The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Will Become Global Reserve Currency | Pierre Rochard, Kraken

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Our guest today brings a refreshing utopian vision to the show: fix the money, fix the world. How do we fix it? With Bitcoin. Pierre Rochard (@pierre_rochard), Bitcoin Product Manager at Kraken, joined host Scott Melker at Bitcoin Miami to discuss why CBDC is contrary to America’s core beliefs, the capital gains tax issue, FUD cycles, and how Bitcoin will fix our money headaches for good. JOIN THE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS ►► Secure your assets, secure your future, with Arculus. Arculus is the crypto cold storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution today at https://amazon.com/arculus ►► Have you ever had your exchange go completely offline during days of high volatility? Of course you have. We've all been through it. Those days are no longer with Bullish. Bullish is a new breed of digital asset exchange that empowers users to trade with deep and predictable liquidity across highly variable market conditions. They also have incredible automated market-making and industry-leading security. I can't get enough of this platform and it's fully regulated. Sign up here: https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube EPISODE LINKS https://twitter.com/pierre_rochard Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

I think that, you know, for too long, the U.S. has used those exchange rates as a weapon, essentially, against developing nations and taking away their sovereignty. This episode is sponsored by Bullish and Arculus. Stay tuned for more information Let's go. This episode is sponsored by Bullish and Arculus. Stay tuned for more information on both of these incredible companies later in the episode. Arguably the most important people in the Bitcoin space are the builders. Luckily we have people like Pierre Rochard who's in charge of product at Kraken, integrating Bitcoin in the Lightning Network and making the tools that will lead us to mainstream adoption and making the Bitcoin Lightning Networks much easier to use, even for your

grandma. We talked about why Bitcoin is so important and what they're building to bring it to the mainstream. I was talking yesterday with Peter Wall from Argo, and he was definitely breaking down the sort of Texas Bitcoin migration. And it happened fast. He's like, literally since they shut down China last year. Thanks to China. Yeah. But were you always in Texas or did you move there specifically for this reason?

So, no, I went to UT Austin. So I was in college there and my parents moved there for my dad's job when I was in middle school. So the Bitcoin community came to you. Yeah, pretty much. Although I also lived in New York for a while, for five years. And so I moved to New York after I graduated from college, moved back a couple of years ago, back to Austin when the kids were running around. Yeah, you have my same story. So I was in, I went to college in Philly.

I was in New York City for 10 years. I'm a little bit older than you probably. Then I was down here for five years and then I ran back to my hometown Gainesville, Florida when I had our kids. The grandparents aren't coming to me. That's exactly it. Yeah, no, I got to get close to the grandparents. But you got lucky because like New York is ceasing to be the financial capital and now everything seemingly is moving sort of to Florida and to Texas. So what's it like in Austin now? I mean, it's amazing.

Not only are there a lot of Bitcoiners out there, there's a lot of Bitcoin startups as well. Unchained Capital has their office there. And yeah, the Riot Blockchain is one of kind of the big publicly traded companies. I'm on their advisory board. Right. And they've got their facility out there. So do you think that it's been a huge boon for the mining industry to see the hash rate migrate from China to North America?

A hundred percent. I think historians will look back on it as like that was the biggest moment in geopolitics of the 21st century was China shutting down. I mean, it's such a self-owned. They don't realize it yet. They dunked on themselves so hard. It's astounding. And because, I mean, in my mind, each mining rig represents so much wealth. It's like if you had banned oil and gas production during the Rockefeller

days of the big boom. Why? Why would they make such a huge mistake? And it's not like they had no context to understand what was happening because the whole narrative has been China controls too much hash rate. China could be the one to destroy Bitcoin. Not true. But of course, it was always that we feared that China had too much control. Seems like the kind of government that would want to maintain and keep that. Right.

I think that their concern is about maximizing the usage of their currency, the Chinese yuan, and they're willing to just try to obliterate everything else so that the Yuan is the only currency that people are using, whether it's in the Asia Pacific region or in Africa, and that that's what gives them strength because they can print more of it. But ultimately, I think that's short-sighted. It's the innovator's dilemma, right? That they have this business that's doing well, and then they've got this something here that's disruptive. And rather than embracing it, they're rejecting it. Contrast with El Salvador, right?

Where in El Salvador, they don't have their own currency to print. And so they don't have that dilemma, and they can go out and embrace Bitcoin. They've already been using the dollar, so it's not like they've't have that dilemma. And they can go out and embrace Bitcoin. They've already been using the dollar. So it's not like they've had their own currency. Right. But there's a deeper story there with El Salvador that people maybe don't realize what you just touched on. They're dollarized. Right.

