The Wolf Of All Streets - Everything Sideways: What’s Next for Crypto? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

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Morning, everyone. Just getting everybody up on stage. Juan, I see you here. Congrats, man. You guys are almost $2 billion on BITB. Crazy. Yes, sir. Thank you, man. Yeah, we are getting up there. So we're very excited. It's incredible to me, right? You guys, I'm showing you... Maybe my numbers are lagging, but I'm showing on my dashboard $1.83 billion cap of Bitwise, Bitcoin ETF, BITB, obviously you're a researcher at Bitwise. I think a lot of people would have been excited if that's where BlackRock was at this point. Yeah. I'll give you the rundown and give you

guys the rundown on the Bitcoin ETF numbers. And then I'll tell you guys some things I'm excited about. I'm on the road this week with my sales team doing presentations to clients and prospects, and we're getting great traction. So I'll tell you guys about that in a second. On the numbers, yeah, we're at about a little over $1.8 billion. The ETFs as a whole, it's incredible what we're seeing. I mean, in January, we saw 1.5 billion in net inflows. Then in February, we saw that accelerate to 6 billion. And now we're in March, just a couple of days in, and we are just at about 1.5 billion again. So everything that happened in

January, just happening in a few days in March. So traction is still going, almost $9 billion in total net inflows. And to your point about us being happy, BlackRock being happy if they just had what we have at BitB, when we were, the expectations from us and many of the other analysts in the space going into the year before the ETFs launched, expectations were for net inflows in the first year across all the ETFs to be between $2 and $5 billion. And we're already at $9 billion in March. So we've completely blown past the initial expectations. So it's incredible.

The ETFs as a whole in concert, including GBTC, are now at $53 billion in AUM. Can I just say something quickly, Juan? Because I just looked this up because I looked at the number and saw $53 billion in AUM. And by the way, guys, the appreciation in price of Bitcoin obviously has contributed tremendously to this AUM, right? Because a lot of people see GBTC and it's showing $27 billion and they say, how has GBTC had these massive outflows if they were $27 billion before the ETF approvals and they're still $27 billion? That's because Bitcoin's gone up 40%, 50% since then. But what I wanted to mention, as I just looked it up, the SBDR Gold Trust, which is GLD, which has been the corollary everybody's been using forever for what these ETFs could do in

the future. Total market cap is $56.92 billion of GLD. And we're at $53,585. And we'll, assuming prices stay relatively high, we'll surpass GLD with the Bitcoin spot ETFs imminently. That is insane. Yep. I was just about to bring up that stat, so you beat me to it. But that's exactly right. It's insane. We are almost collectively in the ETFs at the same market cap as the largest gold trust, which holds a majority of the assets of gold ETFs. So it's insane. It's great.

And then, you know, add to that things I'm really excited about. Well, as I mentioned, this week I'm on the road with clients I've met with various RIAs and other types of institutional clients, and met with five clients so far. And three of them, large RIAs, I can't disclose who, obviously, but just to give people a flavor of what's going on on the ground. The large RIAs, one manages $500 million, another one manages a billion, the other one manages $2 billion. These three RIAs, one manages $500 million, another one manages $1 billion, the other one manages $2 billion. These three RIAs, up until last year, they were allocating selectively to clients, a small percentage of their client book. This year, with the launch of the ETFs, with what they're seeing, the narrative changing of the outlook for

Bitcoin, they now told us in the meetings that they're going to be rolling out 1% allocations across their entire book. And this is the type of conversations that we're starting to see, that we were expecting once the ETFs launched, and we are starting to see it. So it's really, really great traction. And then we have like the macro picture which is looking uh more accommodative u.s yields uh are falling as powell is hinting at the rate cuts they're about to break the 10 years about to break below four percent the ecb cut its inflation forecast on the currency front we're seeing the egyptian pound collapse the nigerian naira uh spiral uh these are all positive developments for Bitcoin as a store of

value on the macro front. And then we're seeing continued traction from the mainstream institutional adoption front. Stanford University's fund announced a 7% Bitcoin allocation in its portfolio. Yesterday, Arizona came out with a bill to add Bitcoin ETFs to their state retirement portfolio. The Deutsche Bourse this week launched an institutional crypto trading platform. So we're seeing the wave of institutional adoption from both capital allocation and then also crypto adoption. So I'm very bullish. Randy, do you think we can just hire Juan to replace Mario?

I think anyone would be good to replace Mario. That was a hell of a breakdown. You did it incredibly fast. It's funny because I just pinged our WhatsApp group and said, we should go back to doing kind of a quick update on the news and a review, and you basically just did it for us. So that was great. I appreciate you getting that out of the way. Interestingly, I, you know, the market, a lot of people looking at right now, I think our title here, everything sideways, what's next for crypto. Unfortunately, I think that's kind

of disingenuous because there are plenty of things that are still rocking. It's just not Bitcoin at the moment, but with Bitcoin sitting, you know, 66, 844, I'm looking at right now after a day where, yeah, two days ago went to 69 and back to 59 to be sitting comfortably at 67 to me as an exceptionally good sign. But then you look at Solana is $146 right now. That's up 15% on the day. Meme coin still had the massive rally cooling off a bit and the AI narrative. And now the AI narrative is back again, right, Rand? So you know why the AI narrative is back? Because there's an NVIDIA AI conference next

week. There are two crypto speakers that I've identified at the conference. One is Ilya, who's the founder of Nia. He's actually on a panel with Jensen Huang. And the other one is Jules from Render. So he's also there, which is why both Render and Nier Protocol have both exploded into this event. So that's actually one of the things I spoke about on my show, is identifying the actual crypto protocols that are going to run based on this narrative. I mean, take me a step back. That's correct. Perfect summary summary it's just so dumb i i just think it's so funny that you know if nvidia goes up we get all these like superficially ai adjacent tokens running wait wait wait hold on let me remind you by the way i love

ilia i love those guys So it's nothing against them. Let me remind you what happened when we had the Facebook change their name to Meta. Do you remember that? I was going to give the exact same comparison. Everything even superficially adjacent to a metaverse in crypto went up in multiples. Exactly. So, I mean, you can laugh and you can hate. I laughed and I hated on the AI narrative and it cost me 150 grand because I went short. Remember that time that I told you I went short?

Yeah, you did. But to be fair, that's because there was a consensus that NVIDIA expectations were so high in earnings that there's no way they would hit. And I got destroyed. Yeah. I eventually closed that short yesterday. Wow. I mean, you had to. You were going to close it or the market was going to close it for you, I have to imagine, at that point.

