The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin to $1,000,000? How Sovereign Debt & Dollar Weakness Could Skyrocket Bitcoin | Jack Mallers

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Jack Mallers, the CEO and founder of Strike, the global Bitcoin app, shares why he is a Bitcoin maximalist, his skepticism towards other cryptocurrencies, and his bold prediction that Bitcoin could reach $1 million. He also reveals how he lives off his Bitcoin holdings. Jack is a rare guest on my show, so don't miss this opportunity to hear from one of the biggest Bitcoin bulls! Jack Mallers: https://twitter.com/jackmallers ►► Sponsored by iTrust Capital Invest in Bitcoin, Crypto Assets & Gold with Your IRA Using iTrust Capital. 👉 https://bit.ly/itrust-scott ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►►OKX SIGN UP FOR AN OKX TRADING ACCOUNT THEN DEPOSIT & TRADE TO UNLOCK MYSTERY BOX REWARDS OF UP TO $60,000! 👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘25OFF’ FOR 25% OFF WHEN VISITING MY LINK. 👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #strike Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:10 Bitcoin vs voodoo magic 3:26 iTrustCapital 4:25 Creating your own money 9:55 Physical reality of Bitcoin 12:08 Monetary policy should be distributed 15:30 Meme coins 20:57 Gold 24:30 Jamie Dimon & FUD 27:00 Wall Street & crypto 32:00 Bitcoin mining & centralization 33:40 Politics 37:00 Wealth transfer and crypto 41:00 Bitcoin is the best designed asset 42:00 Living the short dollar 44:00 Bitcoin price prediction 47:25 Strike 50:00 Selling Bitcoin 54:40 Wrap up The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

How do I arbitrage this trend? Well, I create pink coin or jet coin or Scott coin. This is my dad's portfolio, Bitcoin, real estate, and exchange stocks. And so my life is super simple. I spend on credit and I hoard Bitcoins. Everything else, you can't put a banana on the blockchain. You have so much space in your closet for gold. You got this huge empty closet. I actually don't like the comparison between Bitcoin and gold. I think it's nonsensical and silly. Bitcoin, I think, is like the comparison between Bitcoin and gold. I think it's nonsensical and silly. Bitcoin, I think, is like the digital gold. So arguably nobody has been a better spokesperson for Bitcoin than Jack Mollers, the CEO and

founder of Strike, the global Bitcoin app. We had a far ranging conversation on Bitcoin versus shitcoins, memes, politics, Wall Street's adoption of Bitcoin, HowStrike is being used around the world, and the future of Bitcoin. If you want to hear the best advocate for our industry talk on all these topics, then listen in now. I think we should dive right into the red meat because you just gave a hell of a speech at Bitcoin Prague about how there's Bitcoins and shit coins. Everything else is a shit coin. I would love to hear you go deeper into that for my audience here. Yeah. Well, my keynote at Prague was about proof of work effectively versus proof of stake. I think there's a lot of differences between Bitcoin and shit coins. And I'm what they call a Bitcoin

maximalist. I think Bitcoin is the innovation and the only real money within the space. But the keynote itself was drawing a distinction between proof of work and proof of stake, where proof of work has ties to physical reality. It operates within the bounds of the physical universe. It has physical constraints. And there's also security implications where honest actors can summon physical power

to defend themselves against a malicious attacker. Whereas proof of stake is much more like the movie, The Matrix. That was the analogy I drew where it has no ties to physical reality. This sounds like a little bit of voodoo or like I hit a bong before I started to explain it. So the comparison I like to draw is the US dollar. The US dollar used to be bound to physical constraints and the world. When they left the gold standard and they went on the fiat standard that we're on today, that's transitioning to proof of stake, where you're operating in a virtual realm that has no ties to the physical universe. It doesn't operate with the physical constraints that we live in today, and they can just print infinite dollars. So I think shit coins are voodoo

magic that operate in a virtual realm with no ties to the physical world and no relationship to reality. And Bitcoin, I think, is like the digital gold. So that was what the keynote was about. But I think, you know, shit coins are a scam. And I think there's a lot of differences between Bitcoin and shit coins. Crypto investors in the United States face some major challenges. One of them is that there's almost no way to get exposure to the asset class inside of your traditional investment vehicles. The other thing is the taxes. They are absolutely atrocious. What if I told you there was a way to solve both of these problems? Well, there is. And it's with a self-directed IRA from iTrust Capital. Guys, not only can you open a new self-directed IRA and fund it with the limits each year, but you can actually convert over

from your 401k, your Roth IRA, any other IRA that you already have, and you can do that tax-free, just transferring over the balance. And then you can go to cash, buy as much Bitcoin than you want and not pay taxes when you sell it. You absolutely have to try this if you are in the United States. Use the link down below. It's bit.ly slash itrust-scott. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash I-T-R-U-S-T dash S-C-O-T-T. You have to try this now. It's interesting. I have a similar but different take. Fidelity wrote a report a couple of years ago that said Bitcoin and everything else, which has always sort of been my view.

