The Wolf Of All Streets - The Long-Term Bitcoin Strategy | Lyn Alden

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Only a few guests at Bitcoin Miami brought the crowd to their feet, and Lyn Alden was rightfully one of them. The Lyn Alden Investment Strategy is relied upon by fundamental investors around the world who are looking to better understand the complicated facets of a dynamic and rapidly evolving market. In this episode, Lyn Alden gives a detailed overview of all of the fundamental forces at play with regards to Bitcoin and how they relate to other sectors, including equities, bonds, commodities, and more. This episode is a must listen. Lyn Alden: https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact In this episode, Lyn Alden and Scott Melker explore: Grayscale’s arbitrage trade Profiting from Grayscale’s premium The Chinese hash rate migration Volcanoes in El Salvador Bitcoin’s energy consumption What if El Salvador fails? Bitcoin for billions not billionaires What is happening in global markets? What does inflation mean for Bitcoin? The long-term Bitcoin strategy Is a black swan event coming? Retail speculation --- Cosmos: Visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos to learn about the Cosmos Hub and how the $ATOM can connect every blockchain. Cosmos is the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. Find new staking opportunities, applications, or build your own parachain at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos --- Harmony: Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Be the ONE to bridge to all blockchains. Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Their mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and other chains. https://thewolfofallstreets.link/harmony --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Cosmos and Harmony. Stay tuned for more information about both of them later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music,

sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, to get into this episode, today's guest is a fan favorite in the crypto community. If you attended Bitcoin Miami, which I did, there were really only a few guests that brought the crowd to their feet and Lynn was rightfully one of them. I was right in the front row. Known by many in the crypto community for thoughtful insight covering the markets, Lynn has also contributed massive amounts of education to the broader financial sector. On top of founding the successful Lynn Alden Investment

Strategy, Lynn also has an extensive background in the aviation industry, so clearly she can do just about anything. It's my hope today that Lynn will break down the current macro environment and the markets, also help us better understand what's happening in crypto. Lynn Alden, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. So can you start off from the very beginning by helping everyone better understand why you think we just had a 55% correction in Bitcoin price from the recent highs? So I think there are a bunch of different reasons, but I think one of the largest reasons and one of the most underreported reasons was the fact that Grayscale's premium over NAV for the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust went away,

turned into a discount. And so if you look at that fund in the second half of 2020, that was the largest buyer of Bitcoin. They were a massive buyer, bigger than MicroStrategy, bigger than any other buyer, that the sheer amount of coins they sucked up. And part of that was natural demand. People want Bitcoin exposure, so they buy it in their brokerage account through GBTC. It's an imperfect vehicle, but they relied on that. But two, a lot of that was a neutral arbitrage trade. So someone could, accredited investors could buy into the fund at NAV, which basically took liquid Bitcoin, converted them into that fund, made them illiquid Bitcoin. So you had basically off exchanges into their cold storage. And then they would go and short Bitcoin elsewhere.

And then after six months, when that lockup period ended, they could sell their GBT shares for the market price, which was generally trading at a premium over their NAV, and they bought in at NAV. And so regardless of what Bitcoin's price did, as long as there were no tail risks of counterparty issues or something, they would end their Bitcoin short, they would sell their GBTC and they would extract that premium. And it was essentially a risk-free trade. And they could do that every six months. They could take that capital and do it. And whenever they'd finish the trade, even though their positions are off, those Bitcoin

are now permanently in Grayscale's Bitcoin trust, because that's not a redeemable fund. So other than, you know, potentially selling some Bitcoin in order to pay the expenses, Bitcoin never really leave. It's kind of a Hotel California of Bitcoin. And so that was a really big contributor to Bitcoin's price going up. So we had some increased competition at Grayscale. So we had Canada's Bitcoin ETF. We just have generally more ways to access it. So there's a SkyBridge fund, right? So there's institutional, basically custodians. More people are able to just use things like Coinbase or use other major exchanges, right?

So we've seen their numbers go up. And so there's basically fewer people that really need to rely on, say, GBTC trading at a premium over NAV and 2% fee or whatever it is last I checked. And so basically, with that discount gone, that neutral arbitrage trade can't happen. And so the biggest buyer just switched off completely, hasn't been buying Bitcoin. And so if you look at, say, when they're buying one flat, we've had some pretty significant consolidation of the Bitcoin price. And then when you get things like Elon Musk backtracking on his views on Bitcoin being ESG or some of these other things like the Chinese hash rate migration,

which can cause potentially forced selling or disruptions, any of these other things can then come and impact it. But I think part of the underlying thing was essentially that just one of the big sources of demand dried up and therefore the market had to rebalance itself. I mean, now GBTC is negative, right? And so it's actually gone the other way and that trade dissipated. And as you said, that's how a lot of the yield that was being offered in the markets was being offered. How much do you think that leverage played a role in that? Oh, yeah, definitely.

