The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Whales Dumping As Liquidity Crisis Hits | Willy Woo Reveals The Endgame

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

In this interview, Scott Melker and on-chain analyst Willy Woo dive into the future of Bitcoin, exploring its current market cycle, liquidity flows, and macro forces driving the crypto market. They discuss whale selling, altcoin rotations, and the rise of ETFs, while examining the role of stablecoins, treasury companies, and Bitcoin as the ultimate liquidity signal for global markets. Willy shares insights on whether we’re nearing another bear market, how Bitcoin could evolve into digital gold, and what the long-term path toward institutional adoption and mainstream finance might look like.

Today we are joined by Willie Wu, one of the most respected on-chain analysts in the world to talk about where Bitcoin is headed next. Well, let's wait and see, but I'm just looking at Bitcoin, and it's structurally starting to look weaker and weaker into this bull market. We dig into liquidity cycles, investor flows, and why whales are unloading coins at these levels. The reality is we're in a fair world and everyone needs to live, apart from these hardcore bitcoins that are using sats. Willie explains how Bitcoin is acting as the ultimate canary in the coal mine for global liquidity

and what that means for the next phase of the cycle. We also get into the bigger picture, the Fed, election cycle, debt, gold's rise, and how stable coins are reshaping markets. If Bitcoin goes from $100,000 to a million, that means tether is going to increase because it's the other side of the book. Tether is the gateway to our crypto ecosystem if things traded against it. You work that out and it works out that Tether can displace China, on the short-dated T-bills.

So now you get a situation where the U.S. government's opinion on the growth of Bitcoin to remain solid. Willie shares his candid take on whether Bitcoin could eventually decouple, trade like digital gold, and what institutional adoption means for the future of crypto. If you want a clear-eyed look at Bitcoin's make-or-break moment in how it ties into the broader economy, this is a conversation you don't want to miss. This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's number one crypto exchange trusted by over 270 million users worldwide.

Start your crypto journey with finance atfinance.com. Finance is not available in prohibited countries, including the U.S. Check its terms for more information. finance.com slash en slash terms so willie my crystal ball's broken where's bitcoin going next there are no crystal balls there's no crystal balls scott yeah no no one knows exact but um you know we can look at liquidity um we can look at overall structure how price response to it is up to obviously the market and individual participants and how it actually moves um so you know uh it's late cycle liquidity is waning um you know obviously capital coming into the system

is is what moves it and um i would say prices has run up but um as of maybe six months ago the liquidity powering it is started to drop away while the price momentum continues generally that that gives us a signature of where we are into the the bull market I would note that in 2017 it started that that process started at about two and a half thousand dollars of Bitcoin and it ran up to 20,000 so the tops of a cycle is very unstable right it's it gets very volatile a lot of kind of euphoria happens we haven't reached that stage yet but the interesting thing for me right now is that we are getting a pattern where the countdown timer has started you know in the 2017 bull market the last cycle 2021 we had this point where the flows in bitcoin while positive started to decline and the flows into Ethereum increased creating a divergence and that marked the end of the fundamental cycle, the fundamentals powering the cycle. So that seems to be

happening right now. Ethereum did climb, exceed Bitcoin's inflows, and it's starting to just roll over right now. And the other thing that's happened right now is that the flows into Bitcoin didn't make a high high to confirm the 120 range. Generally, Each new all-time high, Bitcoin makes and consolidates to a level, you get a higher influx of investors and investor liquidity to push it up. This one did not have that. So we're kind of in a bearish divergence where the 120 level was not validated by investors. And in the last cycle, that was kind of around April. And it was, if you remember, went from 60,000 to 30,000. And that was the spot.

kind of um investors uh like not really validating the the price levels and then we had this kind of blow off where it went to 70,000 and that was given by paper so right now 65 to 28 to 69 good times yeah it's a 69 right so that that was uh right now we're in that situation where this same structure is forming um obviously every cycle is different um but uh the question in my mind is do we get this sort of is this do we get a investor recovery do we get higher high in the flows of capital and therefore validating that the structure is supported by investors or do we actually um you know basically the investors are slowly walking away here and we might get another sort of run up by paper investments, a lot of derives of action. So I'm just sitting here watching this.

