The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC hits 4-month low, taps $76k before rebound | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

the the the the the the the the

the the the the the that now I have to host and have all you guys talk. So, moderating equals responsibility, but an interesting morning, obviously. Yesterday would have been even more interesting, but we had a cyber attack to deal with, so be it. In any case, let's get started.

There's a lot to talk about. Obviously, we saw Bitcoin drop as low as 76,000-ish yesterday, briefly. Some of us rallied our own siteies to buy in a little bit more in the 77 range. Here we are trading between 80 and 81 for most of the morning. NASDAQ is essentially flat. The S&P is slightly down. It looks like there's a bit of a dead cat bounce

going on in equities, but we'll see. Curious, anybody want to raise their hand and talk about what they actually think is going on? Or do you want me to call on people? Okay, Carla, you go. Sure, throw your lifeline. First of all, good morning. And here we go again.

Well, I think we're definitely seeing a continued choppy season. My take is if you are in a position where you can hold at these levels, and you don't need to sell good for you. If you're in a better position where you can not only hold, but you can accumulate at these levels, even better for you. And I think if we zoom out, it appears that Trump is executing on what appears to be a plan to nuke the markets and the economy, to force rate cuts all in advance of the midterm elections. to force rate cuts all in advance of the midterm elections.

We've talked about this previously. There's a lot of instability in the markets right now. And of course the equity markets are not responding well to all this, but just a friendly reminder that we could not be better positioned on a regulatory and legal front. Every day we continue to get better and better news. SEC just announced even more

good news that they're considering rolling back certain aspects of the broker-dealer requirements that normally would apply to sector participants in crypto who are launching potentially this would impact ICOs. This has to do with their proposal, a proposal to roll back the and I'm kind of just giving through my post this morning, the ATS, the alternative trading systems. This would relax a lot of requirements that potentially would impact forthcoming ICOs.

Gary Ginsler tried to make this apply more to crypto and the acting chair believes we should pull back on that. So that's something to put on your radar. And look, man, I think that we just are experiencing a little bit of disappointment that the summit and the crypto executive orders that Trump issued did not result in a buying spree on crypto. And I think that those expectations

were a little bit unreasonable and the market needs to absorb that disappointment and carry on forward. I mean, that's my truncated take. Cool, I think Mark had his hand up next. Great, thanks, Dave. Yeah, I listened to your post. Was that done this morning or last night,

the nine minute? You said you wanted to do it a little longer because of all that happened. Yeah, it was last night. Yesterday at like 4.30, I taped it right after I TWAP bought, using our CoinRoutes Algo, some more Bitcoin for myself and then I put it. So, you know, following up on what was it, not Alex, who was it? Oh, Carl saying that the regulatory environment is, you know, very different and constructive. Absolutely. If I had to look at answer the question for folks who are more active traders, I'm not. I'm more dealing with institutions and RIAs trying to just get them to inject a little bit of Bitcoin. And that's my business plan. And so to start with the bigger levers that I think were pulled in this last week, it would have to be Germany's decision to fund themselves and do a military. I don't know if it was Carl Menger or someone said in a meme,

let me get this straight, being Germany. You want us to get a military, march through Poland and take on Russia. Is that right? It didn't go that well the first time for you guys. I think that that was the biggest lever because it can't be rolled back. It's inflationary. We're seeing that in the DAX up 20% this year. It's kind of like what Argentina's equity market did, offsetting inflation.

It's not a growth indication. It's inflation. So I think the structural case for inflation and prices higher are here because of that. So that's the first one. And then the second one would just have to be what happened with the Atlanta Fed now casting with GDP, which was all trade related. I don't know if you guys saw that, the down 2.8 on March 3rd, still down 2.4. And it was all because of consumer and net exports rising as people just hoarded materials ahead of tariffs. So very destabilizing. I think we have at least three to six weeks, even if everything gets reversed, which I don't think it can because

of the permanent inflection point in fiscal spending by Germany, so I do think this is big stuff. This is kind of along the lines of Bretton Woods and And the petrodollar I know there's a bold statement and and we don't do it often But I do think this is a locked in and loaded different market going forward. You know, it's interesting that you say that because when you have major secular, not cyclical changes, you end up having to look back at the time period that it was happening, because these things don't happen like instantly, right? They happen over weeks months you know etc you know the

real question in the world of Bitcoin vis-a-vis you know tech investing even and Bitcoin has been exceedingly correlated to the Nasdaq for the last two days and in particular to you know some of the high flyers you know in the Nasdaq you know the question is is will Bitcoin de-link this cycle? Who knows? That's a large ticket question. Anyway, Alex, you had your hand up next. Yeah, I mean, I think, I'm not sure I have a ton to add over what I think folks have said so far.

I think it's all pretty much on track. I don't think we're gonna see much improvement bigger than the crypto markets in the short or even probably medium term because at the end of the day, macro drives everything. People are freaked the fuck out because they don't know what is going to happen with the markets or exactly what Trump's doing. Or I should say, we know what Trump's doing in that he is making a very big bet to bring down interest rates by trying to force the Fed's hands. But a recession is not the worst case scenario here.

Stagflation is the worst case scenario here. And there's a little bit of playing with fire on it. Some people are very pro it because they think the risk is worth the trade off. Given how it might, you know, reset the economy and move us back into a different track. Obviously, plenty of people do not think it's worth the risk. And we're just going to kind of, to a degree, have to see how it plays out. But yeah, crypto is still very heavily macro correlated. And so I don't think you're going to see some like great divergent in the short term between what it does versus what say now that does. David, I think you were next and then Lou.

Yeah. So, um, I'm going to be honest. Um, I don't know what Trump is doing. And I don't know what the strategy is. Based on the moves, there's certainly a bunch of theories going around in terms of what his end goal is. There's a lot of moving parts here. I think when you get market flushes on a single day basis, as we had yesterday,

there are usually a lot of elements that play into this, and there are certainly also technical elements that are playing into this as well. Certainly there is leverage and there is margin that is getting called in places. I don't think we're necessarily in the clear in terms of there not being additional forced selling that has to go ahead and happen.

