The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's Next Peak Is Further Away Than You Think. Here's Why | Saifedean Ammous

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Coinbase is urging Bitcoin to prepare for future quantum threats, while Strive plans to raise $500M to expand its BTC treasury. Meanwhile, Citadel and BNY test tokenized U.S. Treasuries, Kraken moves into traditional banking with a European acquisition, and hardware wallet security concerns grow as Ledger investigates tampered devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin's next peak maybe further away than you think. We're going to discuss why. But today I'm actually looking much more forward to have an incredible conversation with a very special guest that I've never had on before. Safedianenomus, the author of the Bitcoin Standard. We're going to talk about why the peak may be further away than you think, because there may never be a peak with how much money printing is likely coming. We'll discuss that and a lot more now.

Let's go. Good morning, everybody and welcome to the makeshift studio. You may notice that I'm back in my home. home office after we had an internet collapse 20 minutes before the show. We're making it work. There was no way that I was missing this show today. I'm going to go ahead and bring on very special guests right now. Good morning, sir. How are you? I'm very good. Thanks for having me, Scott. You're giving me background to envy. I need much better lighting for all these records that are behind my head today. Yours looks great. Thank you. So I guess we can start with the breaking news of the

moment, which is that CPI inflation came in hot to 3.7% above expectations of 3.6%. Core rises to 2.6 above expectations of 2.5. Third highest US inflation reading since September 23, rate height expectations are rising on the news. So I'll just put it in context. I don't buy any of it. I'm at the point where every time I see a job number revised or a CPA come in, a CPI come in versus expectation that's arbitrarily set in the first place that we're just being gaslit. And I don't even think I'm a conspiracy theorist. I just think you have to look at the facts. I would love your opinion on it and why Bitcoin matters in this context more than ever.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite conspiracy facts to riff on. The whole 2% inflation is such a ridiculous sigh off, really. There's no other way of putting it. So somehow in the 1980s economists decide. that 2% inflation is ideal. And there's never really been any kind of explanation for why 2%. Why not 1? Why not 3? Why not 5? If 2 is good, why wouldn't 3 be better?

And it's just always been assumed that this is the case. The closest thing to an explanation for it is that New Zealand tried this in the 1980s and they managed to keep inflation down. And when they got it down to 2%, they managed to get manageable. A decent amount of growth with not enough inflation. and then everybody just went with this as being the magic number. And so since then, they're always targeting 2%. And I think now it's been six years or so

that the rate in the US has not been below, has not hit 2%. It's always been over 2%, I think even significantly over, probably never gone down below 2.5 or maybe 3. I don't remember exactly detail. But that's the official number. And of course, the official number is heavily manipulated in order to bring it down.

And it's manipulated because they're always coming up with new creative ways of measuring it. But also, I think a very important point which I try and make in my books, and I've not heard a single coherent counter argument to it, is that these numbers are by design. They are essentially manipulated downward. They're manipulated in order to make them look better. and it just has to be the way the number is measured is going to always understate inflation. And the reason is that what is measured here is the prices of a basket of goods. And so what goes into the basket of goods is dependent on the price.

So the whole thing is mathematically invalid from the first place because what goes into your basket depends on the price. So measuring the prices based on the contents of the basket is, really a circular loop. It's like when Excel gives you a broken reference, because you're measuring the change in the process based on what goes into your basket of goods, but what goes into your basket of goods is determined by what happens to the prices. So my favorite example is meat. As you may know, I'm a carnivore. I eat nothing but meat. So for me, this is the most important thing. I only consume meat, basically. Everything else that I consume is pretty much inconsequential

nonsense that I can do without, but meat is the only thing that matters. And I would say it's the most important food for people. It's the only thing that's essential and complete for people to eat. And its price goes up a lot more than the CPI shows. So if you look at the rise in the price of beef over the last year, five years, 20 years, 50 years, it exceeds the rises in the CPI. So the reason this is, the reason the CPI essentially understates the inflation, the rise in prices is because once the price of beef goes up, people don't just manage to afford to pay the higher prices for beef. They substitute away from beef. They start eating soy instead of beef. So your consumer goods basket now contains soy instead of beef. You're still spending the same amount of money,