Exactly. Well, the market was about to close it for me. But I mean, look, it must be one of my first losing trades this year. Yeah. Unless you've been shorting, it's been a good time to generally just be in crypto or taking positions, I would imagine. And of course, unless you're using high leverage. Juan, you have your hand up. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I was just, everything you guys brought up is on point. I was just going to add, you know, since the title of it is crypto going sideways, whatnot, what's outlook for crypto? There's just a couple more things to add. I think what you guys said about the AI narrative,

I mean, with the GPU conference coming up, those are going to run. And independent of that, I think the AI narrative is real. And I think the emerging narrative that is not so prevalent right now that I think is going to continue to gain ground is the symbiosis and the interrelation that crypto and AI have. AI needs crypto to rein in its problems with fake information and as they become more prevalent in transacting on the Internet, automating transactions for everything from booking our flights and our hair appointments to doing more complex things, it's going to be much easier for them to transact through stable coins than it is to use your credit card and your bank that can't process things on a Saturday. And those are just two small examples. The AI and crypto have a lot to do together. So those coins are going to continue to run. On the more macro level or the bigger assets, Bitcoin, the supply-demand picture is incredibly constructive. As I mentioned, all of the all of the capital flowing in from the from the Bitcoin ETFs from institutional capital that's going to continue right now. This is first initial wave has been allocations from from independent advisors, from hedge funds, from retail.

But the big wire houses, none of them are allocating yet. So that's coming down the pike once approvals start happening. And then with the halving in mid-April, you're going to cut the supply again. And the ETFs are already eating 10 times the new supply being produced. So supply-demand imbalance is very positive and constructive for Bitcoin. For Ethereum, which has been overshadowed, obviously, by the Bitcoin ETFs and Bitcoin, Supply-demand imbalance is very positive and constructive for Bitcoin. For Ethereum, which has been overshadowed, obviously, by the Bitcoin ETFs and Bitcoin, we have the Denken upgrade, which is going to drop fees on layer twos to effectively zero.

And that's going to enable mass market adoption of applications on Ethereum. You have the possibility of the ETFs getting approved in May. Late May is the date that everyone's watching. Right now, I give it a 50 to 60% probability. Not nearly as clear as the Bitcoin ETFs were, but there's a chance they get approved. And if not, I think they're happening sooner rather than later. Maybe on the second go around if they don't get approved in May. But those things are our catalysts for Ethereum. So I think Ethereum is going to run eventually, even though right now it's being held back by the Bitcoin narrative. And there's many other things happening in other networks as well. So I think it's a good time for crypto. Mario is so fired. Mario is so fired. Go ahead, Alexei.

So just to kind of add a bit more to the bull case for Bitcoin. I mean, we've seen the Bitcoin re-sell-ons ever since Ordinal's kicked off, kind of representing Bitcoin's Crypto Kitty moment. What I think we'll see, especially around the halving, is a bunch of Bitcoin Layer 2s launching. Yes, probably still in the early stages. Bob, the L2 that we're building, the hybrids between Bitcoin and Ethereum is launching as well. And I'm aware of a few others kicking off. And I think that will probably give Bitcoin a push just because people will see,

wow, Bitcoin now has L2s. Yes, maybe they're not all ZK-rollers because we can't do that yet. But ultimately, you'll have lots of new use cases, DeFi, NFTs, hybrids between Ordinals and Ethereum NFTs popping up left and right. And I mean, I'm speculating, but I do think that might still a bit to show from Ethereum. We'll see. But also you have institutional players like Marathon announcing their Layer 2 plans, which I think just adds to the narrative in this case.

You said that we will see we have're going to have layer twos, but I mean, we've had layer twos for quite a while on Bitcoin, correct? I mean, I think a lot of this is because people have seen that Lightning wasn't quite up to snuff, but obviously Stacks has had massive movement and adoption with time. So that's not quite new. It's more of a new narrative and new people building. Yes, but I think it's different. The technology on Ethel 2 has matured a lot. And the things that we'll see incoming are closer to actual roll-ups than sidechains. And I think Stacks has done great,

right? I mean, and they've been leading the narrative for a while. I do think they're going to get a lot of competition. And I mean, we're definitely going to challenge them, but I think others are as well. And the big narrative that we're going for, and I know a few other L2 teams, is getting the ETH community to use Bitcoin. And the only way to do that is making it super easy for the ETH users to on-RAM. And that requires EVM support and being tightly integrated and connected with other ecosystems, which I believe previous Bitcoin Layer 2s did not have in the focus. And probably that's why that might cost them the market. And you'll see tons of Bitcoin Layer 2s

moving in and vampiring off ETH L2s and liquidity. And that, that I think just gives it a bit of a different positioning. Perhaps I don't disagree, but the place where I disagree is I think that the only thing, or let me say the most important thing that's going to bring all those people to Bitcoin layer two is a cash grab or an opportunity to make money. And I only say that because I'm not saying that things should not be fundamentally built on Bitcoin. I believe they do. I'm really excited about this entire movement, but I've already seen it. You know,

once you started to see the pumps and ordinals and all these protocols and stuff, you get a bunch of people and you get 500 VC pitches in your telegram every single day about people building things on Bitcoin that are all going to be vaporware. I'm not saying everything being built on Bitcoin once again, but 99% of it, like every other one of these hype cycles, will be a bunch of vaporware where people are just trying to create a token and make a bunch of money. I think one of the other challenges for Bitcoin DeFi in the short term is that we've not had some of the lessons that the rest of crypto learned last cycle. I think the dumbest trend maybe of 2021 was, quote unquote, yield that was denominated in a token that was controlled by the protocol that was issuing that yield. You had like the Ohm forks and the Wonderland times. And just one more thing,

and then those tokens being used as collateral elsewhere. A hundred percent, right? The rehypothecation. But even like the native yield thing was incredibly stupid. And this cycle outside of Bitcoin, we're seeing slightly more sophisticated stuff like GMX, where you've got yield that's denominated in either a major L1 token or in stable coins. And look, there are definitely securities law challenges with that. But from an economic perspective, that's much more compelling because it's real yield and it's not this fake inflationary stuff. I think we might have to go through the fake inflationary Ponzi-nomics on Bitcoin, and those investors might need to get burned before we have a more mature DeFi ecosystem. Anwar Zoueihidroopi, But I would challenge that because I do think

what is different with this cycle is that with all of these EVML2s, and I can tell you that there's lots of the big DeFi protocols on Ethereum looking actively into Bitcoin Layer 2 deployments. They're more mature. They've gone through these problems. And I think, hopefully, I mean, I really hope that we as a project and other good Bitcoin Layer 2s can learn from the previous mistakes of ETH and not just replicate them, but build on top of what's currently there and just work from that and add new protocols and new products that sit on the intersection of Bitcoin and EVM.

