The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC Stalls, But Massive ETF Inflows Signal What’s Coming | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

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Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. It is Tuesday, April 29th, 1018 a.m., so we're not doing too bad on time. And here we are, Bitcoin trading within 100 bucks of where it was trading yesterday at this time. I was reminded of a Simpsons episode where they showed an American announcer and a foreign announcer describing a soccer match. And the American

one was bored kind of like sitting and he holds it, he holds it. And the foreign one was really excited, he holds it, he holds it. And I wonder if we got a lot of that going on. I think Bitcoiners are generally excited. I see Perry Ann is on stage. I think we probably should start there with Arizona and legislative momentum. it seems like beneath the surface, there's a lot going on, but on the surface, nothing's happening. So why don't you take it away, Perrienne, if you're available to, you know, what is going on beneath the surface? Well, there's a lot happening from a policy perspective for Bitcoin and for crypto.

You mentioned Arizona, but I'll start at the federal level. We've talked about this a lot in Crypto Town Hall, but DC is really ramping up efforts to create a better policy environment for the crypto space. This is being spearheaded by David Sachs, who's our new AI and cryptozar. And then Bo Heinz from his staff is really the guy on the ground doing a lot of the work. But this is coming directly from President Donald Trump. He wants to make the US the

crypto capital of the world. And there's a concerted effort to make that happen. We've had a really hostile environment here in the United States to the crypto industry for a number of years, and President Trump wants to undo that. So on the agenda, over the next, I would say, weeks and months is stablecoin legislation. There's a really, really big push to get the stablecoin legislation across the finish line as early as this week.

And then as soon as that's done, we're turning to market structure. So that's more like the regulatory framework for the crypto markets. You mentioned at the state level, so a lot of times the states are first movers in policy, legislation, regulation. So there's also a number of states who have already implemented comprehensive crypto regulatory regimes. New York was the first, which was done in 2013, 2014. They implemented the BitLicense. We're now seeing a lot of activity of creating strategic Bitcoin reserves at the state level, which is quite exciting to see. But a lot of times the states will go first. What happens at the state level will then be used to inform and we take those learnings and use them to create policies at the federal level. So it's, you know, that's a lot of times the states go first and then you see, you know,

and then that's used at the federal level. So there's a lot of activity happening across the country. It's a really, really critical time for crypto policy. And I definitely recommend being a part of these conversations because this is gonna shape how the industry can operate here in the United States for the long haul. Cool, great summary. I mean, it's funny this weekend,

I was asked by somebody why, an incredulous younger person, how could you support Trump? And I basically started with, I said, well, the previous administration tried to destroy my family. Considering how many of us are in the, you know, at CoinRoutes, you know,

my son and I built CoinRoutes and we had to fight for four years against uphill. And I don't think people truly understand outside the US or even in the normal communities just what it's like to have an administration hostile to an entire industry that we all believe in is the thing that is going to help drive the goals of financial inclusion and the modern markets moving into the next century. It is interesting that you started with that. Probably a little bit more pontification

we all need this morning from me, but so be it. Anyway, Dwayne, you have your hand up, so why don't we start there? Yeah, sure, good morning. Actually, I had a quick question for Perry-Ann. Do you think that the administration could be on the clock, so to speak, in regards to the midterms approaching, or do you think just overall, the general thrust in regards to policy, regardless of the outcome,

will be positive for BICRO? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. The midterms are going to play a role in all of this as well. A lot of folks, myself included, are saying we have two years to get this done, not four years, even though Trump has been elected for a four-year term. We really see it as a two-year sprint,

and I know the White House does as well. If you just go back in political history, does as well. If you just go back in political history, it's when you have I mean, what we had this past November was, you know, really a landslide victory for Republicans, and the Republican Party, where you have a Republican in the White House, and then you have a Republican majority and the House in the Senate. And why that's so important is because Republicans control the agenda.

So that means Republicans get to choose which bills go to a floor for a vote. If you remember last year, we made a lot of progress on market structure. That's the legislation that helps create the regulatory clarity and really build the regulatory framework for digital asset markets here in the United States. We got a bill passed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. We had over 70 Democrats vote for that bill.

Why didn't the Senate pass a bill? Well, it's because Democrats had the majority in the Senate. Sherrod Brown, who was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, refused to bring a bill forward. So although we got a bill through the House, we weren't able to get a bill through the Senate and nothing got done. So having Republicans leading in all three chambers just makes it that much

easier to get legislation passed. We want to get legislation passed because we want to codify this in law. We've seen a lot of activity from President Trump through executive action. He's done a number of executive orders. You have the agencies that are also coming out and doing a lot of things. The SEC is a good example of that. Repealing SOP 121, the approval of more crypto products, things like that. All that's great. But without this codified into law, you could have a future administration that comes in and reverses this.

