The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Gets CRUSHED As Trump Escalates War Fears & Oil SURGES! What’s Next?

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Bitcoin just got hit hard as war fears ripped through every market at once. After Trump’s latest threat toward Iran, oil surged, risk assets rolled over, and Bitcoin got crushed alongside stocks and even gold. In this video, we break down why crypto keeps getting blindsided by macro, what rising oil means for markets, whether this is just another headline-driven panic or the start of something bigger, and what investors should be watching next. If you want to understand what’s really driving Bitcoin right now and where the market could go from here, this is the breakdown you need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin is once again getting crushed, trading back below $66,000 this morning because Trump, in his speech about the war apparently failed to calm markets or to give people the firm belief that the war would be ending soon. Oil prices would be coming down and we would see a stabilizing of the global economy. But in the background, it's not just about Trump and Iran and oil. there's actually quite a bit happening that's unique to the crypto market. It's just that price is failing to react because of the macro context. We have a very familiar face here joining. We got Dave Weisberger who's going to help me break that down and also dispel a few other myths circulating in the market.

Let's go. What is up, everybody? I hope that you're all having a wonderful day. I completely lost sound there. So hopefully I can hear me to bring on Dave and we're going to find out. Good morning, sir. How are you? I'm doing okay.

It looks like the green lights on my microphone. phone. Can you hear me? I can hear you. I think what happened was a stream yard had a glitch on the intro music video, which often happens with stream yard. But then we panic over here and we start running around and scrambling, thinking that something's come unplugged or that somebody like blew a circuit. But none of that happened. And we've got you and we've got you nice and centered. We were having fun trying to get you zoomed in. I don't even know where to start, man. I'm going to be honest with you, there's so much. People always need to remember something about markets. It always matters, not what the news is, but what people expected in the delta in the news to what people expected.

That's what it boils down to. It always is. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about corporate earnings. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about, well, you know, pretty much anything in this particular case. For whatever reason, people in the market, the rumor was wildly circulating that Trump was going to announce tonight, something, or last night, something major that would indicate that the straits would get open, that we have a path to peace, yada, I thought it was going to be the opposite, by the way. I thought he was going to say ground mission to get this done. Well, okay, but that's interesting.

So, but the market was clearly pricing in something good. It, you know, oil was on its trajectory, you know, kind of, you know, pushing its way towards one, you know, 105, 106 or so. And it went down to like 98. And, you know, at the same time, gold went up, silver went up. And silver is interesting because silver and Bitcoin are almost been perfectly correlated recently. I don't know if you noticed that. Like silver is down 7% today.

You know, it's not surprising. It's an industrial, it's become the nouveau industrial metal. And so the fact that silver and Bitcoin are there's nothing Bitcoin-centric about what's happening today. But anyway, Trump comes out and basically repeats his normal talking points. He more or less quoted truth social. And the markets are like, holy fuck, he doesn't know what's going to happen. And remember, everyone in the market, in the media market, is very negative on Trump.

And so it's just that's true. I mean, look, the mass media is against him, thinks that this is going to be a disaster. If you watch X Mario's account parades out these supposed experts who don't have a frigging clue, but of course, what do they say? They say that the world is going to end. We have nuclear weapons dropped, all sorts of other stuff. And so Trump comes out and repeats his normal talking points about, okay, we're a blue, This or obliterating that we're winning you've never seen anything like this before yada yada

And the market's like holy shit And it doesn't matter which echo chamber you're in the echo chamber is saying negative stuff about Trump So of course what's going to happen and in fact it's exactly what did oil now is at 112 pushing higher And weirdly and I've never seen this before scott so I don't know what to make of it The US West Texas crude is higher than the Brent future now I'm gonna guess because I'm really it's been trading like 15, 20 bucks lower. Low. Yes, right.

Yeah. So the fact that Brent is lower, now it's probably because they're two different months. I don't know. I'm looking at trading economics for Vegas. I like that view of all the commodities as it puts them all there and you get gold on the same page. But it's weird. I mean, these markets, Gary Cardone said it yesterday on spaces. He goes, these markets are weird and it's really hard.

The only things that we know for sure are that if oil goes up and he loses control of it, it goes towards 150 or 200, it will trigger a demand shock. It's already doing it. Airplanes flying prices have just gone way up. And I'm going on a trip in a couple weeks. We were going to meet somebody, and they said, no, forget it. The plane tickets are way too expensive to go. So you're going to see a big demand shock about that.

And put on my economics hat for a second. The fact that people are looking at this is like, oh, well, inflation is going to go up because of oil, so the Fed's going to hike rates. or isn't going to cut rates, just prove just how dumb most economists are, certainly the ones in the Fed. It's exactly the opposite. I mean, of what makes sense. Oil is way too elastic, right?

That sends you into a recession, which gives me cuts, right? We could because we have time here, do a history lesson of the, is everyone that says, well, it happened in the 80s with Volker. And it's like, first of all, that's not true. It didn't. The oil shock started in 73 and was more or less over long before Volker got anywhere near the Federal Reserve. What had happened was there was an oil shock. Debt to GDP was way lower. We had a huge recession. Nixon puts in wage and price controls before that. Inflation was bubbling below

the surface already. Inflationary expectations went crazy as inflation from a whole variety of reasons, mostly spending, mostly the fact that we were in Vietnam for a long time and we were doing these social programs. And then you had all the Watergate lack of confidence. And it was, The 70s were a very interesting time. People forget. But inflationary expectations by the time Carter was halfway through his office were through the roof and oil was not one of them. That wasn't really the issue anymore.

