The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin’s Supercycle | Dan Held, Kraken

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Dan Held, growth lead at Kraken, is well known for his Bitcoin supercycle thesis, the belief that price will continue to rise exponentially with increasingly smaller corrections. In addition to Bitcoin’s price action, the fundamentals are looking stronger than ever as institutions enter the space, worldwide adoption accelerates, and infrastructure is solidified. If Dan is right, we could possibly see Bitcoin reach a billion users and be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the near future. Dan Held: https://twitter.com/danheld -- Harmony: Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Be the ONE to bridge to all blockchains. Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Their mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and other chains. https://thewolfofallstreets.link/harmony --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Harmony. Please stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now everyone seems to want to know where the price of Bitcoin is headed. Today's guest has made a popular and compelling argument as to why Bitcoin could undergo what he calls a super cycle. As a growth lead at Kraken, one of the world's

largest and most established exchanges, it's safe to say that Dan understands what it means for both an asset and company to expand in value and size. Not only is Dan an OG in the crypto space, he's unwavering conviction and the community loves him. It's my hope today that Dan and I can revisit the super cycle thesis and discuss some of the forces at play that can make it happen. Dan Held, thanks so much for coming back on the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to explore the super cycle again. Absolutely. Well, let's do that. For those who may not have heard of it since all of a sudden we had the bear market since last time we talked, I put that in quotes for those who are listening and not watching, because I think both Dan and I probably would feel that we aren't truly in a bear market, but can you revisit the idea of the super cycle?

Yeah, it's funny. As soon as there was a little bit of a dip, you know, people lose faith. And so I think of the quote, you know, Oh, you have little faith. I've been huddling for nine years and three different bull runs. And so folks, the first big dip in a bull run, people were like, it's over, it's over. And this very much reminds me of 2013. 2013, we had a bull run in the beginning of the year. Then it had this sideways agonizing chop for about three to six months. And then we had a bull run at the end of the year. And so this year very much feels like that. Now to zoom out and apply this knowledge to what the super cycle means, the super cycle is basic. The TLDR is that this time is different and that it probably won't, Bitcoin probably won't behave like all the other cycles. And I think this skews more bullish. Now, of course, no one can

predict the future, neither you nor I can, you know, so as a caveat, these are more of just our opinions on where the price might go. So the super cycle is basically like this time is different. We have institutions, we have institutional infrastructure. We have the whole world coming to understand Bitcoin's value prop. Bitcoin is available to purchase in like Cash App, Robinhood, SoFi, PayPal, Venmo, alongside Kraken, Coinbase, et cetera. There's so many places to buy it. And there's so much good knowledge and educational content that Bitcoin could go from a hundred million users to a billion users potentially, or something really big like that. So the super cycles basically dictates this time is different. You could see it be more

bullish than usual. And what that would look like would be kind of like a 2013 where we have a mini bull run and then another bull run later in the year. Or we would see that kind of like a longer, more extended bull run, or maybe there's a muted bear market, right? Like the bear market isn't as intense. Now with this dip in the middle, I don't know if that part of my thesis or that interpretation of my thesis holds true anymore, you know, in terms of there being a more mild bear market, it seems like this market is still very intense and we saw a pretty big dip here on the way up. So yeah, TLDR, overall, it's basically a more bullish interpretation on this current cycle that this is the moment that mainstream wakes up and institutions wake up and believe that Bitcoin is valuable. And if that happens, then Bitcoin's not going to have a normal

bull run. I think it's also a matter of timeframe and interpretation because you look at Bitcoin March of 2020 at 3,800 or even call it 6,000 since it was very temporarily under 4,000. And you look at a price of 29,000, which was basically the lows of this quote unquote bear market, you would have killed for that price when Bitcoin was 6,000. Totally. Totally. It's so funny how bearish people get when they see Bitcoin at 30,000. They're like, oh man, I mean, that was capitulation, right? Like right under 30. It's so funny to think about that. Bitcoin exposes so much of the raw human nature of fear and greed where Bitcoin's price, nothing changed about Bitcoin. The price just changed. But because of that, people have these mental models of what's expensive or cheap. And so it totally flips the idea of what is value and how do people value

things on top of its head. It's really interesting to see. I've made that argument countless times that price and value are not the same thing. And I think new traders and investors don't understand that. And obviously they're drawn to whatever the price is at that moment and they determine it as such. But when you look at on-chain metrics, the central banks, I mean, all of the reasons that we buy Bitcoin, I think it's a very clear argument that the price has not caught up to the value. Totally. I mean, look, Bitcoin, if the world realized Bitcoin's value, Bitcoin should be at $10 to $100 trillion market cap. I mean, that's what Bitcoin's true net worth is in terms of like, if we look at gold or other store of value assets, I mean, there's $18 trillion of bonds in the world that is negatively yielding. I mean, that doesn't even make sense. It's like the credit card company paying you to take out a loan and then they pay you every single month because you borrowed from

them. I mean, it's absurd. So Bitcoin, I think, especially in this environment, Bitcoin should be worth at least tens of trillions. So yeah, we're very far away from that. So, you know, Bitcoin, I think, especially in this environment, Bitcoin should be worth at least tens of trillions. So, yeah, we're very far away from that. Interestingly, I mean, we obviously talk about inflation and the potential for hyperinflation and negative bond yields. Kathy Wood today said she views deflation as a much bigger threat than inflation at the moment. Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, money printer Gober is pretty insane right now. And I think a lot of the worries around deflation are unfounded. In fact, if you look at that number of times, the word deflation is used. So like right after the Federal Reserve was created through the Great Depression, that word became this piece of FUD for the former pre-Central Bank era of like,

oh, there's these deflationary spirals. There's all these issues with deflation. Oh no, deflation, it's going to end the world. Well, why is inflation okay, but deflation's not okay? And there's all sorts of bizarre arguments that economists come up with as to why deflation's bad. One of the most absurd ones is that, oh, well, as prices decrease, consumers will withhold spending in perpetuity because they expect prices to continue to decrease, which doesn't make any sense. It's saying that humans don't consume anything and that they'll be able to withhold spending on food and housing for forever. The presumption that you will wait two years to eat because prices might go down.

