The Wolf Of All Streets - How Bitcoin Can Be Killed For $8 Billion – Duke’s Cam Harvey

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

Duke finance professor Campbell Harvey explains why the recession everyone expected never arrived, argues that AI-driven productivity is just getting started, and makes the case that crypto's biggest ...opportunity isn't speculation but tokenized real-world assets and stablecoins. He also challenges the idea that Bitcoin is "digital gold," explains why he believes Bitcoin remains highly volatile, and outlines a controversial thesis that derivatives markets could make a theoretical 51% attack on Bitcoin economically profitable. The conversation wraps up with why AI agents may become crypto's biggest long-term use case and how tokenization could reshape the global financial system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Everyone keeps asking why the recession that was promised never came, why Bitcoin is still so volatile, and what the next real use case for crypto actually is. Today I'm talking with Campbell Harvey about all of it. The yield curve. The yield curve tells us something about what's expected by the market, and I believe that there is a good news ahead. AI-driven productivity. So we've not really seen the impact of AI yet.
Starting point is 00:00:26 This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Bitcoin versus gold. My paper makes the case that Bitcoin is not a substitute for gold. So some people say, oh, well, Bitcoin's digital gold. It is not a substitute. It's better to think of it as a complement. Tokenize real-world assets, stable coins, and why crypto may become the payment layer for AI agents.
Starting point is 00:00:54 Agents need to be able to transat every four-seven, not during business. not during banking hours. They need a way to do transactions cheaply and securely. All of this invites crypto. This one goes way beyond price charts. It's about where markets, money, and technology are actually headed next. Would you rather hold Bitcoin, gold, or tokenized assets in the next cycle? Let's go.
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Starting point is 00:02:34 Cam, we've spoken quite a few times over the years. This is the first time when I feel like markets are completely broken. And it's very difficult to project what comes next. The recession that was promised has effectively never come, I guess, depending on how they define recession and what metrics you look at. And markets seem to continue up no matter what. My friend Matt Hogan made a joke that recessions are now illegal. You've obviously done quite a bit of work on the relationship between yield curve and recessions. How do you view what's happening right now?
Starting point is 00:03:08 So I'm actually very positive. The O'Curve tells us something about what's expected by the market. And it has been a remarkable indicator over the last 60 years with a very good track record. And when it's normal, so the slope is upward, meaning short rates are lower than long rates, that's good news. And right now we're in that phase, and I believe that there is good news ahead in terms of productivity increasing. So we've not really seen the impact of AI yet. So this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of productivity. The U.S. in particular is in the driver's seat.
Starting point is 00:04:02 I will say as usual, but it is kind of surprising that it's. still in the driver's seat in terms of this innovation. So I do think that with this surge of productivity, this will lead to surprisingly higher growth. I tend to agree. I'm just curious your thoughts on why we didn't get the recession that seemingly was being projected for all those years. So there are many different reasons for that. So the yield curve did invert.
Starting point is 00:04:38 And it was, when that happened, it was different than previous inversions. Because previous inversion people just ignored. It was only after the global financial crisis that people realized that, oh, the yield curve inverted before the global financial crisis. So maybe there's some information in it. So when it inverted in late 2022, people noticed and they took actions. So think of this as are you going to make a major capital expenditure that is financed with debt in the face of an inverted yield curve?
Starting point is 00:05:27 Like no way. So it actually changed behavior. So in the past, my indicator, you saw it and it gave you some advance warning. However, recently given all of the attention paid to it, it changes behavior. So observing the slope of the yield curve actually changes your behavior and in a way degrades the predictability of the indicator. So once the indicator is well known, this is a typical. thing throughout the history of finance. Once you've got an indicator that's well known, then it stops working.
Starting point is 00:06:09 Because people's behavior actually changes. And if you look at the data, it's very clear. So we know that GDP has got four components in general, consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports. So you don't see any recession in consumption or government spending or net exports. But after that inverted yield curve, there was a significant pullback for three quarters in investment. And that is a very important part of GDP, but that pullback wasn't enough to put us into a recession. That's so interesting and so poignant that once everybody knows about something, obviously, it no longer works because they change their behavior to make sure that the worst case doesn't come true. Exactly. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:07 That's a good thing, by the way. Yeah, of course. It's a good thing because if you think about this as kind of like risk management, the way that the inverted deal curve was used this last time. And it's far better to take that risk management, rather than be surprised. Your company's at risk. You have to do mass layoffs. No. It's way better to manage that risk.