But yes, I fully agree. We've already seen first rock pulls. 90% of the Bitcoin layer 2s out there are probably vaporware. Anyone who says there is E ek roll up today or they have bitvm already live today it's not true right we don't have that um but they're definitely a few strong teams and i i do think that with the rising interest and of diva protocols to go to l2s and this general inflow of ethel tools there's like 44 of them and if you think of it from this perspective a d5 protocol that's live on arbitrum or Ethereum, and they're thinking about the L2 strategy, for them going to Bitcoin L2 is more interesting. And I guess that is the feedback that we're seeing than to another Ethel too, because it opens up for them a new narrative and a new kind of edge over their competitors and potentially new users. And I do think that we will see some of the big teams. That's my point. Sorry. That's my point. That's narrative driven and not fundamentally driven.

They're going to go there because they think that it's a better cash graph. Right? I think the argument should be they're going to go there because there's more liquidity and it's a solid, more solid base layer, right? For the fundamental reasons that that's where the money is. Of course, if you're looking for TVL, but also because it's a more secure base layer, arguably, than the others to say, and I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just trying to play both sides to some degree, but to say they're going to go there because there's money to be made, just really what you

say. Oh, yeah, I mean, I don't disagree. Like I've come to the conclusion and acceptance that, you know, speculation drives adoption, and you will have lots of speculation on Bitcoin layer I mean, I don't disagree. I've come to the conclusion and the acceptance that speculation drives adoption and you will have lots of speculation on Bitcoin Layer 2s. But I do think that there are good fundamentals out there. You have Bitcoin as the best collateral in crypto and you have new assets on Bitcoin. Sure, a lot of them will be used for speculation. I don't challenge that. But if you look at Ethereum cycle, it started with speculation, CryptoKitties, and then now we have actually more mature products. What I'm just saying is, I think the cycle on Bitcoin will be much faster. You'll go through speculation,

but you'll have good fundamental products live, maybe within a year from now, really kind of challenging some of the big ETH players. And I guess, yeah. Yeah. I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm sorry. That's the argument that effectively Ethereum and other chains were a test net for building on Bitcoin, which I've heard over and over again. I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that it's a test net, obviously. I count myself to the more realistic and pragmatic people that accept, yes, ETH has been pushing all the innovation and we have a brain and capital and talent from Bitcoin over to other ecosystems.

But I think this cycle, we just see a lot of the devs and builders who are Bitcoiners at heart come back and build on Bitcoin. And yes, they might initially bring over their forks, but from then on, they might just... I do expect many to build new products directly on Bitcoin layer tubes because of the better fundamentals in the future. Yeah, I was speaking more specifically to you saying that the cycle will be faster. And that's what I meant by saying it's a test that you could effectively... Although Zach says maybe they're not. But you can effectively take the lessons that have been learned building in other places and

just take the best parts of it, even though there's a lag in building on Bitcoin, but take the best parts of it and focus only on those. But that requires quite a bit of faith in humanity, to be honest. Hopefully, hopefully, yeah. The intention wasn't to have a conversation necessarily about building on Bitcoin, but since we have the panel here, I mean, Andrew, do you think that that's going to be meaningful in driving the adoption or price of Bitcoin? Or do you think that this is all about ETF flows right now and Larry? Well, right now it's about ETF flows and Larry, but I think long term building on Bitcoin is going to be a very, very real thing. You know, a very, very obvious point when it comes to, you know, what can be built and what will be built on Bitcoin. The brand Bitcoin is a really, really big deal. You can talk about the speed and price advantages associated with building

on Solana. You can talk about the scale of the ecosystem associated with building on Ethereum. But the reality is, you know, 97% of the public doesn't have any idea what either of those two brands mean, what brands, find a way to build on it. So think of something like this, right? luxury brand out there and you want to create the ability to denote ownership in an immutable way by building on a layer two that is Bitcoin, your ownership of some sort of good, whatever it is. My firm, about a year and a half ago, we were having conversations with Aston Martin about this very thing. How can you denote ownership and how can Aston Martin as a brand find a way with some of their hypercars and supercars like the Valkyrie? How can they build a system by which when you purchase that car, it's not being sold to somebody who's going to immediately flip it. Right. So how can you build a system by which ownership is locked in? The service records are locked in. So if you're going to do that as a brand and you say, we're going to do that, we're going to build that system on Bitcoin, the public is going to much more readily accept that, you know, the name of Bitcoin, the brand of Bitcoin versus some of the others.

So it does make sense that over time, you know, building, you know, layer two type stuff and functionality on Bitcoin sounds, sounds pretty smart to me. Sounds like it makes a whole lot of makes a whole lot of business sense. If you're a brand like that, any brand. I think it does, but why does Aston Martin, I mean, unless Aston Martin is deep down the rabbit hole and crypto native and understands the fundamentals, why wouldn't they just do that like many luxury brands already have, you know, effectively on Ethereum or another chain? I mean, we saw NFT releases and protocols and all these things obviously throughout the last cycle from a number of i was about to ask the same question why would you build that on bitcoin it sounds so

complicated but you can just build it on like solana or ethan and i mean all the examples that you mentioned don't require bitcoin level security like those are like menial things that even a database would be fine why would you build that on why would you yeah you you those are those are like menial things that even a database would be fine. Why would you build that on? Why would you? Those are, those are questions for the brands themselves and the devs that would build it. Those are questions for those types of folks. I'm not a dev.

I can't answer the question of why, what I can answer is a branding question associated with the brand Bitcoin and a larger brand, right? People are going to understand it. Retail public is going to understand it. They're going to be able to make a connection between, well, you know what? If there's a cryptocurrency out there and a way that this can happen, you know what? Bitcoin's been around forever. I trust it. BlackRock, you know, is involved in Bitcoin. So, you know, it must make sense that that's as far as I go with it. Right. But, you know, of course, you know, there are other other crypto Solana and Ethereum that where the infrastructure,

the architecture is is much, much further down the road and, you know, an easier bolt on. But, yeah, those conversations happened. I just want to ask you, Martin. Go ahead, Alexis. So I think to add on to this, if you're coming from outside of the existing crypto ecosystem, why would you not build on Bitcoin? Where else would you go?

