The Wolf Of All Streets - SOS! Gensler Wants More Money, RFK Wants BTC-Backed-USD, Coinbase Wants 8 Billion People On-Chain

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

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Gary Gensler wants more money for his ineffective campaign against crypto tech and now even AI. But do we think that Congress is really going to give this guy more money when he keeps losing, losing and, well, losing? In other news, RFK wants to back the dollar partially with Bitcoin and also eliminate capital gains on Bitcoin gains. Talk dirty. Talk dirty to me, Robert. I think everybody here in the United States would love to not pay taxes on their gains on Bitcoin. Also, Coinbase seems to believe that 8 billion people, which I think is like more people than are on the entire planet, are going to use blockchain in the next 10 years. And FedNow has launched. We got a lot to talk about. I've got two amazing guests, Nathaniel Whittemore, aka NLW from the breakdown at the beginning to talk about

all the news. And of course, since it's Thursday, we've got Dan and the chart guys on the back end to top markets. Let's go. what is up everybody i'm scott melker also known as the wolf of wall street before we get started please subscribe to the channel and do something uh personal with the like button i don't really care what you do with the like button actually i don't even care if you hit the like button. I don't really care what you do with the like button. Actually, I don't even care if you hit the like button, but I get fired from YouTube if I don't, for some reason, say that at the beginning of every single stream. Guys, I hope you're having a wonderful Thursday. We're going to talk about Gary again. I know we all hate it. I'd rather be talking about firing Gary Gensler, but instead we're talking about the fact that he wants another, I believe, $72 million to come after the crypto industry because it's been so effective so far.

The courts have been so heavily supporting his efforts. No, actually, the courts have been rejecting Gary at every single turn. But as usual, we've got an amazing guest to discuss this and more. We've got Nathaniel Whittemore, NLW. What's up, man? How are you? Good. How are you? I feel like it's been a while. It always feels like it's been a while because of the nature of the business, but it's great to be here with you. One week, it's like seven years of a normal news cycle. But listen, this news cycle has been, it was aggressive for a while, but I feel like it's slowed. Obviously, we sort of had, if we're talking about the SEC and Gensler here, we had this major wave of enforcement actions. But then right on the heels of that, the BlackRock ETF news, which somewhat, I think, evened it out for the market. And now it's been a little quieter at the SEC. Do you think that

they're licking their wounds at all from this ripple decision or from anything they're seeing from the courts? Or do you think that this is just normal and we're waiting for a whole bunch more shoes to drop? I mean, I think Gary's not done. I think it's entirely possible that he's not done. But I think that my major framework for looking at his actions now, and this has always been sort of part of it, but I think that we'll see him increasingly become a singularly minded, selfish actor in the sense that he's probably only considering

his future at this point. And what I mean by that is that if you look at sort of the everything closing in around him, like if you watch the testimony yesterday, it wasn't just people critiquing him for crypto. I mean, even the people who were critiquing him for crypto were coming at it from multiple angles, but people are getting pissed at him for not responding to questions around ESG policy. There are questions around why he didn't participate in a request for rulemaking from the courts around, or not a rulemaking, but offer an opinion on a whole different set of issues in a district court issue. And so it seems to me that at this cycle, you know, presidential campaigns are heating up.

He's got to be thinking about his next steps even more than he's always been thinking about his next steps. And it's pretty clear that the line that he has taken is increasing enforcement actions is equivalent to doing a good job, right? He is trying to make the argument to his Democratic Party bosses that he has done a good job because of the amount of enforcement actions that he's brought, right? And you've seen this parroted from his biggest supporters in Congress and the Senate who are Democrats, that the SEC has done a good job because it has brought lots of enforcement actions. So in that light, not super surprising to see him ask for more money for more enforcement actions, because that's sort of where he's resting his political destiny. Now, how much ability he has

to actually follow through on things from here, I think is pretty questionable. However, at the same time, you can do a lot of damage as you leave the building by i was going to say none of the wrong things that we are going to be resolved by the time he's gone there's no right at the seer when these court actions are resolved so it's almost just grand standing at this point i agree with you but i think uh for be honest we know he was basically you know installed by elizabeth warren and some others on that side of the democratic party they love what he's doing so the question i think becomes does he become a political liability for the election in which case they just remove him and put someone else in my i i have a hard time imagining i i know that that i mean this is it would be amazing to the extent that that there's enough different ways now we're

yeah i it feels unlikely to me that we're seeing that. Because there's an interesting sort of counterpart where him being assailed from so many different sides almost entrenches him as a partisan actor sort of through this final phase. And it doesn't necessarily look great. Democrats, I feel like they've locked in the narrative as relates to SEC and markets, right? When they go hammer the polls, it's going to be cleaned up the streets, most aggressive enforcement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have a hard time imagining that they're going to abandon that narrative coming down the stretch of this election cycle. But who knows? Anything's possible. Yeah. I just want to show everybody, we have the very quick clip of what he actually said here. So maybe give people some context. Technology is also rapidly transforming our markets and business models, whether it's

