The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Hesitates As The Fed Prepares To Flood Markets! What's Next?

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

The Federal Reserve has officially ended quantitative tightening, preparing to inject trillions in new liquidity back into the financial system. But while markets rally, Bitcoin remains hesitant, hovering near key resistance levels and refusing to break higher. Is Bitcoin signaling caution while the Fed floods the market with printed money or gearing up for its next explosive move?

Bitcoin is sitting at 92,500 or so, and people are tense on both sides. Fear is still high. Where is it going to go? Let's unpack it all with Alex Miller right now. Well, good morning, everyone. Dave Weisberger here, subbing in for Scott once again. Tomorrow, probably the last time you'll have to hear me for a while. I'll at least until Macro Monday, but it'll be back on my normal spot. Joined by Alex Miller to help unpack what's going on with Bitcoin.

There's lots of confusion out there. Alex, what do you think is going on? It goes up, it goes down. I don't know. The, you know, I think everything, I think it's a reflection of just the general instability that everyone is feeling across the board right now. Right. We're seeing very similar movements across a lot of different equity markets. It's the holidays. I think, you know, one of the endless debates I think over the last year in particular, especially the last six months has been is the four year cycle dead or is it going to

repeat itself? And obviously, you know, December and turn of the year has always been a weird time for people, right? Like I think I think one of the favorites I've seen is like, you know, it goes up right after Thanksgiving because like everyone goes to the, you know, Thanksgiving table. and tells their family about Bitcoin and then people go and buy it. And then I feel like there's always something weird that happens around Christmas time. I think someone who helps run a crypto ecosystem. Every year around like the Christmas holiday, we have, I don't know, some kind of like surge in usage or chaos.

We had a whole weird thing with our test net last year and stuff. And so it's this is always just a weird time of the year. It's more people have like, I think some excess time sitting around the computer and talking to people on the internet. made all the more so by nobody knows what inflation numbers are. Nobody knows what the next job numbers are going to be. And nobody knows when the Fed's going to, like if they're going to go full on printing next year, if they're not. And I just think that's showing up here. Yeah, I think that's just what's showing up.

Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. Look, I think two things. And one, you're incredibly well positioned to talk about. So you'll know which one of the two. The first one is it always feels, and it's very strange this time, I'm not going to lie. It always feels of Bitcoin bottoms coincide with renewed calls of calling Bitcoin tulip bulbs or it's a, you know, a Ponzi scheme or things are wasting, you know, basic fud of some sort, whether it's about China or the environment or these days about micro strategy. that one's an old favorite but a goody and that one's come back you know that there's satoshi fud out there you know it's just it's it's kind of and when i say that i mean people talking

about it being the cia and they're getting ready to dump the market so that the u.s could buy it cheap i mean sure all sorts of crazy stuff and and the perma both the perma skeptics the ones who have been wrong since a hundred dollars the steve hankies the peter shifts the other ones that just have gotten more and more histrionic with daily posts you always see that at the same time, however, building and the network seems stronger than ever, right? You know, I checked this morning back up to 100, you know, whatever, 115 exahasses. Am I getting the numbers right or am I off by a bit? Which is just for those who follow along at home is about more than 10x where we were when

FTX collapsed. The last time we had agreed in, we had extreme fear ratings like this for a sustained period of time. So, you know, the notion that Bitcoin is closer to dying now and people talking about an inevitable bare market because of this four-year cycle narrative, actually, I think it's playing out the opposite. But I'm curious, you know, from a builder, which is what you are, I mean, I think the building community seems other than a not versus core, you know, spam versus no spam, which I think we should get into, and I'm sure you have an opinion on, you know, seems stronger than ever. So, you know, am I crazy?

No, absolutely not. So the, I'd say building on Bitcoin's in, again, also in a little bit of a weird, been like transitional place right now, but I'd say if you, you know, specifically as you talk about like data storage and programming on it, people are still trying to figure out, I think, what's next there. And it's just a ton of R&D work going into it. Right now, there hasn't been kind of a huge major development in it. Like there was, you know, And kind of since ordinals in March of 2023, February of 2023, there's obviously like BitVM. And a lot of this stuff keeps advancing along. But the last year, the story of the last year has absolutely been integration to the core financial system, more than direct building on top of Bitcoin.