Starting point is 00:07:34 And I think the yield curve was useful for that. Very interesting. So I want to pivot slightly towards Bitcoin and Defi, which I know my audience is very passionate about. So you've been teaching about Bitcoin at Duke far longer than it's been. popular, you wrote a book on DFI that came out in 2021, so presumably you were already writing it during the DFI boom of 2020. What surprised you over the past, let's say, decade since you've been looking at this? So I recently did a keynote in Hong Kong, and the title was The Wandering Path to Satoshi's Vision. So let me unpack that a little bit.
Starting point is 00:08:22 original Satoshi Nakamoto paper, and this is in 2008, Bitcoin was launched in 2009, talked about an alternative way to do payments. And I argued in this keynote that we have kind of wandered from that vision, that cryptocurrency isn't really used for payments other than payments for speculation. So over 90% of the use of crypto is purely for speculation. And in crypto in general, and I'm talking about non-collateralized crypto like Bitcoin or ETH, it's extremely volatile. So think of Bitcoin is four times the volatility of the S&P. 500 and people have tried to rebrand Bitcoin. So instead of Satoshi's vision of a payments mechanism, no, it is a store of value. It is a safe haven asset. It is an inflation hedge. And I've been very
Starting point is 00:09:41 critical of that viewpoint that we don't have enough data, number one, in terms of store value or inflation hedging. And for any asset that has got four times the volatility of the stock market, it is immediately disqualified as a safe haven asset. And just by the way, gold has about the same volatility as the stock market. So gold is much less volatile. Gold has got a track record of millennia, not 15 years. So we need to be careful on this rebranding. And I do think that we've kind of wandered away from the original path. And I will say in this talk, I said that there is considerable reason to be positive in this space in terms of what's going on with the tokenization of real world assets.
Starting point is 00:10:54 And the exemplar is the so-called Fiat stable coin. And this actually is solving problems, problems within our financial system in terms of speed, security, cost of transferring. And it's not just Fiat. We have tokenized bonds. We have tokenized stocks. We have tokenized gold and commodities.
Starting point is 00:11:20 So I think that this is a really big deal. And indeed, I see the space gradually, but with increased acceleration, pivoting towards real-world asset tokenization. So a different type of crypto. And of course, we are in a drawdown for the main cryptos. That doesn't happen with tokenized assets. The value of the asset is the value of the collateral. So if you have tokenized gold, it is tied to the price of gold. So this is a much different technology, again,
Starting point is 00:12:07 perhaps something that allows us to get closer to Satoshi's vision. Bitcoin is obviously still more volatile than equities. Some estimates say three times, you said four times. I think we're all in the ballpark there. That started at eight times or ten times or 15 times. So obviously that volatility has dampened slightly over time. Is there a threshold or a point at which you would consider it a viable store of value or even in the consideration to be one, if it one or two X volatility, you know,
Starting point is 00:12:41 one and a half, two X volatility? What's your number? So let's be careful here. I've been in this space a long time. So I got into the space in 2012. So it's really early on. And before that, there's no liquidity for Bitcoin trading. So it is reasonable to look at, let's say, the past, like, 13, 14 years where we've got some trading venues.
Starting point is 00:13:14 And if you look at the volatility of Bitcoin over that period, not 2000. 2009 in 2010, the volatility hasn't changed that much. So yes, you're correct that it was four or five times and now we're three or four times. That to me is not a significant decrease in volatility. So 60% volatility is really, really high. And over the years, I was told by many people, oh, just wait, just wait. Just wait, because when the markets become more liquid, the volatility will come down dramatically. Well, the markets have become more liquid, and the volatility has not decreased, in my opinion, significantly.
