The Wolf Of All Streets - Gold 5k, Silver 100, Bitcoin Lags. Give up? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall, the crew dives into crypto's current flatline, Bitcoin and majors stuck while gold nears $5K and silver tops $100, with AI and commodities stealing the spotlight. They unpack flawed tokenomics from the early days (non-dilutive cash grabs with no real value flow), the need to purge worthless projects, and how institutional buyers like ETFs and MicroStrategy are quietly holding the line against long-term holder dumps. Plus, optimism around next week's SEC-CFTC coordination potentially fixing token economics, frustration with taxes killing real-world use, and why precious metals strength could set Bitcoin up for a big rebound."

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every weekday here on exit 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. This will be the last show of the week since we do not show up on weekends. So we'll dive right into covering all of the stories driving crypto today. Before we do that, we do have an awesome sponsor, ZeroG. I'll tell you a bit about them. AI is reshaping the world, but right now it's stuck in the hands of just a few big players. But what if AI could run openly, verifiably, and on-chain? That's what ZeroG is building. The world's first decentralized AI operating system open to everyone.

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We've got gold at 5K, silver, at 100. Bitcoin lags give up. I think we've even given up on the titles. I mean, you know, it's funny. I was watching your show this morning, and it's almost like watching a person without anyone else to talk to, talking into a microphone,

trying to self-do self-therapy. Yes, that's accurate. I said to my team, I was like, can we just not? I mean, you know, but the thing that's interesting is, and, you know, I posted something this morning and, you know, people don't get it. you know, if you actually talk to, and you do, you talk to some of the best investors with track records who understand what the hell they're doing, people like Mike Alfred.

But if you go back even to, you know, Warren Buffett, what you'll find is almost every investor that is considered, you know, deified later in life. I'm not talking about traders, not an investor. You'll find people who bought when they were uncomfortable and didn't care and sold, when they thought the hype was huge. And we're in a period of time when the entire market is just dead, right? You know, it's like at the same exact time

as price action is saying crypto is dead, you have an enormous number of people who are pretty damn smart understanding that the technology that's being built and some of the value that's being created is going to be enduring. And that cognitive digital dissidents is really, really matters. But there's one other piece. And the other piece is

something I've been saying for a long time. And, you know, people probably have gotten mad at me when I used to say it, which is that a lot of the characteristics that drove people into crypto in the first place were bullshit. And namely, the ability to get immediate liquidity before you prove that there's actually value, right? You know, it effectively opened up the notion of venture investing to individuals, except unlike venture investing where even the dumbest venture capitalists insist that if the firm they're investing in makes money, that they have a way to make money from it. In the Girolda crypto, they gave money to founders without absolutely any notion of how those tokens are going to relate to the value that those founders are creating. And the founders

actually just got the money. Right. So, you know, and I said it in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in 2017. So this is, you know, and the quote at the time was the three words that expose why crypto in this instantiation is going to fail is non-dilutive capital. Because essentially, if you are able to raise capital without diluting your equity stake or taking on an obligation in the form of debt, then that's a magic genie, you know, to the founder. but it's absolutely a disaster to the investor. And the reason investors didn't care was because the investors who did the money in the first place generally made money because they got to sell to the greater fools in the public. And so that is a large part of what we're dealing with in crypto.

And the one place where Mike McClone and I agree is that there are an absolute ton of tokens out there that have valuations in the hundreds of millions or more that shouldn't be worth $1.50 or shouldn't be able to buy you a subway ticket, right? You know, a swipe to get, you know, to take a ride. I mean, they literally have no value whatsoever. And until that is purged, there's always going to be a bad taste in people's minds.

And that is true. But none of that applies to Bitcoin. I don't really think it applies to Ethereum. I don't think it applies to any of the top tokens in a sense, because that's not what's going on there. And so you have this sort of bifurcated thing where all those top tokens are sitting there and there's no excitement, but they're not getting crushed either. They're just kind of languishing.

And so and the things that have no path to money, like you were talking about chain link this morning. I mean, I've said it many times. I own chain link for exactly the reasons you were talking about. But the reason it's been in the low teens, actually 12 right now, is because there's no path. You have no idea. You answer the following question about chain link. And here's a question.

I'll ask you, Scott. If chain link becomes the dominant protocol and ends up generating $2 billion a year in revenue, what's the token worth? And if you can't answer that question, how the hell do you expect people to invest in it? But they did. No, I understand that. But I'm talking about you, why would you expect it to rally? And that's...

Yeah, and if you want to take that logic a step further, why would you buy anything that was launched under that structure now, even if you believe it has fundamental utility or value? Well, there's a reason. Because it's wildly overpriced. Now, here's the bull case here. I'm going to give you the bull case. The day that Sergey could go on your show and not tell you, I can't answer questions about what the token economics are going to be, which is what he does. And he does that with every interviewer. And they do the same, the same thing is true with Ando, the same thing is true with all of them. The day that that changes is the that governance tokens can have the power to vote themselves shares of revenue, right?