How do you track the flows? Like, is it a personal indicators that you have? How do you actually, you know, uh, track that by what metric and, you know, what tool do you use for that? Well, you can track the, um, or spot buying across exchanges, a mix of all the above. You can, you can use the UTXO model, right? And you can look at the price. prices of which coins moving from one wallets to the other and you get a snapshot of when coins moved in, therefore their cost basis and the cost basis is the new investor coming in. And so realized cap, for example, that's the on-chain metric, measures how much capital has come in through that type of arrangement.

It's an estimation. We don't know exactly if it's the new investor. It might be the same guy rotating wallets. and so forth. These ways you can filter it. But effectively, we're looking at on-chain measuring this cohort. This cohort is using wallets, moving cold storage, therefore they're not actively trading, therefore you can call them an investor. And so, yeah, using on-chain metrics you can measure or estimate the flows, right? That's what I call capital flows coming into the system. That's relatively easy to do. There's other things you can look at which take into the

the pricing structure and volatility, which is a bit of a secret source, and sort of overlay that on top of the on-chain description, which is investors, you know, a lot of these, the action is happening on exchanges that can only be picked up by the pricing action. So between the two of them, you get a good idea of liquidity and where the flows are going. And also, you can measure it for other networks like Ethereum and Solana and so forth. So you can see the rotations between the two. Yeah, so we have this interesting scenario where, as you put it, liquidity is somewhat dried up, or at least flows into Bitcoin,

but there's a macro expectation that since M2 has risen, Bitcoin will continue to follow those M2 flows, and they were likely to get fed rate cuts in the coming week and a half, and that could also increase liquidity. So it seems like you have a macro picture. Now we can discuss whether that's an accurate macro picture or not, because that might be an interesting conversation, but there's certainly sentiment that there's going to be a lot more liquidity entering the system generally.

Yeah, and for sure that that is going to bolster confidence that, you know, currency is being debased in a lot of liquidity, new money is injected in the system, cheap money, and generally that lifts things in a liquidity cycle. Turns out the liquidity cycles for years it's superimposed to Bitcoin cycles, circumposed onto the harvening. Bitcoin was great. Yes, and I do. And the election cycle, and I suspect it is soft influence from the election cycle that is

soft influencing the Fed, even though it's meant to be firewalled, that is creating this sort of Fed policy of a four-year cycle of liquidity. That's just a theory I have, no proof. But the thing was, Bitcoin was invented in effectively published in 2008 after the world financial crisis when the Fed was injecting massive amounts of liquidity because of the to soften this crash, right? And Bitcoin has really never had a really full-on test of a business cycle downturn. We've had liquidity cycles of four years, but have we had a full-on business cycle downturn? COVID, you could say maybe.

Those economic indicators sowed that. But, you know, the Fed printed early even before the COVID price affected crash in the market. So in that case, I think it was staved off because a massive amount of liquidity, what is it, 20, 30, 35% debasement. There was some ridiculous amount of money that was unprecedented that was injected, and we had the run-up from the last cycle. This time, we have a business cycle downturn, we expect. leading indicators are showing that and the Fed should be

injecting capital and that also happened in 2008 world financial crisis they were injecting capital in the system the markets were crashing that was their job

to buffer that crash because the directive of the Fed is to maximum employment so it's not always the case that lower interest rates create

market go up and so the question to ask is is this leading or lagging in this time around it usually cut interest rates when something breaks right not because uh stock markets at all time high and things are great yeah it's a it's a weird one this time i think we're all a little bit confused and well let's wait and see but i'm just looking at bitcoin and it's structurally starting to look weaker and weaker into this bull market and And, you know, I work with Swiss block. They've been running the numbers for over a decade on Bitcoin and measuring it and alt-coins. And their data shows that Bitcoin is leading liquidity.