Starting point is 00:14:05 So what is the reason that the volatility is so high? So, again, people have said, well, it's illiquidity. And just to be clear, what I mean by illiquidity is that a large buy or sell will move the price very dramatically and cause volatility. So illiquidity can't be the main story because we've got evidence, historical evidence now, that there's only a minor effect on volatility. So it's got to be something else. And there are two related reasons, in my opinion, that volatility is so high. So the number one and kind of obvious reason is that the Bitcoin is not collateralized with anything. So you might say, well, a fiat currency isn't collateralized either, but it kind of is,
Starting point is 00:15:13 because the U.S. is not going to default on their debt. The U.S. has dollars as legal tender. You need to pay your taxes in U.S. dollars. If you don't pay your taxes, you're potentially incarcerated. So there's a lot of reasons to think that there is some value to the U.S. dollar. Whereas Bitcoin, it's got value because people believe that the price will go up in the future. So that is a much different situation.
Starting point is 00:15:54 So given that there's no backing officially for Bitcoin, that increased risk. And I said there's a second reason that is correlated with us. And I do think that It's important to take this all into account, and that is disagreement. And I've got recent research on disagreement. So let's compare, let's say, Bitcoin to Apple stock. So there's disagreement over the value of Apple stock.
Starting point is 00:16:36 And people take a look at Apple's business. they extrapolate into the future potential revenues and costs and come up with what they think is a fair value today. And there's disagreement over that because I'm not quite sure about what the future cash flows and risks actually are. But that disagreement is narrow. For Bitcoin, there's no obvious way to value Bitcoin. There are no revenues from Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:17:09 So it turns out that there are very different forecasts of what the true value of Bitcoin should be. So this is not a narrow ban plus or minus $100. This is a massive band where there are people that believe that Bitcoin is worth zero. and other people that believe that Bitcoin is worth $1 million. So when you've got extreme disagreement like that, there is the possibility that any information coming into the market leads to large price movements or volatility. You put the similar argument for gold.
Starting point is 00:18:03 And you get this extreme volatility. I mean, you talk about not, you know, the fact that Bitcoin obviously, you know, it doesn't have earnings. It can't be valued in the same way as Apple shares. Neither can gold by that lens, correct? So it's interesting to contrast gold and Bitcoin. Indeed, that is the topic. And maybe you could link to my SSRN paper called Gold and Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:18:32 So it is interesting to contrast the two. And there are some similarities, but some very, very sharp differences. So the biggest similarity is the inflation. So gold inflation, which means new mining supply, very steady. For the last dozen years, about 1.9%, which is in around the range of economic growth, So just ideal. Bitcoin inflation is less than that today and going even lower. So that's a similarity. Also the decentralization of production is a similarity. We have miners all over the world for both gold and and Bitcoin. Indeed, there is no country that really dominates the gold mining new supply. Interestingly, China is the largest producer, but unlike where Earths, where they've got 80 or 90%, it's less than 10%. So no country controls the supply.
Starting point is 00:19:45 But there are risks, and my paper details one particular risk that's new for Bitcoin. So let me detail that risk. And it's actually the risk is an old risk, but it's only operational recently. So number one, we're in the middle of a drawdown for Bitcoin. And my research shows that, again, sampling from, let's say, 2012, when we actually have some trading, some liquidity, my research showed that there were six episodes where Bitcoin drew down more than 60%. So from a peak to a trough, more than 60% a decrease. And that's remarkable over a short period of time.
Starting point is 00:20:48 So we're talking 13, 14 years, six drawdowns. We're in number seven right now. Now, this we could brush off as, well, we've seen that before. That's exactly what you expect with volatility. And that, I think, is definitely a valid argument. And one thing that I also do in my paper is I don't just detail the drawdowns. I also look at the recoveries. You can call it a draw up if you want.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And they're spectacular. And to have the strategy if you're prescient and can buy at the trough is just enormously profitable. Historically. But less so each cycle, interestingly. Go on. Indeed. So the question is, the usual question, is this time different? So is there something else going on?