but you're eating soy instead of beef. The CPI shows that it's stable or 1% or 2%, but you've replaced the nutritious, healthy, good beef that your body needs with poisonous, toxic soy. And that's essentially the same pattern that repeats for everything. This is why things get shittier because people are gaslit into eating crappier things, consuming crappier things, the quality of things declines. And they're told that it doesn't matter. It's not really going up. You're being gaslit by these 2 and 3 and 4% numbers on CPI because you're, you're

you're replacing the good quality stuff whose price is going up by more than 2 and 3% with shitty, low-quality stuff. So houses become cardboard. And food is disintegrating in its quality. Everything is disintegrating and its quality. And the CPI tells you, look, it's only 2-3%. But the interesting thing is that now, you know, they can't even keep up the 2% and the 2%. So even with all of this rigging, which is built in, you know, the built-in rigging of the CPI,

they still can't manage to keep the number below 2% because things have been going crazy recently. Money printing is out of control. The government spending is out of control and it's getting worse and worse and worse. But this is, of course, this is essential for governments to keep understating the CPI numbers because government outlays, the payments that they give to veterans and to Social Security, are all indexed with inflation. So they have to understate inflation. So they print more money, they understate inflation.

that devalues or reduces the value of their liabilities, and it helps their fiscal situation. That's just the way that this game works. This is it. You're constantly wondering why the things you want are no longer affordable, and the government is getting away with money printing. A few things. So first of all, the New Zealand story is one of my favorite,

because not only is it go back to New Zealand, but it's because a central banker arbitrarily said 2% in an interview with no basis, and then they effectively had to stick to it, created as a number which then was adopted around the world. It's one of my favorite. The other is not only is everything you described accurate about inflation, but markets also react in real time to a number that's effectively arbitrary and being compared to an expectation that's also arbitrary. So a good CPI or PCI or PPI print is only how it performs versus the expectation and not verse actual inflation in a vacuum. So even the way that markets react and hang on,

you know, hang on every breath that comes from a central banker, it's still a complete falsehood. It just blows my mind. And, you know, markets, I haven't even looked today. I'm assuming markets are down because now the Fed may hike and, you know, we live in the upside down. It's just complete nonsense. I agree entirely. It's just fiat, stupid games. You, you know, play fiat games, win fiat prices. Okay, so let's talk more about Bitcoin. I view as much as, you know, there's been a bare market, which is relevant to me, that Bitcoin is more important than ever, and maybe people will start to realize this as they read your books and see it in real time. But there is a few,

I think, relevant narratives in the Bitcoin space right now that have been damaging. One of those, obviously, I guess, is quantum. I guess we can start with quantum. Coinbase, which holds 5% of all Bitcoin wants the quantum fix started now. After we talk about quantum, I want to talk about self-custody because that's what I'm far more interested in the current state of things there. I mean, what are your broad strokes? What do you think about the quantum threat to Bitcoin? I'm not entirely convinced of the quantum threat. I think I'm old enough to have been hearing the word quantum bandied about for a very long time. People are always talking about quantum, this, quantum that. And it seems to me to be one of those words that is very good at, and that it's very good.

good for marketing for securing funding but not very good for delivering so as it currently stands quantum computers can't solve math problems that my five-year-old son can solve and so i'm not entirely worried and i'm not i mean i can't i can't claim to be an expert in the technical aspects of it but i think the fundamental asymmetry of cryptography is likely to survive whatever happens with quantum computing because if you can have quantum decryption then you can also have quantum encryption so if worse gets to worse if it turns out that quantum really is a threat and it can break the cryptography that we have we still have these methods for cryptography which essentially create an asymmetry between the cost of encrypting and the cost of decrypting and that's always

going to remain i believe and so therefore worst case scenario you know ultimately bitcoin is not that big of a computational machine. It's just a few hundred thousand nodes that are sharing a list of addresses every 10 minutes and they all agree on them, which is really something very, very simple that you could do very easily. The reason that it is complicated is that they do the proof of work to make sure that there's no centralized authority that is in charge. But ultimately, the computing load that is needed there is just every 10 minutes everybody needs to agree on a list of addresses and these addresses balances. That's it. So essentially, Bitcoin is the UTX-O set. It's the set of balances. We've got this address. It has this many Satoshes.