In fact, it is the most sensitive asset, global asset, you know, global macro asset, gold, stocks, whatever, real estate. It's the most sensitive to liquidity. And so you could call it the canary in the coal mine. And yeah, by the way, swiss block is the people that brought you glass node in the on-chain metrics because they were trading this in 2006, so 2016. So it was very early this data. So anyway, let's wait and see, but the underlying investor fundamentals is currently sort of in a make-a-break zone, and it's repeating the last patterns of, like, you know, the top. we did have a high high and you can have this paper run up but let's just watch it it could

recover you know if investors really come in the next three weeks but it's you know a little bit weak on my side um i think we've we've had a run to 120 how high will it go from here you know 140 160 i don't know yeah i mean that that could all happen in a week right you could just fly up this is bitcoin right get a 440 50% move in a week or two and then full euphoria and see you in a couple years. Nothing was surprised me at this point. That's last cycle. Certainly happened 2070.

It happened all the time. I'm not sure about the cycle. It looks pretty flat. The amount of capital that needs to move Bitcoin at 120 is quite different, you know, than last cycle where it was 10,000, you know, and then became 20,000. So it's significant. And then you got this whale selling into it recently. And every Bitcoin they sell, it's $120,000.

They have to buy each one of them before we're good, you know. I think there's a report that there's been $115,000, $120,000 coins from whale wallet sold just in the past month or two. Yeah, month or two, yes. It's some decent selling from people that had diamond hands and never intended to unload a single Bitcoin. if you ask them right so i'm not saying they know something that we don't i think there's just a serious point where your wealth is so high and so great that you just take something off the

table regardless of uh the asset but we've never seen that level of whale selling at prices like this ever yeah i mean absolutely like last cycle i remember a whale you know friends that said i'm selling and i think it was around 50 or 60 something like that it was like this was generational wealth me, I would just take it off the table. And that happened to be, you know, because like he wasn't doing it on, he totally was expecting 100,000, but it's like, I'll take off the table right now.

And it actually crashed in 30, you know, and it went to seemingly, but it was the price point where I guess maybe there's a whole bunch of whales that bought in roughly that time and that was the price point. And so maybe we're in a similar situation. Who knows? So considering the cycles still rhyme to some degree, right?

As you said, every cycle is not exactly the same, but what we haven't really seen this cycle is the rise of the alt-coin market. Certainly not where you could just throw a dart and expect anything you hold to go up 10x. Do you think that in this last phase of the cycle, if we get it, that we will see that movement? Or do you think that it's really limited to whatever's available on Wall Street at this point? Right, because we'll get us a lot on the UTF and we have treasury companies and so there's pretty transparent, large buyers of some of these coins, but the rest of them are seemingly just stuck in the butt.

Yeah, I certainly, the old coins have competition in the form of publicly trade equities, you know, rappers around Bitcoin now and now wrappers around digital assets. So certainly that takes some of the heat. I mean, right now, over the past month, we are seeing. rotation to Ethereum. I mean, we saw that pump. Then the Solana had a little bit as well of capital rotation right now. I think it's around the midcaps that's getting a lot of the capital rotation into. So we are sort of seeing this, but it's certainly nothing like the past cycles. It's like, you know, Altswear beta, right? And now suddenly you can get beta on even Bitcoin treasury companies and like some Metaplanet going. Was it?

the X-N nav and everything going to the moon. We've seen that in the treasury company, so part of me wonders how much of real capital was coming in because it's the same guise that are moving capital from. I was going to say, I wonder if some of those whales who sold for 120,000 tokens have actually just moved their tokens into a treasury company cashed out on the stock market at a multiple and called it today.

Yeah, right? I imagine a lot of that stuff happened early because it's getting a little bit of risk. you to do that later in the cycle. But yeah, I think the sort of beta game, which is kind of, you know, it's playing chicken, you know, it's like this thing's going to run up, who's going to get out first? And suddenly we can do it with securities. It used to be with old coins. So it's a bit different this time. But like, it's the real fundamental is real capital coming in, which it is. But like, it's not at the scale of the previous.

cycles relative to its market cap. It's interesting because we have, you know, all of these treasury companies that are transparently raising money to buy Bitcoin, but a lot of them haven't even gotten clearance to buy. It's sort of cryptic as to who's done what, but you would think that there's this tremendous amount of demand. I guess on the optimistic side, you can say if there's been 120,000 coins sold and we still are at 112K or so as we're recording this, that's pretty good news.

