The Wolf Of All Streets - Market MELTDOWN: BTC $102K, Altcoins Getting Crushed | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

This live session is a crypto-focused town hall discussing recent market movements, the impact of rumors and fear, fundamental trends in Bitcoin and Ethereum, and shifts in the broader crypto ecosystem. The main goal is to analyze whether the recent market sell-off is the much-anticipated capitulation or just another cycle of fear driving action. Hosts and panelists explore the role of stablecoins, the use of Bitcoin as collateral, long-term value in crypto projects, and how narratives and technicals drive short-term and long-term perspectives. The session dives into the complexities of crypto adoption, regulatory trends, and how institutions and central banks might interact with crypto as the sector matures.

Dave, till Scott comes up, just a question for the group, Cheney dying and Mandami getting elected? Is there any relation? Is that related in any way? I certainly, I don't know. I mean, you know. The cosmic, you know, whisper? No, I mean, Mamdami getting elected is merely the signal of the, of everything, what you sow in terms of monetary policy. policy and policies for decades that prioritized capital over labor and have made the youth of our country turned their brains to mush. And there's just no other way around it.

I mean, New York is going to suffer. And it's sad because I was literally just there this weekend. And, you know, I'm a New Yorker at heart, even though I'm in Florida. I just don't want to go there. Were you here for the marathon, Dave? Yeah, I was in New York during the marathon. Wasn't that? I was, too.

And it's a great day. And to your point, like, it's still a great city for those events, nothing like it. And then when you sort of pull up the covers, you're right. Mondami, it's manifesting. They ask you to use your phone. Yeah. But, I mean, it's interesting, though, I mean, in terms of, from a Bitcoin perspective, you know, we and Bitcoin are all here.

Matthew, please meet your mic. Matthew, we can hear you talking. Please meet your mic. I can't. Okay, I try it. Go ahead. Jesus, so funny. I was going to say, as Bitcoiners, the vast majority of people who listen to this believe that profligate spending and runaway fiat money has enabled all sorts of really bad things.

Some of those bad things are what people like Mamdami campaigns about, except what he wants to do and what that movement is is the polar opposite of what we want. What he wants is more government, more spending, more everything, make everybody dependent. it. What we want is freedom and the ability to actually restrain government because we all understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you give it all to the government, bad shit happens. By the way, just as a caveat, everyone, apparently in both sides of the government, that is in power wants more spending. But go ahead. And that's not political. Did I say Democrat? No, no, no. I'm just, you know, Mumdani, obviously is a extreme example on one side, but spend, spend, grow our way out of it just means prints our way out of it.

Oh, no doubt. No doubt. I mean, it's not a political thing. Look, at the end of the day, you know, our political system is hosed because we have extremes and extremes, both their status who want the government to run a military, you know, on the military side, there are status who want the government to control the society. And most of what we say is an opt-out. But there is, there are, there are cadres and we could go through that. I don't think that's what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about today is, is there, is this sell-off, is this the capitulation sell-off that, people have been waiting for. And if so, then the bullish divergence of what we're seeing today looks like a tradable bottom being formed. And that is important. I've seen all sorts of

stories and I've been trying to ask people, and this is the perfect time to know if anyone's hearing anything, all sorts of stories of liquidations. There's rumors about Wintermute and there's rumors about maxi and then there's you know some stupid shitty stable coin which you know was giving people a ton of yield that was a you know a hundredth of the size of terra luna and people talking about that one i don't want to glorify it the fact that there are people who are still looking for yield without knowing where the yield is coming from at this point you know it you have to be dumb as a rock and or and or ignorant to continue to fall for that crap yeah you should know you play poker if you can't see who the fish is at the table you're the fish oh yeah absolutely 100% and

and people people are like that and it's crazy but but let's we should dive in here so so here's my two sets winter mute i don't know anything about the situation i don't know that you know it was it lawsuit no lawsuit big losses no losses etc what i know is unless something really changed at wintermute there's no fucking way that they were massed massively long. Now, if they're not massively long, and they were basically hedged, then any liquidation of assets that they have to do is limited to the loss. Yeah, it seems like that was fun, but just to be clear, I think the claim was that because of automatic de-leveraging, even if they were properly hedged, that they could have blown up. I'm not saying that did happen at all.

Sure. No, no, but we all know that if you're hedged well, but a platform unwinds your permission, you can't be hedged. I get you. And even if that is true, the size of the automatic de-leveraging is what would be the absolute largest amount they could have been out of balance? I mean, the wallets, they showed the wallet. People were making these claims while also showing the wallets that were only down like, you know, 60.

I don't want to quote the numbers wrong, but it was like maybe a $600 million dollar wallet that was down to like $560. That's not a blow up. Yeah, right. But that's my point. My point is that the total magnitude of the loss is going to be. measured in the millions, not billions. And so measured in the millions loss, and even if you had to unwind the entire company

would not create the kind of selling pressure and waves that we've seen, it's just, it's people, it's others looking at this and saying, oh, oh, my God, this is FTX re, you know, part two, it's the same thing's going to happen and selling. My guess is a lot of short positions have been put on during this period of time, and a lot of people dumped not knowing what the hell's going on. because the magnitude of the size, it just doesn't, the math doesn't add up. And when the math doesn't add up, I always think that you want to be the other side of it. Now, it doesn't mean that it doesn't change sentiment.

It doesn't mean we're not fear, but I will go back to buy when others are fearful, sell when others are greedy every time. So that's winter mute. I mean, but Dave, this is how range is trade. I'll let you go on to Mexie, but I was pretty vocal at 126 when it kind of failed to break that. We had overbought conditions, mass foam on euphoria. straight to 150 that we would probably range 100 to 125. I said it down at this time.