So El Salvador doesn't have, they have to obviously deal with the IMF and the United States. But their currency is the dollar. So they don't have to really worry about the hyperinflation. But they also don't have to worry about if they adopted the currency that the United States would then purposely devalue and destroy their own. I think that's probably why we haven't seen a lot of other countries follow, right? If you're a South American country that's not primarily using the dollar, the United States could literally destroy your currency. That's right. Instantaneously. So El Salvador sort of ends up being the only place this experiment could happen. That's right.

I think there are a few other dollar-wise countries, so maybe we'll see some headlines soon. I think probably like today. Yeah, perhaps today, some big announcements. And yeah, I think you're right. And I think that, you know, for too long, the U.S. has used those exchange rates as a weapon, essentially, against developing nations and taking away their sovereignty. Yeah. So it's going to be interesting if this, I guess, experiment in El Salvador and wherever we sort of see next can grow fast enough in the face of that. Yeah. I mean, I foresee El Salvador becoming like Hong Kong or Singapore of Latin America in terms of the amount of wealth that they're going to be able to attract by going on the Bitcoin standard. And then for all those other countries that are in that incumbent

innovators dilemma, they're going to see how far ahead El Salvador is getting. And that's going to motivate them to be like, all right, well, even if we have our local currency, like let's just go all in on Bitcoin. Right, but even if they don't go all in, aren't there sort of intermediate steps that we can cheer for? Like just add some to your central bank. Yeah, absolutely.

Right. Or just make it so that there's very little, you know, there's not a huge regulatory burden and people can adopt it, right? The individuals, the corporations in those countries, they have, you know, thriving economies already that could become Bitcoinized. So basically, we just, we can still cheer for reducing friction basically in any way

possible for them. It's almost like just don't fight it. Allow it to happen because it's going to. I think that Ukraine has been sort of, well, maybe step it back. Canada, to me, was sort of the really big event, right? Because people, I think, can't happen to us here sort of mentality and saw, obviously, transactions. Their banks first, but then even their Bitcoin transactions really started to be blocked. And then the war obviously broke out in Russia and Ukraine. And we've seen sort of these evolving use cases, which to me has been a crazy narrative.

You started with sort of peer-to-peer cash, digital gold, on and on and on. Were you surprised at all to see sort of the level of commitment from the crypto community to raise? I mean, it's probably $100 million by now as we're talking. That wasn't a use case we've been talking about, right? Well, and I wonder, too, how much of it was the crypto community versus people who felt for Ukraine who bought crypto and then, you know, donated it. And so really, it was like using it as a rails. Because when you're in a war zone, things don't work as well as they should, right? We're in peacetime, we take it for granted that you can access your bank, you can go to the ATM, things work. And it's, to me, it was amazing to in in Canada that it kind of broke down this idea that sanctions are about foreign policy.

And for the first time in a long time, people are like, oh, you can use sanctions domestically, apparently. And there's not really any kind of rules. And there's kind of been this breakdown in norms. I think it was driven by the lockdowns where it's like, oh, all right, well, if they can force you to stay in your house, why wouldn't they be able to take your bank account from you? And so I think that there's a lot of rethinking in terms of our rights. If the government can take them away so quickly, what about something like Bitcoin where we can defend our rights much more effectively than we could with a bank account?

Right. But I think your average person never considered that domestic sanctions, certainly not in a first world or a country like that. But that makes you then we go back to China, that's effectively the purpose of their central bank digital currency, right? You talk about Yuan dominance, but it's really going to be digital yuan dominance and call it a central bank's wet dream or a government's wet dream, but like literal exact to the penny control of the money supply. That plus their idea of a social credit score. So really micromanaging our daily lives. I think

it's completely contrary to what America is about. I immigrated here from France. My parents immigrated here from France. And they did so because they wanted more freedom and more opportunity. And so I think that the United States needs to go in the opposite direction of saying, we're not doing a CBDC. If people want to use stable coins, they can use stable coins. But that's not going to be issued and controlled and surveilled by the government 24-7. And there's already today with the banking system as it is, the Bank Secrecy Act is unconstitutional. was fabricated by judiciary fiat. And I'm hoping that it gets rolled back eventually. But we're so

deep into this mindset of the government should be able to control everything because someone somewhere might do something bad. It's like, that's not how risk works. Right. But your family immigrated here for more freedom. Exactly. As you said, do you feel like they've found it? They have, relative to France. Now I'm hopeful that Bitcoin not only is going to bring more freedom to the US, but also more freedom to France as well. I would like to move back a little bit and work on my French again, but until they Bitcoinize

their economy, I'm going to stay put here in Texas. So, here, Alyssa, you're obviously, you're at Kraken. Kraken's a bank. Yep. It is now. Yeah. Kraken is now a bank, one of the few.