I certainly agree with the sentiment that in terms of the fundamental story, the crypto story has only gotten better over the last 72 hours even. Even Lumis coming out today with a revised Bitcoin strategic reserve bill, I think in the crypto space, things seem to be chugging along as best as they can. That said, technical selling is certainly happening in the crypto space as well. The one thing that's great about the crypto space is you know about it more. You get more information. It's more real time. It's more transparent than what's

going on in stocks and other, I'd say risk assets that are traded in markets. We won't find out about those stories maybe until the end of the month, and PMs are required to go ahead and show their results for the month. We may not find out about them ever, but we should certainly be looking for,

if you have the opportunity should certainly be looking for, if you have the opportunity, like Carlo said before, if you do have the opportunity to go ahead and double down dollar cost average, whatever it is, into your favorite assets that are going to be, because of your conviction held long-term, you know, this is the right time to go ahead and do that. There is no promise that we've hit bottom. I don't think that there's, you know,

any way of knowing until there's a couple of days in the clear. But I, you know, more than anything right now, the macro story is really, really important. And I, for one, do not know exactly where we're going. The fact that Trump went ahead and responded to Ontario's 25% hike on electricity to US states that take from Ontario

with an increase in steel and aluminum tariffs from 25 to 50% seems to indicate to me that we're far from over here in terms of the back and forth, you know, punching that we're we're seeing. Lou, you were you were next. Your mic working? Sure. Can you?

Yeah, like usual, I disagree with much of what's been said. I think Trump may be playing 4D chess here, but I defer to Occam's razor and the simplest most likely thing happening is he's crashed in the market as a result of incompetence. People saying that the market is wrong and that we've had all of this good news, I think by definition the market is smarter than you. The market, I think, expected Trump to actually do something with regards to the Bitcoin strategic reserve and in fact he did absolutely nothing but use his pen, which he does hundreds of times a day, to sign something. They did nothing.

There was no buying. There is a plan to buy just like there's a plan to have a healthcare plan. But most of the time, most of their plans don't come to anything. And I think that's what the market sees and that's why the markets reacted. Obviously, the markets obviously, I agree that macro is driving everything in the short run, but Bitcoin delinks in the long run. It doesn't delink day to day, but in the long run, it's gone up dramatically higher than the market has and it will continue to. And I've got a 10-year million-dollar price target on Bitcoin for 2031, and we're tracking

very well against that. The world is crashing. The only thing that people can believe in and trust is Bitcoin. Well, I mean, I think that we always overuse the word market, right? You know, we saw post, you know, over the weekend, we saw Bitcoin drop significantly. Then we saw on Monday a route in financial assets, particularly momentum-based financial assets. Now, there are some who would say Bitcoin led that. There are others who will say that there's totally different things going on. And some of what happened with Bitcoin is what you said, hot money basically saying, well, okay, we didn't get what we wanted, so the hot money bailed.

The long-term buyers are like, great, this doesn't really matter because do we really want the US government buying anyway? But there is a very big thing that happened and we've talked about this. I've talked about it extensively, which is in something that I think it was Mark was talking about from the RIA perspective, being able to convince people in the larger piles of money that significantly adwarf the crypto market to be willing to invest in Bitcoin, having the United States government declaring it a strategic reserve asset is actually a very big deal. It is not a big deal that means anything in terms of liquidity in the short run.

So, I mean, you know, I'm sorry, David, to add to that into what Lou was saying. I'm curious to know from Lou and I I'm not discounting anything you're saying, you're making very good points, but Trump has also surrounded himself with some of the brightest minds in TradFi with respect to his key positions he's put in place, and are they just sitting back aghast

at what's going on here? Or is this part of a plan that they're well aware of and that they're executing, albeit Trump does go off the reservation, is this part of a plan that they're well aware of and that they're executing, albeit Trump does go off the reservation? Is this a broader plan? I've been thinking about that a lot, Dave, and I'm just wondering from the panel, this can't just be all madness. There has to be some plan here behind the curtain.

And it seems to me that that plan is to accelerate the economy tanking so that he can avoid losing the midterms, which would disrupt his plans for his agenda. Look, there's two things that are clear. I want to go around the horn, but there's two things that are clear. Scott Besendt, who's the Treasury Secretary, has been pretty active out there giving interviews. And he basically said short-term pain for long-term gain not once but twice. He also said changing from a focus on short rates to the focus of the long bond and trying to get that down and

that matters and that's indicative of a plan. Then we have Howard Lutnick with a lot of bluster to be honest on the whole tariff situation and one wonders if he's the agent of communicating that bluster or if that's what he actually believes. I have no idea. I don't know anyone up here who knows it, but I'm curious. So who was next? I think it was Douglas who set his hand up for a while. Can you hear me? Yeah. I think that this is planned. So I disagree with Lou there. I think that the macro strategists that I talked to all day long in other chats have kind of been foreseeing this, I guess, for the last couple of weeks. huge trade that was obviously long Bitcoin through the ETFs and short micro strategy because micro strategy had such a large premium. Obviously that premium has come off significantly. That's now being unwound that trade, which meant selling of Bitcoin ETFs, obviously, and then the buying back of micro strategy. So that's obviously why we've seen a good amount of the weakness in Bitcoin. I think it's been the unwind of that trade specifically. In terms of the V-shaped recovery, I think that we're going to absolutely get that.

This really is about getting short term pain as much as possible, a restructure of the markets and the economy that were very, very fluffy. But for the first three months of a new administration, you can blame it on the old administration. You know, what I think Trump's trying to do here is cut a lot of spending fat and he needs to cut that fat and at the same time get it so that it's muddled up in with sort of, you know, you can call it, well, AI is getting repriced and Bitcoin is getting repriced.