Bitcoin is the most widely adopted digital asset. You walk out to anyone on the street, you ask them about Bitcoin, they've heard about it. You ask them about Solana, ETH, even Ethereum, not everybody knows. Solana, Polygon, even less, right? So it's more of this public perception. And if you think about it, when you use reports to retail to the public about the crypto market going up, who do they talk about they say Bitcoin reached all-time high they don't really talk about the others and that

perception is super important for Brands and then that's where L2s come in because one of the products we're actually offering is for an FT Marketplaces to launch EVM NFTs as easily as in polygon but you link them to Bitcoin in one way or the other. There's tons of ways to do that. So it's a hybrid. But to the user, they have something that's linked to Bitcoin that can be marketed as Bitcoin. Yes, it doesn't inherit Bitcoin security for everything. But I think we shouldn't underestimate the power of the Bitcoin brand, which I think... I think you're overestimating the utter indifference of retail. Listen, I agree with you in theory, but I think people have heard of Bitcoin and understand Bitcoin as an asset. Jumping the chasm to building on Bitcoin or any retailer mainstream understanding

of that, I think is completely false. In fact, I think there's as many people who have heard the term NFT almost probably at this point because of Saturday Night Live and all those things, or even Doge, right? We're not going to build on Doge as they do Bitcoin. So I don't think they're going to care at all. Listen, maybe a brand does because they understand the security. But I don't think the Bitcoin brand carries beyond the digital gold narrative or the ETFs or the classic things that we know Bitcoin for at this point. I think they could in the future. But yeah, that's a big jump. Dave, you're giving me a thumbs down.

Scott, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, look, as the resident boomer on the panel, you know, who, of course, obviously been brought to the dark side, the simple reality is that, you know, I think there's an analogy here between what everyone's talking about and jewelry. You know, everyone says gold is valuable because it's shiny. It makes nicer jewelry. But at the end of the day, you can make there's a reason people value gold jewelry more than than silver jewelry or, you know, God forbid, other base metals, there's a reason people value gold jewelry more than silver jewelry or, you know, God forbid, other base metals. And try giving a bronze, you know, something made

out of bronze to your wife and see how she reacts. It won't be very good. The reality is, if Bitcoin's brand gets built by people accepting the asset, and as price goes up and more global acceptance happens, because whether it's BlackRock or Fidelity or whoever, it becomes a base layer of value that you can build on NFTs out of, and the layer 2s allow you to do that. It gains marketing cachet. It's not just number go up, equal, OK, now I want to recursively buy the asset, although there is that feedback loop. It's also number go up, get into the public zeitgeist, And now in a digital world, I build things, digital things upon it. It is relevant.

We are really early, but it is absolutely relevant. And people who think about brand strategy absolutely care about what they're building upon. I think there's a related point here. We've mostly been talking about building on Bitcoin specific to the sort of like crypto on Bitcoin or NFTs on Bitcoin. But there is another type of building on Bitcoin that really is about the financial asset itself, right? People who are building the financial infrastructure, whether that's banking services, insurance, cash rate markets, you know, federated mints, things that really are about Bitcoin's sort of native functionality as hard money. And I wouldn't underestimate the impact that that type of building has to even if it's not as pumpy as some of the, you know, ZK roll up tokens on Bitcoin. Yeah, I 100% agree that Bitcoin should be the base layer for financial assets and for building right defy on Bitcoin makes a lot of sense to me. But not to just to go back to Aston Martin, but like your average person who buys an Aston Martin

caring that some NFT that comes with their car was built on Bitcoin rather than Ethereum, I can't make that jump personally. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think at least now. I mean, anybody else here have a... Terrence, you were given some thumbs, kind of thumbs up earlier when I was sort of talking about it. I mean, and you're obviously a Bitcoiner. So, I mean, what do you, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So I think the main thing is to keep Bitcoin layer one for monetary transactions and all the other stuff can be on Ethereum or layer two,

layer three Bitcoin, right? We can't stop people from doing that. That's where they belong anyway. I'm pretty skeptical about doing this financial stuff on top of Bitcoin, whether it's DeFi or whatever. Like Bitcoin financial products will come. The financialization, I think, will be led by Wall Street. And the market share will be kind of retained by Wall Street. Obviously, crypto people and Bitcoin people will have a role

to play. But all the liquidity right now is coming from Wall Street and this flood of cash supporting ETFs or from people who trust BlackRock, trust Fidelity, trust the market makers, Goldman and JP Morgan and Jane Street. And that's what Bitcoin is great at. Bitcoin, I think having ordinals, for example, on layer one Bitcoin stamps, stuff like that, it just distracts the purpose of layer one Bitcoin and the narrative. And then you end up having things like state secrets or child porn or whatever on layer one Bitcoin.

And even though there's already some of that on layer one Bitcoin to make spam and content super cheap and prolific on layer one Bitcoin, I think it's a terrible idea. Just keep Bitcoin, Bitcoin and not this other stuff. Bitcoin is Bitcoin and monetary transactions and not this other stuff. But Bitcoin's terrible for monetary transactions. But Bitcoin's terrible for monetary transactions. That's, I mean, that's why people have been so bullish on Lightning Network and that's why people use stablecoins.

Sure, sure. So it's terrible for coffee transactions. It's a great way to send high settlement amounts or big amounts of value. So all the transactions that are being done on layer two, all the transactions that are being done in secondary by authorized participants and market makers, those all get settled once a day or a couple of times a day, whatever the market makers are doing with all the ETF flows, the training volumes massive, right? Those get settled on layer

one Bitcoin. And that's what layer one Bitcoin is for. You're then saying that layer one Bitcoin is for exceptionally wealthy people who need to send huge things. And it's not for the average person who can't afford the time and expense to do it on bitcoin that's sort of um that that's not what i'm saying that i would like more people to be able to use bitcoin as money and i think all the ordinal and other stuff they compete with some of the average people that can't afford you know thirty dollars or three hundred dollars you're saying effectively they raised the cost of a transaction right because like we saw obviously when when ordinals were first created

like the mempool was backed up and it basically you couldn't use bitcoin yeah i mean i think terence any other problem with this framing is the idea of bitcoin having a purpose i feel like that makes me a little bit uncomfortable bitcoin is a digital commodity and just like you know other natural commodities like gold like wheat whatever doesn't really have a purpose there are things people use it for right gold is used as a base money it's used for jewelry wheat is used to make bread but like wagging your finger at someone who uses wheat to make donuts instead of bread because listen we need people to have healthier bread in the world. And that's really what wheat is for.

Like, it's sort of like that's what God intended. Like, that's not how Bitcoin works. Right. Like if Bitcoin is going to succeed as money, it's going to succeed because of the natural incentive structure that it creates through game theory and cryptography. And I don't think we can, you know, moralize the use case that we want. Yeah, no one's moralizing. I'm talking about Bitcoin being hard money and the people from Wall Street who think like, because I come from Wall Street. So the way they think, and I, by the way, I've had 100% success rate in convincing people from Wall Street,

from finance, accounting, law, that ordinals are a terrible idea on layer one Bitcoin. But the bottom line is Bitcoin is hard money, right? And you can use it for whatever you want. You can use it to buy ordinals or whatever. The problem is to have Bitcoin as hard money and hard spam or hard content is too much. You're increasing the attack surface and the attack surface of having content, unfettered content on Bitcoin layer one is not good because number one, it's confusing, but also number two, it makes it very easy for the state to say, oh, there's a lot of

so much more child porn and stuff attacking Biden and Trump and Obama. And you guys are relaying all these threats against the president. Why are you doing that? And there's all these state secrets and other things on layer one Bitcoin. It makes Bitcoin's purpose as hard money kind of confusing. And it's easier for them to backdoor attack Bitcoin that way. That genie is so far out of the bottle now that it doesn't even matter.

