The Wolf Of All Streets - Eric Trump Predicts BTC To $1M, Marathon Buys $1B BTC | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

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Morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday, and congratulations on surviving the great Bitcoin bear market of the past two days. Takes a lot of resilience. We all deserve a t-shirt or a mug. We had Bitcoin drop from over $100,000 down to $94,000 basically two days in a row, and here we are back at $100,000 Bitcoin. Interesting how fast sentiment turns. Yesterday was doom and gloom back to $74,000 here on the show. I have a feeling that now today that we're sitting at $100,000, it's straight to $150,000. Isn't that how this works? So we do have Bitcoin now trading at $100,000, literally exactly as we speak. Bitcoin dominance had a pretty sizable move to the upside. I'm looking at the chart really quick, which gives us obviously an indicator of how altcoins are performing.

Two days ago, it went from basically the low 55s, even below 55, up to 58. Now back to 56, which tells us altcoins, as it's kind of dropping today, are performing well as Bitcoin goes up, giving the market confidence. I think it's hard to be particularly bearish or depressed when Bitcoin is anywhere near $100,000, anywhere even in the 90s. Even if it's in the 80s and you were looking at this a few months ago, you would be astounded and should be exceptionally bullish. So I think things looking generally good for the entire market all the way around. We have the title here. Eric Trump predicts Bitcoin to one million speaking,

I believe, in Abu Dhabi at the Bitcoin conference. I personally did not listen to the speech. Did anyone here listen to his actual comments to see why he predicted Bitcoin to $1 million? If you do, you can raise your hand. If not, then you're like me and saw the headline and moved on with your life. Anyone? Anyone? So I'm guessing nobody saw it, but I do think it is worth note when the president's son or future and past president's son who might know a little bit about the plans for Bitcoin makes a prediction like that. And I do think we all agree that there are things that could send Bitcoin to a million dollars that the government could do, like creating a strategic reserve. I haven't looked of late. Polymarket did not have the odds of that happening as very high

as of right now. But there's definitely a non-zero chance i think that bitcoin becomes a reserve asset in the united states uh in the coming months right or that that's passed i mean simon you what do you handicap that at right now what do you think the odds that that happens are we have russia talking about it as well of course uh sorry scott i just joined and i was listening to something else what was the question yeah how would you handicap the odds of a bitcoin strategic reserve in the u.s in the coming months we have eric trump predicting bitcoin to a million dollars here obviously uh one reason he would be saying something like that is because of knowledge of what's likely to happen you know in

the upcoming administration yeah it seems increasingly more likely so we're getting a lot of rumors um i i for one i don't know if other people agree but i found dennis porter when he says something um it normally leads to an announcement and he has been um hinting at that that this is going to happen and he set a space to make an announcement last time he did that there was a bill introduced for pennsylvania state um there was yeah comments around um russia um you know so there's there's a lot of comments around it so i think the desire to be first to do this um or make a formal announcement um what i'm not quite sure and maybe others have expertise on this, is that if Cynthia Linnis has the bill out there,

maybe they found a way where it doesn't require congressional approval and they can just start buying Bitcoin. Or does this require the bill to be approved? To my understanding from when it was originally announced, Trump himself, obviously, at the Bitcoin conference did not say he kind of came short of talking about buying Bitcoin or specifically a strategic reserve. But he did promise to stop selling it, which is effectively the same thing. Right. Even though we see that some of that might be being sold off right now. Lummis' bill specifically, I think, to buy that much Bitcoin would require congressional approval, but to stop selling it and move that in to basically be effectively a reserve would not require, I don't think, for that to happen. Okay, yes. I mean, that sounds like we might be getting an imminent announcement that they're not selling it. But then even then,

we're still under the Biden administration. So who would be making that announcement and that decision? So it feels like there's definitely something coming. So I do expect an announcement. And I reckon, you know, people are trying to get ahead of that announcement. And that really feels like what's happening right now. And I think we're going to know specifically what that looks like in the next week or so. And although they did sell some coins to Coinbase, I don't think we've got confirmation around whether, you know, there's a lot of movements like BlackRock's coins have

been on the move about 100k Bitcoin. Is that they're moving them from Coinbase to Bank of New York Mellon? Or is the coins that are being sent from the strategic, what would be a strategic reserve, is that Coinbase Prime Trust, Coinbase Custody? So there's an element of speculation. And I don't think anyone's going to fully know until these announcements come out. Yeah, I love Coinbase. But regardless of the company, I think it shouldn't sit particularly well with anyone that almost all of the ETF assets across all of the issuers are sitting with one custodian. Right. So like, I don't think anybody

should be upset if that is actually a move to be in my melon, which has gotten the exemption to SAB 121 to be able to custody Bitcoin. I think having that spread around to some degree would be a good thing. And I don't think anyone would be surprised if BlackRock did that. Dave, you had your hand up. Yeah. I mean, I hate to be contrarian, especially when I agree with the ultimate, with the directionality of the message. But I don't think we're going to find out a damn thing about the U.S. for a month. Because, first of all, the current administration is, if anything, they're going to sell.