but you know we're going to need a hell of a lot of buying to push to much higher prices and have they bought are they going to buy are they going to end up having to puke if we go down and never even get to buy because their mnab will be at a discount yeah yeah it's interesting times interesting instruments right now um certainly when the bear market hits i think you know you're not allowed to say bear market's going to hit willy there's never going to be a bear market again they're illegal now all right that's right oh sorry that's right some people believe in the super cycle and i also said the last cycle last cycle and then i kind of talked about this cycle but i don't think that's going to happen anymore i think we're just going to get a bear market actually we're going to get a bear mark um but this time i think it's different right um it's different in that we don't have the structural weakness as much as we did last bear market um there was a whole lot of obviously everyone saw it in 2022 um then ending with fdx blowing up but i'm taking with it most of the um the big boys along the way including genesis tracing um and and so there's you know

i'm laughing now but i was so disgusted i felt like leaving the the industry it was terrible but um we don't see that this time round but i think right now i think that it's the the macro markets are going to have a downturned and it's going to bring us down and we're more sense of liquidity so we'll have multipliers on the downward leg as well as with the upward league so i think a normal cycle you know assuming we do get this bare market if the volatility will be dampened or at least the amount of drawdown like you know if our entire cycle here was 69k previous bull market high to 125 or let's even say one that 30, 140, whatever, if that happens, but we also just get a 50% drawdown instead of an 85% drawdown on

the downside this time. Yeah, that would not be nice. It would be really nice. I'm kind of betting on, I mean, who knows, but like, I think we'd get, yeah, I think we'd get down to below 40, I guess. I think we'd get down below 40, actually. But I don't know. Who knows? Like, the main thing for me to look at is not to guess at the crystal ball at the high. I think no one can just the high if you get it if you're lucky because the tops are very volatile and unstable. Because when liquidity drops away, you're just trading on momentum. There's no liquidity buffer to hold that price up. So it could whipsaw because demands dropping in.

It's pure speculation. And that's very volatile. If you get the exact high, that's luck. the bottom is a lot easier and more stable because liquid is coming in and you can see it it just sort of stops the volatility compresses

because buyers are coming in buffering it and when you see that then that's the time to come back in never mind what the price is I think knowing these price predictions are not really what you want to look at you really want to look at

the flows are capital when they're coming in where they're waning and what the investors are doing yeah and you can get laid astray with, you know, looking at just the targets. Yeah. So you said with pretty solid conviction, you know, we'll get sort of a macro bear market and Bitcoin will go down with it. Do you think that there's a impending catalyst in your mind or it's just the normal cycle?

I also agree, obviously, that we're seeing irrational exuberance in macro markets generally, right? We see cold flying. That should be a signal that everything else should be going down, but they're all kind of just climbing this slow wall alongside gold, which we've never really seen before. And it just seems like nothing is as it should be for a bull market, but we're still in one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When investors are really moving to gold, there's a lot of faith in the system that is dropping. So, I don't know, what was the question? Yeah, I'm just saying, like, Do you think there's some catalyst that would send us into this bear market because, you know, we kind of joke now that it seems like they've pulled every single lever to keep things propped up, but gold is sniffing it out? What's going to be the thing that sort of, I guess, turns it for macro markets generally, but also do you think, you know, we have some sort of smaller FTX style blow up on the Bitcoin side, maybe a treasury company? No, I just think it's going to be macro. And I think maybe the tariffs are really properly kicking in may be enough to kick it off.

Yeah. We've had a bull market for a long time, right? If you look in them, not Bitcoin, but since 2008. And there's a lot of debt in the system. I don't know if the US government can stay solvent, you know, panning five, 10 years in the future. And I don't know. To me, it feels like since 1931 to 2025, what is that? That's over 50 years of government plugging holes from their overspending because they could do that.