We could talk about it, but it's not going down. No, but the PowerPoint and state secrets aren't yet on Bitcoin. I don't mean that part. I mean using it for another purpose. Yeah, go ahead, Zach. If people started stamping child abuse images

or stamping classified information from the government onto thin sheets of gold foil, does that mean that gold is less good money? Gold failed as money, for sure. So it's already illegal to deface the U.S. dollar. People use it to do bad things. People use gold for bad things all the time. You can't deface the U.S. dollar without it being against the law. They're obviously going to do the same thing to Bitcoin.

It's just a matter of time. The state wants to control. So when you give them another attack... Well, leaking secrets and shopping are both crimes, right? Those are criminalized. It doesn't mean that basically the piece of paper you're writing your criminal act on is bad. It's the act itself that's wrong. It's the same infinite... Why would you make it easier to do? We've adjusted It's the same infinite. Yeah, go ahead. Why would you make it easier to do?

Like we've adjusted with smart people, right? Clever devs have made it very easy to put new types of spam very efficiently on Bitcoin. And to not adjust the filters is dumb. You have new types of spam. You need new filters. So it doesn't sound very permissionless, Terrence, but you know, and also hard money. It's not provincial as hard content or hard. It's a network. I agree, but I mean, it's a, it's a network.

Scott, let me jump in here and tie not to pick on you. I mean, I mean, it's a, it was a tremendously bad take. I wasn't even on stage and I had to get up here just because of like how bad of a take that was. I invited you like 20 minutes ago, dude. Oh, sorry. I didn't see it. But if Bitcoin, the network can't stand up to it needs to be able to stand up to literally anything. And it will. The problem is with delaying adoption by having the tax surface increase with content. Posting whatever bullshit on top of the network, if it can't survive

portals or some random attaching child porn or Joe Biden It's not going to be random, it's going to be a state actor doing it and that's going to give the state an excuse to shut it. No, there's a ridiculous...

There's a tremendous bad take. There's 5,000 people in here. I can't have 5,000 people walking away thinking that this is actually a ballot. I disagree with you. It's not. It's not going to be money. Bitcoin is going to make it, you know, it's $1.3 trillion right now. If it's going to go to 5 trillion and then 10 trillion, it's going to happen as pristine collateral. And you're going to

be shifting hundreds of billions of dollars of Bitcoin from major institutions and extremely wealthy people in the form of pristine collateral. And there's going to be some form of kind of make or die type of situation built on top of some kind of layer two that has much faster, much cheaper transactions. And you're going to be borrowing fiat currency by posting Bitcoin collateral. You're going to pay a reasonable rate of interest for that. And as long as you return the fiat that you borrowed and the interest, then you get to keep your Bitcoin. And if price goes down enough, it gets liquidated. And Bitcoin is going to be built out as pristine collateral. It's going to be competing against treasuries. It's never it's not going to be money.

It's very it's clearly lost that as a method of exchange. And the base layer is never going to be that. And that's the path. OK, so number one, I think Bitcoin is inevitable. The question is, how fast will adoption happen? You're going to slow down adoption by having extra spam and extra content, and that's unfairly cheap. You have the SegWit discount, the 70% discount that was never intended for content or spam.

That's number one. Bitcoin will happen. I believe in Bitcoin. I work in Bitcoin. That's all I do. But I think that adoption will be slowed down by having it have on layer one, on the base layer, having content. The other thing is you're crowding out people who are middle class, global middle class, middle class in America from being able to self-custody Bitcoin at lower prices by having the spam on layer one. All I'm saying is we've always adjusted the filters, spam filters, when there's new types of spam. This is the first time we have not done that. The Bitcoin core developers adjusted the documentation instead of adjusting the spam filters. So that's not great. So now we have it pretty cheap for people to do content.

Bitcoin will succeed as money. I don't agree with you on that. It's peer-to-peer. Are you a big blocker? Exponential gold. Sorry? Were you a big blocker? I was wrong about being a big blocker.

Now I would actually like the block size decreased, ideally, because I think there's too much spam. You want lower fees, but you want to lower the size of the blocks. Lower the block size, right. Because... Travis, he's

effectively admitted. In addition to scaling solutions with all these covenants, the problem He's effectively admitted. In addition to scaling solutions, right? We have all these covenants. The problem with having scaling is you're going to make it, this is a bit technical, but you can make Bitcoin monetary transactions cheaper, but that makes it cheaper for the spam as well, right?

So you're making it more efficient to do monetary transactions. So you can bunch up a bunch of monetary transactions, sharing the same UTXO with a lot of these covenant solutions, scaling solutions. But then the problem with that, the negative externality, is you're going to have more ordinals and other things because it's going to be cheaper. And that's not great. So that's why, in my opinion, block size decrease, scaling solution, and adjust the filters.

But if you're going to do all that stuff, maybe to just add a bit more of a new spam. But the Bitcoin Amish approach, that we're so upset by ordinals that we need to take other risks and do spam filters and stuff. No, no one's upset. We're just like, this is like a mischaracterization, but go ahead. Well, look, I do worry that like there's, I'm not talking about you necessarily specifically,

but there are people who I think are driven by what feels a lot like religious orthodoxy about what Bitcoin should be. And that like lightning is the kosher solution, but you know, stacks is like haram, right. And I just think and you see that in other parts of crypto too. And like, look, this stuff, I think has to evolve on its own. And you know, applying dogma to it seems really counterproductive. So the dogma I don't like is Bitcoin is permissionless anything which includes spam and content, right? The Ethereum is much better for NFTs. I bought the first two NFTs by any rock or metal female position because she was a friend.

So I get why Ethereum is useful for that stuff. I just don't like that stuff on layer one Bitcoin. You can do it on layer two. You can do it on Ethereum, on Solana, whatever. All the content stuff that you guys want to do, all the other stuff, that should be done outside of Bitcoin instead of having Bitcoin be this dogmatic approach. But what does should mean? When you use the word should here, like in what sense do you mean it should be done on Ethereum or elsewhere? Meaning Ethereum is better for that they're the ogs of launching these nfts and altcoins and other projects they're like a baby coin launcher bitcoin is but there are a lot of people who understand this very well better than

better than i do better than you do and they choose to do it on bitcoin and they understand the trade-offs between bitcoin ethereum should and do you still would you apply that should to them also people who understand the trade-offs between bitcoin ethereum and choose bitcoin they're just no i don't agree with that because bitcoin is hard money and the people doing that they're pumping and dumping right so like no no not all of them there are certainly people on all of these chains who are pumping and dumping but the idea that everyone who is doing nfts is pumping, that is the religious orthodoxy we're talking about. I mean, can I just chime in? I'm talking about peer-to-peer electronic gold and peer-to-peer long-term store of value and peer-to-peer hard money.