That's the day that tokens all of a sudden will get a, that's when the new, the massive new bill market will start. And the good news is that there are people in our government, they only have three more years, but there are people in our government that are getting together next Tuesday, quite literally, to talk about how the hell they can allow that to happen. And so, and because for those who don't know, what I'm referring to is there's a joint SCFTC with Selegg and Atkins SEC meeting next week to talk about how they want to coordinate regulations in the world of crypto. And this is the thing that has needed to happen from the beginning. You shouldn't care. The day a crypto founder doesn't give a flying F whether or not it's a security or is a commodity. and they can just offer the token economics and get things listed,

get things trading easily with low friction as crypto. That's when the market takes off again on projects that actually can derive value. Until that point, it's all investor, you know, it's basically, you know, masturbatory finance. And it's the only way I can describe it. You know, it's all one big circle jerk in the entire ecosystem outside of a couple of large tokens which have their own issues in terms of the public's perception, but the truth is that, you know, they're being kind of dragged down with the whole thing. And so that's sort of,

that's my sort of thought process this morning. But I think that that's the cognitive dissonance that has to resolve. If we really believe crypto rails are going to run the future, okay, good, we got at least our firsthand. Then there has to be a way to get value out there. So, okay, let's get the other old guy talk. What's up, Mark? All right. Yeah, I used that term oldhead on our podcast earlier this week. Yeah, I feel like one of the guys who are just like in Pitch Perfect to run in to try to challenge you on that next riff. Yeah, I watch Pitch Perfect guys. I'm a fully evolved man. I want to start with your chain link point. That should be crypto 102 or 201.

one, if it gets adopted, if it has economic value, and people want to use it as opposed to SWIFT, as opposed to XRP, and it's a cross-chain, how does the chain link token accrue value? Who chooses it? Is it systematically done? And I agree with you. If you can't name that tune in three notes, then move on. And I'm just writing something right now for an outfit about why Bitcoin is languishing and the journalist said

and don't tell me zoom out and I thought I said great I'm going to start the article with don't zoom out zoom in

and where I think I won't go into my point about why Bitcoin's languishing I'll stick with yours it's related to Bitcoin

people are not looking at Bitcoin's money right now everything's about AI and people can say I like what's going on. There is adoption. The whole clawed co-work thing is blowing up like bananas,

putting Microsoft's co-pilot to bed. And that's what all the stocks are rallying. If you look at all the small caps, from iron to storage tech, even some of the chips, it's all about infrastructure and commodities now. And that's what people want to understand. they want this simple sentence, oh, there's going to be a three-year moratorium on taxes and you get

the expense everything? Great. What assets are company? Oh, Alcoa. They'll benefit. Let's have Alcoa up 20% in the first four weeks of the year. So people want to know things in those three notes. And that's what's happening in the markets. And that's why chain link's not up. And I believe that's why Bitcoin's not up. So I'll stop there. I didn't even see Mark on stage, Dave. So I didn't see his hand. Are there any other hands I might be missing here? No, I don't see any hands. So I'm going to pick on people. Oh, there we go. Andre. You see safe me picking. Andre?

I happy Friday, guys. So I think the reason why Bitcoin has been languishing is due to like idiosyncratic factors, not so much macro because what we saw, especially in Q4, I mean, we saw this long-term holder selling, long-term holder distribution, right, plus 10-10 liquidation cascade, which exacerbated this kind of sell-off, right? So these were only like idiosyncratic factors. And in fact, like our own quantitative studies show that, like, over the past six months, like non-macro factors, these idiosyncratic factors have explained more than 50% of Biggs' performance variation.

So that may explain this kind of divergence between Bitcoin, crypto assets in general, and everything else, right? So equities, precious metals, and so on. And I mean, the good news about this on the bright side, you can actually see that there's a massive kind of valuation gap. Anyway, look at it. I mean, like Julian Biddle has posted this chart, where he showed macro sensitive assets. like equities, yields, DXY, and so on, right, versus Bitcoin. So massive valuation gap. If you look at Bitcoin versus gold, massive valuation gap, right?

Anyway, you look, it doesn't really fit because I do think it's due to idiosocratic factors, like this kind of long-term, older supply distribution. But this is also like fading, right? we're seeing like that the selling is a losing momentum. And at the same time, I think the moment we see like return and risk appetite, I think Bitcoin will catch a bit. But I mean, the elephant in the room is, of course, like the precious metal complex. Nobody's interested in, or there's not much attention on crypto assets because like precious metals are railing like crazy, right?

You can see it in like Google trends. I've just posted the chart. this morning, right? You can see like Google trends on gold and silver are like at max attention, right? While Bitcoin and crypto is like a minimal attention, right? So it's like huge asymmetry, right, in terms of attention, right, on these assets. And also if you look at it quantitatively, right, it's like I think the fair value between Bitcoin and gold right now based on global. money supply is probably like 50 ounces per Bitcoin.