Exactly. It's a classic economist style of thought, right? Like totally, you know, theory ready, but nothing, nothing applicable to the real world. And also, you know, let's say, let's say we zoom out and look at real world examples of where that isn't the case. TVs and electronics, they continually, TVs continually drop in price and have higher and higher quality. Huh? Why are people buying TVs? Well, because they want to consume content right now. They don't want to wait five years and withhold consumption. This whole deflation worry, I think is really overblown. And if we look at the word frequency done by Google Ingram, so Google Ingram looks at the frequency of words across all the books in their corpus. If we look at the word deflation, it really spiked around the great depression post Fed being created. And it became this boogeyman. It became this boogeyman where inflation fights deflation. It's this boogeyman that they must constantly fight against. But in reality, the market would just equilibrate. It would just equalize. There's nothing wrong with

inflation or deflation. It's just the market reacting to certain conditions. And so, yeah, I think deflation is a really big boogeyman that's often used as this concern, but I don't think it's a concern at all. I've had Jeff Booth on the podcast twice. Well, his book, The Price of Tomorrow is one of my favorites. And in a vacuum deflation, a deflationary environment is actually somewhat biblical heaven, right? I mean, people don't have to work as much goods are cheaper. You go about your day and become an entrepreneur and enjoy your free time.

Yeah. It's funny. Like anyone who argues for inflation typically doesn't have a very good argument for deflation in terms of why they're against it. They're just like, oh, it's bad. Yeah, just the sweeping idea that it's bad. Well, in a classic one, like you ask your economics professor at your university, they're going to say deflationary spiral.

It's a classic term. Remember during the 2018, 2019 era in Bitcoin, where people talked about the Bitcoin miner death spiral? It's funny to see these narratives repackaged in this FUD repackaged and slapped on the Bitcoin or any other topic. The word spiral is often used to connotate this building upon itself negativity that occurs, but we don't see that in practice at all. Right. And Bitcoin's never had a spiral of that sort. Even though price is corrected, the mining thing, FUD. China, always FUD. India, always FUD. Ransomware, always FUD. Environmental impact, always FUD. It never spirals. Yeah. It's funny. People act like

that miners won't care about economic interest and that the market won't equilibrate. And I'm like, well, of course it will, since the market, there's strong incentive for it to equalize. I just did a presentation at an investment firm. And at the end, I had this rapid fire FUD. So I presented the piece of FUD and then debunked it, presented and debunked it. And after being nine years in this space, it gets pretty damn tiring where you're like,

okay, the China FUD has been around for a long time. And now that Bitcoin miners are out of China, I bet you will still see China FUD. I bet you will still see it. It'll be ridiculous because they're out of China and China has very limited Bitcoin economic activity now, but we'll still see China FUD. China FUD will never end. If we have one narrative that returns every time price drops by at least 10%, it's something to do with China. Death, taxes, and FUD. Remember, like the only three constants in life. Absolutely true. So you mentioned earlier,

we could see a billion users on Bitcoin, which I agree. I actually spoke with Anthony Scaramucci, had the same sort of target. What does the world look like with a billion users on Bitcoin? Yeah. Even at a billion users, that's only, let's see, there's like seven or eight billion people in the world. That's only one out of eight people using Bitcoin. At a billion users, I think there's a lot of different things that occur. One, we start to see on the base layer, layer one transactions becoming more expensive, which pushes innovation and transactions to layer two. This is a good thing. The long-term security model for Bitcoin relies on transaction fees occurring on layer one and in those growing. So this is a good thing for Bitcoin's long-term security, which also means I think we'll see development of more layer two tech and a more robust ecosystem of like layer two usability.

You know, doing certain things on layer two can be somewhat technical and harder to use. And so I think that'll be the impetus to go build products and services to solve that problem. That would be one big thing. You know, we're going to see Bitcoin finally be mainstream. And what I mean by mainstream is we'll start to see FUD. FUD will never die. FUD will always exist, but it might start to taper or there'll be different flavors of FUD. Old FUD will kind of die out and new FUD will come up. I think the proof of work FUD will be a perpetual piece of FUD. So I think Bitcoin will become more of this geopolitical conversation. And we saw a little bit of this with the US infrastructure bill where Bitcoin as a cause

was finally recognized where people went, oh, wow, this is a big community. These senators and congressmen, all these congressmen were like, oh, wow, this is a big community. We should start to pay attention. So I think having a voice in the room is good. Bitcoin survives despite that. It doesn't need validation by the existing incumbents or powers that be, but it makes Bitcoin's transition a little bit easier if they understand it and they respect it and they respect the people behind it. So I think Bitcoin as a voter base becomes really large in that regard, especially in Western developed countries like the US and Europe. That means that if 20 or 30% of the population or 40%, if they own Bitcoin, then banning Bitcoin becomes highly unlikely. I think the whole banning Bitcoin FUD will be a big one as Bitcoin rises in popularity

because people will go, oh, well, if this is a threat to governments, won't they shut it down? Well, 40, 50, 30% of your population owns it. Well, good luck. If you shut it down, then you're going to get voted out of office or you're going to have people mobbing in the streets. So I think Bitcoin's adoption, like hitting a billion users is critical for its survivability. As Bitcoin grows in adoption, base layer security fees go up and there's more products and services, and then we become a bigger voter block. So yeah, I think overall it's like Bitcoin finally entering the mainstream where Bitcoin isn't regarded. And we're starting to see flavors of this, right? Like big investment banks are like Bitcoin's normal. We're starting a Bitcoin desk or we're allowing our

customers to buy Bitcoin. I mean, for someone like me nine years ago, this is normal. We're starting a Bitcoin desk or we're allowing our customers to buy Bitcoin. I mean, for someone like me nine years ago, this is incredible. We've already won to some extent. The battle still, I think we still have a long battle ahead of us, but these are huge concessions from the investment banks and traditional financial infrastructure of like, Bitcoin's here to stay. It feels to me like regulating and taxing is much more in the interest of the government than banning, right? Totally. If you can make money on it. And what's funny is people, you know, our community obviously jumped on this infrastructure bill that you brought up because they saw this one line that, you know, whether you believe it was malicious or it was just poorly written, either way, that was potentially

damaging. But Bitcoin was in the infrastructure bill. I mean, you know, like crypto was in the infrastructure bill. Crypto was in this infrastructure bill. To me, this was the biggest advertisement in the history of Bitcoin. You talk about going mainstream. If we're being debated by US senators and that sentence or a few sentences or clauses is freezing the US Senate for three to four days, doesn't that mean that we're already there? Yeah, certainly. I think the fact that it got introduced though though, is probably we're not all the way there yet, but we are at least being talked about.