It's hard money, and you can say it's e-gold or exponential gold. It's just hard money. Eventually, it will be money. Right now, it already is long-term store value. It's becoming a medium of exchange and unit of account for more and more people. It just takes time because the US dollar is really strong. But to kind of confuse what is basically Fedwire, but for crypto, like Bitcoin is the Fedwire or wire transfer, if you guys are familiar with Fed wire. Wire transfers don't have all this art and JPEGs and ordinals and all that crap.

There's like a limited amount of text you can put on a wire transfer. They're also clumpy and restrictive and can't be used cross- and impossible to do in africa and so you're basically taking away the promise of bitcoin for the everyman and saying that it should be treated like uh big bank transactions yeah yeah so i get what you're saying so bitcoin is permissionless wire transfers or fed wire it's permissionless it's hard right it's fixed supply and that's great for people who want financial freedom, which is like if you look at the white paper, if you look at all the battles that have, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, right? We've had these battles before where each time until now, and I think it's just transitory, but each time we've had these battles about is Bitcoin for color coins and counterparty and spam and content and all that stuff on the base layer, right? On Bitcoin itself, native Bitcoin.

The answer has always been no, Bitcoin is hard money. Bitcoin is hard money. There's no show out there. Natalie Brunel has a show, Bitcoin is hard money. It's about Bitcoin. There's no show seen in a hard spam. We discovered that through trial and error, right? That wasn't the narrative early on in Bitcoin.

Lots of people talked about payments. Then there was the block size wars and there were, you know, there was content that came out like the Bitcoin standard and layered money. And people now broadly understand Bitcoin in the way you're talking about. But that's not because we all got together and we said, this is the appropriate canon. And these are inappropriate use cases for Bitcoin. It's because some stuff turned out to work better on Bitcoin and some stuff turned out to work worse on Bitcoin. And I don't know why we would say, all right, we totally understand what Bitcoin is useful for. This is the final end state. And so people doing things that we don't think will work are apostates. Also, we're just speaking in theory because it's all going to happen.

Right. I mean, I think, Terrence, even you all agree, you can have the should, but you can't have the, that's not reality, right? It's never, you're never putting this genie back in the bottle, ever. So, yes. So, the purpose of spam filters, if you think about it, like when you use your Gmail or whatever, you never stop all the spam, but you can reduce it and deter some of it. Right. So the purpose of the filter is to reduce spam. It's not to stop. You can't stop all spam or you can't stop all content. But the idea is to keep Bitcoin mostly for, you know, the purpose of sending it as a payment and for you to self custody. Something that cannot be taken away, cannot be stopped if you want to send it to someone to use for financial. I agree with the latter, but I think the former, I don't.

But yeah, Alexei, go ahead. Travis and Alexei. Correct me if I'm wrong, but like the core devs, I mean, this would never be something that would be implemented, right? A spam filter. I mean, is there any chance of that actually? They've had spam filters before and they've always adjusted the filters, right? In the past, this is the first time that they've kind of adjusted the documentation in light of new spam instead of adjusting the filters.

Because I think everybody has learned that it's it's you can't just keep adjusting and blocking from people from using bitcoin that's not what bitcoin is for and i i've been doing this for nine years i've seen this debate over and over again i'm actually quite surprised even shocked that we have this again bitcoin is for everyone you can't tell people to only use it for the things that you deem serious or knows are not a spam attack. Nobody's doing this to take down Bitcoin. It's people having fun. And Bitcoin was always used, has always been used to timestamp stuff.

One of the first use cases of Bitcoin apart from selling drugs was actually people timestamping commitments to some data on it and to use that as a reliable kind of reference. It has always been used for these things. We've always had color coins. And I feel, you know, it misses the point. Yes, sure, it may. Yes, I fully agree. High fees create a problem of the commons, right?

You cannot transact on Bitcoin anymore. But think about it this way. If a small community of people who want to put data on Bitcoin anymore. But think about it this way. If a small community or people who want to put data on Bitcoin manage to pump up the fees so high that nobody can use it for day-to-day transfers, well, maybe it's not meant to be in this current state. If you onboard as many people to Bitcoin as Visa has in the network, it's not going to get better, right? We're just going to have high fees. So I think it just shows that we're not there yet. Maybe Bitcoin isn't going to be the system that will be used for payments. Maybe it is a layer two. Maybe we need to actually

figure out ways to make it secure so we can do fast transactions that are usable and not like lightning over complicated where nobody can understand how it actually works and simplify and stop rejecting everything that's on Ethereum and everywhere else just because it's on Ethereum. And I think this is what we'll see this cycle is people realizing and Bitcoiners and not, I'm not speaking about people who want to block spam and people who just like Bitcoin and are built in other systems because they were pushed out, they will now come back because the culture has shifted. And I would bet that one of the reasons is that

you don't see filters is because clearly, Ordnance isn't an attack. And there's a big community that likes doing that. And to implement a filter would just not stand in the broader Bitcoin community. And I think people have understood this by now. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. Ring bells with anybody? Literally, the Genesis block of Bitcoin had an inscription. Satoshi Nakamoto did that inscription on the first block. So, I mean, it's like... Yes. So, I agree with that. It's like this religious fur where people try to interpret the Bible in a way that makes sense to them because of their own belief in it, Terrence. And the fact is, the first block had an inscription.

And now you're saying there should be no inscriptions. No, no. I'm saying that the cost for inscriptions should be higher, not lower. So we have Segwit and then we had Taproot. And then the result of that was there was an unintended consequence where you had basically a discount that Casey, the Ordinal creator, he's a smart developer, very creative. He figured out a way to take advantage of the Segwit discount for content,

which wasn't the intent. And so we're just saying that, you know, if those filters should be... The rollback taproot. The rollback taproot or add a filter. A lot less. And it would just be mostly used for people who want Bitcoin as freedom money to transact into self-custody. That's like 50 people, Terrence.