It was funny to watch Peter Schiff encourage them to sell, but whatever. The new administration, there's two things to know. Hey, Dave, I hate to cut you off, but the elliptical machine that you're riding is just too loud. Okay, sorry. How about now? Is that better? That's better. I know exactly what you're doing. I know exactly what you're doing. Exactly. Busted. Yeah, there's two possible avenues. One is a bill, the limits bill. And the limits bill is going to take months to work its way through the Senate, the House, and you want schoolhouse rock to know you know when a bill becomes a law that just takes time so that's that's you know we're not certainly not going to know that in the next next two or three months the second is what the treasury can do now i think they have pretty broad powers to

buy crap you know given the fact that they put on their balance sheet all sorts of stuff between them and the fed you know from mortgage-backed securities to whatever they can do that but scott percent is if that's how he pronounces his name i'm not 100 sure uh he's a smart dude and he's not likely to signal what he's going to do he's going to simply do it and then afterwards maybe talk about it so i don't think we're going to know at any time soon in terms of what the U.S. federal government is going to do. But the indications are that they know this. I mean, keep in mind, Bitcoin, in their mind, is undervalued by 10x. Well, if you have a chance to buy something undervalued at 10x, you don't tell everybody else to do it before you do it.

You do it, and then you tell people. So just keep that in mind. i think that's really important and the only snarky comment i was going to make is eric trump is good but the day that nancy pelosi publicly buys bitcoin that's the time you want to jump in well you'll know that she already had publicly bought a lot of it and as a front-runner solver for sure um anyone else with any particular take? So I had, I mean, speaking of the million dollar prediction, I had Plan B on my podcast on Sunday and his cycle predictions using stock to flow and based on all of these other things was 252 million.

That's obviously a huge gap in potential prices, but a million is on the radar for some people for 2025. I think that's very high unless we get something like the reserve. But I think that anything is possible when you're looking at Bitcoin. Anybody have another thought on these price predictions for this cycle? Hey, Scott, it's Brian here. I had a thought to just about the conversation we're having before is sort of long term, what do we really want in terms of the Bitcoin strategic reserve or strategic Bitcoin reserve? a potentially bumpier ride, whereas the legislation itself, I don't know if any of you all have read that, but it actually, if it were to be passed, it has what I'm calling a statutory huddle period of 20 years. So you get much more regularity and much more predictability if we can get that legislation passed as opposed to having the treasury decide or the president decide unilaterally,

oh, I want to buy this amount of Bitcoin. I want to hold this amount of Bitcoin. Because as soon as a new president comes in or there's an administration change, that can go out the window. And so as a Bitcoiner who is looking for the American who is looking for a long term stability, I think the important thing that we do is ensure that the Lummis bill gets through, gets the attention that it needs and gets through, because that's what's going to give us that long term

stability and predictability. And even actually has a provision in it that says if there is for some reason a future fork of Bitcoin, that even the forks themselves cannot be held. So that ensures that, you know, if you acquire a million Bitcoin, that you can't unduly influence the trajectory of the fork by dumping one and holding the other or vice versa. So I think you definitely want the Lummis bill. I think that's the best way to go. That's the long-term vision. If we want something done in three months, that's great. And that's great for markets periodically. But I would certainly want to see the Lummis bill given its due attention and pass Congress because you get a lot more stability that way. Right. I mean, there's a fear, obviously, for those who are either Republican or in this industry to some degree is that you only really

have two years here to legislate, right? Because traditionally, I'm not saying it will or won't happen, but usually you have an election. If it goes all in one direction, two years later, you know, the other side freaks out and at least one of the houses flips or something, whether that does happen or does not, it becomes much more difficult. So this is an imminent issue for Bitcoiners, maybe not for the government, but they want to see this happen imminently and be passed into law. So it's much more difficult to reverse to your point. Yeah. And a perfect analogy is the healthcare care debate of 09, 08, when it was uniquely unpopular amongst one partisan side. And it led to the Republic.

You know, after Obama was elected in 08, you had the 2010 kind of Republican red wave following the passage of the ACA. And it was their mission to repeal that law for years and years. And it was never able to be done because it was passed what some would say is the right way. The stability of having the law passed in Congress makes it very difficult to overturn down the road, even when things are deeply unpopular from one partisan side. So I think it's definitely worthwhile to focus up on the on the on the Lummis bill, as opposed to kind of taking the instant gratification of of having President Trump issue an executive order, assuming that we're there and that's legal to do in the first

place. So, yeah, there's definitely parallels and precedent for this. And I'd feel much more comfortable if we had a law passed rather than using a Treasury trick or a regulatory trick. Are there any other narratives on anyone's radar that could be a catalyst for, it doesn't have to be a million, but much higher, you know, half a million dollars to a million dollar prices this cycle outside of the Bitcoin reserve? Greg, go ahead. Yeah, you know, my thought is is i'm just watching people playing with all these different cryptos getting in and getting into this getting out and then i'm seeing a lot of the normies my friends who are not involved in this space being like craig is now a good time to buy i'm like i'm not

going to be the one to tell you that um because we could see a retrace i mean look during covid what do we see a three or four thousand Bitcoin. And here we are talking at one hundred thousand at just what? Probably, I don't know, probably in the past hour. And now we're talking to go to 250 and possibly a million. You know, it's it's kind of funny money at this point. And at a certain point, I can't wait for it to really stabilize. And maybe that's where, you know, it comes in, you know, it becomes a part of our currency and sort of a savings mechanism. I kind of look at it as that long term SEP or, you know, that IRA that you have for long term wealth building. And that's at least been my mindset. And I have such a better appreciation this cycle for what Bitcoin means, what it represents and what it will do long term for families and those looking to retire, you know, over the coming years. Dwayne.