Starting point is 00:21:59 And my usual response to this is every time is different, number one. And in this particular case, I do believe there are two distinct differences between this drawdown and the other six. So let me tell you number one. So given that most of the interest for crypto is focused on speculation, we actually have some new ways to speculate. So there's competition for the crypto. Whether it be Robin Hood offering fractional shares with no transactions costs and other online brokers. So this brings in a very simple way on your mobile phone, you can do highly speculative trading with assets that might have greater volatility than Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:23:08 In a way, no transactions cost. You've got a middle person, your online broker, so it's reasonably safe to actually do this. You can even not even bet on individual stocks. take a leverage position in an ETF, which delivers enormous volatility. So you've got this competition from the stock market and simultaneously. You've got a brand new market that's available prediction markets. We can bet on anything. So this is competition.
Starting point is 00:23:50 and I think that given the main use we've seen is in speculation, there's just more ways to gamble. So that's number one, so competition. Number two is something that I described as a no-one risk, but only operational today. So let me detail this risk. And it's called the 51% attack. So this is a simple idea that indeed is in the abstract of Satoshi Nakamoto's famous paper in 2008.
Starting point is 00:24:37 So somebody can attack the network with 51% of the hashing power of the network and then develop the longest chain, effectively take over the Bitcoin blockchain. So this is known from the very first paper, but it just didn't make sense. So like it wasn't incentive compatible. So this is what I mean. Why would you spend billions of dollars investing in mining equipment? You spend all this money and then you take over the network, but the price of Bitcoin would collapse to zero.
Starting point is 00:25:23 So you spend all this money to get nothing. So the only way we could justify this is a nefarious geopolitical entity, a country or an organization, wants to do havoc to the Bitcoin kind of crypto space, thinking that that might spill over into the main financial system. That's the only way it made sense. until a couple of years ago. So let me describe the attack. So the attack is an attack, just the usual thing. You amass the hardware to take over the network,
Starting point is 00:26:10 and that's going to cost billions of dollars. The same thing. In my paper, Golden Bitcoin, I go through the calculations as to how much it would take to take over the network. and it is surprisingly affordable. So what do you do? The cost is about 50 basis points of the value of Bitcoin. That's what I mean by surprisingly affordable.
Starting point is 00:26:40 But again, you are at this situation where, okay, I'll spend $8 billion to take over the network, but the price will collapse to zero. The difference today is the derivatives markets. These markets are highly liquid. So what you want to do is to simultaneously during the attack take a short position in Bitcoin. And as you know, with a short position,
Starting point is 00:27:11 the ideal outcome for you is if the asset goes to zero. So you would have to do this offshore, because it's blatant market manipulation, but it is feasible with the offshore derivatives markets to launch a profitable attack. So this is not talked about a lot, and I'm not sure. This is a real risk of a network attack, and I also contrast this with gold.
Starting point is 00:27:43 There is no risk that I can think of that the price of gold goes to zero. So this idea of a network attack, even though, again, it's a bit under the radar screen, I think certain traders are taking that into account. And I should also say that even if somebody put a consortia together to announce the intention of building a giant data center to take down Bitcoin, that would, have an impact, a highly negative impact on prices. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:25 I've seen that argument from Justin Drake and others at Ethereum. And I think it makes sense, but it's simplified, obviously, because A, it would be pretty highly telegraphed if you bought $8 billion worth of A6, but also there's the mining to set up at the time, the electricity and a lot of other factors. From what I mean, I don't know that it would be feasible, but you're basically saying that, right? You're saying it's a possibility, even if distant, we've seen 51% attacks on other networks before, and they all still continue to exist even smaller and less secure networks. So just to be clear, in my paper, golden Bitcoin, I go through all of those costs.
Starting point is 00:29:04 So the electricity, the where or the data housing, all the electricity, all these details, plus a considerable inflation on the price of the actual mining hardware. because the price would go up. You might have to build some of this. So I do have yet another paper that contrasts with Ethereum. So Ethereum is not as vulnerable to this type of attack. And let me explain why. And this is important because all of these tokenized assets,
Starting point is 00:29:46 most of them reside on either the Athenian. Ethereum, blockchain, or Ethereum-compatible blockchains. But Ethereum has a different method. There's no mining anymore. It's proof of stake. And you'd need to take over at least a third of the existing Ethereum. And that turns out to be really hard to do. And the reason is that much of the Ethereum is state.