I spoke at length with Caitlin Long, and she seemed to be sort of, who obviously, other bank in Wyoming, sort of ringing the alarms that there might be a huge fight coming with regulators on the banking side. Is that something that you guys are actively monitoring or thinking about at Kraken? So thankfully, it's not part of my job duties at all, because I focus 100% on Bitcoin and Lightning that are the opposite of asking for permission. It's really about, let's use open source software to build value for clients and for the company. And so I thankfully don't have to deal with the banking regulation side. But I think that they put together an excellent team that's going to be able to make progress. Okay, so you're talking about obviously your job then is product focusing on Lightning

and Bitcoin. Where are we at would you say? I guess we could talk about like on the adoption curve, especially obviously with so many other competitive protocols being developed or even technologically with it being something that could scale to, I mean, we all have the dream that the Lightning Network is the payment layer for 5 billion people in the world. How realistic is that? Where are we at on those curves? So in a sense, we could do that today.

We could onboard the world today. The problem would be that we'd be onboarding them onto custodial solutions. And so if we want to go the non-custodial route, I think that historically, Bitcoin has always had this tension that so many people hold their Bitcoin at Coinbase, at Kraken, at other custodians. But at the same time, the hardware wallet companies move millions of units. So there are lots of folks who are taking control of their keys and who are empowering themselves.

So I think that it's going to continue to be the case that there's a mix of non-custodial and custodial. On Lightning in particular, I think that the scaling solutions that are coming out now give me no concerns at all about our ability to onboard as many people as we can who want to do non-custodial. To me, I think the point of friction is going to be about trusting yourself to hold your own keys. Oh, yeah. We're our own worst enemy. There's no question there. Yeah. Versus the cost of doing an on-chain transaction. I think that's actually going to continue to be very low. We saw last year, because blockchain.com adopted Segwit and other factors as well, the on-chain fees on Bitcoin are astoundingly low

relative to some of the other competitors where they're trending up. $500 ETH transaction, right, of course. And at the same time, we're seeing a bit of a convergence on the utility side where Lightning Labs just announced a new protocol, Taro, which leverages Bitcoin's layer one upgrade it had last year, Taproot, in order to be able to issue tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain itself natively embedded inside of some miracle trees. I won't get into the cryptography, but it's actually seeing kind of a convergence of feature set with the competitors while still being highly scalable, reliable, having kind of the same ethos that Bitcoin has always had of being a solid layer one to build on top of. Right. So it really all starts with the foundation.

Yeah. And Bitcoin obviously is the best foundation to build these systems on. It's just interesting sort of seeing the proliferation of all these competitors over time. And then obviously, I think for people who are Bitcoin maximalists or deeply down it, it's been a sort of a mental, I don't want to call it mental Olympics, but a growing curve to even accept that these things being built on Bitcoin are OK. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that there's a difference between saying you can do a token on Bitcoin versus you should, or that you should buy one versus buying Bitcoin. And so there's a lot of, you know, healthy debate around that. Obviously, I'm in the camp that you should only invest in Bitcoin. Sure. And I think that what I'd like to see personally are tokens that are pure utility.

So it's more like a ticket to go to an event where after the event, the token disappears. Kind of an NFT on Bitcoin. Yeah, not something that, well, an NFT, NFTs have a long life. But they do have that sort... But they can have that... Right. Basically, an NFT that burns. Right.

So that it entirely removes the speculative aspect of it. And it's purely about the utility of what it's going to enable for you. Because I think that... Yeah, I think people should be speculating on holding Bitcoin for the long term. I agree. Yeah. Okay. Well, which I think probably people like us isn't speculating at all.

It's investing. Right, right. In the Austrian economics world, it's like everything is speculation. Yes. So we don't know the future. Right. Yeah. Absolutely true.