And somewhere along the way, you cannot continue the base. You can see it in the fabric of society. You can see it in, you know, the average person, Mrs. Jones, you know, can she buy, can she afford, you know, I sound like 15% of Americans are really struggling to put food on the table with two people working in the family. It's getting out of hand. The fabric is starting to fall apart. And so, I don't know, like, we're 55 years into this. And, you know, Lynn Alden would say nothing stops this train. They're going to continue up front and this train's going to go off a cliff. And so how close are we to going off the cliff.

And people running to gold seems like there's some fears right now. Last time we had that was World Financial Crisis for, was it, four years to 2012? We thought, I remember trading those days and we thought the whole system might fall apart. Like, actually the banks would stop and we wouldn't be able to get, you know, food on the supermarkets because there's no one could actually, you know, the supply chain breaks down. So the question is how close are we to that? And these are things I think about in the longer term scheme of things. I guess the question then naturally there is if gold sniffing it out and many believe

that Bitcoin would behave like digital gold, is there a chance in your mind that if we really start to see, well, start to see the debt continue to spiral out of control? because we know that it already has, if Bitcoin could actually switch narrative, not drop with the rest of the market, and actually trade like gold? I think that is certainly possible, and I believe it will be, but Bitcoin's barely over $2 trillion, so it's one-tenth the size of gold. And so it's like, you know, think of a boat that is a super tanker, and then think of a boat that's 10 times smaller.

It's going to get buffeted. Yeah, it's going to get buffeted. And so Bitcoin needs to grow and needs to grow a lot bigger before it becomes stable. And it can be that sort of more stable asset. So, you know, and it's only just beginning, you know, it's the newest macro asset in 150 years. And it's tiny, right? But the trading at scale, meaning it's, you know, over a trillion dollars. But it's tiny.

the next ones are like you know you've got fx markets you've got um you know that that is a hundred trillion you've got gold 20 trillion you got real estate 250 trillion bond markets how many trillions is that hundreds hundreds of trillion 300 trillion so it's like we're talking you know big boy club and we're like the new sort of baby in in town and it's going to be pretty volatile um it's going to be pushed around a lot um for a while maybe it's a decade 145.145.1 trillion estimate on the entire global bond market. That's pretty big compared to two trillion. Yeah, yeah. It'll take 10, 15 years unless, you know, something breaks and one runs away to Bitcoin. But it'll take time. I think we're bit conditioned from 2017 and prior. But these things move really, really quickly. But we're in different game now. We're in the trillions. And so, you know, you get the odd person that says Bitcoin might hit 2 million.

And then you go, wait a minute, you mean it's going to be like, well, half world of GDP, you know, half of all equities on the planet, you know, double two and a half times gold in this bull market, you know, are you getting into the limits of the size of the economy here now? So it'll take time. remind me when you got into bitcoin 2013 near the top actually did get bounce so December yeah December 2013

so when you started did you ever think that conversations on podcasts would be about black rock and a Bitcoin president and the president's family launching tokens and mining companies and Bitcoin treasuries and

and meme coins, like how far off your bingo card is the 2025 that you envisioned when you started? Yeah, well, I didn't have any understanding of any of this, right? Like even financial markets then, I was more of a tech guy, and I just thought, see, look at the MP3s. They went from MP3 encoded downloads by a few people on the internet, and now we've got the iPod, and now that's mainstream enough. and it took 12 years and I figured gee 2013 this feels like ripping a CD onto MP3

and uploading to websites other people download it illegally and it felt like that kind of thing and it wasn't ready for prime time but maybe 12 years you know 2025 it would be mainstream and I didn't know what that would look like

you know I'm not a finance guy back then but more or less it's kind of hit it so it's hard to to think about the details, but on the broad strokes, time-wise, it was about right, I think. That's why I kind of bought one Bitcoin, because I didn't want to be pissed off if that happened, and I saw it. And then I walked away and carried on doing my thing until much later

to really research it. But that was it. So I guess a broader question is this level of government adoption, sort of personal profit from the president. Do you see it as a net positive for the asset class? Do you see any hidden traps there? I can tell you my view is that obviously having like positive legislation versus the last four years and a positive view is good, but that the family involvement maybe is not as good. So it's a bit of a, you know, a difficult question. But I mean, it's nice to not be persecuted at all times for being in the asset class yeah i know it's it's it's made it like seeing this cycle i think larry think was the big one um yeah i agree with that because larry think is like you know he's