Like that's what the market's been really interested in. And obviously with Trump coming into office and the resurgence and the insane amount of institutional adoption that we've seen, like that is. where the activity has been. But to that point, like, that makes it all the more insane that you would think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I think that is part of what's helping break kind of the traditional four-year cycle that we've seen on it. Again, you're going to continue to see up and down. You're going to continue to see it be more volatile than, you know, say like the straight S&P or even NASDAQ. But yeah, it's really not going anywhere on it. And the idea that it is is crazy. you know, you made the point, yeah, the hash rate is way up even over the last year,

let alone like three years ago. I actually, I have a miner that I usually run over the winter to heat my garage using like the excess solar power. Traditionally, I've run it in a pool because I at least made, it's like a little 96-terra hash thing. It's made a few bucks a day doing that. I think I'm actually going to swap and just go to solo mining now because, you know, hash power has gone up so much.

again, even in the last 12 months, that there's not really a great point to me running in a pool. I'd maybe make like a dollar a day, or $1.50 a day worth of Bitcoin on it. So I'd rather go into the lottery ticket mode and like, it'd be pretty, pretty sweet if I, you know, hit a block running solo on there. Actually, I think someone about an individual miner about six or eight weeks ago, a couple months ago, did have one and hit an individual block and like three months after they started mining so that was actually pretty lucky for them um but yeah like it's well you're running it basically you're running it off of excess power and the machines paid for so from your perspective yeah yeah it's it's all it's all free money to me on it um but i think

i think that's a very interesting thing which is you saw some bitcoin miners pivoted or look at pivoting into AI, you know, I think it was, Corwee was even trying to buy core scientific, I want to say, or someone else, and it felt that deal actually fell apart. I think it's actually quite impressive. Given how well suited a lot of Bitcoin mining operations were, given their heat and power density for pivoting into AI operations,

haven't. I think that's a very interesting sign that there's a lot of people who've made an investment here who still think there's a lot of leg. eggs, you know, on Bitcoin. So the idea that the people who put their money where their mouth on it is clearly don't think that there's something to go. You mentioned micro strategy as well. I think it's another interesting case where I think there are, I mean, I've said for a very long time I don't like micro strategy accumulating the amount of Bitcoin that they have. I don't think it's good that multiple percentage points of Bitcoin are held by a single actor. I don't like

the over complex financialization of it. I get why it's not like as problem. is taking straight loans to do it. But there's a reason that they announced this big U.S.D. Reserve Fund now is that people were very, very reasonably getting worried about, like, are they going to have to start selling and dumping to satisfy the, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, like a month, certainly a year that they have to pay in dividends out to people? They realized that was going to be a problem. And so they just sold a bunch of more common stock to basically be able.

to do it, diluting their shareholders out in the press, which great. I'm glad that they're not going to be selling on the market. But I think there's a reason you saw Bitcoin start to turn around and come back, you know, kind of bottom out right before that announcement and start to move back up now is a lot of people were rightfully worried about what happens to the market if micro strategy starts something. Now, it's funny because in March, and look, I hold micro strategy for the long term in, you know, a couple like retirement accounts and whatnot for a reason. It's just, it's a way of playing a bet, which, frankly, the bet's going to be right, and there is upside there, and I'll explain in a heartbeat.

But in March, when he gave the earnings presentation, I posted and I got a lot of heat for it about the fact that it's path dependent, meaning that there's, I use the word theta, which is an option term for time decay. And I said that in a sideways market micro strategy will massively underperform. Why? Because they're paying all this interest. And their hurdle rate is, if Bitcoin doesn't go up 10%, you're going to lose money being in Microstrategie because it means that their loans are outperforming their assets.

And so that's a bad thing. And that's okay. I mean, if you know that going in, it's fine. And that is exactly what's happened over the last year. You know, Micro Strategies return profile is going to look like a option, a long option strategy where if Bitcoin doubles, micro strategy is going to triple or so, or should.

