The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin To Hit New All-Time High After Elections?

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

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You can't talk about Bitcoin in mid-September without talking about the election and what's likely happened to Bitcoin if either of the candidates win. We have some predictions we've been talking about this week that we'll review, but also all of the big news stories of the week, and there are quite a few. Good thing we have NLW here to discuss them all. Let's go. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit the like button. Big week yet again. A lot that happened. Some of it went under the radar. We're going to get into all of it right

now on the Friday 5. I actually have an honorable mention that we didn't talk about that just came up. I love it. And it's this. MicroStrategy buys 18,300 Bitcoin for $1.11 billion. Total holdings reach 244,800 Bitcoin. For those of you who aren't very good at quick math, that's $9.45 billion worth of Bitcoin now held by MicroStrategy. This guy is amazing. Listen, we know he's going to do it, but it still just makes me smile when he does. Yeah, I like it. I like now that there's sort of like less dramatic events that he's trying to counteract, just like dropping it casually on Fridays, like a nice little weekend send off. It's good style. What blows my mind about it is that he does this without having to sell any Bitcoin.

Yeah. I mean, just a casual 1.11 billion more laying around. No big deal. I mean, I feel like people are also, a lot of folks who weren't necessarily paying attention to how companies work before have gotten sort of a masterclass watching Saylor take advantage of sort of debt issuance and other traditional corporate instruments that are totally normal and just use them for this purpose that they've never been used for before. You know, all he's doing is taking the sort of increased value, turning it into additional shares of the company and, you know, offering it from there. But, you know, what's wild is it's,

we're at this point in the cycle, we've made a new all-time high. I mean, buying a billion when you have less than 10 billion worth, given the fraction of the amount in Bitcoin is very low because it's only 18,000 versus 200 something. I mean, this is a tenth of the cash value right here in one tranche. I mean, we've seen 200 million, 400 million. This is a big one. Yeah, it is a big chunk, even relative to them, for sure. So he doesn't care who wins the election, obviously.

Michael Saylor is going to buy Bitcoin no matter what. The only competition he cares about is whether he or BlackRock has more, I think, at this point. Yeah, I have a feeling he might win because he actually owns it. Do we count all the iBit as BlackRock's Bitcoin anyways? I think it's kind of misconstrued

that they own everything that their customers buy. But hey, you know what? Saylor's a legend. He has no doubt that this thing's going to $1 million, $5 million. I thing is going to 1 million, 5 million. I believe he said 13 million in 21 years. That was a prediction he made this week.

We won't get too deeply into that. But I think people want to know what's going to happen after the election more immediately. Bitcoin could hit 125K if Trump becomes president. I love that 75K is the bear case for Harris winning, which is yet another all-time high, which is funny. And then, of course yet another all time high, which is funny. And then, of course, we had the 90,000 by year. And if Trump becomes president, 30,000 if Harris wins. But I think this all just speaks to how much uncertainty there is in the market, how much people believe Bitcoin is tied to these election results.

We've seen times where when polymarket goes up or down, it seems at least at the beginning that the Bitcoin price would go with it. And now we have obviously Harris at 50, 49. That's pretty close. Her overtaking him after the debate and, of course, debate as to who's leading in every other poll that's not polymarket. So much to unpack here about what happened at the debate, who's likely to win and what that would mean for our industry. Yeah. So let's, let's take, I think it's a good construction to use the Bernstein and the standard charter as sort of like two different approaches to looking at the same question. I think that the Bernstein one is sort of more resonant for what the average person who's observing this in the crypto or Bitcoin space thinks, right. It basically says really dramatically,

like it's good for Bitcoin. If, uh, if Trump wins, it's bad for Bitcoin if Trump loses, right? So that's mostly what that says. Hold aside the numbers, like 30, 90, like, you know, whatever. The standard charter, I think, is actually more interesting in some ways, because there's an implicit argument underneath there that the simple fact of not knowing, right, the actual sort of uncertainty of the election itself is acting like a price suppressant, both for crypto and probably for a larger set of asset for risk assets as well. And so, you know, it may seem like, oh, that's pretty turbo bullish to think that, you know, even in a sort of the bad scenario, Bitcoin is going to 75k. But I think that what that reflects is the idea that, yes, even if there is correlation