Starting point is 00:30:18 And there's a huge queue to go into the staking and not much to actually come out. So it turns out that about 65% of the supply is available. So unstaked. So to get a third, you would have to buy like over half of the existing supply. And that's going to be very expensive to do. It would drive the price up of ether dramatically. And the same sort of trade that we were talking about for Bitcoin, where you buy the equipment and short the Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:31:03 that doesn't work for the Ethereum blockchain because you're buying the ether. And then if you're selling, it's a wash. So there's no obvious way to do a Bitcoin-like attack on the network. So in my opinion, the Ethereum network is much more secure in the long term. So on that, I agree. Because of the merge. Because they went from proof of work to proof of stake.
Starting point is 00:31:36 So I assume that the same argument you would make for Bitcoin, even though people may be less compelled, could be for those coins. or any of the existing Bitcoin forks or effectively anything, Bitcoin, Manaro that is still proof of work? Well, Bitcoin has got the advantage of an enormous hash rate. So, again, I calculate the total cost of an attack at about $8 billion. To attack a lesser chain is way easier. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:10 I just surprised that it hasn't happened. Yeah. Again, you don't have. liquidity and the derivatives markets for some of these other tokens. So they're secure because of the lack of liquidity and the derivatives markets. When that changes, they're vulnerable. It's interesting because you're focused,
Starting point is 00:32:28 I think rightfully so, on the financial gain aspect of doing it, which did not exist before, and not on somebody trying to kill Bitcoin. It's merely a financial motive. Now there is a way that you could theoretically take over the attack, take over the network, price exactly what that. that would cost and then calculate what you'd make by doing it.
Starting point is 00:32:47 Exactly. It's pure economics. I've actually not seen that argument before and one I would definitely dig more into. Obviously I think bitcoiners have a emotional and probably be jerked reaction to that with a lot of the same arguments that I probably made, but I think it's worth considering. Yeah. So it's certainly something to discuss. It should not be something that is dismissed. So what I do is risk management.
Starting point is 00:33:19 And you can see that's the area of research. And with any asset, when you hold it, either in the short term or long term, you need to understand the risks. So you need to put aside emotional attachments. You need to put aside the grandiose vision. for the future and look at all of the risks. And if you do not do that, that, in my opinion, is irresponsible. I loved your points about speculation. It echoes with my own writing and shows and diatribs I've been doing for the last few years.
Starting point is 00:34:03 I was one of the first people and was very unpopular in the crypto world for saying that, you know, all coin cycles were dead because people have found shiny or casinos. And I specifically agree with you in prediction markets and obviously the Everything apps of Robin Hood and such that are offering leverage on more volatile assets and fractionalize. I'll give you one more even point for that when you're looking at it, which is that even the crypto-native venues where the speculation used to happen now have added all of those other assets. And so even the crypto-natives themselves, many of whom I think lost all their money last October on 10-10, but the ones who were left didn't even have to go to. to those new casinos to participate, they could stay on hyperliquid and such and actually trade those other assets,
Starting point is 00:34:49 which is why we saw silver and gold explode there, oil explode there, pre-IPO SpaceX exploding there. And I'm not saying you missed that part, but I'm saying it's another big part of, I think, that exact argument, which is that even the crypto natives aren't trading crypto. Well, just let's be careful here. Tokenized stock and tokenized gold,
Starting point is 00:35:12 those are crypto. So there are two different types of cryptos. So one crypto might be like a coin that is issued on a blockchain like Bitcoin or Ether. And then there's another type of crypto that is a token that often is collateralized with some other asset. So when I transact tokenized gold, I can use a decentralized exchange. I can use my crypto wallet. It is crypto. The difference is that it is collateralized and the other type of crypto like Bitcoin is uncollateralized.