electronic trading, the cloud, artificial intelligence, of course, predictive data analytics. And the chair also mentioned things about the, what I would call, not your words, the wild west of the crypto markets, rife with noncompliance where investors have put hard-earned assets at risk in a highly speculative asset class. Such growth and rapid change also means more possibility for wrongdoing as the cop on the beat, we must be able to meet the match of bad actors. Thus, it takes time and it makes sense for the SEC to grow along with the expansion. Again, we're just about the size we were seven years ago. Yeah. Basically saying that they only have

the same amount of money, they're the same size and they can't come after. I mean, he went on actually to say that crypto is fraud, scams and abuse. I mean, he's saying the quiet parts out loud right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, the other thing I think, again, sort of zooming out from his perspective, there is a massive regulatory gap across basically all new technology classes. And I don't think it's an accident that he's now basically in public commentary any place that he can is saying, stop asking me about crypto. I want to talk about AI, which obviously on Twitter, everyone's joking. It's like even Gary's pivoted to AI, but he's actually been received from 2021. I think it's actually reflective, though, of he is trying. His modus operandi has been to expand the power of the SEC in the absence of Congress actually making decisions about how these frontier technology areas are going to be regulated. He's very clearly made a decision that proactive guidance is not the approach. Regulatory enforcement that doesn't do anything other than imply guidance is the approach. And I think that they're going to try to bring that to every area they can. So it's just a classic government mission creep kind of situation, I think. Yeah. We'll see if he gets the money. But obviously, I mean, that was a great segue to the next topic. You talked about the fact that he can

basically just apply these broad regulatory strokes until we get clarity from Congress, because a lot of people have made the argument, you know, if everything looks like a nail and the only tool you have is a hammer, well, there you go. And that's been the SEC because they haven't had any guidance from either the Senate or Congress. But now we're seeing some real movement. Obviously, in Congress, we have the market structure bill coming from McHenry in that camp. Also, some stablecoin legislation being proposed. On the Senate side, we have Lummis-Gillibrand being reproposed. But then the news that kind of did not make it through yesterday that I think was kind of big was a Senate bill would tighten money laundering and sanctioned rules for DeFi.

This basically was dropped yesterday by Senator Jack Reed, obviously a Democrat, but apparently has bipartisan support. And if you really start to dig into this, applying banking rules to DeFi is basically banning DeFi, right? Yeah. So there's two takes on this one, I think. There's a cynical take or a nervous take, which I think is completely reasonable given the track record of the last couple of years. And then there's the less cynical. So the cynical or nervous take is exactly what you just said, that this is tantamount to banning DeFi and that it is completely unworkable. And I think that in any context where we have legislation that seems to misunderstand fundamentally the nature of these systems, you have to ask whether it's a mistake or whether it's an intentional obfuscation that is trying to do exactly what it seems, which is sneak in a soft ban in the name of common sense regulations. Hey, there's a street act for TikTok, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I think you have to go back, if you remember the infrastructure bill fight, which is really like the sort of first big lobbying moment for the crypto lobby where a lot of that action got consolidated. The DC players basically assumed that the people who had proposed that amendment were just mistaken. They didn't quite understand. What they found out when they dug in is that they actually completely understood that these intermediaries were not intermediaries in the classic sense, and that by imposing these data collection requirements upon those intermediaries were not intermediaries in the classic sense, and that by sort of imposing these sort of data collection requirements upon those intermediaries, who again, weren't intermediaries, people who operated nodes and things like that, they would effectively be

prohibiting the industry. So the only thing that gives me pause about whether this is one of those cynical actions or whether it is just reflective of, if not even a lack of understanding, the first salvo of what I think is going to be a big fight, which is how DeFi is going to be regulated. So let's imagine a world where we haven't had this contentious battle with the SEC and where we actually had some common sense rules around things like who deals with centralized crypto exchanges, whose regulator is that, right? There's a world in which all of that had happened. We still would have really difficult conversations around DeFi because it does represent such a fundamentally new thing. I'm not a priori worried about having those fights and conversations

because I do think that it's going to require a new set of thinking from politicians that's going to just have to go through a lot of iterations. So again, in a world where we hadn't been fighting these existential battles for the last year, especially, this wouldn't strike me. It wouldn't strike me as an opening salvo. I wouldn't be like, oh, they're definitely trying to kill the industry. It would be like, all right, we've got a lot of work to do to figure this out. And if you look at the EU, they basically punted on all these questions because they were like, it's too difficult for this first legislation. We don't want to let those things be the enemy of getting this sort of first legislation on the books, even though a lot of it deals with ICOs that haven't happened for four years. So it's hard to tell. I guess I'm suspending judgment a little bit about how malicious this particular bill is, but I do think it's correct for people to call out the implications and consequences of it as it's written, because it's something that we're going