Hey, good morning. Yeah. I think there's a lot of other issues as well here. Like even the overall, well, well, number one, it's politics, right? If Loomis can reach across the aisle, you know, in a better way and get more of the Rojanas on board to see if they can get this legislation passed, because obviously that's a major catalyst. And people on the outside looking in will definitely be looking towards that to see what will happen.

And just the overall macro environment is a good catalyst for Bitcoin as well. You know, we're seeing inflation come in, at least CPI in line with expectations. Shelter is also coming down. Shelter is a major component of core right now. It's moved from to 50% from around 70% last month. So if that continues to go, that's a major piece of the puzzle for the Fed in terms of their plans of getting to 2%. That's going to be a bumpy road to get there. We might get there at the fourth quarter to 2025, maybe 2026. But if those conditions continue, if we get a little bit more geopolitical risk into the mix as well, then it looks very good for Bitcoin.

When you know, not necessarily a moon to a million dollars, but we should see those kind of strategic assets like gold, like Bitcoin rise over the next, say, six months to 12 months. Yeah, the main topic of my YouTube show this morning was that Ray Dalio has switched his tune in February of 2023. Dalio, obviously a billionaire, yet another billionaire now on board. He was dismissed, but Bitcoin said it wasn't a store of value, wasn't good for transactions. And this week at Abu Dhabi Finance Week,

gave a speech saying, don't buy bonds and debt, buy Bitcoin and gold, right? So it's pretty astounding to have yet another brilliant mind like that on board. Andre, add your hand up and then Simon. Yes, exactly. Thank you.

Good morning. So I think we talk a lot about sovereign adoption of Bitcoin, we talk a lot about ETF adoption, right ETF purchases. But we don't talk so much about corporate adoption of Bitcoin outside of MicroStrategy, of course, but if you look at the data, they're really amazing, really stunning. So if you look at the change in corporate btc holdings in 2024 alone um corporate btc holdings have increased by almost 300 000 bitcoins right so that's more than half of what um global bitcoin etps had a net inflows in 2024 so it's

quite amazing quite stunning and it's 2024. So it's quite amazing, quite stunning. And it's been accelerating, right? It's been growing at a rate of more than 100% this year, right? And we know supply has only grown slightly less than 1%. So I think that's also exacerbating the supply shortcomings. Also, I think one of the key drivers that could push Bitcoin towards 1 million, but I think 1 million dollars per coin is probably more story for the end of the decade rather than next year. Except we have some kind of super cycle, right? Where you have like the game theory playing out between, I don't know, major nations like Russia and US, right? And all these things. And then I think there's a real possibility, especially if you have an acceleration in adoption rates globally, that you don't follow this kind of power law

kind of price prediction, right? You start toge from from this kind of power law pattern and this i think this kind of scenario is increasing i think the probability of this kind of scenario is definitely increasing lou uh simon and lou sorry simon and lou uh yeah so a lot of the if you look at like the famous investor billionaire ray dalio type of person or like a jim rogers that type of thing um the number one reason why they would have the whole bitcoins going to zero narrative at some point um was because they believed that the government wouldn't allow bitcoin to succeed um and then it would be outlawed that was like the number one narrative um i think that narrative is gone now um so you know the opportunity to have

that objection that the governments are just going to make this illegal more likely is that they would do a confiscation or they would embrace tax um but you know those aren't the same as making it illegal which doesn't really impact price so that's why i think you're getting a shift from like the famous billionaire investor type narrative the other the other thing if we're thinking of a narrative that would drive to one million dollars it's like for example the bank Bank of England just announced that they're updating their policies. So the pensions, hedge funds and very large banks and financial institutions, if they require a bailout, they're making it where it's completely confidential so that they don't have a cascading effect like a global financial crisis. Now, for the Bank of England to choose this moment to change the rules in order to have more secrecy in terms of who requires a bailout

means that the central banking system is now just giving bailouts with no accountability and trying to prevent contagion. And so if we are moving to one of these systemic risk events and the fact that you've now got BlackRock trying to push to their clients that Bitcoin is a risk-off asset rather than a risk-on asset, the one that would drive it to a million is if you had a major event in the financial system, whether it be as big as a global financial crisis 2008 event, then, oh, I think someone's got a hot mic, and Bitcoin went up,

and you ended up with something like, imagine you're trying to liquidate your stocks and you can go easily from your stock to Bitcoin ETF. Bitcoin is the price that's rising because there is problems in banking. And if there was a bullish cycle in Bitcoin at the same time as a very large systemic risk event, then that would classify it as this is no longer a risk on asset. This is a risk off asset. And if Bitcoin was a risk off asset, I don't think that's factored into the price at all. You know, we believe it's a risk off asset as well as a risk on asset.

But traditional finance may not. And imagine a scenario where people are selling stocks and going into the Bitcoin ETF and the underlying asset of the Bitcoin ETF is going up when everything else is going down. That would be a million dollar narrative in this cycle, I believe. Lou, you had your hand up before. Yeah, I just want to think, I think that Trump wants to be the guy to make the Bitcoin reserve happen rather than have a bill with someone else's name attached to it. And I think that he's already signaled that he wants the price of Bitcoin to be reflective of the success of his presidency, just like he talks about the stock, even regardless of the legality of having the treasury buy Bitcoin. I think the administration is going to disregard a lot of rules so that they can get done what they believe they have a mandate to do. And I think there's actually very little the Democrats can do in the face of an onslaught of questionable presidential actions.

