The Wolf Of All Streets - Don't Be Fooled By Bitcoin's Dip - Massive Upside Ahead

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Friday Five is THE show about the main news in crypto. Join me and Nathaniel Whittemore as we delve into the main topics that moved the markets.  Nathaniel Whittemore: https://twitter.com/nlw  ►...► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► The Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://thearchpublic.com/  ►►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  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘25OFF’ FOR 25% OFF WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd  ►►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   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 #fridayfive  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:15 Weird week 2:00 Macro 13:40 ETFs outflows 16:30 CZ’s trial 20:20 Roger Ver arrested 26:15 Coinbase integrates lightning network 29:00 Stablecoin bill postponed 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.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 The economic data rolling in is questionable and confusing at best. Bitcoin kind of trading sideways to down and breaking out of its range in the wrong direction, but potentially a hell of a lot of good news coming for Bitcoin down the road. I think the theme of this week is that things are a bit confusing. There's some good news, there's some bad news, and NLW and I, as usual on the Friday Five, are going to review all of it for you. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like. Let's go. We could have slept through this one. Yeah. Is the whatever a preview of what we get in a post-having cycle summer leading up to an
Starting point is 00:01:08 election where everything kind of ramps up in September and October and it's just extremely boring, confusing and go touch some grass? Unfortunately, I think so. We were just joking. It's going to be the Friday 1.5 for a couple of months. But you know what? We are very good at drawing deep meaning out of non-events. So I'm sure we'll be just fine.
Starting point is 00:01:31 Water from a stone. Yeah. Well, let's start drawing it right now. I think that the first story obviously has to be Powell in general, his views on inflation, no stag, no flation. And of course, the new job numbers that rolled in today, which because we live in the upside down, some are viewing as good, some are viewing as bad, but just take a look. Just in, the US economy added a net 175,000 jobs in April, a solid gain, but below expectations of 250K. Healthcare was the big sector hiring. Unemployment rate, 3.9%. The unemployment rate has been below 4% for 27 months. That hasn't happened since 1967 to 1970. And wages, plus 3.9% in past year, above 3.5% inflation. So unemployment actually was supposed to be 3.8, it's 3.9. So that's a
Starting point is 00:02:19 slight uptick. And we added jobs, but it's less jobs. So now the market gets to parse whether this is good or bad news. We can see the traders are already once again betting that we're going to get rate cuts based on this news and moving it up to September. Oh my gosh, man, what is going on here? More people losing jobs or not getting jobs is good because we might get a cut and that's liquidity and means the market can go up. Yeah. I mean, listen, at the meeting this week, what stood out, a couple of things. First was that unemployment and sort of the full employment mandate is back on the radar in pretty full equivalence with the inflation mandate. I think that where Powell and the market sort of narrative diverged this week was the market's been picking up steam around inflation creeping
Starting point is 00:03:06 back up, even the stagflation idea. And Powell sort of threw as much cold water on that as he could, mostly in the sense that it was pretty clear that they aren't buying the inflation return idea. The reasons that it's coming back a little bit don't scare them. They sound no less committed to the 2% mandate that they're getting to. In fact, one of the parts where he got heated was when someone asked if 3% was okay. But it's pretty clear that right now they're keeping as much of an eye on unemployment as they are on inflation. And I think that they are, rather than it just being data dependent, he started to articulate this idea of paths where, you know, in one scenario,
Starting point is 00:03:45 they can see cutting for this reason, another scenario, they can see cutting for that reason, they can see staying the course for a long time, what they what they said is not really on the table right now. And no one is discussing is additional rate hikes, which some people had started to discuss a little in advance. So, you know, it was a it was a sort of nothing burger of a meeting in some ways, but the fact that it was such a stay the course meeting was significant in its own small way. I agree. He left open more narratives to explain a future cut. But what I found more interesting was how many questions he had to answer about potential hikes. So whether he's talking about it or not, the people asking
Starting point is 00:04:25 questions thought that it was a viable potential outcome that because inflation is taking up, we could see future rate hikes. So once again, just extremely confused and mixed data across the board from around the world and the United States. I think they're really in trouble here if we start to lean towards stagflation. I think this unemployment data that we just got is unfortunately for these markets who are now betting on a September cut instead of a December cut. It seems to me to completely reinforce exactly what Powell was saying, that it's slight wobbles showing up in the unemployment numbers. Not that there's some big dramatic thing.
