The Wolf Of All Streets - SpaceX IPO Frenzy Hits Crypto as $557M Floods In #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In this lively episode on SpaceX IPO day, the guys break down Elon Musk’s paper trillionaire moment as a classic buy-the-news event, covering heavy passive index inflows, massive retail oversubscription exceeding $100 billion, and Fidelity’s push to democratize access, while weighing crypto spillover possibilities like Dogecoin shoutouts, SpaceX’s Bitcoin holdings, space mining ideas, max pain scenarios, and longer-term $250K BTC views alongside cautions on emotional investing. They also explore capital reallocation, silver’s potential bottom, oil sliding below $90 with peace deal rumors and Cushing inventories pressuring inflation, the AI industrial revolution, expectations for lower interest rates, currency debasement boosting real assets, a sharp debate on Visa/Mastercard versus Bitcoin and stablecoin rails—including chargebacks, fraud, rewards, and merchant surcharges—and bullish signals from SEC Chair Paul Atkins on Rule 611 paving the way for tokenized assets and market convergence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So SpaceX goes live today. You know, we'll see whether or not this is the great sucking sound today. I think it's the opposite. I think this is a by the news, you know, by the news, it was a sell the rumor by the news event. I think that any money that was going to go into SpaceX is already out. And now the question will be, you know, what does it say? What are people going to start talking about correlations? They're going to start talking about lots of stuff.

But it's very much a cult of personality day because, you know, this is the, day Elon becomes on paper a trillionaire. And at the same time, we have all the people talking about Bitcoin Prague, Prague, right, DDC Prague, yeah, you know, Sailor kind of saying, well, I sort of said this and that. And Gary and I getting insulted by Dr. Donish for things that we'd never said and him being just, you know, hating Sailor for some inexticable reasons. So it is, as I said, there's a lot going on. But curious, David, so you've unmuted it. What do you think is going on? in the market today because obviously the outside of SpaceX is not a whole lot happening. So much drama.

All I would say is I look at the market and yeah, we've got SpaceX is going to be a different IPO. The dynamics are such that 30% of the offer is going to go into passive indexed funds within the first 15 days that compares with 4% normally for IPOs. So you've got a lot of passive buying power on the sidelines. pre-market indications, 135 offer price, 35% up was kind of the indications,

so somewhere around 185.50. You know, there are names that are out there they're going to benefit, obviously. And we'd love to see what the spillover is going to be to crypto. I mean, here's a chance for Elon to come out and make Doge coin, the official coin of space exploration. Oh, please, dear God. Did I miss anything?

No, but I hope you're wrong on that one. but it's definitely possible. You know, it's like what's old? Well, what do you want? Fartcoin? No, I think, you know, they help SpaceX holds a lot of Bitcoin. I think they should keep holding it. And, you know, we'll see if some of the data centers in space are going to become

Bitcoin miners. It would be a- The first one. The first one will be a Bitcoin miner. Well, I mean, if he actually announced that, that would be a big deal for people. Honestly, should it really matter? No. But would it matter?

Yes. it's one of those things. Look, if sale or selling 32 Bitcoin could spook the market as bad as it spooked it, then a token statement that Bitcoin is the currency of space would be a very big deal. I personally think it's kind of silly. The kind of market power that some of these people have is silly, but it is true, right? We all know how markets move. So, you know, it is a big deal.

But look, I think the most important question here is, are capital flows. And we know that a lot of capital was taken out of a lot of assets over the last couple of weeks for people to get their bids in for SpaceX. We know that on the retail side. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, the retail side was over $100 billion. Yeah.

Well, $100 billion requested. Well, yeah, indicated for 111 million shares allocated on the IPO, the 20%, it works out to a price of about $9.000. $900 a share. Yeah, well, but that's not going to be the price. So, yeah, I mean, it, I know that. No, I know you do. I just don't think people.

And so buying power, my friend. Right. But the point is, is that unsatisfied buying power will go someplace. I have certain ideas of where it will go. And I don't think a lot of it will go. I don't think any of it really goes into Bitcoin or into crypto. I think that the SpaceX insiders, on the other hand, and others will, some will end up back here. But we'll see.

I don't really think a whole lot of the Bitcoin story and the crypto story has been about SpaceX except for recently. Yeah. It's silver, on the other hand, that hot ball of money that we were talking about endlessly for months on end, you know, four months ago. I think that that is seeing its final paroxysm of selling it for this and it will find a bid for not for another reason that in fact, you know, it's actually needed for a lot of the stuff that that's, SpaceX actually does. So, you know, we'll see how that goes. But, you know, there's just, there's just a lot of stuff going on with this. And it creates this sort of Brownian motion. It's a good time to launch the day at X point. Yeah. No, I'm not a, no, that will never be me. It will never be me. But, you know, look, I guess we see what happens. I mean, the most interesting

market outside of all of this is peace deal, nonwithstand. you know, who the hell knows, but, you know, oil now comfortably below, even on Brent, below 90 bucks. And so all those people, all those long people in Houston that Gary was making fun of yesterday are like, uh-oh, you know, we'll see because we all understand the dynamics of markets. And if all the speculators were leaning long and it starts falling, you know, it really becomes a question of, well, will they panic and will we get, you know, a flush out here. You know, honestly, I don't know enough about the supply demand dynamic. What I, all I do know is if oil continues to drift back down toward its cost of production, the cost of gas, which is

ridiculously high or feels high, not that I use it, but I look at the gas stations when I go past it in my electric car, it will start coming down. And that has big implications for inflation and liquidity, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, eventually, eventually that happens, obviously. with the lag, but the other issue is the on-again, off-again nature of this putative peace deal. You know, it boils down to a memorandum of understanding around which they're going to talk more. Well, guess what? They've been talking already. I would say, look at the inventory levels at Cushing in the oil fields.