It's really hard to undo something once it's been passed in legislation, and we never want to live through another Gary Gensler-like era ever again. So that's why the legislation is really important to get done. We absolutely are on a timeline. Two years is really, you know, after the midterms, we don't know what's going to happen.

It's very, very possible Republicans will lose, it means more than likely they will lose one of those chambers. That's just usually what happens. The pendulum swings in one direction, it always goes back. So we've got a really, really, really critical and important time right now to get this done. Right, that was one of the reasons I was asking because, yes, the outcome is questionable, but then on the other side, I was also basically seeing some comments from Ro Khanna saying that his colleagues have made an about face in regards to Bitcoin, et cetera. I mean, I don't really know who those colleagues are, but I was just wondering if maybe the overall thrust may have changed in terms of Bitcoin and just for reasons they may have, you know, turned the tide, so to speak.

from California. He's a big champion for crypto. And during the Gary Gensler era, where the Biden administration essentially tried to shut down the whole industry, and they did a pretty good job. They really stifled a lot of activity, unfortunately. What they did was quite successful, but Roe really stuck his neck out and said, he continued to support the technology for all the right reasons. And I had some conversations with him and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing them, but I mean, I was kind of taken aback when he had shared this a couple of years ago,

saying he went to the Democratic Party and said, I think you guys have it wrong. This is technology. We should be embracing technology. We should be at the forefront of all advanced technologies, including crypto, including blockchain. And Democrat leadership essentially told him, we don't care. This is the party's position. This is the party line. There is no amount of information or data you can share with us that would change our position. Because he was raising things like this can be huge for our platform of financial inclusion. This can be huge in terms of a tool of breaking up these huge big-time monopolies and oligopolies that we currently have.

I really applaud Congressman Conniff for continuing to be a champion for a community when it was extremely unpopular and risky for him to do so. Now, obviously, the tides have turned. We have seen so many more Democrats who are openly supportive of our community, and it is to people like Congressman Rowe, who stuck with us in those really hard moments that have made it

possible to make this a non-partisan issue again, which is really, really important. We don't want this to be partisan. This is about tech, innovation, jobs, the economy. This is not about where you set. We don't really care where you set in terms of the political spectrum. This really shouldn't be a political topic at all. Yeah, it's funny, Perri, and you mentioned that because yesterday there was an event that should solidify in everybody's mind. One of the most important things, which is utility and Bitcoin and just how incredibly wrong Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren's constant rhetoric despite proof was. That was mass power outage due to too high of a concentration of solar energy, but what

isn't really generally understood by, certainly recognized by the Democrats, but any Bitcoiner will tell you that were there an enormous amount of Bitcoin mining to be able to manage the grid in Spain, that wouldn't have happened. I mean, the reality is they probably should have more what people would call high inertia power, that's euphemism for fossil fuels or nuclear, to be able to respond to grid variations also. But the truth is, is that Texas, the reason that they have gone so strongly towards Bitcoin is because Bitcoin mining has helped stabilize the grid

in a very big way. That news story, interestingly, is not in the mainstream media today, which I find hysterical. I mean, it's almost like we know that the media is very, in general, very in with the Democratic Party, yet I did not see one story about it, which to me is kind of funny because it just proves why we shouldn't listen to these people. But we've heard nonstop rhetoric from both Brown and Warren for four years about how Bitcoin is bad for the environment despite every scientific study that's been done shows how it reinforces renewables. It also effectively puts to bed the notion that Bitcoin has no utility.

It's funny when you see these mass things with real human impact that they don't get picked up and talked about. I don't know if anyone in Washington talks about it. I know Richie Torres understands this and Ro Khanna understands this. But I do think it's interesting. I mean, you know, does anybody care about that aspect of it in your conversations? Yeah, absolutely. And we have a affiliate organization called the Digital Power Network,

which we started at the Digital Chamber, which is the largest coalition of Bitcoin miners in the world. We're driving policy for energy security related to Bitcoin mining. The news that you mentioned, I certainly saw that and agree with a lot of your comments, Dave, that this woke clean energy agenda is not based in sound data information, anything. I did just want to point to a really great study that just dropped yesterday from Cambridge University.