Starting point is 00:05:08 I mean, the way that he described it, it would have to be dramatic. You know, it's not a miss on 250 gains, you know, but with 75,000 less jobs than we expected, we would have to see, you know, a significant uptick in unemployment, serious sort of sector level disruption. You know, it's not. This is not the thing that's going to get that cut is my point of view after that meeting. Right. I mean, to the point of the tweet that I showed, we still have record levels of long streaks of adding jobs to the economy, whatever those jobs are. It's funny that she talks about that hasn't happened since the
Starting point is 00:05:43 late 60s to the 70s, but the 70s as what came after that wasn't so good. Yeah. So I don't know if we're making a good point or not. Now, this is not something I intended to bring up, but I have to play a minute video. I'm not sure if everyone saw this. This is Jared Bernstein, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, which is the agency that provides Biden with economic advice on domestic and international economic policy, talking about money printing in a film where he was asked a question. I don't know if you've seen this, but if you haven't, even better, because I can get your first reaction. And it should be clear, the woman who is interviewing him is not against this per se. You'll see her question, then we can unpack it. The U.S. government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money.
Starting point is 00:06:29 It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, why do we borrow our own currency in the first place? Like you said, they print the dollar. So why does the government even borrow? Well, again, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money, and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money, and then it lends that money by selling bonds. Is that what they do? It's not a joke. This is real. Yeah, they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds, right? Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So a lot of times, at least to my ear with MMT, the language and
Starting point is 00:07:31 the concepts can be unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to... So yeah, I guess I'm just, I can't really talk. I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about. Because it's like the government clearly prints money, does it all the time, and it clearly borrows. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don't think there's anything confusing there. Yep. Yep.
Starting point is 00:08:07 Yep. That's our lead economic advisor. There's definitely nothing confusing there. Yeah. And, you know, listen, I think Powell and Yellen may be rather intelligent and understand these concepts, but a little scary when you watch something like this. And what I wanted to say is that woman is not against money printing. She's a huge MMT homer. She actually just doesn't think we should borrow. We should just print the money and use it because she doesn't understand that that would be
Starting point is 00:08:34 runaway inflation. So it's two morons. Yeah. Stephanie Kelton is the lead intellectual behind MMT. So it's a weird thing. So one thing that I hadn't seen yet is what's the context for, or not the context for it, but what's the actual end product that that video was in? It's a movie about money. And I believe it's a movie about MMT. But yeah, I don't have the context either. I just saw the video. It's clickbait. But I mean, it's real.
Starting point is 00:09:01 Clearly, they videoed the guy. And then he probably does another clip where he actually explains it once he's learned. But when you see it in real time, what was really happening, it's jarring. It's jarring. Oh, man. Okay, so our second story of the day after our confused economy has to be ETFs and specifically ETF outflows. We saw the biggest day of outflows on Wednesday, 563 million. This puts to rest the idea at least that nobody can sell an ETF if they bought it, right? Which apparently was the premise
Starting point is 00:09:32 for our future super cycle because money can only go in and money can't go out. That was dumb. But this was a huge outflows, obviously, during this week as we saw Bitcoin break down. And interestingly, we had stories on Bloomberg saying that this Bitcoin slump led or followed by the ETF outflow is a canary in the coal mine for all markets and all risk assets. Are we so big now that we are the leading indicator of what's coming for markets and the economy? I actually don't think it's as crazy as it sounds, and here's why. So one thing that has always been mind-boggling to me as we debated correlation over the last couple of years, it is very clear that as more TradFi participants come into Bitcoin, correlation gets higher, particularly in moments where correlation in general in categories of assets is getting clearer. We're in a period
Starting point is 00:10:27 where all of our expectations about where rate cuts were going to be and just sort of general economic health have been finally, the market has finally been accepting that it's not going to look the way that they wanted it to look. The consequence of that has been that all risk assets are sort of taking a leg down. They don't look like they have strength. The only things that are sort of thriving in that area are AI-related stuff because that's the sort of the counterweight to everything. And so the reason that I think it's not insane that Bitcoin would start to act like a canary in the coal mine is that for a lot of the holders of these ETFs, it does represent the
Starting point is 00:11:04 furthest end of the risk spectrum that they're on. Even if they're buying it with an unrisky type of structure in the form of an ETF, it still represents a far end of their risk tolerance in their portfolio. So if in general risk tolerance is peeling back, Bitcoin is going to be the first thing to go, especially if they're low conviction, just got into it for the first time, kind of non long term holders. So I actually do think that especially the longer that ETFs exist, the longer that that Bitcoin sort of the deeper that Bitcoin gets into the existing system, the more likely it is in the short and medium term, let's call it to sort of play this role of, you know, the furthest out thing on the risk curve