We're at least in the conversation. And we showed that we're not something to be messed with. You know, we're not going to go quietly into the night. We're going to put up a fight. That's the whole point. Bitcoin's about freedom. Bitcoin is about sovereignty. And ultimately, you have to fight for something like that.

And I think the community rallied behind it and really said loudly, we're not okay with this. I don't know what will happen in the House, but it's my feeling that the way things went in the Senate, a few Congress people are going to jump all over this as a potential way to gain votes and the support of the crypto community. And they're easily going to rephrase this and get it done. Totally. I think that's a very likely outcome. I mean, they saw the outpouring of, And I was on a Twitter space with Neeraj last night, and he said, out of all the issues in the bill, the crypto and Bitcoin community were the loudest community. That became the sticking point of a trillion dollar infrastructure bill, right? That means that we have a powerful voice and congressmen are certainly going to look at that and go, okay, we need to figure out how to work

with this voter base. I think it's also quite ironic that it's a trillion dollars or more being printed out of nowhere and the Bitcoin's also being mentioned in the exact same bill. It's very poetic. Yeah. If anything, it's showing you exactly what Bitcoin was created to hedge against. I couldn't have put it more perfectly. So outside of price and the bull market and the super cycle, what is exciting you right now in this space? What do you think we're going to see in the coming months and years? Yeah. So what's cool about Bitcoin is I'm a product and marketing guy. So Bitcoin to me represents that it's found product market fit in terms of traction,

in terms of usability. Bitcoin as a store of value asset fits all those parameters without any tweaking necessary on layer one. Bitcoin doesn't need to do any improvements. It doesn't need to do an upgrade. A lot of people find that boring. I find it thrilling. It means that Bitcoin has found traction and product market fit. And that even if we all walked away and there was no development on it, it would still survive. That's what you want from a money. You want a money to be the super stable, barely changing thing, the solid foundation for the economy. So I think that that's great. With that though,

of course, I'm curious about new things. And the DeFi sector, I think has some very interesting stuff going on. And I've been doing an exploration across various DeFi projects like Stacks, Sovereign, which I'm going to write about in two weeks, DLCs, distributed log contracts, and like Lightning and other... Lightning is a smart contract and I would say DeFi. People forget that the first DeFi application was on Bitcoin called a join market. It's a decentralized way to earn yield on your Bitcoin where you coin join with other folks. So you provide liquidity for coin joins. So people forget that there are some of these big... The word DeFi is somewhat ambiguous. When writing about DeFi for the first time, I struggled to even define what it is because the definition of DeFi across protocols and different folks is pretty broad.

And I think that becomes more difficult every day. Yeah. Because it's just this expanding balloon of things under that umbrella. Yeah. Some of these have centralized keys. Some of these have, you know, really centralized team structures. Some have none. You know, there's a whole spectrum of how it works. So yeah, DeFi I would define as like smart contract functionality that's usable and is being used. You know, there's all sorts of theoretical DeFi, but until it's used, I don't think that's

representative of like having product market fit or utility. So yeah, I mean like Lightning is used and Lightning uses smart contract functionality. It's funny. It's a lot of people are like, oh, Lightning is not DeFi. I'm like, how would you define DeFi then? And oftentimes they don't have a super tight definition of it. And I don't think I do either. So yeah, it's been, I think on the DeFi side, like certainly there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the ecosystem. Bitcoin's fine as is, but there's a lot of cool ways to bolt on this DeFi functionality into Bitcoin. And so I kind of view it as a nice to have, not necessarily like a need to have for Bitcoin

to survive. So exploring that's been fun for me. Yeah, it's crazy what's being built in this space. And it's almost hard to imagine what it will look like year over year. Totally. Yeah, the pace of innovation is pretty wild. Pace of innovation and structural risk at the same time. Look, I'm an old Bitcoiner. I'm like a dinosaur, right? I'm really wary of structural issues. DeFi is really cool. So I've been exploring that. At the same

time, there's massive structural problems that I think that most folks don't like to talk about. For example, like USDC or other centralized stable coins being the predominant collateral used in the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum and other DeFi platforms. That's a huge risk. I mean, it's completely centralized. It's not at all DeFi in the slightest. Like Maker is basically most of the collateral used are stable coins, centralized stable coins. So you've got a decentralized stable coin collateralized by a centralized stable coin. And so in one second, the US government or any other government could come in and request that all these funds be frozen. And if all these other contracts are written on top of those contracts, the composability that they're all kind of woven together, then you have this cascading effect.

And I think that a lot of people just kind of brush that off, but I'm an old Bitcoiner. And the reason why Bitcoin was created was because these one-off events that happen every 20 years, 10 years are catastrophic, right? I mean, that's Satoshi planted Bitcoin during the 2008 financial crisis when the whole system broke. And so Bitcoiners naturally and myself included are, I think they're more negative and I would say more cautiously optimistic is maybe a way to phrase it as like, I'm wary. It's exciting, but I'm very wary because there's a lot of very obvious structural problems. Right. I mean, DeFi wasn't really discussed in the white paper, right? More peer-to-peer cash, the store of value, obviously, the concept of it being a hedge, it's right there, central banks. So I guess that begs the question of,

do all these things need to be built on Bitcoin or can there be this whole other world of DeFi that it's just like, I know everybody fights about it, but maybe it's just a completely separate thing, right? And it's just a whole other universe. Could be. I see kind of both, it's the free market playing out what people want to use. I think like if I were to personally use DeFi products, I'd want to use them on Bitcoin in some fashion. And Bitcoin does have very limited capabilities for a variety of reasons. And that's why I'm interested in exploring these other solutions that are either tied to Bitcoin in some fashion or rooted in Bitcoin. Whether you look at these, there's all sorts of, there's no DeFi solution on Bitcoin or Ethereum that has a perfect trade-off of no risk

and usability. There's all sorts of trade-offs of decentralization and basically settlement assurances are the higher you go up in the stack in terms of like layer one, layer two, layer three, the less settlement assurances that you have. Because whatever is settled on chain is your highest settlement assurance. I'm sure that this transaction went through versus different like layer two technologies and above. So I don't think that's necessarily a bad or good thing. You know, I just think that like having a stable foundation for an ecosystem like this is really critical. Now, yeah, so for me, I'm not just negatively saying like, oh, I don't believe that any other ecosystem could exist. I just prefer that mine's built on something really, really solid. And that's Bitcoin, in my opinion. That makes perfect sense. What I find interesting is that Taproot has fallen completely out of the news cycle and that's smart contracts coming to Bitcoin, right? Totally. Yeah. Taproot is a narrative as well to where I think there's a lot of like ETH things going on that kind of suck all