And so it had already filtered through. So the notion of hiking rates because of oil, you don't use that as an example. Oil price. Volker had debt, you made the most important point in the most obvious ones. Volker had debt to GDP like floating between 25 and 32% or something. Someone argued we're 130, right? It's not the same environment. it hiked to 20% without crushing the economy? Well, it's not that he couldn't do without crushing the

economy. He did crush the economy, but what he did was he starved. People were borrowing to spend. He starved it. People, investment was in, was off the charts. And unions were basically demanding, you know, crazy pay raises. And unions mattered a lot more back then than they do. That was before Reagan broke the air traffic controllers and signaled the decline. line of union purchasing power in many, many cases. That was when the big three were pitted against the UAW, the UW was able to destroy them by picking one off at a time. But the big three is not a big three anymore. I mean, right now, I don't know how many auto manufacturers there are in the U.S., but it's not three. So it's much harder. There are lots of other reasons, but the most important

part was that the aggregate demand cut off from that oil shock had dissipated. And that's when the inflation rate started to take off. And so the notion that an oil shock, which will cut consumer demand, is going to be inflationary insofar as people asking for jobs, what jobs are people asking for, what raises are people asking for in a world where AI is replacing jobs as fast as it is? It's just, I don't see that.

And honestly, it's, it's, the bigger problem is the fact that AI is replacing jobs, and we have this case-shaped economy because we've had decades of prioritizing capital over labor. By the way, what is AI? The oil stock could end within a week or two, I think there'll be problems. But I mean, you can't price in indefinite oil prices rising because of a war that could theoretically end or a tweet that could change everything at any given time. Right. So I just, yeah, it's not like where you can price in five years of $120 oil. Yeah, I was just looking at my screen. I brought up the screen that you had that what you mentioned before because it's really interesting, right? So Brent here you can see is kind of consolidating after already hitting the highs.

And here, crude, which I assume is WTI basically is ramp raging up to new highs. So it's actually for the first time, it's kind of a different chart over the past few days. I have no idea why that would be the case. None. And I guess we'll have to ask, you know, if I was on, I would ask, on us from the finance show, He tends to be the best oil guy that I hear and listen to in terms of understanding the nitty-gritty. But the point of all of this is if you can scroll down on that and you see silver down, you know, six and a half percent now. I mean, I guess things are a little bit bouncy here.

But, you know, look, the interesting thing about the market is markets like certainty. We always talk about that. Right now, there are three possible outcomes that people are trading on. and they're literally ignoring one of them. And some people are pricing the second one, and the whole market is pricing, the one that I think maybe that they think is the most likely. So let's say, what is the market pricing?

The market is pricing. This drags out for a little while. It ultimately gets resolved in a kind of negative-ish, but not horrible way where oil starts flowing again. Geopolitics is between the US and China, and we don't care. and everyone just kind of retreats into their bubble of not much has changed, right? You know, the notion that not much will change is sort of baked in the cake here with some pain in the interim.

That's what the market is pricing. That's, you know, where the malaise is coming from. That's why the S&P is still back where it was last week. You know, that's why it's not really moving because it's not going to affect corporate profits. The market is not pricing in the absolute disaster scenario where the straits or the oil capacity in the middle East is bombed into smithereens and oil prices are going to be at 150 to 200 for the next year. The forward curve is not going to be contanguant anymore or all that. Or the other one being that, you know, Iran and Oman, I guess, or Iran has permanent control

as a toll booth on the Straits of Hormuz and, you know, manufacture those prices. Yeah, well, they wouldn't. I mean, that's not in their interest to do so because for lots of reasons. First of all, if they did that, then short of bombing the Saudi pipelines and everything else, I mean, the straits would become less important. Also, there's zero probability that the international, even international law, I mean, they don't own those waters. And Oman is on the other side of the UAE is on the other side of it. I mean, it's like all of a sudden every country that has a gun that can fire into international waters can control and create a toll booth.

I feel like Gandalf, I know, you know, this shall, you know, thou shall not pass. There's no way in hell that. I mean, Joe Biden's administration might have elect that. happened this one won't and there's nothing Congress could do about it because not no american rational actor would allow that sort of thing to take place uh if so then that if the only way that takes place is if america does something completely uh different which is essentially pull out of all its international obligations leave nato leave all these bases to get get rid of all these bases and you know shrink the size of our military or take the dollars from the number of people that are

the forward bases and deployed into rapid response, you know, kind of quick hitting sort of stuff that have been the military experts have talked about for years, but that will be at a lower budget. This administration doesn't seem even remotely interested in lowering the military budget, so that's not going to happen. So you start gaming this stuff out, and it gets kind of gnarly. That's why I say kind of status quo too bad is what most people are talking about. When no one is pricing in, no one is pricing in, is that eventually they'll find people,

in Iran who the people will accept and that won't be complete theocratic you know dieharts you know zealots and you know open up the country and the question is is what's what's fascinating about that is if you read or talk to experts on the subject of the makeup of the Iranian population what you get is a vastly different picture than Afghanistan or any of these others you get a a relatively educated population who does not want to be governed by a theocracy. It's wildly unpopular. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of in voters or people, it's less than 20.

It's in the 20% range, 20 to 25-ish, which more or less is the same as it is in a bunch of other countries like Israel, for example. Their ultra-religious right is the same rough population that the ultra-religious is in Iran, interestingly enough. Obviously, different religion. The difference is in Israel, they are marginalized. political sphere, there's still a few that talk every once in a while and we hate them. And you and I have had email threads about that, not email threads, you know, X threads.

Yeah. But in Iran, that's the possibility and no one's talking about it. It's almost given a probability of the markets of zero. Now, that probability, that possibility, if that happens, basically would justify the war. So the other thing that would actually justify it, because the resulting peace dividend by hamstringing the funding to Hamas, and Hezbollah and the Houthis and the people, you know, some of the insurgents in Somali, in Somalia, not in Somali land, in Somalia and some of the other places would be massive. I mean, it would be a massive benefit to the world and the humanity, honestly.

Is it likely? No, I don't believe it's that likely, but it's not zero. And the markets are pricing it at zero. And that's what's interesting. Yeah. And I guess, you know, to bring it back home, as we always try to do on smelting crypto town hall to Bitcoin, it just feels like it's very hard. for any crypto-native news to push through the global headlines at this point. I'm really not even sure what kind of news you could get on Bitcoin right now that would move price massively. I think that quantum is the biggest thing that's going on right now.

I mean, it didn't flinch yesterday with the Google News, nor should it have, by the way. I mean, it shouldn't have. But that's besides the point. What is fascinating is none of those three scenarios, None of them is bad for purely financial assets. Now, let's say what I mean. Even the worst, the disaster scenario, Iran is a toll booth. We do nothing.