to need to organize around. Yeah, I actually agree with you. I err towards the slight ignorance and misunderstanding in that when they look at DeFi broadly, they just would rationally say, hey, we got to get the money laundering KYC AML side of this under control. Bill Hughes had a great tweet about this. He's a lawyer at ConsenSys. He basically said that the two biggest enemies of crypto right now are Gensler and the Lazarus Group. And the argument for the Lazarus Group is that the ability for terrorist organizations around the world to take advantage of DeFi, or at least the publicity surrounding that, is one of the biggest narrative challenges. And there's a lot of good responses to that that are conversations we can have. You're seeing

illicit activity go down as a percentage of transactions from basically every company that looks at that. You have the argument around the inherent on-chain transparency is making these systems not necessarily great for these organizations. But again, there's no way we're getting around having this conversation. So it's really a question of how bad faith or good faith the actors engaging with it are. Well, that's a decent argument. I mean, but once you go down that rabbit hole, the Lazarus group might also be using iPhones to commit crimes or the internet.

So when you can differentiate the tool and the criminal organization, being a criminal hacking organization is highly illegal, whether you're using crypto or not, right? So once again, I just hate when we get lost in the weeds of the tools that they're using rather than the actual behavior that they're engaging in they should be targeting the lazarus group not crypto to stop the lazarus group in my humble opinion but i do understand as a you know as the government of the united states seeing north korea uh make billions through defy hacks and exploits you want to get that under wraps yep Yep. Makes perfect sense. So moving on, we're going to talk about the next thing, which I don't know if you can see it. I just saw the headline and I just can't. 8 billion people will go on-chain over the next

decade. That's from Coinbase Protocol's lead. I didn't even check what the current population of Earth is. So I just looked at this actually when we were talking about it. It appears to me, so this was not a... The headlines make it seem like Coinbase put out a press release for Brian Armstrong was sitting before Congress saying that 8 billion people were going to ... It was a guy at a conference talking about the fact that the company believes that so many... So this is my interpretation. So many of the things that we do today are eventually going to end up on chain. I think that's what he was saying. But the danger of when you have the authority of a brand

like Coinbase behind you, all of a sudden, every single person on earth, maybe double counted in a couple of cases, is going on chain in the next 10 years yeah i mean it's it's my favorite when financial news reports like jp morgan says and you realize it's like intern to an analyst to a managing director jp morgan who like wrote an email to a friend i quote so jamie diamond you know reagan looked that way and they do this all the time. But I think, you know, ignoring the clickbait headline and the nonsense of it, it does speak to a trend that Coinbase clearly believes is coming. And that I think all of us, even at the depths of sort of a bear cycle, think are real use cases for crypto in the future.

I mean, if we're talking about tokenization and real world assets coming online and more people using it to transact, it doesn't have to be $8 billion, but we can see a trend in the right direction, which I think is what they're really talking about here. 100%. And I think that all of the indications point that way. I mean, there are two big parts of the BlackRock discussion points, the talking points from Larry Fink. One is around Bitcoin, and it's been explicit. The second is around tokenization and real world assets. And one of the fascinating things about this, which hasn't been put as crisply as I think is probably relevant, is we've completely now obliterated the Bitcoin or blockchain narrative

because the biggest asset manager in the world has just roundly said both pleads in as loud of terms as they possibly can, that there's something discreet and specific about Bitcoin that they're excited about, and that they believe that the underlying technology that powers Bitcoin is also going to be used to do things that are highly relevant for the financialization of real world assets. So it's fascinating to me just how singularly that former Bitcoin versus blockchain narrative has just been undermined in the last three weeks. I agree. Well, I can't wait to see all the newborn babies immediately using blockchain to keep up

with the numbers that we have. Irrationally, it says current population 8,048,512,032, and then the next person 33, 34, 35, right? I want to know who the 48 million people who aren't using, who the 48 million holdouts are. Yeah, those probably just literally don't have internet or phones So that's the only way I can get there. But obviously the next topic that we got to talk about here, and for some reason the article itself is not opening, but RFK, right? RFK making a big waves this week saying that he wants Bitcoin back to US dollars.

Not exactly what he said, by the way, but yet another headline. And tax breaks for investors, effectively saying that you wouldn't pay taxes on those gains. I have the video, but yet another headline and tax breaks for investors effectively saying that you wouldn't pay taxes on those gains. I have the video, but it's long. I'm not sure it's worth reading. I do have a few of the quotes, though, I guess, to give some context to what he said. Just really quick, this I wrote it up at the newsletter this morning. I want to talk about two additional reforms that we have given a lot of thought to. The Kennedy administration will exempt the conversion of