If Bitcoin goes down, it's going to go down more. And if it stays flat, it's going to continue to slide because of that time decay. And it's really as simple as that. And people need to understand what they're buying. The kicker with micro strategy,

and the only reason, and by the way, I loathe all the other digital asset company, digital asset treasuries, because they don't have this. The kicker is, If one wanted to try to get 100,000 or more Bitcoin on their balance sheet to be able to do Bitcoin-backed loans and do Bitcoin-back banking, once Bitcoin can be treated as collateral in the system, you would pay a lot, a lot more money than Micro Strategy has it on their cost basis, right? You know, forget whether it's 74.

I mean, we're talking 200 if you want to try to accumulate that sort of stash right now unless you found an OG willing to sell it to you. right and it really is that simple and so when the basal rules change right now if just to put this in perspective you may not even know this if if you are galaxy digital and someone comes to you and says i want to buy a billion dollars worth of bitcoin long will you sell me a swap and i'll take your credit and we'll figure out we'll figure out who's going to custody the bitcoin but i don't want to have it on my balance you i don't worry about that i just want to have the economic returns over the next four years. So you say, okay, great. And then someone else says, I want you, I want a short Bitcoin over the next four years. And so you have a swap on both sides. Well, that's a billion dollars on both

sides. Right now, they have to reserve $2 billion in capital to have on that trade, even though their risk is limited to counterparty risk because they have a long and a short. If it were in the S&P, they probably only need $100 to $200 million in capital. Now, when Bitcoin, they'll probably we need $2 to $400 million because of the volatility, but the reality is that difference is whether or not banks or under Basel rules can actually declare it as capital that is usable as collateral. Right now, it is not. And when that rule changes, Microstrategy has the ability to turn themselves into a Bitcoin bank. And in fact, J.P. Morgan even said it yesterday, and Microstrategy even said that they see that as a funding source in terms.

of the ability to do it. So at that point, now you have to start comparing it to banks. And banks trade between 0.8, i.e. a discount, to 1.8, i.e. a significant premium, to their book value is obviously Bitcoin. So I don't hate micro strategy what they're trying to do. They're trying to do it as a first mover. And I certainly don't hate what Jack Muller's is trying to do if you take them at his word of building operating businesses that can generate Bitcoin. But Bitcoin treasury companies that are just purely buying Bitcoin as an access vehicle, I mean, I never, I thought that was going to end. I thought it was going to take a year or two years longer than it did. But I think that that's kind of dead now.

And that's a good thing for the market. Yeah. I mean, you have, there has to be a reason people actually want to do the thing. And again, it's very hard to beat micro. If you're just buying and holding Bitcoin, you're not going to be able to do it in the size and therefore beat micro strategy at the game. They're always going to be more efficient. it, especially because they've already got all the, like, leveraged ETFs that are giving them the additional volatility that other traders want.

Like, it's the, yeah, you're just never going to do it a little bit better than they were going to be able to. I think you've seen some of the other, some of the other plays that are for some of the other assets. But again, even, like, the appeal of some of those go down as the SEC approves staking on ETS, right? So, like, that was at least one advantage to doing it. But I think the other thing you're going to see is you're going to see people. I don't think you're going to see the strategy on treasury companies go away entirely.

But I think one of the things that the market's going to really want to see, and maybe this is a device because it's something that I want to see out of them is like, how are you derisking the fact that this is a company run by people who can. and fuck this up, basically, right? Because, like, the upside to an ETF is, it's just the asset, right? Like, yeah, sure, I pay, like, you know, what, 10, 20 basis. By the way, that is a great point. And people need to understand that. And we've seen exactly this. I mean, I lost some money in Nakamoto,

thinking when it got below its MNAV that that would be a good buy and it kept falling. And with all due respect to David Bailey, the market lost faith in him. Yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing is that, like, you know, it's a lot more sure of a thing to pay 10 or 20 basis points. on an et f uh maybe it's it's 25 but there's discounts on some of it so you know 10 20 25 basis points on the exactly what it is each year you're paying versus like well how much money are these people going to spend on CEO salaries and compliance and like what if they get hacked