But the reality is there's a lot of government spending that's going to disappear from this, from the US economy. And so you want to sort of get that over as fast as possible and as quickly as possible, which obviously is Doge's job right now. So I think that this is about cutting fat so we can have a much leaner, more private sector economy than public sector economy. And I'm all for it. I think that the expectation that we'd see more growth in Europe for defense spending makes a lot of sense as well. We constantly are threatening leaving NATO, and I've done a couple of studies on this in the last couple of weeks, but the net of it is there are so many countries in Europe that haven't been spending as much as they should have for spending. There's been a

free rider problem, and the US has called them out on that and now they're sort of, but you have to shock them into believing that now they need to start spending money and obviously Germany has realized that and has put together a 500 billion dollar package but Spain and Italy are doing the same sort of thing. You know Italy, I don't know if everyone knows this, but Italy's been spending a heck of a lot of money on Russian oil and gas during this whole period. So on the one hand, we get from NATO allies, hey, you know what? We're all against Russia. But on the other hand, they're paying Russia for oil and gas.

And I think that what Trump wanted to do is really to bring this out to the fore to make everyone realize that it's not black and white, and also to get rid of some of this froth in the economy. So I'm all for it. I think it's going to be a V-shaped recovery. I agree with the first speaker in that this And also to get rid of some of this froth in the economy. So I'm all for it. I think it's going to be a V-shaped recovery. I agree with the first speaker in that this is the type of opportunity where we should

be buying if we can, holding if we can't buy more. But I think you have to look again and again as Bitcoin as being just like real estate. I don't go on Zillow every single day and check what's the price of my house. I just don't. And Bitcoin is that sort of very, very long-term horizon where we all know it's going to rise in price over the long term. There's going to be some, you know, miss mark along the way. There's going to be some trip-ups, but we all know it's going to go from A to B. And I think we've all seen the memes. Yeah, they're constant. It's sort of like, you know, everyone says,

oh, so easy for you to make money in Bitcoin. It's not easy. You lose a lot of air. You go gray very, very quickly. But it is something that when you believe in it, you know it's going to go much higher. Yes. Speak for yourself.

I've managed to keep the gray off somehow. I'm not sure how. Infra, you know, you've been bouncing up and down to is your mic working now? Everything okay? Hopefully, hopefully, is that you can hear me? Yeah, perfect. Okay, cool. Yeah, so I would agree with a lot of what Mark was saying, and, you know, the Douglas as well with the restructuring of the economy. And I, and I do think that's a

good thing. But I want to bring up something that not many people are talking about, which is this dollar carry trade concept. So, historically, surplus countries have used the dollar and dollar-based assets, dollar-denominated assets, as a positive carry trade. So their trade surplus is get invested into, you know, US equities, corporate bonds, real estate, just kind of go down the list. And because the dollar has been steadily appreciating versus their local currency and those assets kind of go up in dollar terms, they are getting this positive carry. Well, this is a kind of a result

of being the reserve currency issuer of the world. We run these huge trade deficits as a means of providing the kind of dollar liquidity that everyone wants. They reinvest those dollars into our capital markets, right? Everyone gets rich, It's great. Well, Stephen Moran, who is the chair of the CEA, as well as like JD Vance even, and certainly Scott Besant, they understand that this dynamic leads to a lot of the second and third order societal

effects we're seeing. Hist historic wealth inequality, suicide rate, drug overdose death rate, hollowing out the middle class, right? They understand kind of the more complicated dynamics that it's not, you know, the reserve currency issuer of the world ends up hollowing out their industrial base to the point that it becomes a national security issue. I would also point out, you point out foreigners own over $31 trillion of US assets and our net international investment position, the gap between what foreigners own of us and what we own of them is 80% of GDP.

So I think that they understand that all these issues, I don't think Trump necessarily does. But if we see a world where that dynamic starts to be addressed and you start to disincentivize foreign holding of dollars and dollar denominated assets, you would get a much more fairly valued dollar, which would re-industrialize America, make American exports more competitive again, on and on and on. It would break the kind of hyper-financialized economy that has led to the K-shaped economy. It would have numerous positive benefits. It would be very volatile, but it would be monetary reordering that you only see once in a generation.

And we're starting to see that. So like, you know, the futures, ES and NQ will be down, right? During Europe, Asia dollar down. And, and I would point out last week and, and, and a bit recently you see bonds down too. So equity is down bonds down dollar down. That is textbook capital rotation. And I would agree

that German stimulus story, that's a higher nominal growth story. But on a currency, from a fundamental valuation of a currency, it doesn't really matter. If there's higher nominal growth, the interest rate differential, right? Just that that currency will strengthen and capital will flow towards those higher nominal growth environments. For right or wrong, I don't think war is a good reason, right? But if we start to see this kind of dollar flywheel that has worked so well, you know, been a virtuous cycle, if we see this dollar flywheel start to reverse, it would be 6-7%

on S&P is going to be barely a blip on the overall longer term timeframe. Well, a lot of people, I mean, look,. Vance has talked about this extensively and yes, you know, there's no question about the pathologies that you mentioned, but doesn't it boil down to accept more expensive consumer goods or less consumerism, not being able to import that nearly as much in favor of more production, right? I mean, it's really about consumption versus production, but that's a very large reordering with lots of second, probably even first order effects. Yeah, but China, totally.

But I would also point out like China, they need to reorient their economy towards more domestic consumption. This is something that Michael Pettis and China experts have been talking about for a while. So Amaralago Accord becomes kind of much more beneficial for all parties involved too, you know. And in that, just to bring it back for the audience, because you know, what we really care about here, you know, in that one would expect rather dramatic reversal, breaking of some of the correlations in the markets, right?

Certain assets would do extremely well because obviously they're oriented toward domestic production. Certain assets would get crushed because domestic consumption would decrease and they're relying upon the quote American consumer. Meanwhile Bitcoin in a world where in dollar terms at least becomes that hard currency, which is extremely relevant. One would think that would be very good for Bitcoin, but maybe not as good for consumer oriented platforms, etc. I mean, are you thinking about it the same way?

