty good about some of the high quality alts like, say, hype. I feel really bad about the rip being extreme and some of the alt coins on the back of this because nothing has changed fundamentally. And it's just a sympathy and correlation rally. And speculation. I mean, I think that that comes with every single one. But yeah, most of those are a fade. But I was going to say it's worth saying out loud. that you might want to be long Bitcoin and fading some of the alt moves in this market if you

really believe the inflation thesis. And so this is why I like looking across multiple types of markets at the moves that are going on, not just one, because it starts to give you a little bit more information. And so to me, I feel good about Bitcoin. I probably feel good about growing stablecoin notionals. I'm not sure I love a lot of the alts here, especially those that like, call it tokenization is not happening in conjunction with. Right. That makes sense. Yeah.

I mean, something that you still has no utility and no fundamental way to value it maybe is an easy fade because it just caught a bid in the nonsense and went up more because there was zero liquidity on it. Yeah, like I know people are going to be angry, but I'm looking at the screens and I'm like, why is Cardano up as much as Bitcoin right now? This doesn't make sense to me. Producers, mute him. Mood him.

Why don't you yell that? Charles into our DMs. And DMs explode from the Cardano Army. Do they have a name? Like, I know we have the XRP Army. We have the Link Marines. Are there like, is there anything for Cardonters? The Cardoner party.

That's it. Wow. Okay. You may have single-handedly killed Cardano there with something. It's just a funny word. It's just a funny word. Well, according to crypto-quantical market has begun, by the way, and the bear market is over. They have some indicator that has this tiniest little bit of bear market ending, so it's got to be over.

The thing is, though, I will say, like, you know, as funny as all these little indicators are, all of the bottom signals that I love have been there for months, and I've been screaming about it. By the way, if you go back to that chart for a second, as much as people are joking about it, look at the previous flip and the shape there of coming up back down and then the kick back up. No, no, way back. Way back. Yeah. Oh, it flipped.

I did flip. I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying, right? Like, and again, there are global macro reasons why the bottom might be in specifically for Bitcoin here. So again, you know, Bitcoin rips really far when it tends to rip.

People are freaking out that we've gone from like, call it, 60s to like 70s or maybe even tapping 80 here. And it's like everybody, this was at 120 not too long ago. Like what are we getting so excited about? There's a lot of room here. Yeah. I mean, what I, card, cardot, cardado party. What I really love about this is what you can see sort of with other indicators aligns. Actually, this is the first time I'm actually deeply looking at the chart. You know, these like dark blue lines are extreme bear and you kind of add the extreme bull here. Those were, as I kind of point out, at the February. bottom and not as we got to the later bottoms. And, you know, we saw different behavior at 60 and

both of those times. I had pretty high conviction that February was the low-ish, even if we went a little lower, that that was the beginning of the bottoming process. And it shows here, right? You kind of have that same divergence where even though price went lower, the indicator didn't kind of show as bad. RSI showed the same thing. You know, weekly RSI was really low and kind of made that bullish divergence. So I think those bottoming signals, you know, those bottoming signal, are really following through, I think the surprise is just it happened in August. I mean, people just, you know, this, like, it has to happen in October consensus. Nothing can happen in August.

But like, when is the crowd ever right? No, and another important thing is for people, when you're thinking about when is a bottom really in, is everybody feels like the answer is when people hate something. And that's usually not the case. It's actually when they've given up. Like despair tends to mark the bottom. It's when are people not talking about it? When have people forgotten?

And so in a weird way, the fact that everybody walked away from Bitcoin thought it wouldn't go anywhere, nobody was talking about it. We all thought it would be in like October if you were an optimist or we all thought it would be never if you were a pessimist. And then it comes out of nowhere in August is actually a pretty constructive sign, right? Like, remember, depression and abandonment is what marks market bottoms. Like go back and look at what happened with MBS post crisis, you know, go back and look at previous stock cycles. It's when people have given up. Yeah, and they have, we had the time-based capitulation for sure. I mean, I think that's where the shock comes from.

There's never going to be a rotation again. It's never coming back. It's over AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It always comes back. And it's a little bit like eventually all roads lead back to gold in certain kinds of markets. Like things have dropped dead for, I'm not kidding, when I say decades. And then come ripping out of nowhere. Yeah, the Japanese stock market did that.