you know there's just there's a huge amount of like open-ended risk there that has to get priced in and again to your point if you think it's just going to keep going up and they're going to keep raising and like be able to you know buy the you know buy get two dollars a market cap for $1 a Bitcoin, then fine, you'll keep doing it. But as soon as the market starts going sideways and they can't do that anymore, you're just left with the asset plus a bunch of additional risk. Right. And that's exactly what's happened. I mean, it's risk and cost. I mean, over there's like there's a big difference between it. I mean, treasury companies that are doing things uniquely like staking or earn and things that they can do at scale, you know, on certain

assets. I understand that. The truth is, is I've said this all long. Treasury companies will go away and you'll be left with companies, and a lot of companies are going to say, I have excess cash on my balance sheet. I have a choice. Do I want to buy back my stock at this valuation? Or am I going to put it in treasuries and underperform the market? Or am I going to put it in a potentially productive asset? And the answer to that is going to be, they're going to try to outperform and people will start using Bitcoin on balance sheets for a very specific reason, And, you know, as momentum builds back into the market. And, you know, I'm a very simple guy, Alex.

I just look at the price to hash rate. And I'm happy to buy at a price to hash rate at basically all-time discounts because every single time in the history of Bitcoin, it is corrected. And if you think Bitcoin's going to drop to 50 down to 10 or whatever, some people are talking about, I mean, you're basically saying it's going to fail. Meanwhile, the smart money is investing. And I'm not, when I say the smart money, not only talking about minors, like individual economic actors. I'm talking about nation states,

right? I mean, we're talking about a geopolitical, you know, arms race, and it's there. And with AI, people totally don't appreciate that the component of the cost of a miner, and actually, you know this better than whatever, what percentage of the cost of mining Bitcoin is power and, you know, data center space basically vis-a-vis the actual mining equipment themselves these days depends where in your depreciation cycle you are i mean yeah it's a huge percentage of it is marginal cost on on electricity and things and you know this is one of things is there's actually a bunch of miners who bought their mining cardware like three years ago and are coming up on refresh cycles and having to do that um and there's a bunch of new machines that have come out again

like me running an old, you know, S-19-96-terahash machine is not even what it was a year ago, let alone what the power was two years ago. There's been a huge shift in that right now. And so, yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely driving a shift. And depending on where you are in your cost of power, really, really affects how much you want to do it. But the price of Bitcoin is still high enough that it's clearly worth people investing in because we're only seeing the hashing power go up rather than that.

Think about it from the AI perspective. So, you know, look, basics are not for AI, but the data center power and the data center platform is. And data centers, space of the data center is not nearly as important as the power and cooling, right? And people don't understand, especially in a lot of these remote data centers, the land space, the land cost is really, really small. So if you're building a data center to power AI and you, you know, it costs you X. But the problem with AI data centers are other than the training, everything else is demand response, meaning there's significant peaks and it's a not an even use. And Bitcoin mining can be turned on and off.

So you can get 90% discounts, 80% discounts on power by running it alongside on an intermittent. Yeah, I mean, this is part of how Texas has built so much solar is that Bitcoin miners can go there and use it as load shedding because, yeah, you can ramp your demand profile on Bitcoin mining in 50s. 15 seconds faster potentially like you can just turn them off and there's no downside to that you can definitely load shed AI but not in the same way you can't do it as fast um and you you know the you can do it much easier with training runs it's interesting with training runs you want to run it at 100% but you can you can control the demand profile so you can ramp it down with inference profiles you're dependent on what the other people are doing but you're not running it 100% right Which means having Bitcoin alongside it in one of these data centers.

So, you know, there's been all this talk yesterday, which actually makes a lot of sense using small nuclear reactor technologies, the kind of stuff that in the previous generations powered submarines and aircraft carriers, right? But now all of a sudden you build data centers with that stuff. Now that's expensive and that'll be expensive for AI, but it's a lot less expensive if when it's not being fully utilized, if you can use it for Bitcoin as well. Yes. Well, and I think the goal, the desire for SMRs also comes down to a whole other, just reality of what it takes to get internet connected to the grid, especially here, right? Like, there's this whole funny thing right now where nobody actually knows how much power demand there is.