Here we are at 100, and now it's the same sentiment, like always, with humans. If you're at 100 and you're at support, by the way, we just tapped the 50MA on the weekly, which is like a very definitive line in the sand for technical analysts and bounced a little bit. But this is the same sentiment on the other side, which is that you get to support and we've got to go way down, right? And it's just a range. We're violently in agreement.

agreement. We, we are totally, look, you and I, yes, yes. Unfortunately, we make, we make terrible, you know, terrible podcasts because, you know, we agree with each other. I'm just trying to point out and debunk Fudd to, on the other side. Yeah, on to Mexe. Right. So, Mexe is an exchange, and that literally prides itself on proof of reserves. And I have seen nothing that suggests that their proof of reserves are lies. So therefore, yeah, they could, you know, obviously, and the exchange could go down.

But if there are proof of reserves and they have segregated customer spot, then there's no issue there. I've heard lots of fud and lots of accusations that on the derivative side, they may have issues. But once again, people need to remember, derivatives exchanges are balanced. They have just as many buyers as sellers. And yes, there can be slight delinks, but this is not the same thing as taking people's Bitcoin and Ethereum off their exchange and replacing it with Samcoins, which is what FTX was. it's also way smaller. So to basically look at those things and say, okay, that's why it's

falling is a bunch of horseshit. And I think people should understand that. We use the word fud very, you know, heavily here for fear, uncertainty and doubt people trying to push markets around. But honestly, I think what you're seeing is exactly what you got to my punchline first, is exactly what you're saying, Scott. And it just, I find it funny almost how predictable humans are that, you know, at the top, everyone's crazy and at the bottom, everyone's crazy and in between. And so, you know, I guess we see, you know, I guess we'll see now that the tide is out. But I'm curious. I mean, you know, we've got a bunch of people on the panel. Anybody else heard anything to dispute any of this?

I mean, Mark, you know, you watch this stuff. You've seen a lot of these things. I mean, obviously you, you know, you probably tend to agree with us as well, but I'm curious what you think. And after Mark, J.W. had his hand up. I don't know if you saw that, Dave. But go ahead, Mark. I see the block prop. as a listener. I'm sorry.

No, no, no problem. Just making sure. Yeah, we know. Yeah, I mean, Dave, you said that when you don't see a reason, then you're going to go back to, you know, people are weak or people will sell bottoms and buy tops. And that's true. And then that's also why I'm not a great trader. I'm more of a, I won't say investor, but I risk managed because I traded for a bit.

I wasn't very good at it. I was good to step away. So I keep pressing to say, all right, it's not winter mute. Is it a traditional player that got in recently who said, I'm out? Is there any market structure feedback from any of the folks like digital asset researcher or blast node that has shown unusual behavior? Because if there's not unusual behavior, then I agree with you. Then this is going to persist as long as a negative equity sentiment does. So I do think we could hang out here if equities need a release valve. To your point, if we've exhausted, there's no new player who's dumping, no new Sam, then yes, this is an entry point for sure.

Yeah, and by the way, the S&P on its gap down today and moved to the downside before bouncing, exactly. I pinned it above, but tapped the previous all-time high, like almost to the penny on the SPX. So a lot of, obviously, fear even with the S&P sort of at highs, but simply a support test is not that big a deal. J.W., you're up. Hey, I'm going to repeat one of my moms who's on this show, which is I don't know anything about short-term trading. I think short-term trading in equities is mostly noise. Crypto is even noisier, believer in the Fisher-Black kind of hypothesis of noise trading. But I want to go back to where Dave started, which is the politics and crypto has opt out from the broken nature of government and politics.

I look long-term in crypto. And what I've learned recently is that I need to do a better job of practicing what I preach. God, I wish I could, instead of all the meme coins and dog shit things I invested in because they look cool, I wish I had done more to live up to my belief that it's long term. structure. It's D-Pen. I serve on the Zcash Foundation board, and I didn't do as well in the 1000X Zach run-up this year as I could have if I hadn't wasted my money on Pepe and all this dog shit. I'm going to go back and reread Balej's network states. I'm going to go back and reread everything Masari's ever done on D-Pen. I'm going to think about the projects that'll be here in 10 years,

and I'm going to do more of this strategy of, you know, looking at how many devs are working on the project, do they make sense in the thesis of Bologi's vision and Nival's vision for the future crypto? Does Bissari show a project that works? Okay, I'm going to buy some tokens, put it in cold storage, and I'll come back in 10 years and look for a couple of miracles in there. That's all I got. J.W. Don't forget to buy a little Bitcoin while you're at that. Yeah, of course, Bitcoin and E because of the thesis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Bitcoin, you know, How many devs are working on the protocol? That's good for Bitcoin and Eith and Salana.

That's good for some D-PEN projects. Some are newer. I still don't know if Filecoin's going to give AWS a run for their money, but I sure hope so, especially after AWS's recent failure. And I'm still betting on Filecoin over the next 10 years, because those devs are very smart, even though the price action has been a dog for a year. I haven't heard the file point in a very long time. It's not great for trading, but the devs are there, the infrastructure is there.

people are still working on. Yeah, I mean, look, the point, someone asked me the point, and J.W., since you're here, I think that you're perfect to actually comment on this. You know, I'd ask someone asked me a point about the Clarity Act and blah, blah, blah, and my point on this is, this is the meta trend, that the meta trend is that there will be rules written that effectively force issuers to explain token economics and, you know, for their tokens, as they're listed, and that those rules will effectively end up, meaning that tokens that do have value propositions that go to the token holders will shine, and the ones that don't

will be exposed. That's going to take years. It's not going to happen immediately. But that's been my thesis as we enter this time. So anything I buy for the long term, I want to actually know that there's a long-term path to value for the holders. We clearly have not been like that. That has been, that's sort of the antithesis of where crypto was looking back five years or seven years. But I think looking forward five to seven years, that will be the antithesis. I'm curious if you think I'm on drugs or if you believe that what I just said makes sense. Well, and both could be true. But I definitely, I don't know about the first, but the latter, yes, I think it makes sense, Dave.