We're trading at around 20 ounces, right? So that's like a massive undervaluation. The risk is, of course, that these models are broken, right? That there's some kind of structural shift happening, right? But I don't have the answer to this. Yeah, well, I mean, I hate the word fair value within that sentence, but I understand. No, no, because it's a question. It's a model value, right?

No, no, no, I understand that. I mean, look, central banks can buy gold. They will never, they're not buying Bitcoin until they're forced by gunpoint to do so. You know, it's just it, the central banks that are buying gold are not the G7. They're the others who basically are rejecting U.S. treasuries as their reserve asset. And we all know that that's going on. I mean, that's true. Silver has its own thing, which is, frankly, it's massively underpriced relative to its

rarity in the Earth's crust compared to gold. And so that's what's playing out there. And, you know, Bitcoin right now, I mean, look, it would be really hard to look back. If someone says to you, crypto winter started on October 10th, and you could expect it to play out like it's done before, which is a minimum of six months or so, because that's been more or less, Like from Luna to the bottom, it was about six months. It was made in November. So if you look at that and say, okay, well, we had a similar size destruction in the crypto space in October 10th, people getting wrecked.

Many false rallies are people getting wrecked. I mean, Scott publicizes it every time. Every time you get a failed breakout, people get wrecked. And the numbers are not small. I mean, hundreds of millions to billions. It was 800 billion red in value. Exactly. So if you have a very simple mental model, which says we are in crypto winter.

Crypto winter started on October 10th. That was the crescendo. That was the lightning strike. Then you'd make the argument that, well, okay, cool. That means sometime around March, you know, we might see some green shoots. Okay. The reason people don't say that is because the Bitcoin price is sitting at almost 90,000. They go, well, wait a minute, crypto winter, Bitcoin should be trading at at 40, 50, 60.

And what they're not understanding is that inside of crypto, it may be crypto winter, but people are slowly putting money in on the traditional financial side while the crypto, the general crypto cycle is selling to them. It's a rotation is what's going on. And it's caused by people, by two things. It's caused by the traders who say, well, we're in Crypto Winter, it's going to go down that much. I manage to get my money out now.

And it's caused by disgust from OG Bitcoiners. You know, Bruce is on stage, and I don't know if he's selling or not, but I do know that the disgust that two firms, and by the way, they both have investors, so it's not really two firms, but between BlackRock and MicroStrategy, they are becoming the dominant players in terms of concentrated holdings is the exact opposite of what they signed up for from Bitcoin.

Now, we can debate whether that's an accurate assessment or not. I personally think that to get to long-term adoption, that actually needs to happen, but it doesn't matter because that is a very real sentiment. And so those things happen, right? And so, you know, it's like if I'm right, then this, what we see as tremendous undervaluation will have a rally like we've seen in previous times in that order of magnitude. But it's not going to start, it's not going to start until the despondency has run its course. And that's the issue.

Mark, is that a new hand? To be honest, like, I don't believe we're in the crypto-inter, you know why? Because if you look at previous barrenarks, you have at least like 50% plus throwdown, right? We now have like 35% pete to draft, right? Yeah, but you're missing a point. You're missing the divergence of Bitcoin and Alts and Ether and, alt. So it's not just pure Bitcoin dominance, but Bitcoin and Ether both have massive TradFi sponsors that have bought, bought huge amounts of supply mitigating the fall. Look at, I mean, look, I don't really

care which one, look at Tao. That's a good example because I watched that one. You know, Tao was pushing for, it was over 400. It's at 230. Okay. Right. You know, it's, it actually was over four. It's almost a 50% drop. And there are lots of tokens like that. If you go into, yeah, You go into the smaller all coins. There are tons of them. I mean, Scott, I mean, how many all coins that are in your portfolio were down north of 50%? Hundreds. And how many are down?

What do you mean? What do you mean hundreds? You have hundreds. What do you mean hundreds, Mark? I don't like your tone. Yeah, it was. And so, you know, I've been, but, you know, there's like dusty bags since 2016 in there that, you know, at some point they were down so bad. I forgot they existed, they would ever, I mean, they'd come around in yours.

That's just legacy of an OG. That's all. I'm just jealous. No, they're just going to go back up eventually, right? I'm just holding them because they obviously are all just going to resurrect. But you know where I actually agree, Dave? Like, my counterfactual argument is we would have entered like a classical bear market based on like the degree and level of like long-term holder selling a loan.

if we didn't have this amount of institutional demand, right? Because if you just compare the numbers, right? If you compare what ETFs have been buying in 2025, what treasury companies have been buying, it's around 700,000 Bitcoins, right? And long-term holders sold, I think, an equal amount of Bitcoin. So that's why we were essentially flat in 2025. But I agree, like, we probably would have entered this kind of classical bear market

if it wasn't for, like, institutional buying. I mean, I think it's stronger. Everyone who says, well, I can't believe micro strategies bought that much and the price hasn't gone up. Well, the answer is that the price would be a lot lower. Exactly. Yeah, that's the point. But now you have to ask yourself the question. What is a stronger foundation for a market, a market where people who bought at $100 or less own the majority of Bitcoin or a market where people are buying in at these levels, expecting it to eventually. rival gold. What's a stronger market? And then look at gold's price and say, well, wait a minute.