in terms of Trump is seen as better for Bitcoin or crypto, what's bad for the industry is the uncertainty, not necessarily one candidate that much or the other, at least comparatively. And I think that that rings, again, hold aside the specific numbers. Markets hate uncertainty. And you can feel this everywhere across markets right now, that they're just, you know, it's this coiled moment. And it's going to be like this right up to the election where it doesn't even matter if it was an inconsequential election. And this one feels very consequential to people, whether they're right or wrong about that. That's, you know, there's just only so much movement you can do. And so every time things kind of nudge forward a little or nudge back, it kind of centers back on itself because everyone's just sort of wound

up and waiting for what happens next. And they're not going to do, not much is going to happen until that. Yeah. I like that framing. One of these predictions basically says Bitcoin survives with Trump and dies with Harris. And the other one says we're in a normal four-year halving cycle. This is the slow summer and it's going to be either up or up more. Yeah, totally. And I think that that's the framing to your point that we would see in the Bitcoin community, those who have watched the cycle, those who expected a slow summer and perhaps to see price action again, getting interesting and rising in the fall. Now I've made the point that for Bitcoin itself, and this is a Bitcoin price prediction, not a prediction about the market or any of the other

tokens. There's a lot of people in America who are very hyperbolic about elections, right? The same voices who say, I'm leaving if so-and-so wins. I'm buying guns and ammo if Democrats win. Those people are the same ones who might see Bitcoin as a flight to safety. So I do see the still up, maybe even up more argument under Harris for those who fear that America is going to fall apart under a Harris administration or that socialism is coming. I'm not making a judgment to these claims. I'm just saying, if Bitcoin is a flight to safety, I think there are a lot of people who will buy it as well if she wins. So I would love to see polls that say, what does Solana do if Trump wins or Harris wins? What happens to Doge? I think those will be actually pretty interesting because I think there's a lot more differentiation in what's likely to happen to everything else in the crypto industry than there

is in what happens to Bitcoin. One of the things that we could have put on this list, which might have been interesting, is just a discussion of Travis Kling's recent Twitter thread around the pervasive quiet quitting in crypto. And one of the interesting points underneath that was this sense that right now it's not clear what catalyst we actually have potentially on the horizon. And he pointed to a Trump administration, which is actually more nuanced than just Trump good, Harris bad. Basically, what he was saying is that in his estimation, there's only so far that basically we've reached as far as you can go with security like things in the shape of tokens without a regulatory regime that actually allows them to be securities like in some ways, right?

When tokens don't have the ability to get yield and do all these interesting things that a decentralized financial system could do, at some, you just run up to the limits. And I think it's an interesting way of looking at where we are right now, that we have spent the last, you know, five to 10 years, depending on where you want to define it, experimenting in this really interesting sandbox of what a future of finance kind of, you know, ecosystem could look like. But we have officially ground to the end of how far people can take those experiments without being allowed to, at least in the United States. And so in that way, I think that the interesting thing is that the sort of like Trump good, Harris bad becomes a little bit more of a proxy for there may be a path forward for, you know, specific types of and interactions with tokens to look really different. So I think that's an interesting point. And we're kind of examining that gets, again, beyond just sort of the headline of who's in charge or not. Yeah. And there was also, I'm trying to find it as we're kind of chatting here, but

I saw Paul Graywall from Coinbase, as for that security argument, was tweeting something, I believe it was in the Binance case. I don't want to speak incorrectly, but basically saying that the SEC had apologized for calling these crypto assets securities or crypto securities and creating confusion by having that term. So clearly, we're getting a bit of a more of a reframing, I think, of how these assets are viewed and how they might be viewed moving forward. I wish I had the story in front of me, but if you were, if you were viewing this as a as a truly objective observer, and this was just like a sports game between crypto on the one side and the SEC on the other, you almost have to respect

the calling them crypto securities thing just as an attempt to sneak past anyone actually saying that's okay and just naming the thing. It's often an effective strategy to just call a thing what you want it to be and hope the world orients itself around you. But recently, they had a judge slap them down for doing exactly that. So once again, that's yet another of the SEC strategies that's now out the window. Talking about potential unregistered securities, we obviously have to talk about the fact that we now have an official date for World Liberty Finance, which will be surprisingly launched on Twitter spaces with Rug Radio and Donald Trump Live. I don't know which version of the simulation we're running right now, but it's really, really entertaining.