And so if we're thinking about how we get to a million, I mean, obviously, I think this is the biggest potential catalyst. But there, I think, are so many roads to a million. It's everyone that's going to drive this higher. It's sovereign wealth funds, it's corporates, it's TradFi. And the largest opportunity is simply the billions and billions of individuals who don't own Bitcoin yet. And we know that they come in fits and starts. But when they come, watch out. Tom.

Hey guys, just a few more data points. So we're really focused on the US, which is fantastic. So I think it's a signaling and I put a pretty high likelihood of a strategic reserve in some form or fashion being approved in year one. But the total supply of gold for all sovereigns worldwide is about 3 trillion. And if you convert that naively to 100K Bitcoin, that's 30 million Bitcoin, which is not possible to purchase. But if we just assume broadly, corporates try to get to 5% or sorry, sovereigns get to 5% of gold supply worldwide with their Bitcoin purchases, that's 1.5 million Bitcoin. The exchange traded volumes of Bitcoin monthly are somewhere in the 400 to 500K range on the both buy and sell side. So you can imagine what 1.5 million in Bitcoin over a year or two really does on the buy side for the order books. It's

really even hard to handicap what it could be. It could be 200, it could be a million. But when you start having these nation state purchases in even any percentage of gold, it becomes crazy numbers. Do we think that that's happening already and we just haven't heard about it? I mean, do we have any? We've had some conjecture about Qatar, Qatar, Qatar. You guys want to pronounce it? Potentially Saudi Arabia.

Obviously, Russia is talking about it. We know that they do some mining. A lot of these countries do mining, smaller countries. Dave would be a good person to hear in terms of what it means, what would happen in the order books if you saw that. But I think you would see a lot more price action if you have a big TWAP from one of these nation states actually logging in, unless they're doing it over a very, very large period of time. And we could see very clearly on chain what the micro strategy purchases do to the price. So I'd be pretty surprised if a lot of these programs are in place.

Yeah, keep in mind two things. I mean, first of all, it would be spread out, as you say, and you know, it'd be dip buying, yada, yada, it could very well explain why liquidation cascades in Bitcoin, other than that one day really have been incredibly mild by historical standards while everything else was getting clapped, you know, crushed a couple days ago. The other thing is, there are a lot of countries like Bhutan who are using mining. And frankly, my conspiracy theory a little long has been that's how China is accumulating Bitcoin is by

mining. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is doing the same thing. So we don't really know. Obviously, that's even slower over a longer term, but it's still part of the equation. It's perfect sense. So the other story here, obviously, besides how we can get to a million dollars is Marathon buys a billion in Bitcoin. We're now seeing a few miners specifically. I don't think we've seen other companies in the United States of late really outside of miners trying to follow the MicroStrategy playbook. But we do have Marathon raising, I think their second convertible note, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, to do exactly what Sailor and MicroStrategy have been doing. It was announced, I think,

on Monday that Riot Platforms is doing it was announced i think on monday that riot platforms is doing the same and i think i saw the core scientific as well uh what does it mean to see some of these bitcoin miners and other companies starting to follow the sailor playbook i think sailor has bought over a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin or announced the purchases four Mondays in a row. I think I saw a stat that said it took basically a year of MicroStrategy buying when prices were much lower, obviously, to get to their first 100,000 Bitcoin. They went from 300 to 400, I believe it was, in two weeks. So major acceleration here in their Bitcoin buying. And now we have multiple other companies looking to do it.

Tom? Spaces is really giving me trouble this morning. My hand is not actually up, but I will say that. I saw your hand up. So now you have to have an opinion. Now I have to have an opinion. No, I do. I think, you know, as we saw with Microsoft, it's really hard to get these things pushed through in public companies when you have, you know, boards that have to vote on them. Sailor has a unique level of control right now. So I think it's going to take a bit more, though. I do think we're going to see it at like the smaller level, sort of like we saw with blockchain, ICT company or whatever it was for the last cycle. Like, I don't think there's any downside to these smaller companies just putting blockchain or Bitcoin on their balance sheet or

in their name and saying, hey, if you want a little bit exposure to us, here's some attention, free marketing, et cetera. I think we're going to see a lot of that. Anybody else an opinion on seeing other companies follow the MicroStrategy playbook? I guess we can also discuss what risk there is to the MicroStrategy playbook if anybody has concerns there. Dwayne, you're looking at this, obviously, I always say this, but kind of from a grander perspective than just from the Bitcoin echo chamber, does we have MicroStrategy going into the NASDAQ 100, the Qs probably as soon as this weekend? We've seen, obviously, they've accelerated their buying.

Does anything about what you're seeing with MicroStrategy concern you? The only major concern with MicroStrategy is really just the rapid, just, you know, just being a victim of their overall success. Just the rapid rise of MicroStrategy has, you know, does have some people dubious about their success when you look at the model of just, you know, basically being a leveraged Bitcoin play. So there are people who are worried about seeing leverage on leverage on leverage kind of stacking hands to the ceiling, because, you know, we have seen the outset of, you know, 2x MicroStrategy ETFs, 2x or 3x Bitcoin strategy ETFs. And then also the opposite of, you know, looking at shorts on the ETF side as well. So I think that's just the overall concern.