And, you know, inventory levels are getting down to a point where if people need oil, which they apparently do every day, prices can arguably spike. So, yeah, we've got to pull back on the rumor, but the facts on the ground haven't changed. Yeah, I know. I just, the interesting thing, the interesting inflection point will be at what point, because it will happen one way or another, at what point will the December contracts and the near contract start to converge? Yep. That's really the interesting question.

And it could converge at a higher price or a lower price. We just don't know. But it's all higher for longer, just like interest rates. Well, I actually think interest rates will be different, but that's besides the point. I think once one way or another, I think that you're going to see, we can call it whatever you want. You can call it manipulation. You can call it Operation Twist. You can call it QE with another word, but I do think that they're going to do everything they can to push lower interest rates down.

I can push longer rates down in order to fund business investment. I think that's very, very clear. And I don't know why I seem to be a minority in that, but, you know, I think people should invest accordingly. I think that's kind of a big deal there. That's very bullish. Well, bullish for a lot of stuff. I mean, look, I think that valuations, like there was an interesting, someone made some comment this morning. I think it was Joe C.

About how people shouldn't be bearish when we're going into another industrial revolution because of AI. And all I can say is over the trip to from, I drove from Miami up to New Jersey, part of the time I listened to reminiscences of a stock operator again. And for those who haven't read that book or listened to that book, and millions have, it is an amazing book talking about trading back in the day when there were bucket shops. It was legal to have 98% or, you know, 50x margin was completely legal in the United States. This was in the 1800s, early 1900s. And, of course, it's a lot like what goes on in crypto.

And you can see the same strategies and the same talking. But there are a lot of pieces of that book where it's pretty obvious that when there's bull runs, they're manipulated. And when they're bare runs, they're manipulated. And it goes up and down. And it's really a question of just, you know, how much volatility could people stand? And it's fascinating because what's old is new again. So while you're on that autopilot drive in the long distance, did you happen to take a nap and in the nap? What was your dream of the great bull market of 2027?

No naps. The car evidently would have woken you up. But yeah. Great. I don't have a dream about it. I just think that I like to understand where forces are. We're printing more money. We're going to keep printing more money.

There's no way out of that. the only way out, possible way out of the budget deficit that we have is, frankly, to do what Sweden did and not do the opposite, meaning less government spending as a percentage of GDP, more private investment and effectively reshore, you know, productive capacity. And that is, it's not clear that that will work, but it's the only thing that even has a chance. Because other than that, it's deficits as far as the eye can see, continued printing and continued debasement. And, you know, what does that mean? Well, that means that the companies that are profitable will be, will get valuations will continue to go higher. And that means real assets will just go up in price in nominal terms. Not necessarily in real terms, but in nominal

terms. And the real question is, will the notion of an opt out with Bitcoin allow it to, you know, really tap into gold's monetary premium? And honestly, I think the answer will be yes. yes, but it is not obvious that it's going to take that it's going to happen immediately by any stretch of the imagination. So like when people, and I love Mike Alfred, I think he's awesome. But, you know, when he says $250,000 by the end of the year, it's like, well, you know, I'm not going to say that. First of all, I will tell you that I do think Bitcoin hits $250,000, but I have absolutely no freaking clue when it hits that or in fact, in nominal terms, you know, hits $500,000. I don't know. It could be a very long time from now. And in my lifetime, when I've had this sort of belief, I've been right, but my timing has

always been, well, not always been, but generally, I'm way, way early on these things. And so, you know, it could drop, it could get cut in half before that happens, right? And so people need to understand that a long-term view and a trading view are different. And that's what matters. And so, like, you know, these arguments, you know, like Gary is the great Bitcoin bear, except for Gary wants to accumulate more because he believes it will go higher. I don't want to put words in your mouth, Gary. But I mean, I find it funny that, you know, how people throw abuse at you

because you don't, you're not, you don't have the pom-poms and your cheerleaders skirt out. It seems silly, although I really don't like that mental image of thinking about you and it's your loop your skirt. Well, I think I could, I think it would be a way to build a cool token, actually. Dave, I'm thinking me, me, and, you know, get my legs jacked up like Max Kaiser and, and just go with it, man. Just, just, I mean, I'm going to need to make some money some way because I'm just going broke. I'm so stupid, you know. Look, I hope the SpaceX thing goes really well.

I actually think it will, dude. I think when you open it up, democratize that IPO to Joe, Joe, Consumption. Joe investor. That is a really good thing. And it's really amazing to me that we're hearing, okay, they're going to rug pull all the consumers. They've been begging to get access to IPOs for 30 years, dude. We've been blocking, Wall Street's been blocking Joe user forever.

This has to increase demand. Wouldn't you think? I do. I mean, you're just going down the food chain, right? It's like an addressable market that's never really been touch without a bunch of intermediaries. You're democratizing access. I mean, look, a large part of, if you think of the pillars of the crypto market, why was the token market so explosive? Why were the ICOs such a big deal?