Because right now, like the timeline to get interconnected to the grid is anywhere, depending on where you are, from 18 months to seven years, right? If you're trying to get into PJM, which is out on the East Coast, you know, basically around Virginia, that whole area, it's like a six, seven, eight year weight right now. But part of the reason there's that weight is you have a bunch of these people with phantom applications for interconnect because there's like a multi-year weight. And so, right, it just like it keeps exacerbating and stuff. And so they may not actually have to. So like said, it all comes down to nobody knows exactly what it is right now. And so the idea of like, oh my God, I could just like buy a nuclear reactor and just like drop a gigawatt of power. is like really appealing to people, which is why you've seen, I don't know, how many

hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into SMR companies in the last 12 months. Also the fact that, you know, thanks to, thanks to the Trump administration's difference in view on nuclear power from the Biden administrations, people actually think like it might happen this time and they're actually, you know, like rushing to do it. So it's, yeah, it's a lot of it is about just reestablishing control. over your business and your timelines and de-risking things. Right. Reducing your dependence on outside.

From a macro-investing point of view, if you think that a modern grid can be recalibrated for double the amount of power demand, which more or less is not far off of what is, I mean, some of the estimates are much more than double. I mean, reconfigured without a stabilizing technology like Bitcoin running alongside of it as I think that you're smoking something. I really think that's the way that you're going to be able to do it without wholesale massive infrastructure projects that, even if you did a wholesale massive infrastructure project, the time it would take. So, you know, being able to, people just don't understand the harmonics inside of stabilizing grids. I mean, you made the point about Bitcoin and said 15 seconds, like, well, that's massively important.

Well, what people don't understand is when a grid fails, starting it up again is a non-trivial task. It is incredibly complicated. Yeah. And the grid, the grid is incredibly complex with the number of interconnections between different things, the way all of this works, the economics behind it. And that's just the running of the day-to-day of the grid. That doesn't even start to factor in what it takes to upgrade it, the legal situations. And again, you know, the funny thing for me is it's not just about AI. It is simply that, you know, and you'll see these charts posted over the internet all all the time. But there is a simple truth, which is there is no such thing. as a, you know, rich, energy-poor society, right? All rich societies have a lot of energy. And the cheaper the energy is, the better, right? Also, the cheaper the clean energy is, the better. And by the way, the cheaper and most accessible, the energy.

Well, I think those go hand in hand with each other. Yes, you and I do, but a lot of people don't understand that this is a multivariate problem. And so you're trying to evaluate assets. You need to evaluate the assets that are contributory versus extractive. Bitcoin is undeniably a contributory asset despite. But if you listen to it only in New York Times or Stephen Hanky or Peter Schiff, they would say it's extractive. They would say, well, you know, Bitcoin takes all this electricity, small countries.

And this is like, well, yeah, but as it does so, it'll have you to build grids in a much more efficient. I think there's a very interesting dynamic, which is Bitcoin does. doesn't have politics here, right? Bitcoin, just like almost any other financial transaction, cares only about the input and the output, right? Which means if you make it really easy to build a ton of green power and you lower, you know, you lower the cost of it, right? Then Bitcoin miners will buy that power cheap and they will sign the offtake agreements, right? Again, as we've seen happen in Texas where they've made it really easy to do that. If you don't do that and you keep the cost of renewable power cheap or high, then Bitcoin miners

will go and they will buy old coal plants and reactivate them and burn coal power to do it because that's the cheaper cost of power for it. They will do just like anybody else, just like the same thing you will do. If you get the cost of electric cars cheaper, people will go buy electric cars and do that. If you don't, they will buy ice cars and they will use those, right? Everyone does this. They will go to the cheapest source of power that they can find. Obviously, depending on who it is, there's a little bit around the margins there, but fundamentally, people will use the cheapest power. So if you make it really easy for people to build green power, Bitcoin mining will fund the next generation of green power build out the same way that AI is like driving a move