Bitcoin to the U.S. dollar from capital gains taxes. There are downsides to this policy. I want to be explicit about this. This policy will do something that is inconsistent with many of the other policy objections in my administration, which will give a windfall to the early investors in Bitcoin. However, the benefits of this policy are so great to our country that they dwarf the disadvantages. The benefits include facilitating innovation, spurring investment, ensuring citizen privacy and incentivizing ventures to grow their business and keep tech jobs in the U.S. rather than elsewhere. Just quickly, the rationale. One of the historical factors we looked at was the very controversial policy of exempting e-commerce from taxes basically points to how Silicon Valley was built on the back of a similar policy. Okay, so we'll talk about that, and then we'll talk about backing the dollar with Bitcoin. I mean, do you think that, A, as president,

that someone could literally step in and eliminate the capital gains tax on the single asset class? I think that presidents have the ability to exert influence on their parties in significant ways where they choose to levy that political capital, even if it's not their decision, right? This isn't something that I think you would see an executive order for. However, a president could absolutely say to their party, effectively, this is the thing that's a priority, let's get this done, right? So there's a mechanism by which that actually gets enacted that is not through the White House

itself. But then the question becomes, how much is that thing going to be worth spending political capital on versus other things? However, I don't know, temporary capital gains exemptions for innovation industries aren't something that are necessarily as controversial as they might seem. Yeah, that's controversial. Here's the controversial part. Actually, I Bitcoin, which is the world's hardest liquid asset, to strengthen the U.S. dollar and guarantee its continued success as a world reserve currency. This will include U.S. treasury bills, notes, and bonds. My plan would be to start very very small perhaps one percent of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency by cold silver platinum or bitcoin and then depending on the outcome we would increase that annually and what this will do is it will, ironically, we will be able to use

Bitcoin to help save the U.S. dollar. You know, I was in Cleveland 10 days ago in the Lee Harvard District of Cleveland, which is one of the poorest districts in Cleveland. Absolutely, the business in that district. That's the gist of it. I mean, I don't want to go too deeply because he keeps talking. And then I think that Eric Voorhees, which was my original take, but he articulated it better, simply just tweeted, the dollar cannot be backed by Bitcoin any more than it can be backed by gold. An asset with unlimited supply cannot be pegged to an asset with constrained supply. So I guess, listen, I love the idea. What are the mechanics?

How can this possibly work? If you can print money endlessly, how can you then back it with hard assets? So again, a couple of things. View this through the political lens. A couple of things going on. One, I think that Kennedy has figured out that Bitcoin topics punch way above their weight class when it comes to press mentions. I mean, this is universally true. The amount of attention that stuff about Bitcoin gets relative to how many people engage with it, how big it is, is astronomical. So that's one thing. You have to assume it's going on. Now, secondarily, I think that there is a broader point that he is trying to make that is probably much more significant than the sort of classic reasonable idea of starting with 1% or whatever, which is he wants to be able to talk about things like endless wars. And he wants sort of to reframe issues in ways that he can win on them. And something like the relationship of fiat money to foreign wars, to poverty, are issues that are... There are new ways of coming at that that people in the mainstream haven't necessarily heard yet. And so he's kind of got this two for one political asset where because he's connecting

it to Bitcoin, if he was just saying gold, that'd be one thing. He would just look like an old crank. Now he looks like a young crank and that's much better. So you get the juice of talking about Bitcoin, but you also get to kind of hone in on the issues where I think that if you ask people, broadly speaking, across political perspectives, should we spend less money on foreign adventures for the last however many years, the trend line has been both Democrats and Republicans want less, not more global engagement, right? So I don't know. I think that on the one hand, I don't view his interest in Bitcoin cynically. I think that he has discovered that it aligns with a lot of his goals. But I also think that he's a savvy politician who understands that he's in this very,

very interesting space where people are paying attention to him as not just a third party spoiler candidate. And he's just on that cusp of people taking him seriously and people taking the campaign seriously and also getting to sort of lob bombs in. And I think that this is a way to do a lot of that all at once. That's my read on it anyways. I can tell you that he's got a big team and many of them are Bitcoiners and he's been actively adding people

to different parts of his team, the social media side and elsewhere, that are very passionate about Bitcoin. So I do think you're right that he's sort of struck a bit of a nerve. That said, that are very passionate about Bitcoin. So I do think you're right that he's sort of struck a bit of a nerve. That said, if you had told me six or seven years ago, Bitcoin would be a major discussion point for a political, a presidential election, I would have told you you're nuts. And now it seems that every single politician, not 85 or older or whatever, has come out and had a pro-Bitcoin position.