I view Bitcoin as the only money. I don't view any of them as even competitors to Bitcoin at all. I view most of them as speculative VC tech investments. And as long as you know that they're speculative VC tech investments, it's totally fine to trade them, invest in them, and put your money in them as long as you understand it's in no way competitive to Bitcoin. So it's like I agree with the premise. I just think they're a completely different asset class. To me, it's like gold bugs being pissed off sometimes that somebody wanted to invest in Alphabet or Amazon? Yeah, except the scam part. So I have no problem when people want to create technologies. You're talking to the founder and CEO of a

technology company, and I've issued my own shares. Those shares have oversight by the SEC. Every single year, we go through a tremendous amount of audits and get approvals, and our stock price is overseen by the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission. So I have no problem with people creating technologies. The problem is when you create your own money with those technologies. And that's when it becomes unethical. Like Jack Dorsey is working on Noster. That's a distributed social media. He didn't create his own token. So you can create distributed networks, distributed technologies, and you can use real money to your point, which is Bitcoin. The second that you create your own money is when I question your ethics or morals and whether

you're scamming. I like to call the altcoin industry an arbitrage on the trend. It's really like, how do you monetize this new trend? There's a new technology that's disrupting existing monetary financial systems. How do I monetize that? How do I make money on that? How do I arbitrage this trend? Well, I create PinkCoin or JetCoin or ScottCoin and I draw a false equivalence to Bitcoin and I sell it to retail. And the particular arbitrage to me is a regulatory arbitrage and an informational arbitrage. The general public doesn't know the difference between Solana and Ethereum and TonCoin and Bitcoin. And the regulatory arbitrage is I get to be my own central bank. It's a less legally

accountable way to be a central bank. So I get to create currency for myself, issue it to the public, and then I get to take advantage of an informational asymmetry in the market where people just don't get it. So that's where I think the scam is. You want to create technologies? Great. Then you should start a company and publicly disclose how it works and who gets what. But it's the false equivalence to Bitcoin that is the scam.

And so maybe you understand the difference, but I don't think Ethereum would be worth, what is it worth right now? Like a third of a trillion dollars. There's just no way that that to me is the scam. And I'd be curious if you disagree with that. Well, you're effectively saying to me that there's value in the platform and the technology, but that it doesn't necessarily need the token to drive.

And therefore the token is a scam, which is interesting because if you look at what Coinbase did with their layer two base, which is a layer two on Ethereum, they chose not to have a token, right? Because they knew obviously that that would be probably in violation of some security law. The SEC was coming in very aggressively and they managed to create one of these without a token. I've long said 99% of these things just don't need tokens. Right. If you create your own money, that traditionally is a security, but fuck Gensler, whatever.

The point is that's the scam. That's the scam. That's what's unethical. Like I'm watching this Ethereum bro on TV talk about, you know, Ethereum's a tech play. It's like Apple. It's doing three billions of profits this year. It's like, can you imagine if I said aluminum is doing three billion of profits this year? Like these things are commodities. They're owned by no one. They're ethical. They're fair. They have ties to the physical reality. If Ethereum

is a technology, Amazon doesn't have the money. Apple doesn't have a money. Meta doesn't have a money. They have shares of a company. They have hierarchical leadership. That's what proof of stake is. Proof of stake is proof of rank, right? So that's the confusing reality is when Vitalik Buterin says, well, proof of stake is an innovation to proof of work. It's similar, but better. And you should buy the money that I created and minted for myself. That is what's unethical. If he said, I created this company, I'm the CEO and the founder. I have shares of the business. We're going to go public and register at the NASDAQ and we're going to trade as a multiple to our cashflow and to our profits. And the public markets is going to value Ethereum as a business. That's totally different. And then what are the

merits of Ethereum as the business? Like if you take away the token part and you just look at like a distributed network, I mean, again, it's like Nostor, it's like BitTorrent. Like how valuable is that? Like, is that actually better than AWS? It's unclear to me. The reason Ethereum is valuable is retail can speculate and punt it. And they're, again, it's an arbitrage on the trend. They have a regulatory arbitrage in a world that doesn't totally get this shit yet. So they get to just punt tokens to retail and market the fuck out of it. That's the unethical gray area. Yeah.

And the really big problem is when they call it ultrasound money or something like that and start comparing it to Bitcoin. To me, you're right. The average person's never going to understand that nuance. I feel like I do. And I've never viewed any of it as money. But if you do, I certainly see exactly your point. Nobody should be able to issue their own money, control that supply. That's literally why we're here. Yeah. And the keynote, I encourage everyone to watch it, is proof of work. The question when you create a digital money,

if I'm going to create digital tokens, where am I going to store them? Okay, a digital ledger is what Satoshi proposed. If we're going to store a digital ledger, who gets to store it? Well, all of us do in a distributed network. Okay, this is all logical. Now, who gets to update that ledger? If that ledger has all of our money on it, who gets to update it? Because whoever gets to update that has a lot of power. So right now, we live in a proof of stake system with the US dollar.

The people that get to update our money is the Fed and the US Treasury. So how did Satoshi solve that problem? Well, whoever solves the proof of work gets to update the ledger. That was the innovation. And that's how you're tying. You're implying physical costs and physical constraints and physical reality to updating a virtual digital action. Now, that is the innovation. Now, if you remove physical ties and physical costs to a virtual money, then you just live in la-la land.

And that's what we've seen. Like all of these altcoins are la-la land. Like the DAO hack, la-la land. Switching to proof of stake, la-la land. Pre-mines, la-la land. Switching to proof of stake, la-la land. Pre-mines, la-la land. These are not real contenders to be the world reserve asset. So I don't think, as a Bitcoiner, I don't think it matters too much. I think it's just an unfortunate waste of human capital that we have such a breakthrough

for money. Money is our time and energy in an abstracted form. So it's the most important technology in a human civilization. And I think it's just such a waste of human capital that we have to kind of sift through this era of confusing a bunch of nonsense with a groundbreaking invention. And I think that Bitcoin, unfortunately, is correlated to a lot of this nonsense. So when FTX happens, when Luna happens, when these things happen, Bitcoin is set back. And so that is why I think it matters to try and draw a delineation. But on net, I think Bitcoin's already shown in the 15 years it's existed that these things aren't going to be able to stop it.