the air out of the room in terms of narratives. But Taproot is a huge upgrade for Bitcoin. You've got Taproot, you've got a lot of exciting other things going on. At least Kyleen and myself hung out with her a lot at Satoshi Roundtable. Her and I talked a lot about this of like, you know, just what is the definition of DeFi? Why is Lightning not considered DeFi by the common population, right? It's just all, it's more of narratives than anything else. I think the Ethereum community does a really good job of narratives and marketing. Whereas the Bitcoin community is, you know, they're more just like, hey, Bitcoin doesn't need to change. And while that may be true, there's all sorts of cool things that we could at least explore narrative wise that I think are value accretive to Bitcoin,

you know, in some degree, I, I, again, I think like these other smart contract platforms, them executing rapidly and, and, and creating many, many, much like much optionality, you know, that I think is a really tough race to fight because you've got like Solana coming up, right? Like Solana, I think very much challenges Ethereum. Solana is becoming very popular. There's going to be a race to the bottom. Like we've seen this with USDT. USDT was on Bitcoin, then went to Ethereum and now Tron. There's more usage on Tron with USDT. And, and that's just kind of like this, this, and this is a huge,

this is a, this is the number two, no, this in terms of volume, I think USDT is higher than Bitcoin. There's more daily volume. Yeah. And so, you know, on chain, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more settlement going on with USDT than there is with Bitcoin, you know? And so you've got all these sort of like weird, funky things like that, where, you know, USDT then is basically, it doesn't really care about what blockchain it's on. It doesn't really care about settlement assurances because it's all centralized at the end of the day. It's a ledger database that is completely controlled by, I forget what consortium there is on the Tether side, but it's funny. What smart contracts need to be in a nuclear grade, like nuclear resistant ledger and what contracts need to be on basically a centralized ledger.

There's this whole spectrum and it's really interesting to see how that's all playing out. It is. Even just if you look at what's been happening with the other protocols with Taproot coming, Ethereum announced the IP 1559 London hard fork. Now forget even the tech or what it is, price effectively went up. The market reacted positively and said, we like this. Cardano makes an announcement of an announcement of the Alonzo hard fork, but smart contracts are coming and price has absolutely gone crazy. So imagine what happens when Bitcoin gets its first significant and meaningful upgrade when Taproot hits. Totally. Yeah. It's funny how these narratives are woven into price. When is the narrative priced in? There's a big debate with Nick Carter and others about, is the halving priced in? And the way that I've come to a neutral

perspective of these events are priced in for those who understand it and not priced in for everyone else, which is basically 99.9% of the population don't really understand the impact of these different news events. So yeah, I think with Bitcoin, with Taproot, I think the market, it's funny too, as I don't know if you noticed this, but when the US infrastructure bill news came out, it's very negative. I mean, this was not good news. Bitcoin didn't care. It was wild. At all. Like not even a little baby dip. It was like maybe 1% and then it bounced back up. And that to me reads bull run. That screams bull run when in a bull run, negative press is disregarded and positive news buoys the price. And in a bear

market, we see the opposite, right? Positive news has no impact and negative news continually punishes it lower. And so we're very much seeing that where I think like taproot might be kind of perfectly positioned at this peak of the bull run where Bitcoin's price starts to surge, then taproot news feeds into this. We see this with other protocols as well. This is not just with Bitcoin, but yeah, it's this positive news cycle when sentiment and there's a bullish sentiment going on, it buoys the price and negative news is largely thrown away. When we use the term priced in, for me, that's more about a news event, something that's happening. So the announcement that taproot's happening or that's happening is coming is sort of what's priced in, but the actual fundamental impact of that

over a long time cannot be priced in. You can't price in reduced supply with increased demand. That's not priced in. Yeah. And that's where folks who know and pay attention have started to price it in with their own bets, but the rest of the world doesn't really know. And at the same time, there's also the one-liner of buy the rumor, sell the news. That's right. Maybe there'll be a lot of upswing in price for Bitcoin with Taproot up until Taproot launches, and then there's a dip. Right. But then the actual fundamental benefits of it play out over the next six months to a year, and that helps slowly grind the price up, which is sort of what you see with a halving, right? It's not like the day the halving hits,

all of a sudden price moons. That's what everyone expected. They're like, oh, it's going to go to like 100K the first day after the halving. I'm like, no, that's not how it works. It's like every market participant is repricing what they think the asset is worth. And halvings reduce the amount of supply hitting the market. If demand stays constant or goes up, then you've got less supply, which naturally prices start to climb. And then that cycle repeats itself. People have FOMO, they buy it ahead of everyone else having FOMO. And that's how Bitcoin has grown. And that's how all these crypto assets have grown since the beginning. So a complete pivot, pudgy penguins, Ethereum rocks, crypto punks. What do you make of the

absolute insanity of the NFT cartoon art, quote unquote, JPEG, as people like to call it, space. I would say call myself more of a moderate on the Bitcoin side. I'm a libertarian free markets guy. So I'm like, if people want to buy and sell digital rocks, sure. I personally don't want to do that. And all the power to you, I guess. I mean, people buy and sell paintings and I may or may not want to own those or sculptures, et cetera. So everything in life is subjective in terms of value. And these are subjective JPEGs. Now, do I think the, so I'm more of a moderate of like, if people want to do that, great. I don't really know if it's overvalued or undervalued. At the same time, I think people

should be wary that there's a lot of like painting the tape going on where an artist sells it to him or herself. And, um, you know, famous, um, the guy who made that crystal skull in real life. Um, I forget his name. He's a really famous artist. One of the, one of the highest priced art items, him and a group of investors bought that from himself to paint the tape. So this happens all the time with art. So I think people should be wary of what they're getting into. The same principle applies for any investment. Well, why do you feel FOMO? You're feeling FOMO because the price is going up, not because you just fell in love with this piece of art. If you truly love that piece of art, go for it, I guess. Who am I to say, who am I to stay in between love? If you really want that, go ahead. At the same time, start to question why you really want that item. Is it because everything else is pumping

and you're hoping just to ride it? And I think a lot of people are doing it because of that naturally. I think so too. You may love that rock, but I don't know how you can love that rock six figures. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, all the power to them if they want to go buy and sell whatever they want to trade and people are free to trade whatever they'd like. At the same time, I think people should be very cautious. Think about like, hey, this is a very like insider market. A lot of people painting the tape. You're feeling this feeling because the price is going up. You're not feeling this feeling because someone made a piece of gorgeous art that you just have to have.