And I'm not being cynical, but it's for exactly the reason you said. You can speak to this young audience. You don't really have to do anything policy-wise. We'll see what happens. But they're wealthy, they're angry, they're young, they're primarily men. And so you're going to get a lot more donations and you're going to get a lot more media. Right. And so I don't listen. I think some of them are more genuine about it. I think he's genuinely for it. Suarez is obviously generally for it. I think DeSantis is just, you know, like using it as a talking point, much like Eric Adams did it as mayor of New York. Right. We all knew Eric Adams didn't give a shit about Bitcoin. He just saw that Francis Suarez was getting good press by talking about it. I do also think there's the fact that it's so resonant with people is a reflection of

it's almost a way to re-co-opt something that is sort of threatening to government power by bringing it in, in the sense that like, if you're a politician now, you have to speak to people's disillusionment with politicians. And frankly, a lot of that narrative space was used up, chewed up, and spit out by Trump in the last cycle because he promised to drain the swamp. I don't think that people broadly speaking, other than people who are Trump adherents, feel like the swamp got drained. And so you still have that sense of frustration. Well, all of a sudden you have this thing which really does shift power theoretically in a pretty meaningful way. So the question becomes, can you, on the one hand, embrace that in ways that are controllable? So then all of a sudden you've got Bitcoin backing 1% of the dollar. So I don't know, at this stage, I think what's more interesting than a policy specific, like, look, they have

to give a policy specific. It has to sound reasonable. The dollar backed by 1% or whatever, that's a reasonable campaign type of slogan. People can sink their teeth into it. I think that the more interesting underlying thing is why it would feel like a good approach and to your point, why it would seem like something that people across the aisle, especially the challenger candidates, feel like is important to attach their wagon to. Yeah, I just find it. I mean, it's not surprising rationally. I just didn't think we'd be here yet. No, I don't think rationally. I just didn't think we'd be here yet. No, no, I don't think anyone did. I also didn't think that it would be on the Senate floor or the key, you know, topping point for the SEC,

but here we are. I mean, in your mind, does that mean that we're sort of in that then they fight you phase and we actually could win here? I mean, listen, it was a lot more fun to be in this market when nobody was paying attention to us, to be quite frank. Yeah, we are, you know, the funny thing is that we are sort of simultaneously in the then they fight you,

but also the we've already won stage. I mean, I think that part of the weird psychic fracture right now is the contrast between the SBF regulatory hangover on the one hand and the full bore move ahead with digital assets integrated into mainstream finance on the other. In some ways, it feels like the battles, quote unquote, for the next bull cycle are going to be much more specific. They're going to be things like what space DeFi can carve out where politicians are appreciative of what it offers while also comfortable with the crime preventions or however that shakes out. It's going to be things like to what extent the mass financialization of this asset class undermines some of its core properties. Is it just completely eaten by Wall Street or do we

find ourselves in a situation where it doesn't matter how much paper IOU Bitcoin people buy through BlackRock because the thing still exists and has caps. Those are sort of the interesting questions. But I think we're in the most pronounced and loudest sort of, and then they fight you stage. But the biggest financial players in the world are acting like the battle has already been fought and won. So whatever that tells you is interesting, I think. Yeah.

So not fighting very hard if BlackRock is applying for a majority ETF. Yeah. Yeah. So if the goal was institutionalization, then we've got the biggest endorsement we could possibly get. So I will take that as a win. And the final thing before I let you go, obviously, we've been hearing about FedNow here for months. Actually, RFK first kind of got on the Bitcoiner map when he wrote that long

tweet thread about central bank digital currencies and how FedNow is effectively a CBDC. I don't think that's necessarily the case, but maybe this is greasing the wheels for the path for one. I guess you could make that argument, but FedNow actually is going live, which is the 24-7, 365 settlement network for Fed. I mean, to me, this is, I'm going to be honest, this is just like updating technology from the 80s and 90s they were using that was so subpar that they needed to do it. I mean, this is, it's like PayPal or Venmo for the Fed, right? I mean, we can individually do this already, but do you think that this is a threat to crypto in any way, shape, or form? I mean, what do you think this means?

No. Short answer, no. I'm on your page. Look, most of the world has some version of this sort of real-time settlement system. Our banking infrastructure is ridiculously far behind. If you actually care about any of the things that a lot of people profess to care about in this industry, like the unbanked having better access to services and stuff. Having a modernized real-time settlement infrastructure is completely essential. Now, maybe you wanted your preferred chain to be the one that they did it on, but whatever. I think that we have to be able to have conversations where we can separate implications from slippery slope arguments. Sure, it is worth keeping an eye on the extent to which it appears that Fed now is a Trojan horse for some future CBDC effort. But I got to say, based on the political discourse

right now, I don't think that that's going to be snuck in. You know what I mean? It has, in some ways, again, exceeded its actual place in the dialogue. But if you look at how Powell talks about CBDCs and these things, he's not happening for retail. He doesn't want to touch that with a tenfold poll. I mean, he has basically been clear that he's going to force Congress to tell him that he has to do that before they really go full bore in that direction. So I don't know. Look, I guess to what I would say is the CBDC warning flags are up in an aggressive way. In fact, so much so that it risks becoming stupid partisan before it's a real thing. And on an overemphasized point,

that is just a political talking point. I mean, it's the worst when really important things just dissolve preemptively into sort of just a partisan hackery. But I don't know. I think we always have needed real-time settlement. And for anyone who has to still interact with the actual banking system, which is basically all of us, I think it's a good thing, even if something to keep an eye on. Yeah, I agree. I think that we're being extremely hyperbolic in our echo chamber, thinking that everything's about us. And in reality, sometimes you just need to have faster payments. Yeah, just that simple. Dude, I really appreciate having you on, man. I hope we can do this more often. And to be honest, I tell everybody pretty frequently, but yours is the only podcast in the world that I listen to regularly besides the