Yeah, I agree with that. And let's take the tokens out in a la-la land, another la-la land. There's no tokens, but you have a platform like Ethereum, and you have all of these different buckets created on it. DeFi, NFTs, Metaverse, whatever. That's all coming to Bitcoin now, right? And a lot of people would say now that Ethereum or Solana ended up being sort of test nets for Bitcoin and what could be built there. But of course, within the Bitcoin community, there's a lot of controversy as to whether those things should or should not be built on Bitcoin as a base layer. I mean, viewing Bitcoin as the

hardest money that ever existed, potential global reserve currency, doesn't need DeFi on it. Is that where these things should be built? Because there is arguably, obviously, innovation there. I don't, well, I don't necessarily see the innovation. I think fundamentally, the consensus rules are the consensus rules. So the idea that someone could abuse the network that lives within the consensus rules, I'm dubious towards. If you want to put, listen, if you point the gentleman out in the crowd that's paying $500,000 to put a cat image on the blockchain, I'll go shake his hand because he's helping secure my net worth. You got a lot of balls to waste that much money on a JPEG. So I'm all for it, brother. I think it's uneconomical. I don't think it's sustainable. But kudos to you if you're able to

do that. And I don't think that you're abusing the system. The fee market is a free market. However, to call it innovative or disruptive or like a new chapter that's going to bring a lot of new value, I'm skeptical to put it politely. I don't see the necessary innovation. I think what we want to be distributed, decentralized, censorship resistant is the monetary innovation. I think what we want to be distributed, decentralized, censorship resistant is the monetary policy. And the fact that we can hold a bear instrument in our head is a massive leap forward versus older commodities and defunct metals like gold. But do we need distributed cat images, distributed culture? I don't know. I listen to Kendrick Lamar and Drake. I don't need that decentralized. That's my culture. So I think it's a lot of grifting. And again, it's more just

arbitraging this space is, is we're living in the greatest era of monetary debasement. According to just like, if you look at the M2 supply, like this is they're printing more money than they've ever printed, you know, since world War II. And so naturally, society is turned into aggressive speculators. And so if you have an opportunity to monetize people needing to speculate, I think that's what we see over and over and over again, right, Scott? I mean, where you were around for the ICOs, you're around for, I mean, the DAOs, you were around now for the NFTs. Now we're going to get it on Bitcoin. It's just recycled, monetizing, desperate human speculation because of the monetary debasement we're living through. I don't think any of this innovation is real. The only thing

that matters is if we've protected and distributed a monetary policy away from central banks. Everything else, you can't put a banana on the blockchain. You can put time and energy on the blockchain. That's what proof of work is. You're abstracting time and energy from the real world into a digital object. So if monies are time and energy in an abstracted form, you can put that on the blockchain. That's what Bitcoin is. You can't put a banana on the blockchain. There's no proof of banana. So all that shit is garbage. You can tape one to the wall at Art Basel, though, and charge millions of dollars for a piece of duct tape and a banana. So, you know, far be it for me to tell somebody what that banana is worth.

But yeah, you're 100% correct. And I think we've seen an interesting sort of development in this cycle. We always had meme coins, obviously, Doge being the kind of king of meme coins from the very beginning. Now, I believe in April, there were 500,000 meme coins created on Solana in a 30-day period. I don't want to misquote, but I believe that that's accurate. Whatever it was, it's an exceptionally high and insane number. But in this case, people are basically admitting that they're at the casino. Some people may not know it, but the people who are largely participating are basically at the casino. They're not claiming any sort of utility. They're effectively making a huge joke of everything that you just described and over in their own little world. Now, the

problem with me, I hate meme coins. I think that once again, you end up with a bunch of wrecked retail that doesn't even know they're at a casino and they think they're making some sort of investment and inevitably they're going to lose and they have probably already. But I mean, what do you make of this massive meme coin trend that's happening sort of on the far opposite end of the spectrum from everything happening on Bitcoin? I think it's just a reflection of the currency debasement we're living through. So my favorite metric is global debt to GDP because it encompasses the whole story that governments collectively have borrowed so much time

and energy from our future in the form of money with no growth to pay it back. And so the only way out is to debase currency, right? And so what does that do to society? It's the equivalent of like looking at, I don't know, what's like the obesity metric in America is like, clearly we're becoming unhealthier. I think if you look at society's urgency to speculate and gamble, you know, clearly we're being turned more and more into speculators because they're just attacking our currency, if that makes sense. So it's just

a direct reflection of monetary policy and monetary debasement from central banks. That's what I make of it, very simply put. It's degeneracy. It's awful. It's disgusting. The fact that a central bank and government can deprive the time and energy from printing more of your currency and turning you into what I think we would all consider degenerate speculative gamblers. That's what society is. And my dad got me into Bitcoin. And I was raised under like a short dollar thesis. My dad raised me and said, they have to print money. That's the only way out. So if you want to make money in this world as a trader, you got to find a way to monetize that. So how do I monetize them printing money? Well, I own Bitcoin. This is my dad's portfolio,

Bitcoin, real estate, and exchange stocks. He used to be part of the CME. And so why, so Bitcoin makes sense, fixed supply, real estate makes sense. In theory, there's fixed amount of land. Why exchange stock? Exchange stock is an interesting short dollar trade. It's the more they print money, the more everyone's turned into a speculator. And so exchange stocks have done it tremendously well because there's more volume the more they print money because everyone's trying to monetize things like equities and speculate and find different ways

to obtain and grow wealth. And so what do I think Solana meme coins is? It's another way to monetize the inherent speculation that the populace has to go through during this debasement period. So I think it's, I don't know if that was the answer you're looking for. It's degenerate speculation as a result of central bank monetary policy. How many times did your dad call you in 2021 when GameStop, AMC, Hertz, and all the meme stocks were going absolutely nuts and say, see son, I told you so. Because that was the best. Obviously, we literally printed the money during COVID. So there was no hidden shadow printing or central