Every time gold goes up, that increases the, I'm not going to say ceiling, but increases the target for what people think is where Bitcoin's valuation should go. And the answer is if Bitcoin is to, if safety mimosas Bitcoin standard is ever to happen, it cannot happen without the, without people, without Ibit and without micro strategy and without, without BitGo being public, which was another very big deal, without more public companies offering intermediate solutions for people who simply don't want to take risk with their financial assets. There's a reason.

You don't have to put dollar bills in a bank account earning no interest. You can hold it in your own house. You can. And arguably, if you're not getting interest, why the hell would you give it to a bank who does things to you like what they did to Scott yesterday in terms of trying to get it? get a wire sent. I mean, the reason you do it is something that people do. I mean, we may say they're sheep, we could make fun of people all we want. But the truth is, is there's a lot of

reason. People want that security. Once it's ubiquitous, then that asset can become the measuring stick of which all financial assets are measured. It can't happen without that. I mean, there have to be people who disagree with me on this one. No, no, 100% agree. I mean, the good thing about this, like, even if like micro strategy owns like 20% of this flight, right? They can't control the protocol, right? That's the view of Bitcoin. I mean, my view of micro strategy is different than most.

I actually hate the fact that they're paying such ridiculous interest for STRC. I really do. I think in the end it'll probably work because I think they're buying, they're finally not smashing, top smashing. They're finally, you know, up-upping their game at a time when I think is actually an opportune time to be because if they sit there and they're the buyer of last resort and they absorb all the supply when the supply stops and it and and bitcoin inevitably does what I expected to do, they're going to look like gold. They're going to look golden. They're going to look great.

But why should they have to pay exorbitant interest rates in order to buy it? The answer is because they have to. That's what the market's telling them. And that is not a great sign. That is telling you a lot about, about, you know, where the market is pricing this right now. I mean, it'll change, right? It'll change. If Bitcoin, like, starts rallying, it's perverse, but if Bitcoin starts rallying tremendously, justifying the fact that a lot of billions have gone into this product, they won't have to pay that high of an interest rate. The market will take the price of the stock up so that the interest rate that they're effectively paying for new, for new buyers is down. I mean, that's just the way markets work.

But it is an interesting sign. Anyway, anybody else want to talk about something else? So I see J.W. I got rugged there for like three minutes, so I missed the talent. I contributed. Yeah. Maybe J.W. can give us a sweeping overview of what's happening with either Zcash or Clarity Act. Oh, please, dear God, not.

Oh, you got an hour or two? Yeah, exactly. I was trying out. Got it, got it, got it, got to get to that. Do you think, yeah, do you think that that Sealing and Atkins can pull something off in terms of... This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. Actually getting real rule proposals that go through the full public comment process and get implemented at the CFTC and SEC to clean up this mess in it without a congressional, without congressional delegation.

Well, so start off, I've always been a skeptic of major. My prediction two or three years ago, it was we'll get stable coins through. We won't get anything else major through. That was my prediction, pessimistic, hopeful, hopefully, certainly, and helpful if I could help with drafts and stuff. But some time on the Hillpost, Frank, I became a real skeptic. We never could pass anything as Republicans because the Dems kind of view was, you know, we got. We got once in a century legislation with the Dodd-Frank Act. Let's just protect that and not do anything.

So I'm a skeptic just based on that history. So directly to your question, I've always been a little concerned about the ability of SEC and CFTC to work together, especially with crypto, given that crypto needs more of crypto to be housed at CFTC than SEC. will SEC give up jurisdiction, jurisdictional fights between the agencies, stuff like that. And the last time they did anything major together was a joint memorandum of understanding with respect to swaps, securities-based swaps versus commodity swaps. And that took years to do. And it was a small thing achieved over years of fighting and backbiting and all kind of stuff. But what is amazing here is Selig came right from the SEC straight to the CFTC.

So he's got CFTC experience and SECC experience, and he just recently worked for Atkins. He's a crypto-native dude. The first time that guy, I met that guy, was at consensus. And he walks up to me at a little cocktail party of like 20 crypto lawyers, defi lawyers, and he says, hey, I'm starting a forecaster channel for crypto lawyers. And he was just working at a law firm. You want to join. I was like, this guy is based, man.

This guy's cool. So it's been great to see him get in there. So he's crypto-native. He was just working with Atkins a hot minute ago. So that's going to change the dynamic in a very positive way, I think, for SEC and safety to work together on their own, using their own exemptive authority, working in tandem. They might write it down in a memorandum of understanding between the agencies, so they might just do their thing.

But I think this is going to be real in terms of the agencies. I think probably they'll have to do it on their own, but that's okay because they both have pretty extensive statutory exemptive authority. And I think they'll actually work well together. And, you know, if you're a career staff, you might be like, oh, we need to protect our jurisdiction, I think the two chairman are going to say, no, that's not going to work. You're not going to be on the team writing this stuff, if that's your view. So I have a lot of hope for that working out, that joint exempted process between those agencies.