Because they made no fucking sense in many cases. I mean, okay. Well, I go back to it was access. It was easy for their user to do. That's exactly. You know, access, dude. Yes. I'm agreeing. So there were two things that happened with crypto. They basically got around all the rules that you had to season things and spend 40 million bucks to IPO, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. So you could IPO cheaper. That was one thing. The other thing is that there was no accredited investor rule for a company that didn't have earnings, et cetera. You could get out into it. What didn't happen was that this would happen without VC involved. And there were plenty of examples in crypto where VCs funded the internals on before the tokens were actually created. They were just kind of distributed. And then they went live. And people didn't realize that they were exit liquidity in what was going on in ICOs, which I think is a large part of what will change when you finally have a crypto market.

And we finally get to. Like if you ask what is Paul Atkins' vision, I mean, you know, at the SEC, I mean, his vision would be, yeah, you should be able to look. launch a security token much cheaper than you can do securities now because our laws are archaic and it should be much quicker, but your disclosures have to be right. And if you lie, you're going to pay for it, right? And there are lots of lying going on and there's lots of rug pulls going on in the crypto market. And so he's trying to deal with that line. And that matters, right? That's the way you want it to be. Jamie? Hey, Dave. Yeah, honestly, I actually really agree.

agree with Gary. I think I'm excited really for today. Like the idea for SpaceX and opening up to, you know, more access to people, you know, through fidelity and their broker accounts. Like, it's a great opportunity. I mean, like, that's the big thing that's been preventing people from getting access to some of these, you know, this is a generational, you know, position for this, for this type of company, especially during a bare market, there's not much good news out there. I mean, I believe in Elon. And, you know, I think it's something that going forward, I hope Fidelity extends this beyond just this.

And it's something that trends in that direction. Look, I think that I was there in the early 2000s when Bill Hamburg tried to democratize tech IPOs. And people, it is amazing what actually happened. So he had this idea. He said, listen, you know, this IPO stuff is stupid where you have all this excess demand. So let's just make it into an auction, let everyone in there and create a clearing price for the IPO and give retail full access to it, right, on that IPO date. And, you know, before it. And what happened was the investment banks and the founders basically said, well, wait a minute, we're locked up.

The thing we want more than anything is the IPO pop. So therefore, we want to restrict supply of the IPO, and we want to restrict access to the IPO. And then even after it starts trading, because it's going to be trade on a limited float, we want to decrease that access. So we want the IPOs to be at higher price. So people scratch their heads.

They say, wait a minute, but that means the company, when they issue stock, gets less capital than they would under Hamburgs measure, because obviously you would clear at a higher price. And that's true. But who makes the decisions in the companies, the insiders or the holders of the stock or the shareholders that don't exist yet? The answer is, well, the insiders. So if the price is higher after a restricted supply thing, then, well, that's good for them. And so for years, I mean, we're talking decades. The process of IPOing has been less money to the companies, more money to the insiders when they get to dump onto the market by, controlling supply, et cetera. But now, with Elon, that flips on its head because does he really care? He cares about the long term. He's already said it. He said, listen, I want to be the first 10 trillionaire.

What does that mean? Well, it means that he didn't give a shit about what the stock price does in the short run. What he's trying to do is maximize his ability to build this thing into what he thinks it can be, which is a vertically integrated, you know, you know, basically name that sci-fi novel or name that future novel or name that Bond villain kind of level. He wants to have the company that controls robotics on Earth via control and space colonization. I mean, that's what he wants. And so that's why this is happening. The real question is, will it matter to other things? And we'll see.

And I have no idea of the answer to that. What do you think, Gary? I think people are going to chase the gluary object, buddy. And that's just where we're at now. So, you know, look, regarding Bitcoin and all. the hate, I, you know, the response is actually making me believe this is a much weaker industry than I thought. There's just no real capital here coming in here right now. And until that changes, we're going to see 63, 64, 62, 61. We just need, I would prefer that we puke. I mean,

that we just have a cleansing moment. Go down. to whatever we need to go down to. I didn't say we were going to 40. I most certainly am saying we're going to see 50 before we see 150. I mean, I don't know what people are thinking about. Like, you got to crush, way crushed through the 126 number. And we have so much wood to chop, dude. I'm just sitting here long going, okay, how do I extract some value out of this while

it's sitting here just kind of like, you know, doing very little? Well, I think the doing very little is... Oops, I don't know what that was. Doing very little is the max pain scenario for people. Yeah. I agree with you, dude. It is max pain there. And I think, Dave, I think that's the way you got to look at it.

See, I'm considering Bitcoin's going to go through max pain because it's denying that it's possible. Yeah, of course. Well, look, there is a, before fig speaks, I just want to make one clear thing. There are markets are... have lots of facets. There is definitely a part of the Bitcoin community that are just, you know, dyed in the wool believers,

they think it's already here, they don't understand that it's an option. I think they will ultimately be right. I think there's a lot to it, and I actually have a lot of respect for a lot of those people, but people get very emotional about investments. And if there's one thing I can say

with absolute certainty is if there's something that should be separated from investments entirely, it should be emotion. because it's just it's literally the single word if you listen to me forever and you pick one piece of advice that I ever give it's do not make emotional decisions about your money that's probably the most important thing and so anyway we got a bunch of hands so I see fig then Corey and then Carla hey guys yeah I totally agree with the max pain situation I'd love to just get it over with and do a huge dump so we can reset.