Yeah, sorry to kind of put a bow on it and bring it to Bitcoin. All of what I just described is immensely bullish for Bitcoin, escalating trade tensions, deglobalization, a move away from dollar-based assets, all of these things. Bitcoin is neutral. There's no politics, there's no leader, there's no... It's a protocol. It's neutral. It freely floats in all currencies, so currencies can start to be fairly fundamentally valued again. There are so many positives for Bitcoin in this. If this is the direction things are headed, it is immensely bullish for Bitcoin. Now short term, there will be volatility, but I'm talking a year, two year, five years out,

this world would be insanely bullish for Bitcoin. Which is a large part of my thesis, obviously, but that implies a delink between Bitcoin and consumer NASDAQ stocks, for example. Anyway, Mark, you've had your hand up again for a while, and then Austin, and then Luke. Yeah, you've had your hand up again for a while, and then Austin, and then Lou. Yeah, you bet. Two things.

I think it was in for talking about the K-shape recovery and basically the impact on our culture and people. It's palpable as far as what it does to mental health. So the fact that we want a soft landing has made us, I think, soft. I think that a recession is that near-term pain, like Besen said, long-term gain. Since 1981, we've had recessions 7% of the time. And prior to 1981, between 1900 and 1981, we had them 30% of the time. So if you look at those gray bars on those St. Louis fed charts everyone uses, we don't have them anymore because we can't afford them because of the debt. So even though we're inviting recession, I'd love to get thoughts from people about can

we really afford it because credit spreads are still tight If we allow recession do we really control consumer behavior? Or will we just have another? BTFP and everything else roll in and we're back to flooding the market with with liquidity So that's the that's the chick game of chicken that I think right now with Trump in there I don't I don't know if if That's the part that I would say we don't know what's gonna happen

Someone said that earlier with Trump and the only thing I'm looking at is the move index in Bonds because if that gets up to like 130 140 again, I think that's when everyone runs down to Maiden Lane and has a meeting about, you know, tariffs are fine, but we got to, you know, shore up the banks that we still need to sell treasuries. So I think that's the interim part that isn't yet priced in, isn't contemplated, and gets in the way of Besson's plan about having that pain, because I don't know if we can afford it,

a full blown recession. And that's because I don't know if we can afford it a full blown recession. And that's all I wanted to share. Cool. Is it me, Dave? Sorry. Yeah. Can you guys hear me now? Yep. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Why don't you go ahead and I'll tell my story after. Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. So I, I agree with a lot of what's being said about the paradigm shift that we're dealing with here. And it brings up, you know, as somebody who's poked around in markets for a while, two things for me. One is, you know, it's a very basic principle, but I think understated in a world where we're trying to restructure how people utilize the dollar and have access to American markets is that in very simple terms, if you reduce the demand for an asset, you would expect prices to decline. And so part of what I think we're going to be experiencing in capital markets is a little bit of a reversion of the labor versus capital paradigm and asset prices probably take that on the chin

for a while. I think people need to understand that that is a feature, not a bug of what the administration is trying to do and not try to look for, call it market shifts in the short term that are gonna be supportive here because they've pretty much clearly told you their medium term goal is hammering down asset prices to some extent. Now their belief, right

or wrong, is in the long run, this will lead to a much better setup and growth for America, but you've got to understand what the goal is. The second part, and this is a behavioral thing that I think is driving some of the violence of these moves, is how many people are left, either retail traders or more so even on trading desks on the street who have actually traded through truly painful regimes, right? Like unless you were around for the tech bubble bursting or 08, right? Which I will remind people is 17 years ago now,

even though it feels like yesterday for some of us, nobody's actually traded through serious bear markets in the past. And a lot of people have been conditioned to always buy the dip, always buy the dip, always buy the dip. Even right now, if you like go on Twitter, you talk to people, they're trying to figure out, Okay, where do I start buying? And as somebody who lived through 2008, the answer might be you just don't, right, or at least not until much longer until everybody is like crying and giving up and you're getting all the posts about I'm never investing again, like

all of this is hell. And so I would just caution people if you haven't been around in markets for a while, if you're entering a real bear market regime without some sort of fiscal or monetary put behind what's going on with price action, things can get more violent and uglier than you have ever seen, right? And be prepared. Austin, just real quick, how much downside, if that dollar flywheel carry trade starts to unwind, like we were talking about, how much more, like what sort of downside do you see on S&P? So the hard part about pricing that

is you're essentially asking how much implicit leverage is there in the shadow banking system, which is a hard thing to wrap your arms around. But I would remind people that, you know, back to sort of oh, eight or previous recession vibes, you could easily have like well into double digit downs from here. Right? Like if we go from here to another 20 to 40% down, it's not totally off the table. I'm not predicting that I want to be clear. But leverage is very, very important to understand. It will accelerate some of these moves violently downwards. Trying to remember who had their,

oh, I think it was Lou, you still have your hand up. Yeah, yeah. I just want to say again, the simplest explanation for what's going on with the tariffs, this is Trump's Brexit. Trump just wants us to be self-reliant and he wants us to build stuff ourselves. And how did that work out for the UK? Not well. the UK, not wealth. There was a book written in 1776 called The Wealth of a Nation, and

that is the fundamentals of economics that now 250 years later still stand. If one country's better at producing something than you, and they can do it cheaper, let them do that and put your resources elsewhere. If you try and build everything yourself, the net is you're going to have a lot less stuff. And that is the direction that we're going. And that is, I think, going to be extraordinarily painful for many, many years if we continue on this path. Douglas. Yeah, I was going to say, the Wealth of Nations, correct, I mean, it's a great book, but the Europeans can't produce energy, and so they need to import it from Russia.