Well, if that's true, that could be, look, my working theory, and not theory, I've been saying, for eight years that I've never understood. I actually wrote about this, you know, years and years ago, often talk to people at the SEC, include talk to people outside the SEC. Actually, some of the people, one of the people I had the longest conversations about this with is now head of trading and markets at the SEC, Jamie, SELA, is that there should be a new part of the capital stack that right now has zero ability through law to be utilized, which is companies should be able to sell future forms of identified revenue, which based on

something that we might call a commodity, but is a corporate fundraiser. tactic. So think of it as Amazon selling Prime before or Tesla selling, you know, transferable full self-driving. Now, those companies don't need to do that. So it's a bad example, but you understand the point. A lot of, you know, if your chain link as a company and you're going to earn revenue, sell a discrete form a piece of that revenue that doesn't confer equity ownership, all of a sudden that becomes probably a security, but should it matter? The issue is securities right now have have a couple of things about them, more than two, but a bunch of things about them that are incredibly over-regulated.

That, you know, you have the accredited investor rule, meaning that startups basically can't source from the public, which is a horrible rule for so many different reasons. They have seasoning requirements, which require, mean when you create a token, you gotta wait a year before it could be public and not, and, you know, and that. So you put all these together and you also have, lots of minute rules that you know very well, things like transfer agents, et cetera, et cetera.

There's so many rules that they strangle the innovation. There's so many rules that would not exist at the Internet and had the technology that we have today been available in the 1930s and 40s when the rules were written or the 70s when they got rewritten. Or hell, in 2005, when Reg NMS was written and the current sitting SEC had wrote a brilliant reason why it was a terrible reason why it was a terrible, law as a dissent. So we have this. And the real question is, is, you know, how do you allow for that innovation? And if the CFDC and the SEC get together, exemptively or otherwise, you could get that.

That's the long question. But that to me is the issue. Agree? Yes, not. Yes, no. I agree. No, I think that makes total sense. And to me, that matters.

I mean, you know, it's the problem is, is that. While they won't go as far as you will, Bruce, honestly, you know, I am sure there are a lot of people both, the people running both agencies right now understand that the vast majority of the rules that they have, the minutia, are bullshit. They actually do understand that. The question is, can you figure out a way to allow for innovation? And that's the question. I mean, you were regulated so you know. You understand what FINRA does and how it works and all that stuff. and it's just, it's hard, right?

I mean, you know, that's really the question. What would happen if they allowed for innovation? And to me, that could be the next big spark. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, I think, you know, tyrant's going to tyrant, pinhead's going to pinhead. I'm not optimistic about a gaggle of penheads being any more effective than half as many pinheads.

You know, it's all pinheads, SEC, CFTC. You know, it's just a bunch of status tyrants. And, yeah, some of them know that it's broken, but their idea of fixing it is baby steps. You know, go and tell them that you want to get rid of AMLKYC, see what they say. Oh, my gosh, no. You know, tell them you want to scrap accrediting the best of rules entirely. We dive in on that a bit, Bruce, because I want it, first of all, AMLKYC, I hate the fact that we late them together. Just for those who don't understand, because we bring them together, AML is anti-money laundering.

and KYC is know your customer. There is a link, obviously, because if you don't know who your customer is, how the hell do you know if they're laundering money? But KYC rules started long before AML. KYC was brokers, and you ran this and you know this, had a responsibility to, before they recommended investments to people to know whether they were appropriate. Now, you could make a really strong argument

that that's complete and unadulterated bullshit, that that's nanny state crap. And by the way, I would agree with you on that. But that's what it was for. It had nothing to do with anything else. AML, money laundering has to do with the government's overarching desire to block bad guys from getting access to capital. And they have failed beyond miserably. In fact, most people who've looked at this in any reasonable sense would say that the current AML regime effectively has not just failed.

It's probably facilitated money laundering. And you can just tell that by the amount of fines that have been paid by the largest banks, because people can get things done. And so the real fight in terms of, well, the real fight is on ethics and yield, but a lot of people worry about defy allowing for money laundering, but at the end of the day,

you have to be able to get dollars into the system if you want to get dollars out of the system. They can do it much simpler, right? There are simpler ways of doing it. But most money laundering training that you get at broker dealers is just obvious stupid shit. Don't let someone come in with a briefcase full of cash. I mean, seriously.

But that's just because that's also status and any state nonsense. It shouldn't be anybody's flipping business. If somebody wants to use cash, people did for thousands of years. They used some variation of cash. And every single ancestor that every single one of us had had far, far, far, far freer ability. You know, you had people who would do the original actual Silk Road. You know, they would go on caravans for six months and bring their spices and trade it for silks. and you didn't have some pin-headed nitwit tyrants saying,

oh, not so fast, where'd you get your money? Like, that's just a nanny-stayed nonsensical thing that pin-headed tyrants have invented. It's not legitimate. The government has absolutely no flipping business knowing any of this. You want to go chase terrorists and child traffickers and whatever else you want to blame this on? Go chase them.