That address has that many Satoshes. So worst case scenario, worst gets to, worse comes to worst, you can still ultimately go back to a certain point before the quantum broke things. You could say, well, that was the point where nothing was broken. We stick to the. to that UTXO and now we move to this new algorithm that is resistant to quantum encryption or that is a way of essentially using quantum encryption. So I think there are ways around it and I think ultimately Bitcoin is robust enough that we could have ways to fix this before it happens, but also even if it happens as a surprise, I think it would, worst case scenario, it would be a few days or a few weeks of disruption,

but then we can go back. So I'm not worried. I'm not selling my coins because of the quantum threat. I don't think it's that serious of a deal. I think we have much bigger problems if quantum can hack this than Bitcoin. And I think it's actually the least reasonable thing to attack because of the incentives, right? I mean, if somebody attacks it successfully, it goes, you know, it goes such a low price and it wasn't worth it in the first. And also, I think, you know, when people keep missing the point that, you know, you have to invent all of these fantastic sci-fi scenarios for how Bitcoin breaks, whereas the dollar is breaking every day.

All these other fiat currencies are breaking every day right in front of you. They have been hacked. You know, the dollar is already hacked. It was hacked when they went off the gold standard. And it's being hacked every day. So the alternative is we have this incredible technology that works that has never been hacked. and some people are coming up with these fantastic scenarios about how it may be hacked one day with futuristic technology versus this decrepit old analog technology that is falling apart.

And that's really a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. We're going to talk more deeply about all that in a moment. I want to go specifically since I don't want to miss it to the topic I mentioned before. Obviously, this is just the dearest in the assault on self-custody, but ledgerasse resellers to halt sales in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, we've covered it ad nauseum, but obviously there was a physical exploit in these devices with a certain third party that allowed people to spy on the keys and over $90 million hacked. This comes on the back, obviously, of the cold card hack, which I think to me is a much bigger deal.

Obviously, our data breaches from Treasor and others. It just seems that a lot of things we took for granted in self-custody have no longer hold water and I'm just curious how you're viewing Bitcoin custody generally now. Yeah, I still think self-custody is the way to go, but I think in the last couple of months have really changed my mind on hardware wallets. I think Bitcoin-specific hardware is the thing that is in doubt now. And I just can't in good conscious tell anybody to buy a piece of computer machine, a computing machine that was built specifically for Bitcoin. Because first of all, everything that can be done by a Bitcoin-specific piece of hardware

can be done by a general-specific piece of hardware. Bitcoin doesn't need any kind of magic machine. You can do it with your laptop. You can do it with your old laptop that you had back in high school. The amount of computational load needed to manage a Bitcoin wallet. can be done by any laptop from 2010. You can get a 15, 20-year-old laptop and run Linux on it, and you can do everything that a hardware wallet can do.

But the distinction and the difference is that with the old laptop, you are able to use a device that is not specifically made for Bitcoin. And that's enormously valuable because the device that is specifically made for Bitcoin is just going to have all kinds of different. attack vectors. And we saw with cold card, we saw it with ledger, we saw it with the Treasord data hacks. It's just you're essentially signing up for a honeypot when you buy one of these devices. And people in the company, people outside the company, your mailman who delivers it, the reseller, they all have an enormous incentive to try and find a way to compromise those devices

because they can find a way to compromise these devices. They can put in malware. in the software. They could put malware, put in the hardware, or they can replace it. We haven't seen this one yet, but it might happen, you know, that we can get some people who are insiders in one of the shipping companies, build identical machines and then start replacing them. And if you manage to make a few of these, then, you know, a couple of hundred of these work, then you can rug them. And there's a lot, I mean, $90 million just from whatever they did with this resale or their first attempt, right, that that we know of. It's a lot of money. It becomes a rounding error in people's minds and Bitcoin because we hear such huge numbers,

but I mean, that is an incredible amount of money knowing especially that's been stolen from individuals. It's true. And the sad reality of it, the reason I think the model is fundamentally difficult to defend is that these numbers dwarf whatever money you can make from selling the device. sorry, from selling the devices. So as a reseller, how much are you going to make as a profit over 10 years? Probably you're not going to make $90 million from reselling ledgers and these devices. So it's just, I think, and you know, in retrospect, I think in a few years' time, people might look back and just think that, yeah, that was a silly phase when people thought

they were just going to buy Bitcoin-specific hardware because nothing that can be done with that hardware can't be done with generic hardware. And I'm increasingly being won over to the side that says generic hardware that you can destroy. And I think this is really the best thing about it. You can generate the private keys on an old laptop. And then you can destroy the old laptop because the old laptop is cheaper than the hardware wallet. So the hardware wallet looks cool and it makes you feel like your James Bond. You know, you've got your money on a little device that you plug in and then you hide it and you hide your keys.