This is happening. The DeFi visionary behind it is 18 year old freshman in college, Barron Trump. And we can also dig into the other people who are behind it. For those who haven't seen the guy who described himself as a dirtbag of the Internet, some guy named Chase Harrow, who apparently also was behind a recent dough finance that was hacked. And maybe that's the base platform, man. So many things to talk about here, right? So I think on the one hand, we should be extremely encouraged and excited that Donald Trump and his family are really embracing crypto, going down this rabbit hole, building things themselves and supporting them.

But it also obviously leaves question marks as to how deeply they understand it and the judgment of who potentially they may be working with on it. There's also the framing from the previous conversation we just had, which is clearly these are not going to be unregistered securities if Trump wins because he has four NFT projects and is launching a token. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think if I had to crypto industry with five people, you're going to have 15 opinions. So I don't want to overstate the consensus. But to the extent that there is a consensus here, it seems to be basically exactly what you just articulated. Great that this is a clear sign that they want to go deeper with this space and want to actually be involved. And frankly, if we're being the most generous,

this is exactly the pattern that happens with everyone. You get less hostile and then you get kind of interested and then you get really interested and then you throw yourself in and start a damn business because what else could you possibly do once you actually start to fall down the rabbit hole, right? So like this is a kind of a pretty normal progression. It's just an abnormal set of people in the context of the world that we're in. So I think that there is that, you know, base level, hold aside the details kind of excitement. The flip side is I don't, I haven't seen anyone who's not just sort of out and out skeptical of what it's actually going to be and, or extremely unclear about the timing decision, right?

Like why this now before the election? Um, and I think that, you know, I don't think it's a particularly confidence inspiring thing. If, if it's sort of a, you know, one of the, the, the negative interpretations is like, we'll do it now while we got the spotlight. Cause the spotlight might go away in a couple months, you know, which is just realism. That's not actually like an assessment of one's chances in the election or whatever. It's just opportunistic. But like, if that's the case, that's not so good.

And so it's like, what, what would the reason be now? Maybe we'll learn that on Monday. They're doing a Twitter Spaces. They tend to be pretty candid about discussing these things. And again, I'm not even getting into what you mentioned, all the personnel involved and stuff. But I think that this is, boy, this one is sort of the most sort of good and bad all wrapped up in one big bundle that you can imagine, I think,, I think high risk reward for them, right? Because the risk of something

negative happening with this in the next two months is pretty high. Not because of them, because when's the last time we saw a launch of a crypto platform be particularly successful? Like I said, this has nothing to do with them. This is just whether it's cyclical or whether it's the perception of the industry. We've got meme coins and we got Bitcoin and nothing else has done particularly well. So this either failing or having some sort of smart contract risk or something in the coming months, I believe would be very bad. But if it does exceptionally well and brings millions of people that otherwise wouldn't have been in here into DeFi before the election, that's a huge win. The flip side is that, and I will say this as

clearly as possible, this is, I believe, outside of the ETFs, the first credible catalyst for new people to join the space of this cycle, really. I mean, it just is. It's not even like we've put up a bunch of things that have been rejected. The things that we've chosen to spend our time on this cycle, like meme coins, are explicitly not for normies in the way that, for example, NFTs were in the past or something like this. So if you are a person who thinks that part of that four-year cycle necessarily involves an injection of new capital, new energy, new people, we've been looking for catalysts. And to your point, if it goes well, this is one of them.

I mean, I'd rather have Trump and his kids launching a lending platform than have Sam Altman scanning my eyeballs to get mainstream adoption. There you go. So I'll take whatever I can get. And listen, this isn't even the end this week of the conversation about securities, non-registered securities and how they're framed in this country. eToro reaches 1.5 million SEC settlement, agrees to stop trading most cryptocurrencies. This is pretty wild because plenty of other exchanges are trading things beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, which are the three that they're left here allowed apparently to offer to American customers.