It's usually the case. Now, you know, that's where you weren't accumulating Bitcoin during the bear market. You weren't accumulating NFTs during the bear market. You're accumulating them during the bull run. And that's because you're feeling FOMO. I was just going to say, I mean, you mean, that obviously applies to NFTs, but it also applies to Bitcoin at 50,000. Didn't want it at 20, but I love it at 50, but retail, right? And that's why we end up having this 55-ish percent retrace. It's so funny how this happens, right? You tell your friends

and family about Bitcoin when it's $10,000 and they're like, ah, I don't know. It seems expensive or they think it's dead. Then it goes up and they're like, okay, I want in, I don't care. And then they buy in and then it dips and they're like, okay, I'm out. And you're like, oh man, it's taught me a lot about investing in general. Like if you just have a five to 10 year horizon on any asset, and now you're going to be wrong a bunch of times, but you know, if you come in with an investment thesis and you're right, just thinking that far ahead in the hodling, you're ahead of the curve by 20 fold. You know, they're going to panic sell the first time something bad happens and you're going to hodl.

Now, obviously you're going to lose some of those bets. Not everything's like Bitcoin. So, you know, you're going to lose some of those, but I do think that the philosophy of hodl is kind of like a life philosophy in a way. It teaches you to like, okay, reorient your thinking, you know, reject that emotional sentiment of FOMO or greed or like FOMO or fear and think through, okay, why did I get into this? Has anything changed investment thesis wise? If not, then I'm going to hodl. And I've got a certain time gated range of five to 10 years to see if this is going to play out and you play, see how it plays out versus like, man, I feel like the

younger generation, the Gen Zers, you know, they just, you know, I feel bad. Cause like, you know, marketers like myself and product builders, you know, Silicon Valley, we've built like these mobile games. We've built this addictive feedback loop and products of like, they see a notification on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, they got to check it. And I fall prey to this as well. Like I'm not into it, but we grew up without it. We grew up without it. Yeah. I feel like I was prey to this as well. Like I'm not into it. But we grew up without it. We grew up without it. Yeah, I feel like I was able to focus a lot more. And now, you know, Robinhood has tapped into that mechanic as well with those trading,

right? You know, and I feel like that's a really intense loop. Guys, I'm really excited to be sponsored by Harmony. I know all of us have traded their coin one in the past, but what they're fundamentally doing is a game changer. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, and governance. Think of it as the one to bridge all blockchains. Harmony is open and insanely fast with two second transaction finality and a hundred times lower fees than Ethereum.

Their secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance, and almost every single other chain. Maybe most exciting is that Harmony, in cooperation with Sushi, will be providing $4 million in incentives for liquidity mining. Find out more about this program and build something yourself at thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. That's thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. Build on Harmony, run on all chains. I remember back in the day when I first got into investments, it was like a really shitty web interface, like TD Ameritrade or E-Trader, Fidelity. It was really hard to log into. And so you just set it and let it because it wasn't fun to log into and check the price because it was really hard to read it. It was a pain to trade it. And now it's just, it's so easy on this app

that I think it really changes this entire generation. It taps into that generation's very short-term attention span. And this is an overly sweeping generalization. So hopefully no one listening to this who's Gen Z is taking offense to this. I similarly find myself having problems with attention, but I think the hodl as an investment philosophy is really hard. It sounds easy. It's just like buy it and don't touch it. But for any asset, that's tough. Yeah. It's nearly impossible. Mark Yusko, I tell this story all the time. And he came on the podcast and he said, there's, you know, how many people do you think are still holding Amazon stock from the IPO? Totally. Four. Four. Really? Bezos is now ex-wife and apparently his parents

are her parents and everybody else at some point gave up or sold. Listen, it had 95% drawdowns. It was just a book company, right? And you had all these events and eventually, you know, weekends, you find your reason to sell even no matter how long you've held. And that plays to something that is really interesting in this space, because people love to say that OGs were lucky that you guys were there early and that was your only edge. But most people I know who were early like sold it a thousand bucks. I mean, I'm just happy I didn't lose my Bitcoin or sell it. And honestly, there's probably like other parallel universes where I did that, right? Like it's in this one where I had the conviction to hold Bitcoin and a lot of other facts. I mean, there's so much

temptation, right? Like there was times where I took some time off between two jobs. Yeah. Maybe I'll sell a little Bitcoin, live for another two months or three months. Sure. And I lived in San Francisco. It's expensive there, right? Like I didn't have a ton of money and I put everything, almost everything I had into Bitcoin and you know, this, this was a lot, right? Like, and so I think people don't understand like, you know, the philosophy of hodling that long. It's, you have to resist the temptation to spend it. But there's so many reasons to. I'm also fortunate. I've got a girlfriend of two years. She's great.

And she's big into Bitcoin as well, fortunately. But I'm very thankful to have a partner or to have not had a partner previously that would have encouraged me to sell. I mean, I feel bad for the Bitcoiners who had a husband or wife and they were like, hey, honey, I want to buy a home. I need you to sell. Or, you know, like there would be a lot of contention. I don't fault them for doing so. If it can better your life, that's your decision. But

if you're really that steadfast and this is you're holding it forever, that pressure is really unfortunate. What I love about the secondary effects of the not your keys, not your coins ethos is it makes it so much harder to panic sell. Because if you get the rabbit hole from, I'm not holding it on an exchange, I'm putting it on a hardware wallet. Then you obviously go from hardware wallet to multi-sig and then you get crazy about where you disperse your keys and multi-sig. So like you make it basically impossible for yourself to make at least an impulsive decision to sell. Totally. Yeah. There's other methods of that too. It's kind of funny. Like I lend out my Bitcoin and Genesis has fixed term lending. I'm on open term right now, but they do a fixed term lending where it's locked up for X amount of months. Well, you're stuck. There's also like

I borrow against Bitcoin using my Bitcoin as collateral. Well, unless I pay off that loan, I can't touch those coins. Right. So it's kind of like a great secondary effect. It really is though, because if it's just sitting on an exchange, I feel like at some point, there's just that weak moment where you just hit the sell button. Yeah. And by the way, definitely for everyone listening, definitely recommend self-custody. That's the way to go. You know,

I don't risk a ton of my coins on these centralized venues to borrow against them or lend. So yeah. Yeah. So plus one on Scott's thoughts there. Yeah. I have a small percentage that's earning yield or, you know, involved in those things, I did the same thing. obviously they really have gamified trading and made it sort of seem just like playing a game to Gen Z. Robinhood just reported, I believe today or yesterday, 41% of their revenue comes from crypto and over 60% of that 40% is Doge. That was wild. I saw that statistic too. I mean, obviously I work at Kraken and I think it's pretty obvious. You know, what was crazy is that Dogecoin wasn't available on Coinbase when Elon Musk started a tweet about Doge. So obviously we got a ton of inbound traffic with that. And it was, I mean, wild to see how many people were interested. But yeah, I mean, Doge was such a crazy phenomenon.