But you actually don't need it. And for cold storage, you know, it's a long-term storage solution. you're not supposed to be spending from these private keys every day. Yeah, just get a laptop, destroy it. And then when you need to spend in a year or two or five or maybe 10, buy another $40 laptop from eBay and extract the keys, do the signing ceremonies and then destroy that laptop as well. Make new keys as well when you do that with the new laptop.

So you can, by using that laptop that's fully offline and that's, you know, you bought it from some random shop. Nobody's out there putting malware into random 15-year-old laptops that you're buying for 40 bucks off of eBay. That's not a business model. Then you'd need to put into millions of laptops in order to be able to get a few laptops that can be used by Bitcoiners. Most people buying those $40 laptops, they're buying them for their 8-year-old daughter to watch videos or do homework. The vast majority of them aren't being used for Bitcoin. So it makes no sense to target them.

So, okay, so a lot to unpack there. I agree with that. I would love your take on multi-sig as well. But I think we can both agree that your average person who hears about Bitcoin for the first time and wants some exposure isn't buying a $40 laptop off eBay generating their private keys and throwing it away, right? It's just a very technical. I think that makes a lot of sense for people who have truly, you know, gone down the rabbit hole and want to be their own bank and want to self-custody.

but there's a wide ocean of space between those people and maybe your average investor who doesn't get it yet. So what are those people do? Because right now it feels like they're just going to buy ETFs. Yeah, well, I mean, honestly, the disposable laptop thing is actually not that complicated. If you just run Bitcoin Core as a software, and I mean, yeah, you need to know what you're doing.

I was more alluding to not that it's technically difficult. They wouldn't even know where to start to think about doing it, I think is my point, right? Your average person sees Bitcoin on CNBC as a ticker and wants to get, you know, some exposure and eventually they're going to fall down the rabbit hole. You know, the first thing they're going to do is, I would say, is not buy an old laptop. Right. I would do that. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. If you want financial freedom, if you want to have money that is free, then, yeah, it's worth spending a couple of hours knowing what you're doing. And the good thing about it is that if you do it properly, you know, you're not

having to follow up every day. It's not like when you're with the Fiat market where you have to trade every morning and figure out what the Federal Reserve is going to do and follow the CPI numbers and follow the wars and follow the politics and follow the elections and all of these things that regular Fiat people have to stay on top of every day in order to just keep the money that they've already earned. Well, with Bitcoin, you just need to figure out your cold storage once. And if you figure it out safely, destroy the laptop.

and then nobody can access the machine that has your private keys is destroyed and so then it can never connect to the internet then you could be safe with that and of course yeah you can also use multi-sig which is also another great solution that might be even more convenient for some people which is you use different providers different suppliers you could also use an old laptop with that you can use some hardware wallets and old laptop and in order to ensure that you know if If one of them is compromised, then the others won't be. And with multisig, even if several of them are compromised, they're unlikely to all be compromised by the same person at the same time, specifically to rug you. So if one of them is compromised, you can replace it.

But yeah, there's a certain amount of work that is needed in order to do this. I think there was this appeal that you could just order something off of eBay or order something off of Amazon, go to the website, click on buying the wallet, and then you just plug it in, and you hit receive, you get the address, and then you send the money from the exchange, and now you have to think about it. It's nice, and I think it would have been very good if that was possible, but I think ultimately that's kind of third party custody, unless you know exactly what the hardware is. And that's a serious technical issue to figure out what the hardware that goes into your wallet is, figure out what the software is, verify it, verify everything that went into it,

verify the code that went into it. That was the problem with cold card. I mean, nobody had actually audited the code and if they had, they may have seen this vulnerability. So to verify and audit all those things is what it would take for you to have full self-custody. And it's, it's, seems like that's just difficult to get if you're buying hardware specific to Bitcoin. If you're buying Bitcoin-specific hardware, you're signing up for all these attack vectors. And I think the way to defeat them is to just go to hardware that's not Bitcoin made. It's not Bitcoin-specific. It's amazing how much we have to evolve.