Once those underlying fundamental factors basically just triggered less demand, when you started to have prices going down, definitely those liquidations, those big leverage positions were another big factor, along with Tesla, along with these other kind of headline news. And so they exacerbated the moves. And then therefore, if someone was, say, a momentum investor and they're watching a negative price action, they might get out or they might not buy when they otherwise might have bought. And so that triggers everything until you have people come in, kind of the buyers of last resort and say, no, I'm fundamentally long term interested in this network.

I think, say, $30,000 is a great price. And so they come in and kind of try to hold a floor. And so lately in the past few weeks, it's been kind of testing this floor area. And we'll see how well it holds. But yeah, leverage was certainly one of the big factors as well. I'm curious. You're talking about GBTC, and you sort of touched on the fact it was the only vehicle for a while, right? If you wanted to invest in your IRA, you needed to buy GBTC. If an institution wanted to gain access, maybe they weren't allowed to buy the underlying asset, but they could buy GBTC. Does the fact that GBTC, that Grayscale stopped buying and that we've seen this price action, do you think that's an indication that perhaps institutions were

less excited or are now more hesitant than we believed them to be on the run up? I think it could be, but I think the bigger story is that just the fund has more competition now. And so if you look at, if anyone's familiar with, say, equity closed-end funds, they often do trade at a discount to NAV. That's basically the market's way of kind of factoring out the expense ratio of the fund, which tends to be higher than say passive ETFs, for example. And so if a closed end fund has a 1% fee, it might trade at a 10% discount to NAV. And so you're basically factoring out 10 years worth of the management fees. That's pretty common practice in the space. And so it's actually pretty uncommon for these

funds to trade out a premium to NAF. But Grayscale was because it was such a unique product. It had such alpha to it. And so it was the only game in town for a while. And so actually kind of the natural state is to have roughly zero or a slightly negative discount to NAF. Now, I think when it reaches low as like almost 20%, I think that's excessive. That's pretty uncommon for closed-end funds to do. So there's still kind of an arbitrage trade where if it ever gets really low,

it tends to probably be a trade where you want to maybe go long that fund. And then if you're trying to make it neutral, then you can short Bitcoin. And so until that kind of that compresses a little bit. But overall, I think that, you know, the Grayscale Bitcoin trust going into negative, you know, under NAV isn't necessarily tied to institutional interest. You can have that go negative while there's still interest in other products. Yeah. And when it goes extremely

negative, then you have that mean reversion trade, just assuming that it's going to come back, of course. So how much of a concern then are the future GBTC unlocks? Because now that they're not buying and we know that price has dropped and people are going to have their six month unlock happen soon. What does that mean for the market? So that's certainly a volatility event. I mean, you know, basically, because the Bitcoin is not redeemable from the fund, you know, it's a little bit different dynamics than, say, if they could just kind of redeem Bitcoin or basically if Grayscale had more of a mechanism to sell Bitcoin. At the current time, the only way they sell Bitcoin is they're gradually drawing down their Bitcoin from paying their expenses, but that's at a 2% rate per year. But I do think the lockup periods can add a period of volatility. But I think as far as grayscale is concerned, I think the primary damage is done there. And so I'm kind of looking at other factors like, say, the Bitcoin mining hash rate migration,

as well as anything else on the ESG front, on the regulatory front. Those are factors that I think could move price a little bit more. Then I'm also just watching the underlying network build out, like the things that are happening in the Lightning Network, things that are happening in El Salvador,

the different partnerships that firms like Nidig are doing with banks to make it more access points for the protocol, things like that. What's your take on the Chinese hash rate migration? I mean, I've sort of taken the opinion that it's a short-term pain for a long-term gain sort of situation, or obviously it decentralizes mining out of China to some degree and probably moves more towards renewables, which seems to be the narrative at the moment. What do you think it means if China this time is really banning mining? So that's pretty much the consensus take. And I haven't

disagreed with that at all. I think my opinion on it would match yours. And I've seen a lot of other people express that view that essentially, this can result in some forced sellers. This can result in just kind of a hassle in the space in the near term. But one of the longstanding criticisms of Bitcoin is that by most estimates, more than half of the hash rate was out of China. And so for people that understand the way the protocol works, they know that the nodes actually have quite a lot of power along with the miners. And so we saw that play out in 2017. And so I never considered the hash rate concentration quite as big of a risk as some of the critics would say, but it was definitely still a non-zero risk. It was also, even if it's not a huge technical risk, it'd still