we're talking about decades of of stability here with black rock you know where the president is a four-year term thing and i wonder how much you know an opposition would try to turn over you know what has been done so far um but you know I think what's happening right now is, and I said it a long time ago, before the election cycle, three years before election cycle, I said it's really, you know, the point, the thing is, there's enough wealth in this industry that you can lobby and effectively fund politicians on policy. And I think that's what's happening, right? where i think that there's a number of um like you know i think coinbase was was very very particular

like very visible on that they were very much showing the list of the senators that were against and pro stuff like that so i think that i think a lot of that has it's the the cohort of bitcoin and crypto voters have grown in the in the in the in the um population so it's it's got its own defense through the political system what else is on your radar like you're obviously an active trader how are you approaching markets in general is there anything that you're really excited to trade in this environment yeah yeah no i try trade very very short term um it's almost like market making sort of stuff but then um i also yeah it's not quite arbitrage I sort of like try to buy the dips and, you know, it means reverts upwards.

It's very short-term tactical. It kind of looks like a market-nutry yield. The long-term stuff is mainly I really want to make sure that I'm in cash. Don't tell the hoddlers, but, you know, I think the hoddlers are onto the right thing is to hold. But I've always done best when I move to cash and just sit out the mayhem. And maybe I'm wrong, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm as wishful thinking that we're going to be a market and it goes up forever, Laura. But, like, I'm looking forward to a bearish market also.

And, you know, it's usually the long-term trade to the best. Like, you call them investments, I'd say, moving out, moving back in. And, you know, I'm a builder. I'm building stuff. Most people don't know what I'm building, but I am building stuff. stuff in the BMA. You hit it. Well, we've already built the crest line of products, which is three institutional funds

that get you yield on US dollars, one which gets you yield on Bitcoin, one that's institutionally sort of hardened to work with a Swiss private bank for the investors. So this is like, you could think of it as like, you know, all these earned products. but this is how it's actually done. They would give the money to a whole bunch of traders and try and trade it. There's a whole institutional thing about it, and it's a fund of fund. So that's been the last three and a half years, and that's my learning and trade-fi,

and now I'm moving into building, let's call it a credit fund. So basically tapping Tradify and grab capital. via capital and giving it to bitcoiners lending it out to bitcoiners who want to use their bitcoins and doing it in a such way

where they have a private key on their collateral so they know it's not no hanky-panky it's not being moved around it's not being re-hypublicated so I want to get a profitable business that's working to make use of this Bitcoin

and have Bitcoin self-custodied because this is the type of lending we'll do and I want to promote self-custody so that's what's loading me up right now haven't announced the product and they say that all the builders relish the bare market because everything

calms down and you can actually build in a bare market when everybody's not insanely euphoric looking at prices so I can understand why you'd be looking forward to a bare market in that perspective I also like it's so triggering to obviously bitcoiners when you talk about looking forward to a dip.

I don't know if I look forward to a bear market or not, but I still have cash and I would prefer to buy Bitcoin lower than now, if possible. I don't know why that's such a jarring sentiment. Look, I would say... If you're not selling tomorrow, shouldn't you want lower... Like, if you're one of these people

who says, I'm going to hold forever, shouldn't you just want a permanent bear market to give tons of time to buy a bunch of cheaper coins? Well, maybe not permanent, but... No, but like, I don't know. know that if like the the true bitcoin is like i remember seeing the price pump right and i think it pumped a hundred thousand or something i was like from 70 and i was like now it went up again you know um and because when you're sure of the trajectory you you kind of like the lower prices because you can

stack more um and so i think we should celebrate it coming back down because it's another opportunity um yeah like if you're confident in what you bought if you've done the research then every beer market is great you you can wind back time you can wind back the clock and and get some more right um so so clearly you're focused on building institutional grade products around this so naturally you believe that that's where the puck is moving as far as where the big money is going to come right so who do you foresee when you're building all these things as your potential customers where do you think that money is going to come from the well i mean look at how about i ask of this is the money that we're seeking um fiat um right is is going to come from trade fire traditional investors

who want um yield on their u s dollars um and currently the market for us dollars in our industry between 10 and 16% right that's well above the risk rate it outperforms SP 500 and with zero volatility zero drawdown so it's incredibly great for them um so that's one customer the other customers the bitcoiners who are getting 20 30 up to 80 percent annualized return on their bitcoin over four-year cycle depending on where they bought it in the cycle um so it makes sense for them as well just you know um Those two should low balance. Bitcoin's multi-trillion dollars, and it's getting bigger, and it should get to the tens of trillions.