However, at least within the, you know, as we were saying earlier, like within the macro environment right now, I think it's so far so good it's just um you know a a really a danger of them being overstretched uh so to say on the charts and us yeah um what is it now is that micro strategy owns is it two percent of the entire bitcoin supply is it something i think they surpassed 2%. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, my question, and maybe someone in the audience can answer. And by the way, that's not counting lost coins, right? Right, right. So my question is, what happens if all these corporations, like BlackRock and MicroStrategy,

and then maybe Microsoft end up starting to do this and whatever. And then we've got a very large percentage of the supply of BTC owned by a bunch of corporations. What kind of risk are we looking at if something like that happens? It's a valid question. I mean, technically, and I'm not saying this to you, but we see it all the time. Like, we don't know. BlackRock probably does own some Bitcoin, but the ETFs themselves, I mean, in theory, that Bitcoin is owned by the customers that purchase the Bitcoin and BlackRock buys on

their behalf and custodies it, obviously. So I think MicroStrategy and ETFs are different. But yeah, I mean, I think that that's always been a concern is be careful what you wish for. Right. You know, Bitcoin was created with a by a bunch of cypherpunks who are trying to rage against the machine governments and Wall Street. And now, you know, we cheer, obviously, Wall Street adoption, but there has repeating. 24% of the entire equity market are owned by index funds. And nobody really talks and people every once in a while have articles about cross ownership, whereas by the way, ownership and equity is the miners have more rights than the the holders but that's besides the point uh at 24 it hasn't impeded the functioning of the of the system per se and we're not even close to that that's point one point two is microstrategy isn't very different than etfs in in a very important respect microstrategy owns that bitcoin pursuant to uh covenants that they've signed with their bondholders for what they're going to do with the bonds, and therefore can't make determinations about selling it, forking it or other stuff and all that. And probably there's

nothing about forks in those covenants, I don't know. But there certainly is something about selling it. So it really is the investors who ultimately have a lot of say there. And it's just worth understanding that. And same thing is going to be true with a lot of these public companies. I mean, public companies that buy Bitcoin as a treasury asset may not even tell people about it until they've accumulated enough that they think it might boost their stock price. So, you know, companies like to manage their stock price.

And so predict when you have a bad quarter, oh, by the way, we also, you know, we put our cash into Bitcoin. You know, it'll cover it up. I know that's very cynical, but, you know, having watched the markets for years, you do tend to see that. So there's multiple things at play here. But at the end of the day, the most important point is if you want mass adoption of Bitcoin to be the denominator of, first of all, start with digital gold and then go to everything. Mass adoption looks like this. Mass adoption is everyone who is holding cash as a treasury asset wants to own Bitcoin instead. And there's just no way to get from here to there without this sort of adoption. So you can rail about as much as you want, but it's the only way.

Can't be for everyone unless it's literally for everyone. Go ahead, Brian. Yeah, sorry. That's essentially exactly what I was going to say. I mean, number one, you have to assume that these corporations that are acquiring Bitcoin in large amounts are going to act in a self-interested way. In the same way that Joe Pleb, when he acquires a little bit of Bitcoin, acts in a self-interested way. I don't think that game theory plays out any differently when it's at scale. And I think, you know, to the point of this was invented by cypherpunks raging against the machine. You know, the nature of something that you cannot control means that people can try to acquire as much of it as they want. And, you know, us, you know, nobody gets a special

say in denying them that. So this is Bitcoin working and it's uniquely positioned to survive in sort of nefarious actors, even large ones, because nobody controls it and because the owners of it are incentivized to maintain its credibility and its reliability over time. So, I mean, conceptually, is it concerning that it's getting allocated into a smaller amount of hands? Maybe, but I don't think that in the end that that really harms Bitcoin. I think in the end it survives just as it has at the lower levels. Simon?

I'd say, you know, the first thing to consider is this is why Bitcoin being proof of work is different from Ethereum or something else being proof of stake. It doesn't necessarily matter who owns it in terms of the government. Well, it definitely doesn't matter who owns it in terms of the government, where it definitely doesn't matter who owns it in terms of the governance of the network. And that is a downfall of proof of stake. So this was envisaged, and it is an important feature of Bitcoin. Having said that, price manipulation in the short term is something that those that own vast quantities of Bitcoin are able to do. The custody relationship in the case of ETF definitely matters. And the terms and conditions around that custody relationship and who can actually use those Bitcoin. And the whole point of custody is that if the financial disclosure and system is working

well, they shouldn't be able to use those because it's not their property. And that's the whole point of it. But I do think as Bitcoiners, we should continue to advocate for the true strength of Bitcoin. Look, if you've got a pension, I've got a pension, it got locked up from my corporate days, and you'll need some Bitcoin ETF or something in there if it's part of your strategy. But the true power of Bitcoin and the way you protect yourself from confiscation, the way you don't allow coins to be used for market manipulation, the way you don't allow paper Bitcoins to be created by leaving them in an exchange like FTX or anywhere else

is you owning your own Bitcoin. And that is a huge part of the utility. And I do think it's important to watch that ratio between ETF to self-custody. We have a very healthy ratio at the moment because ETFs are catching up. But it is growing. And I do think it's something we should keep an eye on. And as a community, we should always be supporting people in understanding you can have some in custody, but please don't have all in custody because you're

not harnessing the true power of what Bitcoin brings to the market. And my prediction is that one day everyone will need Bitcoin in self-custody, whether you realize it now or not. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Buzz, I don't know if you were ready yet. I know we're coming up on the time you need, but maybe we need a couple more minutes to get things going. Yeah, keep it going. I'll make sure that we get Vitreous up here, which is going to be the sponsor of today's show, but keep it going.