I did it's the post on my ex profile right now. Yeah, I was going to go there. But a lot of the things we've been saying for years at the digital power network, which is Bitcoin can be a tool to advance and strengthen domestic energy security. Bitcoin mining is a tool to extend more opportunities in a cleaner and greener energy environment. It's driving investments into clean energy production. Bitcoin mining is literally cleaning up emissions for those who are following things like methane gas capture using Bitcoin mining tools. So to have Cambridge University, an independent,

credible academic institution, also do their own study, their own independent analysis that's data driven, that also comes to the same conclusion, I think is huge. And this is gonna be a really, really strong tool for us to be able to take to Capitol Hill to use with policymakers. But we do have, just to answer your question directly, there are many policymakers, members of Congress

who are serving in the administration that do care about this, that do understand Bitcoin mining or leading a lot of that education, the digital power network, and we're gaining a lot of momentum and yesterday's study was just a really really good development for sound policymaking. Did you guys go over any of these stats in it because I just compiled like some of the main like takeaways for the stock twits as light paper just this morning. The whole story about dirty energy, not a thing. 52% of Bitcoin's electricity comes from sustainable sources and renewables alone make up like 42% of it.

Hydropower, I think is 23%. Wind and solar are another 18%. Almost 10% is nuclear. And then even on the quote fossil fuel side, like most of that is from natural gas. I mean, it's pretty crazy, the report. And it's beefy. It's a beast of a report. I'll just caution with Cambridge on their methodology. Be sure to read the disclaimer

on methodology because they rely on self-reporting and IP address tracking and it's notoriously unreliable. So just like it's important. I think their percentage of contacted miners using renewables, I think is quite useful. Their geographic location data less so. Okay, Ryan then Sasha, I think, actually Sasha then Ryan, I think. I can't remember, I didn't see who was first. So one thing I would say is another catalyst

which I think can be good for Bitcoin mining is what's going on with AI, right? Because we've seen over and over a lot of pieces around Bitcoin mining there, to say the least, very uninformed with bogus arguments about scaling of number of transactions as compared to MasterCard networks or things like that. And now we're seeing the, you know, all the discussions were often centered around,

oh, Bitcoin is consuming so much energy. And now we're seeing Eric Schmidt saying that he expects that up to 99% of electricity consumption is going to be for AI and LLMs and data centers. So I think that that's helpful. Sort of reorienting the discussion to right, like the differences in size and where actually Bitcoin mining can be helpful in bringing more adaptability in the system to adjust to the demand and to the swings in demand and they're going to be necessary to be able to service all that AI system. Yeah, I'll jump in on that and second that. What's interesting is politicians and higher education both will sit on the wrong side of a subject until the very last minute until they're proven wrong and they'll switch and then history will just forget that they were ever on the wrong side of the subject. So I never never cease to do amaze me how higher education and politicians

will take credit for things even though they were on the wrong side of the subject. We've been saying this for years, as Perrienne said, about Bitcoin mining balancing the power grid. We've been talking about production following for years. I think we started narrowing in on this narrative back in 2013, 2014, saying that the renewable power grid at scale has to have a constant load or has to have load following.

So with Bitcoin mining, you can ramp up and ramp down based on your energy usage. We've been talking about that for years. But now that you have AI coming into this scene, which is a variable load as well, where it can require a ridiculous amount of electricity, but not all the time. So we've been treating electricity as this exhaustible resource, which it's not. We're just not building the power systems at scale as we need them because we've never had enough of a load to require it 100% of the time. So what we've been saying now for the last two years is that Bitcoin mining will be the saving grace for AI compute

because AI compute is a massive load that when you need the power, you need the power, but it's not constant. So there will be times where AI compute doesn't need as much electricity and something is gonna have to swoop in and take that electricity and that's where Bitcoin mining comes in with its flexible load. And we're gonna see this pop up over all over the world as nation-states start realizing this and I think it's just time before the Department of Energy realizes that has a vested interest in working with Bitcoin miners. And I really do think that there's going to be a national Bitcoin mining pool, probably popping up at just about every single nation state

when they realize that they have a vested interest in working with the miners on the pool level. Yeah, I mean, all I can say is that I wish that our electorate wasn't like Dory in Finding Nemo when it comes to holding people accountable, but unfortunately that is the case. And Elizabeth Warren famously just won reelection against our collective friend, John Deaton, because people in Massachusetts have no clue how that fact that she has zero fidelity to the truth and pretty much anything that she says. Who knows? A year from now, she's going to probably claim she supported Bitcoin and just it wasn't the