That's where we're headed for sure. And, you know, it creates opportunities right now because those of us who spend some time with Deepa Lama, with Misarra reports, with that kind of stuff. have an advantage, that advantage is going to wear away as the Mantua disclosure kicks in, hopefully in a reasonable way. I noticed I see your hand out. Yeah, I joined a bit late, but I think it was Mark that was talking about seeing some unusual stuff in the market. I think there's something really unusual going on right now, but it's something that I've

seen over multiple cycles, and that is the privacy coins like Dash and, and, you know, Zcash having these runs. And what that indicates is people are washing their money. Now, previous cycles, when this happened and we saw these privacy coins ripping, it was people washing their money and getting out of the market. Now, I'm not saying that that's what's happening right now, but there is a lot of people that are pumping money into Dash and Zcash and other privacy coins right now.

So I'm just curious what your guys' thoughts on that is. My take on it, and this is only from kind of sitting at random dinners and people telling me, and I don't know who, how, but I think, in my opinion, that the Zcash run is a result of a few people with large influence getting together and collectively saying, hey, we can form a narrative and pump this thing, and the Dash and others are following. I don't know that there's something fundamental there. I'm not saying there's anything untoward, but I think that it's moving because of, you know, social media pushing and sentiment more than because something fundamentally is happening, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Well, I don't know the reason either why it's pumping. And you're on the foundation. Yeah, probably some narrative stuff.

I do know some cool stuff we're doing. Probably the thing that's most useful to retail is that, look, this project, the challenge with this project is the devs wanted perfect code, perfect cryptography. To their credit, they wanted Ph.D. unprackable cryptography, and they had shit UX for like seven years. So nobody used it. Finally, we've gotten around to good UX. Zashi Wallet is cool.

It's really easy to use, and it connects to near-intense, so you can pretty easily swap from Zek to other stuff for whatever reason you want to swap into Zek. So Zashi Wall is probably helping us, but I'm not claiming that this is a purely foundational narrative or anything. The pump could be partly, you know, based on what most pumps are about. I don't know.

But Zashi is cool, and we're devin it up over here. Yeah, I would just say, like, when you start to see the whole sector move, I mean, this is how crypto cycles happen, right? You get, we all know, like, yeah, the NFT summer and DFI summer and Metaverse fall and all these things. So one of them catches a bid, and then the other ones follow because there's a narrative, and then generally you see a drawdown and we move on to the next hot thing, right? So I'm not saying that there's nothing fundamentally happening.

I'm not making that claim at all. You just don't generally see 10 to 15 X's on accident. Yeah. No, I mean, who knows? That's possible. One thing, though, if a part of the demand surge is people who want privacy in their moving positions, if that's the issue, they need to be careful because you, you know, the only way Zet works for privacy is if you hold for a while, you need some time between going into Zek and going out of Zek. so you don't have time correlation on the front end and the back end, that's still the case. You're shielded while you're shielded, but on the way in and the way out,

you need to make sure there's no correlations, which usually means hold for a while. Has Manero moved? A little bit. But not the same pump right now. I would think that if to Panos's point like this was people washing their money or exiting the market, that we would see major movement on Monero as well. Would you think so? Yeah, I would think so, but didn't Manero just get like 51%?

attacked or attempted wasn't that quite recent that's right that was not that long ago some some funds yeah 51% or something exactly so I think I would agree with you but I think people probably avoiding Manero because of that and that's why like Zcash and dash are really like running I think that's the privacy coin of choice over Manero because there's some issues there but who knows and typically what you see as well if people are are doing this to obfuscate their funds or, you know, to do whatever with, take it out or whatever, what happens is these coins start running and people get greedy. So they'll put in some money into it and then they see that, oh, this shit, this is going up. So I'm going to hold my,

I've got to hold my money in here for a month anyway just to really protect myself from from a privacy standpoint. And my money is actually going up in value because people are aping into it. So that's, I think that's what I'm seeing right now. But I just, again, I don't know whether it's people trying to exit or they just want to maybe they're entering and they want to obfuscate and then pull it out and then go into other assets. I have no idea. But it is interesting seeing these coins like Dash and Zcash making these runs. Sorry, my mic not working particularly well.

So I think we kind of talked that one out. We were talking markets and I don't know that everybody was able to offer their opinion of of where we're at. I think that's what most people are still kind of eager to hear about at this moment. We've got Bitcoin at 104-258. It did drop below, like I said, the weekly 50MA. That's something that has only been tested three times since 2023 as support held each and every time throughout bull markets. And just, I was posting this before, not to scare people, but every time, and Dave will remind us that four data points is not particularly relevant. But there's been four times in history that Bitcoin has squarely broken below the 50 MA on the weekly. And every single time

it has gone down to touch the 200 MA on the weekly. The 200 MA is currently sitting at 55,000 and rising. So I think ask yourself, do you think that, you know, if Bitcoin drops below 100 and starts closing candles there, 55K is likely, or maybe if this is probably a tradable bottom, as Dave said. I was showing that kind of to laugh at it. I don't think we're going to 55. I think most people here probably agree. Well, you need to look at what was happening at the times, right? You know, in all cases, there's two points to be made. One, in all the cases before, when it came down off the high to go down there,