It was like 30 years under an all-time high or something and then went. So listen, I want to pivot off. So, I mean, also just as another like anecdotally, you know, when will Bitcoin cross 100K again on CalC? It's still very little confidence of that. You know, even after all of that, we have a 29% that it happens. I mean, I guess by January, 2027 is still relatively soon. But, you know, back year, people really believed, you know, and this is not that long ago. just in May that it was good at 50-something percent chance. We're nowhere near even the high sentiment

that this bull market is back, which to me, look at how people are actually placing their bets means there could still be some more fuel here. If that was 75 percent, I would be very, very worried. Yeah. Again, you got to, especially on short-term price moves, you got to fade the crowd, right? And on the flip side of the coin, you know, if you're a long-term investor, don't even look at that stuff. Just keep DCA, the worst thing you can do is change your behavior. Oh, and by the way, speaking of Cal Sheet, before we move on to stable coins, they raised $1.12 billion via private equity since April. I think they can go up to $1.5 or something in the filing. But prediction markets, I mean, the amount of money that's flowing into this is

astounding. No, and the CFTC has been very constructive on these. It's pretty obvious. There's some kind of future here. The question is just what is the exact shape of it? I was going to say I also personally find it enjoyable to watch them punching the crap out of the sports gambling platforms because for a long time, those have been extremely high fee and engaged in their own shady behavior. Like one of my favorite things is I have a friend who's at a hedge fund now, but was a pretty effective sports veteran. So all of them started banning him, of course, because like if you win, they get walked out of the casino. Right. And it's like, are we really mad that people are competing with? them, no. So to me, this is American markets in action. I'm for it. I agree with some of the

concerns about like, let's clean them up and make them work properly. But this stuff should happen. We want to move to better form factors. Yeah. Listen, we're at that point. We're moving fast and breaking things. And it's not like the government's ever good at being on top of things before they happen. Right. So they're going to catch up to some degree. But we all agree that there's a lot of insider trading that probably needs to get out. But, you know, naturally these things just happen faster than they could react. But I think they're going to be a net positive in general. Like outside of the like, I don't know that people need to be speculating on everything with leverage 24-7, 365, but that's their choice. But if, as you said, I mean, if draft kings and

Fanduel can exist. Right. Like it, you're only intellectually honest if you've already been on a crusade against those things for a decade. And you know what? If you have and you also hate prediction markets, like I'll give it to you, the Amish or intellectually consistent on these things. So fair enough. But overall, Scott, exactly as you were saying, market evolution is a messy process, right? Like, things don't get created in their perfect form on day one. And so when you're reading all these critiques, you have to understand if somebody's mad that there's problems here, it's like, yeah, well, there's problems at all markets, right? Like, the answer is not stop it from happening. It's try to fix it over time. Yeah. Speaking of things, we can't stop from happening.

Oh, no. We have stable coins and their wild proliferation around the world. We got a few stories. But this one really caught my eye. U.S. state banking associations plan to launch their own nationwide blockchain network. The bank chain allies. I mean, they literally just went ahead and called it a bank chain. He's aiming for a 2027 launch and would foster stable coins payments,

tokenized deposits inside the banking system's regulatory sphere. So they haven't announced in any way to perform what the actual tech stack would be or if this would be built on their own chain or what that would be, that's not what's interesting here. So they basically came out and said, we don't want it to be private stable coins. And this is mostly, I believe, the community banks, right? I mean, this is over 30 states and such.

And they also don't want it to be J.B. Morgan chain because they feel like they'll be left out and they're trying to thread a needle down the middle. That's sort of how I read it, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. All right. So I'll start by saying this. if anybody from any of these community banks or associations are listening to this,

reach out to me. I have been thinking about this for a decade. You have said some internally contradictory things and misunderstood the problem, but what you're doing here is very important. So let's lay this framework out for people who have not spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about bank deposits in the United States. One, in 2009, close to half of the total system was in deposits outside the top 20 banks. Today, in 2026, that number is about 20%.

Small banks have been systematically dying for a decade, and it doesn't have to do with stable coins. It has to do with technology because the fastest growing bank in rural Michigan is probably so-fi, right? So this is really a meet-the-customers where they are. How do you build something people will use? I'm not going to be 75 years old and going to the branch, right? If you're a 35-year-old, like I have MBA students. I ask them all the time, who do they bank with? Because I want to know.