I always laugh that it's Bitcoin Cash that gets included. It's usually Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. But it is at least interesting here that Ether, of all things, clearly not being deemed as a security or viewed that way anymore. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not really able to make heads or tails of this in terms of why it's so strict. Again, it makes me wonder if there's more going on that this was the settlement that they were willing to accept. Are, are there business dynamics that we saw? Like, you know, for example, it's entirely possible that, you know, their brokerage business, just everything else represented a fraction of a fraction, you know, of their business. So who cares? You know, ultimately, if they have to make concessions, I always think that, you know, you kind of have to

contextualize these things with the particular business itself, but this is a bummer. You want to see platforms offering more, not less access. So it's hard not to see it as anything but a big negative for the space. Yeah. And we're always looking for some sort of context or a view into the future of what it could be for Coinbase or anyone else who's dealing with the SEC. And this is an outright negative example of the worst case that could happen. I mean, I don't think this would, but imagine a world where Coinbase is told you can offer Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. Yeah. I mean, the difference is too, is from how much they fought perspective, eToro obviously has a huge variety of other things. Coinbase is all in on a single

thing. So it doesn't surprise me comparatively that it's a more diverse brokerage, let's say, that was willing to make some of these concessions compared to Coinbase. It's existential. So they're going to fight to the death. We have another story that you brought to my attention that I completely somehow missed this week. And I feel like I'm pretty on top of the news, but house lawmakers clash at first ever DeFi hearing. So this was brought by French Hill. DeFi was to explore emerging topics, and this was on the floor of the house talking about the future of DeFi.

Can you tell us a bit more about what happened here? Yeah, so this was throwback to pre-operation chokepoint 2.0. In 21 and 22, there were a series of hearings that were genuinely more or less about Congress learning about the industry, right? So it's hard to remember that there was a period where that was the case. And there was still some amount of grandstanding, right? The way that these hearings work is you have, they're called by a particular subcommittee head or a committee head, and you have a set of expert witnesses. Expert witnesses prepare testimony and then kick it off with sort of their short testimony. And then all the different members of the committee have their

five minutes, whatever. They can either use those five minutes to genuinely ask questions that are of interest to them to try to learn, or they can use it to grandstand and try to get soundbites. Now, as you might imagine, the standard practice across pretty much all hearings is grandstand and soundbites, but there was this kind of glorious period in 21 and 22 where that wasn't the norm, right? You had Brad Sherman grandstanding every chance he got, but by and large, people from both sides of the aisle actually asking questions. That of course went away through the whole sort of late 22 period, early 23 period, where we were sort of in the in the most aggressive part of this, we just didn't have these types of hearings. You know, the only hearings about crypto were, you know, were sort of about the failures

of the industry. So in some ways, this is a nice return, because it was intentionally a learning type of experience, right? This was not examining any particular legislation that was that was coming through, it was a chance for Congress to sort of dig deeper into DeFi. It was brought, as you said, by Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair, French Hill. And unfortunately, for those who are looking for any signs of a Democrat crypto pivot, at least among members of the House, this was a pretty stark reminder that that is, you know, whether that might happen with the administration is one thing, but it's definitely not happening here. It was we were right back into the crypto is for criminals narrative. Not only that, you mentioned Brad Sherman.

So I have to highlight a couple of his quotes. This is Cobra coin, mongoose coin. You guys know Brad Sherman, right? What we have here is an effort to liberate billionaires from income taxation. That's what apparently Brad Sherman thinks of DeFi. I don't even know how those two things may have anything to do with one another uh every time a billionaire successfully cheats on his taxes a member of the freedom caucus hurts his wings sherman that's a that's a pretty good line i gotta say oh god that's really good um not that i agree with it but that's actually legitimately funny and i

happened to read it while you were talking but like like, this is once again, a few of the most anti crypto anti defy people sitting there and getting in their soundbites. was with a democratic congressman who who said explicitly that he believed that the creators of defy platform should be held accountable for the the things that are done with them uh and um and there's a weird pizza parlor analogy that got some play on twitter but but hold aside the details that is obviously a question that is that is always lurking just behind the scenes when it comes to our relationship with the internet it's beenking just behind the scenes when it comes to our relationship with the internet. It's been lurking behind the scenes since the mid nineties, when section two 30 became law that said that people weren't responsible for what their, what their users did, but that is obviously back on the table in a huge way. It's back on the table. We see it with,