it was with velocity and it was... Entering bare market. And it was a euphoric high, right? The high was with significant leverage, with significant, you know, people paying up to get there. Lots of FOMO and the high was, well, significantly higher in terms of percentages of the run. So, and then the second thing you need to do is understand that Bitcoin really is a referendum on its probability of becoming digital gold. And it really is because that's where people are, that is the vast majority of major holders and new, money, that's the narrative they've been sold. And when you look at the fundamentals of what's

been going on, it's dramatically different. Under Biden, everything that happened, and under Trump won, everything that happened was with a government that effectively was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we, you know, there was all the flood, this is going to get banned, this, this, it's going to be that. It's literally the opposite right now. And so, and none of that has been factored in. It doesn't seem to matter or it does matter. But so you need to make your your long-term thesis on the basis of what you see. And the evidence is very different now than it was in those other cases. That doesn't mean that this time is different because I hate that crap. But the notion that this is happening because it's a four-year cycle is literally insane. It's

clinically insane. And because the data and the math just doesn't go there. So you really do need to look at the context. So the other context you need to look at, frankly, is money supply and how with the fiscal dominance of what's going on. I mean, you know, Lynn Alden's, nothing stops this train. Effectively, you need to look back at over the 200 weeks and see, well, what actually has happened? And the answer is, you know, we have like, in those 200 weeks, we've had, what, 30 to 40 percent increase in the number of dollars in circulation, give or take, which means that 55,000, you know, basically that brings you into the 80s to where a reasonable, bottom of the range is if in fact you adjust your chart based on that which i think is probably

the most important thing to adjust your chart based off of i mean you tell me scott am i am i crazy it makes sense context matters and like i even caveat is that uh the few data points you love to point out uh with statistics are meaningless and the four year cycle itself obviously meaningless in that context so i agree with you i agree with you and i don't think listen i mean the deep four your cycle believers, I think, would be telling you that we topped, right? Because usually the top is between October 20th and November 20th and, right? I mean, I haven't dug too deeply into it, but that seems like this would be the time. Yeah, that's true. Look, I think the, you know, we talk about Bitcoin and we always phrase our conversations about Bitcoin, and you and I both believe that Bitcoin is different

than every other coin out there. And I think when you start talking about Alts, I think you have to focus in on Ethereum, which is, it looks, you know, it looks rather different, right? You know, for start, you know, not for nothing, you know, Ethereum is, is tracking Bitcoin today, but the dynamics there matter. And, you know, like William was out yesterday, talking about how, how strong the network is. I know today it hit an all-time, you know, transaction rate, I think. And the real question is, is Tom Lee's support enough to keep people from the fear and despondency because the technical's there, well, they look a bit different, don't they? Yes, absolutely. I would love to get the panel involved here. You know, I'm talking a lot.

I'm trying to bring up Bitcoin versus Eath to get the panel. Yeah, of course. What do you guys think? So, yeah, Dave, you thought that bone was enough for us to run in the circle and engage. So the East story, why isn't it still engaged or pumping because of the stable, Is that just a legislative slog that doesn't have enough zest for the investment community? That's my main question. I thought that was going to make this thing moon with a persistent bid. Because I do think that the stable coin game is real, that the treasury is behind it, and that it will get to that $2, $3 trillion number in the next couple years.

Once again, Scott and I have the same opinion on this, which is that of all the reasons to buy ETH, stable coins, which will, the issuers will pick what is the most cost-effective platform for them to use is probably not going to, you know, redound to Eath holders, or at least not in the extent. Great narrative, really. Great narrative by Tom Lee to hook Wall Street early right after the Genius Act, though. I see Doug. And it was a stroke of brilliance.

As one of the guys who got hooked then, can you, can you, can you? you go into it, is it because the, it'll literally be like a lost leader? No. That if you want to play. But it's like anything else. Pick a business. It doesn't matter what the business is. If you're relying on a utility and the utility is switchable, i.e. you don't have to stay.

You know, the cost of switching is relatively low. It makes that utility a commodity price. It doesn't mean you can't make money, but it does mean you're not making economic rent. I mean, you're not making exorbitant profits on it because if ether was too expensive, you switch to Tron or whatever, or you do what several others are doing, which is build your own blockchain for it. I mean, unfortunately, commodity underpinnings are never going to make you incredibly rich. I think you can make you money, but they're not going to make you incredibly rich, right? So that's the difference in mooning and not mooting or, you know, whatever.

I mean, I thought, what was it? Douglas had it was it, no. Yeah, Douglas has a hand up. Someone had their hand up. Yeah, yeah, I did. I think that to go on the Ethereum debate, you know, everyone's talking about how so much, so many stable coins are going on Ethereum, but they're not actually being used in the Dexas, right? Stable coins on Solana. I think that Ethereum has had this traditional sort of view, at least over the last, like, what, five, five years that because the regulators approve of Ethereum, everything should be on Ethereum. And I think that with Galaxy, when they came out and decided they're going to tokenize their NASDAQ shares on Solution. Salana, I think that that sort of points out the problems that Ethereum has.