bank policy. Helicopter money from the sky was sent to your average person. They took it to crypto to some degree. But for the first time, you really saw it go to the stock exchange. And your dad, real visionary, seeing that. And it went absolutely nuts. I mean, that must have been incredible vindication beyond the profit for that sort of view that your father imparted on you. Yeah. I mean, you have to monetize other assets if they're not going to protect the purchasing power of the fiat currency. And so traditionally people have done real estate and the S&P, right? Equity. So I want to own the CME. I want to own the SIBO, right? That's what his thesis. And I want to own beachfront property. That's been the thesis until you find Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's obviously the way better. I mean, Bitcoin's unbelievable. It's the best expression of fiat debasement. It's a put option on the existing system. I actually like it's long vol, I think is the best way to describe Bitcoin. If you're a trader, it's long volatility. It's like it's long, all the utter chaos. And so, yeah, that's the thesis. And so, now my dad is unbelievably bright and he's a lot of the reason I'm in this space and where I am. But I think these are just different ways to monetize currency debasement. These are different ways to short dollar. And so another way to do that is create a shitcoin, arbitrage the fact that there's a regulatory arbitrage and idea the difference between ton coin and solana coin and doge coin. And that's how I get to monetize short dollar in this awful period we're living through in society where every single human is a natural degenerate speculator. I find it really interesting that your dad didn't mention gold.

I was raised not to be a gold fan. I mean, gold's a defunct, shitty metal. It's a bunch of chemicals that was appealing at one time. I mean, I was just in Rome when I was doing my keynote and stuff. I took a pit stop in Rome. And I'm sure, you know, I'm looking at this old Roman architecture. I'm sure this collection of chemicals was appealing then, but it doesn't work now. It doesn't work. If you actually look like the S&P is better than gold, real it doesn't work now. It doesn't work. If you actually look like the S&P is better than gold, real estate outperforms gold. Gold is barely retaining any purchasing power at all. So I think gold is a defunct metal. I actually don't like the comparison between Bitcoin and gold. I think it's nonsensical and silly. So no, I think gold is the slowest horse

in this race. And I don't understand any allocation to gold. Interesting take and aligns with something I've said quite a few times, which is, I got very tired of defending the Bitcoin as a non-correlated asset thesis that I have just pushed endlessly. It's not a tech stock. It's ridiculous to say it trades like one. It coincidentally often does at certain times, but never over any meaningful period of time. It certainly doesn't trade like gold, to your point. And I think we've done a major injustice, actually, with the digital gold narrative or any other narrative that we've had for Bitcoin beyond that Bitcoin is just Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I think Bitcoin cycled through so many narratives.

I mean, it's the first perfect money that we've ever designed. It's actually the first money that we've built from scratch with our hands. Like if you look historically at monetary assets, like gold, we didn't create gold. We found gold. Bitcoin, we created. So I think it's going to take time for, I mean, I wonder, I wasn't alive for this, but I wonder the iterations of narratives that the internet went through, right? But no, I don't think, I mean, gold unfortunately concentrates, that's its biggest issue, is the reason that it was able to be attacked and we left the gold standard is because it concentrates in the governments and central banks own all the gold and have all the gold. So I think it's a defunct metal. I think it's a bad comparison. I think Bitcoin is

a thousand times better. And yeah, I don't own any gold and I wouldn't own any gold. The one thesis is that when central banks do need to devalue their currency officially, they'll probably do it against gold. So you might want to own the thing that central banks are going to devalue against. But it's just so hard. I mean, dude, listen, at best, gold has 2% inflation rate, where probably with more demand, that rate of production will go up. With more demand, there's more supply and everything but Bitcoin. But let's say 2% inflation rate, over 100 years, you're losing over half your wealth. Over a lifetime, you're losing a substantial amount of your wealth in gold. How much better is an asset with 0% inflation rate? A million times better. What's the lifespan of Bitcoin if it has zero percent inflation rate? Like a billion years or technically infinity. Gold, two percent inflation rate. Half my money's gone before I die if I store my wealth there for a lifetime. So I just don't think it's close. You have so much space in your closet for gold.

You got this huge empty closet. You can literally just be filling the shelves with gold. If I put anything in this closet, the last thing will be gold. I'll tell you that much. And no inflation. Jamie Dimon told me on the news that you could just make as much Bitcoin as you want. That Satoshi was just going to come back from wherever Satoshi is and change the monetary policy. Epstein's banker. Yeah. I mean. How do we fight these insane narratives and these absolutely corrupt people that are spewing them on national television to an electorate that effectively believes anything their guy or someone on their team says? Because listen, we can talk about the narratives happening in crypto as much as we want. That's still not the final boss. I don't think we necessarily have to. I love the idea

that Bitcoin is opt-out technology. You can gain benefit from acting yourself. You don't need the collective populace. I don't need to march outside Wall Street or march outside the White House and campaign for the government to adopt a Bitcoin standard like gold bugs do. I can gain benefit from just buying Bitcoin. So, you know, Bitcoin, what it averages, you know, somewhere between 50 and 100% year over year, annualized returns compounding over the last 10 years. And so it, let's say a hundred percent, that means everything in my life has gotten half off on average for the last 10 to 15 years that I've been in this space. That's insane. And that's ridiculous. And I don't need Jamie Dimon to co-sign that. I've outperformed Ken Griffin for the last 10 years sitting in this empty closet.

And so I don't think we need Jamie Dimon's approval. It's opt-out technology. You can gain benefit on your own by adopting Bitcoin by yourself. So I don't know. People aren't stupid, right? I think Wall Street and this Bitcoin ETF approval, I think is everything you need to know. Not everyone's going to sit and watch this level of performance without being a part of it. So I don't know. It's different than things like gold. We don't need to rally outside of the White House and get anyone's approval or convince Jamie Dimon of everything. The performance speaks for itself. People aren't going to let crypto bros outperform them year over year over year over year. And you can gain benefit just by adopting it yourself. You don't need Wall Street or your bank to support it. I don't know.