It's none of your flipping business to treat a billion people in the world as if we're all criminals and ask somebody where, you know, oh, where'd your money come from? None of your freaking business where you're, your money came from. The entire thing is totally illegitimate. And that's only one example. I just said that as an example, because if you say that to these pen-headed tyrants, they're going to freak out and act like you're taking out some cornerstone of the global economy that the whole system isn't going to work if you don't let them get up in everybody's business, which is a relatively new thing,

by the way. I mean, even in my career, you used to be able to open brokerage accounts without an ID. You know, that's something in the last 30 years. You know, a lot of this current tyrannical, ridiculous regime where they want to know where, you know, you can't buy a motorcycle on eBay without some pinheaded tyrant. Oh, where'd you get your money? Where'd that come from? What's your source of funds? That's all nonsense. And that's not the way that the economy has ever worked in the history of humanity.

It's a brand new and really, really, really stupid idea created by pinheads. And that's just one example of many, accredited investor. Same thing. None of this stuff is legitimate. It's all ridiculous. None of them have the slightest clue. It does nothing but gets in the way of people who are actually out there building, actually out there creating jobs and solving things.

But here's the thing. So let's put some shape on this. I completely agree. Accredited investor is a pure subsidy. One of my favorite, I use Monty Python a bunch this week. So we'll do another one. Montefathe had a great skit. John Cleese plays Dennis Moore.

And it starts with Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore running through the night. He robs from the rich and gives to the poor Dennis Moore. By the end, he's robbing from the poor to give to the rich. And the accredited investor rule is robbing from the poor to give to the rich. It is literally creating, it has created a VC industry. It has created people who call, will call me up and tell me, you know, whether or not there was a cold call, but I just was curious. you know, it was just saying, well, you're not an accredited investor, and I didn't say anything. Of course, I am, but it doesn't matter.

He was telling me how he could get me access to SpaceX and charge only 20, 25, between 20 and 25% for the privilege more than if I were a rich person. Now, think about that. Think about what I just said. And by the way, that is a legitimate business allowed by the rules. Yeah, caused by the rules. You can do that. It is the most unjustifiable rule that exists in D.C. There is, it is no doubt.

And there are a lot of people who know that. Think of another one, you know, Warren Davidson, you know, Congressman Davidson, he's been on this show before. He put out a keep your coins and, you know, ability to have self-custody wallets, you know, some very simple rules that everyone says, oh, no, no, we're going to get that all done in clarity. Well, the reality is fuck that. I mean, what the Republicans that actually care should do is instead of one big bill, do things such as the Keep Your Coins Act, do things such as a tax. Exxonomy Act. Get those things done. Yeah, but you can't co-op little bills. If you want to play the Washington game, you can't, you can't slimy banking stuff unless

it's some big dumb bill like the Genius Act or Clarity or, you know, Loomis Gillibrand or any of the other, you know, big giant boondalls. Look at what happened yesterday. Now, in the House of Representatives, 86 Republicans voted with 100% of the Democrats on a spending bill because it had billions. And I mean many, many billions of what's called earmarks and including things such as funding organizations, literally, literally funding organizations do political advocacy. I mean, is there a human being of a voter? This is why we, by the way, Bitcoin is going to run one of these days again, because all the people who think, oh, well,

Trump's going to get the budget deficit under control are completely ignoring the fact that we are, we have a systematically structural reason for overspending in this country that unless there was unless desantis is capable of getting and he's gotten 20 states so far unless they can actually get a constitutional convention of the states together this is going to continue and frankly you know good luck that would be a great it would be a great hold it if desantis does that it's going to be a shit show for florida there's going to be no housing no schooling because ever Because if the government can't fund all the blue states with deficit spending, New York's going to just eat itself and people are going to be running to the states that have balanced budgets. So that's, I'm surprised that that he would be pushing for that.

He's pushing for at the federal level. He wants, the Constitution Convention. He should. I think it's admirable. I don't disagree. It's a balanced budget for term limits. and there's one other one other thing that's that's also make a lot. The Santis is also trying to get rid of property taxes.

In Florida, he's tried to get rid of property taxes for primary residence. Homestead. Homestead. I am a proud homesteader in Florida. So yeah. You hear me both, bro. Let's get rid of them. I don't care.

My kids don't go to public school. I guess we can stop funding those. But it's fine. No, it's not about funding the public schools. You actually could look at the budgets. We don't want to talk about Florida politics, but we should. We can do a show. But it's a model.

Yeah, he's doing a good job. The point that I was trying to make is there are people, believe it or not, I have heard people say, well, I don't see that if you're in the Trump orbit, you say, well, you know, you're not going to eat Bitcoin anymore because they're going to balance the budget. Those people are on serious, very high-quality drugs. That's just the truth. The only way you're going to balance the budget is by running the economy incredibly hot and causing financial inflation. There was a point in his in his in his in his, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, West speech with I thought was him saying the quiet part out loud. Everyone who thinks that he's going to focus on affordability, he made it very clear. He said, listen, we, we want to help people buy houses, but we can't afford to have housing prices drop.