uh, obviously like that is, that is the stakes of that particular argument. And, um, and AI restoring, is putting that debate front and center in the US again. When Sam Altman testified before Congress a couple of years ago, one of the big questions was, do you believe that the creators of chatbots basically should be held accountable for the bad things that people do with them? And it's basically, should you be protected under Section 230? And Altman actually said no, which I thought was completely insane,

but that's a whole different conversation. So this is a real thing that is storming back and crypto is going to be front and center as a part of this. Great. Yeah. Just what I was hoping for. More Brad Sherman in my life.

Yeah, exactly what I was hoping for. And listen, it's incredible how many stories we have here with the SEC and CFTC and what we can and cannot do. CFTC appeals ruling that blocked its attempt to halt Kalshi's election contracts. I actually know Tarek from Kalshi. They're doing a really, really cool thing. But this is the real story is that Kalshi has listed the long sought election contracts after beating the CFTC in court. We've seen these on Polymarket, obviously, but Kalshi is in the United States. They've been fighting the CFTC on their ability to list predictive markets like the election, and they're doing it. And so the story is they got the clearance and the CFTC immediately is trying to stop them. Yeah. I mean, election markets have, they were flying under the prediction markets in general, clearly were like flying under the radar because we were taking all the heat over in sort of pure play crypto. And now that the election has come up and that's the context for the betting markets, it's like the sleeping giant, the congressional smog has woken up

to sort of scream at everyone. And now they're trying to quickly backtrack and get that. I mean, Warren's squawking about this now. It's everywhere. And it, to me, is just another indication of the fact that we are bursting at the seams with unclarity around what US citizens are and aren't allowed to do. And it's a totally unsustainable state of affairs, that gets more unsustainable every single day. And trying to litigate it in court is just an insane way to do anything. But that's all we have right now. Yeah. And Kalshi has been in the news before because they were one of the first to even be able to compliantly offer any sort of prediction market.

So the fact that this is specifically about the election, I think, makes it more interesting, especially as mainstream media literally quotes Polymarket Daily. Yeah. Mainstream media quotes a offshore platform using crypto that Americans can't use to get their story on what the odds of election results are. It's just so bizarre. Yep. It's weird times. Okay. Well, now we got to talk about ETFs. Jim Bianco says Bitcoin ETFs have failed to attract TradFi or Boomer. Investors, I'm not going to go too deeply into all of his claims, but the fact that we've had some substantial outflows, that there are

unrealized losses because most people I think bought ETFs at an equivalent of $60,000, $61,000. Obviously, we're trading at around $58,000, not a huge loss. And the fact that they are not being offered by many RIA platforms yet, et cetera, is a massive failure. Everybody hates the Bitcoin ETFs. Last time I checked, like three or four of these individually are the most successful ETF launches literally of all time. They've gathered $50 billion in AUM and what the hell is he talking about? But hey, what do you think? I actually think it's a great debate. So Jim's a smart guy. Jim's one of those people where when he's sort of critiquing something, even if he's wrong or you think he's wrong, there's usually something that's interesting there. So i think there's a couple things here

the the interesting part of the conversation is how fast what were our expectations around how fast new actors would buy into the etf this is to me the real question the question of whether these have been successful in pure terms i think is totally to your point, there's no way to argue that they're not successful. It's insane, right? And in fact, one of the counterpoints to Jim was if you look at the portion that just represents the investor advisors, it would still be hugely successful by any metric. So the only reason that it looks potentially not successful is that that buying behavior is such a small portion because there's so much of the other type of buying behavior that it's just sort of like, it's almost like it's only unsuccessful in comparison.