rest of crypto that she didn't like or whatever. Nothing would surprise me. But in any case, here we are, still at 95,000, and there was an argument over the last few days, people have come out of the woodwork saying, yeah, it's such a hype cycle, et cetera. Kelly, I see you're joining, I saw your hand up earlier. I assume that you kind of wonder about this. I mean, do you see any hype or

any froth or euphoria in this market? Or is it does it feel more like the crypto universe is still selling to the TradFi universe has been buying by ETFs, etc, etc. I mean, what do you think? I think the process in the right place. I think when you look at the on-chain data, the old whales and also the new whales, large money players moving into acquiring Bitcoin is showing not only resilience, but sort of a matter of exponential increase over the last 12 months, especially over the last about four months with the new whales. with the new whales. So for me, it's kind of like follow the money. We also saw Bitwise CEO or CIO the other day talking about the incredible institutional advancements just in the temperature of those conversations

around Bitcoin, let alone also seeing the stack. And I think the number is somewhere north of, it's somewhere roughly about 750,000 Bitcoin held now by global corporations. You know, this includes everything from things like GameStop to MicroStrategy to MetaPlanet to the list is only growing. And it's not just those, those are the ones just making headlines. Interestingly, so far this cycle, I would say since January of last year, we have not yet seen any sort of retail, large exponential increase in retail, which for me, kind of signals that we're

actually at a pretty good place of market strength with the structures we're seeing in price action. And the fact that unfortunately, retail has been shaken, being shaken, shaken out and about. With last year's seven-month sideways price action, only seeing large players, the accumulation addresses stacking in. And where we're at right now, $95,000, I think, is an overwhelming steal for what's to come considering where I think this market's going and the fact that Bitcoin just entered the world stage,

I think what's really confusing a lot of people is they're locked in on this idea. You know, considering we've had three cycles and this four-year cycle narrative and people think this is the case and it will always be the case. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people are going to be wrecked considering that notion, because I think that the landscape and the environment in which Bitcoin lives is a 180-degree difference from even where it was seven months ago. I think the fact that these institutions are now waking up to it, and not only do you have BlackRock and Fidelity out there, you know, selling Bitcoin products and promoting this, we're also seeing the charts speak for themselves on companies like MicroStrategy or now known as Strategy or MetaPlanet. Outside the charts itself, I think that the move towards, especially with the trade war and understanding

that we're seeing basically the global M2 pushing up and all the different money metrics showing the inevitable which is in every fiat system money printing is coming, the devaluation is only getting exponential here because the problem doesn't get smaller. Servicing the debt means that there's going to be more printing and it's going to be exponential. So I think the fact that the bitcoin is where it's at right now is an absolute steal. I also did share up in the top from Perry Ann's comments. I think she's right on the money. I shared a metric I basically pulled from AI.

I think a lot of people forget whether you like Bitcoin or not, you nailed it. You hit the nail on the head, Dave. I think that the argument that Bitcoin is worthless is a tired and overwhelmingly misplaced argument nowadays because even if you look at it just from the point of energy consumption and energy usage and also green energy, if that's your full narrative, you know, somewhere there's some metrics globally that it's like 30 to 40% of wasted or lost energy that's produced.

It shows here that somewhere between 60 to 70% of US energy that is already being produced is wasted or lost. So it seems like just from that metric alone, there's an incredible value and just capturing that energy and transmitting it transmitting it into a store value while also strengthening power grids. I think where we're going is nothing short of unfathomable and those that are stacking right now and not being shaken out by the bizarre headlines and the 15 minute

charts are going to, I mean, I just couldn't be more excited, but thank you for having me on stage, Dave. Yeah, no problem. Nice soliloquy there. So, you know, the other news this morning that is interesting, well, it's not really this morning. I don't know when they actually announced it, but I started digging into it this morning. And the market seems to be, you know, kind of slightly starting to stir is Ethereum, the news of the planned hard fork, which of course has to get voted on, etc. You know, I'm curious if anybody up here cares or thinks that Ethereum sitting here just kind of reclaiming

the point, the not so important but hard to reclaim, 0.019 of Bitcoin level matters. Ethereum at 1800 hardly seems like a bull market, but compared to the 1600 it was at two days ago or three days ago it seems seems high. You know, Jonathan, what is your network thinking? Stock exchange users for Ethereum, it is overwhelmingly bearish still. Nobody's happy. If you look at like any of the message traffic, a lot of people have moved on. There's been a definite rotation, at least stated from our users, that people have rotated out of Ethereum. And I mean, listen,

Ethereum has been a horrible, painful experience. I mean, you had 14 and a half months of pain from January 21 through January 23. And then you had like nine and a half months of screw this from February through November of 2023, where it was just sideways price action. Four months of joy between November 23 and March of 24 and then seven and a quarter months or so of a slow drain south. I mean, it's just been, and then most recently we had a one and a half months of like, oh yeah, let's go. That was October to December of 2024. And now we're in what? Almost five months of horror. And the Pectra upgrade is like what? It's like a, it's the same thing.