Starting point is 00:36:01 That's the key difference. But they're all crypto. So what Hyperliquid is doing is not just. deviating from crypto. It's just using crypto in a different way. So it's all crypto. Yeah, I agree. I was just making the argument more about why the price of the existing crypto assets pre-tokenization have not risen as they did in previous cycles. So if you, you know, if you want to talk about the previous cycles, when Bitcoin went up to 126K, you would have expected that broadly the all-coin market will have, you know, outperformed at some point there,
Starting point is 00:36:36 or at least kept up and all we've seen is down for five years. And I think most of it is exactly what you described. I was just adding that as a bit of extra nuances, that it's not only do people have better places to gamble than in crypto, even the crypto people have better places to gamble than in crypto. Sure. Interesting. So obviously you believe that tokenization of real-world assets
Starting point is 00:37:00 is the future of this technology. You mentioned obviously stable coins, the explosion there has been in disputed. I guess my next question is if that is the future, and this is one that I've been thinking on myself, how does that become investable for the average person has it has in the past, or is it something that effectively gets co-opted by the institutions that do it themselves? And we end up with a situation where the technology was adopted as plumbing and infrastructure, but it really ceased to be investable or profitable for the average person who believed in it this whole time. Okay, so this is the way that I see it.
Starting point is 00:37:41 So I am positive on the tokenization of real world assets. I don't see that as the only crypto technology. So I don't see the world in the future just focused on tokenized real world assets. There's plenty of room for uncollateralized, and ether is a good example of that. needed to run a smart contract or to do a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. So you pay Amazon for AWS cloud computing time, and you need to use your ether to pay for compute time on the Ethereum blockchain. So I think that that is quite resilient.
Starting point is 00:38:31 I do believe that, and if you look at what is happening in the real world asset space, you see many traditional companies getting involved. So all major banks have stable coin initiatives, even though there were negative unstable coins. They realized that this technology is actually useful to them. It actually saves money. and they can pass some of that on to the people they do business with. They can pass it on to their shareholders. So is it fully decentralized?
Starting point is 00:39:09 No. Does it improve the current situation? Yes. So it's not just stable coins. It's tokenized bonds, tokenized money market funds, tokenized deposits, tokenized stocks, tokenized gold. There's many different possibilities here. They all have some degree of centralization.
Starting point is 00:39:32 So this is not pure decentralized finance. It's only partial. So if you think of something like tokenized gold, well, you need to have a custodian for that gold. It needs to be audited. The quality needs to be attested to. For a tokenized fiat currency, you've got a reserve fund. Like Circles, USDA has got the Circle Reserve Fund. where you can see the investments and treasury bills and reverse repose.
Starting point is 00:40:03 And there's a degree of trust. So this is not trustless. So think of it as a continuum between kind of centralized finance and everything was centralized before 2008. And then on the other end is complete decentralization. And I think early in the process people thought we're moving to the complete decentralization. I think it's more realistic to think of this as a continuum,
Starting point is 00:40:33 and we've moved from centralization to somewhere in between, will continue to approach the decentralization, but, again, balancing the rewards and the risks. I agree. It's something I've also talked about quite a bit is that decentralization and centralization or a sliding scale, and there's no such thing as true decentralization. I think you can get close, but even if you get all the way there with the protocol,
Starting point is 00:41:00 then you're on an Amazon Web Services server and things go down. You're no longer decentralized, right? So, I mean, it's very interesting that people are working on solutions for all of that, but I think that's a decades-long process. Yeah, I totally agree. So you obviously, it seems like you would prefer tokenized gold to Bitcoin. I was going to ask you, you know, if you were designing a monetary, huh? I didn't say that.
Starting point is 00:41:26 So my paper makes the case that Bitcoin is not a substitute for gold. So some people say, oh, well, Bitcoin's digital gold, dot, dot, dot. The paper makes the case that it is not a substitute. It's different. And it's better to think of it as a complement. So what I'm not saying is, oh, dump all your Bitcoin and invest in gold. I'm saying in a bucket of investments that are considered safe. So that might include commodities like gold.