I think though that the premise of Jim's argument, I believe, is that he seems to think that most people thought that as soon as these ETFs were available, a bunch of investment advisors would rush in. And I think that why the argument doesn't ring sort of super strong to me is that I don't believe that that was ever the way that this was going to play out. The availability of a thing does not create demand for a thing. There was demand for this thing, as we clearly saw, but it was always going to be a long, slow accession. Demand now becomes possible for a new category of people. Holding aside the fact that the big shops have only had a couple weeks at this point to actually start promoting this, there's no reason right now to be promoting anything in these sort of markets going into the elections. It's just like, if it was six months

from now or a year from now, I think that this would be a much more interesting conversation. Right now, at the risk of sort of doing the thing that crypto does, you know, or saying the thing that crypto people say, just kind of too early to tell whether it's successful with this particular category of people or not. So that's my take is that it's just sort of the wrong timing, wrong timeline for the argument. Yeah, too early. Objectively, when you see the AUM and the amount of volume that there's been, you can't argue that they've been unsuccessful, in my opinion. And he knows better.

He knows that Morgan Stanley couldn't do the due diligence the day that they were approved to get these listed. And we've seen Morgan Stanley, to the point of Matt Hogan, come on much earlier than you even would have expected because it should have taken nine months to a year. And now they're here. You have UBS coming. You have all of these other platforms that will eventually be offering these. Like you said, it's just plumbing.

Doesn't mean the demand will be there, but it's not even available still to most people who are trying to get it going. And so I just think that maybe you can write an aggressive tweet thread or analysis in a year. Yeah. That's sort of my take as well. Yeah. And listen, the final thing we have here that's worth discussing is not specific to crypto, but everybody's watching it. Of course, the CPI numbers, how they're calculated, what's going to happen with Fed rate cuts next week. They're finally here. And what it's going to mean for crypto. To me, I just see a lot of confusing data that seems to be different and recalculated every month and a whole lot of people throwing darts at the target and hoping for the best.

But maybe you have a more informed opinion of what's likely to happen here. Sure. Here's my informed opinion. For a long time, the debate that markets got to have with themselves was when would the cutting cycle start? As soon as that became clear that it was going to be September, which has been the longest, most painfully telegraphed thing in Fed history, basically, the discussion became, all right, well, is it going to be a 25 basis point cut or a jumbo cut? Is it going to be 50? And so markets have mostly had this conversation with themselves because they no longer had the chance to have the conversation about when the hiking cycle. So they have to talk about something. And so they spent a huge amount of time working themselves up into a frenzy around why it might make sense to go 50. To me, it's like everything about Powell has always been like moderate, moderate, moderate, moderate.

I mean, this is like if a soft landing was embodied as a goddamn human, that would be Jay Powell, you know, like, like no one's ever going to be that satisfied and no one's ever going to be that angry because it's just so down, down the middle. And that bit him when it came to inflation, because he didn't move fast enough to try to tamp the thing down. And now people are arguing that it's going to bite him on the backside because he's not going to move fast enough. And we're going to see economic deterioration on the cutting cycle. But he just nothing indicates to me that Powell has changed in any meaningful way or that the Fed around him has changed in a meaningful way that he was ever

going to really consider going to 50 basis points. So the confusion around sort of like what exactly the numbers say, like CPI is, you know, okay, but there's like high shelter. And what does that mean? Anything that gives more credence for just the like the down the middle, like standard, not rocking any boats answer is a great, you know, I think it would have had to be so extreme for him to go to 50 basis points. So my feeling is that this is all just confirmation that Powell is going to get to do exactly what he wanted to do, which is nudge his way into this in the slowest possible way. The amount of conversation surrounding what J. Powell is likely to do over

the past two years, while J. Powell has told you exactly what he's going to do over the last two years, it should be like studied by aliens when they find our civilization. Yeah, I mean, one thing you cannot critique the man for is consistency with what he says. He is not throwing curveballs. Unbelievable, guys. That's all we've got. If you want more content like this, obviously, listen to NLW on The Breakdown. He goes deeply into these

type of topics every single day, and it's always a quick listen, 10 to 15 minutes. Amazing. Amazing. That's why he's here because I have ADD and I just read headlines, quick listen, 10 to 15 minutes. Amazing. Amazing. That's why he's here because I have ADD and I just read headlines. So I need someone to actually tell me the substance. Guys, that's all we got for you today. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Daniel. We'll see you soon, guys. Bye. Later. Let's go.