We've retail between our legs, et cetera. All this devastation, you know, the government has even more incentive to print like crazy, right? You know, the most likely scenario where we get some sort of status quo, we've destroyed enormous amounts of property that will need to be rebuilt, around in the region will be part of it. Our military has to be restocked. You're not going to see in the world us to go back to balanced budgets or anything that would increase the confidence in the fiat currencies of all the major countries. That's not going to happen. So the question you have to ask yourself is, why are Bitcoin and gold so inversely correlated to oil and why are they reacting this way? And the answer is because right now, what we always talk about is,

markets are uncertain. And when markets are uncertain, what happens? The big boys pull in their horns. They don't take leverage. Leverages is flushed out of the system. They don't make bets. And so it doesn't matter which bet. They don't make them. And so because you could a literal tweet or a truth social post, your entire portfolio was exposed to that. And that sort of thing makes any professional money manager nuts. You know, there are some people who were making good bets. Now long-term traders, I think, understand what's going on. And they're places. their bets. That's why gold is still well above, even after today's 4% drop, it's still over 4,500. And, you know, we talked about this. I mean, McClone said, well, it's going to

be on its way to 3,000, which it would if it wasn't for the fact that central banks still want it, and people still want a hedge against all this fiat destruction that we see going on. Bitcoin has not benefited nearly as much, but it's still in the same trading range. It's been in. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, I just think that, All roads eventually lead here. The question is there are people who are spooked by quantum and that is holding back money. There's also people who are looking to allocate and are not going to do allocations until this war is over. So I think you have all of that going on.

Yeah, I'd be yesterday's guests. We were talking privately and we didn't really get it onto the show. But he definitely believed that the quantum narrative is holding markets down. There are a lot of people out there who have sold because of quantum fear or, more importantly, who just aren't going to buy, who maybe one of them. So the crux of the argument is, first of all, let's understand what is at risk. Nobody doubts that newer wallets or people who have control of their wallets will get upgraded wallets to be able to handle quantum risk by hiding public keys,

etc., etc., or even newer signatures that are quantum resistant. Not a problem. So 70% of all Bitcoin is not really going to be an issue, not unless, you know, you know, all, it just would be completely irrational self-interest for that not to be. And Nick Carter may say it, but I think that I actually don't think he really says that. But here's what people are afraid of. They're afraid of somewhere between Satoshi's $1 million and, you know, a full 30% of Bitcoin and older wallets won't get upgraded and they'll be stolen, et cetera.

So ask yourself a question. And this is really a simple one. So I did this analysis yesterday. Let me see if I could pull it up. Yeah, oh, God damn it. Sorry. Here we go. So I did this analysis yesterday.

I asked Grock. I said, okay. So when people buy into these big IPOs and the stock trades, and there's a huge amount of locked up coins, what happens when anywhere from 5 to 30% of those coins, that stock gets unlocked, what happens to the price of the stock? because, you know, they didn't know. Now, the Bitcoin is different because there are people who think that they're gone forever and that we don't have 21 million. We have 16 million coin, but whatever. And in the past, when people thought that there was a rumor of a Satoshi wallet, you know, moving coins,

the market would drop 50 or 60%. Today's Bitcoin market is not the same as those markets. Today's Bitcoin market is dominated by people who would say, okay, 16 million, 21 million, What difference does that make really in my long-term price expectation? The answer is not that much. So if you look at it from the perspective of what would professional people look and you take volatility into account and try to compare it to Bitcoin, if the bottom line is the scenarios are this.

So I ran a graph. Unfortunately, I can't, you can't see it very easily. So I would present it. But, well, I could try. Let's let's try. We'll put it up there. Live TV, man. We can do whatever we want.

Okay, can you see a screen? Yep. Okay. So this is 10% of the dormant pool, you know, becomes available, right? And you can see the numbers start going higher and higher. So effectively, the numbers range. We'll just go all the way out to the bottom. This is the predicted recovery line.

So go to all the way down to the bottom of this. Right. Let's get over here. And then, yeah, 100%. So three and a half million. Bitcoin get non-dormant. Major shock, 25 to 40%, recovery in 6 or 12 months. So that's our worst case. That's your worst case. And that's taking into account Bitcoin's volatility and modeling

the way that investors are now. Could that major shock be a wick of 60% down where smart people make a fucking fortune? Yes, it's possible. But your shock, your equilibrium price will be somewhere 2025 and 40% and you have 6012 months to recover. Now ask yourself, we just had that. We literally just had it. And it was coincident with the quantum narrative starting to circulate. So is it already priced in? I don't know.

Possibly. I think the other addition, just playing devil's advocate, and I actually tend to agree with you, but is the loss of confidence that would obviously impact other people selling? What loss of cost of confidence in what? If people started seeing, as you mentioned before, in previous markets, if there was even a rumor of a Zatoshi wallet becoming unlocked, you would see price dropped 50%. So imagine one actually does come unlocked and those tokens sell, how many other people would pile off. Well, okay, let's game theory that out too.

I'm saying game theory a lot today because I think that's what matters here. So first of all, will, is it possible that it depends who gets it? So let's say a Chinese state actor, that's your worst narrative. Let's go with North Korea. What, or whatever. North Korea, China. What is their interest? North Korea is not the worst.

China's the worst. North Korea's most important interest. If they hack those coins and get them, it's for people not to think it's North Korea, for people not to know who did it, and to sell them very gradually and make as much money as possible. Because if they knew it was North Korea, they wouldn't get nearly as much for their money.

They'd be selling it for pennies on the dollar, and they wouldn't want it. If it's China, and let's say China decides that we think Bitcoin is, a strategic reserve and they don't have one. Frankly, if you think with all the Chinese mining capacity, the Chinese government... They actually wanted to break it, not profit from it. Right.