back to nuclear. But if you don't let them do that, yeah, they will use dirty ass fucking power to make the next buck. And like, I always come back to this is why I like capitalism. is it capitalizes and it capitalizes on what I think is just innate human nature to try and make money, whereas communism, social, tries to deny it, right? It tries to battle against it instead of pointing it in a productive direction. I always phrase it very simply, capitalism, which is we do not have capitalism in America today. We have cronyism, but capitalism is about letting human incentives achieve what human incentives will achieve allowed to do so. And communism, socialism is, let's deny human incentives and try to force our way around that,

which is why there is no such thing as a socialist or communist country that doesn't have a totalitarian government. And in fact, when people say, well, Sweden or Norway, it's like, yeah, they both, all the Scandinavian countries went hard back in the direction of capitalism and freer markets because they always, those countries have always been heavily capitalist. they had a very good strong social safety net, in part because they had massive natural resources to do it with. That's right. No, I understand the dynamic. We could have that conversation, too, but I don't think our audience really cares about it. But the point...

I feel like there's not a lot of communists watching the wolf of all streets. That's probably true. But look, the SMR point, which stands for those in case you don't know what small modular reactors, I consider that the ultimate green energy. I know there's a waste issue, but we... of it's a solved technological problem. It's a solved technological problem. The green, the fact that the green movement was in large part founded because of hysteria about nuclear energy has set back the green movement.

Unbelievably set back. Decades. Decades have set back. I mean, it's actually one of the most craziest things that the green movement, which started, you know, you're talking about Greenpeace, started with Save the Wales, is actively campaigning to ignore studies and ignore data that says, that wind power off the coast of North America is killing the North American right whale. It's one of the craziest things that drives me nuts. But the fact is that AI is going to demand power. Bitcoin allows technologies like small modular reactors and wind and solar to be more

economically viable and help build out a better grid, which we now know we're going to need. And whether it's electric cars or AI, there's no doubt we need a bigger grid. And I don't see any path to doing so without Bitcoin. side by side, which is why a lot of people pushed Trump to make that EO that people have ignored since he signed it, which is a Bitcoin is a strategic asset. It's strategic, not just in the financial sense. And I think that's the point. I know you understand this, but I don't think that's in the price. I just, I think it's in the hash rate. I think you could see what's going on, but I don't think it's in the price. Do you? No. I mean, I again, I think Bitcoin's price is still highly

volatile. I think it's in the long term, it's certainly not priced in on it. You know, you were talking about like, does it go to 50? I say obviously, I don't want to jinx. It doesn't go down to 10 or something. But yeah, it's going to go up. It's going to go down. It's going to do its freaking thing. But again, I think the level of integration and adoption, there's a lot of people with a lot of incentives for why they've done that. And at the end of the day, people want to make money. so they're going to do that. But I think there's good principal reasons to like it. And then there's just good practical ones.

And I do really think that the energy build out and transition there is a huge, huge positive use case for it. And it's just a matter of people needing to channel it and take more advantage of it. So we have five minutes left. What are you up to these days? And is there anything in particular that you think that people want to hear about? Yeah. I'm building on Bitcoin.

Yeah. So for those who don't know, I help run the stacks projects. We're a layer two for Bitcoin. We just actually a couple of weeks ago rolled out our dual stacking, as we call it, where you basically can earn, return, yield on your Bitcoin by holding Bitcoin and a lesser ratio of STX on it. It's created from the stacks mining process. Again, I think this goes into a major theme right now, which is people want to earn yield

and return on their Bitcoin, right? You have a bunch of Bitcoin. You don't want to have to sell it in order to. live or you also just want to grow and accrue more of it. And we've seen massive demand on it. You see every single Bitcoin dat talking about how they're going to earn yield on it. But no one really has very good ways to do it right now when you lack the programmability and you lack kind of the inherent staking mechanisms that you see on like ether salon and things. And so that's what we're working on doing is trying to, you know, just make Bitcoin more programmable,

more usable by folks. And there's a ton more that we have coming up. soon that's going to actually, again, just continue to improve kind of the security and privacy profile on Bitcoin, while still just making it more usable for people. And I think, you know, yeah, Bitcoin is this, it's established itself, obviously, you know, years ago we were talking about like, well, some people, not those of us who knew, we're talking about the flippinging and the idea that like, right, Eath would overtake Bitcoin. And I think, I think any idea of that happening at this point is pretty well dead and buried. it's it's just pretty clear bitcoin's going to be around for the long run so so look

Alex all boomers like me uh asked the question when someone says the word yield where does yield come from and i you know i always laugh and i go back to one of the only big services the sam bankman freed actually did other than hosting a kick-ass conference in the bahamas words was was yeah it was we went thankfully it he caused a lot more pain net, net to me and the company that, you know, that I co-founded and our clients than anything else. But he did expose a lot of the hypocrisy about yield in crypto with the whole magic box thing with Matt Living. So I always ask. So when, look, for yield to exist, there has to be demand for someone to borrow.