be a narrative risk. It's something that critics could point to. And so if China's hash rate does go down significantly, especially if it goes under 50% or even way lower And so if China's hash rate does go down significantly, especially if it goes under 50% or even way lower than 50%, and the hash rate gets more distributed, that I think is a long term gain for Bitcoin, it kind of removes some of the biggest criticisms. So one is you don't have Chinese coal going into it. And two, you don't have, you know, the threat of, you know, China's government, say, capturing all the Bitcoin miners and then trying to do a 51% attack or something crazy like that. So basically, all of those risks are removed. Now, it also removes some renewable sources, right? So, you know, people use the hydroelectric extra capacity in the wet season to mine Bitcoin. So

that, you know, that's apparently going to be removed. And so I think it's not fully clear how that will affect, say the total energy mix that Bitcoin uses because you're basically taking away one of the dirtiest sources as well as one of the free clean sources. So I think that kind of remains to be seen.

Yeah, I was a bit surprised actually to find out that the Sichuan region, which has been so widely discussed of late, but the shutdown was actually primarily overflow of hydroelectric electricity is effectively free and clean energy, which I did not know. Yeah, my take, and I've seen people that kind of focus on the Chinese grid more than I have, is that basically because China overbuilt a lot of things. And so you naturally had a lot of areas of inefficiency, all this kind of free energy. And so Bitcoin's really good at going to that because it's one of the few sources of energy demand that can go to the source, whereas most sources of energy demand, you have to bring the source to the demand.

And so whenever there's an area of excess capacity, which is essentially free energy, it's otherwise wasted, buyers can go there, get it for super cheap. And basically, it doesn't really impact the environment at all. Now, over time, China's kind of working out the inefficiencies, right? So they do this thing where they'll build a ghost city. And we kind of point out that it's a ghost city. But then a few years later, it's not a ghost city anymore. Eventually, populations start trickling into that city.

And so they overbuilt things. And then those efficiencies kind of get worked out. And so the same thing seems to be happening with their grid, where they're starting to make more connections. They're starting to tap into that excess capacity. And so my understanding is that, you know, that these inefficiencies are probably going to be arbitraged away in the long term anyway, or at least reduced. You know, so hydro kind of always has that issue in some cases where

it's always if you can get near it, it's generally because it fluctuates with wet seasons and stuff, there tends to be periods of excess capacity. But I think China's huge excess capacity is slowly kind of going down anyway. And so as they connect the grid more, as they're able to make use of that energy, I think they, in some ways, wanted the Bitcoin mining out. But I think in the long run, it's not good for China because I think it would be better. All of that, some of those machines, but also some of the personnel, some of the capital. So some of China's entrepreneurs are leaving or otherwise investing elsewhere, which I think is not great for the country in the long term. Right. Talk about the ability of miners to go to the place where electricity is the cheapest or

most abundant. How about volcanoes, right? What's happening in El Salvador and how important is it? I think that's one of the most exciting news because geothermal is one of the cleanest energy sources. Because even if you look at, say, solar or wind, they actually have a lot of environmental downsides as well. I mean, when you take down solar panels or wind, they actually have a lot of environmental downsides as well. I mean, when you take down solar panels or wind panels or wind turbines, we don't really currently have a way to recycle them. And so they just get thrown into landfills and things like that. And so there's still improvements being made in those areas.

Whereas, and even hydro, for example, it basically can damage the ecosystem, right ecosystem because you're kind of cutting off river. And so it kind of reduces biodiversity. It can reduce coastal sediments. Whereas geothermal is actually one of the energy sources that if you have the right environment for it has almost no downsides. And so Iceland gets tons of geothermal energy. And any of these other kind of countries that exist on fault lines can get this pretty attractive, low-cost energy source that really has almost no downsides. And so the fact that El Salvador is exploring that, I think is really bullish. So especially as this hash rate

migration continues, there'll be machines available. And so hopefully either private miners or the state-based energy company there will pursue that. I think that's actually a really good potential energy source for El Salvador because they have that, you know, attractive energy type. And it takes a lot of capital to say, say, if you want to export your energies, let's say your country, you have really good electrical generation capabilities. And then the question is, how can you monetize that? How can you benefit from that? And so, for example, Iceland has a lot of geothermal energy. And so the question is, well, how can we make use of that? We can't export it, right? Because it's a small island, you know, and you can't just run like a huge underwire, like electrical

transmission. And so what they do instead was that, you know, aluminum, refining aluminum is a very electrically heavy process. It requires huge amounts of electricity. And so what Iceland does is, okay, send us your aluminum ore and we'll apply our electricity to basically turn that into aluminum cheaper than anyone else could. And so by doing that large refining process, Iceland is essentially exporting its electricity indirectly. They're using it for a global competitive purpose. And so a similar use case would be Bitcoin mining. So let's say El Salvador says, OK, we don't have enough places where we could build billions of dollars of electrical transmission infrastructure and export cheap energy.