Awesome. The last thing I actually wanted to talk about if we had time in advance of that was the CPI print today. I don't know if you guys were paying attention to it. It hasn't seemed to tremendously move markets. Maybe I haven't been watching stocks guys were paying attention to it. It hasn't seemed to tremendously move markets. Maybe I haven't been watching stocks too closely today because I've been busy. But we had November CPI inflation rising to 2.7% in line with expectations of 2.7. Core CPI inflation 3.3% in line with the expectations. Headline CPI at its highest level since July 2024. And inflation has obviously leveled off above the Fed's 2.2% target has been kind of rising. Dwayne, any thoughts on this?

Well, yeah, sure. So okay, so we've seen CPI basically move in line with expectations. So you know, that's basically expected. I think overall sentiment is still pushing us towards another rate cut of about 25 basis points, which, you know, makes sense if these are the numbers that we're seeing. If we want to look at inflation overall, shelter is a big portion of inflation. I believe I probably said this earlier, but, you know, shelter is a big portion of core inflation right now. And that's coming down as well. But we have to see what happens when some of those leases and some of those rents turn over. So the expectation is for that to come down as well. So we'll basically have to see how it goes. It's not going to really do much in the markets today because everything is going according to plan thus far. So, you know, we have to see what things are going to look like

really in 2025. But, you know, so far so good. And that expectations if the rates are continuing to come down, because I believe that they will come down. If you look at the rest of the world here, Canada, Sweden, etc. we're all within rate cutting cycles. If the U.S. wants to maintain dominance, they're going to continue with the rate cutting cycle. And that's great for gold. That's very good for Bitcoin. That's very good for small businesses, small caps. So, you know, I think that things are holding steady right now, but we shouldn't really expect to get down to the Fed's target until maybe, I don't know, 12 months or 18 months. Simon? Yeah, to me, this is an indication that the target is no longer the target. I don't think

we live in a 2% inflation target world anymore. I think it's more that we've just decided to move the bar to 3%. You know, we had the last few prints, we had 2.4% when we're meant to be moving to 2%. Then it's 2.6% when we're meant to be moving to 2%. Now it's 2.7% when we're meant to be moving to 2%. To me, whatever the market is expecting, the reality is that we've got tariffs coming. That's an inflationary strategy, depending on how it's executed.

We have replacing illegal immigration with legal immigration. That's an inflationary strategy. We have the Fed cutting rates. That's an inflationary strategy. And we've got all of the geopolitical uncertainty that can cause a lot of inflation. So while it may be in line with market expectations, I think we have fundamentally shifted what inflation targeting actually means. And I think a massive percentage of those on the wrong side of inflation, they just can't handle any more inflation. So I think structurally, this is very concerning, whether the market expectations,

whether these numbers are meaningful to the market right now. The trend is clear to me, the Federal Reserve has broken the dollar and that will have implications at some stage. That's what Dalio was saying. In his Bitcoin kind of speech, that's effectively what he was saying, was that the dollar and currencies around the world

are going to be broken. That's why you don't want to own interest and debt. You do want to own gold and Bitcoin. So nice to have Ray Dalio on this side of your argument, Simon. Boz, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, do we have Vitreous up here now? I'm having some issues with my new live. Yep, they're there.

Okay, cool. Well, before we get started, I just want to do a disclaimer. So Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing. Sponsors on the show are sponsors working with IBC and not necessarily Crypto Town Hall and Scott specifically. IBC is hiring for writers, journalists, and moderators. So if you're looking to either join a great team or your project wanting to work with an area where IBC just DM his account. So Vitreous, I can't actually see the speakers here right now just due to the UI issue on spaces but um love to start

it off with just an elevator pitch of what vitreous is yeah hey thanks for having us guys hey taylor uh vitreous is a layer zero blockchain which is an evolution from you know what started with uh with bitcoin right uh crypto is just the surface without the blockchain architecture driving it it's all just hype with no foundation. Right. This DAG based technology that is the foundation of Bitcoin has evolved so much since that that fundamental proof of work concept that was delivered by these cypherpunks that are raging against the machine, as you guys said. And we've evolved into this state of using blockchain as an under the hood layer to base a lot of verification from. So what Vitrus is, is a layer zero blockchain ecosystem that is designed to connect other layer one, layer two blockchains together into an interoperability, an interoperable ecosystem as a whole. We do this uniquely from counterparts through the use of a very contrarian form of economics in the blockchain itself, where we have demand for the use of blockchain, the use of our blog space, the transactions, etc.,

actually decrease the cost therein of that, which perpetuates a loop of affordability and usability. So let's start there. I have some more specific questions just about basically the architecture of the protocol. But I also noticed in your bio that you're from Canada. And I've noticed this interesting parallel this week with a lot of builders and founders that I've been speaking with. It's been the Project 89 team, Barachain team, now yourself. And of course, Ethereum was born in Canada as well. What do you think, just on that topic of the macro discussion, what's in the water in Canada as well. What do you think, just on that topic of the macro discussion,

what's in the water in Canada? Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe we're, I don't know, you know. I think we're just built to innovate up here, and I think we're doing cool things across the board. There's a lot of interesting things that come out of Canada, and yet we only get praise for being nice. It was just an interesting parallel, and it's

seeming like a lot of really great up-and-coming projects are domiciled in Canada. I digress on that. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. No problem. But I know, when people think of layer zeros, I think their mind often goes to Polkadot. And how does this differ from Polkadot? Yeah, Polkadot Cosmos, probably your two staple layer zeros in the market, right? So we are based on the Substrate framework, which did build Polkadot, but we have a very key difference, right? And that's our economic structure.