But I thought it was really interesting how you were talking about SpaceX being actually a way of funding the development of SpaceX. And I guess Elon will probably use it to start more companies because it's tempting to just look at it like a meme coin. Exactly the same pattern launched a very high valuation, IFTV, and then you slowly dump into a lot of retail buyers. And I'd previously taken a more like negative approach on it. I guess the last true meme coin we saw was the Trump coin and that and that sort of ended the whole crypto bull market, I feel, along with a lot of other things. And I was thinking that might happen here, but there are builders in crypto as well. Like that's where I come from. I'm a founder in crypto, but we're building building blockchain tech and it is actually just a really good funding mechanism if you

want to build something so hopefully that today and like the SpaceX IPO will mean actually a lot more investment a lot more like net growth for civilization the one the only thing I would say is look I have been very outspoken I think that the Trump but Malanya mean coins and the Libra coin from Mule were the in that those few weeks were absolutely a disaster and is what took the why the the the bull cycle was so much less ebullent than it otherwise would have been because when you completely kneecap people they remember and so you get lots of bad stuff happening but so I agree with you there but I don't think SpaceX is a meme I think SpaceX is a dream and there's a difference memes or dreams memes

are something funny that's that's whatever I think that the dream of SpaceX is a vertically integrated company that is that is handling robotics at scale by having satellites to be able to create do the compute and the power, et cetera, as well as being able to explore Mars, et cetera, and do, you know, all of those things. I think it's a dream. And dreams are very powerful. And I'll just leave it that way. Memes are powerful in the instant. Dreams are powerful until the dream is, is gone. And so, you know, you take that quote for me together. It's a dream, not a meme, and be happy with it, but anyway, I think it was Corey next and then Carlo. Hey, that's Corey.

A couple things. Accredited investing, at least in the U.S. still, it's an access thing. I just both of you touched on before regarding people IPOing and paying the retail upcharge price that the VCs put in place as a blitz scale companies up. and the retail pays for the overpriced exit that the VCs and other people

insiders get advantage of. Secondly, under an IPO, you all know, banks have I agree upon haircut already associated with all their best friends versus, say, a direct listing like what Coinbase did. I wish companies would go more direct

and less through the banker because again, you're just making the rich people more richer and the true the true, I say fair price is not present when they go and hit retail. The third thing is there is things like tender offering. So it's about helping, you know, for a tender offering for those don't know, you know, private companies do have to give access to data room. They do have to have a set price before it goes to public on a secondary ATS,

alternative trading system like a forge or whatnot, if they even list it there at all. It's more of a private, sort of like exchange. I really wish the public had access to secondary liquidity before it went IPO because a lot of the value gets extracted or a lot of value is built prior to an IPO where you get your 5x, 10x, 100x,000x, again, depending upon the risk levels of individuals. And right now that's all restricted to a lot of mostly private investors and a very small percentage of people. So there's got to be a better way to allow some, quote, protections, I guess, for the retail investor, or at least requirements to get financials to investors, but be able to do it pre-IPO so that people can get in a little bit earlier that aren't, quote, accredited investors. So there's my problem is secondary liquidity in the private space is shit. It's like shopping around at a garage sale door or door. I have a company.

I have a company. I've been working on trying to solve that friction problem in that market. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. It's very hard. But anyways, those are my things here is that the retail through the IPO vehicle, this sucks, in my opinion, and the retail page for the exit. Yep, there's no doubt. Look, you know, Carlo, you and I have both talked about and you have the next hand up.

The whole notion of the current process, which allows, which literally puts a gate up if you're not rich enough. is insane and it's it's reverse Robin Hood. Now the good news is the people running the current SEC actually agree with that sentence. The bad news is it's really hard to change things because they get enormous grief. You know, it just becomes very, very politicized. That's the real problem. And look, I can tell you, I spent a lot decades on Wall Street. And what you were saying, Corey, let's boil this down to a civil statement. Wall Street uses the fact that they control the IPOs as one of the most important currencies in order to get other business. So, for example, if you are Goldman Sachs and you're running the SpaceX IPO and you have the highest allocation,

I guarantee you that the companies that pay them the most commissions are the ones that get the highest allocations. Now, should that be the case in any rational world? Well, it is the case if it's currency, but if it's not, it doesn't make any sense, right? You know, because the issuers should want the biggest allocations to go to companies that aren't going to sell that are going to be good shareholders, et cetera, et cetera. But none of that matters. All that matters is you're a good customer in the investment bank. They can wave their arms around everything else, but that's what matters the most.

Anyway, Carlo, go for it. Good morning, Dave. Yeah, I don't disagree. Look, I'm not a buyer today, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in what is possible with SpaceX. anytime people have bet against Musk, you know, it generally doesn't end well. This is a guy who scaled the electric vehicle and completely disrupted the auto industry when no one thought that was possible. This is a guy who basically scaled deployable rockets that can be recycled and completely turned that entire industry on its head. He evolved NASA from a shoot and dump rocket system to now, we have recyclable rockets. And the next ambitious thing he's aiming for is to build and deploy data centers in space,

which will scale AI at a rate that is stunning. If he can pull off unlimited free energy in space through solar with a cold environment that solves for a lot of the brick and mortar issues we have here on Earth with data centers, then he's pulled off something brilliant. And again, I'm not a buyer of SpaceX today, but I'm definitely watching it. And I don't discount what he's capable of doing. With respect to the Bitcoin conversation, I'm starting to latch on to the notion of being a Bitcoin realist, as opposed to what we have available as the menu of options, maximalists, so forth.