It should get to the 20s of trillions. And there's infinite fiat being printed, and the fiat and the system is $100 trillion. And I think that, like, this is great. We've got a business here for multiple decades, and I want to empower the Bitcoin ecosystem, make it useful, I believe that we've got two choices right now. We're going to move towards central bank digital currencies,

basically lock in this fee at debasement forever into a totalitarian, sort of pretty nasty 1984 scenario, or we have fair money, and a lot of this burns to the ground, and we have freedom. And so freedom of our finances. So those, it's bifurcating, and I know what side I'm picking, and I want to empower that side. So it's mission-driven as much as anything. I'm trying to find the quote.

I don't have it right in front of me, but literally today a Russian minister said that he was outraged that the United States was going to basically use stable coins to, like, I wish I had the exact words, but basically to just shove all our debt into stable coins and distribute it around the world to effectively, you know, democratize our debt around the world and get out of our dead problem because you really it is interesting though because every time someone buys a stable coin they're kind of passively buying a treasury or yeah yeah who's buying a treasury for them to do it so we talk about someone in vandalisuelas sending 20 bucks to someone else in tether tether is buying you know 16 or 14 whatever the number is

dollars worth of treasury for that to happen supporting the u.s government you know it's like great you know like um china's no longer buying in fact they're selling and so someone's got to displace it And it turns out if Tether goes, if Bitcoin goes from $100,000 to a million, that means Tether is going to increase because it's the other side of the book. You know, Tether is the gateway to our crypto ecosystem. Everything's traded against it, you know, in the major markets on finance and DFI. So you work that out and it works out that Tether can displace China on the short-dated T-bills. So now you get a situation where the U.S. government's

opinion on the growth of Bitcoin to remain, you know, solid. It's ironic. It's ironic. It's pretty astounding that the two killer use cases so far for blockchain technology are obviously Bitcoin, which is probably the greatest chance at hedging against the fiat nonsense and actually owning the future digital reserve currency. And the other one is digital fiat to make a fiat, the thing that Bitcoin was created basically against spread around the world right yeah it's yeah it does make sense though because

you need an on-ramp right you need an on-ramp and because banks never gave that on-ramp tether came birthed into existence and they sort of you know maybe abstracted that layer juggling all the banks who's going to work with us who's going to work with us and so that became the om-ramp and they did that very well they did an amazing job over the you know I don't think anything stops stable coin adoption. It's such an incredible tool, and now that obviously it's been legislated, I think we're just going to get, A, the growth of the existing ones, but we're going to just get, you know, more J.P. Morgan and Citibank and Western Union coins and stable coins in every corner of

the globe. I wonder if I actually see successful stable coins on anything other than dollars, though, because we really haven't yet yeah yeah yeah it's all around the u.s dollar isn't it that's the other one i mean they've tried i mean tether has euroback stable coins but at the end of the day when you're in some country i guess looking to use a stable coin you'd rather trade a dollar than a euro right so interestingly would it makes when it makes sense to like you know you use the base layer of U.S. treasuries and U.S. dollars, you know, if you've got a big, big sort of base there, well, I mean, hedging's pretty cheap, isn't it? Wouldn't you be worth just doing an FX hedge? Maybe? Not sure. Yeah. It's interesting, but I guess it just proves, because, you know,

Bitcoiners, myself included, would say ideally you would want people all over the world to run to Bitcoin. but the thing is they still want dollars. And so, like, dollars are still way better than anything else other than Bitcoin. So they rush to dollars and stable coins give them to be able to do that. I've heard some crazy stories. I have a friend in Argentina. And he said that, you know, I guess pre-stablecoin, that you would go to the black market to get cash in dollars. You know, and you would pay two, three-x premium to get it.