I've been around a long time and I know Jackson Palmer, like I hung out with him in San Francisco. He's at a PM at Adobe and he hated Bitcoin. He hated crypto. That's why he created Dogecoin. It was a spite coin. I don't know. I don't know who here has watched Larry David, you know, Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm where he creates the spite store. It's kind of like the spite store. Like he, he hated it so much. He's like, I'm going to make the most absurd money possible. And he comes up with Dogecoin. And then, you know, you know, he doesn't own any at all. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm well aware. Yeah. He doesn't own any. And so it's kind of funny because I like how Dogecoin kind of perpetually reminds him that like all money is just a belief system and it's all kind of a game.

And so, but it was just wild to see the sentiment, you know, like, and this is where I think a lot of people over-prioritize technical development with these protocols. These protocols are network effect and narrative driven. Dogecoin hadn't had a commit issued in like six years or something. No programmers, no developers. Yeah. And its security is rooted in Litecoin. I forget, it's like MergeMind or something.

It's a fork or something. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't even have its own security. And so, yeah, I mean, the market just didn't care though. People just didn't care about that. They just wanted to buy Doge because of the meme. Dogecoin, I think back in the 13, 14 era, I forget when it came out, but back then, Dogecoin really represented to us memes, like that money are memes and that narratives and

memes drive price. That's one thing that kind of like challenged my assumptions of money. Back then it was considered really ridiculous, right? Like Dogecoin was considered like, okay, this is for sure a joke, but there's some old videos of like Dogecoin conferences and you'll see how people talk about it. It's really interesting. You know, people just don't care about some of these fundamentals. They just want to buy it because they like a cute little dog. Which I get. It's interesting to see these celebrities. I mean, you talked about Elon Musk, obviously, but Mark Cuban's been getting heat of late because he kind of has defended Doge. He said it's the best crypto for a number of reasons.

But then he owns $494 worth. Yeah, I think there's a healthy balance of like, at Kraken, of course, we're crypto agnostic. You can trade whatever you like. And I'm a libertarian guy. So I'm like, sure, trade whatever you want. I personally only recommend or would own Bitcoin. But I think there's a little bit of irresponsibility going on when you actively promote it, but you don't hold the asset yourself. Like if Bitcoin goes to zero, well, I'll be there along with you in the bread line. You know, I got everything on black. So I think that people are

like, these folks with a really big audience talk about these coins. And I'm like, that's great if you're really truly exploring it, but if you only own $500 worth and you're promoting this, it's a little bit, you've got some responsibility there that you're shuffling off. Again, people are free to buy whatever they want, but to actively promote it, but then not hold any of it, I'd say $500 is nearly nothing, right? It's getting in the game. That's something to some people, I guess, but not to a multi-billionaire. Not to keep it. It just means he's sort of waxing poetic on it conceptually. But if what he's saying has any effect, it doesn't matter to him, like you said, which is not ideal. And that's where I'd say I'm in between Bitcoiners and other folks in the space where like, I'm a Bitcoiner.

I think Bitcoiners feel that there's a big, big responsibility for folks not to talk about these other coins where they're kind of more, I don't know, subjectively frivolous. And I agree with them to some extent. Yeah. Like people with large brands looking at stuff and making people, I mean, we're talking billions of dollars here. This is a lot of money. I think there is some responsibility there. At the same time, people are free to buy whatever they want. And if people choose to buy it, then who am I to stand in the way? I might find it silly, but other people... Yeah. I mean, maybe Doge becomes the global reserve currency for all I know. I mean, anything in this world is possible. But if I had to make my bet,

I would say eventually the shine wears off and people don't care anymore. What happens to Robinhood? You know what I mean? Like 60% of 40%, of course, of their volume is just Doge. What happens? Yeah, I mean, this is where I try to, and again, I'm with

Bitcoiners, I've been trying to talk to some of them about like, Hey, you know, these Dogecoin folks are brand new to the space, you know, telling them that they own garbage and that are like people, but be nice to them, you know, like, okay, congratulations. You made 50,000 bucks with Dogecoin. Well, you know what? I've been around a long time. Maybe it's time you roll that into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's your long-term savings account. It's statistically, you look at all the different alts. Yeah, a lot of them have phenomenal returns. Depends on when you pick it. Bitcoin is your best return per unit of risk. And so I think that's a better, more palatable narrative for folks versus like, oh, you're a bad person, you own Doge.

And so I've been a little bit frustrated. And listen, maybe they made a lot of money. That's great. Maybe Bitcoin needs a cute animal to roll them over from the dog into the, well, it wouldn't be a bull, a bear, maybe a really cute bull or something. Well, yeah, I know there's a bunch of folks working on like Bitcoin type, like ask NFTs and stuff.

So yeah, maybe there'll be some of those on there, some cute animals and penguins or whatever you might be into. In your role at Kraken, how much does the nature of the market, the cycle affect you on a day-to-day basis? I've heard anecdotally from a few people that they were looking forward to somewhat of a bear market so they could stop putting out fires and actually work. And that people high up in exchanges and brokers were doing customer service calls themselves and trying to sort of. Working in, this is my first bull run working at an exchange and it's insane. You know, I mean, it's good for the profitability of the business. A lot of people are trading volumes go up. We make,

we make bips on volume. You know, I think it's a particularly exciting time for exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase because we're going mainstream. Coinbase went public Kraken. You know can't speak on what we're looking at there, but Jesse has publicly mentioned we're looking to IPO someday or direct listing or something like that. When we look at the maturity of these companies, they're getting big. I mean, Kraken's at 2000 people now. I didn't know it was that big. That's crazy. Yeah. Kraken's at 2000. Where were you a year ago? We were at like under a thousand. So Kraken is exploding in size. I'm sure Coinbase is as well and Gemini, but, you know, with Kraken, I think it's really exciting to be in these roles because during the bull run, you're like, whoa, like I, so I do user acquisition. This is like SEO paid acquisition. So if you see a

Kraken ad, it's likely to be from my team. Same with like organic, organic, organic social. So on social media channels that falls underneath my team. You know, when you look at this surge, you're like, whoa, this is really cool. I mean, we're talking Kraken's at 7 million customers now, you know, and as the market's growing, this is a really rare opportunity where I'm like, wow, this is a really cool spot to be in. So you've got the insanity of the bull run mixed with, I don't know how many more times I'm going to experience something like this in my life.