Lynn Alden put out a post yesterday where she kind of said it in the coldest, driest way. If Bitcoin can't survive, it should die. And I think that's the way you need to look at this stuff. I mean, Bitcoin was built different. It is built different. I believe in its underlying principle. I believe in its fundamental value proposition. However, if it fails to execute on that, as a realist, we have to accept that.

But I don't think that's where it's going. I think we're going through a period of extreme chop right now in uncertainty. but all of this is going to, in my opinion, work itself out. I still maintain that crypto is the economy layer of AI. AI is the next industrial revolution on a scale humans have never seen. Put those two things together, and I think the possibilities are limitless. I do have, if you would indulge me, Dave, a milestone to talk about if I could. Okay.

You know, I've been building tirelessly in the stablecoin space reporting every day. putting out podcasts. And today, my addition of the stablecoin strategist on Substack is an announcement that I have put out the first edition of my intelligence report, which is more geared towards people building in the Stablecoin space. The posts I put out every day on Substack will remain free. However, after this first intelligence report, it's going to be behind a paid wall. My value proposition to people is you can go pay lawyers after the fact when you've got it wrong, or you can subscribe to something that gives you my take, looking around the corners, assessing the threat in these proposed regulations. This particular edition I put out today

builds on a letter I filed this week with Treasury and FinCEN pointing some things that I think should be on the radar of everyone building in this sector with respect to AML, suspicious activity reports and et cetera. And I'm trying to give people the playbook for how to anticipate these risks before the rules go live and the enforcement regime goes live as well. So this is a big milestone. It's kind of the culmination of everything I've been building towards. I'm excited about it. And for anyone who hasn't subscribed yet, even on the free level, I welcome you to do that.

So thank you for letting me take up my personal agenda here today. Dave, I appreciate you as always. Sure. Yeah, no problem, Carla. You're a friend of the show and you're always here. I mean, look, the fact is that stable coins matter. I was going to say something to Gary, because Gary made a post that I think is so effing important, although I'm not sure that I come to the same conclusion as him.

So I'm looking at your post, Gary, from 22 minutes ago where you're talking about MasterCard and Visa versus Bitcoin and the difference in settlement finality and overall volume. The one thing I've noticed is there's a massive trend going on. I mean, maybe it's only following me around where I am in the country, but the number of businesses, hell, my municipality in Surf City is the same way, who are effectively putting a 3% surcharge to use credit cards is just exploding. And so the amount of cash that I'm using this year versus last year is dramatically higher. But now I ask you something. Why? Because you're being charged a fee for doing using the card, right?

Yeah, use a card. They charge you a 3% and you get about a percent or so back in rewards. That's a 2% losing transaction. That's fucking stupid. So why would I use it? The reason for using cards and you make it. You go to a restaurant. There's never going to be a chargeback.

Sorry. You're not getting a refund or a chargeback on a restaurant. Yeah, you can. Oh, come on. How? Oh, all day long, bro. Starbucks gets 50,000 chargebacks a month. See, what you guys are assuming is that the payment rails are fair and that everyone tells the truth.

But we have people that are broke, okay? They've maxed out their credit cards. They're getting 23% charges. They look at their credit card statement. Oh, you're in arrears. You don't have enough money. And what do they do? They go on their Bank of America visa account and they go, well, let's dispute this charge to

Dave on his subscription. Sure. Now, you have a subscription for $10. It is a $25 event every time you get hammered with one of these things. You got to handle it. It's like a speeding. Whether you were speeding or not. So you're telling me that it sounds like the business opportunity here, and it seems like a massive one.

Dude, clear all the disputes. It's a great business. Is, yeah, a pay. But you have to have a centralized party. Sure. neutral centralized party that's why it will never work under the visa master card rails i'm just getting ready to post another one do you this company i used to own i had a meeting with them last week her biggest growth sector is crypto people are using exploiting the visa master card rules they're so

complex and they've then flip into crypto and it's like because it's going to hammer you guys It's going to hammer the crypto guys, man. You're going to take the losses. Even if you don't take the losses, you'll have to build a team of people to handle the disputes. It's 650 million disputes a year in America, bro, just on Visa MasterCard. But if you're a restaurant and you have a choice, you basically say, okay, you can't use a credit card because of the dispute mechanism. But you can use a debit card. Well, they'll never have any business.

What do you mean? See, that's the other thing. No, they charge 3%. They do it all the time. I'm telling you it's almost every restaurant down here in southern New Jersey. I mean, it's more than half of them, not almost every, but it's more than half. Well, that's a new thing because it's very common. Like if I do a large transaction, like, you know, send a charter.

They want to charge me 3.5%. Retail's never done that. In fact, I think they would lose their... What state are you in? I'm in New Jersey right now. Yeah. I think they're breaking law about doing that, dude. It's looking at Miami Beach, too.

We were seeing it in a couple places. But the point is that there's a. Well, what is showing you is that the merchant is taking so many losses. Okay. It's far greater than three and a half percent. They're not even washing their face with three and a half percent. People think they only, you know, pay one or two percent for these chargebacks. They are at least $27 every time one shows up on your doorstep.

Oh, I believe you. I'm just saying that a, to go there. There are many transactions, not all by my bar. I mean, look, you buy something online. You know, I think people are going to pay. They're going to pay for the intermediary to smooth it out for them. But you walk into a restaurant or you take payment for service, a DVP, a delivery versus payment of whatever it is. Whatever the service you get, whatever the food you get, whatever the good you get, you get it, you know it, it's done.