But instead, we could set up some Bitcoin mining operations near some of these geothermal and we could start getting gravity from it. And then potentially, you know, if we find another use for that energy, now we have that already kind of developed and we can just build local lines and kind of tap into that energy more. And so I think that's a win-win. I think that's, you know, the fact that looking into that is almost as important as the legal tender law, in my opinion. So why don't we hear Elizabeth Warren attacking

the aluminum industry? Why is it only Bitcoin that seems to get the attacks about electricity, even though it's obviously misdirection? You talk about something like that. There's plenty of industries that are extremely energy heavy. Why is Bitcoin seemingly the only one that we talk about? And why only when price is going down? Yeah, I think it's one of those things. Bitcoin is inherently not too well liked by a number of politicians. I mean, obviously, some politicians have embraced it, but I think the majority have remained neutral to negative on it. Some of them more aggressively negative on it. There's some jurisdictions like certain parts of the United States or UK in general, the political environment has not been very favorable towards Bitcoin. And so it's one of those things where there's a lot of questionable use cases for electricity that people watching other people play video games on YouTube. We put lights on our house on certain holidays. I mean, there's all sorts of ways that we choose to use energy in a way that just, you know, we choose it. Maybe we want to celebrate

something. Maybe we like how it looks. Maybe we're having fun. That might not be the most productive use of energy, but it is Bitcoin that always seems to get the disproportionate amount of criticism about its electricity. And I actually have an article coming up this summer. I'm going to kind of dive into that because if you run the numbers, there's no situation where Bitcoin would consume a lot of energy unless it's important. And so, for example, if Bitcoin's, let's say for whatever reason, Bitcoin fails, its market capitalization stagnates, it doesn't keep going up. Well, when you have the combination of

the block subsidies going down and the fact that hash rate is largely tied to Bitcoin's market capitalization, it's not as though the network would consume more and more energy despite the fact that it's not become a more important network. And so it would just kind of work itself out. On the other hand, if Bitcoin's wildly successful, it goes up 5x or 10x from here, it would consume more energy, but it would also be ensuring a really important purpose. David Gardner, MD, PhD, MD, MD, MD, So it would be basically backing up these permissionless payments, these ways to store encrypted value. And the way I look at it is, right now, the whole Bitcoin network consumes a small fraction of 1% of global energy usage. And yet it's a pretty

important network. And even in the optimistic cases, when Bitcoin goes up, you add a zero to the price, along with taking into account the block subsidies going down each halving cycle, there's really no world where Bitcoin consumes more than a rounding error of the global energy supply. And so I think a lot of people are not familiar with the scaling math. They're too focused on the energy per transaction, which is kind of, for a variety of reasons, doesn't make sense for this network. They don't include the lighting network. They don't include kind of the purpose of the network. They don't include kind of the purpose of the network. And they don't seem to understand that every four years as the block subsidy goes down, eventually that kind of minor revenue, which is mostly the energy spend, kind of trends towards just supporting the transaction fees,

which tend to be pretty low for the network. Yeah. It doesn't make as good of a soundbite as Bitcoin uses more energy than a small country, right? What you. It doesn't make as good of a soundbite as Bitcoin uses more energy than a small country, right? What you just said doesn't work as well for a 30-second clip on CNBC. Yeah. Unfortunately. Guys, this is so cool. For the first time in history, rather than a company or project sponsoring the podcast and newsletter, a grassroots community is doing it. The Cosmos community is extremely passionate and active. And because of that, cool things like this sponsorship can happen. Their Atom token has been absolutely on fire and solidified itself as a top 50 coin by market cap. And the Cosmos platform has so much in store. Now, if you don't know about them, Cosmos is effectively the port city connecting

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will be providing $4 million in incentives for liquidity mining. Find out more about this program and build something yourself at thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. That's thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. Build on Harmony, run on all chains. So I want to go back to El Salvador because obviously the volcanic mining and the implications of that are really exciting. But to me, what's happening there, the velocity of it is just astounding, right? We had an announcement on a Saturday at the Bitcoin conference. We had a bill basically passed on