Starting point is 00:42:09 It might include cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, not holding it naked. So holding it naked, you get that extreme volatility. But when you put it into a portfolio, given its lower. correlation it can be very helpful in this bucket might include real estate also so the the sort of things that that are not linked directly to equity or or or bonds yeah that makes perfect sense I was just gonna ask if you were designing a monetary asset from scratch now would it look more like gold or would it look more like Bitcoin so
Starting point is 00:42:51 So my idea is, and we're just in this mode of, well, the central bank has control, it issues like a fiat currency or a commodity back currency or whatever. This is how it's worked historically, but it doesn't need to work like this in the future. So with tokenization, we've got different types of value that we hold in our wallet. So it could be US dollars or euros, it could be Apple stock, it could be gold, and then we just decide what to pay it. And it's seamless. You tap your phone, let's say that day you decided to pay in gold.
Starting point is 00:43:40 You tap your phone at the checkout. If the retailer doesn't want the goal. gold, you're automatically rooted to a decentralized exchange that gives you the best possible exchange rate for your gold and whatever the retailer wants. Maybe they want silver. Maybe they want Amazon stock. It doesn't matter. And it's seamless.
Starting point is 00:44:04 So you choose what to pay in. And again, I said, somebody might want to exist in the world of the gold standard, which we lost August 15th, 1971. You can choose to do that. So everything for you is in gold. Now, let me also say the fiat currencies will not disappear. The government will still demand that taxes are paid in U.S. dollars. All government employees will be paid in U.S. dollars.
Starting point is 00:44:39 But even if you're a government employee, you get paid in U.S. dollars, you swap into something else and you've got this freedom but given that you're a government employee you're not immune to inflation so inflation could go up and inflation as we know it today is a monetary phenomena
Starting point is 00:45:02 the reason we have inflation is because of money creation and historically we've seen extreme examples of this where you get reckless money creation and hyperinflation. What do you think Warsh will do? So I'm actually positive on the new Fed chair we will see. We share a point of view that is really important.
Starting point is 00:45:34 And that is that the Fed has strayed away from their fundamental charge. And what do I mean by that? So traditionally I've studied the Fed for decades. Traditionally they were doing open market operations in the bond market and that's it. During the global financial crisis they adopted this idea of quantitative easing and they expanded the range of assets that they could buy. For example, buying mortgage-back bonds is an example of this. And to me, that is something that goes well beyond the Fed's mandate.
Starting point is 00:46:31 That is a political decision to support the housing market. And that decision should be made by Congress, not the Fed. So they have strayed very significantly. The balance sheet has exploded to over $6 trillion. And I believe that the new chair will provide a correction for that. So the balance sheet will be drawn down and the Fed will extricate itself from these other assets. where it really smacks of a policy initiative rather than focusing on the dual mandate of low inflation and sustained growth. I agree that the Fendant is out of control.
Starting point is 00:47:30 So I don't know what his policies will be, but going back to the original mandate seems like a positive through any lens. Certainly. Well, Campbell, I know that we've only got a few minutes left. anything that I miss that you'd like to dive into before I let you go? Let's see. We've covered a lot. One last thing, I will say, that kind of ties two different pieces of what we talked about. We talked a little about AI and the productivity growth that we've not seen.
Starting point is 00:48:10 And AI is moving so quickly. And one part of AI that the average person has not really participated in is this idea of AI agents. So we use AI, we do Google search now, and Gemini gives us much more detail. We might use Claude, might use chat, GPT, or even GROC. for answering questions, kind of an enhanced answering our questions. But with agents, so much more can actually be done. And most people have not realized this yet. They've not participated in this part of the AR revolution.
Starting point is 00:49:05 And the reason that I mention this is that this provides a new opportunity for crypto. So agents need to be able to transact and they need to be able to transact 24-7 not during banking hours. Indeed the agents can't go into a bank and open a bank account. That's just not possible. They did not qualify. The agents need a way to do transactions quickly so they cannot afford to wait two to five days. They need a way to do transactions cheaply and securely. And all of this invites crypto. And indeed, the first crypto that will be used by agents is a stable coin linked to a fiat currency.
Starting point is 00:50:03 And it fits exactly in terms of what we want. So this agent to agent or A2A economy, in the past we've talked to things like B2B, business to business, this is agent to agent. It's enormous opportunity. And it provides a synergy between AI and crypto. So I'm very positive on that. I totally agree that that's the future and that is the killer use case most likely for this technology.

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