Does their support raise any red flags for you? Does it concern you in any way? We've obviously had people who say BlackRock's coming in. They want to control it. The government wants to control it. What do you make of those arguments? No, the opposite. I think it's phenomenal. Well, I think, yeah, the cosine that Wall Street likes Bitcoin, listen, gold, as we're talking about this defunct metal, is up in the face of a hawkish Fed. That is very, very telling. The world is really concerned around the purchasing power of the dollar. They don't think that the central bank and the treasury is going to protect the dollar whatsoever. They think there's going to be a lot of printing. And Wall Street says, give me one of those ETFs.

I mean, the poor Winklevoss have been trying to get a fucking ETF for forever. A decade. Yeah. Now Fink comes along and says, I need one of these. I need it now because I think it's the best expression of currency debasement. And so I think it's a massive cosign. It's a huge deal. The timing makes all the sense in the world and kind of validates everything we've been saying. Like this level of government spending isn't sustainable. These guys aren't going to try

and protect the purchasing power of the currency. They're going to have to print their way out. Hard assets are going to be the winner. What's the hardest asset? So I think all of that's good. And it's actually probably one of the bigger, I don't know, victories of Bitcoin's life, to be honest. And they can't, I mean, the point of proof of work and the way Satoshi designed it is they have no influence on the system. It doesn't matter how many coins they have. Bitcoin is protected by power, by electricity. And so the analogy I drew, this is a wild analogy, but the analogy I drew in my keynote in Prague is Hitler. Hitler tried to 51% attack planet Earth. So that is a malicious actor that tried to control the surface area of planet Earth. And planet Earth was able to defend itself because all the honest humans, all the

honest actors in the system could summon enough physical power to protect the surface area of planet Earth and outnumber through physical power Hitler, right? So Hitler tried and failed a 51% attack of humanity. Now it's the same in Bitcoin. If any single actor tries to attack Bitcoin, it's not who has more coins, it's who has more power, which is what makes Bitcoin secure. And what is why proof of work is the innovation is that even if I have zero Bitcoin or a million Bitcoin, I have unbounded ability to summon power and go get watts and electricity to defend this thing. So there's never been an outside single party threat to Bitcoin. And if anyone does try and attack us, then the honest actors in the system will all go summon enough power to defend the network. So I don't know. Kudos to Satoshi for the

invention. And I think it's an amazing thing that Wall Street is under the same impressions that we all are. I love that analogy because it plays so well into the game theory of Bitcoin as well, that even a bad actor probably doesn't have the incentive individually to attack the network. They have the incentive to participate in it. And so even a terrible individual on planet earth during World War II didn't want their home taken. So they aligned with the interest of the group and fought back. So it actually makes a lot of sense, I think, in the context of Bitcoin. It's pretty brilliant. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think a proof of stake analogy is when the US sanctioned Russia. So take that as an opposite example where that to me is a

proof of stake system where in a proof of stake system, honest actors have no unbounded ability to protect themselves. Like with proof of work, with physical power, with something like electricity, that power is outside of the system. It's outside of the network. So again, I can have zero coins and I can still participate in defending the network. In proof of stake, all of the power is from within the network, right? It's self-referential. The power comes from how many coins you have. And so when something like the US sanctions Russia, no one could have defended or opposed that. Proof of stake is proof of rank, right? And so you're trusting that the higher up authorities are going to do the right thing. And you remove yourself from dealing with objective

truths to subjective truths. Was that the right decision? It depends on who you ask. You know, maybe the US dollar nodes or US dollar slashers and validators did the right thing, right? So that to me, proof of stake is sanctioning Russia. Proof of work is, you know, I think a good analogy is the Hitler. And so that's the big difference. And so I actually pose the question, you know, is Wall Street attacking Ethereum with the ETFs? Because if someone like BlackRock owns a large majority of Ethereum, they could sanction Russia. And there's no way that quote unquote honest actors in the Ethereum system can summon power to protect themselves. That's proof of rank. In Bitcoin, that's not true. Again, that's I think the huge difference in that an ETH ETF and a Bitcoin ETF to me aren't similar products and isn't similarly exciting. It's dangerous and scary. In that analogy, does it concern you at all that Bitcoin mining arguably is centralized? You know, that you have a few

mining pools that effectively control most of that power on the network and it's very difficult to a degree for an individual to participate. They can participate, but obviously the bulk of that hash rate is controlled by a few players. Listen, I think it's been 15 years. Well, no, a decade maybe of consistent work to try and improve mining.

It's not an active concern. We can be better. I'd put it that way. The point though, is that if there not an active concern. We can be better. I'd put it that way. The point, though, is that if there was an active attack, we have the right to defend ourselves, right? Like the Western world and the world at large wasn't actively summoning a bunch of military power until Hitler started attacking us. So if Bitcoin was under attack, it'd be very trivial for us to defend ourselves is the point. And to your point, that imposes a lot of game theory of if you can summon enough power to theoretically attack Bitcoin, you might as well just mine the

coins and make a lot of money. So no, I don't think it's a concern. Doesn't mean we can't be better. There's a ton of really cool technology like Matt Corallo is working on that actually improves on a lot of mining pool centralization stuff. But it's not a big concern or a big threat just because of the design of the system. I don't know if you agree with that. Yeah, I do. I do. And I mean, the next question that's a natural sort of from the Wall Street adoption of Bitcoin via the ETF and other things is obviously, which I did not have on my bingo card, if we're being honest, the rapid politicization of Bitcoin and the crypto space and how much it's become a key issue in this election. I always believed it would become a key issue in an election, but this happened really, really fast and seems to be driving not only Trump's narrative,

RFK's narrative to some degree as well, but certainly now a response and a bit of a pivot from the White House, the current administration, because of fear of losing that entire constituent, part of the constituency. Yeah, I think that this is a phenomenal example of two theoretical value drivers for this asset, which is one, the game theory. So we're seeing the game theory play out at the biggest stage it's ever played out at, which is a US presidential election. And the other is the power that something like Bitcoin places in the hands of the people, right? So think about that for a second. Trump is doing this because he wants votes.