Oh, is we're gonna make it cheaper, more scalable, better. We'll see if this one will do it, but that's been kind of the MO for Ethereum for the last number of years is the next thing is going to make it better and it just doesn't. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm of two minds in this. First, when I hear you say that, I think it's a short-term tradeable bottom because that sounds like capitulation. But the problem is Ethereum's market cap is indicative of a successful tech company and a successful platform.

And it's hard to understand whether that's actually going to be the case. I guess institutional adoption will matter. Anyway, Ryan, you had your hand up first, then Kelly. Yeah, I agree with you actually 100%. It's hard because everyone wants to push towards utility. You have Michael Saylor even looking for a way to put utility on top of Bitcoin. Ethereum has utility and is one of the most utility-used networks in the ecosystem, including

all of its layer 2s, a base, an Arbitrum, and all the DEXs and the lending and everything that's happening. At the end of the day, it's just about the speculation and the investors and the institutional capital coming in. So until Ethereum starts capturing the larger institutional capital and even nation state capital, I don't think we're going to see it move. I don't think utility is enough to move these networks anymore. Cal, yeah, on that note, you know, I think there's still a disconnect

that a lot of people in crypto that look at, they get blindsided by just the speculative coin price. And then the other side of that the actual utility and integrations, you know, there's a Ted, Ted Pillow's actually shared that there's about a 62% surge in active addresses, which obviously shows is there's a massive amount of utility in that regard, but also in BlackRock's Biddle Institutional Liquidity Fund,

I think it's $2.5 billion and 2.3 billion of it is on the ETH network. But on the flip side of that, then everybody says that coin price not go up, that project must be dead. And in reality, I think a lot of the altcoin market speculators are going to kind of have a rude awakening going into the next three to five years where there are going to be coins that perform very well. But I think that's going to be more narrative based than actual reflective of, you know, directly tied to what this project is actually integrating and being utilized

for. But I don't think ETH is dead. I think it's just changing dynamics of how, how it's going. Now, do I think it's going to go to $22,000 like people were claiming last cycle? I think maybe but I think that's an irrelevant sort of argument in this market cycle where the narratives are so disparate across an exponential number of opportunities that are out there. I think the narrative is gonna go,

speculation is gonna go where the narrative is flowing. So will ETH do well? I think it's a little bit of a local bottom, sure, but it's among that diversified sort of thought, I think. Jonathan? This is back to like how Ethereum is, and this is really just altcoins in general, but Ethereum for or representing all the altcoins is actually the worst performers. But I remember when it was, I was trying to find the article I wrote about it last week or a couple of weeks ago, but the number of Ethereum addresses that are at a loss is lower than it was during FTX's collapse and lower than during Tera's collapse

by it was like 50% for both of those, but now we're sitting at in the 80% range. I haven't checked it in a few days. It might be different, but yeah, Ethereum and altcoins in general, since about the middle of the month, the on-chain analytics, no matter which way you measure it, there was either a bottom established or it has been found. But if you're like somebody who likes short-term speculation, looking for some something that screams, oh my God, this is like just stupidly overdone. It's been like that for a couple of weeks. And it's not gonna take much to push these things up

once they start to push up because there's nobody involved in there right now. Yeah, it feels to me like the Ethereum, I mean, not all alts, but a lot of alts and a lot of the ones that the people who are building tokens that we don't really think about are really going to be impacted by regulatory clarity here because it will allow real money to come into those ecosystems and allow real use cases to emerge.