But that's like an infinite regress of you literally can't buy anything. Right, right, right. Without it being being consistent. Speculation isn't bad. It just has to be supported by some fundamentals. Have you ever been trading crypto and during bouts of high volatility had your exchange go completely offline or seen the order books go thin and have absolutely no liquidity for your trade? I know that you have. It's happened to every single crypto trader, but it's not an issue anymore thanks to Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with confidence across variable market conditions

while secure in a regulated environment that's backed by multi-billion dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish treasury. Follow at Bullish on Twitter or visit bullish.com slash Melker to learn more. We all believe and know that cryptocurrencies are the future, but it's still very scary to be your own bank and have to secure your assets. Most of the traditional hardware wallets are hard to use. They're clunky and people lose their private keys. It's not really that efficient. And that's where the Arculus key card comes in. I absolutely love this thing. I've transitioned largely to using it for most of my assets. It's literally just a card that you tap right on your mobile device. You can send,

receive, swap, buy, and sell crypto with that simple action. It's literally amazing. There's no cords. There's no charging. There's no Bluetooth. The only person that has access to your crypto is you. You guys have got to try it. And guess what? You can buy it right on Amazon. Go buy your Arculus on Amazon now. Thomas Lee was on a panel and I was doing the commentary, myself and Robert Breedlove. And he basically said that we need more speculation actually in crypto, that basically it's 2.1 to every Bitcoin being actually used. There's 2.5 in speculation. And you look at the dollar, it's like 97 to 1. Right. And he was like, you actually need way more speculation and things being happened

and people trading around this to have it become a bigger market. It was a really interesting dichotomy I'd never considered or heard of. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I still think we're very early, which is crazy for us who've been around for years. It's like Bitcoin's liquidity is good. But, you know, if you compare it to treasuries or something like, you know, the stock market, we could see a lot more volume, a lot bigger coin. We're smaller than some companies. Yeah.

So, you know, not even the biggest ones, but, you know, especially when you break it down asset by asset. So you're building all this stuff, right? Lightning Network's great. The thing seemingly nobody kind of talks about, in other countries it's amazing, but here if you and I are having this conversation and I'm like, let me buy you a coffee, just Venmo me the money,

there's no taxable transaction there. If you're Lightning me Bitcoin, you just sold something to sell it to me. Right, right. To send it to me. The capital gains tax issue is a problem. I know that Senator Lummis and others in Congress are trying to push through a $600 kind of threshold. I hope it's inflation adjusted.

I was going to say, $600 is going to be $6,000 by the time they pass it. Right, right. Exactly. So that'll help. It won't help, though, with this idea that, you know, it's kind of the Bitcoin pizza problem, that the value is going to go up so much in the future. Why would you spend your Bitcoin today? And I kind of see it as that's true.

But if you're getting paid in Bitcoin, you don't have an option. So it's really about building the circular economy. And how do we get more people getting paid in Bitcoin? And that will naturally lead to more people spending Bitcoin. That's such a good point. If you're buying it to hold it, you're never going to use it. Right. Right.

Which is actually a problem for the network. Because you're using your fiat paycheck and you're putting it in there. So you basically have to become entirely Bitcoin native and your bank account is the thing that you sometimes have to use when you need to pay a bill and they won't accept the Bitcoin. And there's no other option. Can we get there in the United States to a place where enough people are literally, their banking system is native Bitcoin and everything else is ancillary? I think so. I think so.

On the pull side, people are getting pulled into Bitcoin not only because it's value increasing, but because it gives you more freedom. It gives you more control. On the push side, people are getting pushed out of the fiat system by inflation. They're getting pushed out by these sanctions, by all of these limitations that they have. So I think that massive adoption is inevitable. We can debate about the timeline, right? It doesn't matter, though. Yeah. And in a way, it's taken way longer than I thought. But at the same time, I see the progress every day. So I can't get too impatient. You said it's taken longer than you thought. When did you get into Bitcoin? Like what was your, I guess, your evolution story? Yeah. So at the beginning of 2013...

Early. So early. Now, I was a broke college student. So it's not like I was like Barry Silbert, you know, scooping up all the coins or the Winklevite. It would be nice, but that's not the hand I was dealt. But nevertheless, seeing that April bull market and there was like this narrative about Cyprus adopting Bitcoin, which turned out to be complete bunk. But again, too early, right? And then, you know, we see El Salvador doing it years and years later. And then in the bull market in December, when it went up to $1,200, which was like mind-blowing at the time, there I thought like it's's game over. This is hyper-Bitcoinization. We did it.