Most of all, if they... But it's not just want to break it. If they think they have to believe they can break it, knocking the price down doesn't help them, right? Especially if it's over after a certain point. So them dumping the coins on the market matters not. What matters more to them would be overhang and leaving that overhang going. The real reality,

is what is the most bullish thing that could happen to Bitcoin? No one talking about overhang, knowing what the supply is, and having a relatively understood set of holders. That is the most bullish scenario. That's how you get better adoption. It's what needs to happen. The fact that Satoshi's wallet is closed and people who will speculate about it is a drag on Bitcoin performance, arguably a bigger drag than the likelihood of anything that would have.

happen. So my argument is at the other end of all this, without any doubt, the best path to Bitcoin becoming, you know, people talking about hyper-bitcoinsation, a Bitcoin standard, there is no way that can happen without these coins becoming part of the available supply and ending up in the hands of people who believe Bitcoin is money. Or they're being definitive certainty as to their status that they would never be unlawed. But think about it. Some of those coins are the dude who lost his keys in a garbage dump. Yeah, garbage dump in England, right. Right.

So that dude, he doesn't have that much, but just that dude, how much is he willing to pay the MIT or whoever, Google quantum computer to reverse engineer and hack his coins? And who owns legal right to them? Because that's the thing people aren't talking about. It's like everyone is just assuming dark shadowy hackers are going to get there. Well, if Google is the one who hacks it, do they have? have actually the right. I mean, if you, this is really simple. Someone leaves their door open in their house and a pile of money inside their their vestibule. If you go in and take it, you're committing

crime. You know, it's like if you literally steal somebody's Bitcoin using a quantum computer, you've committed a theft. Just because you can, doesn't mean you will and doesn't mean you won't be prosecuted. Just remember that. No one is considering any of these things. Everyone just said, oh my God, oh my God, it's not safe. But it's not the daily users that are that are, that are are problematic. It's not the strategies hoard. It's not coinbases. It's not iBits. It's the stuff that was locked. But is it right to steal? And you just need to understand that all of this stuff is not being talked about. What I'm saying is right now there's this dark cloud of uncertainty. Remember we started this whole show by talking about uncertainty, Scott. This just creates uncertainty.

And I think it is suppressing the price. But I think it creates a, it's creating a longer term buying opportunity for exactly that reason. I really like that argument. It makes me sleep better at my night, so I'll accept it. Yeah, I think that, I just think that there's a huge, huge misunderstanding about what the quantum threat is. A lot of people say it breaks Bitcoin, no, it allows you to unlock coins. Those are two very, very different things, and I think that the market will eventually

realize that. But I will say that the quantum narrative has jumped the shark from. from just being an echo chamber thing to mainstream. And I have heard people who I know in the real world say, but what about the quantum threat? Exactly. That's my point. That's all that matters.

The narrative is out there. Remember, we said this when it talked about oil. It's true with Bitcoin. People hate uncertainty, and it's all about expectation. The expectation today is almost as low as it can be. There are so many people who are not buying and so many people who have sold because they fear the worst. I would say the expectation is pretty close to the worst.

The expectation right now among the people who will matter, the marginal buyers or sellers is bad. That the diehards, people like me, or permables, you and others are like, you know what, it's not going to matter in the end.

And they believe that this will all get solved in a reasonable way. But the truth is that a lot of quantum is already, a lot of the impact has already been seen. That's the fact. And if you don't understand that, then you're not paying attention to why. It's the same reason. Why is oil not at 200? How many people did you hear two months ago said if the Straits of Formos gets closed for any length of time, oil is going to rocket to 150 and 200? Now, it may be that we'll get there. But the expectation was always from the day that the war started that was that could happen.

but it's not happening, right, in why. It's because people's expectations. Remember, it costs $55 a barrel to produce a batter of oil. So, you know, obviously the farther you go above that, 112 is double or literally double. You know, how much do you go beyond double based on temporary things and need to bid against others for what is scarce in the short run because you can't get it, right?

Remember, it's like you have to bid, you're outbidding for it. you have to be able to get it somehow. And the oil supply, the problem is, is the Saudis can't get their oil. So the only people who can get their oil out to China, Venezuela, the United States, places that don't go through the straits. So there's outbidding for that. That's what's going on. So I want to talk about another topic that you got in a heated debate about yesterday that I think is really interesting. And we haven't really unpacked at all on this show.

So I have your tweets here kind of with Josh Mandel, who, you know, I've communicated with quite a bit. Eric Weiss, who's a friend of mine. But it started with people and companies re-hypothicating Bitcoin or the primary reason it isn't already $250,000 per Bitcoin. And to give the TLDR, we have basically this narrative that paper Bitcoin, all the products around it are what's suppressing price. And I think it's fair to say you took issue with that. Well, it's completely wrong.

I mean, you know, it is insanity. You know, look, I've been reading GADA, GATA, in the World Gold Council for over two decades. And they have made the argument, and I believe it is somewhat true, that at times gold has been manipulated and suppressed, silver has been manipulated and suppress. They make the argument that it's perpetual long-term suppression. Most of the public, the sort of if you go to the grocs of the world and the other things of the world to try to assess their statement, they put that at between a 20 and 40 percent probability. I'll even say, let's just stipulate to the fact that it's true.

There's a huge difference in gold and Bitcoin, and it's a massive difference, Scott. And it's the one that no one even talks about. Golds, dealers price their inventory off of futures, meaning you could knock the futures down and continue to sell futures, and then it goes to the next contract, to the next contract. You never have a tether to the spot market. There isn't one. Gold miners sell spot, and yes, they do forwards, and some of that is different. And I bet gold miners yell at me, and I'm sure some of them will get on here and say,

you don't know how the gold market works. And I'm like, I understand enough. The gold miners probably do have spot markets that are divorced from the futures market, which is why the people say the got a stuff, the price suppression is only 20 to 40 percent. But gold dealers like atbex.com, because I've talked to them. I know the guy's there. They use the futures market to do all the bullion selling. So the futures markets are really important in gold.

In the case of crypto, perpetual swaps and futures both move with spot, full stop. If spot moves, futures and perps get, in the case of perps, it's immediate. The liquidation is a trigger. I mean, they have a mark. And every quarter, futures expire, every expiration, every month. Futures expiration is off of the volume weighted average of spot markets. So you cannot just roll a futures paper position. It's based on spot.

That is a massive difference. So that takes out the whole futures and perpetuals being biased against or for Bitcoin. At times, it's true. And we've seen it. We saw it a couple of years ago where futures were trading in a perpetual premium. When that happens, that allows the spot price to continue to move higher. We see when futures go to a discount spot does get under pressure. It does happen. Some rallies or bear markets are driven by futures.