Monday. Twitter spaces that night that said, we're not even looking at mining. And by Tuesday, we were mining in volcanoes. But now even more exciting, I think they're going to potentially airdrop $30 into anyone's wallet, and Paraguay, and potentially Panama. Do you see what happened there as really a major catalyst and potentially laying out a roadmap for other similar countries? I think so. I mean, now they have an easier game plan if other countries want to follow this, right? So they're not kind of building it from scratch. And so another thing that they did in addition to the $30 airdrop they're considering, that goes along with the government wallet that they're issuing. And the cool thing is, I mean, they could have chosen to be more kind of heavy handed and say, everyone has to use the government

wallet or everyone has to do this. But they're saying, OK, we're providing a government wallet. The purpose of it is so that, say, say someone has a cell phone, but they don't have a cell phone plan. As long as they're in cell coverage, they're actually that government wallet will work. And so basically, yeah, increases accessibility. But then if someone wants to use a private wallet, either custodial or non-custodial, they can.

It's all interoperable. And so, you know, basically the combination of, as you point out, first they proposed it, they passed it, they talked, you know, someone brought up mining to them and he said, that's a great idea. We'll look into that. And then they were kind of, you know, the president seems to be on board with that. Then the, you know, they're already kind of underway with this government wallet. There's still a couple months left until the law is implemented, right? So there's that, you know, when it was passed, there's that three-month window where they're building it out. It's like anything else.

I mean, the advantage of being a small company is you can potentially move faster than a... If you're a founder-led small company, you can move faster on something than, say, a large company. And so similarly, this smaller country with a leader that has kind of a super majority, they can push things through. Obviously, that can be good or bad depending on the political environment. You could push something bad through if you have a lot of power. But in this case, I think they're pushing something good through.

And so that's moving pretty quickly. Now, it remains to be seen. So other countries, there are other politicians that have expressed interest in this. Generally, if you're looking at other small dollarized countries, especially ones that are reliant on remittances, there's a lot of advantages for them to switch to this. Some of those other politicians, for example, are not in their majority parties. So it's harder for them to get the idea through than this kind of special case where the president's actually kind of a hardcore Bitcoiner, it turns out. That's kind of a unique case. But basically, I think, you know, it certainly opens the floodgates. And then especially if this starts to be successful. So if El Salvador

begins to attract capital, you know, for it, if it does start to make some revenue from its mining operations, you know, then that, you know, the more successful it is, the more it would naturally attract the attention of other countries that are in a similar place. And then the fact that there's a toolbox there, it's like, okay, here's how to do a wallet, here's how to implement it, here's how to manage two currencies at once. El Salvador has described their specific plan of how merchants can accept Bitcoin, even if they don't want Bitcoin, right? So they can exchange it for dollars using that government wallet. And basically the country is going to operate that fund where they can kind of do conversions for you.

And so basically if that ends up being successful, that is a roadmap that others can quickly follow. The thing that I haven't heard anyone discuss really is what if it's not successful? I think that it's so exciting that it's happening. We need it to happen, but we haven't really had the conversation about what if the World Bank really does make it prohibitively difficult to do it or the IMF steps in or the United States government, anyone we know that can obviously have a negative influence or if people just aren't interested and they don't adopt it? What does that mean? I mean, that would certainly be a negative. And I think one of the things that's worth kind of being careful of in, say, the Bitcoin space is hero worship, right? So when Elon Musk bought Bitcoin, everyone loved that fact.

And then so the fact that he then backpedaled on it, people were devastated, right? And so the whole point of Bitcoin is decentralized, it's leaderless. It doesn't rely on any one person, one country kind of making decisions. So obviously, any one thing can be very bullish for it. So the fact that MicroStrategy made it its primary reserve asset was bullish for Bitcoin. It brought attention to it. It got it on CNBC more, you know, things like that. Same thing, El Salvador, this overall news is bullish to it. It got it on CNBC more, you know, things like that. Same thing, El Salvador,

this, this overall news is bullish for it. But we should never, you know, it's never good to, to pin your, say your, your bullish case for it on how it works out with El Salvador. Because like you said, they could have these international organizations make life harder for them and basically, you know, try to, you know, basically hurt them elsewhere. Even they could potentially counteract any gains they get from this. In addition, you know, try to, you know, basically hurt them elsewhere. Even they could potentially counteract any gains they get from this. In addition, you know, they could find out that they do all this and just the population just doesn't want to engage with Bitcoin much. And so it doesn't take off as quickly as some of the bullish people think or that, you know, they otherwise say there's more volatility in the price.