And let me tell you, if I suggest, hey, all of you should go to a branch to open a bank account, I get about the same reaction as if I wield a corpse in and dumped it on the floor in the class. branch. Yeah, they're not, they're not going to do this. You mean a machine? Right. Literally. Literally. And so the community bank here have a lot of problems with the tech stack, with the product offering, but their core function of distributing loans at local communities is valuable. The other problem they are misunderstanding is how stable coins work, because going back to why I have some pretty clear views on the treasury, I'm going to say something that constantly makes people angry and confuses them,

but is true. U.S. dollar stable coins have zero impact on bank deposits. They do not increase them. they do not decrease them. This is not a statement of opinion. If you disagree with me, you disagree with the Federal Reserve on how the monetary system works. Reminder for everybody at home who has not studied this. Here's how you destroy bank deposits, okay? You take cash out of an ATM, you repay a loan, a bank sells assets off their ballot sheet, or the U.S. government takes in money. And by the way, I just said something really weird there, which is that taxes destroy money supply but that is technically true. Okay?

That's how you destroy money. So please, for the love of God, tell me which one of those a stable coin is doing if you think it's destroying deposits. It just reallocates them. Right. So why? I mean, so what's the start to interrupt? But obviously that was the big false flag fight of the Clarity Act, right?

Last December when Brian Armstrong came out and said, you know, we're not going to even discuss yields. No bills better than a bad bill. Because the big banks, not the. these banks were claiming deposit flight or the theoretical future deposit flight. So the big bags have been stealing all the deposits from the small banks for about 20 years now. And now they are acting as the champion of the small banks to protect them from deposit flight from stable coins, which can't even cause that.

Right. Like this is an abusive relationship. It's somebody who's been beating their wife for 20 years and then saying that they're going to protect her. So what the hell are we doing here? By the way, anybody listening to the big banks on this in policy space, you're being played. And like, I know I've got some friends there, but like we got to call it like it is when it works that way. And so really the community banks need to understand if they unionize on this and build a widely acceptable, widely usable, interest paying stable coin that they can back with deposits across all of these community banks, it becomes a way for them to buy.

bundle all of like the tiny community banks together and become one megabank to fight against them. This is the smartest possible thing they could be doing to compete against a J.P. Morgan, a Bank of America, a city, a Wells Fargo. And they need to get this right because it's existential. If they don't, 30 years from now, we're probably under a thousand banks in the United States of America. By the way, we're at 4,000 right now. So there's a prediction for you. I mean, first of all, this isn't going to work. Not as they're currently doing it. There are ways to do it that will work.

To be clear, you could build a community bank stable coin that is a better product than the bank accounts that are being given to people by big banks. And it is existential for them to get that right. This is not the way to do it. Yeah. I mean, I don't try to remember how many states it said. I'm sure I have it in my notes. 30-ish. And like- there was a lot of support for this.

It is the right. In the US banking associations are building there. It is the right people talking about it. It's just, again, it's sort of the blind deleting the blind here, right? Like everybody's trying to invent a car from first principles. And it's like, guys, just go outside and look at Toyota. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, but they're not the only ones, right?

I mean, I think we can agree that stable coins, they may not be taking bank deposits, but they're certainly going to replace dated infrastructure. Yes. And Japan to work on blockchain-based stock settlement system details expected early 2027. We'll be looking forward to that. Let me set a calendar invite for myself to check on Japan. Hold on. I'm going to pause you here.

The FSA in Japan has been one of the more blockchain-aware regulators for a long time. I will remind everybody, nobody in FTX Japan lost money because the FSA understood how exchanges work. they wrote a far too restrictive stable coin bill. I think they understood their problem and reversed it. Like, I know people over there. I know Shita San. I know Naota San. Like, they're actually on this.

They want this to happen. The big banks are building stuff. I'm normally I fade. I mean, Nomura got an approval just this week. So it's at, yeah. And Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi has been looking at this. You've got SBI over there. Like normally I would fade.

regulatory developments, but this one, I would keep your eye on this, people. I guess I was being a little too dismissive, just saying the trajectory is very clear, right? Whether it's small banks in the United States, whether the narrative or the reason for doing it or the specific chain or plan works, like this is the future of the infrastructure and plumbing of the financial system. 100%. And even for the privates, right? You mentioned SOFI before, but here's the SOFI.

of Europe. Revolute begins phase your stable coin rollout in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal. So this is interesting because this is a euro-backed stable coin. I think we had an announcement Monday. I'm not sure if it was end of last week or early this week that Standard Chartered had a Hong Kong-backed stable coin, which was really the first bank-issued stable coin that we've seen. Of course, that was more infrastructural and institutional than retail. But still, we are now starting to see hints of maybe not only U.S.D backed stable coins, and they're coming from less expected places. There's a pretty interesting take on that this is that a lot of it had to do with Micah. I call it Mika, by the way, but my European friends call it Mika. So I'm going to Mika,

Porsche, Porsche, you know, whatever. But that they're phasing out USDT here because of Mika. And so USDC is up massively, but they're trying to kind of replace that U.S.D. part with their own Euro-backed and see how much of the volume they can grab. Interesting. I mean, it's interesting, but this all comes down to something that is sort of a fact of the internet, which is when people have global access, you have to compete. I haven't seen a lot of global demand outside the Eurozone for Euros. We don't see other central banks using them as reserves. We don't see people outside the Eurozone preferring to hold it in size. So, On one hand, revolutions a European company.