Yeah, and it's just crazy how much we have to evolve, you know, because like I said, that was sort of the core belief of most of Bitcoiners would be put your money on a hardware wallet and called storage and called a day. and I guess we learned those lessons the hard way. So one of the other, I just have to bring this story up because it's just cracking me up today. Senator Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly stated the cryptocurrency is used for money laundering

and to avoid sanctions. Of course, that has nothing to do with the story, but it's good framing. Today, the U.S. government fined Bank of America $1.2 billion for violating money laundering, regulations, and sanctions law. So I don't have it in front of me, but one of my favorite old websites or charts

was all of the fines paid by the big banks for all of the crimes that people effectively think Bitcoin is being used for. And it's something like 40, probably more now, $45 billion is something of course, J.B. Morgan and Wells Fargo are leading it. Such a nonsensical narrative, but so funny when you can see it happening in real time. Yeah, I think it's difficult to argue that's not part of the business model. I've always thought this is really the business model, because you really think about it, you know, they're not making money out of your checking account and out of your overdraft fees and out of your little day-to-day business running on their accounts.

There's serious money being made in crime. And I think the ability of Fiat banks to be useful for her crime is unmatched by Bitcoin. That's one place where Fiat 3D is so much better than Bitcoin. If you're using Bitcoin as your money, it's still on a ledger that is transparent, there's open. you know, yeah, crime does happen with Bitcoin, but the criminals have a very hard time getting rid of their money. So we saw with the, for instance, the BitFinex hack, which happened 10 years ago. It was a significant sum of money at that time. I think it was $600 million and maybe wrong.

It was a huge sum of money. And it was a very technically sophisticated attack. People figured out how to get around a couple of really good security setups with social engineering and everything. And they managed to get that money. and they couldn't spend most of it for a very long time, and then they spent some of it on Walmart gift cards, and they got busted on Walmart gift cards. You know, that was just Walmart gift cards.

Imagine you're trying to transform that money into a yacht or into a mansion. It's very, very difficult. Bitcoin's an open ledger, and the coins are all accounted for. There's only 21 million, so you can always keep tracking the coins. And, yeah, there's ways to hide, but it's getting harder and harder to hide with all of these. the tax. With fiat money on the other hand, nobody knows how much fiat there is out there, and banks can just create fiat, which really for me suggests that the crime is the business

model, because if you had the possibility of creating fiat money in different jurisdictions, I think the best way to monetize that is to get into professional high-level crime. So, you know, J.P. Morgan, HSBC, they were involved with Mexican cartels. I think this is what got to do you know people talk about bitcoin being for criminals i don't think the mexican cartels can use it yeah maybe your local weed dealer is selling you 50 bucks of weed uh using bitcoin maybe 500 bucks of weed here and there maybe but a lot of these people did get busted but if you're jp morgan bitcoin's completely useless for you if you're a mexican cartel bitcoin can't cut it but if you're jp morgan and the mexican cartel you use the u.s dollar you know

the branch in Mexico can generate money and then it can pay off loans and it can mark the money as is paid off and then it can pop up the money in another branch in another country. And like magic, it just disappears or it gets created because that's what banks do. Banks create money. So that's really an excellent thing to do if you want it to be a criminal. Fortunately, for criminals, Bitcoin is just not good enough for them. They're going to have to stick to shitty information. inflationary money.

And I would offer, yeah, sorry, I would also offer that not only is the creation of money, their crime, but if you know that you can, I think the number here was that they admitted to $5 billion in suspicious activity they made, if you know that your fine is going to be $1.2 billion and nobody's going to go to jail, which has been proven in every single one of these, or if, you know, you can make $10 billion or $20 billion and your fine will be a $60 million slap on the wrist and nobody goes to jail, then that's an even better business model. because you know that the penalty will never, never compliment the crime. And of course, you know, the penalty is for the times that they got caught.

It's pretty safe to assume they weren't getting caught every single time. Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. So I'd like to have a more, I think, like theoretical conversation about what's likely coming, right? Obviously, you wrote the Bitcoin standard. You wrote the Fiat standard. You've laid out what's happened very, very clearly. And it gives a roadmap, I think, for what's likely coming.

but in context of everything that you're seeing, the nonsensical inflation and job numbers, you know, best in stepping up and saying that we need to intervene in the bond market, bonds going wild, do you think we're at an inflection point, or is anything that's happening, you know, lend even more credence to your theory

about what's coming next? I mean, look, it's always tempting to put on the doom and gloom hat and say the collapse is coming tomorrow, and, you know, every single day, it gets more and more likely. The yields rising on the 10-year is, I think, an enormously dangerous signal. And the fiscal situation is very, very bad.