And let's say, you know, El Salvador Salvador is a little reserve they're going to have, goes down in value. Now, I think they're being smart about it. They're sizing things appropriately. And so I think that they're kind of reducing their risk. I think that their plan is pretty well designed from what I've seen to basically reduce risk for users, merchants, and themselves. But I think the two biggest duds would be basically if there's more kind of international pushback or if just it doesn't really catch on. And so right now we see, for example, apps like Strike are the top downloaded apps in the country. So there is this big push at the moment.

But it's possible that, say, a year from now, not as much of the population is using it as we thought or that it's just kind of stagnating and the news didn't really catch on. Maybe they don't really move as fast as people think on the Bitcoin mining or something, and that the economic prospects don't improve. So overall, I'm optimistic, but I don't think that Bitcoiners would do well to basically pin their hopes on the success of one historically troubled nation. Yeah, I mean, we learned it, as you said, from one historically troubled man. Yeah, I mean, we learned it, as you said, from one historically troubled man. No, I like Elon Musk.

But really interesting what you just touched on. And I've kind of vacillate on this myself. We cheer this institutional adoption and the billionaires coming in, but to some degree that does counter the ethos of why a lot of people got into Bitcoin, the little guy. And actually, I believe your talk in Miami was called Bitcoin for Billions, not billionaires, right? So how do we sort of resolve that bipolarity of allowing,

being excited that institutions and Wall Street and billionaires are buying because the number goes up, but also realizing that could eventually price out the little guy who this is best for or something like that. So I think, I mean, there's a couple layers to that. So one is I don't view much of a risk of being priced out because, you know, people can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin and then the Lightning Network can also, you know, keep it cheap to operate, even if on-chain fees become kind of persistently high. And so especially when people think in terms of stats, instead of, say, full Bitcoin, they can still use the network even if Bitcoin goes to half a million.

So that doesn't exclude someone from using it. So you can still use it for small remittances in El Salvador, regardless of what Bitcoin's price is or how many micro strategies buy into it. And so that's kind of the well-designed aspect of Bitcoin. And I do think that there is some kind of cultural conflict there between making it a corporate asset versus this kind of cypherpunk asset that it started as. I would say that for Bitcoin to be successful in the long run, one of the things it has to do is have a pretty persistent fee market. So as the block subsidies come down in the next couple of halvings, Bitcoin will be increasingly

reliant on generating enough fees to reliably have some persistent, there's no kind of exact model for how much of a market cap that should be spent on security, but it should be notable. And so in order for Bitcoin to persistently fill those blocks, you'd probably want it to be an over $1 trillion asset by the time those next couple of halvings occur. And so Bitcoin doesn't have to reach $10 trillion or $100 trillion to be successful, but it does have to reach a certain scale that the blocks are persistently full, that there's a lot of on-chain demand, and that those fees are kind of high enough to ensure security for the network. And so in that sense, Bitcoin adoption by larger entities helps secure the protocol over time, helps raise the

success of that asset. Pot know, potentially if it reaches more people, you know, if there's kind of firms that are kind of rebalancing, right? So say they have like a 5% Bitcoin position and they're rebalancing, that could potentially reduce volatility. And so I think that those two worlds can still benefit from each other, even if they could have entirely different purposes of using it. And so obviously there are some investors that are really focused on number go up. And so they want institutional adoption and that's kind of their biggest goal. Whereas other people, you know, like the person I spoke with, Elizabeth Stark, who the whole purpose is to build out the network, build out the lightning layer, make it more accessible for

people in emerging markets. You know, for them, for the most part, it doesn't really matter what the price does, especially because, you know, they might even not be holding actual Bitcoin. They might be using the monetary network portion without even holding the underlying asset. If they do hold the asset, obviously, it would benefit from them if they go up, even if it's because corporations are buying it. But I think there's kind of those two separate, there's Bitcoin, the asset, there's Bitcoin, the monetary network. And at least at the bare minimum, corporations buying into it doesn't really hurt the little guy. It either benefits them or it's irrelevant. Yeah. It can't become a global reserve asset if that's what the maximalist community believes

or wants or what the community believes without everybody touching it. It can't happen. So I guess there really isn't that much of a bipolarity when you think about it at scale like that. And what you touched on is actually the age old debate that I've never gotten a clear question for is what happens to Bitcoin miners when all of the supply is mined? Right. I mean, you touched on it, obviously, the transactions hopefully will carry it. But, you know, what's the incentivized to be a miner or secure the network if the mining rewards are gone?