Well, we definitely do liquidation cascades and perps that affect temporarily spot markets. Well, generally, liquidation cascades and perps are triggered by the spot markets. What people are doing, and I've explained this in detail, I have a post that explains it in detail, an article I wrote, where what happens is people buy long spot position, short perp position, and they amass it over a period of week so it's big and they do it closely, slowly. And then they dump the spot position in a liquid time, which causes per liquidation cascade. And then the person with flushed. But at the end of the day, it's spot that's doing it.

So spot, spot, spot, that's what drives the price in the end. Perps can have wiggles around it. But in order to suppress it, you have to believe that somehow you can sell spot. Now, Ibit is spot. They have to buy Bitcoin. They have to buy Bitcoin. So their argument is you can borrow and re-hypothicate Ibit

and therefore sell more of it. Okay. Well, let's talk about how that works. In order to sell Ibit shares, you have to borrow them. Borrowing Ibit shares has, it's not as trivial as it's, sounds, but you can do it. You can only borrow what's been created, right? You know,

this whole notion of rehypification, yeah, there is some where you can get to, the worst is like 140%, 40% more iBit being sold is not, first of all, it's not structural. It can get to that. And it's only in hard to borrow names, which it's not. So it's just by the data not happening. And the notion that you could sell iBit without having to borrow it is just, nuts. It's just wrong. And in fact, what the market makers, the only ones who have any wiggle room, and that's a three-day extra wiggle room because the market maker exemption, market makers don't make directional bets. If they're selling Ibit, they're selling them buying, they're creating the spread. That's the entire point. That's right. It's just, it's just not the business. Look,

I ran a market maker. And so when some jacked up fixed income trader who had a dream and called one day's price correctly, you know, tells me that someone who believes gold, was going to be at 16,000, you know, last December, you know, tells me that I don't know how the markets work. I mean, you could tell me my price predictions are wrong. Sure, fine. I'm wrong as much as the next guy. I totally was too bullish on Bitcoin. I totally didn't after the quantum narrative and the effect of it was going to happen. I definitely believed that October 10th would be shorter lived or less shallower than we thought. I got that wrong. But on market structure and market mechanics. Okay, whatever. I mean, there are a few people in the world who I will talk to about it that

are equals. Josh Mann's not one of them. And I don't care how many followers he has because like Martin Luther King, he had a dream. I'm sorry. It's just wrong. And it's, that's, 84,000 Bitcoin. Was that the thing? I like that. Yeah, yeah, it was the 84,000 and then the 4-4-4 prediction. And frankly, you know, I actually think that it's, it was good for Bitcoin to get that kind of people's, interest in it. The truth is that even if you look at what he says, he's not taking into account the different volatility dynamics in Bitcoin as immatures. And so we could talk about that, but that's arguable. What's not arguable is this notion that there is a market that is divorced from the spot market that's driving Bitcoin down. What's driving Bitcoin down is more sellers than buyers. And a lot of

people who say, I thought Bitcoin was this indomitable, perfect risk into the future. Now I'm worried about quantum. What's driving Bitcoin down is a lot of people saying I have lives to live and I need and I took money out. I agree. I think, you know, listen, I think people don't have money. That's, that's number one, right? So there's either you have dry powder and you're kind of excited, as Tillman said, or you have no dry powder. So you're emotionally upset that you can't buy this low and maybe want it to go lower and it just is what it is. But all of these things just compound. I think for a Normie investor who maybe had a superficial thought to buy Bitcoin to just say not now. There's not buying this thing now.

There's quantum. Is it destroying the environment? Is Elizabeth Warren Wright? Does North Korea get a hack by coins? Is quantum a threat? The same old recycled bud, right? Yeah, I don't think so. I think that there's a lot of recycled stuff.

I think the normie investors are listening. their financial advisors and they're, as Matt Hogan will tell you and has told you, they are migrating towards more of a position in the portfolio. I think these weeks right now, there is none of that. Nobody's doing anything. I mean, and if they are doing it, they're raising cash because they're afraid. People in, we always say this. This is a slower motion version of this. We always talk about it. When markets all fall, correlations go up. Right? So crude oil at 112. causes silver to drop from 75 to 70, right? Bitcoin to drop from 68 to 65, actually performing better than silver, right?

You know, you see the stock indexes are, you know, down anywhere from almost 2% on the NASDAQ to, you know, a little over a percent. It used to be that the dollar was inversely correlated to all these things and now it's oil that's in the driver's seat, which, you know. Well, yeah, I mean, that's true. know, if you look at the Dixie is usually the flight to safety. And I guess the dollar is doing better. It's up half a percent today. But, you know, it's up half a percent. The pound is getting crushed continues to, right? I'm just looking down the thing. The Japanese yen is actually stronger against the dollar, but that's because it's up against its artificial ceiling the BOJ has at 160. But the point here is, is we're in a period of time of uncertainty. What is, and the reason Bitcoin's

probably holding in better than people would have expected with all of this. this is because why do people buy Bitcoin? Because we don't trust the system. And if the system is going to fall apart, and this is stresses in the system showing that it could fall apart, what do you want to own? Obviously in the beginning, you know, you want to own anything that doesn't lose your money. And then people start looking for how to make money. So the real question is what happens when there's an aftermath? And is there an aftermath or is this a forever war? That's the real question. And there are a lot of people this morning after listening to Trump think it's a forever war. And if we're still at war with Iran in four years, yeah, there's a, there will be a very

bumpy ride over the next four years. Yeah, I mean, the takes are kind of the same. I mean, circling back. I had highlighted this before, but as you said, he effectively re-read his recent social media posts out loud. And there was just sort of no new news. And I think a lot of people were like, if we're getting an address from the president at 9 o'clock that the world is good to tune into, there should be an announcement. Right. And I think that that's why people are just kind of confused. I mean, you know, we can go through. We get the idea, right?

I mean, we know what happened here. But yeah, the summary, two to three weeks, but then no definitive answer on what happens after two to three weeks, right? Are we nation building? Are we not nation building? We may take out their plants. We may not. You know, we won't use this.