No one's going to be using an Ethereum-based table coin to transfer $3 from one wallet to another, right? They're going to use it on Salana or something that's much cheaper. And Ethereum's obviously, you know, 15 transactions per second isn't really going to be used by a consumer. It's going to be Salana, where there's maybe $165,000 with the Alton Glow upgrade. So I think that there's been this move into Ethereum, but I think it's really based upon, how Ethereum was viewed maybe a couple of years ago where that's all the SEC liked. I mean, we did

an IPO on Ethereum because that's what the regulators knew. That's what the SEC knew. But now the SEC knows Solana. And I think that the regulators know Solana. And I think that there is going to be a move away from Ethereum towards Solana. And I wrote a piece on it or put out

a podcast on that today. But I'm convinced that I think that people have run into Ethereum because of regulatory knowledge and they're not actually looking at the, and how the chain actually performs. There's not a single all coin that value or price reflects its usage or adoption. So to Dave's point about all coins that we were discussing before is either they continue to be a blend of utility and the ones with utility catch a bid and go up, but in my opinion,

still that utility could never justify the current prices or you get a full repriced. pricing of the sector, which I don't think happens. But like there will never be enough quote unquote usage of Ethereum to justify how far the price has come before that usage was adopted or most all coins. I'm not even saying that as an indictment. I just like, you can't. If you're going to try to value them in the same way, you would value, you know, a stock, there's none of it makes sense. You know, and momentum and community and things like that, that all makes a lot a sense and tail as old as time. There's nothing new there. But yeah, I mean, like, to your point, and Mark, on the stable coin thing, the future, stable coins only work in the future,

in my opinion, if what chain you're on and what coin you're using eventually gets completely abstracted away. Like, there's got to be people building platforms that make all of them completely interoperable. And the user on the front end just hits a button that says, I want to do something with USD and behind the curtain. Some stable coin is transacting somewhere on some chain that the platform has identified is the cheapest and fastest way to do it. But there's no world where we get mass stablecoin adoption, where you as a user have to figure out if it's USDT on Solana that you're trying to get to USDC on ETH or something. Right.

So it all has to eventually be interoperable and completely abstracted away from the user, in my opinion. And that's what's going to happen. So I think they're commoditized down the road. And that is that is it. Matt, if you're in the room. Yeah, great conversation this morning, guys. Almost as good as the Scott Melker mashup of Sierra Fleetwood Mac and Luda, which I highly significant. No, there are some people that remember, Matt. You know, there are my former life. It's a great mashup. You should go check it out.

And almost as good as your Sailor interview, by the way, flowers on that. But speaking of Saylor, he did say something the other day. And I kind of wanted to maybe shift the conversation since we got some really smart people in here. He was speaking about the big banks offering Bitcoin in 2026. And I'm thinking just since we're in the space, what does that look like? I'm imagining they have to probably do OTC buys. Would they be doing that right now? And then my final question would be, how are they going to custody this? How is Brian Moynihan?

What's his plan for custody? What is the plan for big banks in 2026 to custody Bitcoin? Thanks, guys. I'm happy to try to answer, but I would love somebody else too. Yeah, I was thinking to say, I was thinking the same thing. I mean, the short answer is, custody is just is the is the the the people storming the beach the real juice is financing based off of bitcoin and getting bitcoin to be adopted as pristine collateral by the boswell accounting rules and when that happens met then all bets are off basically what that means is full integration in the financial system in the wall street machine being able to uh being able to support multiple businesses it will massively increase demand it will do the same thing thing in terms of valuations as the 1988 changes and the rules did for equities.

If you want to look at, if basically anybody who looks at historical charts going back in time forever like, you know, my friend Mike McClone does, if you look before, you know, from the before the 90s, you know, and you look at valuations in the stock market compared to post that, they diverge rather dramatically. And there's a reason. And I would expect Bitcoin to be the same. So that is a massive price. driver that people aren't talking about. And the signal that they're all getting into it is telling you an awful lot about what's going to happen. I'll give one nugget as to why, one simple one, which is right now, if you want to offer, if a bank or a broker wants to offer a swap to an

institutional customers, institutional customers, for the most part, don't want to, they want to pay a management fee, they don't want to own physical, they don't want to have to deal with the settlement of anything. So they do a lot. There are a lot of institutions. They do a lot of their investing via swaps, not perpetual swap, but a swap. And they take the counterparty risk of the institutions, etc. Right now, if you want to offer a non-deliverable forward or a swap on Bitcoin, you have to reserve 100% of the capital on the long side and the short side, which basically means you're using all your balance sheet and it's not efficient. In other inequities, for example, there'll be a haircut, but more or less, you'll get, if you're long and you're short against it, maybe you're using

20% of the capital. So you get five times more capital efficiency, and it could be more than that. It could be 10 times or 20 times. That allows for significantly increased volumes and significantly increased demand to be satisfied. And so that's one of the reasons we talk about. It's all, it's plumbing, and a lot of the people that are listening don't want to listen to all of this or care about it. All you need to know is, as it gets into the financial system, it allows a lot more money

to be put into the asset from people who are constrained about, you know, the notion of custody or the notion of spot, et cetera. And by the way, that's not a unique to Bitcoin, as I said, it's to all instruments. I hope that helps. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it does. That's why I love coming to the spaces in Iron Sharp and Zions. So thank you, Dave.

Appreciate that much. Gary. I see Gary. Gary Woods. So we got, we got, we got doing Gary's, but you're the one with your hand up. Yeah. So I put it up in the nest. You can take it back down.

But I did put it in there because you guys were talking when I came up in the space about Ethereum specifically. I think that there are some Catalyst events that happen in the next month or two. I did post them. At least that's what Grotka is for us formalized it saying, you know, Fusuka supposedly is going to reduce the fee drain by L2s. So that's an interesting, you know, maybe sell the news kind of event. and then also the, you know, typical if people look at charts and things like that, then, you know, this Santa Rally at the end of the year, that's something that a lot of people have been looking forward to across all crypto chains.