All In podcast, which is like once a week. But when I need to just know what's happening for 10 or 15 minutes each day, it really gives me a great perspective. So I think, first of all, I mean, go ahead. You can, do you want to just give the quick elevator pitch? I wouldn't bear to mind. No, you did it. You did it for me, man. I appreciate it. Now, the breakdown is, it's trying to do exactly this. It's trying to break down the most essential, important news and discussions in the space. I think that the one thing that I try to add that makes it a little bit different than just straight news is basically this type of conversation, pulling from Twitter, seeing what people are talking about. So no, I love doing it. I love having a chance to talk

about it with you here. So thanks for having me on. And also I saw that you've expanded, right? You have an AI podcast now, Bitcoin building podcast. You're busy. Yeah, yeah. The Bitcoin Builders was a, it's basically a love letter to a section of Bitcoin, which doesn't always get enough coverage, which is this sort of Cambrian explosion of people who are building on it. That's actually an interview show. It comes out a couple of times a week. And then the AI breakdown is, I've always said that the framework or the goal of the breakdown is focusing on big picture power shifts. AI is another big picture power shift that is going to fundamentally and is fundamentally reshaping the world. So I'm doing a same type of daily show on that one. So two dailies right now,

which is a little nuts, but it's fun. You can do it. All right, guys, everybody, follow him on Twitter and please check out the podcast. Really, I'm not kidding when I say it's fun. You can do it. All right, guys, everybody, follow him on Twitter, and please check out the podcast, really. I'm not kidding when I say it's my go-to, and I don't listen to many podcasts because I don't have time. So thank you, man. Cheers. Good to see you, Scott. You too. All right, man. A lot of great perspective there. Hell of a lot easier to have someone

who looks at the news every day do my job for me and talk about the news so that I don't actually have to read things and do research. Perfect. It's amazing. No, but you know that I do spend every single morning writing the newsletter and then also prepping for Twitter spaces at 1015. And then quickly, just back to the RFK topic before we move on and get Dan on here, which has been awesome every Thursday. I have mentioned, but I'm hosting RFK next Wednesday on Twitter spaces, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. It's not on Crypto Town Hall. Contractually, it had to be on my Twitter Spaces because of who it came through, but it'll be

myself, Robert Breedlove, Natalie Brunel, Marty Bent, and Mark Moss all interviewing RFK for about 90 minutes. So listen, my first question I'm'm just telling you right now, is literally going to be, what are the mechanics of this proposal to back the dollar treasuries with Bitcoin? I just want to hear it from his mouth. I love the idea. How can we actually do that? I think that is a valid and relevant question. All right, guys, obviously,

right before we move on, you got to check out MELD right down in the description. Actual bank that also allows you to participate in DeFi where you can earn yield. Yes, I know it's a five letter word, but if you listen to my podcast with him, you'll understand why. Risks are very transparent and it's non-custodial. So you hold your own assets while it's happening. So they can't take your assets away. Anyways, check that down in the description. And now without further ado,

every Thursday and from the chart guys, what's up man? Glad to be back, Scott. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I saw you were in the wings. We forced you to listen to all the news today. I like to. I like to know what we're coming off of. And although it doesn't directly relate, it definitely can be informative. Yeah, for sure. So sure so listen i mean we've had kind of a boring week for bitcoin since we spoke last which i think we've anticipated right i mean we've kind of every week we say yeah it's ranging it's sideways it's chopping i think we're starting to see some movement in all coins we're also continuing to see tech and sgx rise but uh a lot of fear now i think that that trend might be

exhausting. So I guess as we start with every Thursday, broad strokes, what are you looking at? Yeah. So one thing that has stood out this week is with the broader market, as you mentioned, we've been extremely strong, but a lot of the narrative has been AI, that type. And we saw Microsoft put out an AI headline, and Microsoft shot up 6%. And that's just insane to see these kinds of market cap companies going that large move in one day. I mean, the stacks are like, Microsoft went up an entire Disney worth of market cap or entire AMD market cap, just big companies. And so that was a big hype pop. And then the next day,

yesterday, you had Apple do the same thing, putting out an AI headline. It ran up to new all-time highs, but then it started selling off and a lot of the AI stocks sold off with it. And so that to me was kind of, okay, we're getting this AI narrative just being a little used up in the short term. It's a little bit exhausted. And so the question now is, all right, what kind of consolidation do we see in the broader market? Of course, Tesla earnings, Netflix earnings, both had a bearish reaction. So just some daily consolidation. And the question is, is it healthy or is it going to be more significant? And as you mentioned, Bitcoin sideways hasn't really been a fact. It hasn't been paying attention to the dollar. It hasn't