And whatever. There is a business to be able to use stable coin or crypto-backed rails to be immediate with. with way, way, way, way lower costs for merchants to take and way lower costs for the consumer because the consumer wouldn't be charged to 3%. I mean, right now we have it. It's called cash. You do a cash transaction.

But I think that crypto could easily, I think that this business could explode. And I think that it's kind of in between what Carlo was saying and what you were saying. That's sort of where the rubber meets the road. But there's technology that needs to be done. And you're right, it has to be managed and it needs to be,

the UIUX needs to be the same as a credit card. Credit cards are really easy, right? Anyway, Paul, I saw your hand up next. Yeah, I just want to say I can fully 100% attest what Gary said. I actually used to run and manage a restaurant. And I think we were averaging 5% to 6% total credit card fees when you factor in all of the chargebacks. So guaranteed, they absolutely do happen.

But you're right. If a restaurant decided to simply not take credit cards, they would lose a shit ton of business. And maybe unless you are a small, farmer's market vendor, you could say cash only. But I think the biggest challenge in trying to compete with the existing rails with crypto, even though crypto can actually lower the cost, if you're saying that you need the exact same user experience as a credit card, then you're just going to introduce another

intermediary. There isn't a way to really do that. And then that intermediary can just soak up the price difference between credit cards and crypto. Except for the barrier to entry becomes way the hell lower if you're using stable rails, for example. Define barrier to entry. Barrier for who? Like the merchant to adopt it, for the consumer to get on that rail? Like to have a card? Define that barrier. All the restaurants are using things like toast and other stuff like that, right? You know,

and, you know, whatever. There's, there are various systems that you can plug it into, and there are chip cards that you can plug things into. And there are standards in there. The difference between debit and credit has gotten smaller and smaller. And debit are different, right? Debit cards, you rarely get the charge back stuff. Right. Right? You can't still charge. You can. Really, debit card?

They all give the same. Hard really? I guess it's there. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, because you're really using a debit card. It's just a Visa MasterCard that's backed by dollars versus backed by debt. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I guess, I guess even there, and there are merchants who distinguish in credit and debit in terms of charge back. So I guess in terms of fees. The point here is, is that we pay a lot. It's, we have a business that's integrated. right that gives you three different services gives you credit it gives you charge back you know protection as it were uh and it gives you the ability just to use a piece of plastic instead of having to have cash in your hand right there are people who want to pay there are a lot of people who only want to pay for the third one some people want to pay for two of the three and others want to pay for all three

and they should have different pricing but they don't right now that's that's really the point To the merchant, they do have slightly different pricing. So if you use a card that gives you like huge rewards, especially like business cards, that actually charges the merchant more. Now, does the merchant want to go and say, hey, it's like a 2% discount for using cash because, you know, cards cost me a certain amount. And I'm just going to give you a blanket discount. By the way, this is, in reference to another comment that was made earlier,

it's not that it's illegal to my understanding. It's not illegal to charge extra for credit cards. it's that credit card companies don't want you to do it. And they can revoke your kind of ability to use credit cards if you do. But then the loophole is. This is a huge issue. It is. I agree. It is a huge issue. Like if you don't have a ability to process a credit card if you lose visa,

you've literally lost 66% of the payment processing rails. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a club. They just block your ass like you're nothing. It is, although there is a loophole. There is a loophole. And you see every single gas station does this loophole, which is you, post your price with credit card, then you give a cash discount, right? You give a crypto discount.

And so as long as the price you're posting is the actual price for credit cards, then right now, they can't go after you for that. So anyway, that's a small little loophole. But getting back to the point, if we wanted to actually push a different rail, the adoption across all of the point-of-sale systems, like you're mentioning, yeah, a lot of restaurants use toast. A lot actually also use things like Square. I think one of the biggest problems we have, especially, is that the at least in the U.S., is that point of sale systems are vertically integrated now, where the point of sale is the credit card processor. And if they don't want to incorporate new payment method, especially crypto,

then you don't really have a way to plug it in. There's not like this open plugin architecture to do that. Whereas if you go to a lot of the developing countries, really every payment system is one little tiny device sitting on their counter and they've got like five of them. You want to do Wii chat payment, Visa, MasterCard, you know, PayPal, whatnot. It's fragmented. It's a crappy user experience, but developing countries are willing to go through that because they'll take money in any way, shape, or form you can give it to them.

Not here in the U.S. and not in a lot of the largest economies. Well, yeah. I mean, look, the point here is that there is, if people, if you want to think about where crypto will ultimately go, obviously the technology underlying it will matter. But Gary's point, which is absolutely correct, is you can't solve, crypto can't solve the chargebacks. That's an intermediary sort of thing. That's a, you know, it just can't.

So there are certain, until you break apart businesses into their component pieces, that's the, that's the key to, that's the barrier. And that's all I was trying to say here. Well, Dave, while we have a slow day and we don't, we're talking about this, I would just ask people to consider that, well, they have never considered this, okay? They, they considered, oh, Bitcoin's going to be used for retail, but no one ever bothered to ask. Yeah, but is the consumer going to use Bitcoin for retail? If the consumer has rights under Visa MasterCard to pay 28 days later, so they get float, and then they have the right to refund for 187 days, 187 days on a visa transaction does not settle. MasterCard is asking for an extension to 280 days.