Starting point is 00:11:44 for a lot of those traditional participants. That actually makes a ton of sense. I'm not sure how many of those participants there are, so what we can draw, and the very fact that they just bought these and then immediately exited them, obviously, maybe just means they were gateway drug or trying a little bit. But what you're saying absolutely makes sense. It just goes back to the idea of Bitcoin either being a risk asset or digital gold at any given time, or maybe it's neither. There's also, I mean, the other possibility, which some of this stuff is, I think CheckMedia and Glassnode are probably having a good time trying to figure all this stuff out. But it's not impossible to me that hold aside the sort of correlation effect with traditional
Starting point is 00:12:30 markets, that crypto traders who are literally living in this 24-7, can't go to sleep without there being moves, are going to be relatively speaking ahead of traditional markets when it comes to digesting new information. That actually wouldn't surprise me at all either. Just they have to move faster. They have to assimilate information more quickly because they never have the benefit of slowing down. It's obviously a very different demographic than the long-term holders. I mean, sometimes in the same person, you know, you can be a long-term holder and also a trader who's got, you know, different pots for different reasons. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if that group, you know, when they watch sort of shifts, like they're one, they're less likely to sort of fight
Starting point is 00:13:08 against Powell, you know, like and sort of, you know, be dumb and buy into it. They're not listening to the same sort of, you know, consensus making analysts on Wall Street. So they might be on the vanguard. It wouldn't surprise me. Interestingly, when Bitcoin did find at least this local bottom and bounce what you saw in the market from those crypto natives was meme coins flying again and Solana rising. Yeah. So they're still there waiting for any little signal that it's safe to go back to the casino. Totally. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:38 And God bless them. So obviously, we had, as a part of this ETF story, even Ibit trading at a discount to NAV, which was interesting because we hadn't really had that before, about 1.7% discount to NAV. We have JP Morgan saying that the crypto market sell-off was driven by retail investors. No surprises there. We know that we don't have large institutions yet buying these. But to the title here, Don't Be Fooled by Bitcoin's Dip, Massive Upside Ahead, that's coming from the fact that BlackRock has openly said they see sovereign wealth funds pensions coming to Bitcoin ETF. So it won't just be retail in the future. Fidelity following up this morning saying pension funds exploring Bitcoin investments on ETF approval. So we have the two largest
Starting point is 00:14:21 issuers not named GBTC saying that they are actively working with sovereign wealth and pension funds to bring the real wall of money into the ETFs. I mean, this has been clear for a long time that there was going to be a delay between ETFs launching and sort of the full market access actually coming into full effect. You know, when it comes to Bitcoin price right now, to the extent that you believe that it is driven by larger market forces, i.e. is not a reflection of some structural weakness in Bitcoin itself or even Bitcoin markets, then, you know, there's no reason to be less optimistic over a longer time horizon, you know, and it's, you know, as always, the game of markets is to be able to hold at the same time, you know,
Starting point is 00:15:11 the short, medium and long term and make different decisions based on them. And, you know, I think we're just kind of living in that right now. But, you know, BlackRock's not stressing about this. I don't think Fidelity is stressing about this. I don't think anyone who made these bets and started going down this road a couple years ago to try to get to where we are now is really stressing about a short-term dip. Totally agree. And they know that it's going to take a lot of time for due diligence to get that kind of money into these products. They weren't even taking it seriously from the very beginning and are probably just starting to look now. And the final thing on ETF was Hong Kong because this week it was widely reported this major failure in inflows,
Starting point is 00:15:45 how disappointing and horrid it was. Only $12 million came in on the first day. Apparently, you don't track and report these the same way that we do in the United States. And looking at it now, a few days later, $292 million in assets on day one. And the prediction was $1 billion in two years. So it got over a quarter of the way to the two-year prediction in the first day. And our industry widely reported this as a huge failure all week. We're not always great at getting all the information before we tweet, but you know what? We punch way above our weight class when it comes to Twitter engagement. And you can't have one without the other, I guess. Yeah. Well, the next story we have to talk about is some big names in the industry
Starting point is 00:16:31 and their legal troubles, some being resolved and some just starting. Of course, I'm talking about CZ getting four months in prison. And then, of course, Roger Ver, aka Bitcoin Jesus, being arrested in Spain for tax evasion. Let's talk about CZ first. As it says, CZ's trial proves it pays to cooperate. Totally different crime than SBF, but also notable, totally different strategy, totally different approach to his personal PR, totally a different approach to the judge and admitting guilt. And the guy's only going to jail for four months. He'll come out. And as they say, he'll probably get a strategy out all the way when he commits to a strategy. And I think that for a very long time, Binance and CZ thought they could get away, they could push the line as far as they possibly could. At some point, the tide turned, everything shifted. And he went in an opposite direction with the strategy.