been paying attention to the broader stock market. We're just waiting on short-term direction. Yeah. I mean, the dollar actually is showing some strength today, it appears. I don't know if you have your charts up, but just to point this, it did break down from what I was calling sort of this complex head and shoulders. Maybe this is just a retest of that neckline back as resistance. I still think the dollar is going down, but it is showing strength this week. I mean, and with potential tweezer bottoms there on the weekly as well. So maybe worth watching if the dollar is going to actually start to show some strength here and give us that sort of correction you just discussed. Yeah, the retracement

size on the bounce right now is still pretty insignificant, but it did double bottom right at the low there on the short term timeframes. One thing that's notable is you look at the inverse relationship between gold and the dollar and gold gold had the bull break, and it's now ignoring the dollar bounce. Gold is going sideways while the dollar is bouncing. And that's exactly what bulls want to see, an inverse relationship, but the bulls ignoring the dollar bounce. Inverse, but only when bullish. Yeah. And that's a direct change from the last two months. The last two months, it was the exact opposite. So that's where paying attention to correlation

could give you a little bit of insight into the shifting sentiment and price action of an asset. And we're seeing that in gold. But again, with Bitcoin, it's right now, I'll pull up my chart here. We've got the daily timeframe of bounces underway. And the key for me when gauging a bounce is retracement size to help determine probabilities. So I want to know how significant is this retracement size

of bounce going to be? Because anything under 382 favors a bear flag, and we just touched 382 today. If we get a 50% plus bounce retracement, then we create the space for the daily higher low to try and confirm an uptrend there. So we're going to get information in terms of where does this bounce top out. And if we're going to head back to the recent high, we're definitely going to need to see a good bit of increasing volume. We definitely won't go anywhere near that level without that volume. So it's really a wait and see mode for me. One positive is, you know, you see a name like Lake up 19%. And so, yeah. And, you know, you see a lot of times on social media, people will, you know, bash other coins

because it's not their coin. But in reality, you want to, everybody's on the same team. If Lake is popping, it's a sentiment builder. It has people looking around at the other all coins saying okay i'm gonna put my work to here in case this name gets a pop so uh don't bash you know don't any fight that's that's my takeaway here we're all on the same team and the rising tide raises all ships so if lake you know can break out like it's two years of monthly lower highs every single bounce.

And if we break 880 here, then that's going to break for the first time in over two years, which anytime I look at a chart, I try and identify something where I can say, this hasn't happened in a significant period of time, whether it's eight months, 16 months, whatever. And then you recognize, okay, this has now changed. And so if Lake breaks the monthly downtrend for the first time in two years, that's a notable shift in the character of the chart. And we definitely want to pay attention to that. Yeah, I've been watching Link.

I'm so dumb. Like this is one of the ones I literally had pinned. I was like, I'm going to buy it if it goes to the range lows. And then I just didn't. But I love that there's serious, it was dead volume on the drop, like literally nothing. And then you start to see volume coming back in and now big spread. I mean, at 520, this was such an obvious play to like 960.

I mean, just an easy 80, 85%. I mean, this should be going up here, even if it's not going to go above and just touch the top of the range at the very least. But this candle spread today from 690 to 830. I mean, it is a real move. Real move. It can be hard. One thing I've been seeing about the stock market recently is there's a ton of shiny objects. Everything's popping. The bull fervor is picking up. And so, like you said, there's so many times where I'll be watching something and then just miss the entry because I'm watching 18 other things as well. So it is important to narrow the focus a little bit to ensure we don't get overwhelmed trying

to look at 50 different things at once. I mean, we had this sort of consolidation period now for well over a month on Bitcoin. I thought that altcoins would do this weeks ago. Yeah. But just because of past, like usually when Bitcoin goes up and then goes sideways and gets boring, people start to look for something else and they go down into altcoins. It just didn't happen there for a while. got over this, gave Bitcoin dominance a little bit of staying power. And so now, the dominance is pulling back as the altcoins are seeing some relative strength, while Bitcoin is trading sideways. And the big question for me is, is the dominance chart just going to set another higher low here? Or is it going to fade more significantly? And if it sets

another higher low, there's two ways that that could happen. It could happen with Bitcoin heading back up to the high of this range and outperforming the altcoins, or it could happen with the entire cryptocurrency sector dropping and the altcoins are dropping faster. And so again, the daily bounce retracement size on this Bitcoin current bounce is going to be telling. And I'm always looking for clues in the crypto stocks. Right now, MARA and Riot and Coin, they're all trying to be little daily bull flags. And so I'm keeping an eye. Sometimes there's no information to be had by watching those stocks, but they are holding on very strong. And the fact that Riot and MARA have both gone up 80% or whatever, while Bitcoin has been ranging sideways,