People are trying to anticipate that, but I don't really think the crypto market is doing a particularly great job in doing so. It feels like every time I look, it looks like the correlation between pure memes and other tokens is very high. Solano, okay, I understand why that moves with memes because it's the house in the meme coin casino, but in general it feels that way. I mean, I don't know if Jonathan, if either you or Kelly have been noticing this, but it looks like the correlations inside of everything other than Bitcoin are pretty high, all looking

kind of icky. I know where my portfolio is and I can know, I can kind of see it there, but it feels like that. Now, I don't know if that matters, but I think at some point, my thesis has always been the back half of this year, you'll see a sorting function where real utility is going to get rewarded relative to none. I mean, I don't know what you're seeing. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of the people who like you stock quits who are like those C-suite people. There's a lot of tickers that they pay close attention to that at don't

generally get a lot of buzz. But if you ever think about like an altcoin cycle, I don't know if we've ever seen anything like we ever did before, but certainly there are going to be some who do like they did back then like Avalanche, it's one of them that I can think of top of my head, Chainlink. There's a lot of altcoins that people are aware of, they know about, but they don't necessarily generate a whole crap ton of news. The gaming space is, there's so much money in that right now. It's insane how much money is in Web3 gaming. You have these networks that are just like, it's just a deal, we'll give you millions of dollars to do it.

But yeah, real world tokenization is a, asset tokenization is a big growing thing and there's a lot of sophisticated, mature networks that are operating more like a business than an altcoin and will probably do very well in the next cycle. Yeah, so the last story that I thought was worth talking about, I'm curious, and especially if Perrienne is still here, is there was a couple of interesting threads from, you know, Caitlin Long mostly, about how the Fed still has retained some of their anti-crypto and anti-Bitcoin bias at the same time that, you know, pressure against the Fed from the administration is going on.

You know, I was wondering, I don't know if you're still at your mic, Perianne, but is there any talk in the administration about this? Because it really, look, the Fed having being a regulator as a private company is something that I doubt seriously would be politically a hill anybody wants to die on. And to the extent that their activities is so obviously biased toward their owners, which are the big money center banks, it feels really like an interesting political lever that could get pushed. But it's the kind of thing that would probably only show up inside Washington. I don't think the media, I don't think the actual public really cares about any of this inside baseball stuff.

Yeah, I mean, it's been an issue for a long time, right? I mean, Bitcoin really disrupts the purpose, the entire, the whole focus of what the Federal Reserve does. And you can't put anything past them. And I have a lot of respect for Caitlin Long. I think she's always pretty much right on the money. So I would definitely reference her comments on this. But, you know, I think the administration does understand that. And I think there's just an inherent conflict of interest and it's hard to know exactly how to resolve that. I mean the Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful entities on the face of the earth. So to introduce a new digital asset, a new kind of competitive monetary system that will obviate part of what the Fed does, it is a really tricky conversation

to navigate. I mean, the way we've always navigated is we don't want to position Bitcoin as a competitor to the Fed or the US dollar. It's just not a helpful conversation to have, again, because you're up against an extremely powerful entity. And it's almost like creating an unnecessary enemy. The way that I've always positioned this conversation is that Bitcoin can be a tool to enhance and strengthen the US dollar. When you look at things like the strategic Bitcoin reserve and this being a tool to strengthen

our financial security, or if we look at bit bonds, kind of an extension and kind of the next step once we get through strategic Bitcoin reserves, being able to make our bonds a lot more competitive and attractive to international investors. So the relationship with the Fed is going to be a long-term thing to work through. I do think the administration understands that inherent conflict of interest is navigating it the best they can. And in the meantime, I think it's really important that we position Bitcoin as a tool to strengthen national security, economic security, financial security, and let's not make unnecessary enemies in the highest places in the ranks. Over the holidays, I did an interview with Natalie Brunel, and I am seeing on my feed,

whoever Thomas Jeffasor says, who looks like a real interesting dude, has a poll going right now on who's the most annoying woman in crypto, me or Natalie Brunel. So I think together we're probably extremely annoying to this Jeppesaurus dude, which I take that with a badge of honor. But I met with the Fed back in November and I brought up, when I was meeting with the Board of Directors of the Foul Reserve System, and I brought up the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in my meeting with them. And one of the members of the board just had this insane reaction where they're like, this is, I mean, they were cursing saying this is basically the dumbest idea they had ever heard. There's nothing

strategic about Bitcoin. And literally was like, okay, the meeting's over and got it out of the room just by me bringing up the topic. So that does kind of give you a little insight into where the board is, where the Fed is on Bitcoin and just the challenge we have at really overcoming that and the challenge the administration has at leveraging that relationship and navigating what they're doing to support and advance Bitcoin and crypto in the United States, but that entire conflict that, you know, is ever present at the Federal Reserve. Yeah, it's obvious to people who have studied this that the Federal Reserve was granted the powers that it was granted in 1913 to allow basically because they were, because

it was established that way. And that legacy is insane. It's insane for a variety of reasons. There is no way if you had a blank sheet of paper today that you would create the monetary entity of the Federal Reserve with the regulatory power the Federal Reserve has over the system. You would never do that. What you would do is you would have the regulatory power the Federal Reserve has over the system. You would never do that. What you would do is you would have the regulatory power in the OCC or the Treasury Department

or wherever the hell you want to put it, but not in the private entity that the Federal Reserve would have to be auditable in terms of how it makes its decisions. And you would leave the monetary setting arm as the independent entity. I think that the problem that we have here is people conflate Fed independence across all of its functions and not just about its monetary function. I mean, I'm curious.