That's like 50 people. I'm sorry. Listen, I believe squarely in Bitcoin. I do. Okay, I'm being sarcastic and hyperbolic. But that is never going to be, unfortunately, the thing that brings Bitcoin widely mainstream and self-custody. That train has left the station. That's just reality. I'm not saying we shouldn't convert more people and educate more people. I self-custody that that train has left the station that that's just reality i'm not saying we shouldn't convert more people and educate more people i self-custody bitcoin i believe exactly what you're saying obviously right i'm way down the rabbit hole but like that's not for the average person that's not for that's not the way to onboard people onto bitcoin that's not how it's

going to work yeah so right right now i you, right? The wall of cash coming from Wall Street via ETFs, they are looking at it as a financial asset, not as content, right? But I think that if we have the option for people to self-custody where it's not super expensive for the middle class, then Bitcoin... Or terrifying. Or fucking terrifying. Because, right, I mean, listen, there's been times when people have gotten a hell of a lot of criticism, certainly in the past when exchanges were way less secure, right, for saying most people are going to fuck up self-custody, right? And more Bitcoin, and I'm not saying people shouldn't self-custody, but I think it's a terrifying prospect for most people to be their own bank, even though we believe they should. And their single point of failure is probably their own human stupidity. Yeah.

So I agree with that, especially in the past, but self-custody is getting better and better. And we have multi-sig options where like you can have two free keys and the other key is held by um like yeah i have that but i i have to fly around the country to send bitcoin 99.9 percent of people are not going to do that like multi-sig is really great for people who want to store value indefinitely and actually have some fucking money and never need to get rid of their bitcoin or never sell it i went on a rant about that this morning. I personally think that everybody should buy Bitcoin, self-custody it, and multi-sig, put it in safety deposit boxes across the world, fly around when they need to

sell it because I'm a lunatic and because I never intend to sell my Bitcoin. But that's wildly anti the ethos of using Bitcoin. That's impossible. It's clunky, it's antiquated, and that's not what's going to bring any meaningful level of adoption. It's just not. So like we can say that that's what people are going to do. But 99.9% of the world that we're telling to buy Bitcoin is also trying to pay for food for their kids and doesn't have the concern of where they're going to custody it for how long because they can't afford to save anything regardless of the asset. So once again, the way that you're talking and I'm thinking about it, it's like a rich man's problem, which is not the intention of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin should only be used for huge transactions like Fedwire, right? Bitcoin should only be put in self custody for savings. Who has savings? How much of the world even has savings? Yeah, not enough. Not enough. So I do think that if, for example, if a US middle class doesn't feel like they can afford the fees or they get confused by Bitcoin and think it's just a joke because of all the ordinal pump and dumps that will inevitably wreck a lot of people and that will hurt Bitcoin's reputation. I do think it's important to have Bitcoin as an option, the layer one, to self-custody. When will they do it? When will they finally learn, Wolf?

I think it's when the state surveillance increases and the state starts doing things like confiscating assets or threatening to and censoring more. And we have another kind of COVID lockdown or other things that infringe on people's rights and they want to get the hell out of the country. I know people who have used Bitcoin, right, to escape terrible governments, in their opinion, whether it's China or South Africa or whatever, to come to the US with almost their entire net worth in Bitcoin. And then, you know, of course, they convert it to other things, although they probably keep some. I think I heard you say in there that somehow ordinal pump and dumps will hurt the middle class. did I hear that correctly like um the middle class and the poor the Target audience of these ordinal pump and dumps like those are the ones buying it they don't the middle

class and the poor don't have never heard the word ordinal they don't know what it means what are you talking about I would say they used used to T on strong. They don't use Bitcoin. In the audience. The poor and middle class have hardly heard of Bitcoin as well. By the way, you guys didn't hear what Alexi just said, which is the point I always make and is the correct point. If you want to talk about the lower middle class, poor people in hyperinflated economies, they're sending Tether on Tron.

Correct. They're sending Tether on Tron because it's cheap and it's fast. It's like, I think one of the best recipes to, I think, de-maximalize a Bitcoiner who says that ordinals are bad and claims lightning is working and like the ultimate solution is do a world tour and actually try yourself. Like go find a place where people have hyperinflation and where they actually use digital assets

and blockchains to escape that. Nobody uses Bitcoin. No one. Because Bitcoin does not cater to that use case today. Bitcoin has not managed to cater to this use case. Tron has. For as much as we are skeptical about it, Tron has probably unbanked, more

unbanked people than Bitcoin has because it's usable, easy to access. Of course it does. Because it's easy and it's cheap. I actually agree with you guys. And it's sad and it sickens me that this is the case. Like it was Bitcoin's mission to do that, but we've ignored what people actually use day to day. And I think just as like we are in our DeFi bubble often and our NFT bubble, and we are also in our Bitcoin core of Bitcoin is as it is, and it will solve the problems bubble. That reminds me of like, we've seen this many, many times, like think of Blackberry. I mean, I'm sure many of you have seen the film recently,

right? Same example. We like Bitcoin invented this and Bitcoin is always as it is. The core is always going to be right. But that's not the case. Things change. People moving with new technologies that are more usable and cater to the problems and needs of the wider user base. And if Bitcoin does not do that, it will not manage to keep up and people will use something else.

People will use less secure solutions. People will lose more money. And I feel that many core Bitcoiners and all OG Bitcoiners have missed this point. That Bitcoin cannot, like, sure, it can consolidate and ossify. Doing that too early is risky. And rejecting layer twos as an attempt to counter this and offers products that people want to use on a day-to-day basis, rejecting them just because of ordinals or some pump and dump schemes that can be done on top of

this, it makes no sense for me at all. Absolutely not. So Alexei, you and I actually agree a lot based on what you just said in terms of number one, absolutely Trether. Tether on Tron, Tether on Ethereum, Tether on anything other than Bitcoin is used much more than Lightning or Bitcoin. So I agree with that. I live in reality. I've complained to Bitcoiners about it. Lightning is not easy to use. I've lost a lot of, well, hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, using Lightning wallets because they're hard to use and paint in the whatever. And then lastly, I have nothing against Layer 2. I'm happy with Layer 2

development, all the art and content and other DeFi, whatever, being built on Layer 2 Bitcoin, Layer 3 Bitcoin and other coins. The only thing i'm talking about is layer one bitcoin please don't you know do content on there i mean if you do you're gonna have to pay a fair fee like everybody else instead of getting getting this sort of what i consider an arbitrary and unintended discount but it really is for um bitcoin layer one really is for hard money and with less spam not zero spam or zero content less content. This was a wildly unintended topic in conversation

just so you know Andrew you can say something then Vinny you had sent me a really great DM from 2018 so I want Vinny to give us the last thought on this topic Trying to move on to where the actual conversation is with Bitcoin. I mean, ordinals are effectively, you know, a cute freckle and a really pretty girl, right?