It's just going to keep going up. And I think that at the top of any bull market, everyone's sentiment becomes, it's going to a million dollars. Supercycle. Yeah, supercycle, laser eyes. And that's just what defines the top of the bull market. And then conversely, at the bottom of the bear market, I remember the despair after that. Zero. Going to zero.

It's literally the exact opposite sentiment and the exact same thing. I remember having a conversation with my friend who, he founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and I was helping him with the website. And I remember we were talking about how we should keep the website up even if it goes to zero, just as kind of like a historical thing. you were like, yeah, you don't believe it. Yeah But you also can't help with it creeping in. Yeah, there's that 1% Maybe it could yeah, right But so I think the thing that's really changed now certainly for you is early The Bitcoin going to zero narrative is done. You don't even hear it.

No, never, never. I mean, except for people who are like, you know, living in their own world. Yeah, it's completely unrealistic. I think that the network effects have gained a critical mass where, yeah, it's here to stay as they say now. That's the narrative. Yeah, here to stay, but then I guess's the narrative yeah here to stay but then I guess then it starts to be an issue of how we define it and jurisdictionally like every single we have

first of all we have every country in the world that needs to figure it out and then you try to operate in the United States which you guys actually have the balls to do you have to go state to state right I mean you guys probably have more lawyers figuring out what you can do in every state in the United States than most companies have dealing with regulators around the world. We've got a great legal team led by Marco Santori, and they're doing a great job keeping us compliant, keeping us able to deliver Bitcoin into the hands of millions of people. It is a challenge. And in Europe, it seems like there's a move to make it more challenging. But I'm hopeful that the European

community is going to come together and explain like, hey, look, this has value to us. This isn't just about criminals. This is about real people. In fact, very little of it is about criminals. Less than 1%. Less than 1%. It's crazy. Now do the dollar. Right. Yeah.

Let's benchmark. Let's see. How are we doing relative to the dollar? I think they were actually doing pretty well. Yeah. I mean, and we see the FUD cycles, right? And slowly, we're actually eliminating them. China eliminated themselves.

They were the best one, right? The China ban was every six months if Bitcoin dropped, it was because China had banned it. Now they've really banned it, so we don't need to worry about that. I think we're now seeing the FUD cycle of only for criminals and stuff really diminished. The new one seems to be for getting around sanctions. I think even energy is slowing. Yeah, I agree.

Energy is slowing because the facts don't back it up. I know. It's hard when you have to actually use science and math and facts. Yeah. And Nick Carter has done a great job of pointing that out that, hey, if you actually look at the energy use mix, it's better than what most people are doing on the grid. So I think Bitcoin has an advantage there. It's just about education. And then you have folks like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who are so dogmatic and they're like entrenched in their position that it's going to be tough to help them see, hey, look, Bitcoin's

not so bad. I heard Jack Dorsey recently met with a bunch of congressional Democrats. So hopefully things are moving. I think that the bipolarity and sort of that it's a bipartisan issue is overblown, personally. I think she's the loudest. She is, yeah. But I don't think most of them agree with her, even on her side. That's right. I've spoken to a lot of congressional Democrats. I've had them on the show and whatever. I think most politicians understand reasonably that technology moving forward is probably a good thing and that freedom is probably a good thing.

Absolutely. I think it's her and Brad Sherman. So it's like two out of hundreds of Congress people. And so I definitely think that in terms of bringing people together, Bitcoin does a great job of that. And, you know, it's going to bring people towards the center. So I saw Senator Lummis has been making outreach to the Democrats. So I think that in the U.S., it gives me a tremendous amount of hope that not only is Bitcoin not going to get banned, but we're actually going to get constructive policy that's going to help accelerate Bitcoin adoption here. I like to believe that. And it certainly seems we're trending that way. And a year ago, I would have told you still maybe we're kind of screwed. But you pointed out Europe, right?

We don't have to look very far to see the opposite happening. Talk about the idea of buying the coffee and the taxes. Well, now in Europe, if I want to send you a Venmo for something over $1,000, I need to get your ID and your social security number. And not only that, I need to submit it to the proper authorities. It's insane. It is. And they say it's about money laundering and about the environment, but I think they have a real concern about the ongoing legitimacy of the Euro project itself. I remember when I was a kid going to France, we used the French franc. And the euro is very young. And I think that in terms of brand value, it's not like

the US dollar where it's like- It's not the global reserve currency. Right, right. And nobody's ever claimed it to be. And anchored in this past with the gold standard. I think that they're very sensitive to the idea that today we have the Euro, tomorrow maybe we all just use that coin because they've gone through a currency transition before and they know it can happen pretty quickly. They don't want it to happen because the Euro gives a lot of not only control, but the ability to give subsidies internally and to kind of, you know, politically grease the wheels. They rely on that a lot. So I think that there's a lot of

misdirection about their motives when really it's about keeping control of the money printer. Yeah. And also here, we can vote you out. Right. We might not. But like Elizabeth Warren's position puts her at legitimate risk with her constituents. Maybe she doesn't view it that way, that love cryptocurrency. Or maybe being even pro-Bitcoin puts you in favor with your constituency. Most of these people in the EU are basically unelected.