That doesn't obviously work if Russia becomes your adversary. So where the Wealth of Nations failed in some what was thinking about strategic importance of certain manufacturing certain industries Certain things and I think that Trump grasps that and so that's why he's rejiggering the economy So that we're not reliant upon other countries like Europe is towards Russia For things like let's say rare earths. I Mean rare earths are obviously extremely central to to the war that's going on over there since those two countries both have some of the the bigger supplies and right now we have a national security issue

because our access to rare earths is going through all roads lead through China and people who will 20 years from now when people look back at this war and look back at what happened, they're going to say similar things to what we say about things in the Middle East with regard to oil, because rare earths are that important and weirdly doesn't get the press coverage. David? Yeah, while we're talking, Trump has said that he will shortly declare a national emergency on electricity and he's threatened to go ahead and permanently shut down Canada's car industry.

I mean, I just, you know, these words may just be words, but the tensions continue to ratchet up. I think we're kind of just, most of us who have a portfolio, unless you're a zero or you're neutral, we're just kites in the wind right now. I frankly, and I don't think the Canada issue is the biggest issue out there But you know if Trump is going to continuously double down no matter what no matter what the endgame is You know until there's capitulation on the other side. You know he's Undoubtedly if he's gonna pick fights with lots of different people he's gonna run into at least one if not numerous that for either fundamental reasons or ego and personal reasons are not going to go ahead

and back down very easily so would you back down? That's irrelevant. I just care about my portfolio. You can't back down. You cannot back down. If you back down, you know what's going to happen? He'll want more. Listen.

He had a deal. What he has shown is he doesn't care about deals. There is no deal. There is no agreement. There's only what he wants. And if you don't give it to him, he's going to be upset. And if you do give it to him, he's going to want more. Okay. it to him, he's going to be upset. And if you do give it to him, he's going to want more. Okay, so if we take it 100% of the time, if we take that to its logical conclusion, then,

right, we're going to get the full on nuclear war joust, right? Because you're saying that he doesn't have an off ramp at all. And the other side certainly doesn't have an off ramp because if they capitulate, they'll have to capitulate for forever They'll become a slave They'll be the next Other than South Park Which is looking awfully prescient here for those who have watched it understand how they treat us Canada wars over the years It's been rather amusing. I mean come on

I mean Doug Ford and Trump, if you put the two of them in a room, there's no room for anybody else's ego. I mean, let's just go right there. Mark Carney will be different, but this is coming out of Ontario, and we should understand that. But to say that the histrionics,

look, there are certain inequalities in the relationship, and that's just facts. I mean, you just look at some of the way the tariffs work between the two, and that's true. And Trump looks at this and says, F this, we shouldn't have it. And Doug Ford said, well, it's been ugly forever, so you guys are being bullies. These were deals that he made. I'm aware. He made these deals.

And when he made them, he said they were the greatest ever. So why were they the greatest ever then and not now? Because when he says something is the greatest ever, the attention to detail is, shall we say, lacking. And, you know, now he has a new set of it. I mean, people have made the point, and it's fair, it's just factual, that he has a completely different

inner circle now than he did when he made that deal. So understand that this is a direct result of that. I mean, I think it was Mark and Austin both made very, very clear, concise description of what the new set of advisors thinks. And that's very different than the old set of advisors, which are more typical neocon or neoliberal. And yes, the USMCA, if I'm getting it right, was better than NAFTA from our perspective, so to that degree it was an improvement, but it still had features that the Trump core

constituency, the new one, doesn't want. We haven't even talked about Mexico yet. USMCA still allows Mexican production of things, and Trump's changing that. And yet he used Fentanyl as an excuse, but there's going to be some flack there. So, but anyway, I mean, all of this may be true, but the question is, is there anyone who ties any of this to the fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin? And then the second question is, what does it do to the market for crypto infrastructure, which is much more aligned with the tech stocks?

Anyone want to take that? Mark go ahead Yeah, can you guys hear me? Yes Oh perfect. Yeah, so bringing it back bringing it back to bitcoin Absolutely, if you have uh trade agreements being written up and then you have this SubRosa network that is outside of the existing system that can be built on and store value, etc., then yes, this is a huge win for Bitcoin. There's near term pain though.

So we're talking about people who have portfolios, liquidity, you know, Bitcoin is sensitive. Dave, you said it's connected to, you know, NASDAQ and it is over the short term, but you know, speaking to adoption, the reason BlackRock and Fidelity, and I've done some calls with them, the reason they got in early years ago is because they saw that over periods of months and quarters. It still is a tremendous diversifier

So I'm not gonna get into it. They've written about it. It's not understood by most any RIA yet I've spoken to it's just not in their consciousness So the decoupling that we're seeing in agreements that Trump is initiating, I forgot who said it just about, electricity strikes. So all of that is very constructive for Bitcoin because it will only make it, I think, less correlated as people are forced to look to new options outside of liquidity- driven equities. Yeah, I mean, I look at my view for what it's worth is all of this is crazy positive for Bitcoin.

And the other thing we've seen and you can see it today in the market for those who aren't paying attention, the volatility second to second is dramatically higher. I don't mean in terms of directionally because it's still more or less just under 80,000 right now. But the fact is that there's much less order book depth right now than there was a few days ago. That's probably because a lot of the leverage has been washed out of the system on the long side and people in the crypto world have pretty long memories of what happens when you short this thing and someone decides

to buy. At the same time, we've had a rotation from crypto native holders to TradFi kind of put in the vault kind of people for the small percentage of RIAs and small percentage of funds that are investing in Bitcoin, they're not doing it for days. They're like your example, Mark of Zillow. I mean, it's like, yeah, okay, whatever. This is a diversifier. These are people who make decisions on a quarterly basis, are the ones who are buying. So you got that in Bitcoin. But there's something else that's going on in the market that has to be talked about,

which is Ethereum. You can look at Bitcoin's weakness, but the relative strength to Ethereum, we're plumbing levels that we haven't seen in a while. Ethereum below 1900, and there's all sorts of talk about the Ethereum foundation. Does anybody want to comment about what's going on there? My opinions on this are I'm far from an expert, but have definite have thoughts. If I'm actually here now, yeah, sure, sure. I joined. I was a rare moment where I had something counter scheduled, actually just interviewed the

Richard Tang, the CEO of Binance, which was awesome for the for the first time. Richard Tang, the CEO of Binance, which was awesome for the first time. But yeah, Dave, just to follow up on that, has anybody been able to confirm that the Ethereum Foundation is in fact leveraging long on Ethereum right now? Because that is not something I had seen before. And I've seen that going around X. I don't know if, Carl, if that was something you were going to jump in on, but pretty curious if that's something that's actually happening, because that would be a real eye opener. Yeah, same.