So I think Ethereum still has a play. You know, I think I also, after being in the space seven years, am more of a Bitcoin person than ever before. So like the idea of people making their money during a rotation and then rotating back to Bitcoin, I think that that still has a lot of strength and narrative, regardless of the centralization into DATs or into government coffers and things like that. And then the final topic, just, you know, if you do segue to something else, is how many people believe that there is a crypto use case as far as a peer-to-peer when basically free capital in the form of fiat print, Fed print, is really what moves the market as far as price. If you can buy a crypto with a fiat, peso, dollar, euro, doesn't matter, does that actually serve the narrative of it's a people's money or it's a parallel money? I don't really think it does, in my own opinion, just because you can print for free if you're on one side of the class structure and you have to print for interest if you're going to take a loan or leverage or do anything like that, you know, still using fiat to participate in this economy.

So again, first is just the the theorem narrative, and the second is, you know, who's still in the space that is a cypherpun. Anyone? Hey, Gary. This Mark, so your point is the value just coming from the arbitrage of the swap in and out, so therefore it'll never be peer-to-peer, which goes to, you know, The Toshy's opening line or the title of his white paper that hasn't manifest? Is that your point that it's not peer-to-peer? It's just a, not a wash, but money-changing systems and gaining value from the different states it exits and enters? Well, again, it's the free launch.

So the free launch of any crypto project, whether it was Bitcoin or anything that followed, there was a founder, there's a launch, there's code that is put into the public space, than the public can participate. So the public participating early in the day may have been mining from your laptop or growing miners and things like that as the technology was necessary to harvest a yield effectively, right, above your cost.

Now that we are all happy that the price is 100,000 or higher, it is partly, you know, a large part because Wall Street can get money for effectively free. So can Fed or government. Government can basically take, whether it's fines in all of the cloud of what is an ICO, what is a public launch, and all the Gensler era, you know, they can basically acquire crypto for free as well, through penalties, even CZ's penalty in some ways I see that as a hit on crypto's valuation.

But that is because you can get for free what we all are all trying to buy. And we're trying to buy it through our labor or innovation or invention, you know, as a public participant, you know, in this narrative of what is crypto. But at the end of the day, if you have the Fed, you have a central bank in any government that has a central bank, you can participate, you can basically play for free or close to free or hedged or leveraged. And I just don't believe in the narrative as much about whether it's Bitcoin or anything else that there's a peer-to-peer parallel economy. Totally. You're dead on. And this is a discussion about, and I do believe that Bitcoin is. is a monolith and difficult to manage for a reason, because it's not mature enough to allow

the engagement on layer two's yet. Its value will come from staying tight and closed like an umbrella, and only opening up when it expands and gets broad enough so that it's truly decentralized. It's, like, Satoshi was wrong

if you take him at his word with the first 50 coin mine in 09. It's not a peer-to-peer. It will be, so it's time frame. So I agree with you. All the history of the past 17 years, nope, not peer to peer. It is a money game, money grab, it's fouling up. It's set. It's all those things. It's ugly, but below it, Bitcoin is growing and maybe there's some other tech that lays on it. So I think that's a discussion it's not often had. People are purists and say it is, it's not peer to peer yet.

Dave, I know you got thoughts, but Gary, go ahead. Yeah, Gary, go ahead. Yeah, Gary, jump in. Yeah, I mean, I just, I appreciate anybody that has commentary on those particular topics. Otherwise, I'll just listen in. It's kind of the same story. You know, you can participate in cryptocurrency and call it a different ticker than a stock or than a gold miner or gold in your vault. But at the end of the day, you know, fiat is what's pushing the price and fiat can be produced for free by governments. I mean, look, there are two.

points here and you have to detangle them. One is 100% I'm in agreement with. Look, as long as we have a printing press and the entire Western world has a printing press, there is a need for a financial instrument that is an opt-out. You know, some people argue it's gold, but gold doesn't really work in the digital age without having to trust that, you know, that there's no fraud in the vaults that you're, there's so many different reasons why gold is not particularly appropriate, where Bitcoin is a significant advancement. And so from a Fiat, you know, protection against Fiat point of view, that's the ultimate reason to buy Bitcoin. As far as the peer-to-peer part of Bitcoin, I look at it differently. Frankly, you know, whether we love them or hate them, but Justin Bonds will tell you that the math says that if everyone try to use Bitcoin on their own transferring on the Bitcoin network, there's just no, it just the math doesn't work. It's just, it's too slow. It can't handle that. But for settlement finality, for being able to hold your assets in a portable, way to be able to move someplace in a place where people can't take it from you, it is

unparalleled. And I think that most people don't care about that. Most people care more about opting out of Fiat. And so what you're going to see and what is necessary, if you told me five years ago that Bitcoin was going to go to a million, you know, when it was trading, you know, below $10,000, you know, six years ago, whatever it was. I would say that along the way, it needs to broaden to the point where everybody that matters has some Bitcoin, some way, somehow in there as a denominator of their finances. And that means that all the long-term holders, the cypherpunks, basically need to go from being the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin holders to a new minority of very rich Bitcoin holders. But it has to be a significant minority, which means you have to go

through distribution, which means all the things that you're complaining about have to happen. And it literally would have to because for it to be broadly accepted it has to be broadly part of the system and you know this is something that sailor has said many times he he tends to try to soft pedal it because he doesn't want to lose his cred within the bitcoin community yet those cracks are showing but the truth is that it needs to be integrated in the system because the system isn't going anywhere uh and unless we go to a mad max scenario and if we do we probably don't have electricity in which case bitcoin's going to be cooked anyway so you need to to to to look at at it in terms of its evolution. That's my view. And I think that what we've seen this year in

2025 has been incredibly healthy for the long term and really painful for a lot of people who are looking at Bitcoin as a momentum trading vehicle in the short term. And sadly, it's a huge part of our audience. The Mad Max, the Mad Max is like my favorite analogy. When Bologi was saying, you know, Bitcoin goes to a million in the next 90 days, I was like, that's not the world that I want to live in. If that happens, something is blown up so massively. I I think the sailor conversation is actually worth having because I think his evolution is proud. He leads, right? And he was a very hardcore Bitcoin maximalist, obviously from the very beginning.