Like this is not a settlement system. It is a transaction fucking... circus and Bitcoin did $26 trillion worth of settlements last year, and Visa Mascar did 26 billion of transactions. At least 2% of those imploded. There's 7% refunds online transactions and at least 1.5% charged back fraud on e-com transactions. So, Gary, all you're saying, and I agree with everything you're saying, I'm not disputing a word. The consumer's not going to give up his insurance policy.

I disagree, actually. I think that you pay him enough, they will. He gets float, dude. He gets float. He gets float. He gets refunds. Consumer's not monolithic. There are people who will say, hey, I, and you're absolutely right.

There are people who are going to say, listen, I like my cards. I like to be able to, I like this insurance policy. I'll pay two or three percent. I don't give a fuck. I want it. I want my float. I want this. But they're not paying two or three percent. The consumer's not paying anymore. This is my point.

This is my point, no, they're not. Well, they couldn't afford the product. They are. They just don't know it. They just don't know that they're paying that amount. Well, they do in a lot of cases. It's becoming more and more popular. That's what I was trying to mention. Cash.

The fact is there are lots of people out there who don't need the float. And there are lots of people out there who say, okay, I get my 1% value and rewards. but that's not worth paying 3%. And so there is a business opportunity for delinking this bundled service that we have. Every time you have bundled services with all due respect to Jake to State Farm, bundling isn't always what it's cracked up to be

because it means that the low demand consumer is paying more and the high demand consumer is paying less. And I think that this is one of those cases where it is gonna get broken apart And I think that that's going to be, you know, there's a lot of crypto business potential in that. That's all I was trying to get at. But you're right. Like, for example, Bitcoin, is never going to change.

Native Bitcoin for trading between people, you're not getting chargebacks. You're not getting flow. You're not getting it. It's final. That doesn't stop a business from using Bitcoin on the back end and providing credit on the front end. Doesn't stop. Where I was trying to go to, though, does keep talking about how big. stable coins are going to be.

Stable coins will come under the card rules. It won't be under the Bitcoin rules. You're going to have so many disputes. It's going to be staggering. I mean, my non-competes up with this company. I'm actually thinking about it. God damn, I think this is going to be a huge problem. Plus, VISA Mascar hate you.

Hate this industry. They will not help us. Of course. And they make billions and billions of dollars on this. problem. I mean, they actually, I think they're making more money on the fraud, what they call fraud, than the payment processing itself. Both companies have separated their businesses. They've got a value-added services activity. The fucking margins are staggering. 50% margins, dude. These emaci-card aren't even the payment processor underneath. You got first data. They're nothing. They take zero.

They're just the rail. They're just the monopolism. They're not even a rail. I mean, a rail is a physical thing. This is virtual bullshit. These are not physical rails. But they're integrated network rails that have been there forever. And so you have to surpass them. You have to do a Netflix type of thing, right?

You have to totally flip the industry on the head. And I think there are ways that you can say, forget the rail, but you have to be able to have devices or an app on a phone to be able to skip over that rail and also communicate and market that out successfully so people start using the new rail, the new virtual rail, the point-of-point-s that, you know, type of thing. And to the point earlier, these POS systems, right, you have to somehow get them to be able to quickly integrate or be able to rail into that as well. There's a company called App Brilliots that takes advantage of the Dell APIs and literally does an app, you know, bank-to-bank like Zelle does. So there's things around that. but the fraud is the issue

and I agree with you Gary I think the the credit card company can only charge the consumer for all this point and stuff but they actually take advantage of the fraud they can reduce fraud very easily especially now with AI

they should be able to automate and quickly evaluate real fraud cases versus fake ones and really force back on the consumer not to make false claims and reduce the fraudulent components around that pin the chip right

you know so the chip has been a disaster bro Everything they've rolled out has been a disaster. Absolute disaster. Because it's built to make money. It's not built to solve the problem. Yeah, as soon as you have someone to sign a transaction. The consumer has had 50, 50 years.

This problem has, the cagger on disputes is 20 to 25% greater than e-commerce growth. That tells you everything. Let me just say that real clear. e-commerce growth has a cagger of, say, 20%, disputes have exceeded the growth of the Internet. Now, that tells me the plumbing is so fucked up, and let's be clear, it was built in the 60s. Like, this plumbing is really problematic.

It's not ready for the future world, and they're going to fight the shit out of us. And the rewards programs are a huge moneymaker. I don't know if people know this, but the airlines actually make way more money, on their rewards point systems that they do on the actual airline business. They're really into the rewards program business. Corey, this is my point.

Like, why would anyone not use a card when they get rewards, they get 30 days afloat, they get charged back rights for 180 days. I don't know why I would do a digital transaction. In addition to that, Gary, it's also the dirty little secret of the industry that it's the merchant who bears the burden of, paying that reward not the credit card company so the customer and look there was just which really means the customer exactly because they're marking that up also okay all exactly all these little things are costing us um and these visa master card are going to become

very very active here i mean i don't know if you guys are watching but they're buying shit every almost every week yep yeah that's true uh listen you know we're getting close tom i just wanted to see if anybody noticed oh paul do you want to have something something on this before I pushed one last topic. Yeah, I think the, all the different advantages that the Gary was mentioning, float is really the only thing that crypto can't easily solve, you know, and keeping its decentralized rails. But we haven't actually tested the consumer to see whether or not they really care about