I don't know that there's been any confirmation from the foundation itself about it outside of the speculative post that we've all seen. I think the downtrend in Ethereum is obviously related to the overall downtrend of all altcoins, because there simply is no use case scenario that anyone wants to adopt right now, because everyone's jumping out of windows, metaphorically. So do I think long term Ethereum still has a place in the market, and it will be used as the rails for DeFi? Absolutely. But I think we just have to clear this short-term pain before people wake up to that again. Hey Austin.

Yeah, so, all right, I'll be maybe a little bit more dire on this one, having written something and talking to a lot of people and regulators in this space. I think one of the things that we're experiencing now that we have an admin in the US that is not hysterically crypto negative, where they think even saying the word Bitcoin is a crime is that things actually need to work properly and be usable. And one of the problems Ethereum has had for a while is you sort of created this V1 of it and it worked in theory, but security has always been a problem and scaling has always been a problem

and scaling continues to maybe sort of kind of happen. But I think people have really underplayed the security part and the Bybit hack was a good example of this because if your value prop for Ethereum to the average two-legged normal human being is that your info sack on an individual basis needs to be good enough to withstand the North Koreans, then most people are rationally going to look at that and be like, well, I can't do that. And then the answer becomes, okay, don't use it. I think there is a much deeper, more existential question for a lot of blockchain design and

the security models around them that people are acknowledging here. And I think a lot of the bearishness around Ethereum is as you would go pitch it to institutional people or try to get people on chain, the more sophisticated ones I've found have very deep questions about the architecture of the space and are basically not sold on anything other than Bitcoin and to some extent stable coins, but TBD wear.

anything other than Bitcoin and to some extent stable coins, but TBD where? Well, that brings up a bunch of questions, but, you know, from a security point of view, vis-a-vis other chains, that you started this with a very interesting point, which I've which we haven't used the word meme in this space. And this maybe would have been the first crypto town hall I've ever heard without it getting mentioned. I mean, my thesis from November has been that there will be a rotation out of means and into, well, not out of means, out of pure means and into assets that can provide some economic benefit to the holders. That is a secular change, which I don't think people were expecting to happen so quickly. Of course, they also weren't expecting the President of the United States family to put

out coins that were effectively rug pulls, and then the same thing happened a couple days later to the President of Argentina. It sort of accelerated it, but that trend is, I think most people would say is a healthy one. You know, actually did he leave? Oh yeah, no, no actually. Yeah, Dave, I would say, I mean, but if you look at the transaction or the earnings

on pump fund, I mean, it's cratered to, back to where they started basically, before any of the hype cycle happened. I mean, you can seeed back to where they started, basically, before any of the hype cycle happened. I mean, you can see the price action on Solana obviously coincides with the Trump launch. I mean, Solana basically peaked all time high at the high of the Trump volume the Sunday after the launch and has gone down about 55%, 56%, 57% since then.

And Pump Fund is almost non-existent, not from the perspective of people trying, but from actual fees generated and tokens getting adopted. I don't know if that's a permanent washout, but it does look right now like at least for now the meme coin phrase is effectively done. I literally just asked Richard Tang about that and what he was seeing on Binance since they obviously operate the largest centralized exchange and huge in the decentralized space. And his thinking also was aligning with what you were saying, which is that we should see a return to utility and actual use cases and building things from here. Not to say that memes die,

but you don't get a more gratuitous ceiling for a bubble in crypto than the United States president launching something, right? You're not going to hire them. Whatever Trump did. That's it. No, no doubt. I mean, as I said, it's an enduring thesis to the extent that you can build a community that actually has something with it? Well, we'll see. Now, remember, you might remember what happened with Shiba Inu when they announced Shiberian. Of course,

you and I took a ton of crap from various sundry bot armies on X for laughing at it, but that actually was a short term, not a short term, it was a long term price top for Shiba Inu when they tried to convert it to something. So, you know, who knows what the conversions will be, but that is that is certainly a trend and we'll see how it all develops. Mark, you had your hand up. Yeah, great. Thanks. I think the barbell approach here is means versus stablecoins because you Dave want to bring it back to you know, Bitcoin stable coins. But since we brought up memes, I'll touch on that. I think means just reflect what we talked about in that K recovery we had in 2020, where so

many people got left behind. You know, there's a scattering, there's no work from home. People did a great resignation. So I think means this are a reflection of where we are. And then some people took advantage and do rug pulls. Mammography is here to stay. It's economics will change. But I think that, I think that bringing that to Ethereum, you need integrity. So you need to be around. If you grow too big, you can

grow outside your community and it's going to fail. You know, Trump did that basically. We saw that by trying to bring everybody into his coin in a matter of days. It blew up and fell. So Solana and Ethereum don't have the same integrity. Bitcoin will be the layer. And now moving into stablecoins, this is where the banks live. They need new payment systems. JP Morgan, I think, changed the name of their process, their program that they've been running on Ethereum for six years to, I think it's Onyx now. I forgot what it used to be called, but they're invested. And then obviously the

treasury needs new buyers of their treasuries. And if you want to, if you think that the economy is going to be more digital than analog, then you want to be involved in the stable coin and be the reserve currency on the digital asset platform that's going forward. So it's not gonna be easy. You have this thing called the UCC, I think uniform commercial code that takes years to roll out before you can have legal precedent for banks to operate interstate. It's not gonna happen overnight.