Starting point is 00:17:49 You know, he went basically, he played the exact opposite of the SBF sort of strategy and did it all the way. And by the way, I don't think that that means that any of those sort of shared remorse or anything like that is not real. I just mean that he kind of leaned in all the way to knowing that there was a possibility of getting jail time and just wanting to minimize it as much as humanly possible. And listen, I think in some ways, the biggest tell that CZ had accepted that the tide had turned and the times had changed was when he stepped down as CEO of Binance. I mean, this is a brand that is so inextricably connected to him. That was, to me, an indication of just him knowing that it was a different time. And I think we saw that play out.
Starting point is 00:18:34 I think it clearly worked. I think that he got jail time because the US in general is trying to nudge white collar crime into the realm of having actual consequence. And crypto is sort of caught up in that a little bit. But, you know, he goes in, I think, as widely seen as the richest person to ever go to prison in the US. So still breaking records. And, you know, I don't think four months is going to do too much. What is it? You know, Sue from Up Only Fame said it was just a great way to, a place to meditate for that period of time, right? He also, interestingly, goes to jail extremely popular. Yeah. Right. And so, I mean, the outpouring of letters were a part of the sentencing. Even the
Starting point is 00:19:17 judge said it, I mean, from supporters, celebrities, industry leaders. He has a lot of support. A lot of people are happy he'll be out in four months and actively participating in education and the future plans that he has. But nobody is angry at CZ anymore, seemingly, which is very, very different than a year or two ago. Yeah. I think that we do does, we do sometimes need example, like different examples of things that were once grouped together to understand that there are big differences, right. And Sam and what he did just stands in such radical contrast to a huge portion of, you know, crypto bad behavior that we've seen, you know, with with sort of, you know, CZ being emblematic thereof. And I think that as adults,
Starting point is 00:20:07 we're able to tell the difference and make different judgments because of that. Yeah, absolutely. But now we obviously have to talk about another crypto legend for better or for worse, obviously, Roger Ver, aka Bitcoin Jesus. United States is pretty angry at this guy. They were so angry that they bothered to have him arrested in Spain and worked with the Spanish government to do so. There's a lot of nuance to this story. Obviously, Roger Ver himself is one of the early proponents of Bitcoin, one of the most outspoken advocates for Bitcoin itself. That changed in the block wars when they hard forked Bitcoin Cash, which he believed was the future of Bitcoin, leaving him
Starting point is 00:20:45 very unpopular with early Bitcoiners. More interestingly, in 2014, he decided to denounce his United States citizenship. He left, got citizenship elsewhere. He paid whatever he needed to pay and left. But in 2017, two companies apparently that he still had in the United States transferred Bitcoin that he had never reported to him personally, which he sold for upwards of $200 million. Apparently lied about this on his tax forms, et cetera. Very confusing story. Part of you wants to support him because he exited the United States. It was 2014. Nobody was thinking about Bitcoin. But if he literally evaded taxes and lied about it on his forums, you can understand why they would go after him. But it seems like they're really trying to make an example of an expat Bitcoiner for others who
Starting point is 00:21:36 may think about trying the same thing. Yeah. I mean, I definitely don't think that the US particularly likes people who renounce citizenship. I don't think that's a demographic that they're particularly worried about courting. And a lot of the policies show that, right? So the thing that's interesting about this story, to your point, Scott, is that there's so many dimensions of the way that people are discussing it. One dimension is the ethics of this entire category of taxes, right? It's the rest of the world tends not to have things that are sort of this egregious. And so it's sort of strange on that level. So a lot of people are talking about that. Then, of course, there is the personality story around