everything else, right? If we can actually offer something and says, hey, five, six percent off, right? In rewards, not the one percent. All these airline miles, by the way, one percent is about the best you're going to get, maybe two in a rare instance, but they all calculate down to about 1% rewards, which is nothing. It's like a rounding error to most consumers. Give them 5%. And realize, too, most fraud, a lot of fraud is because the entire credit card system

is basically baked around me sharing my private key with every merchant that I ever want to transact with. Here is my private key, take money out. Crypto works differently. I'm not sharing a private key. I'm sending money to you just like cash. You don't get the keys to my wallet. And if you remove that aspect of fraud, we don't need the same level of fraud prevention in a

crypto-backed system as we would need in credit cards. So as a consumer, I worry less about fraud. There's just less fraud for me to deal with. And personally, I don't remember last time I did a chargeback of my credit card. Does anyone here remember? Maybe you guys have. But the merchants that I use haven't screwed me over. Now, could they? Yes, they can. But look at the dollar volume of transactions that you do with merchants where you're not needing to actually do a chargeback especially the large reputable ones like Amazon. Amazon is your intermediary, not the credit card company. That could reduce a huge, huge amount of this fraud float

and also the fees involved with a lot of the centralized systems. And now we could possibly use a crypto rail. So I think it hasn't been exercised. We don't know, and I think it is possible, but we haven't tried it yet. Okay. So it's probably a little bit late to tee up a last topic because, but this one that does matter from a tokenization point of view. So yesterday, Paul Atkins, the chair of the SEC, talked about getting rid of a rule called 6-11.

Long story short, that's the rule that was put in. He wrote the dissent against it in 2005. It's the rule that broke the New York Stock Exchange's monopoly on trading, and it effectively means that if someone's posting a price, you have to go to that price. You can't trade it on your own platform at a different price, you know, at an inferior price. And while it sounds great in practice, in crypto, there's none of that. Crypto, there's markets are crossed. They're all over the place. Fees are different.

And yet, Ian and I wrote a comment letter about this months ago. It's on the website of the Crypto Task Force, which basically says that institutions are trading in crypto cheaper than they're trading in equities. And the reason is because with the market, the monopolies, the oligopoly that's happened in the equity world, has created a lot. lot of extra expense. And that expense makes tokenization of stocks very, very difficult. And so this is the first piece. Now, this takes a long time to happen, but it's clearly what they want to do. And if you start seeing that sort of deregulation, that is very, very bullish for convergence of these markets coming together. And I just wanted to point that out. I don't know if anybody cares about it. Yeah, no, it's a big deal because that's the big opening to tokenized assets.

Absolutely. And so I think we'll want to talk about it next week for sure. I mean, look, I have written dozens of articles over the last 20 years about the problems with this regulation and what does it do and all the reasons why it's called the trade through rule and the order protection rule. I don't want to go into the, I'm a market structure junkie. I can tell you that it has created enormous businesses such as, you know, an enormous message traffic and all sorts of things.

And the exchanges, by the way, NASDAQ and NIZ and SIBO all have huge data center businesses because of the requirements of this rule. So changing it is going to be really hard. But if you do, it opens the door for many things. Some are good for crypto. Some are not good. The good is is the markets will be better. The good is the tokens that actually have value will be able to work in that environment. The bad is that you're going to see convergence between equities and crypto businesses and being a security at the end of all of this. It's not going to be a death sentence. It's just going to have rules and hopefully the rules will make more sense.

Paul, is that a new hand or an old hand? Sorry, phantom hand. Not shown on my side. Not showing on my side. Well, in any case, we are more or less at time. I'm sorry for bringing that up. And if anybody has any comments to that, that's fine. And, you know, it is, it's the kind of day where we're looking, you know, for those who are paying attention, you know, Bitcoin is at 64,000 now, which is no big deal, as Gary would say.

But it feels like this is the reverse, you know, this is the buy the news, you know, people had already sold their Bitcoin. Grant just posted your brother. He got, what is it, 1,000 out of 10,000 he asked for in the SpaceX IPO. So it's clearly oversubscribed. So a lot of people sold shit and they're going to probably buy that shit back because they didn't get it. How much do you grant get? 1,000, he said. He posted 10%, which is that.

I'm biased TRC today for the dividend. That's great. That's great though, man. I mean, you got a lot of people got, you know, $2,000 worth of SpaceX. They're in the game. They feel like other rich people. I've got to believe this is going to help demand. Oh, I think.

And if it doesn't, if it doesn't, why are we token? fractalizing assets. That is going to save this economy. If we can distribute an apartment building to 10, a million investors instead of one, the price of every door is going to go up. Well, it has to because most people can't invest in some cities. They just can't. I think you're right.

David, will you make, were you lifting your mic? Yeah, I was just saying buy STRC today for the dividend Monday. Well, you know, STRC's, where was it, 92 a few days ago? Now it's at 96 and a half. 97. Yeah. Okay, well, I'm old. I was looking, you know, I looked like 10 minutes ago.

I mean, look, you know, the panic is subsiding on sailor. And, you know, look, I'll say it again. It's going to, I believe Bitcoin floats into the low 70s within the next week or two. And then we'll see where the next direction is. But we'll find out. We'll see if I'm right or wrong. And I have no huge conviction behind that. It's just what my gut is telling me.

So we'll see. Excellent. Okay, well. See you Monday. A great weekend, everybody. We will see you on Monday. I think it's supposed to be beautiful here. And I hope it's beautiful wherever you all are.

Take care.