How can you get the buy-in from tens of millions of individuals supporting Bitcoin? Think about it's because Satoshi put this thing on a mailing list, made sure it worked and walked away. Bitcoin's already distributed. 19 million of it's already been created. It's already in the hands of the people. The Bitcoin held on exchanges is at an all-time low. It's implying that people are sovereignly holding this physical bear instrument with themselves.

And that has given us, the people, the power to effectively say, if you want to be the president of this country, you got to support us. When was the last time the individuals had that level of power to determine the outcome of a US presidential election on topics of such as monetary policy, of technology regulation? Silicon Valley's always had a tough time with the White House, with Washington, D.C. Zuckerberg and these guys have always had a really tough time with the White House. All of a sudden, the White House is supporting us. It's because Bitcoin's put the power with the individual. To contrast that, what if Satoshi created this thing and said, went to Goldman Sachs and said, I'd like to list it publicly, right? And I'd like to list Bitcoin publicly and distribute it through the public markets on the NASDAQ. Well, then Bitcoin might be more

controlled by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs. The supply would have been distributed to Wall Street first. Does that make sense? So the fact that this thing was a bottoms up movement, it was so ingenious by Satoshi. I don't know if he did that on purpose, but it's empowering the individual. So this whole notion that Bitcoin puts the power to the people, I think is a great example of that, of Trump, you want to win the election? You want our support? You got to support Bitcoin. You got to support proper regulation, proper monetary policy and acknowledge us. That's unbelievable. And then I think the game theory, the Bitcoin game theory is super simple. You're better off on its team than against it, right? It's like the Michael Jordan. You might as well play on the bulls because you're playing against the bulls, you're going to lose. And so

the game theory and the power to the people, this is the best example at the biggest stage, I think. Interesting. The flip side of that, because you made a great point, you want to be on the side of the people, obviously. This is an easy electorate. It's a one-issue voting block that you can get, whether you're being genuine about it or not, frankly. I just need to talk about it. The flip side is that we had these years of the anti-crypto army and all this rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and that side, which brings precisely zero voters. There are plenty of people who will vote for someone that's pro-Bitcoin, but there's nobody that cares enough to be anti-Bitcoin and vote on that single issue. So what's behind that?

Is that Jamie Dimon and the banks and the movement towards a central bank digital currency and control? Because it's politically unpopular and never has been politically popular. Totally. I think it's, listen, with the ETFs, banks are now making money. They're monetizing this thing. Think about the deals banks were getting before. They have to sell and buy bonds, which are now getting, for the first time, absolutely destroyed. What an awful deal to summon deposits from the general populace, shovel them into bonds that get absolutely destroyed. And the rest of the general public is now running to the exit door of this Bitcoin thing. And they weren't getting any part of that business.

They weren't getting any part of that deal. So of course, like tell those people, stop buying Bitcoin, screw that asset class. They can't run to the exit doors without us. We're not monetizing that. We're not part of this industry. Fuck these people. Tell them to shut it down. Now, all of a sudden, they are part of it. The ETFs is the most successful ETF ever launched. Banks are making money. They're monetizing this.

And so I think that is a huge part of why this is changing. Instead of saying, shut it down, they're saying, hey, how many pieces of shit can we approve? Hey, put an Ethereum ETF, Solana ETF, Dogecoin ETF. These people want this stuff and we can monetize it. It's a way better business than buying bonds right now. So I think that's a massive part of it. I also think there's a subtle, so, you know, in Bitcoin, we talk all the time, if this is the greatest wealth transfer in modern human history, what's the world going to look like with wealth being transferred to these new participants or constituents? Like if Manhattan real estate that's been passed down

five generations is being demonetized and that new wealth is going into something like Bitcoin, who is the Bitcoiner? I think you're starting to see that is that now we're at an asset class that's over a trillion dollars. That's a lot of new money. And I do think that money changes political opinions, right? These Muppets are purchased. They're bought out. They're controlled. So I think this is the first election too where people could start writing big checks. I mean, like Brian Armstrong's got a lot of money.

Michael Saylor's got a lot of money. This is a trillion dollars of newfound wealth. And you're going to start to see the world be influenced by that wealth transfer. So this is also probably the first time that we're writing as big checks as Wall Street's writing, right? Like we're up there. So anyway, I think that's a subtle point. You're going to start to see the world be influenced by this new wealth. There's a lot of old asset classes that are being demonetized and the world's going to look different with wealth held in new hands. Do you think then that Bitcoin eventually,

you use the Manhattan real estate analogy, and I've talked to, actually, I think it was one of the first podcasts I did with Saylor right after he started buying Bitcoin. And that was the analogy he gave. He said, if you owned real estate in New York City, you'd never sell it. You'd pass it down, pass it down, take a loan, take a loan, take a loan, never sell anything. Obviously, you'd be insane to sell it. Do you think Bitcoin starts to become pristine collateral like, or even more pristine collateral like Manhattan real estate passed down through the generations. Totally. 100%. And I think you're starting to see that with the SAB, what is it? 121. Yeah, 121. Yeah. I mean, banks want this business. They want to be able to hold it. They want to be

able to issue loans against it. So I think that's absolutely where it's going. And Bitcoin is the best asset we've ever designed and arguably the only asset we've designed from scratch. So that's absolutely where it's going. And Bitcoin is the best asset we've ever designed and arguably the only asset we've designed from scratch. So that's the thing I don't think people understand. We designed Bitcoin to be perfect, us human beings. It's the only asset where we've built it from scratch to solve all the problems that money theoretically needs to solve.