Starting point is 00:22:14 Roger. And in addition to the block wars, there are people who, you know, like Dan held, who feel like this guy has personally gone after them and use extremely aggressive tactics during these things. And so they will never forgive him. And so they don't care what he's being arrested for, basically. It's sort of throw him away and lock the key or lose the key. I think that the other take, which is more from the crypto legal class, is, boy, was this flagrant, at least as it appears. If the facts of the case are as alleged in the complaint, it is a pretty flagrant violation and pretty clear-cut tax evasion, where he basically just didn't tell his accountants about these entire big categories of assets that he had. Now, to your point, I think it is a reasonable
Starting point is 00:23:07 question, which a judge will eventually be dealing with around how much consideration there was for Bitcoin back then. But listen, he didn't tell them because it was worth something. So it's a tough one, I think. Yeah. Back then, I've said, even when I got into crypto in 2016, and then in 2017, there was this widespread belief that you didn't have to even report it. It wasn't a real asset. There were no taxes. We've seen they haven't even changed the wash sale rule yet that they were way behind. So in his mind, maybe he believed believed that but it's very hard to make the jump to i sold 250 million dollars worth of something and don't think that i should mention that the thing is he wasn't a citizen anymore when he sold it yeah now it's for years it's legally complex for sure yeah or
Starting point is 00:23:57 at least look at what do i know maybe it's actually incredibly legally clear. And then, as you said, there's this interesting sort of nuance of a class of Bitcoiners. I'm not talking about Dan because, Dan, this is like a personal situation for him. But a general class that, because Roger did what he did to Bitcoin in the end, don't care what the government does to him, whether it is right or wrong. And that reeks of them cheering against Ripple or against Ethereum, literally cheering for the SEC when they're supposed to be libertarians. And now the chickens have come home to roost
Starting point is 00:24:37 because they're going after Bitcoin self-custody, the very same entities. So, you know, it's kind of like the old poem, they came for the communists, but I did nothing because I wasn't a communist. They came for of like the uh old poem they came for the communists but i did nothing because i wasn't a communist they came for you know and then uh they came for me and there was nobody to speak for me that's i guess we we should mention too because i didn't when i was kind of laying out the different camps that um relative to that group there have also been a huge number of bitcoin you know early, early adopters, OGs who are
Starting point is 00:25:06 on the other side of Roger in the block wars, who have made statements, if not in support of him, you know, against sort of this sort of policy, basically saying exactly that, that they're never going to cheer for this, that we shouldn't be cheering for this. Some have pointed out and shared personal stories of Roger being a good person behind the scenes. Peter McCormick talked about Roger offering to pay his legal defense fees against, you know, against Craig Wright. So, you know, they're actually we shouldn't sort of paint it too much with the monoculture. I think that that that slant of the sort of Bitcoin hypocrisy crowd is, you know, always a frustrating thing to see. But in this case, frankly, probably more, a bigger portion of the early adopters
Starting point is 00:25:49 than I might've thought came to, again, like if not the defense of Roger, at least a, let's not cheer this on guys, kind of a statement. And a lot of the biggest names and some of the earliest names throughout time have now been punished effectively for believing this from the very beginning.
Starting point is 00:26:06 It makes me think of my friend Charlie Shram, obviously, who took the first bullet for the industry and went to jail all the way back then. Next story, Coinbase integrates Bitcoin's Lightning Network in partnership with LightSpark. We've been talking about this forever. It actually happened. Does this matter? It matters in a similar way, not the same way, but a similar way to the ETFs, as we discussed, which is what matters is that it exists. It's now available. It gives people the chance to do this should they so want. It means that we are not technologically constrained. We are not structurally constrained from using lightning. Will it mean that all of a sudden more liquidity is going to flood into Lightning channels? Not immediately, but Coinbase being in Lightning is a non-insignificant event.