But yes, if I was at a bank right now, I would wanna be running our stable coin program for sure. Well, of course, that brings up the most maybe the most contentious, you know, coin in crypto, which is, you know, XRP trying to be that, you know, stable coins. And we've seen, you know, I haven't heard a lot from what's going on there, but it always, it always tends to inspire strong opinions one way or the other. Austin.

Yeah. So one point of clarification as somebody who's been involved with it, Onyx, which they rebranded to something like Kinetics or whatever the heck they're calling it now. It is an Ethereum clone, but it's a private blockchain. It does not run on Ethereum before anybody walks away with that impression. I think the problem you're going to have right now with institutional adoption, and even with some of the pathways clearing for regulators, is sort of what I raised before, which is I have been in seats at a bank running digital asset groups.

And the issue you run into using a public blockchain is you have all of the info sec concerns that lead to you having to hold huge amounts of capital against any of the assets you're handling that are native crypto assets. Let's say for things where you have freezancies and control of the smart coins, but fine. And then number two, you also have all sorts of OFAC concerns that I think we've kind of forgotten about because we were so busy fighting the SEC. But guys, technically, if I pay a fee to an anonymous validator set, and I can't prove that none of those validators are in like North Korea,

Iran, et cetera, in terms of sanctioned jurisdictions, that's an OFAC violation just de facto. And this is gonna be a huge problem for the banks getting into this space. I think that's what leads people to talking about things like Ripple. But Dave, being fully transparent with you, I've never seen any of the banks doing anything material with Ripple either. I know that rumor is out there, but like it is factually false that the large banks of

the United States are using Ripple as their backend or like running large amounts of transactions through it. I would tell everybody on the institutional finance front, we're still very, very early. Like the transition just from firing paper tickets and pneumatic tubes around to clear FX versus actually doing it electronically was a multi-decade thing. So let's not get out over our skis here. Oh my God. I'm actually writing a book charting that from 1984 and five through to probably 2010 in the first book. I'm calling it Million Dollar Frat Boys for those who care, but talking about the paper

tickets and the spreads and the way all the rollicking crap was happening back then. You make me laugh. Yeah, there's a lot going on, but what that leads to is a question of what's the value of these rails. And the answer is there are massive markets for them, but very unknown product market fit, which is, in my mind, it's a perfect situation for markets to be talking about, but not when things are flying all over the place. Although it looks like things are stabilizing here. So, Dipz, you're new to the stage. What do you got to say? Hello. Thank you for having me. I hope I can be heard enough because of my mic. I'm from Argentina.

Very fond of you. All the crypto townhills since ever. I want to say something about the geopolitics and the macro stance of Bitcoin. But referring since from my point of view from Argentina, we are seeing that the supercharged doge chainsaw fiscal spending spree that we are having here is profoundly productive. We are having a growth in our GDP in Argentina, while we are slashing inflation and we are lifting almost 10 million people from poverty. All besides the Libra scandal and all that nonsense, we are seeing that the products and the results of being very orthodox in the fiscal spending cuts. So I think the Doge, obviously, Elon Musk is very fond of Javier Millet and Doge's chain saw is being perpetuated, I hope, in the US.

I know the $2 trillion of deficit is not going to be cut easily, but it's the right path. I also think the tariffs, tariffs, tariffs and all this from Donald Trump is just a power play, a geopolitical power play to maybe pull some levers. And definitely we know that any kind of protectionism in economy ultimately leads into inflation for the consumer. So the consumer. So there is more free market than protectionism in the path for US to continue to be a superpower. That is my thought. And I think it's very natural to understand that there is no level of protectionism that can protect you from other competitors doing better goods and services than you. Regarding Bitcoin, I think this is so obvious. Two or three years ago, no one would have thought that we are going to have the president

of the most powerful superpower in history with a lot of power in the judicial system. He appointed three of them and the House of Representatives and the Senate with the amount of votes that he had doing an SPR, a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The stockpile is just to make a balanced neutral sell-off of crypto blah blah blah to get some more Bitcoin and have like a gold standard. We are going to have a little brother with a Bitcoin standard. That is very, very big in history. So we are having an administration in US that is leading the way. Everybody's going to follow through

this domino of the power play. We are going to see that this maybe in the future was going to be a very good, deep opportunity. So I think everybody has to connect into Bitcoin and understand that although we are going to have probably some fiscal spending delusion regarding the tax rates and all that, the big print, maybe it's coming, but always the hard money, the hard sound money assets are going to come through. So that is my take.

I am very grateful that you had my take. Thank you very much, Dave, Scott and Mario. I think it's great to get that international perspective. I mean, Argentina is very relevant here because the media has polarized Mila pretty significantly. Various people say different things, but what is amazing is how the media has portrayed and what is going on with Musk and Dozier. And people are saying, oh my God, it's gonna be horrible.

They're gonna cut all these government workers. And it's like, well, and then others are saying, well, but let's look at what really matters. And this stuff is gonna shake out. And as it's happening, all I can say, and I've said this, and I didn't really wanna get political, but I wanna get some more hands up, is I think that the level of histrionics,

the incredible scripts that are being written every day by someone in the Democratic Party in the back room, probably the people who were running the last administration, are all saying things, in most cases, some monstrously false things, but still saying things defending this whole NGO flywheel that's being exposed. To me, it's almost indefensible, but other than Ro Khanna, I haven't seen any Democrats starting to talk about the actual corruption that's going on in DC. None of this is going to matter from a Bitcoin perspective. It's just not going to move the needle.

What is going to matter is liquidity. If Elon's doge does actually take out a significant amount of the workforce, make no mistake, your employment numbers are going to go down, your employment numbers are gonna go down, your spending is gonna go down, and the real question is, is that gonna force the Fed's hand? Anybody have a comment about that? I mean, Reggie, I think you lifted your mute button.