Now, there is demand for people to borrow Bitcoin for a variety of purposes. Well, no, there has to be an economically valuable transaction taking place. That's what I mean. Right. Yeah. So could you just like I'm a five-year-old? Tell me how stacks helps take that economically viable transaction where the demand comes from and where the... So stacks, mining on stacks works using a system called proof of transfer. And if you think about proof of work mining, right? Proof-of-work is pretty simple. You bid electricity to win Bitcoin, right? Stacks works one layer up from that is you bid Bitcoin to win STX. And then all of that Bitcoin that's been bid by miners gets rolled up and distributed out to people

who stack STX or in this case, who stack STX and Bitcoin together. And so it's, you know, there's no lending. There's no counterparty risk going on there. The economically valuable transaction that is generating that Bitcoin that becomes part of it is securing the stacks network so that mine, you know, which allows users to use it, which means miners want to mine on the network and they bid the Bitcoin. to do so. So it partly comes out of in effect inflation on the stacks network, right? Because there are new STX being generated all the time and that goes to miners. The miners bid the

Bitcoin. So you don't have to have lending, but you do have to have economically valuable transactions going on. And that is, I think, the thing that a lot of people in crypto do miss is that they don't ask that question fundamentally like, and you know, you'll hear people say the things of like if you're not, if you're not paying you are the product right or there's similar thing. If you don't know where the yield's coming from, you are the yield. And that's Absolutely true. If you don't know what the economically valuable transaction is, you're the economically valuable transaction to someone. Okay. So how can people learn more about stacks and obviously. Stacks.co, stacks.co, check it out. You can follow me on Twitter, Alex L. Miller. Shoot me a DM if

you got any questions. And yeah, like you said, our goal in life is just to make, build the Bitcoin economy. I think the, you know, there's a very funny thing where the U.S. dollar, is already for many people around the world has been for decades the equivalent of how we talk about Bitcoin for the future, right? Like it is the hedge against a shit government run system and things. One of the great joys I have is the fact that the first thing in crypto to ever find product market fit was stablecoins. But it makes sense because again, the dollar's already been playing that role. A stable coin is just a better way of doing that. I think you fast forward this out five, 10, 15 years. You see Bitcoin gradually take the place, especially if we're just

going to have a bunch of cronyism in the U.S. and rapid changing a financial policy all the time based on the winds of the precedent. I think that's a great place to end it. So everybody obviously give Alex a follow, check out stacks, and we will be back tomorrow for the Friday 5. And hopefully we'll start on time tomorrow. This is my fault this morning. Sorry, guys. Thanks, Dave. Take care. Today's video is sponsored by Rain Protocol, a decentralized platform for prediction markets where you can wager on future events without a central authority. It's built on arbitrum and supports markets for everything from major global news to niche topics. The platform uses an automated market maker to dynamically adjust prices and maintain liquidity as participants place wagers, ensuring markets remain balanced and active.

Anyone can create a market with a minimum of $10 in liquidity, choosing between public markets open to everyone or private ones that require a code to access. A standout feature is the resolution process. Public markets can be settled by Delphi, an AI Oracle that draws consensus from multiple data sources for impartial decisions or by the market creator. If a participant disputes the result, they post collateral. Point one percent of the market volume or up to $1,000 and the case escalates to human oracles for final review. Whether your forecasting events hedging risk or creating incentives for specific outcomes, rain offers transparent fees, no refunds on wagers, and a rain government's token with a buyback and burn mechanism tied to trading volume.

Visit their site or click the link right below to explore Rain Protocol.