a lot of that I think is Vanguard establishing a 10% stake in these companies. So a significant amount of buying pressure there. But they're still holding on just fine on the daily chart. I lost your audio. I don't know if it's just me. I was muted because I coughed. Yeah, I mean, Coinbase, for me, at 83 83 rsi now putting in kind of some bearish divergence likely i think we get a little retracement but not big so i think that this is going to be the

opportunity to buy some dips on these things what you alluded to earlier though is the worst nightmare for crypto traders is when bitcoin dominance goes up while bitcoin is going down because bitcoin's getting wrecked and your alts are getting more wrecked, so you're just getting absolutely slaughtered there. Yeah, that's definitely... That's money leaving the market when that's happening. And that's one thing that I'm always watching in the stock market is, is it rotation during this consolidation or is there money leaving the market? And one clue for that to leave your viewers with, probably mentioned it before, but watch QQQ, XLV Healthcare, XLF, the financial sector. If those three things are hitting the low of the day at the same time, it's a signal. It's showing

us money leaving the market. In the bear market, it was happening multiple times a week. It hasn't happened in months. So I'm just waiting for that signal that the next time that I see that happen, that tells me don't look long or it tells me go aggressive bearish, you know, whenever my set I want to be in. But that's an indication of money leaving the market. So when the dollar rates chart is going up and all of crypto is dropping, we know that there is a lot of money leaving a lot of points. So listen, now that we're seeing these moves

and things like Link, I know you don't necessarily trade off coins aggressively, but does this pique your attention? Definitely. I've been keeping an eye on Sol. I've been liking the Sol action recently. It's trying to set a daily high or low. I agree.

And again, for me, just holding that EMA 12. It's just that red line there is just my uptrend guide. And if you keep holding that, then the bulls are holding strong. And of course, we had that ripple news right after we did the stream last week, and that led to a whole bunch of short term- Oh, I couldn't remember if it was before or after, but it was after. So that's when we saw Matic, Solana, ADA, everything that had basically been passively named in the coin pursuit and had dropped 30% just went back up. That's essentially the market saying, oh, we priced this in incorrectly and having to

reprice the fundamentals there. But I'm going to be interested to watch XRP here. Whenever we see wild volatility, I always watch for the tightening ranges. And we just had that on the 12 hour and that broke full. So now my question is, do we see this on the daily timeframe tighten up? And then what direction does that break? Which in my opinion, will have some implications on the altcoin space as a whole. Again, same thing. If I'm an altcoin bull, even if I'm not an XRP, I want to see XRP going up. I want to see bulls confident in this market. And so fundamentals aside, rising tide raises all ships. Love it. Absolutely love it. Any final thoughts before I let you go today? Again, if you're watching the stock market, write it down. QQQXLFXLV. I'm surprised. I look around

Twitter and other traders and nobody talks about that. It's just, for me, it's been such a clear signal of action for the Bears. I always say the Bears are not sneaky. See them coming. They have to have big volume. And that's a key signal. And if that's not happening, it's healthy rotation going on at the market. All right, man. That's great, Alpha.

Thank you so much, Dan. I'll see you next Thursday. Absolutely. I'm away next Thursday going to Colorado for a Jerk Guys meetup. Well, that you so much. Dan, I'll see you next Thursday. Absolutely. I'm away next Thursday, going to Colorado for a Shark Eyes meetup. Well, that's even better. So we won't see you next Thursday, but we'll see somebody that looks like you, hopefully.

All right, man. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the insight. And actually, I took a note there, to be honest, guys. You could do XLF, XLV, not something I've used or heard of, but anytime you get something that compelling, write it down and use it. Thank you, man. Absolutely. Have a good one, Scott.

Awesome, man. Great stream. I love both those guests. Just really, really helpful. And I learned a lot, which is the entire point here. If I'm learning something, hopefully you guys are learning something. And if they can teach me and get something to this blockhead, I know they can get something for sure into your blockheads as well. Going to Twitter spaces in 20 minutes, talking about the RFK Bitcoin backed dollar conversation as well as FedNow. I'm going to continue this conversation with a whole bunch of experts. I know some of my favorite, favorite, favorite people to talk to joining spaces today.

One being Adon Yago from Sovereign. Guy just literally like every time he talks gets me so amped for the future of Bitcoin. Lex Soklin, Census, others. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be awesome. It's going to be a really awesome conversation. I hope you guys will join. Otherwise, I will be back here tomorrow.

And now I'm trying to remember who the guest is. I'm going to check, see if we can. I think David Lin is joining tomorrow, which will be really, really awesome. All right, guys, that's all I got for you. I got to go over to the place with the stuff and the things. Check out Meld for real. Get on the wait list.

Otherwise, fire Gary Gensler. Bye. Let's go.