I mean, it's been bad for a long time. It keeps getting worse. COVID made it a lot worse. And then under the Biden administration was getting worse. And I think there was a moment where, with all of the Elon Musk Doge thing, people thought that there might be a change.

Trump, maybe. he's the businessman maybe he's going to come in and he's going to cut off all of this wasteful spending and i think there was some sense of optimism with that that maybe the debt situation can be managed you know a i productivity boom Elon musk takes a chainsaw to the government spending but the you know the doge thing ended up with cutting something like 17 cents of government spending overall approximately it's a rounding error compared to what they have so none of that that is happening. And then, of course, there was the Trump, no more wars stuff, which turned out to be another giant-ass lie. And that didn't work out. So there's going to be more war.

There's going to be more government spending. The Department of Defense has increased this budget by about 50%. And I think, you know, if they're done with Iran one way or the other, there's likely going to be bigger fish to fry. There's always going to be more wars to prosecute. So I think over the last year, there's been a significant change because a significant amount of capital and money and money managers may have been buying into the Trump-Musk-will-fix-it narrative. And that basically collapsed over the last year with the war in Iran and with the end of Doge. That's gone. So I think that's what the bond market is really saying. It's a reflection of the war.

It's a reflection of all the increased expenditure. And it's a reflection of just the complete hopelessness of any kind of political solution. Because up until the Trump administration, this current Trump presidency, there was at least some consistency among the Republican Party that used to say, we have a problem with the debt. Well, that's gone now because they're all voting for all of this stuff. The only Republican who's talking about it being a problem is massy. He's been driven out of the Congress. And the Democrats aren't going to come in and cut spending.

Even if you believe they're going to stop the war, they're going to have all kinds of crazy stuff to spend money on. So there's no political constituency for fiscal responsibility anymore at all. And you can't see that changing in the next few years. So the idea that you can outgrow it, I think, is baseless. So the question then becomes, is it just going to be more of the same or is it going to be a massive cataclysmic explosion? And I don't know. I go back and forth. I don't have a crystal ball. With each tick on the 10 year, it looks more likely that there might be a default or a massive devaluation. But the default scenario for me is that we

just continue with more of the same. You get a faster speed of devaluation. And that's how the debt is managed. The US government just continues to devalue its liabilities by increasing the supply of the dollars. And it continues to do the same thing. How long they can keep? this shell game going is and it's a difficult question but you know the great thing about bitcoin is that you know once you figure out how to sort out your cold storage then it doesn't matter what happens because you're playing the winning move you've already gotten the checkmate either you win very quickly or you win slowly but you're winning either way you know if you've held bitcoin over the last few years you have been protected from all of this insanity and i think likely the next few years

it's going to be more of the same. Whether it's going to speed up, whether there's going to be a formal default, whether there's going to be a massive official devaluation is, I think, up in the air. I don't know. But either way, by being in Bitcoin, you are protecting yourself.

You're winning this game. At the very least, you're not losing. And the other game is a hundred percent a losing game. Like, no way about it. You made a really interesting point earlier. I went on a rant not too long ago on Yahoo Yahoo show. about, you know, my sort of case for Bitcoin. And a lot of that was reflected in the things that

you said before. And one of those is that you require an investment manager just to, you know, stay still, right? You're, you, you either have to take on a second job yourself or hire someone who takes a percentage of your money just to not lose. It's an insane game to play. And most people can't play it. That's one of the things that I came across, that I came at after I wrote the Fiat standard. You know, I'm studying the Bitcoin standard, how Bitcoin works. And then I said, all right, let's take the same analysis and use it to Fiat and see how this Fiat money works. And the basic conclusion is, yeah, they're devaluing the money. So the money is always losing value. So you need to borrow and you need to figure out what to do with your investments. So you need to always

be investing. You need to always be borrowing. And you basically need to be a hedge fund manager. So you can be a dentist. You can be an athlete. You can be any kind of successful person in your job. but on the side, you have to be a part-time hedge fund manager. It's, you know, you want to get into commercial real estate, you want to get into residential real estate, you want to buy several properties, you keep refinancing them, you want to go into stocks, you want to try and figure out what the next big AI stock is going to be. Everybody's always playing these games, and it's sad because we'd have a lot better dentists