I would say he still is. But to your point, he's kind of, let's say there's a divide in the Bitcoin community about him right now. A lot of that because of tapping the ATM, you know, below the dab that he had discussed before, which is not something, you know, that is expected or accepted on Wall Street. But if you talk to him, you know, there was a time where he said, Ethereum will never get an ETF, right? He literally said that. Do you remember when the Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved?

He was like, it's a security, it'll never get approved. Well, he's one of those rare intelligent people who has strong opinions loosely held and when confronted with new compelling evidence changes his two. Right. And so I obviously was with him last week in Vegas, and I made a joke to him about altcoins before we went on. And he said to me, Scott, I think if we sit down and have a conversation about all coins, you'll find that I've changed by tune and that my view is more constructive. And in the first answer that he gave in our talk, which is readily available at Money 2020, he talked about how big the crypto industry would become, not just Bitcoin, talked about the crypto industry. and he mentioned proof of stake and talked about the tokenization of all things.

Those were not a part of his narrative in the past, but he now presented with new information says, if this industry is going to 10x, these are the things that's going to drive it, not just buying Bitcoin, right? So he's a leader, as I said, I have a feeling there will be a continued divide in the Bitcoin maximalist community as there has been with core and knots and big blocks and small blocks and all things of the future, where some will follow that trajectory with him and others will remain sort of ardent Bitcoin-only period, regardless of what the evidence shows.

But I think he's realized that for him to continue to be successful, and I'm only speaking on what I heard, is that, you know, you have to acknowledge that this is a full industry and not just, and that Bitcoin is not a monolith, and that the products that people are going to want, you know, we had a 30-minute conversation there. just about digital credit. He wasn't selling Bitcoin. He wasn't selling micro strategy stocks. He was selling 10% yield that adjusted for taxes, the 17% yield that people are going to want instead of getting 4% or 5% that's diminishing in a ZERP environment. That's coming. Right? So the narratives are changing across the board, even with the big names that you would not

anticipate would be doing that. Okay, well, we got a few people up. Matt, go ahead. Yeah. I think the ways to frame it, and I've said this for a while, and I've learned this from somebody smarter, probably in one of your spaces, Scott. But when looking at crypto, look at it very similar when we look at metals. We have precious metals and we have industrial metals, and there's use cases for each one. And then we'll have precious crypto and institutional industrial crypto. So each one's going to serve a different use case. Look, copper has a use case, aluminum, steel, et cetera. So I think when you break it down in that way, it helps a little bit, at least it does for me. So you're saying that aluminum is a shit coin. Got it. Exactly. That's exactly the takeaway. Love that. Yeah.

And poor Alcoa is always the first up for earnings, letting people know how shitty it is every year, every quarter. What Sailor is doing, Scott, like you said, on credit, it was. He just explores wherever the opportunity is going. I think he's saying yes and, you know, and as you said, there's an either-or mentality in crypto and Bitcoin for sure. What he's, and being a tradfied guy, what he's doing in credit with the preferreds is mind-blowing and is, you appreciate it, and a lot of people here do, he's building out a credit market and pricing credit from equity to senior secured, and he's basically daring people not to buy a 10% untaxable preferred that has tens of buildings. billions of dollars of support below it. It's wild. Yeah, like you said in the conversation, his worst product is 5x over collateralized and the best product in the rest of the market is 3x over collateralized. You have to, an RIA has to have an answer. Because if their clients find

out that there's 10%, I mean, you have a million bucks, you'll get a hundred grand in your pocket. Without taxes. A hundred grand goes to you. Jesus. It's amazing. So I agree. He is, he is. really advancing that blurred, not so blurred line now between, you know, the hash wall between Bitcoin and then the reality of income that's needed to support people. He's doing a good job of it. Gary. Yeah, I want to go on what Matt just said also about metals. So like, you know, what I was saying earlier about fiat being able to participate effectively for free and fiat produced by Fed around the world for free. It's the same thing that happened.

really with Roosevelt and buying up the gold that was available and then repricing it after basically was in the coffers or in the vaults of Fort Knox and during World War II and all these other things. So it's not like metals are basically the same same situation. Stocks are the same situation. What I love about cryptocurrency in general is that it is borderless. It does have a low transfer cost. It does have a relatively low security cost as long as you know what you're doing and don't lose it, you know, to your keys and fishing attacks and so forth. But, you know, I think that there's a lot of utility in crypto, specifically in Bitcoin or rap Bitcoin or other networks that basically move these things around. And I did want to get maybe some feedback

from Dave, since he does make a lot of these kind of comments that I think are very valid. He said something earlier about collateralization. I think major banks accepting Bitcoin as collateral, very similar to Basel 3, considering gold as the ultimate layer of settlement for anything and then leveraging on top of that because it really does come down to belief whether there's tribal belief whether it's public market you know I think that wall street is smarter than me you know whatever you want to call it banks are smarter than me because obviously they have the biggest buildings in every big city that I ever see you know you can call it an insurance policy if it says hey it's got fdIC insurance well that's still belief in a policy being paid or value being

returned to a loser and as a user I do like that there are you know again a lot of people don't like central exchanges, but central exchanges, when they do display that they have more TVL, especially in cores, whatever you want to call the cores of crypto, than the user base has in TVL on their network. I think that that's really the evolution that's going to happen. I don't really believe, even though everyone's known that Dexas have been around for many, many, many years, the participants that move the market, just like Comex or just like any other major exchange, is centralized. It's not decentralized. So, yeah, just commentary about like collateralization or use of Bitcoin in collateral form as, you know, kind of being reinforced by the Tomlies and the sailors and the,