Yeah. So basically, as the block sub is come down, if you look in Bitcoin's history, the percentage of the market capitalization spent on security every year, even though it's generally gone up over time, it's been a smaller and smaller percentage of the market capitalization. And that's because the block sub is going down. And so in the very beginning, the fee market was tiny because the blocks weren't really full. Then when we got to the stage where blocks were more full, you have this kind of variable, there's always some transaction fees in a block, but it can vary quite significantly. So in 2017, you reach pretty high fees as a percentage of market cap. You got up to something

like 0.75% fees that year as a percentage of market cap. Other years, it's been lower. And so no one really has a great model for how much security is needed in order to make it secure against 51% of tax. But generally, you'd want some persistent non-zero fee revenue. You'd want it to be maybe persistently half a percent of market cap or higher. That's the number I'd like to see as a healthy market. I'd be concerned if it was maybe persistently less than 0.5% of market cap or 0.3% of market cap. And so it doesn't have to be super high. It just has to be persistent and present enough. And now the way that the Bitcoin network works is that there are difficulty adjustments. So if minor revenue goes down, those difficult adjustments go down to ensure that it's

always an incentive for more hash rate to come onto the network if needed. And so overall, I don't view a major security threat, but I do think that it's one of the things to watch. Basically, I've had an article on it because it is something that I think doesn't get enough attention and is something that we do have to pay attention to because in order for Bitcoin to be successful, it has to persistently be large enough to fill blocks and generate a non-zero amount of fees as the block subsidies eventually go down to being a negligible amount of the security budget. So I'm curious, sort of pivoting a bit, obviously, that was quite a conversation about Bitcoin. Where does it lie now in context of what's happening in global markets? Obviously,

the last 18 months have been arguably a black swan, obviously, with COVID, but the world seems to at least be coming out of it economically, to some degree. Do you believe inflation is transitory? Do you think that Bitcoin still will continue to have the narrative of being an inflation hedge? Where do you think, I guess, it fits in to the macro outlook at the moment? Yeah. And so the question of inflation being transitory, I think it has to be broken into a couple of different parts. And so one is that people are often using transitory in ways that they contradict someone else's uses of the term. And so I like to separate into transitory in a rate of change terms and transitory in

absolute terms. And so if prices, say there's like a bottleneck somewhere and prices temporarily go up, but then that bottleneck is resolved and prices go back down. That would be a transitory thing. It was a kind of a one-time thing. It's gone now. We go back to normal prices. However, if prices go up due to that, and then they don't keep going up, they eventually level off, but they stay at that new level, that means that inflation was transitory in

rate of change terms, but not transitory in absolute terms. And so generally in history, when we see these large increases in the broad money supply, and so, for example, for people, you know, back in 2008, people talked about, you know, the risk of hyperinflation because of QE. But mostly that was increasing base money that was staying in the banking system. It's not getting out into the broad money supply. What we saw in 2020 and to a lesser extent in 2021 is that the combination of fiscal spending with deficit monetization increased the broad money supply at a rate that we haven't seen year over year since the 1940s. And even though that, again, that money supply growth rate is leveling off, it's not going up

at the same rate that it was last year, but that money is not being taken out of the system either. We permanently have a higher level of broad money. And so it's natural that we're seeing on average a permanently higher level of prices. So we had this big kind of stepwise increase in prices. I think the big question now is not whether or not those prices will come back down. I think most of them will not. When wages are sticky, when Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola and Chipotle raise prices, those are sticky price increases. The semiconductor shortage is not really kind of abating anytime soon. Some of these supply chains have to be reorganized. Furniture things are up like 10%, 20% year over year in terms of prices. And so you can have individual prices

come back down, like lumber, for example, got way too high and it's naturally coming back down. But I think a lot of these prices won't go back down to their starting point. And so I think the bigger question is, will this rate of change continue? And I think that the rate of change of inflation is cooling off now. So I think we had this kind of a lot of the fiscal stimulus is behind us, right? So people are not getting more stimulus checks. They're not, you know, they're still getting some, to say, child tax credits. You know, Congress is still working on an infrastructure bill, for example, but that's kind of a slower rollout of that money. It's not like an adrenaline of getting a stimulus check into the market. And so I think that that rate of change is probably slowing down, but that I think longer

term, the inflation rate will probably still be above interest rates. You can get on bank cash or sovereign bonds like treasuries. And so there's, you know, that it's a high enough inflation rate to basically still be a devaluation effect on your currency over time. And then in addition, you know, this kind of round of inflation we saw happened without oil prices going high. And so historically, most of the big inflationary pulses are from higher oil prices, or at least that's a big component because it's by far, compared to every other commodity combined, oil is a much bigger market. And it impacts everything from transportation to manufacturing to energy costs, all sorts of things. And so this whole thing happened with oil just kind of returning to where it was pre-pandemic. And so we've also had, for example, companies around the world have reduced their oil capex. And so supply is a little bit more limited. And so going forward as these emerging markets,

for example, which are now the biggest sources of oil demand, as they come out of these lockdowns, as they come out of the pandemics, as their oil demand kind of trajectory comes back online, I think we could see kind of persistently higher oil prices in the years ahead. It'll have ups and downs. But I think that, you know, we've been in this kind of 13-year oil bear market, depending on where you measure it from, like 2008, especially the past five, six years, ever since, you know, 2015, we've been in this oil bear market.