He was very clear about that, right? I mean, it's like he said the quiet part out loud. I mean, there is no doubt they're going to run the economy as hot as possible. There's no doubt they're not going to keep prioritizing asset prices. So anyone who thinks that that's not going to happen, well, good luck with that. No one else saw that. No, I agree. I want to touch on the legislative morass and the sclerotic system that you guys have been talking about for five minutes as a huge problem, why the deficit is structural, among other things, and go to what happened at Weft.

look who's running Davos now. Larry Think. So we've gone from a political to a financial engineer, because that's the only way out. So he's going to provide the glue or the connections to make the economies run hot, the financialization, because legislatively were just focched. So I thought that was also a under-discussed signal.

And he's going to be, you know, he's the emperor now in my opinion. And now ask yourself the question, does the emperor whose most profitable project product is a Bitcoin ETF, you know, how is he going to steer things? I mean, ask yourself that question. I mean, you know, you can sell it if you want. But I think that people are going to be really surprised as the policies that start coming out of this move forward.

Absolutely. I mean, Bruce, Satoshi Roundtable is this, is that you made a big point. of saying how different it is. I mean, is that starting? Is that next week? Yeah, it's coming right up a week from today. So, or a week from yesterday, whatever, the 29th. I'm here already.

What do you expect is the big topic of conversation there? I hope it's not a bunch of status nonsense. I mean, I made a video like a month or two ago saying that, you know, I'm just personally troubled by the way our industry is going. You know, I don't want to just have this thing where we show for Larry Fink, for number go up in this. this captive, you know, dead frozen fish of an asset that sits there and we think it's going to go up. So that's why we buy it because we hope it goes up. That's not interesting. And I don't

think that the long-term investment thesis on that is sustainable. Nothing ever goes up because people think it's going to go up. It has to have some reason. Limited supply, yeah, that's kind of cool in a world where idiots keep printing money from thin air. Sure, but that I don't think is enough either. There's a lot of things with limited supply. I think it has to be real money and it has to be used. And unfortunately, you know, you're right. Larry thinks the most profitable product is, I bet. So he is not incentivized to have it be used the way that we envisioned it in the early days. And hopefully, you know, maybe there's people who are so smart that they'll say, gee, this is just a dead fish of an asset if it's not actually used as real money. But we've got to

move to that. Otherwise, I don't think Bitcoin's going to have value. You know, I mean, I've never been so bearish on Bitcoin in my life. You know, Scott mentioned, you know, our OG selling me, you know, if I could find something better, I'm out. You know, I'm just not interested in it. It's flipping boring now. Who cares? We came here to change the world.

We didn't come here for some stupid-ass centralized asset that sits on your Merrill Lynch account next to your meme stocks and we hope it goes up because a bunch of people just constantly shill it. That's ridiculous. It's a joke. It's the kind of thing people made fun of us for doing. This is an asset that has unique properties that make it different from any of the anything else in the world.

That's what made it valuable. That's what made it interesting. Isn't one of its most unique properties, the fact that it can in fact be used both peer to peer as well as being held as an aggregator as an asset as a hedge against currency risk? Yeah. Not really. That's not that interesting of a property.

Anything can, Black car can hold anything. They can hold real estate. They can hold junk. You know, the Byzantine general's dilemma, solving that. As long as people can. And the big reason why, and let's call it what it is. is. The big reason Bitcoin isn't being used as money in the United States for sure is taxes. And the reality is inflation and debasement of the currency is the stealthiest tax note out there,

but it is an absolutely is a tax. Right. So, you know, it's a cost, if you, if you spend Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee and you want to replace and you want to keep your your savings in Bitcoin, so then you have to go buy more to do it. And you can do that frictionlessly. You owe, if you bought it at whatever, you owe 40% of the or whatever, you owe some percentage that's non-trivial on that. Change that and then all of a sudden people will start using it. Ensure that wallets will be, that you could, at any place you buy Bitcoin has the ability, you can, not an iBit, but you buy it on an exchange, buy it wherever, that you can take hold of it and you can use it. It's fine. The biggest problems we have is you have taxes and you

have some notion people are afraid. And I've had multiple people say this to me. So this isn't, this isn't bullshit that well, if you're not allowed to leave the country with more than $10,000 in currency, if you walk, if all of a sudden are they going to start patting you down for ledgers or frankly, are they going to interrogate you to see if you have a seed phrase? I mean, arguably, you know, people, there are people who think that if you are able to self-custody and you leave the country with it, that you're violating the law and that they're going to come after you, which is absolutely ridiculous. But, you know, that's why something that Congressman Davidson said, you know, to keep your coins act would be so important. You know, but if those things are true and you

could have those two things side by side, I don't see how that's a betrayal. That's the difference. But you're right. Yeah. I mean, it's just the direction we're moving. You know, if we move more towards more centralization, you know, I feel like we've regressed a lot in the last 12 years or so. We, you know, used to go to Bitcoin conferences. Everybody was buying and buying stuff with Bitcoin. I mean, you had local bitcoins. You could go and grab cash and meet somebody at McDonald's and buy Bitcoin from them. You know, little by little, these things have been made illegal.