And this is really thrilling. So it's been super fun building out my team. Like I've got a group of hustlers. They've all got that startup hustle energy. And so I think Kraken still has that preserved, like that original kind of like crypto Bitcoin ethos, but combined with the startup vibe, but becoming, you know, professionalized where there's a lot of like really top-notch people from mainstream tech companies that are director levels and above at the company, you know, VPs that are really, really senior. And so it's super exciting to see stuff like that. It's like, okay, we're now entering the stage of like crypto was this kind of like small

niche industry and now it's becoming really big. So it's crazy as hell working on an exchange during a bull run. It's exhausting and fun at the same time. And we saw volumes basically cut in half over the summer from the top of the bull run. Did that give you guys a chance to breathe and focus on the actual business? A little bit. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of funny.

I actually, most folks on my team, I prefer to hire folks who are not crypto natives for two reasons. One is that they come in with a very strong curiosity of like, everything's new to them. They might've heard about some of my content on Bitcoin, but they're pretty new with other things. So when we create advertisements or we create different landing pages, they go, wait a second, that doesn't make sense to me. You guys talk about the halving. I have no idea what that means. Can you explain that to me? And then that makes us refocus on what we're writing and we're like, oh, wait a second, that does sound confusing. We need to drive clarity about

educating folks. So I think that's really cool. And then point two, they don't have a whole boatload of crypto from the last full run. So they're not in the spot where they're going to retire six months into the role. Oh, right. Because that's- It doubled, I'm out. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many people quit their jobs that I know in the last six months. Yep. Yeah. It's funny. I'm one of the few, a lot of people ask me, I mean, all the time, people are like, why are you still working, Dan? And I'm like, I don't know what the hell else would I do? It's fun for me.

I mean, it's, it's really exciting. I really love the folks at Kraken, you know, Jeremy Welch on the product side. He's the chief product officer. Like they've got an exceptional team that they've built there. I think you're going to see a ton of exciting things come out from the company. So I'm just thrilled to be a part of it. I've known Jesse for almost nine years now. Like we weren't close buddies or anything, but I have a lot of respect for Jesse and his,

his ethos. So, you know, I think for me, it's like, well, I could, I could watch the parade or I could be in the parade and have fun, you know? And, and I think at Kraken's a really cool spot to watch it all play out. It was huge news when Kraken got its banking license in Wyoming and sort of the banking side has also gotten lost in the news cycle to me for you guys. And just in general, you know, like obviously there's this string of announcements, you guys getting your license, all the things happening, I guess, with Avanti, the OCC saying that banks could test stable coins. What happened to that? That they could custody assets. What's going on on the banking side? Right. And it kind of forgotten, but what's going on in the banking side?

Yeah, I mean, this is part of like, I think a broader vision to build out this whole, you know, crypto bank stack, right? Like you've got the banking licenses, you've got spot futures, you know, there's a lot of other cool stuff that we're exploring. And this is kind of like the rebundling of like banking, right?

And we've seen Coinbase do this and other exchanges do this as well. Like other exchanges, you know, like BlockFi is doing lending, borrowing, credit card. You know, these are all kind of like the rebundling of what you'd expect from a consumer banking service. And we see this with Revolut, SoFi, Cash App, Robinhood. They started with traditional finance and they're kind of creeping into crypto. So we're sort of the opposite. We're starting, and I think we're in a better position because the growth in Bitcoin is far higher than traditional finance. So our revenues surge, and then we're able to enter new markets in the traditional financial world versus like traditional financial services, their revenues don't 20X or something like that. I'm not saying

Kraken's revenue 20X, but these volume numbers went crazy for Coinbase and Kraken and revenue numbers surged. So when that happens, it gives us a lot more opportunity for growth. So yeah, it's really interesting to see. On the banking side, I don't have any good insight I can provide there on timelines, but it's definitely really highly anticipated within the company and there's a lot of resources being put behind it. So they're Blockbuster and you guys are Netflix. Yeah, we'll see.

Look, there's a lot of smart people that work at these other fintech companies. I think it's really interesting to see how all this growth happens. It's like they're coming in or eating its way out. It's going to be fascinating to see how they all play out. And I've got tons of respect as well for the Cash App team. They're really, really phenomenal. I know Miles Sutter and a bunch of other folks on that team, they're great. They've same with Jack Dorsey. I think they're doing some awesome work of making Bitcoin easy and accessible. And then I'm really excited about other things with Twitter. Twitter maybe having lightning wallets is what Jack Dorsey hinted at. I mean, that's pretty sweet. I'm actually pretty bullish on Twitter. It was a pretty shitty product for most of its existence. I mean,

it sort of survived despite itself rather than because of itself, but now they're throwing in like monetization on like a better consumer experience where they'll give you the ability to like add bookmarks to folders and stuff. You can subscribe to your favorite Twitter account. And they also bought like a newsletter company as well. These all make a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Review is who I use for my newsletter. And I was using them long before Twitter bought them. Yeah. Well, I've seen some mock-ups of like how they might weave review into Twitter and that's pretty crazy. They announced it. They actually announced it today and started the functionality of right under your description. You can put a subscribe box on Twitter for your newsletter. So it'll be the first thing that people see when they come. It's pretty, yeah.

I mean, it's compelling. Yeah. It's very tempting for me to potentially switch from Substack. The Substack team has been great. Loved working with them. Also, we've got a, there's a surprise coming out next week with Substack. I helped that on, which is kind of fun. Maybe this will come right in time, but I know you can't tell me now. So yeah, they've got a really cool, exciting announcement happening next week. But yeah, like I think Twitter's doing all the right moves, you know, also like the super follows. I think that makes a ton of sense. They had all these people creating audiences and building their audiences on Twitter, and then they were monetizing them elsewhere, newsletters, membership services. And so to bake it in there, it makes a ton of sense. Now I don't really know, of course I'm following it closely. I don't know if they're,

I mean, they're taking like 33% or some absurd amount of the cut, which is a little bit egregious because it's only 10% with Substack. So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. But yeah, on the newsletter side, I think it's phenomenal to have that link right below as it's kind of like a sticky pinned post in a way, but a little bit more engaging. I think you can one-click subscribe. Yeah, right above your pinned post, it looks like it's basically part of your profile description. It's really cool. I saw it today for the first time. Well, they have your email, so you can probably just one-click subscribe, which that's super killer functionality.