I mean, I know the policy wonks in Washington, get this, Senator Lumetoss gets this, but my strong suspicion is most of the people that you talk to in DC, heads would start spinning if you started saying what I just did. Am I wrong? No, I think that's right. I mean, I think some people get it,

but most people really don't. Most people just aren't gonna go into that level of death. And I think most people, I mean, if you look at our current generation, I mean, the Fed was created in 1913, and we went off the gold standard in 1971. So most people working in D.C., this is all they know. All they know is fiat. So the whole concept of Bitcoin having a limited supply where you don't have, you know, a central bank, you know bank centrally planning the economy. It's just a concept that's beyond anything they've ever thought about or even knew existed.

I was an economic major in college and I just kind of remember my own wake-up moment was when I realized that economics is not science, it's a theory. You know, it's kind of almost like religion. If you take a religion class in college, they walk you through, okay, there's many different religions around the world and everyone kind of has to choose which one or not. But most people choose one that resonates with them.

But it doesn't mean anyone's necessarily right or wrong. There's just many different ones. Similar to economics, there's many different theories of economics and different countries subscribe to different theories. But what we were taught is it's science. There's not other ways to think of it. There's not other theories. There's just one way and that's it.

And that's indoctrination. And most people, you know, living and working in DC today were indoctrinated into the fiat system and don't even know that there's other ways to do economics, that there's other ways for people to interact and transact, you know, in their daily lives. You don't have to have a central bank. You don't have to have central economic planning. You don't have to have a central bank. You don't have to have central economic planning.

You don't have to have Fiat. That's what we have today, but it doesn't mean that there's not other options. And that's why Bitcoin is so special because it really was for the first time in our lifetime that there was another option put on the table that people can peacefully opt into. They can choose to do that on their own.

And that's what we're fighting for. That's what it's all about. It's not about number go up. It's not about making money. It's about ensuring people have options and how they're gonna interact and transact in their daily lives. And they have an option to opt out of the fiat system if that's what's best

for them. Well, you know, I agree. That's the first two words in my ex-profile or economic freedom. So we understand it. And just for the record, I completely agree with you generally about economics, but then there are the cadre of people in Washington, including those who are claimed self-proclaimed economics majors that think they can repeal the law of supply and demand. That is science. Human incentives will always be something that matters, where the art slash philosophy slash religion are on the edges. I don't think anyone's going

to argue that if you tax something, you'll get less of it. I don't think anyone can argue that if prices go up, that demand will shift away from it, etc., etc. The difference is, and I have this argument all the time with Mike McGlone from Bloomberg, is if your entire conception of commodities trading is based on commodities that are elastic to price, you cannot use that same model for Bitcoin, which is completely inelastic because it's a fixed supply and I think that's what you were getting at those sorts of things Yeah, are more science than anything else, but around the edges. There's a lot of art. Anyway, Ryan Yeah, I

Love what Perian was saying it comes down to the word sovereignty this idea idea that we control our assets and we control our money. We control our banking. Um, and in the political arena, especially in the United States, uh, there's just a lot of hubris with, you know, the quote unquote religion that you've selected, whether it be on the right or the left. And it's what I believe is truth and everyone else is an idiot. And it's what I believe is truth and everyone else is an idiot. Um, and that's, that's kind of the, this system that we've found ourselves in.

Um, there's very little thought outside of one's worldview, very little thought out of side of one's echo chamber. Um, and the reality is if you take a step back and do some critical thinking, you'll realize that our government and our political system and our beliefs were formulated by people that were our age or even younger than we are now and not of, you know, above average intelligence, a lot of them. So the reality is, is the systems that we find ourselves in are not above being questioned. They're not, you know, penned by God incarnate and must be followed. They need to be reviewed, they need to be altered.