The taxes is significant. In the early days, everybody said, here's a new system that's just going to disrupt it so bad. Nobody's going to pay taxes. Everybody's going to be underground, this entire underground economy, and it's going to become so huge that they won't be able to do anything about it. You can barely even say that out loud right now without getting audited. And certainly nobody at BlackRock is going to say that.

And nobody at any of these big centralized publicly traded companies, even if they secretly believe it because they're a closet libertarian. Nobody's going to say that out loud, so that narrative is kind of dead. And so taxes is a big problem. I wish that, you know, all this regulatory effort, all this wheel spinning for all these, you know, two steps forward, two steps back regulations with Genius Act and everything else, I wish that the efforts would have been put towards at least making a diminishment exemption, saying, you know, under 500 bucks or, you know, under 5,000 a year or something like that.

I wouldn't have been jumping for joy over that, but it would be, you know, a significant improvement over this. Because if you're not using it to buy coffee, and I agree with you, the reason is, I mean, I don't, I'm sad about myself. I used it all the time in 2012, 13, 14, 15, a little bit in 16, 17. But, but, you know, I never use it now. I just sit there and look at it like some stupid piece of, you know, a fancy NFT. Oh, boy, number go up, number go down. It's ridiculous. It's boring. It's not cool. And so, you know, I wish we were using it.

But, yeah, I'm terrified of the taxes. You know, I go out of my way to not have, as you can imagine, I get hassled. I had this massive, massive, massive pain, which my lawyer was convinced. It was at least partly because of my big mouth. But I won. Thank goodness. I got absolutely no trouble. But they put me through a big ringer. You know, they really scrutinized.

We came 40,000 pages of documentation, you know. And so I'm terrified. So, yeah, great. Lesson learned. I'm the slave, and, you know, I just won't use it. I'll just sit it there. I'll do three, four transactions a year, and I'll triple quadruple document them. I'd see them to, you know, six different people on my team to make sure, like, uh-oh,

I used my own money. Better triple quadruple make sure that we declare it and have the basis and everything. And now it's even harder. There's this new law where you can't. You can't even make it fungible between wallets. So, yeah, I mean, the taxes is a big hassle, but this isn't the way I thought. I mean, I didn't think this was how it's going to go. You know, I'm just disappointed, and it makes me uninterested in it as an asset.

And both as an activist and as an investor. As an activist, I say, forget this. This is trash. It's just a bunch of centralized nonsense. I don't care about it. I'm not interested in it. I don't see a path to change the world through Black Rock. But as an investor, I say, yeah, you know what, number go up because of limited supply

in a world where there's unlimited fiat is somewhat interesting, but it's not interesting enough to onboard the next 10 million people, particularly if they're being onboarded through this centralized sludge that has zero properties and isn't usable and they can't buy it and hold it and they don't custody it. And those real, truly valuable properties that I started to mention, you know, this Byzantine general's dilemma, the true decentralization, where you have total control. those are erased. And that, to me, makes it not an interesting asset if that's the way it goes. I think it has to have those principles to be unique and interesting. And that was the value

crop that it was sold on in the early days because it was unique and interesting. Now it's just being sold as yet another type of ETF. So I hope we reverse course. And there is, you know, to put a silver lining on it, you know, there is some aspects of this, you know, people working on privacy. There's, you know, movement in El Salvador where people really are using Bitcoin. And, you know, there's glimmers of hope. But I think overall, we need a big reset and a big change of direction for most of the industry. Well, I mean, yeah, as I said, if you want to get adoption, there's all sorts of things that have to happen. But the one place where you and I are totally in agreement for, I mean, there's a reason. People ask me why I don't trade. And the answer is

because, you know, God knows, if I sell any Bitcoin, I'm in a document. living crap out of it and make sure the taxes are paid. And, you know, it's, it really is, it really is that simple. I mean, there's certain things you don't screw with. Al Capone found out, far from Al Capone. I don't do anything illegal, but the truth is is that it's the easiest way to get yourself screwed. But the, we're in this, this, this, this is a Friday, and I think it's a good time to wrap. I mean, you know, we are, here we are, you know, the same price, the low volatility. And, you know, I was, I was checking. I haven't looked. Yeah, Silver is now officially over. 100, $100 and two, you know, and a quarter. And gold is at 4973. And so we're going to be hearing

all the headlines this weekend. That's what it's going to be about. Anybody who thinks that that's bearish for Bitcoin is not paying attention. And that's all I'll say. Anybody else have any final thoughts or should we wrap it up? Scott, you've been glitching in and out. I think I'm here, but I think we should wrap. Well, have a great weekend, everyone. We'll see you Monday morning. Thanks, everyone. Take care, everybody. Thanks.

Happy Friday. Good night's beginning.