So you should never sell it. And I think Morgan Stanley can't offer you that service. Morgan Stanley can refinance this empty closet I'm sitting in and give me a loan against this place, but they can't for my Bitcoin in cold storage, right? So I think that's where the world is going, a hundred percent. There's no doubt about it. And it is pristine collateral. Like if you just pound for pound, compare it against real estate, it's better for a myriad of reasons. So yeah, I do think that. I should say that you don't just talk the talk,

you walk the walk because, you know, we've had this narrative of getting off zero, which is for people to just get some Bitcoin, right? Buy a little bit, play with it, send it to somebody, hold it, get the feeling. You've taken that a major step further and said we should be getting on zero, but you're talking about fiat. So talk about how you live that and how you would sort of recommend that to people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I own $0. I own three things in my life. I own

Bitcoin, I own this house I'm sitting in, and I own my company. And that's it. That's my portfolio. It became logical, the owning zero dollar things for me, because Bitcoin is the best performing asset in human history. And being a Bitcoiner now for 11 years, I'm able to live that experience and realize that the dollar is one of the only assets in the world that only goes down year over year. The dollar's never had a performant year, especially against, right? So my logic was, well, hold on a second. Why would I own something that only goes down? And why don't I own as much of the thing that only goes up? It was a very logical conclusion. And then I went to seek,

how can I do that in a way that doesn't disrupt my quality of life? And I came across credit cards. I was like, holy shit, banks offer me this product where I can spend dollars without having to own them. So I get to spend the thing that only goes down without actually needing to own it. And then I get to hoard the thing that only goes up. And so my life is super simple. I spend on credit and I hoard Bitcoins. They average, like we said, I don't know, somewhere between 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100% year over year, the Bitcoins do. So my life generally gets like half off every single year. And I just pay down the loan that banks are giving me to spend dollars, which only go down. And so it's living the short dollar. It's a great way to monetize the way we live today. So we've talked about the performance then of Bitcoin year over year. We know that over these periods, it does exceptionally well. Low time preference.

People should always zoom out when they think about Bitcoin or any investments, arguably. But we do have these sort of cycles and these massive drawdowns. And obviously, people get emotional and they sell the bottom. And that's how these things happen. But we're kind of arguably into the next bull cycle, if you believe in the idea of the having cycle and the four-year cycle. Any wild price predictions on how far this thing can go over the next 12 to 18 months? Let's say if we have a repeated cycle. I know a lot of people believe that cycles will sort of dampen over time. I think so with more adoption, but still

think we can go pretty high. I'm on record. I think we are somewhere between $250,000 to a million, which is a wide range, but we're being asked to price the hardest money ever in this piece of paper that they're rapidly debasing. So it's kind of up to their debasement. I think, you know, Bitcoin, a large driver of the price is the printing of dollars when you're pricing in dollars. But that's, I think we could hit a million dollars for Bitcoin. I feel super confident in 250,000, at least in this cycle. And I do think it'll land somewhere. The high will land somewhere in that range. I am a believer of the halving cycles. I think of the halving as an inventory reduction, which is a very Chicago Midwestern way to think of it, as opposed to it's priced in,

it's not priced in. It's like the 88 drought, like the corn inventory was reduced drastically. So the inventory on the shelves are reduced. So you're that much closer to reaching price discovery. That's how I think of it. So I do think that halving induces like a price discovery period for Bitcoin because the inventory reduction. But I think the bigger catalyst is the sovereign debt market is the fact that for the first time ever, I mean, central banks price fix everything, right? Like that's theoretically their job. They tell society that the world is better off when we fix the prices for things instead of the free market. And they've gone through each crisis and price fix different things like real estate, right? And now we're at like one of the final bosses, which is

like the sovereign debt market, the bond market. And so the level of money printing to bail this thing out is going to be immense. And that's what I think is the main story, albeit at times with a having and at times with the presidential election, all that stuff is fueled to the fire. But if they're going to save this thing, like we saw this like yen dollar swap line, like risk is fully institutionalized. When people say, we could have a recession. No, we can't. The S&P 500 is, the government relies on the S&P 500 for the people's wealth to be. All of the wealth is in the S&P 500. It's in real estate. They can't afford for these things to fail and to go down. They can't afford for the yen to go down because Japan's going to sell treasuries. So I think risk is fully institutionalized. They have to prop this thing up.

And this time what they're propping up is the biggest financial market in the world, which is the bond market. And so that level of money printing from central banks, we've never lived through anything like that. So I think a million dollar Bitcoin is reasonable. It's not impossible. My target was 235. So I'm slightly lower on the bottom end, but then I think a million in the next cycle. So yeah, it's just a matter of time. Now I see inventory reduction. Now I see what your closet is a metaphor for. Empty Bitcoin shelves. It makes perfect sense now. I see what you're doing there. I see what you're doing there. So listen, we've talked for like 45 minutes and we haven't even mentioned Strike, right? We're calling it these days, obviously, the global Bitcoin app. It's everything Bitcoin.