While the technical architecture may be similar, the economics are very different. Polkadot runs off this inflationary tokenomics structure where they inflate until recently 10%. Governance just changed it to under eight, I believe, 7.8%. So, Vitreous itself runs off of a static token supply, which means we will not mint any more VTRS tokens itself. The VTRS token is just one of the three assets that actually run our ecosystem. And while that may sound complex, it actually increases usability through the

mathematical proof associated with the economics associated with polka dots also rife with complexity and isn't natively EVM compatible, which creates a significant barrier for people coming from Ethereum, or, you know, and Ethereum being that entrance to web three development development until this point, right? While substrate devs are the second largest developer community around, perhaps, you know, the complexity of Polkadot might be seen as a barrier. So, Vitru's attempts to address the complexity and native EVM compatibility within the same kind of architecture of Polkadot.

Cool, that's a great answer. I'm also interested, I was kind of reviewing your documentation. How are you guys onboarding new projects without those parachain auctions? Like maybe talk a little bit more of what's under the hood there. Yeah, so that's interesting, right? One of the core business models of Polkadot is crowdsourcing the dots out to all of these projects

that are going to deploy or earn a para ID for their parachain, right? So Vitreous itself, we abstract that away by hosting as a foundation or as a DAO itself, these collected set of environments that will replace the need for absolutely everybody to spool up a parachain or parathread, which means we create permissionless environments that are connected to the totality of the ecosystem natively, right? So I think we could actually correlate that to a native L2 kind of solution, right? Or a native parachain that Polkadot might deploy, where we have a DeFi hub that's, you know, maybe similar to the Plaza concept, where DeFi activities are supposed to be kind of collated into this in this environment, and you will have the tools you could work with

out of the box in this environment and we just offer that in a permissionless basis which couples into the v energy system and driving down demand based on or driving down cost based on demand so we have a welcoming open door policy into these specific buckets that interoperate with other buckets and we also say the more people that are here, the cheaper it gets for everybody. So that's a good segue because there's V-Energy and there's V-Forge. So can you explain the difference of both and how they each fit in? Yeah, so V-Energy or Vitreous Energy is our hyperinflationary network usage utility kind of aspect, right? And that was a lot of words.

But V-Energy works... Say that three times fast. Yeah, good luck. VTRS, right? Let's start there. VTRS is the governance and network security-based token, right? This is what you stake. This is what you delegate to validators. And this is what you use to vote within the network.

This is VTRS. Correct. VTRS. No, different. Venergy. Yes. Venergy is adjacent to VTRS. When you stake, instead of earning block rewards or VTRS itself, you actually earn Venergy in a denomination like Gwei called G-volts. These G-volts will flex in capacity or in supply to always meet the demand of the network, which means the staked value will always produce the amount of usage that the network will require based on a dynamic formula. Yeah, I'm here. I hear you.

Okay. I guess we lost buzz. I'll continue. So V-Energy is earned by staking, right? So we stake, we contribute in the security of the network. Great. We earn this GVolt asset. And this GVolt asset is what users or transactions actually consume on the network, which means we've decoupled governance and security from usage explicitly, which means any speculative or correlated market trends that collapse into VTRS itself are adjacent to a hyperinflationary usage-based asset that is V-energy, which

means everything, even if we wanted to correlate the effective price between VTRS and the G-volts you would earn, as the amount of G-volts scale up to reach usage, the effective cost of each G-volt is dragged down by the amount of transactions that are being generated because the same quantity of VTRS is generating all of those G-volts. So V-Forge comes in as a different platform and product altogether that isn't a token. So we can get into V VForge as a separate topic here after. I'm back now, Taylor. For some reason, I could hear everything that you said, but I got put down into a listener position. But I'm back now. It's just the trials and

tribulations sometimes of using spaces. But that was a really good explanation. And I know that in a lot of your documentation and specifically also the pinned tweet on the Vitreous account, which is also up here in a speaker spot, you talk about Vitreous going builder ready. What's the definition really of builder ready? So builder ready means that, you know, if you're familiar with Substrate, if you're familiar with Polkadot or Kusama or any of those adjacent environments, and you want to come and build on Vitreous, you're welcome, you're able, and our code is open for you to engage with. Which means all you have to do is go to our GitHub, Vitreous Foundation, and pull down that repository and get building, right? You can back into our public testnet. RPCs are available.