When the president of the United States talks about geopolitics, the way that people do in bars. You have a situation where the world doesn't know what's going on. I mean, in the bar, I mean, if you go to a bar after 9-11, it would be very common to hear people say, well, we should bomb those people back to the Stone Age, right? You know, if you were, you know, if you're, you know, a few beers in and people start talking about people you don't like,

oh, bomb them back to the Stone Age. You read the president of the United States on live TV saying it. I mean, do we live in a same thing? Simulation, yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, what I will say is it's, you know, he's talking true. He's using those words carefully in order to rally his base and the common American who's like, you know, what enough is enough. But I don't think a common American have been affected by these people that much, except for the ones who live in Minnesota, you know, except for the ones who live in Dearborn, Michigan, right? You know, to get mad enough. And it's like, what is happening? I mean, you know, what is Iran done over the years? They funded terror. Is terror done bad shit? Yes. Is it affected Americans? Yes.

Does it affect allies? Yes. Is it a drag on the global economy? And when I say allies, everyone thinks I mean only Israel. Let's be really clear here. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are- All of them is allies in the speech last night. I mean, he said Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates.

He was very clear about that. No, it's very true. I mean, it's very true. I mean, Dubai is it's a, the longer this goes on, if it stays that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, in the middle, that status quo piece, where Iran continues to have power, etc. That is horrible for the UAE. It's horrible for Dubai. No one will trust that they'll be safe, right? The obvious, you know, worst answer is bad too. They need a resolution where the people can go back and invest

and turn Dubai back into what it was quick close. I mean, look, let's face it, Dubai was becoming arguably one of the financial capitals of the world and has the potential to be that, but can't do that if the people there think that Iran could decide to send a drone swarm and take out all their water. Yeah. And it's very important to understand. Saudi Arabia, same thing.

If all their oil is held hostage or a huge percentage of is held hostage by Iran, and Riyadh could be threatened, same thing. So it's a very big deal. In fact, they have far bigger issues, than Israel does. Israel is an existential issue. Yeah, there's seven million billion people there. Oh, the direct impact to the neighbors is much greater than immediate impact. The impact to Israel is if they ever lose a war to Iran, seven million people are genocided. That's the issue.

Or like a nuclear Iran and theory and, you know, they, well, nuclear Iran and nuclear Israel is, I mean, better read up on the impact of nuclear. Unlike the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and not having clean water tomorrow is a big deal. Oh, seriously, but that's the point here. I mean, and so people don't want to think about that. I mean, obviously, I think about it. Obviously, everyone in crypto does because we all have friends that live in Dubai. We all have friends that live in the Middle East.

We all have friends. We know because they've been one of the epicenters of our industry, thanks to Gensler, who pushed it all over there. So, you know, which is the last story you haven't mentioned, which is the Clarity Act, you know, clown show. Right. Yeah, I didn't, I was going to go to something more positive, which was the Franklin Templeton basically acquiring.

I can't understand the mechanics of this, no matter how many times I ask. But I'm friends with Chris Perkins, who was on recently, and Seth Ginds, who's been on the past. I'll just ask him at some point. But the TLDR was out. Or did he leave his firm? I can't figure it out.

Like, it's like I was looking at the same thing. I know Chris as well. I'm not a friend, but I know. Franklin Templeton is buying 250 digital, which I think is a part of coin fund, although some of the articles kind of presented as if this is a joint venture between Frankl Templeton and Coin Fund, but Chris and Seth both sort of in their language said

we're leaving Coin Fund to go to Franklin Templeton, but they are Coin Fund. And the liquid assets of Coin Fund's portfolio and that portfolio is coming with them. Maybe that's 250 digital. Either way, Franklin Templeton, who's long been one of the most bullish institutions on crypto and has been building in this space forever. You've guys, I've had Sandy Call on the show many times. She's absolutely brilliant, clearly making a much bigger push in that direction and not worried about the price of oil while doing it. Well, I mean, yeah, look, you don't make investment decisions on the basis of short-term things if you're a builder.

If you have to, if you're thinking about what's going to make me the most money as a company over the next three to five years and what's going to make me and what can I talk to my investors about my plan, then you plan for three to five years. If you're planning for the next quarter, yeah, you have to worry about these things. So if it's as an investment manager, you invest, you know, your liquid assets have to care, but your illiquid assets, no, you don't care. You know, I'm curious. The reason I was curious about Chris is because one of the assets that they have is some

intellectual property around measuring, you know, on-chain rate determination, right? That's good. I read very specifically that the liquid fund itself is being consumed by Franklin Templeton, but I obviously can't speak to the IP or the other businesses. But that IP is potentially very interesting in an on-chain world. And, you know, it's just there's a lot of that, that IP becomes very important. And just for those who understand, it's like you, everyone knows, you know, what SOFA is, or if you don't, then maybe you remember LIBOR from the old days.

But the notion of a reference rate that can be used by all participants is very important. And Chris was developing that for- That was one of the big problems for getting ETFs approved. If people don't remember. I mean, not specifically, but that, you know, a market of sufficient size, but then the, what was it called, the agreement surveillance. Yeah, that's true. If I wanted a different price than Coinbase has a different price than, you know,

Bit Stamp, how do you, you know, price the ETF and make sure that it's actually tracking? What's your actual, you know, S&P has been working on this for crypto. Galaxy, obviously, created their fund for benchmarks, Bloomberg, for these exact same reasons. You have to have a price to reference. Yeah. I mean, look at Corrin Rout, so one of the very first thing I did was I created this thing called our cost calculator, which at every single second can tell you aggregated across whichever exchanges you think should fit, what it would cost to buy ourselves specific amounts, dollar values of any crypto. And so, you know, all our algos know roughly where the price is always, but we don't publish it. We're not a benchmark provider. It's a different. data, it's a data thing. ACO has something similar to that and they do that and other people have done it. All this intellectual property is going to become very important because in distributed

markets, it takes market data collection and makes it into a different problem. But, you know, that's going down, you know, that's, that that is, that's when you really go down that rabbit hole. So, and that's not a rabbit hole that anyone really cares about. But what matters at the Franklin Templeton News is it's more proof. I am moderating a panel at Security Traders Association. Yes, the word securities in the title in New York in a couple weeks on the Monday the 13th. And we have a panel, I'm moderating a panel on the perspective of traditional financial firms

and what does it mean as they start moving into more and more digitalization, tokenization, et cetera. We have another full panel on crypto firms and how, they are embracing traditional assets and now their technology is working, how their market structure is because they are as a difference. It's a convergence, right? These things are coming together. We also have two other firesides, one with zero hash and another with the New York Stock Exchange talking about tokenization and all of it. So it is a huge deal in traditional finance. It is what a lot of people are looking at. This is not a small thing. This is moving aircraft carriers This isn't speedboats, right?