Talk about, I guess, where it's evolved to at this point, what the future is. And then, of course, you're probably in a better position than almost anyone to put some metrics behind adoption. How much are people really using this stuff and who's sending it to who and what's it being used for? Yeah. So Strike, we've turned into one of, if not the global Bitcoin leader, which is very different than a crypto leader. So you guys have probably learned on this podcast, I believe very much in Bitcoin. I don't believe at all in shit coins. And so we're better at Bitcoin than Coinbase. I don't think Brian would disagree with me on that. That's our focus. That's where we spend

our time. Brian's better than us at crypto and things like base, right? And so that's the difference between Strike and something like a Robinhood or Binance or Coinbase is that our customers value the high quality Bitcoin experience and want the best Bitcoin experience. And that's the business that we found ourselves in. And it's turned into a really, really valuable one because of the lack of focus on Bitcoin from other players in the space. So if you are a Bitcoiner that wants the best in the world, Bitcoin related tools, wallet, exchange, that's who we've become. We're one of the only in the world that's, I don't know, license regulated, the tech, the brand. So it's turned into phenomenal business. And adoption is great. Listen, founding this business, I'm like long Bitcoin, short crypto. That's kind of the way I'm monetizing this, right?

Is that the further Coinbase drifts into base and Dogecoin and token listing and stuff, the more we are compounding on an amazing Bitcoin experience. And then through these cycles and through things like FTX, this industry churns out more Bitcoiners, people that just care about Bitcoin, people that think there's the difference between Bitcoin and everything else. And we're just, we're monetizing that, if that makes sense. So that's our thesis is that 10, 20 years from now, like my kids won't be buying Dogecoin. They'll want a high quality Bitcoin financial services company. And that's what we do. And so if you're interested in extremely high quality Bitcoin services,

there's probably not many other places in the world besides us to give you that. And how are people using it on a day-to-day basis, like the bulk of your customers? Would you say they're high net worth individuals who are using it because they want to buy Bitcoin, move it into self-custody, and they obviously trust your security and your ethos? Or is it also people want five bucks or want to send 10 bucks? All the reasons that we're actually in the white paper, right? Yeah. Peer-to-peer cash. Yeah. Our biggest business line is selling Bitcoin. We sell a lot of Bitcoin and it is still dominated by high net worth. I think what we've seen is where the capital is, is where the business is.

So for example, the US is still our biggest market by a long mile. And within the US, it's heavily weighted to those that are wiring in tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no doubt about that. I think that's just the reality of the space is that the dollar's under attack and those with a lot of them need to get them into a different asset. And that's still our biggest business line by far.

But all of our products are naturally growing. So we do a lot of cross-border payments on top of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. We do a tremendous amount of on-chain Bitcoin volume. We've got to be one of the biggest Bitcoin on-chain wall volume. We've got to be one of the biggest Bitcoin on-chain wallets in the world. All of our customers pretty much do move their Bitcoin to cold storage. So again, we have the type of customer sophistication that is in Bitcoin, does want

high quality services, does want to hold the asset themselves, is familiar with stuff like cold storage. So it is still dominated. It's a market that's still dominated by the wealth, the Western wealth. So America's our biggest market. Second biggest market is Europe. Maybe by the time this is out, I don't know when this is releasing, we'll launch in the UK. That's our bread and butter is the West. And that's just where the wealth is. But we're live in 100 markets. A cool stat, I don't know if I've ever said this publicly, outside of the US on a weekly basis, our second and third biggest market signups and user growth is Argentina and Nigeria, which is interesting. So the activity is there, the user growth is there. There's just not a lot of wealth

in these markets, if that makes sense. So if we do, you know, a billion dollars in a month of, you know, selling Bitcoin, you know, Nigeria and Argentina won't come close to that in that metric, but they are in the user growth and the activity and using the Lightning Network and using it for payments. So those are hopefully some helpful insights. Yeah. And a lot of those places, Argentina in particular, it's widely reported that those people, their first step is to try to get into dollars. So they're buying Tether on Tron because it's cheap and it's fast. So I mean, there's a learning curve there, honestly, but they are using that side of crypto to at least protect themselves from the massive inflation and the banks and the corruption in their own markets. I always found it astounding that I think it's like 56, 57% now of Tether is on Tron.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we support Tether in these markets. So our Western product is very different than our global product. Our global product allows you to hold stable coins and it gives you this amazing Bitcoin wallet where you can make free on-chain payments. That's the type of stuff that we do different than Coinbase. We built incredible batching and fee analysis technology where we'll give you free on-chain payments sustainably and scalably. So it's an amazing Bitcoin wallet and it's a tethered wallet versus the West. Someone in the UK just wants to be able to wire in a ton of pounds because they've got a net worth of $50 million and they need some of this crypto thing, Bitcoin thing. So different products for different folks. But yeah, I mean,

it's hard to compete with the volume profile of like Florida in Lagos. That's just the reality of the space. If we're going to transfer wealth, a lot of it's going to come from where the wealth already is. But that doesn't mean that user activity and user growth and a lot of it's going to come from where the wealth already is. But that doesn't mean that user activity and user growth and a lot of the smaller use cases aren't growing as well. I just think they're the longer tail. Changing consumer behavior like that's going to take time versus the West is buying Bitcoin is growing a lot faster. Let's hope in 50 years that some of those kids in Lagos who are using Strike to buy Bitcoin are a part of that massive wealth transfer.

And we're talking about these metrics very differently. Yeah, I think sooner than 50 years. And the best part about Strike is the low time preference. That's why we're building the business is I think in 40, 50, 30, even 10, five years, I think the world's going to need a business that only focuses on Bitcoin financial services.

I don't think anyone's going to give a shit about like Dogecoin options in 20 years. So that's our bread and butter right there. And with time, I think it's going to be more valuable to the marketplace. Jack, thank you so much for the conversation, man. I appreciate your time. I'm glad that we finally got to do it. Next time you see your dad, you know, buy him a beer for me or something.

We're glad, we're glad that we're glad he taught you all of this so that you could create Strike and be such a great voice for our industry. He's a bright dude. Shout out my dad. And I appreciate you, brother. I'm a big fan of this show. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Jack.