Starting point is 00:26:50 This is the sort of default user-friendly UI, particularly for American crypto users. It's, in general, the first exchange alongside maybe Kraken or Gemini that American users try. And so yeah, supporting Lightning is a big deal, I think. Yeah. I mean, we didn't bring it up here. I'm going to just slide it over because now that I mentioned Coinbase, I think we have to talk briefly about Coinbase earnings yesterday because they absolutely smashed. Absolutely smashed. $1.64 billion in revenue versus $1.34 billion expected. But the bigger number was the earnings per share expectation. They did $440 per share, which was the 109 average analyst estimate. They 4X'd the estimate on earnings per share. Obviously, most of this just comes from Bitcoin ranging. But I mean, Coinbase is
Starting point is 00:27:47 absolutely crushing it and Wall Street gets it horribly wrong every single time. It's what's super clear is that Wall Street just does not understand how to... They don't know how to look at Coinbase as both a financial institution that deals with types of numbers that they understand and also a crypto institution that deals with a bunch of stuff they don't understand. I think where you're going to see this again in the future is when they start to try to explain the fees that they're making from base. That is going to be a whole new boondoggle for Wall Street that they just won't get. And the cool news for crypto native investors is that it means that it's very likely, I think, over the next
Starting point is 00:28:25 five years plus, that there will often be price dislocations when it comes to Coinbase specifically because of Wall Street just misunderstanding where it is and being six months behind the eight ball on how they should be pricing it. Yeah, they think it's just a crypto exchange and don't understand that there's a much deeper business there and there's much more nuance. So I just keep buying coin and hope for the best. Interestingly, it went down overnight on the good news after hours, which was kind of interesting to see, but they tend to get it wrong. Final story is stable coins. We obviously had strangely Maxine Waters touting progress on the stablecoin bill. We talked about this, I believe, last week. And then there was this belief that it might
Starting point is 00:29:09 actually get wrapped into the FAA bill, but that has now had cold water poured on it. So now, little optimism that we do get stablecoin legislation in the immediate future. I still can't imagine we see anything on this before the election. Just seems like there would be no political motivation or will to do so from either side. But we are getting a serious uptick here in conversation about stablecoin bills again. Yeah. So the analysis that I've seen, which sort of resonates is, one, this FAA bill was one of the sort of last chance must pass type bills that you could tack things on to. And when they decided to push that forward as a clean bill, which by the way, there's a whole separate conversation about why we should
Starting point is 00:29:54 be, you know, maybe enthusiastic about more clean bills going through and just being voted on, on, on the basis of the main thing. But, uh, you know, the, the next one that has a, uh, that, that you could tack this type of thing onto is, you know, the next one that has a, that you could tack this type of thing onto is, is the Defense Authorization Act coming up, you know, much later in the fall. So there's this big in-between period where it doesn't seem there's likely, there's likely to be a lot of movement. Now, one counterweight to that potentially is that Sherrod Brown, who is historically one of the big obstacles in the Senate, seems to, he's really focused on this marijuana banking legislation.
Starting point is 00:30:30 He really wants to get that done. He's in a very tightly contested race. The marijuana legislation is something that he views as extremely popular for his base. And so he actually does have a personal political incentive to try to, if he can get the compromise deal that he wants, to try to push this as a set of people running around. There's big swaths of the stablecoin supporting legislation, you know, senators and congressmen and women who will not support marijuana banking legislation because it's marijuana and who are taking every chance they can to be pissed off about it being reclassified. It's just a stupid display of hypocrisy that
Starting point is 00:31:25 shows that these people are not our allies when it comes to actual beliefs. They just sometimes happen to agree with the same stuff we do when it comes to crypto, and we should never treat it as anything other than that. I think that's a perfect way to wrap it up, guys. That was the Friday 5. Hopefully it won't be the Friday 1.5. As he said, maybe we'll get some. I think that Bitcoin has actually risen while we've been talking. I haven't looked, but I'm checking the comments. People are saying 61.5. So I'll take that as a good win. If things are actually bouncing at the moment, I still expect a very boring summer, but maybe they'll prove me wrong. Guys, follow the breakdown NLW, of course, and we will be back next week with another
Starting point is 00:32:03 Friday 4.5. Later, guys. Thanks, guys. Bye. Let's go.

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