These things are, this is, what's going on in Iran, it's not going to change that. That is happening. And even Elizabeth Warren's anti-crypto army, she's really, if you've listened to her recently, not that it turns my stomach to have to listen to the bullshit, like the wealth tax stuff. And I'm sorry, I just, the lack of, the amount of innumeracy and lack of economic knowledge is crazy. If you want to talk about that, I can explain. But her tone is much more. about things that I really don't disagree with.

I mean, we shouldn't be able to issue meme coins if you're in politics and could affect it. Yeah. You should have we should have insider trading rules for crypto. Sure. I agree with that. You know, we want to make sure that things can't be stolen. Now, of course, in her case, it all it always devolves into truish behavior that has nothing to do with the technology and protecting the banks. But you know, it really hasn't been the the, well, this technology is terrible. We don't want to use it anymore. Yeah, we don't know that. When Jamie Diamond tells you, says, crypto rails are better, it's game over. Yeah. I mean, we've also, you know, a lot of the recycled flood of past, even from Elizabeth Warren, has actually died.

Bitcoin miners boiling the ocean and things like that. Right. So we are advancing. And I think to your point, she's right about a lot of things, but they need to apply to everything and not just crypto. So an ethics law for crypto that doesn't apply to insider trading of stocks by Congress is non-star. I have made this point until I'm blue in the face, not that anyone will ever listen to me. But should there be a blanket ethics rule for all elected officials? Yes, of course there should. Could anyone who works in the DOD or on the staff or on the financial, on the armed services committee be allowed to buy and sell Raytheon? Of course not.

you know, bankers have harder, every bank out there has rules. Oh my God, they're so strict. And but I was there for you, believe me, I know how strict. I can tell you right now that that argument against crypto, it's very specific to Trump, so it will last, but it's coming to prediction markets near you, and it's going to be a much bigger debate there

because there's so much less regulated, so much easier to use, and people are going to be able to buy positions there on insider information with basically, nobody watching for a while until they try to get their heads wrapped around it. So that's where that behavior is going to shift in my opinion. Oh, you're so spot on. That's exactly right. But the whole thing is, look, the whole, the whole, all of watching it is, is corrupt. I mean, the corruption is off the charts. Like, you know, Elon found it. And, and his band of merry

men started figuring out how much fraud there is, how much NGO money gets recycled back into political campaigns which get used to slush funds for kids wet you know their kids weddings and you know where they eat all the other stuff it's it's insane so much money not just political campaigns but also consulting fees and other sort of you know arrangements from NGOs that are partially funded by the federal and state governments i mean it's crazy and then we we get what we're seeing with the clarity act where the banks somehow where the the administration of the congress say words like well the we need a a compromise between the banks and the crypto industry No, you don't. You're public servants. You build, you should build laws that work for the people.

Did you see anyone saying the public savers committee is, is negotiating with the, whatever, for protecting their rights? It's like, no, let's call it what it is. The lack of paying yield on stable coins is, there's this, this big Hoover, you know, big vacuum cleaner, pulling into the pockets of America and just sucking out tens of, of billions of dollars at a time because the people have to use payment systems that don't pay them interest and they have to keep it in the in near there so they can get it there in a moment's notice lest they not be able to pay their bills i mean it's insane scott and it's just it's just it's taken money in politics to such a bare level that that anybody can understand

it when the banks have such a strong seat at the table it's crazy but that's where we're at I mean, I guess you mentioned it before. We have eight minutes. So usually we're wrapping by now, but this is fun. We can talk about clarity. So obviously we had this yesterday. I can tell you privately that this set the world on fire because it was kind of, is it fake news or is it not?

If you listen to the interview. So the headline, Coinbase, Paul Graywell says clarity act issues will resolve in 48 hours. I corrected it below saying that he said, I'm very confident we're going to see progress when asked if this would be done in 48 hours. But clearly, Coinbase and Paul Graywall never came outright and said, hey, 48 hours, this thing will be done. But the confusion, I can just say, came from the Chiron. Coinbase expects Clarity Act deal on rewards within 48 hours. So Fox News threw that up. It caused a big stir. Either way, Coinbase not thinking, by the way, that this is going to get done in 48 hours, but a lot of people saying that there is major progress here

towards it getting done. I still view this as a quagmire, but would be really unsurprised to be proven wrong and happily eat my words. Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way. Look, my point of view on on the Clarity Act and where we're currently at is that the bigger deal is going to be the ethics provision. I think that if you're in crypto and you understand that that Cracken's gotten the skinny Fed license and all of these crypto firms will be banks, and you understand that they have the ability to create technology that won't in a product but could effectively mirror what needs to be done so that you don't have to hold stable coins for any length of time, right? I mean, the problem is U.S. Treasury, Bissent's going to wake up and say, wait a minute,

what's going to happen here isn't good for us because the U.S. Treasury wants is people to hold trillions of dollars in stable coins. That's what they want. Why? Because they're going to buy U.S. treasuries, right? So they want that. What's going to happen? is people are going to hold maybe a trillion, maybe hundreds of billions in stable coins, and they're going to have investments that can be very rapidly moved back and forth to be used for payments.

And those investments are no longer limited to U.S. treasuries. That is the trajectory we are on right now is that trajectory, to where you will have deposit accounts that might hold treasuries, sure, but they're going to have to compete with Bitcoin. They're going to have to compete with STRC.