In context of the fact that BlackRock is buying a billion dollars, you know, of Bitcoin every day and a half. I mean, that's the reality. So not only is that happening, but over the next, you know, two to six months, you're now going to get options on those ETFs. So volumes are going to explode further. So ordinals, which we just spent way more time than we ever should, it's a waste of time in terms of the conversation. Again, it's a cute freckle on a really pretty woman. Bitcoin is a really pretty woman. Wall Street agrees. Larry Fink agrees. And that's why they're

shoveling billions of dollars into it. Right. So cool conversation. But, you know, tying yourself to purity associated with ordinals is like, you know, yeah yeah i don't think i want to go out with that pretty girl because she's got a freckle that's kind of cute it bothers me she's not pure enough doesn't make any sense yeah vinny vinny you had sent me an awesome dm of a tweet that you literally sent in 2018 as i've been trying to invite you on stage for the last 45 minutes i'm going to give you kind of the last word on this topic uh Yeah, thanks. You might want to put it up there. But I have two things to say. One is another tweet that I posted in 2017 was Bitcoin was created so humans could

decentralize stores of value and currency to prevent manipulation by governments. And then in a bit of commas, let's create an ETF. So we've basically gone from decentralizing money throughout the world to can you guys hear me? Sorry, my phone tried to ring. We lost you for one second, but you're good now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I hit when the phone rings. So the other tweet I sent you was very simple. It was... It's tagged above. It's above. Yeah. And so the accessibility to poor people for bitcoin is is super low right yeah and and so let's just be perfectly frank and i call it i've done this for years i've said bitcoin is rich people money and when you think rich people you

think well it's like i'm not rich but actually in relation to some of the people in Africa, other parts of the world, we're all rich. We're on this call right now and having a high level conversation about this stuff. We're rich. You go into the townships. I'm from South Africa originally. Those are poor people. Townships, favelas in South America, et cetera. Look, I'm not going to go rehash the 2017 scaling wars debate.

We had those debates. Bitcoin Core won. Bitcoin Core is what it is today. And it's never going to go rehash the 2017 scaling wars debate. We had this debate. Bitcoin Core won. Bitcoin Core is what it is today. And it's never going to change. They're never going to make a hard fork, except under emergency circumstances. The block size is not changing. We're stuck with Segwit. It is what it is, guys.

There's no change that can be had yet. Bruce Fenton, I see those on the call here. He was part of that debate and discussion in 2017. I'm not sure how long some of you guys have been here for. I've been here for a decade now plus. And we can either accept Bitcoin the way it is or we can move on to other chains. What the community did in 2017 was exactly the latter. Everyone who opposed the unwillingness to, to, to scale Bitcoin moved to other chains. I invested, I seed invested in Solana and in January or February 2018.

And I moved on to other chains. Now it doesn't mean I don't own Bitcoin or I don't think Bitcoin is valuable in some way. I just don't. I just don't think it can scale. You're very popular. A lot of people are calling you. That's improved now. Congratulations. When you have ordinals coming in, I don't believe in Layer 2. I'll be honest. That's one of the things.

I just don't believe in Layer 2 from a usability perspective for the average person out there. Everything I've seen so far in Layer 2 means that it's not going to get to poor people in Africa. They can barely understand Layer 1, and now we're going to try and add layer two onto it. You have to do it in a way which makes sense. But this is a very long discussion.

I don't want to get into it. I'm happy to jump into a separate room and discuss the pros and cons of scaling crypto for the whole world. But it has to be cheap transactions, because otherwise it doesn't work. And I can see why people are using it.

I also say back in the days that I think the big opportunity isn't for store of value, that it's for digital money around the world. Now, not a huge fan of anything I've seen really so far, but it looks like USD on multiple chains seems to be that. We've got $100 billion worth of Tether. We've got tens of dollars with a tether we've got tens of billions worth of circle and people in africa are now using us dollar currency as an alternative to anything else on multiple chains because they trust it as a as a unit of account

and we just need to see like we can have whatever ideological belief we want but just look at the data and look at the stats. Totally agree. Guys, we're going to wrap. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Last word, Tan. We're going to wrap up. I'm just trying to help Bitcoin be used for freedom as money and help number go up.

I agree that the ETFs have helped number go up and are bad for freedom, right? Because they make people lazy and they have this custodial product that's not real Bitcoin. They can't self-custody. They can get censored. They can have their assets confiscated. So Bitcoin is ultimately hard money that's hard to take away and hard to stop. And that's what I think layer one Bitcoin is. I hope things happen on layer layer two or three bitcoin but i understand

that a lot of the innovation and other activities content art will happen uh put elsewhere probably i just don't like it happening on layer one bitcoin because that's not what layer one bitcoin is for all right guys what do you think layer one Bitcoin is for? We already did this, Vinny. We're not doing that one again. He gave the answer to that before. I appreciate your asking, but yeah, we're going to end up in circles. What do you think layer one Bitcoin is for, for the world?

Not for a small group of people, for the world. What is it? Financial freedom. Bitcoin is for financial freedom. And the other stuff is important, right, to a lot of people. I wish artists got paid more and weren't ripped off musicians by record labels and Spotify and so forth. But Bitcoin layer one, the base layer of Bitcoin is for financial freedom. so high that people can't afford to use it? Isn't that the question? I agree with you. That's why it needs to be lower.

And I'm hopeful. Maybe I'm naive, but hopeful that with the scaling. But how do you get it lower? No, I'm just asking the questions. How do you get it lower? Sure. How do you get Bitcoin Layer 1 lower and make it accessible to 8 billion people? 8 billion is the tough part, but we can make it lower with creative developers. So what is the right number?

Do you want to make it accessible to 100 million people? As many as possible. Ideally 8 billion, but yeah, Vinny, realistically. It's not freedom. Then it's not freedom if it's not available to everyone. It's elitist if it's available to a billion because that's just it's just 12.5 percent of the world. So just like that's the just keep an open mind. The argument that I'm making is if you want it free and open and available to everyone, then it's freedom.

If it's not available to everyone, it's not freedom. It's freedom for the elite. Yeah, that's exactly what I was making. Guys, we have to wrap. I'm sorry. Terrence, I'm sorry. We're going to wrap up. Yeah, we have taken a horse. We've killed it and then we've beaten it and then we killed it again. And then we beat it 57 more times. I'm sorry. So it's time to wrap. We're going to come back obviously tomorrow. Thank you to all the guests. I actually really enjoyed the conversation.

I just don't want it to become too circular and indefinite because the train has left the station and we can talk about, in theory, what Bitcoin should be. And I think a lot of us will agree with those. But we have to also be pragmatic and look at what it is and what's happening there. And that's not going to change. That train has left the station, in my opinion.

Guys, I'll see you all tomorrow, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thank you. Bye.