But someone would basically send you money, you know, a bank wire or something. You would get it in your bank account. You would cash out, go buy dollars. then you go back to the same bank and put the U.S. dollars into a safe deposit box at the bank instead of into a bank account. So you basically use the bank as like a depository for the safe deposit box with cash that you paid too much for to avoid being in your own currency. Well, stable coins do seriously solve that. Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. It's a great invention, right? The reality is we're in a fiat world and everyone needs fiat to live.

apart from these hardcore bitcoins that are, you know, using SATs. And I don't know, you've got to be a bit of a ninja to figure out how to do that. I've made a few. But it's not easy. It's not for the... There's always a way, but it is still very, very difficult to live your life entirely in Sats. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's the reason why, you know, dollars exist,

and stable coins exist and so forth. So, yeah. I guess Bitcoin can be your savings account and stable coins can be your checking account, your spending and save in Bitcoin and spend that dirty, fast digital fiat. Yeah, pretty much. And I think it's also an emotional buffer. You know, like when the price really crashes, you can get excited because you can sort of rotate some of your buffer in or at least you've got runway.

I think being too heavy in Bitcoin, like 99%. um you can freak a bit um yeah because you can't spend your bitcoin you've got to like rotate it to us dollars or whatever the fee it is so then you buy shit and it doesn't feel good to sell the dip you know you don't want to sell the dip you want to have some buffer building so you can take a loan against it and never have to sell it i mean that's exactly that's that's the whole point of it that's whole point of it so listen you kind of alluded to the fact that we'll get a bare market inevitably that means we get another bull market, but when you started throwing out, you know,

Bitcoin at $2 million or higher how much of the global economy that becomes, so do you think that there's a ceiling in your mind to Bitcoin price? I mean, you know, we hear this, Bitcoin will be a million by 2030 or 14 million by 2040, these huge monster numbers. In your mind, what do you think is a reasonable, I won't call it forever top?

But where does the, you know, how high can it go before it's so big that the volatility is just dampened in it, by the way, it would have to kind of stable out to be the global reserve asset, so that's not unreasonable. Yeah, I look. First, the price target is kind of like the wrong approach because it depends on the debasements. The unit account is you're measuring in the US dollars, which is being debased and the unit account is distorted.

So I think of it in terms of the pools of capital. generally money is one-to-one match with GDP and it seems like it's pretty close to one-to-one match with all the publicly traded equities around just over 100 trillion. So I think that would be a pretty good, like, sweet spot. If Bitcoin becomes the new money, then that would be, you know, equivalent to world GDP.

300 trillion, maybe that's 200 trillion, maybe it's, you know, a, you know, a gazillion, like 500 trillion, you know, if AI, you know, the AI wave and, you know, like, all sorts of, who knows, we hit the singularity in 2027 and, oh, geez, it's so hard, but to think of in dollar terms, but I do think it's fair that money should be one-to-one match with world GDP, because that's what you're trading against. And then you've got to think about, um, How much of that capital in real estate is just store of value versus actually living in? How much of that would Bitcoin take? And so forth.

So, you know, on the optimistic, I would think double world GDP. On the pessimistic, I think, something like gold, which is one-fifth of world GDP. One-fifth of world GDP to double world GDP is the zone. no it's spread i'll take it yeah it's a big spread so anywhere from you know a million or two dollars a two million dollars a bitcoin to a guillian deflated u.s dollars worth of a bitcoin yeah yeah yeah yeah something like that yeah um this hand-weaving it's not it's not useful everyone right it's just like this is the point of view a target to 50 years in the future should be super inaccurate and loose and anyone who's telling you with conviction that they know where that going is nuts yeah i know it's

literally a past midnight for you man and uh yeah i got to go run and get my kid so i appreciate you uh staying up and taking the time willie any final thoughts before i let you go no no thoughts it's way you like to think that just means we nailed it man go to bed thank you so much really i'll speak to you soon all right thanks scott cheers have a good one