Yeah, it's awesome. So we talk about you guys becoming a bank. The big banks, we celebrate them as a community coming into Bitcoin. But is that sort of counter to the ethos of Bitcoin, short the bankers, long Bitcoin, but they make the number go up? Well, I would say that it's kind of like, we've already started to win the war and they're starting to switch what flag they fly. So yeah, we're like, oh man, they were enemies, but at the same time, they're putting on our flag and they're like, cool, we're going to adopt your cultural standards and your standards of culture and ethics

and which is basically not the Bitcoin blockchain and any other blockchains, but mainly the Bitcoin blockchain is this immutable decentralized tool that can't be stopped. And they're recognizing you were right, which is cool. Yeah. I don't think it's necessarily like, I definitely noticed the sentiment. It's a good question. A lot of like the OGs are like, oh man, I miss the basement days, you know, when we're all like hanging out in basements and there's only 10 of us. I enjoyed those days too. You know, I still do. I still like hanging out with the OGs. In fact, last week I grabbed barbecue with a guy I've known for nine years from Silicon Valley. Him and I went to the first Bitcoin meetups, you know, things change, life changes. And so I'm enjoying this part of this, the process, you know, it's,

it was very hobbyist back in that day, but now it's mainstream. I think it's kind of cool. It's different. There's things I don't like about it, but there's things I like about it. Bitcoin is succeeding. And that's ultimately what this is about, right? It's like Bitcoin has succeeded, is succeeding, and banks coming in is a validation that that is true. We're all boomers in our own way, right? Hey, kids, get off my lawn. In our own things, the thing that you found first is always something that you have resentment for the people who find it later. Everything's like that. I got involved in the drone space as well in San Francisco.

Same sort of thing there, too. You know, actually, drones are pretty fun. People are pretty lighthearted in that sector. But yeah, it's always folks going, oh, I don't like the new way of things happening. Yeah, sure. I don't like all of it, too. But it is what it is. Before we go, and I know we have to go soon, is there a price or event or something fundamental that could change where you would say, ah, the super cycle was not dead or even take it further?

I'm no longer a big corner, but- Sure. Well, let's start with the positive ones first, then we can go to the negative ones. Positive ones would be like a surprise ETF approval. I don't think that's likely for 2021, but if it happened, it would be very surprising and the market would go nuts. You know, I think there would be other ones like more purchases happening from top hedge funds that are sizable insurance funds and sovereign wealth funds. I think like those getting in, in, in bigger sizes of like 10 billion, that's when things really start to get clicking. That would be surprising, which would make the price, I think, very much give more check marks to a super cycle happening. I think if we get over $100,000 of Bitcoin, well, the probability of a super cycle goes up as the

price goes up, of course. But I think that once we break that 100K barrier, I think that that really distorts people's opinion. I saw this happen at 1,000 and 10,000. When that breaks, people just lose all semblance of like, they're like, whoa, okay. I never thought I could get this high. And it did. And so when that happens, I think that, and that combined with this mainstream institutional investor feedback loop, that's where I think things can get really nuts.

So I think like, yeah, if we break a hundred K, then the game begins. Then the race is, we're off to the race. And they start talking about a hundred, a hundred, you start talking about a million. It's the next round number with a one. And then that's a magnet that people, you know, withholds, withhold selling from, and the price starts to climb. They keep withholding selling. So yeah, I think that yeah. Combination of factors could lead to a super cycle being more validated of it being a possibility. Um, you know, I'd say in the negative side, we could see like, well, what if 65K was the top? That obviously would invalidate that this

is a super cycle and we see sideways churn for, if we see sideways churn or like sideways chop past December, I think that that would be a very bad sign. We should see Bitcoin break all-time highs again this year. So if we don't see that happen again, I think that the super cycle would be invalidated. But who knows, maybe it goes sideways for eight months and then has a 20X run up in January. I don't know. Yeah. So who knows, who knows how this all plays out and make sure, you know, when you're listening to this, I don't know where the price is going to go next month. I don't know where the price is going to go over the next couple of years. All I know is that the fundamentals look great and I'm still hodling. And so that, you know, that's how I think

about it. But yeah, I'd say like maybe other negative stuff would be like, you know, if the infrastructure bill had banned like proof of work mining or they got really, really intense in like the US and like top regions, like that would be very negative. That would definitely put a damper on things. Bitcoin will still survive. I just, I prefer to see Bitcoin thrive and win sooner than later. So a lot of Bitcoiners are like, oh man, you're too bearish. Like Bitcoin will survive anything.

I'm like, true, but I don't know. I'm 33 and I kind of want to see Bitcoin crush it by the time I'm like 40 or 50. You know, I want to see Bitcoin win. That's the whole point. And I want to see it win sooner than later because the longer it takes to win, I think the more vulnerable it is. So yeah, I think that, you know, I think I'm more, of course, bullish that this, the rest of this year should be really interesting. I could certainly be wrong. I'm 44. So I'm even, you know, in a bigger rush. I would say you are to see it happen by those ages. So I've been really loving your YouTube channel. As you mentioned, your newsletter, before we go, tell everybody where they can

follow you and find you after this conversation and check out your work. Cool. Well, yeah, my newsletter is called The Held Report. I write it every Thursday and it's my intimate thoughts on different topics. So if you like my tweets, if you liked what I said here, this is the verbal interpretation of that where I'll write about a certain topic and write a couple of pages on it. And so you get this first in your inbox on Thursdays if you're a paid subscriber. Free subscribers get it once a month. And then on Sundays, I have a YouTube video that I put out, which is similarly on in-depth Bitcoin topics. So if you like what I said here, if you like kind of hearing my longer form thoughts, definitely check out

those two spots. So Dan Held on YouTube or the Held Report for the newsletter. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this a second time. And I know that as we're recording this, you and I will be on Twitter spaces in an hour, but nobody who's watching the podcast will know that. So I will see you there, man. Thanks again. Thanks for having me, Scott. Cheers.