if the dentists weren't trying to be part-time hedge fund managers. When you're getting a haircut and you're bar. is talking to you about their stocks and their meme coins, you're thinking, you know, I'd probably have better hair if this guy was focused on just cutting hair. Well, that's the world that Bitcoin theoretically gives you. I don't think people realize that it's not only about the money, it's about the time, right? And I think there's an element of that with technology and AI as well. But I think one of the big unlocks of understanding Bitcoin is how much of that time you get back

and how much of your mental energy about money that, you know, you recapture. or that you never had in the first place, but that you have moving forward. For sure, yeah. This was one of the major things for me. And it really totally transformed my life because once you've got this ability to hold on to something that you have,

a fairly high degree of certainty is going to be around in the future. And you don't have to be reallocating every day. You don't have to be borrowing again and picking stocks and picking investments and following the news and listening to the Fed and doing all of those things. If you're able to have this sense of security in the long term, it completely changes you as a human being.

And I think it's why I managed to write four books. Before that, I was always a good writer, but I could never sit down and write more than a couple of pages because I just never had the attention span for it. And I think that security of being able to think for the long term is something that I've seen in myself. I've seen in a lot of other bitcoins. They all tell me the same thing. And the freedom of being able to just live your life, focus on your craft, focus on your family, it completely changes you as a human being. And it's one of the horrible, horrible things that fiat money has done to us over the past century.

Can't die soon enough. Yeah, I mean, I've always made the argument that, you know, steals your time even more than your money. And it's probably your most valuable resource. You know, it just, I know sometimes people listen to us and they think we sound crazy, but I think once you get it, you really feel it. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's, you know, it's, what matters whether we're crazy or they're crazy is the result. And as long as it war, it's working out for Bitcoiners, then I think we can't be dismissed as crazy just yet. Dare I ask you what you think of the financialization of Bitcoin. Obviously, you know, you talk about holding Bitcoin and in cold storage and going about your life. But, you know, there's a wide industry of products being built around Bitcoin. Some of them, like Bitcoin lending and such. Obviously, we have the treasury companies.

Strive's raising $500 million for a 15% dividend yield product after the success of SETA. Of course, you know, strategy is moving towards daily dividends because Strive did it. And, you know, there obviously had a bit of a crisis there with STRC, which I thought was nonsense anyways, the crisis, not the product. But, and I just wonder what you make of all of this, seeing it become a mature financial asset, largely in the same system that we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I tell people to just buy Bitcoin and hold it for the long term. And if you need to ask advice about these financial services, then you should probably stay away from them.

It's a complicated thing. With Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin is just a commodity. It's like telling people to eat meat or use the internet. It's something that I can tell people about. I can recommend and I can sleep easy. I can tell my old aunt about it. I can hold her, Bitcoin for her, and I don't have to worry about it. But with everything else, you need to look at the balance sheet.

You need to look at the terms. You need to look at the risks. There's all kinds of other complicated things involved. But, I mean, ultimately, if Bitcoin continues to perform well, then, yeah, fiat markets, fiat financial services are going to be able to turn that into all kinds of different financial products that appeal to people. So what Michael Saylor is doing is truly remarkable because, you know, he's out there in the bond market.

He's competing with businesses that don't really have the long-term growth rate that Bitcoin can offer. And yeah, they have cash flow, but that's not really ultimately what it matters. What he's doing is he's converting the Bitcoin appreciation into cash flow and eliminating the volatility. And, you know, that ends up allowing him to offer people in much better bonds than the bonds that they can get otherwise. So, you know, his competition is the U.S. government bonds, which are.

taking money from people in order to go kill foreigners and enrich cronies and buy elections. Well, he's buying Bitcoin. He's capitalizing the new global money. He's funding a replacement for a central bank. So that's a much more productive and profitable enterprise. And so I think there's an enormous opportunity there. And Michael Slater obviously is capitalized on it very well. And I think he's going to continue with this.

You know, he's, he's, we arguably, we probably have bottoms. We may still bottom again. I think we bottom. But yeah, I think we have. And it's been a year. The all time high was a year and a week ago, exactly. So it's been a year and a week of Bitcoin and dropping significantly below the all time high.

And he's withstood the second bear market. And, you know, if you're still thinking he's going to get liquidated, if you're still thinking he's some amateur if you think he's just like some shit coin trader on an exchange who's going to get margin called you may be it may be time for you to revise your priors he seems to know what he's doing i think you have to admit and so you know if i as i expect i think we're going to be getting into a bitcoin bull market over the next couple of years is going to just continue to go up if that's the case i think it's going you know micro strategy is just going to go up and the services that they offer are going to be an enormous winner in capital markets.