They're going to have to compete with high yield funds. They're going to have to compete with crypto funds. You're going to have to compete with stock funds. Because all of these things being tokenized means the velocity of money is increasing. When the velocity of money increases, Scott, that means that the amount of money, the $7 trillion that are sitting in payment accounts are gone. A CD will literally be RIP CD. There's no need for a CD.

lock it up for six months to get the yield. Other people will give you that yield without six months lock up, and it'll all be, it'll all be tokenized and you can move it like that. That's the problem for the banks right here, because the speeding up of the technology, if they lose control of being the gatekeepers of all payments, if you can Venmo, PayPal, etc, and or write checks effectively from an account, Coinbase Cracken or Robin Hood, there's no reason to hold money in bank deposits anymore. And so that's the thing that's a far bigger deal.

It's actually perverse, but allowing stable coin yield, which might be anti-compate, which might make the banks lose, you know, make less money is far better for their long-term health than forcing the industry to the next level of where it's going. You would rather make a little less but keep the customer than lose all the customers. Right. And that is what's happening. We have seen this story before. We have.

We've seen it in the financial. markets, right? We saw the way, you know, people used to pay commissions to trade stocks for retail customers. I remember the financial consultants used to make, there were these ads, I remember the Smith Barney ads with the guy on the yacht, the first Charles Schwab ad when they came in with, you know, $10 commissions, which is whatever. They had the old broker sitting on his yacht, and the argument was, the caption was, would you rather the broker may have the yacht, or do you want to be able to make your way toward that kind of wealth? That, was the world. And it got lost, it eventually went to zero, literal zero. I'm not saying the same

thing happens to the banks, but you don't need, there's much less need for the current way a fractional reserve bank than people think with mobile capital flows, et cetera. But you just got to, once again, game it out, what will happen. And as things get faster and faster, investments will compete on the merit of investments and payments will become a much smaller piece of the overall pot. That doesn't mean that a cash account that's paying yield that's backed by U.S. Treasuries is going to go away. They won't. Those money market funds are going to do well. It'll be tokenized money market funds like Frank and Templeton has, the Benji. That will do very, very well.

I did see that a lot of coin funds deal is paid in Benji. Why not? Yeah. Why not? It's a high paying, very safe in tokenized asset that pays a solid yield and is in, immediately movable back and forth into whatever else you need it. Yeah. That's what it is.

It can be used as a stable coin. Very simple. Well, not at, no, no, they don't use that word because of the legal side of it. But the bottom line is, is this, it's not a war. I will continue to make the statement that the banks are shooting themselves in the foot and they don't even know it because they're not smart enough. Yeah, that's, I mean, Chris John Carlo made the argument to me. He was like, the real story of the clarity act is that the banks need it more than the crypto

industry because they, You know, they really are under the law and the regulator, and they need to know exactly what they can and cannot do, getting into this industry that they want to be a part of. So maybe it actually, you know, listen, right now, the third act never passes. There's a lot of things you just mentioned that maybe become vague. But one thing we know is that you can still get a yield on coin base and that the banks will have less participation in the industry. Yeah, that's dead true. Look, you know, I personally care because the M&A activity that is likely, to happen is still being held up by clarity. And that matters to me because I'm, you know, I'm,

you know, an owner in coin routes and the technology matters and they're in the banks don't have it. So I would love for this to get resolved. And then we'll see where things go. You know, some people are already figuring out that this is going to happen. It's inevitable. But, you know, look, we're in it, we're in an uncertain world. There is the real question of what we didn't talk about, but you and I talk about last on crypto town halls, what the hell does this mean for non-Bitcoin crypto assets? And my answer is going to be the same. Tokens that can demonstrate revenue and participation by token holders in revenue will eventually become very, very good investments. Tokens that can't will eventually die. I think it's as simple as that. And that scares the hell out of

people because, you know, when you go from, in the case of the internet, eyeballs to money, it's always a rocky chasm in the case of crypto when you go from this attention economy or TVL or whatever and just say, well, but the total addressable market is so huge, we're going to get a big piece of it. It's like, great, show me the way. And some will. That's the thing. That's the thing that's interesting. Some will. And the ones that do will be worth quite a bit. And some won't. And they will be historical curiosity. I don't know how the owners of Lycos did or Ask Jeeves did, but I don't know which Cryptos are Ask Jeeves, but I think quite a few of them are.

Yeah, but if they are, they probably founders are going to be on yachts without the product ever being delivered. Well, that's the other problem. You've asked Jeeves and Likos for a while. I mean, the other topic that people could talk about in terms of regulation and we'll probably bring it up is the biggest difference in crypto and, and, securities is crypto, you can get immediate liquidity. And in securities, it's a ridiculous process. The truth is, the world is better off, but somewhere in the middle. Yep. Well, they agree.

All right, we hit 10 o'clock. I think we unpacked it all, Dave. See, now that we're at Cryptotown on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we have to find things to do on Tuesdays at Thursdays. Well, I'm still finishing off my book. We're going to have, I'm going to be getting you a copy of the first draft. Yeah. Well, it's the rough draft of all chapters is written now. So it's done. Right now I'm at, you know, we're just south of 80,000 words. It's there. You know, it's, what do you say? That's a real book. Oh yeah. No, it's, it's it's it's or it covers, basically a 20 year period from 85, 1985 through 2005. Actually goes, I hit, I kind of scratch into 2008. So it's 23 years. Uh, of how markets have changed. What were the learnings and all

the hijinks, all sorts of stuff that, that, you know, funny stories about things that went on to illustrate Wall Street. It's meant to be, you know, beach reading, but with some actual alpha buried in the pages. So, you know, we'll see. But that's what I'm wearing. It's called million-dollar frat boys for those who are watching. And there's a website. We'll start, I'll start promoting it for a mailing list, whatever.

But John Wiley and Sons is publishing it, so I'm not handling the PR, the distribution. So we'll see. I can't wait to read it. We'll push the hell out of it here. All right, man. Well, thank you as usual. I'll see you on Cryptotown all tomorrow. 10.50.

at Eastern San time. The rest of you, I'll see you tomorrow here at 9 a.m. Thanks, Dave. As always, guys, give him a follow on his actually new Twitter account, which is links down below. We'll get into that another day.

But until then, we will see you tomorrow. Thanks, Dave. Bye, guys.