It makes a ton of sense for them to do this for domestic purposes because, Scott, as you just said earlier, this is better back-end technology. So this is a smart thing for them to do. I think they should do it. That's not really good. Yeah, you have to do it. However, if you're looking at this from an outside the Eurozone perspective, what you should be watching for is, is this just a local product? or do people in say like China or Latin America start preferring the euro over the dollar? Because that would be information.

And we just are not seeing a lot of evidence of that. That's not going to happen. Right. I mean, that's the thing is, like these stable coins will have their little niche. But you made the best point. And it's the most important one is that people want dollars everywhere. And this is giving them access to the dollars. So just because it's on tokenized, you know, on blockchain rails doesn't mean it's going to become popular because the euro is not.

popular. In many ways, you know, a lot of people have asked me over time, if the dollar is losing its status as the reserve currency, what currency will people move to? And my answer is they're not. They're going to go to tokenized gold, right? I would put that probably above a lot of other local currencies. The dollar, look, the dollar has a lot of problems, but it's like the cleanest dirty shirt, so to speak, right? Right. And if you're going to go to something else, once you're absorbing the switching costs, you're probably looking back to historical analogs that have held value better over time. So that's a case for tokenized gold and that's a case for Bitcoin. Yeah, tokenized gold could end up being more popular than people think.

You know, I had my friend, I think actually is coming out today, but Mauricio from Leden, who I talked to all the time, and they've just, you know, they were kind of a Bitcoin only, and they've started now, they're announcing tokenized gold back loans and Tether, obviously, has put a hell of a lot of money in gold, and they have the tether, basically gold-backed stable coin, which is exactly the product that these people are going to be taking for loans.

These are smart people. They're not making these bets willy-nilly. So I think that you're right. I mean, or at least they're prepared for you to be right if things go bad. And I don't necessarily think Bitcoin or gold are competitors with each other. I think they're complimentary in a lot of ways.

The scarcity story is the same. the physical properties and the security surface are very different. If you're somebody who's looking at like systemic issues and stores of value, they're both valuable for different reasons. If we, again, believe the diversification thing we were talking about earlier, the answer is not either or. It's yes and. Yeah.

I mean, this will just, the same way that stable coins will be adopted, it'll just be the way that probably eventually people get their exposure to Bitcoin and gold and every, I mean, obviously Bitcoin. to gold as well or any hard asset, right? Think about it this way. If you're a random person in India, Africa, South America, China, and you want a secure way to store value and somebody says to you, I will give you a tokenized claim on a gold bar

at the London metals exchange that is legally enforceable but within UK norms so that your local government can't steal it from you, isn't that a pretty damn good person? product? Yeah, people are going to love it. Yeah. Hypothetically. I think that it's going to be more popular and people think. So we kind of like brushed over the percent conversation at the beginning because we were just talking about Bitcoin catalyst and what happened with the market. But I feel compelled to ask every guest I have on right now what they think about this treasury maneuver, right? It's not quite yield curve control because they haven't said, this haven't said, you know, 5.2 is the level we're defending. Certainly not money printing.

per se because it ain't the Fed and it's coming from the Treasury General account, but the effect may be similar to both and the signal may be what matters most. But how are you viewing it? How are you hearing people viewing it outside the crypto bubble? Okay. So one, I think people are pretty negative on it outside the crypto bubble because it just seems like, you know, another tool to avoid the conversation we truly need to have, which is what are we doing with our total like fiscal and monetary balances in this country. You know, there's only so much the Fed and the Treasury can do if Congress insists on firing money out of a cannon into the sun just in endless amounts. And, you know, I'm going to like, let's talk MMT for a moment because it's a very

misunderstood subject. And by the way, anybody who thinks MMT says you can print money infinitely and have no problems, you're insane. It only says the first part. You definitely can print money infinitely. but anybody who understands MMT, like the Randall Rays of the world, will also point at Zimbabwe and be like, and that's what happens when you do that. Let's zoom out as far as possible. The government can only do two things. Take in money and spend money. When it takes in money, it is destroying money supply for the private sector.