Yeah, I wanted to address a couple of issues, not the political issue, I'm not touching politics on Twitter. I would prefer not to as well. But just now I've been listening for the last 30 40 minutes in. As for the the mantra of bringing industry back to the US. I'm a believer in getting where you fit in. The industries that have left the US have been the lower value added, lower margin industries, the higher value added, higher margin industries the US leads in. Look at AI, cloud centers and systems, the IP behind all this, the crypto, the OTs, the United States leads in this. The industrial, the industries where a lot

of the working class flourished back in the 30s and 40s, et cetera, in the 30s and 40s, those were the high value added industries. Okay. And as they were supplanted by the higher margin industries, they tend to go offshore where labor is cheaper. If you were able to get your way and bring those industries back, the US would be worth less, not more, which is why these entities have allowed those to go offshore. The things that are very high margin will never go off-shore voluntarily. Notice, nobody's doing their AI research offshore. Okay, nobody's doing the IP, R&D offshore. It all stays onshore. Just want to give perspective from that. Now, you can't say that politically because that doesn't make the working class and the middle class voter happy. But that's what happens in the macroeconomic reality. Now, as for Bitcoin,

That's what happens in the macroeconomic reality. Now, as for Bitcoin, I don't hear too many bad cases on Bitcoin or Ethereum and everything else. And everybody's not everybody. Let me be more accurate. Many, particularly in the media and the pundits, are discussing Bitcoin as if it's a financial asset. Bitcoin is a technology and it has all the pros and cons of technology. technology. And that is all the pros and cons of technology. You know, parts of Bitcoin are patented. And a lot of the institutions act as if it doesn't happen. Nobody's even checked. Nobody's done an FTO, freedom, operate analysis on any of these. And as a technology, you should look at it as a technology first. And

then you can look at the units of account, right, that allow for the accounting in the technology, which is Bitcoin below case B. And that could be an investment in the financial asset, which if you put the financial asset portion ahead of the technology portion, you're gonna get hurt because you don't know what you're investing in. Well, I'm not playing right there,

but I'd be happy to discuss it if anybody's interested though. Yeah, I think that's a long conversation. the that I've seen too many technologies that were inferior become gain network effects and stay. And I think that, you know, I'm not gonna say Bitcoin is inferior because I don't wanna get into that hornet's nest, but I think those two things are whatever. So we're gonna wrap soon. Andrea, I see you have your hand up.

So when you haven't spoken. Oh, sorry. Let me just, I think I might have missed the point. I'm not opining upon whether Bitcoin is inferior or superior. I'm more planning on the fact that it's a technology and not a financial asset. First, the unit of account that runs through the Bitcoin technology can be used as a financial asset. Let's suppose the let's suppose the patent holder of Bitcoin

decides to start enforcing it. OK, what happens? Bitcoin's fringibility? What happens to its financial asset price? I'll be honest, it's not a topic that I have actually researched. I would love to get some of our legal guys to talk about it. It might be something we should talk about in the future though. I'll leave that one. You're definitely not by yourself. Apparently, Black Rock and Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, the Citibank and nobody's looking to it. This is just one aspect of many when you go into a technology that being

familiar with, just to give, let me give you a perspective and I'll jump off. You, you buy a semi-conductor fab Intel or Nvidia decides it's put a 10, 15 billion dollars into a fab and they build it out and they start selling the chips as an investment. Nobody bothers to look. If whoever they bought that from, they're into technology. What happens if they come and claim their rights?

A collapse, but nobody would ever put 15 billion dollars into something without finding out what they bought. But they've done this in the DLT industry. Just perspective, you know. Have a good day, y'all. Okay. Andre, and I think we're going to wrap after that. Yeah, thank you. Sorry for joining late. I just want to provide some macro perspective on Doge because you asked the question, like, how could these Doge redundancies affect the US economy? So I think what we've seen already is we've seen this significant increase in job cut announcements, right, in February, and was mostly government related, right. And this tends to lead initial jobless claims

by around two months. And we've already seen this increase in initial unemployment claims, right? It was mostly federal employees, right? So I think the unemployment rate will increase. I mean, we've just seen the job openings rate ticking up, right? Today, the JOLT numbers. But these numbers are significantly lagging. If you look at high frequency indicators, like the daily link up 10,000 index, right, it still means job openings are being reduced. So that means redundancies are not as quickly are not as are not absorbed as quickly as, as they used to be, you be. So that will lead to an increase in the

unemployment rate. What does that mean for BTC? I mean, recession is definitely negative because we've seen that global growth expectations are being priced out. That's what has brought equities down. And I mean, the biggest macro factor for Bitcoin right now is global world expectations from a quantitative perspective. But I mean, if the unemployment rate increases and the CPI inflation numbers are coming down, as implied by the true inflation index,

that means the FED will, I mean, they will have a monetary easing bias. That's why the market has been pricing out. They've been pricing in more rate cuts. We're now pricing in three rate cuts in 2025 again. So that's bullish. And you've seen the increase in global money supply because of dollar depreciation, because of these renewed Fed rate cut expectations. I think that is generally bullish, right? Well, I think that a lot of people look at it that way. But you know,

when there's panic selling, the one point that I tried to make in my recap video yesterday is when you have a momentum driven market, and everyone's buying a momentum and the momentum stops, they sell. The one other point that I made, which no one in this call talks about, but I just have to say it, is March, the year after a big year from a profit perspective from traders is always dicey because people have to pay taxes in April and they generally start getting their cash available a month before. Well, we're a month before. In the US, that's what was the proximate cause for a math, the first, the shadow pricking

of the dot com bubble in March of 2000. It feels similar to that to me, but we'll see how it goes. Obviously, we do this every day. You know, this is my first time hosting, you know, Scott asked me so you know, hopefully I didn't talk too much. But I think we're gonna I think we're gonna wrap it here. We'll be back. I'm getting rave reviews, Dave. I've made rave reviews in the background. And I think you might have taken my job, which

is probably not in the offing, but I'm happy to do it once in a while. But anyway, we'll see you all back here tomorrow at 10.15. So thanks a lot. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave.