The Wolf Of All Streets - Paxos Accidentally Mints 300 TRILLION In Stablecoins | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

This live session is a Crypto Town Hall discussion with an expert panel discussing recent crypto industry events, market cycles, and broader financial trends. The goal is to break down current issues affecting crypto—from stablecoin mishaps and global scams to market cycles, the role of central banks, and the interplay between gold, Bitcoin, stocks, and treasuries. The conversation captures market sentiment, regulatory concerns, and evolving narratives, offering both macro views and ground-level insights for traders and investors.

Good morning, everybody. We apologize for the late start. This is attempt number three at launching spaces today. The last two completely crashed the minute that we launched them and tried to invite guests yesterday. You may remember such greatest hits on X spaces as Scott tried to talk for the first three minutes and it was completely silent and we sat here awkwardly. That was a pretty good moment. every day a new adventure on the world's best forum to have a conversation that happens to be the world's worst technological platform for doing so. But here we are. Hopefully we will not get rubbed once again. And we've got another great show, I'm sure. I see guests are getting dropped to listeners as we speak. I don't even know who's on stage. I'm flying completely blind here.

I see Adam, Dan, Lou, and Ajit on stage, is that correct? But Mike was here before. I can confirm we can hear you, bro. We can hear you. You're here, man. We got you. Adam, I literally, like, you're invited pretty much every day. Just for the very least, you're wonderful, and I love your perspective, but at least you throw some emojis at me and don't leave me here hanging.

Scott, I understand that there's job offers out at CBS, buddy. If, if. I was thinking about going. and taking a job at CNN, but if CBS is offering, you know, I could go there, too. They're most certainly going to need some talent here pretty soon. If they continue to exist, I would say that platforms like this are going to eventually replace them. I can tell you we're going to build something that we're going to certainly try working on that very actively at the moment. Gary, I got to show you, man, since we're local, we've got to show you the new studio I built, man.

Bro, why don't you invite me out, man? It's not so, you know, it's actually some of the guys that were worked with you before helping to set that all up. But I just let them letting people run with it and I'm going to show up when we can actually hit record, you know. Awesome. It's sick. And you're going to be there hopefully every day with me.

We're just going to chop it up, shoot stuff, you know, blast it out into the internet and bye-bye CNN to take them over. That's right. That's the idea. You know, it seems that this isn't a crypto town all topic, but it seems like, like, it's doable. I know that you and I are the two, yeah, I mean, you and I are the type of people to take moonshots, certainly, generally, but I mean, it's doable, not replaced.

My idea here is that, like, the studio that I've built out is a full, it looks like a CNB, it can look like a CNBC or Fox Business Newsdesk. You know, 12x7 LED screen that I spent way too much money on, so we can be shooting on the moon or in Times Square or wherever, but, you know, built a proper desk so we can try to make it look familiar. I probably have a piece of equipment that I could give you that you will love big 70-inch write board, you know, electronic board you can write on. Oh, hell yeah.

I need that. Okay. Bring that over. Yeah, but the idea being and, you know, it does crossover. When are you going to make me rich with Bitcoin, though, man? Let's talk about how do you going to get rich with Bitcoin because these guys are probably. Why do we need to get rich with Bitcoin if we can mint $300 trillion in stable coins? We can mint $300 trillion in stable coins.

Let's go there. So this happened for anybody who didn't see the title. It's right up above yesterday at 312 p.m. Paxos mistakenly minted excess PYUSD, which I'm sorry, I have the mind of a 17-year-old boy from the 80s, but every time I see that, I do not read it as P-Y-U-S-D. Anyways, as part of an internal transfer, Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the XS pusty. I'm going to call it PUSD. Anyways, so we have the Genius Act, and we obviously have stable coin issuers, and obviously this was rectified immediately, and $300 trillion didn't hit the market.

But it does beg the question, if these are supposed to be one-for-one backed, how is there even a mechanism where you can YOLO accidentally print $300 trillion? seems like a problem you know bro at the end of the day you're you're tying this is a real world asset right this is like in theory you're tying a u.s dollar right which lives in a bank or somewhere to online and this is this is the problem with all real world assets is trust me bro situation i mean it's just it's there's nothing that solves that yeah well you would think that there could be a mechanism that restricts minting to the amount of assets held somewhere to back them. Like you can't just accidentally add a zero. But I just was unaware that you could fat finger non-existent money that's unbacked if you're one of these regulated now platforms for

stable coins. I mean, Dan, I've got you here luckily. Is this the kind of like, is this just ha-ha, like whatever? Or is this one of those things where you're sitting on Capitol Hill and you're like, damn it, I have to explain some more crypto stupidity. Yeah, no, it's a clown show. I mean, it doesn't certainly help the case of all the great work we did with the Genius Act. I mean, a fat finger that's kind of funny. I haven't really looked into this too closely. I've just been seen it on X.

It's a high level to look for, it looks pretty stupid. And again, it doesn't help our cause. We don't work with Paxos directly. You know, we work closely with Circle, Athena, some of the other issuers. So I don't know. I mean, I think there's enough problems in this town right now. The good news is, I suppose a lot of them aren't even showing up to see the news. We're at day 16, 17 of the shutdown now.

But when they come back, this isn't going to help. Okay. I don't want to pivot too hard. So, listen, Paxos is a wonderful company. They've done great stuff. This is obviously like somebody hit the wrong button. And I think if this thing is possible, people are going to make mistakes. That's why I'm speaking to sort of the systems in place

that shouldn't even be possible, right? I think that's what, oh, Dan, you're on stage. I just saw your hand up, go up. Dan, are you on stage? Yeah, yeah. You keep it, you keep it. Oh, other Dan, me, Dan Clark. Either one.

Yeah, I keep picking and accept and so I want to put my hand of the show. I'm here. Anyway, just to chime in. There was a case in Germany a few years ago where a woman fell asleep as she was typing the numbers in for a transfer and transferred something like $6 billion euros to an account. If you Google it, that will come up.

So it exists in the Fiat world as well. She literally fell asleep as she was typing the buttons, apparently, and sent an insane amount of money. So it happens in the Fiat world, but I agree, it makes it look stupid, and it gives sucker to the tether truthers. I mean, they immediately identified the problem. I mean, they fixed it. And again, PayPal's got a great reputation still up here, too.

The P-Y has got it cracked up at that. Go ahead, say it out loud, Dan. I want to get fired. I want to get fired at the end. with the pussy stable coin. How would we call it that? Yeah, no, it's, it's funny. I think it's, PayPal's still got a great reputation again. If they fixed, pexes, I would say, they're definitely one of the best stable coin issuers. I mean, they got a great reputation. Stupid mistake, it seems like. But I think there's other issues to worry about.

Yeah, I mean, but it's just that we go through these phases in our industry of, it's like clustered stupid mistakes, right? So, yeah, I know this is kind of probably a nothing burger for you, Dan, or anyone up there, but, like, in the same week that we have 19 billion in liquidations and we have engines firing into empty order books on exchanges around the world, it just seems like we have this tendency when we finally have tailwinds to, you know, load the shotgun, name it at our foot and fire. And on top of that, too, I just want to bring up this. We'll probably get into a letter, but this ridiculous narrative now about SBF. I mean, this is the last thing we need to be talking about right now. What's going on there? This charmed offensive somebody's running for him. That's the last thing we need to be focused on Washington.

So I'm hoping that this blows over too because it's absolutely not helpful. I mean, what's the angle there? Is he trying to go on the redemption tour? I would love to see if somebody can fill me in on this because we saw it, we're looking at it, and I don't know if he's high. P. Diddy's camera crew to, like, kind of help him with this.

But I don't think he's going to get a pardon. There's no way. Absolutely, it would be preposterous if he got a pardon, considering especially the Trump of all people. You know, he's certainly not in that camp. But I'm keeping my eye on it. I'm trying to see who's behind this. If he's hired some major lobbyists of some sort. But if anybody has any intel, yeah, I'm all ears. Yeah, we also have the pig butchering scandal this week, right? So we've got a lot of kind of, kind of, kind of big ones going on. Let me ask you about that, Dan, and then we'll open everything to the panel. So that's 127,000 Bitcoin. For those who missed it, the DOJ basically has recovered, we'll call it, 127,000 in Bitcoin that was using a pig-bouchering scam in Cambodia, coordinated by a Chinese

national. To my understanding, they had basically sweat farms, you know, like sweatshops in Cambodia, where they were pig butchering, which means to, like, find a victim and slaughter the pig, right? So, like, I'm your online girlfriend. I'm sad, and I need $30,000, all of these things, just scamming people around the world to the tune of $15 or $30 or something billion. How many catfish are out there that can be scammed for that much money? The National is still on the run with $1.8 billion in their account. And somehow, this is the question I have for you, Dan. How is it the DOJ's jurisdiction and the United States is money when a Chinese national uses a Cambodian sweatshop to scam mostly non-Americans around the world?

Well, I just want to point out, though, that this is the pig-bouchering problem is a serious, serious problem for the reputation of the industry up here in Washington and globally. The AARP, for those you who don't know, it's the American Association of Retired People. It's a very, very powerful group up here in Washington. They've hired some folks on their staff to begin somewhat of an offensive against the cryptocurrency industry and the ATM industry because of this topic. They're targeting elderly. The romance scams overwhelmingly target senior citizens that are not very tech forward. We've all seen it.

These people, they go to random gas stations to feed these ATM money for Bitcoin and they pay to a scammer. They're butchered. It's a romance scam and it's big butchering. So there's a really, there's a big messaging problem, and the ATM companies really need to work on that messaging problem, too, because it's not helping their situation out. But it was a huge sum of money. They were making $30 million a day. They were making $30 million a day. CBS, CNN, they had this documentary on the whole thing, like just two nights ago. So it's getting a little bit more mainstream coverage now.

But the funds that the DOJ sees, I think it was like 133,000 bitcoins, give or take, a huge amount. Yeah, I think that goes back to the conversation around funding a Bitcoin strategic reserve without having to worry about, you know, procuring Bitcoin. We're a third of the way to a million Bitcoin. I think we're probably one of the largest nation state holders now, if I'm not mistaken. If that, I got to check on that, but I think we probably are now. We haven't gotten that final audit, but chain analysis, I think, said today it was we have 320, 330,000 Bitcoin on the United States balance sheet.

We didn't have to buy a single one of them, but I still don't understand how there's our money. So imagine this is the same with the Bitfinex coins, which are holding. Like, imagine a thief comes into my house and steals my wife's wedding ring, and then the police find that person. They get the ring back and then say the ring is theirs and not mine. How is this different? Yeah, bro, I don't know. It's literally, it popped up on the timeline yesterday for me. How is it that these grandmas who lost their money don't get their fucking money back?

How is that even possible that the U.S. government just keeps it and doesn't redistribute it back to the people who were scammed? I don't get it, man. Well, especially when you consider it's all on chain so you could realistically better than any property in history see exactly where it came from and who was holding it before. There's no excuse there, but to Scott's point earlier, it's a very sort of focused time right now where we're seeing, you know, the hypothetical, very bullish. landscape for the crypto industry and at the same time we get the new proposal from the democrats regarding the defy legislation which is just completely backwards from where we want the industry to go and we hope that people don't consider that but at the same time we're seeing in the course of the matter of the last seven days five six or seven things that just make everything go into

question about looking deep not deeper into the books but looking at it in more regulatory heavy ways then i think people want on the one hand we need positive and empowering regulation on the other hand we know when regulators get involved it just uh kind of sends it backwards yet again yeah you're absolutely right i just cannot comprehend how that has anything to do with the doj like where does the jurisdiction of the doj end does anybody know so if i get this right A Chinese national using a Cambodian sweatshop stole Bitcoin from a grandma in France. And now that Bitcoin belongs to America. Correct.

By the way, so does the Gulf of Mexico, in case you're wondering. That's now the Gulf of America, too. So does the moon, right? You remember that Futurama show where the balloon belongs to America. We were there first. It's wild that they just, they just has it. Yeah, there's two kinds of countries. Those use a metric system.

Those have been to the moon. Does anybody know what process they use to actually get the keys and the seed phrases and such, because that's another thing that kind of really stands out to me, regardless of if the U.S. should remain a custodian. How did we actually get access? What leverage was actually applied to actually secure those Bitcoin into U.S. custody? Because, I mean, I can't imagine somebody outside the system is going to get some sort of legal pressure. It's like, well, you better hand these over. You're going to be in jail. It's like, well, that's, you know, tens of billions of dollars that was just taken. It seems. But I think the person's on the run, Kelly.

Like, I saw today that they still control a wallet, and they haven't, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but there was like a $1.8 billion still controlled by the wallet. Maybe they're not on the run, but they still have $1.8 billion. Yeah, they have $15 billion right now worth of, in the U.S. custody from that guy, from the Z, his name was that held, held him in his wallets. They've seized those, but that's only a little more than half, I think, of the total. That's right. So that's where the 30 billion number that they'd earned. I just can't, how do you scam $30 billion from average people? How big is this sweatshop?

Well, if you read the article, the guy, he basically had a slave compound from what I gather. He beat people. He tortured people to compel them. There's photos of it. It's pretty sick stuff. But, yeah, I, I think they got $30 billion by getting Bitcoin when it was valued lower, right? I think a lot of that $30,000 is going on the appreciation of price. It's $127,000,000, Dan.

that they've already seen. Yes. There's 250,000 of Bitcoin. We're talking about like an actual percentage, more than 1% of the supply of Bitcoin for the $30 billion, right? Yeah, you're right. I was just trying to point an explanation to the $30 billion. But, yeah, even in real Bitcoin numbers, that's insane.

Yeah, I'm just trying to really process the magnitude of it. Anybody else? Any more comments on pig butchering or pactsos before we move on to just generally discussing the market? McGlone, I got you here. We're about to hang out tomorrow. Mike? That's going to be fun. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, Mike and I are doing at the Money Show in Orlando. We're doing a live market mavericks tomorrow afternoon in Orlando. It's going to be awesome. And maybe you can give us a preview of what you're going to tell me there. Well, you know the stuff I talk about. And sometimes it's scary when I can make factual statements about markets like gold, having their best year since 1979. and, you know, stock market cap to GDP at the highest in 100 years and the excess of speculation,

Humbria I've seen in, you know, things like cryptos that are just reverting a little bit. And then I talk about simple things like Moon Reversion, I find extraordinarily scary. But for now, I think one thing I did see was nice to see one of the first signs of what, you know, when I saw the polymarket expectations that Bitcoin's going to drop to 95,000, I'm like, oh, finally, something little bullish. Because that's the key thing I see in the space is when you, you know, my spidey sense has really kicked in at the end of last year. I love that quote from you, Scott, that this was towards the end of a bull cycle. And I still stick with that for all risk assets and cryptos at the leading end of that.

And that obviously tilted me over to gold and bonds. Now bonds have only started kicking in a little bit. But gold is just plain scary. I mean, if you take a 40, 50, 60 month moving average and people would say it's like 18 standard deviations above levels. You'd have to go back to 1981 or 2011 for how extreme it is. It's just plain scary. I'm really concerned what this might mean.

So putting it in the shorter term, I still think, you know, we could finally get the VIX above 20, but the thing is just a couple weeks ago, 90-day volatility in S&P 500 bottomed from its lowest level in five years. And it's still half the level the VIX. So just catching up the VIX is normal. And I think we're all on tender hooks right now. We look at things. It's that time of year when years can happen in months.

And the risks are all we all know is just what happened last week. And just hitting a few stops, kicking the algos, and you run through stops in the market. Everybody's just sitting here watching that stock market has to stay up. This is the way I see it right now. And I look at the tenure, it's just bouncing on 4%. It's bouncing there. It has to stay above 4%. And there's one thing, key thing that can make it go lower.

And I look at the tip of the iceberg, and that's cryptos. And one of the tip of cryptos is microstratology. micro strategy is already in bear marketing. Look, it's 200-day movement average. So to me, everything's happening now. Even that, like, Bitcoin to gold ratio. Now, good news is it's backed on the near support run 25. But the last time it got to this level, you know, 90-day volatility and the stock market was running 28%.

Now it's 10%. So you've got to hope the stock market goes up from here. And I look at things like the gold-silver ratio. It's back down at 80. It's really good support. Typically supposed to buy it from there. So I look at this next few months as ideal. Again, I think it's an ideal year for traders.

And if we just start hitting a few stops here, it might get somewhat exponential. And that's my worry. Stockmark has to go up, but everything's tilting lower. And crypto's at the leading edge of that. Mike, I'm not sure if you were paying attention. But last Friday, if you're talking about some stops have to get hit, our crypto exchanges went in head and took out all the stops everywhere all at once. Well, that's my point is people are, I enjoyed reading an article.

pointing out it's past tense. I mean, what it's like, you know, just having been in the pits and seeing stops and being with customers when they get stops, I look at it as, yeah, that was nothing compared to, okay, we had a 3% down day in S&P 500, wherever we do, everything's bounced back up. You get that S&B 500 to, say, drop 5% from the highs, and you're going to see some real stops. That's just to me, we just saw a little sense of what happens when, you know, the tide goes out. And the tide is back up.

that that's my curious serious thing here so also I'll put in some of the anecdotal I look at that Bloomberg galaxy crypto index it was up 30% on the year now it's up about 9% it's just hovering near I think hitting some more stops and that's again here's the thing I think about cycles when I initially proposed this index in 2017 I'm like we got to get an index distracted space it was you know most of the people Bloomberg had no clue what it was I'm like we got to get an index it works great and now it's really lagging and the same thing one thing that happened this week in the chat. We have a finance and crypto chat. I propose the same thing in 2017. We got to get a chat in a space. And they would not let me do just a crypto chat because

most of didn't understand it. So they had to do fintech in crypto. Now, obviously, it's all crypto. But in that chat this week, there was a headline from a story that said Trump emerges as the $870 million Bitcoin whale amid historic crypto market meltdown. And this is what really struck me is now, back then when you bought and invested in crypto, which a lot of us did and enjoyed. You were kind of pushing against the government. You knew everybody hated it. And it was your way to say, get it to the, yeah, we're getting out of the system now. If you're buying Bitcoin cryptos, not only you are somewhat potentially supporting the Trump administration, but you're also dependent on the Trump administration. The world's changed. And that's why I look at it is this place

is just maybe we'll get lucky. But if we just hit a few stops to say S&P 500 drops 5%, I think the whole crypto space is going to lose 20 to 30% in the heartbeat. Eric Trump yesterday said, When asked, or at least the article came out today, I don't know if he actually said it yesterday that they made over a billion dollars in crypto as a family. What was the story that you saw about Trump specifically? I didn't see that one. I will post it. I can send it to you.

It was on Coin Grape. It's actually on the Bloomberg Terminal. Bloomberg decimidates a lot of these things. And it just, it said the highlights. Report shows Trump owns $870 billion, a million dollars. in Bitcoin, even as crypto market crash, in Bitcoin, yes, sorry. The $2 billion Bitcoin acquisition by Trump media is the biggest break out of its social platform origins, the crypto fortune of Trump is boosted by Bitcoin price gains.

This is just stuff. I think it's quite interesting, Mike, when you dig into that, though, when you talk about the sheer numbers, and we mentioned this when they announced, obviously, that DJT, that they were going to buy Bitcoin with their treasury and start treasury, but even the Trumps who are speculating across this market have mean coins, all of that. 70, 80% of their crypto holdings are in Bitcoin. Well, this is my question for the people in the spaces is, is there a sense now that if you're, like I said, if you're investing in this space, or from the whales who kind of stuck it to the

government, made a lot of wealth to say, yeah, thank you. you very much. Now that we got this, the Trump incident, the U.S. government involved, Trump in it, we've got ETFs on a tear doing the pile on trade. Maybe it's time to say, thank you very much, you know, bait and switch. And I mean, that's my Mac review, but overall, I mean, I'm just asking people that question if that might be the case. Either way, I'm just seeing performance. And my bottom line is I've been, my spidey senses in showing me there's been waning performance in higher volatility in space for almost a year now. And gold has been my main bias. Now gold is just so expensive. I'm just plain scared.

I had Peter Schiff on yesterday, and yeah, he is not doubting it's going to continue up, Mike. Yeah, well, definitely getting a pile on trade in gold. And as we know, I look at the lessons of when it gets this expensive. Certainly if you're overweight at the beginning year, you're way overweighted, and it's good to have that kind of problem. You're supposed to just the lessons, essence of the businesses, don't ever tempt the market gods and give some money back to them. we can open this to everyone we do have a lot of charts and narrative that show that bitcoin obviously lags gold occasionally and sees the move if you overlay them obviously it's always selective time framing and you know this time could be different but it seems mike or anybody on the panel that you know if gold is pulling that off and bitcoin has followed for quite a while that we may at least see another blow off top on bitcoin

Anybody thoughts? Yeah, I would agree with that. The thing that I think bewilders a lot of people right now looking at previous market cycles is the phrase that everybody hates this time is different. It feels bizarre right now, especially looking at the gold trade, because there's a massive amount of central bank buying on gold. And I'm not necessarily, I would love to see massive rollover into, you know, from, central banks into Bitcoin. The question is, is the central bank buying in gold going to have that pile on rally like Mike was just speaking of with retail really buying, you know, in droves coming in to push it even higher and then potentially seeing some of that carryover effect

into that rotation of capital. Right now, it feels like gold is a bit of a darling in markets. So I don't know if that's going to be the direct correlation like we've seen in the past, where gold runs up and then you see Bitcoin three to four months later, I do think Bitcoin's still going to run up pretty dramatically. I think everybody's still fighting through the narrative bias regarding the four-year cycle. We're right at that time. It's supposed to turn down here. But then you look at the other macro conditions that just suggests that it feels to me, and I feel very hedged right now in the market because of this, my bias is that we're going to have a fairly bullish 2026, but that is completely contentious with how the Bitcoin cycle is run previously.

So you've got to be a little bit risk hedge there if you're trading. And then I keep learning every single day, why the hell are you trading gold, figure out a way to buy and hold and generate more cash flow, sorry, Bitcoin, find a way to generate more cash flow and be more resilient in hoddling through the chop that everybody else just keeps wrecking themselves on. Mike, do you have any doubt? I know you've shared some on central bank buying of gold versus retail. I know the ETFs are doing exceptionally well, which obviously indicates some retail interest there.

Yes, I can send you some of that. One of it's actually a journalist reached out to me yesterday about it. And my main source for this is World Gold Council because they have the good connection. Now, there's so much controversy there. First of all, a lot of central banks don't report. Some of them do publicly. On the boomer terminal, we have data from China, but it's somewhat dicey. It's just somewhat, that's why you just don't really know until a lag.

And some of the professionals do, and that's like World Gold Council gets at Goldman Sachs, some people who do it. But that data is just harder to point out. And the bottom line I pointed out recently is, I was comparing gold to copper. It's again, another all-time high, just scary stuff. But it was pointed out that the, obviously what you said, ETFs are really kicking in. But central banks also very much lagging. And the thing I think is more.

serious now with central banks is I suspect their buying is going to be a little more elastic. So certainly for the last two years, three years, according to the World Gold Council, Central Bank buying of gold has been I think two to three times the 10 year average. And it's just such a lagging thing. You don't really know for sure

but the number one buyer in the planet has been the Chinese central bank and we all know what's happening in China's severe deflation. That might trickle down. So I'll just point out that fact. PPI in China's running minus about 3%. bond yield 10, you know, there's 1.84. I think the U.S. might go there. That's despite the fact their money, their money supplies running $45, 46, almost $50 trillion, double the U.S.

And debt to GDP is 300% versus in this country is 1.3 or so. So that just reminds me of chating JGB's 30 years ago. I've seen it before. One of the things I'd love to add there, too, is, you know, with the buying that we're seeing in gold right now, one could argue that it does sort of underpin, at least to some degree, you know, a growing loss of confidence in, you know, the U.S. dollar, as well as sort of the debt buying narrative that has really sustained what we've seen in the U.S. economy over the last, you know, many years. And this would be a bit of a, I don't want to say a stretch, but a tangent. Bitcoin's

coming at a time where we're seeing it in other asset classes like gold perform extraordinarily at the same time we just saw in the last three months that there's a 40% increases from a report from Bitwise yesterday a 40% increase in the last three months in corporate buying stacking of Bitcoin so I do think there's a lot more to come I think that the gold performance is very interesting I think a lot of I did a post on my ex yesterday crypto bros me included, you know, looked at this market like the thing that's going to outperform every other asset. And historically, it kind of has in the short history of Bitcoin has had. However, we're looking at this cycle and there's frustration because you got gold running up dramatically.

Invidia just melting faces. You got other assets out there that are performing in ways that's like, oh, this was a cycle that the stocks were actually going to run and you needed to just be a little bit more patient, especially those people that are playing in the alt market that have just never ended waiting for an alt season that all the capitals focused in other places. That's because there's an alt season happening in crypto-adjacent public equities. It's just a much bigger pond, and the real money doesn't need to buy all coins to participate in that anymore. I'm not saying there can't be an alt-season, I'm not saying there won't be an alt-season, but like, if you can invest in a treasury company and see it go up 28x before

they've ever even done anything, and you can exit and make money, that's alt-season. If you can watch your crypto miners go from $2 to $65, why would you buy coin number 94 on coin market cap? It's just a... With a very different market. With so much more liquidity in the paper market than you do in the alt market, that's the big, massive difference. So true.

You can get in and get out. Yeah. David, you showed up at just the right moment for this conversation, huh? I saw your request to jump up, David, damn dark. Can you hear us? Maybe you can't hear. I don't know. I was trying to bring him up.

David, obviously, is CEO of B&B network company, which is BNC on the NASDAQ, which, you know, the biggest B&B treasury company. So I think he has a perfect voice for this conversation. Ajit, go ahead. So I've been an active crypto investor since about 2016. And if I want to try to correlate Bitcoin prices with either gold on the one hand, or the NASDAQ stocks, on the other hand, I find that going back many years, like 2016, 17, 18, I would find that Clipso was more correlated directionally with gold at that time.

Now it tends to be more correlated relative to that period with the stock market. It might be because of a variety of reasons, such as liquidity, such as the fact that there are ETFs or what have you. But I think that we continue to discuss gold as some sort of indicator of where Bitcoin fly might go and there is definitely a logic to that but i think that bitcoin has become a little more wall street a little more main street and we might have to look at the stocks also and where they're headed well i know mike would agree with that but i think that narrative is shifting for the first time in the past few weeks we've talked about it here so i don't know how far down this rabbit hole we want to go but this is the first time regardless of how it's trading that we've heard

names like J.P. Morgan and Ken Griffin at Citadel and Morgan Stanley and Paul Tudor Jones, well, not the first time for him, talking about the debasement trade and including Bitcoin next to gold in the proper assets to buy for the debasement trade, right? I'm not really hearing as much. I mean, Mike, you obviously say it all the time. You're pointing out the correlations that's math, but you're not hearing the Bitcoin trades like Nvidia narrative as much. as you're now talking about Bitcoin as digital gold. So it really is a shift, at least narrative-wise. Mike, I'm not saying factually that is true, but narrative-wise.

Yeah, well, I do enjoy the narrative shift, and that's where you have to stick to your discipline and relative value. And that's what I sometimes. I always point out, markets always get really cheap for a reason and really expensive for reasons. Sometimes it's best to ignore the reason, just focus on the value. And that's why, I mean, I got to meet Ray Dahlia last week at Greenwich Economic Farm. just a hello, I didn't really, you know, to have time to talk to him.

But I saw him to recommend Golden's conference. I saw a bunch of Bitcoin panels and did enjoy that because it was juxtaposed to a lot of the other people at the conference. The Bitcoin people were average age of 30. They spoke real fast and they're really bullish. That's okay. It's great. I mean, I was 31 too.

The key thing I want to point out is when you see headlines of, you know, significant personalities making comments about an asset that they didn't make comments about a year or two ago when it was time to buy it. And it's really expensive. If you're a trader, I mean, just sitting in and train desk, we'd all look at each other and say, hey, I got some profits here. It's towards the end of the year. All right, book a little bit. I think that's the big problem that might kick in in cryptos. Everything's based on a year-end basis. For those of us, a lot of people on this call who run, you just run leverage money and manage money. And we're getting towards the end of the year. And you got profits. And I'm really worried about what that October effect.

Mike, doesn't that apply? Doesn't that apply? I mean, all those same kind of investors. obviously have massive exposure to mag mag seven tech stocks they probably even have exposure to gold so i'm assuming that's not a crypto problem you're saying that's a market problem for a retrace right i know that bitcoin oh yeah everything yeah at these levels everything is correlated we all you know dave wise word points out a lot what happened 2008 those are also way overweight gold and made a lot of money 2007 gave some back in 2008 because everything went down that's what i'm worried about and i look at the tip of the icebergs cryptos bitcoin's there and what's the tip of the iceberg of the iceberg is micro strategy.

So everything's starting to me, giving you warning signals. And do you heed them and say, okay, maybe I don't make that extra little oomph towards the end of the air, or do I avoid a potential what happened in 1929? And these are just things that, you know, I have to say that because a history of gold outperforming like this, you have to go back 50 to 100 years. This is not normal. And I just look at it like, okay, thanks, what's the, where's the sore thumb on the markets? I look at things like, you know, people hate when I say it, but dogecline, it's a joke.

It's launched as a joke. It's worth $30 billion. You can take that down to $3. And at some point, then there'll be a good washout to buy all the stuff. When gold made these moves in the past, maybe we've talked about this. But how often did we also see everything rallies where everything was up alongside gold? Rationally, you would think that in a moment like this, if gold was up this high, we'd be alongside a crashing stock market.

I'm glad you mentioned that because the only recent comparison is that the inflation of the 70s last, 1979 was the last, that the S&P 500 was up about 13%. PPI, CPI peaked just over 10%, gold was up over 100%. Now that was late 70s, that was right near the peak of inflation. That's the difference now is it was U.S.-based centric, and now we have the second largest, most deflationary economy on the planet in severe deflation. They're doing everything they can to fight it. And the pillar of the whole global economy is that U.S. stock market.

It's got to stay up. That's why I point out is, you know, this VIX stays above 20. If the, you know, 90-day volatility does a day below, you know, a multi-year low, if you just get a little normalization, the dominals tumbled. And that's what I, as a trader, my spidey senses are on that. You know, if you're, and if you've been outright leveraged long this year and made money, you've made money in everything, most notably gold. And that's why I'm sensing just a little.

trigger for stops. And like you saw, sometimes when you get this expensive, it just takes a little spark. And regardless of what the spark is for reversion, that's why, like I said, I'm very scared. It's interesting that it was, yeah, sorry to interrupt. It's interesting that it was the 70s because you talk about, you know, CPI back then, but that was the Arthur Burns era where they just conveniently changed the way that CPI was calculated as a result, right? So we're not even looking at the same kind of data anymore. That's, it's a classic thing to mention. And we have to love, I love the fact that Mr. Powell has become a nemesis, an enemy of Mr. Trump, yet Trump appointed him. When you get someone to that position of being known in history, they're not going to want

to go back in history as Arthur Burns or the name of mud. And anybody you appoint to that position knows that. Once they get to that decision-making thing, just to do what the president says, and they know they might ruin their life and reputation in their family's name forever, they might act this might not act accordingly. And that's what I think is happening a little bit in the Fed in the macro picture. And they're starting to get pushback. And that's what you think, I'm from Chicago.

There's massive riots going on in Chicago and things like that. I was just there recently. It's a great city. But one thing that's going to happen, I think, with all this, is we've got about a year before midterms. And it's human nature. It's normal cycles in this country. I always push back and a party in power.

And I think all this stuff I've seen the videos right now on Chicago and fire is people are just going say, yeah, okay, I might have liked the guy, but I'm going to vote against him just for that check and balance that's in human nature. And that's why things are cycling, I think, and also part of that is the stock market. It's all there. And what emboldens Mr. Trump to do what he does is the stock market. And that's another thing with the shutdown. I think it's all related. What's embolling Mr. Trump to really kind of play hard game is what can bring both of these parties to the table is the stock market.

And if the stock market goes down, what does that mean for cryptos? Cryptos might be leading the way. They're just so highly correlated now. I was just sent an article in the chat, which is interesting worth unpacking, at least briefly. Bitmine chair, Tom Lee, obviously Bitmine now I believe owns 2.5% of the total supply of Ethereum and is the largest, probably the largest treasury company next to Microstrategy. Second, Bitmine chair, Tom Lee, says the bubble has burst in digital asset treasury companies. I would love thoughts on that, because obviously he has a vested interest in them being successful.

but maybe he's saying that the bubble is everyone else and not himself. I'll have to read the article, but it's an interesting take because Tom Lee's been bullish on everything all the time. Well, you know, I mean, I look at NACA, and it's surprising to watch how far that fell, especially when you consider it, it's like, it's basically like a negative premium there for the exposure. Gary, Kelly's trying to trigger us. Don't, don't fall for it. Go ahead. Well, no, I'm not trying to trigger at all.

It's just more like I look at that. triggering at this point. Kelly, you just read, Gary and I lament this regularly. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I just, you know, I look at that just from a, the net value of the Bitcoin held, and then you look at the stock price, and it's like, well, that doesn't correlate. It makes you wonder if it's a good trade, regardless of what's happening at the organizational level, because it seems like even if it was further driven down, at some point it would either be acquired or it's going to rebound up to that level.

But I think that just speaks to the sort of overabundance of the treasury companies that, you know, just started deploying. And everybody was expecting to ride the exact same wave. And then you see, you know, some outflows or loss of sentiment in particular ones. But, I mean, I don't know what to make of it. I mean, it seems like Nakamoto trading at a discount to their Bitcoin in debt is probably, good buy but you know we've been saying that since what one well it wasn't a discount at 120 but it was approaching it it has to be at a massive discount now i mean gary i don't know have you even looked or done the math because listen i want to give you a lot of credit you came on here

and you share everything you do and you said this thing is 93 cents and you're like but i'm not going to do it again i'm not buying it it could go down a lot further yeah i don't know where's that today it was 79 pre-market yeah i think the value is around 600 and he's got you know over 800 and bitcoin i it's a deep discount but i think he's getting i mean the share price is getting pummeled i think because of uh the management style i you know and there's no announcements look it was a mistake on my part i don't know why i did it i really you know i do you and i ragging each other on buddy i'm there with you probably yep yep so i don't know what tom lee i saw that earlier this morning i was like oh that's an

interesting note now maybe what he's saying is hey the damage is done you know i mean that's kind of the way i read it hey the crash has already happened i agree maybe yeah maybe that's right maybe he's kind of calling a bottom in the bubble burst and you know just pay attention to the big ones and move forward responsibly and they'll trade a slight you know premium eventually and Now, if Mike's right, if Mike's right and you get a 30% retracement on Bitcoin, man, these things get crushed. Crushed. Mike, I'd like to know, where do you think gold and silver go here? Well, in fact, all the medals.

Gary, Gary, I appreciate that because I'm worried that everything goes down. It's a lesson I learned them. Yeah. One of my hedge fund guys I worked for is that, you know, in bare markets, everybody can lose money. That leaves only one thing left. and that's good old treasuries. But yeah, there's so much room to hit stops and everything. I mean, we're actually running through short squeeze in silver,

particularly, definitely, because you see the cash above the futures. That hardly ever happens. But I'm afraid everything has, that's why, you know, sometimes there's time to just, you can just say sell, you almost sell at the low, but when it's just, you can say take profits on enormous gains, that's not giving investment. But it's just logical. And I think this is time.

with people, rational people like you here. Yeah, but Michael, let me ask you a question. So let's say you have that meltdown. Where does all the money go? Exactly. There's more money than you and I have ever seen sitting on the sidelines today or getting 3.15. Well, Gary, that's one thing I appreciate it about it.

I know you're a wealthy successful investor. First thing you do is you know you admit when you're wrong. You're mitt when you're wrong and you move on that. That's how you. Totally. Yeah, and I just, I see that for me. That's so admirable. The key thing I want to point out is I like when,

people say that, but I've been publishing on this for two years now. People use this money market amount. It's like $7 trillion. I'll say it's high. If you use that relative to the actual total market value of the stock market, it's very low. It's about 10%. Right before the crisis in 2008, 2007, it was closer to 15%. So cash levels, well, to stock market value, level to the average value of total real estate in this country, which is around 50, almost $60 trillion, are very low. It's just the bar is so high now. And that's the lessons of history. Once you get this kind of inflation, you always look for typically some form of just a little bit of deflation. We haven't had that yet. That's what I'm worried about that gold's

telling us. But the key thing I also want to mention the stated earlier, but some of this gold's getting away from the dollar. But if you look at cryptos, the dollar is king. I just, I've been pointing that out forever. It's finally great to see Trump figure it out. That you just, you know, typical every day in coin market cap.com, you click on buying what's the most widely traded crypto on the planet. It's tether. It's $300 billion. All that stuff's going to Treasury's. If anything, I completely agree with. There's a bull market and proliferation of crypto dollars and people call them stable coins.

300 trillion in a day, as our title says here. I would call that wild proliferation. But yeah, that's a joke. But we know that tokenization is the next narrative, regardless of what the market does. We had Eric Trump yesterday saying tokenizing real estate Gary, I think you were mentioning that yesterday.

BlackRock saying they're building their own tokenization. platform. And we know at the end of the day, stable coins are just the first and best example of tokenizing real world assets. So, I mean, Mike, I know you're still bullish on the utilization of the technology regardless of the market. Oh, the technology is amazing. This is something we both completely agreed on. I just, you know, just like the internet was. And we all knew it had a bubble and it corrected. But oh, yeah, but it's just the key thing is, what really struck me is Michael Slerland in 2020 that really accelerated my bullishness when Bitcoin is around 10 grand. And when Sy Sheffield, Lord Shin had Sy Sheffield from Visa on her program.

He just pointed out the facts. You know, we can square our dollar balances instantly with stable coins. Now, he said this one there was maybe less than maybe 50 billion of him. And it's like, yeah, it's the technology. And that's the key thing. I think that's Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out, but less than he had expected. Peer-to-peer cash was a headline in the Bitcoin standard. Now we're getting peer-to-air cash, which is an actual dollar.

You don't have to use that, have that fluctuation. And virtually every person, planet in the world needs 100 or so crypto or actual dollars or currencies that are basically not so good. You may have 12 that are great and one or two that are really good. And that's the dollar in the Swissy. They all have access to the dollar now, at least more so every day via stable coins. I don't know what stops that. And just a matter of time, we should be able to use them as money markets and get some return.

I mean, just figuring out the technology. I just like to watch it from above, you know, from a 30,000 foot view. And this technology is awesome. I just don't see what stops it. But, you know, Matt, you know, things that are launched as a joke and trade at $30 billion, just need some purging and just a question of when and how. Anyone else? Any final thoughts?

We've covered everything I wanted to today, and we got about three minutes left. But if anybody has any words of wisdom or great insight, feel free to share before we go. No pressure. I'd love to just comment. Mark Moss yesterday, I saw the interview he did with Natalie Brunel, and he was, kind of discussing this exact scenario that we're in right now. We're on the one hand, we have the, I don't want to call them doomers, but people that are looking at market data through a lens that looks like we're going to get,

you know, and it's looked like for 10 years that we're going to get a massive correction in markets. And then you look at the administration right now and what's going on with our debt and the ability to service the debt. It feels like, and it sucks to navigate a market just by feel, but it feels like the market, they're going to push the market to run hot. And a lot of people waiting for that big correction are just getting positioned or potentially worse and worse as we're getting sort of the crash set up for the dollar and the meltup that just continues to persist to the upside and investment assets. But I just thought that was an interesting point.

The question is, which way is it going to go and what your entry and what your ex are going to be? Because only each individual investor can make those decisions, right? Also, I think at the end of the day, it's what do you exit into, which was the question that Gary asked Mike. Right. If you're an ardent Bitcoin believer, you exit into Bitcoin even if you think it's going to go down because you're holding forever and it's going to go up, you know, and or you believe it's going to. Mike, I saw you lift your mic there. Well, I had to answer that because a good 30 not something friend of mine who's way overweight micro strategy and his father was so scared about it was interesting, was asked me the other day, you know, he's lightening up on a lot of stuff. He says, what should go into? And this is just a silly question for me because in the old days, you were always just go right to train. and say thank you very much. And that's the key thing. When people get so emboldened by

bull markets, they forget you can really lose a lot of money. And that's part of the reason. I'm still thinking we might be at the cost of starting our third 50% drawdown, the SB 500 this century. Now, we've already had, I'm sorry, since the start of 2000, we've already had two. It's just, it's the human nature of people even asking the question. Just put it away, put it, you know, get your 4% and say, thank you very much and get pissed off when it goes to 2%. And that's basically what you're getting in China right now. All right, everybody. Great, great show today.

As usual, I'm glad we got it up after three attempts. Well worth it. Amazing panel. And thank you guys for joining. Adam, thank you for the emojis. You keep me in line. Really deeply appreciate it. Gary, thank you for the screen.

I'm sending a box truck over on Saturday. And Mike, I'll see you tomorrow. See, guys, we know each other around here. You guys might not know that. Kelly at gary's house right see we know each other around these places uh great show as usual and we will see you back tomorrow 10 15 a m eastern standard time for another crypto town hall thanks everyone bye Thank you.