A lot of them are, yeah. If you're being appointed, you don't have the political risk of making these decisions. You can actually go and do these things. That's right. But that's a problem. And the central banks being independent. So I think the European central banks, far more independent, but really unaccountable, right? And so compared to the U.S., I think that maybe the Fed is not independent enough in the U.S. where its monetary policy is affected by who's president, what the priorities are, when the next election is. So yeah, we'll see.

Right. So I mean, that brings you, bringing it to the Fed in the United States, we've obviously seen the out of everybody knows the memes at this point, 40% of the money supply ever printed in the last 18 months, et cetera, et cetera. Now we get to this kind of interesting crossroads where they speak more hawkishly, right? But there's an election coming. Right. You said maybe they're not as independent as we think. How do you thread that needle of monetary policy if you know that what you have to do would make you lose your job? Right. And the only person who has been able to do that was Paul Volcker in the early 80s. And he's no longer with us. But debt to GDP back then was like 35 percent or something. Now we're in the hundreds of percent.

I agree. It's a completely different scenario. And yet, technically, that's what they're supposed to be doing right now is raising interest rates because of how high inflation is. So I don't think that they're going to be able to do it. I think inflation is going to continue to run. That's going to mean that the real value of the debt is going to go down with inflation. And it's just a soft default. And I think it's a massive tailwind for Bitcoin, obviously.

So I think that I'm, you know, you mentioned SuperCycle jokingly as kind of being the hyper bullish. But I do think that, you know, I heard somebody say that we're in a bear market now. And in my mind, a bear market is an 85% retrace on Bitcoin and a 99% on, you know, the altcoins. And extended. And extended. We're not seeing that at all. What we're seeing is like 25 to 35% off the highs of like 64 grand. And so I think that we're going to enter into another bull phase without ever having really had that capitulation that we had in December of 2018. Right. It's all about perspective and it's all about low time preference because I'm like a chart guy. I love to, I still, I just love technical analysis. But if you zoom out on the Bitcoin chart, it's literally a, since inception, higher highs and

higher lows and up into the right. There's no bear market. No bear market since 2009. Right. I mean, but the funny thing is you can make the same argument for the Dow Jones. Yeah. Right. The Great Depression is a blip on a chart that you've zoomed out for over 100 years and was the greatest buying opportunity in history. But like, why can't people see that and understand that every single time this asset goes down, you should be doing everything to your power? Yeah. Buy early and hold for the long term. I think that it's going to continue to work for Bitcoin, not because I'm trying to pump a pyramid scheme, but just looking at the fundamentals of the engineering. This thing is engineered to last forever.

And so I think that it's a no-brainer that it's going to continue to deliver value. We talked about hyper-Bitcoinization, but do you see a world legitimately where Bitcoin becomes the global reserve asset? A hundred percent. I think it's going to demonetize all of the other assets. Today, we use real estate as money. We use art as money. And so I think that by demonetizing all of these other assets, not only does it become the global reserve currency like the dollar is, or like gold was, but it's going to be 10 times, 100 times bigger than

that because it has much better properties than those other reserve currencies had. So then the question becomes, what does the world look like if that happens? I think the world looks fantastic. I do not have the Doomer view. It's not the Mad Max. Yeah, no, no, quite the opposite, really. Taking protection to Gastown. I have the utopian vision that fix the money, fix the world. That today we live in the Mad Max world, right? Where you have countries invading each other and you have, you know, people paying off voters and

committing mass fraud with the COVID relief and all of that. Like, that's the Mad Max world we live in today. I think Bitcoin fixes that. Love it. Where can everybody follow you and keep up with you after this conversation? Absolutely. At Pierre underscore Rochard on Twitter. Awesome.

I appreciate it. And I look forward to living in utopia with you. Hopefully in like five years and not 50. Absolutely. I'm going to be really old in 50 years. So let's not do that thanks for having me on thanks dad let's go