you know, finks of the world. I think that's really the direction we go over the next five years. Dave, I think I was addressed to you. Yeah, I'm just thinking there's, there's so much to unpack there. I mean, first, you talked about, well, look, the collateral point that I'm making is very specific. It's technical. It's essentially creating more access to demand for Bitcoin. That's what I was really talking about. But you brought up a whole other can of worms. I mean, the entire notion of deposit insurance, for example, is based upon the notion of fractional reserve banking, which in, you know, before the internet existed, was 100% necessary. Because if you were a business anywhere locally, the only people you had to talk to, we are local banks. That's it. Because there was no such

thing as geographic reach. So, you know, you need to be able to get a loan and had the local banks manufacture the ability to borrow or to be able to lend. Well, they took deposits and they said, well, no one's going to come and ask for their deposits back. So basically every loan that they did was backed by, at best, 10%, and probably closer to 5% on the dollar of deposits. So, of course, in the 30s, in the Great Depression, what happened was there were runs on banks because, after all, if more than 5 or 10% of people want to get their money out because they're afraid, then the whole thing goes, boom. So what did we do? The United States created this massive regulatory apparatus to surveil the risks of banks, which of course

has been captured by, you know, it's regulatory captured by the banks themselves who write the regulations, and they created the FDIC deposit insurance. Well, now we have a new world that is emerging. And it's not, this is not Bitcoin related. This is Stablecoin related. of Carl over here, he'd be smiling, where we now realize that today banks, some banks still do lend locally, but banks were the largest holders of U.S. Treasuries. Well, if you start scratching your head and you say, well, why the hell are banks holding treasury securities and buying mortgage-backed securities and doing all this other crap with their deposits? Why are they doing that?

It's not the reason that we have it. And the answer is because they can make money at it and the other parts are hard. But with stable coins, all of a sudden, you have the ability to cut out the middleman. And so instead of putting banks and bank deposits, then levering it up, you can go to a fee-for-service model. And that's going to change things because then the regulation is much, much less necessary. The need for deposit insurance effectively goes away, and you have a totally different world. That's where we're headed. It's going to take a long time to get there because the banks, as you say, have all the big buildings in all the country and all the cities for a reason.

Banks used to be a really small part of the S&P of the economy. They're now a very large part of the economy because we've had decades of easy money and decades of what I would call financialization. So that's what's getting unwound here. And so with Bitcoin as a backdrop, Bitcoin becoming collateral is really just an aspect of how the financial system can utilize this. And as these entities are going to need to figure out ways to make money, when they can know. longer get free deposits. I mean, the best estimates are somewhere around 30 billion a year, Gary, 30 billion. That's kind of the number of the implicit subsidy given to the banks by all the regulations where they can pay out 0.5% or less for deposits and then go and buy

treasuries or whatever to create yield. And so, which of course is levered. So it's a pretty big number that they get and that's why they can afford all those buildings. So I don't know if that answers your thought, but I think that you're on the right track. I just think there's a lot of changes here, and it's not all Bitcoin-related. Thanks, Dan. I think we covered it, man. Yep, and meanwhile, we're testing the moving, we're getting closer to your test of your 50 MA again. Again, I guess we will. As is tradition. I will tell you this, my prediction, and this isn't terribly surprising, after two full days of markets going lower.

this time of year, you're going to see ETF outflows today, and that's what you're seeing. So we saw EATF outflows yesterday, Bitcoin and EF, but 70 million of inflows to Salana, interestingly, just because it's the new kid in town, but interesting that we did see outflows on both Bitcoin and Eif. Well, look, markets are markets. I mean, there are people, you might remember Jim Bianco saying that he thought that the ETS would cause, would accelerate crashes because on days like today, people would sell, and days like today people will sell. I mean, at some point, you need a capitulation sell-off. And, you know, the magnitude of that, I don't know, but it'll be more in terms of flows

than you'll see it necessarily in terms of price. But all sorts of things can happen. But we'll see what happens over the next day. I can just tell you that I am buying every price here and down with all the dry powder that I have. Lower would be better because, obviously, I have a long-term view. But operations starting to buy has kicked in pretty hard for me. Well, I think you, I, my suspicion is that it will, when you look back on it, you will think that your operation is a smart operation, but we'll see. And my other prediction is that in like three or four days, somebody will clip me saying that and tell me how stupid I am because price is like $2,000 lower or something.

And I'm telling you, I'm buying it for a decade from now. That's a fact, because people will clip it. And if the price is 110 or 115, they're going to say you're stupid for waiting. to buy and you waste all your drug out or you're going to buy in higher and if the price is in 80 they're going to say look you started buying too soon you're an idiot so either way they're going to call you an idiot so look forward to that yeah i always look forward to being called an idiot all right everybody thank you so much for joining another crypto town hall uh always great this was a uniquely uh good good conversation in my opinion i love uh everybody on the panel

here today really great uh crew um so look forward to chatting with all you guys guys again in the very near future i think we've uh really uh cultivated a great mind trust here uh on this show and really differentiated from you know the uh degeneracy of the rest of the market which i think is very valuable and uh and you know i continue to come here and ask you guys questions and listen to sort of formulate my own opinion so so thank you for that and of course especially you dave it's great to chat every single day and get your opinions. It helps my market view a lot with your depth of knowledge. So that's all we got for you guys today. Thank you so much. And we will see you all tomorrow later.

Thank you.