I'm not saying you should invest in them. I still prefer Bitcoin. Even Michael would tell you to he prefers Bitcoin, right? I mean, you know, like he's creating these products to give access to different walls of money that probably didn't have it in the first place. But I can tell you personally, if you sit down with him and he would just say, if you're a normal person, just go buy Bitcoin. If you want to buy my thing too, you know, for a different reason, but first, just buy Bitcoin. Also, that's also what he's doing. He's buying Bitcoin. That's what he's doing.

He's buying Bitcoin. Strategy is buying Bitcoin. They're selling liabilities. They're selling ways of getting this into. And so, you know, they may outperform Bitcoin, but ultimately they are capitalizing on people who haven't figured out the value proposition for Bitcoin and people who are not willing to tolerate the volatility of Bitcoin. But I think this is really the most bullish thing about Bitcoin, I would say right now, is

that the volatility is declining by any measure of volatility. Bitcoin's volatility is being eliminated, essentially. And probably Michael Saylor has a big part to play in that. He's offering a steady hand of buying pressure that is probably eliminating some of the volatility around it because he's tapping into demand that is from outside the market cycle. It's not the people that are buying his products and not the people that are on Bitcoin Twitter every day following the news cycle, following the mania, getting excited at the top and leveraging in with leverage like apes at the top and then panic selling the bottom.

The people that are doing it are just doing it because they want the 10% or the 12% or the 15%. So the demand is different from this. And that's, I think, going to help eliminate the volatility. And once the volatility declines, and it is declining, I think it's going to decline more and more. That's just going to make Bitcoin a lot more attractive for serious allocators of capital. because if you're allocating capital, serious amounts of capital, if you're at a big hedge fund, big institutional investor, the most important thing for you is you want to protect yourself from the drawdowns,

maybe not hedge funds, but institutional investors. You know, you don't want to be the money manager who's managing retirees and held an asset that went down 70%. Well, we haven't had a 70% drawdown in Bitcoin since 2021 to 2022. So it's almost coming up on five years since we had that. So the longer it goes on without us getting to 70%. Makes a big difference. Now, this drawdown last time was only about 53% or so.

I think that's a very big difference from 53 to 77. That means what you're left with at the bottom is double what you would have been left with with the 77% drawdown. So it's significantly less risky now and it's being increasingly de-risked. So if we don't drop below the bottom of this bear market, below 15,000, K, if we don't drop below that, if that turns out to be a floor and we just continue to go up, and then we don't get other big drops down, I think we're going to start seeing a flood of capital come in.

I think people who think that Bitcoin's establishing diminishing returns might be surprised because we may be getting diminishing returns from the demand coming from regular Bitcoin, Twitter, crypto Twitter. the crypto exchange money that's willing to take on a lot of risk. But by eliminating that little bit of volatility, well, that enormous volatility, by eliminating that volatility, we may be opening the floodgates of all kinds of other capital. So we may witness enormous upside, I think. Yeah, I think now in hindsight, after two cycles, if you see those narratives about strategy being insolvent or bankrupt, it's probably time to buy. It's one of my favorites to be. Yeah, exactly.

It's literally become one of my favorite bottom signals, and I was screaming about it in real time when people were calling me a strategy shill because I was pointing out the fact that you mathematically couldn't be bankrupt, which, you know, I think so much as pretty supportive, but people get very emotional at the bottom. I know we're kind of here at the end of time. Any final thoughts, any new books, anything you want to tell everyone before I let you go? Well, I just started my new course based on the Bitcoin Standard on my podcast. So go to the Bitcoin Standard podcast. I'm doing a new, the Bitcoin standard course. It just started yesterday, posted the first episode, and we're going to be doing lectures weekly, approximately over the coming few months. They'll be for free on YouTube,

sign up, and then we're going to be doing discussion seminars on Twitter spaces on Mondays, generally. So join us at 2 p.m. GMT on Mondays for a discussion of the book. Amazing. I'll be tuning in, and I'm sure everybody else will as well. Thank you so much for your time for suffering through our internet issues here. I deeply appreciate it. glad we got to have this conversation, would love to do it again in the very near future. My pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me. Take care. And thank you, everybody else. I'll be back at noon for the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. Thanks, everybody. See you tomorrow.