And believe it or not, they should be iterated on over time and they will get better. And I think Bitcoin is a great example of a better monetary system than what we currently have. And when you talk to the Fed and you talk to anyone in the government, you know, they want to hold to the old system, they want to hold to the banking system, they want to hold to the safe harbors of what they know because it's, like I said, safe. And they don't have to challenge. And they don't have to challenge themselves. And they don't have to challenge the status quo and their echo chamber. But

the reality is, is it's a disease. These people believe in their echo chamber and believing their political beliefs without questioning them, without analyzing them, without taking a step back and saying, wait a minute, like, I don't have freedom to send my friend $1,000 from my bank account without being questioned of who it's going to and why am I sending it? I'm sorry, that's bullshit. That's not okay. That's not freedom. And we need to rethink these things. And that's why I think Bitcoin getting into the US the way it is, is a massive step forward. Well, yeah, I mean, I agree. I think there's a couple of assumptions that the Fed makes. I mean the person who walked out and I'm not

sure who I find lower on the totem pole in intellectual ability the moron who called Daddly and Perry Anne annoying or the Federal Reserve guy who walked out of the meeting I mean neither of them should pass a high school economics class if they actually had a freaking clue, but so be it. The other big thing is the Federal Reserve and all the banking system have this religious belief in fractional reserve banking, just in general. I'm going to start sounding like Caitlin Long, and she would be smiling if she were listening to this. But the truth is, fractional reserve banking evolved because the system of capital formation

required it. Why? Because we had literally no freedom of information and movement of information across the globe. Capital was very regional. Capital was very specific. And so if you wanted to start a small business in Peoria, Illinois, you were going to the savings alone in Peoria, Illinois, and there was no way there was enough capital in Peoria to necessarily, you know, I'm picking on that one just because it was

industrial at one point, and I went to Northwestern. But today, capital is global and mobile and information travels at the speed of light. And you could make a very strong argument there's no need for fractional reserve banking to create the pool of capital necessary to start businesses. And that's, you know, obviously something like Caitlin with Custodia, you know, would say, but the fact is, is that statement itself is anathema.

And that's why in the stable coin legislation, they have this silly belief that they need to keep yield away from stablecoins because after all if you get up stablecoins with yield then checking account balances will go to zero. But here's the joke. The funny part is once the stablecoin legislation passes, once there's a market structure bill, the checking account balances are going to go towards zero anyway. Why? Because you'll be able to have the velocity of money will go dramatically higher because there won't be the frictional cost that there is in the

ACH system and so people will, the business models that win will be the ones that sweep unused or unneeded monies from checking accounts into savings vehicles that will of course pay much higher interest than the money center banks pay their savings account. And so people don't understand that that's a bigger Trojan horse than Bitcoin because Bitcoin until it 10xs isn't even on the radar of competing with fiat. And so right now we have a generational opportunity as a government to using bit bonds and strategic reserves to

support the dollar by getting in early into an asset that almost certainly inevitably will 10 or 20x. When it does 10 or 20x, well, now that's a different situation. That's where Ryan, the philosophy behind Bitcoiners, and by the way, I agree with that philosophy. I'm just more tactical about it. You don't fight straight on with people people and I think that's the issue anyway Yeah, I'm sure you you you you do differ on that piece No, I think there's a lot of strategy there and

You know Regardless I wanted to comment on one thing you said And you know you have a lot of listeners here and if they're looking at startups and they're looking at companies and what's coming next, the smart startups right now are already prepping for the smart contract ecosystem that will replace all the different utilities of the current banking system. So the ACH payments, as you mentioned,

building out in smart contract systems to replace all the functionality of the ACH systems, all the lending and the credit systems. And we've already have lending on a lot of these platforms, but having more institutional grade lending, credit, ACH payments, payroll, like all that, like the smart startups are already building that stuff for the stable coin economy.

smart startups are already building that stuff for the stable coin economy. Yep, I agree. And I think that's a rabbit hole we probably don't wanna go down to today because we're coming up against time. Once again, interesting conversation. Anybody else have any closing thoughts? Because I think that with token 2049 going,

audiences and speaker lists are down, and the market is basically sitting at the same price. I mean, I guess a few hundred dollars higher than it was when we started, but the volatility for what's going on, it seems like we're kind of caught in this amber right now, which probably isn't the worst thing in the world. Maybe it's a good thing, but it is what it is. Okay. Well, if there are no other thoughts, we'll see everybody back here tomorrow. As Scott is fond of saying, everybody should understand that the people who are speaking are doing this with their own time. You should give them a follow. There's a lot of incredible thought processes. And regardless of what some idiots think, you know, Perrienne is not annoying nor any of the other speakers up here particularly and

I think that except for maybe me but I do think that that following people and understanding that people are giving their time is important but we'll see you back here tomorrow for Crypto Town Hall. Thanks Dave.