You can even interface with us on Discord at discord.gg slash vitreous, and you can really get involved with that. Cool. And maybe I missed this in the process of me going up and down because sometimes there's a lag between becoming a listener to a speaker. But did you mention at all the AI agent platform? Yeah, no, we didn't touch on that yet. I'd love to know more about it because AI agents are something that, I mean, of course, has been a huge topic within the meme coin industry right now. We talk a lot about the famous bell curve, like early adopters and laggards. It's

almost like with AI agents, it's starting to kind of hit another area of that bell curve where more people are starting to understand them and realize what they could be in their day-to-day lives. They're seeing Twitter accounts become autonomous and now trying to think, oh, wow, like maybe I could have an agent do X, Y, or Z for me. So my question is really how does your AI agent platform work and maybe how does it differ from some of these competitors in the space? So one thing we have to understand

is that agentic AI needs one key thing to differ it from traditional AI, right? Agency. It needs to do its own thing on its own schedule for its own reason based on the goal that it was commanded to execute on, right? So a lot of these competitors may not even have agency, but they may have just endpoints that run a fine-tuned model. So there's a distinct difference.

Let's not get caught up in that. VForge is a agentic AI platform, right? It supports agentic AI by allowing people to deploy these agents or bring an agent in and register it as an on-chain asset. So that on chain asset can orchestrate from vitreous based on V energy to the autonomous tasks through scheduling on chain, which means it's all auditable through Hey, my agent's doing this today, my agent's doing this today. And now it can talk to your agent. So my agent and your agent can team up and do tasks together. We create an agentic mesh at that point, which is what the network type is called. So vForge enables AI agents to use the blockchain as their orchestration layer, along with others, enabling them to work collaboratively with other agents in the network. They have their own sovereign wallets and are ultimately NFTs that are owned

by holding a wallet, which means you can sell your agents. Your agents can earn revenue based on their activities. There's no code required to deploy one of these agents. And we're currently working in a kind of closed testnet environment on getting this up and ready. But the potential for a platform like this differs from BASE's AI that just kind of does crypto trading bot kind of stuff for you or you know the social element of it it's literally meant to be a foundational platform for binding and incorporating ai agents into a wider web 3 based web 3 and non-web 3 based

scenarios you could do on-chain or off-chain compute when vitreous is meeting its uh full potential i i want to dig into that one specific point you made about the agents having sovereign wallets, wallets that they actually own. Because I think a piece of misinformation in the market right now, when you look at some of these AI agent coins that have really taken off, is that the market actually thinks that these agents hold a wallet themselves, when the reality is there's a person behind this who set them up a wallet, probably has the private key to that wallet. And maybe dive even deeper in what that means that the agent actually has a sovereign wallet and why that's such a breakthrough.

So when somebody goes to mint or create an agent in VForge, what happens is that we programmatically establish a private key for them and encrypt it within their own data. So only they have the ability to access this wallet from a seed phrase level, which is great. And now there's still some logistics in sorting out the totality of security there, which is cool. We're very early in our implementation. But this provides just that agent, you know, in concept, just that agent, the ability to fundamentally use and access their wallet, which, as you said, is something missing. It's easy for an AI agent platform to say, hey, yeah, all the agents use this wallet, but I have the keys to it. So that's kind of a downfall there. So the idea here is to programmatically create a seed phrase-based access for this agent to hold, and that wallet will travel with the agent wherever that agent is. So we take NFTs, elevate them in a nice little way and create them into

this true digital asset embodiment of a new technology, if you will. Yeah. And security-wise, if you guys can nail that down, as I'm sure that's not a trivial problem to be solving, but there's just so many use cases across the industry for an agent that actually has a sovereign wallet where only they have access to the private key. Like I see use cases with with DAOs, payroll, even some of these investing DAOs like AI16Z. Like I'm sure that that is a really great use case for for what they're doing over there. I think that's genius. Yeah, absolutely.

Being able to fund your agent and your agent actually use funds that it controls is very important for the progression of agentic AI and blockchain. That's always, for me, been the dichotomy between Web3 and AI. There's sort of this tinkering around right now and really great experiments going on, but there's that clear divide where these agents are not Web3 enabled. They're not natively Web3 enabled. Yeah, that's what vForge built on Vitreous

aims to accomplish here. A very holistic binding between these two. That's amazing. And just a last question as we're starting to wrap up here. We do have a lot of listeners, over 358 comments in the space. Our audience is typically a mixture of people who are looking to buy tokens, there's builders, there's marketers. What would your call to action be for people who are tuning in on different ways that they can get involved right now? I think you did a great job of saying if you're a builder, this is builder ready, you can go to the Discord, there's

great documentation, even documentation in the form of a flowchart in your header. But what else do you want to direct people to get involved? So Discord is our home base, right? Discord.gg slash Vitreous is where you can come and engage with us on multiple levels. Whether you're a marketer, somebody interested in getting involved with Vitreous as a holder, as a validator, as a builder, that's where you want to be. We're in the process of redeploying our website to be builder friendly um so that that will also be you know if you come to the discord that's that's the place to be um wholly and truly vitreous is a layer zero blockchain

platform it has a very disruptive economic system that will fundamentally change how people value the on-chain addressable compute and the functionality underneath of it, which empowers builders to have new and different business models that use blockchain as their fundamental element. So I would encourage everybody to come to our Discord, dive into some documentation, ask us some questions, and get involved. Again, that's discord.gg slash vitreous. And for those in the audience who are maybe not typing in the URL themselves, click on the vitreous page. They're in a speaker spot here, has the nice green logo if you need it in color-coordinated directions.

If you click on their profile, they do have their links in bio and Discord is on there as well. So Taylor, really appreciate you joining today. Scott, appreciate you putting on another great show yet again, as you do most days. And with that, happy about the market. On with our Wednesday. Happy Wednesday, everybody.