And when it spends money, it is creating money for the private sector. In many ways, total tax flows and total spending just offset each other. and debt is only pushing that through time. It's not changing the aggregate amounts. So the core problem we have is Congress is spending way more money than we take in. And on a long enough time frame, that will cause inflation. The story is that simple. Don't let anybody overcomplicated for you.

And so if you understand that and you look at what Treasury is doing, it's like, Besson's probably trying to do what he can to prevent things from getting really out of hand in the short term, but he's putting a band-aid on a severed arm here. Right. Like at some point, you've got to deal. Right. I mean, that's what Drunken Miller had to say. I wrote about it in my newsletter.

And he's correct. He's correct. Right? You have to spend less money. There is no other solution. I wish I had it in front of me. There's a Charlie Belello had, and I've shared it a couple times, but he had the quotes of Bacent a year ago at this time, you know, about Doge, basically,

and the quote about now. And it was, you know, laser-focused on. on paying down the debt a year ago. That was the effect of the quote. And three days ago, it was, we're laser focused on growing our way and 40 trillion is not a meaningful number.

Look, you could certainly grow your way out of 40 trillion in nominal terms, but people are not going to like what happens to the dollar on that path. And people are not going to like what's going to happen with benefits. Because here's the core of the problem. We promised people a shitload of benefits. we did not set money aside for those benefits, and now the bill is coming due. The Social Security Trust is going to run out of money.

And by the way, I blame the boomers for all of that because, like, you guys voted yourself huge benefits from people who didn't exist yet and then didn't fund those benefits. Like, I'm not surprised young people are very angry about this. And the person who had this right was Paul Ryan back in the 2010s and everybody kicked him out of office for it. So, one, everybody please go apologize to Paul. And two, we're in this place where the reality is the hard decisions are coming and you're just going to have to deal with it. And what it means is either benefit cuts in real terms now or we're going to have a decade like the 70s where you just financially repress people where interest rates are far lower than inflation and everybody's going to be mad as hell and it is what it is.

I feel like that's the most likely outcome. I really would like to own golden Bitcoin if I believe. that. Yeah. Yeah, tokenized. Just theoretically speaking. What else is on your mind? Before I let you go, there's no like specific news topics here, but I know there's got to be something. So I think a last point for people to follow as you look at this whole sort of thing going on in the United States, everybody's very focused on social media on the right now on the last 15 minutes. go back and study some history. After the 1940s, we had very high debt to GDP.

We got out of it in America through financial repression, right? The reality is we held interest rates down. We let inflation go. We worked our way out of it. We again did a similar thing in the 70s. Like the pathway is clear here. What America loves to do is get drunk, party, spend way too much money, have a huge hangover for a decade or two, and then get drunk and start partying again.

This is the American monetary cycle. And you need to look at that and understand where we are. If that's true, you're going to have significantly heightened volatility in assets. Interest rates are going to become a minefield. And the correct decision for most people in that world is value investing based on cash and hard assets. This is where Warren Buffett made all of his money. And by the way, I'm going to remind everybody to something we were just discussing when

people are depressed and have given up, that's when things start working again. So go back and look at things like value investing playbooks and what happens at interest rate volatility and all these things that have not mattered since the 80s because everything old is going to become new again. And you should really be going back through history books. And history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. So understanding what has come before is probably what you need with where we're going. That makes perfect sense. Austin, anything else before I let you go. Also, clarity is dead. Just give up on that.

Yeah. I'm nine months into that opinion as my personal consensus of one. Hey, we have been in consensus for all nine of those months, my friend. Yes, for sure. I mean, it's just done. But I do love that, you know, Atkins and Seleague have finally admitted that basically and are going to step up and do what they can. Just write rules.

And by the way, we got genius through this stuff is here to see. day. It's law. Congress has approved it. The regulators have to deal with it. Not getting clarity is not the end of the world. Everybody just move on and keep building. And by the way, genius probably is a bigger threat to the banks than if they got clarity. So they were pretty stupid to have tried to kill it. Right now, last I checked, Coinbase is allowed to offer that sweet, sweet yield, right? It would be based on genius. So nobody has ever accused the banks of being internally consistent, Scott. No, but you can get Jamie Diamond saying that Brian Armstrong's full of shit on TV, which is worth every penny of the entire fight. I am here for the drama. Turning banking into

daytime television is probably net net, at least positive for entertainment. All my children. Sorry, and Jamie Diamond. Love it. All right. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody else. Obviously, we've got the Daily Wolf at noon, and I will be back tomorrow here at 9 a.m. Thank you, sir. Have a good one. Have a good one.