And I think that, you know, say the next five years, next 10 years, we've been in this oil bear market. And I think that, say, the next five years, next 10 years could be a lot more positive for that market than this past period. And that would be a generally more pro-inflationary environment, especially when you compare it to how low yields are on bank accounts and treasuries. And so basically, the idea of something like gold or Bitcoin or these other kind of hard assets is that in an environment of negative real yield, those harder assets generally hold up pretty well compared to holding large amounts of fiat currency. Now, fiat currency can still be useful tactically. You can still, you have to pay your short-term obligations, but in general, you wouldn't want

to hold it for many, many years for a large percentage of your assets. Yeah, it's interesting. My friend Mike McGlone at Bloomberg has been pretty consistent in sort of making the point that you just made, which is that if you look at commodities, they're somewhat sort of inherently deflationary through all of this, is that it's just not really happening. And then you look at gold, which is basically at a 0% return over the last year, right? And it makes Bitcoin look like such an astounding trade when you take that in content, since a lot of people view it as a sort of a commodity or hard asset, as you discussed,

and not as a currency. But what you're saying is that inflation will continue. And we just don't have the high bar that was so absurd over the last year. It kind of makes you shake your head when you think about it, because even if inflation is far greater than it was a year or two ago, people view it as a positive that it's not as bad as when it was the worst. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, what does that mean for Bitcoin moving forward, do you think, in that environment? I think if this negative real yield environment continues, then it should continually be good for assets that have some degree of scarcity. And so if you look back with even the past 10 years, so the longer end of the treasury curve generally had yields that were at or above the official CPI inflation rate, at least,

whereas T-bills were below the inflation rate for most of the past decade. And so now going forward, both T-bills and T-bonds have their yields that are below the official inflation rate, let alone any imperfections in that inflation rate to kind of truly capture real inflation. And so as long as that persists, that is pretty good for real assets. And I think that Bitcoin is one where the majority of the world can access it. So not everyone can access stocks, especially in emerging markets. But anyone with a smartphone, which is something like 4 billion people now, can access Bitcoin. And so some of the most inflationary effects are not even in developed countries. And so, you know, right now, the lowest areas of inflation are in places like Europe or Japan. Then you have higher inflation

in the United States because we, you know, we increased our money supply at a faster rate. But then when you go out into a number of emerging markets, they have higher levels of inflation. And those are environments where, you know, I think that there's a much easier case even for holding Bitcoin. I think the case is really good in developed markets. But for example, if I was in Turkey, if I was in, you know, Argentina, if I was in Brazil, if I was in any number of these countries, you know, as volatile as Bitcoin is, it's more attractive than holding large amounts of the local currency. And so I do think that these forces will be continually beneficial for the protocol over the next five, 10 years.

Do you think that we could ever see that hyperinflationary environment in the United States? So my base case is not for something like hyperinflation. There are kind of outcomes where it could happen. It's a non-zero risk. So generally, for hyperinflation to happen, you need a couple of variables. So we see it often in emerging markets. It's exceedingly rare in developed markets. And that's for a couple of reasons.

One is there is a large amount of debt out there. And that debt kind of represents demand for that currency. Because when you have dollar-based debts, the only thing that can extinguish that debt is a dollar. And so there's debt in the United States. There's also at least $12 trillion of foreign debt that is based in dollars, let alone all the debt they have in their own currencies. And so there is this kind of persistent demand for dollars and for euros and for yen. The second thing is that when you look at hyperinflations of the past, generally, if you look at emerging markets, they often have

obligations that they can't print. So they have, say, dollar-based debts, even though they're Argentina and they don't have a way to print dollars or acquire dollars. And so their local currency ends up hyperinflating as they risk default, as they risk kind of a financial crisis. The second case would be, say, like a country that lost a war and that their productive capacity was extremely damaged, like Germany. Or if you do social practices that can badly damage the productivity of a country like, say, Zimbabwe. And so apart from those extreme events that really kind of collapse the productive base, it's hard to get hyperinflation in a country that controls its own currency.

Now, especially because hyperinflation is defined as 50% inflation per month, which is basically currencies quickly becoming useless. So even by that metric, even something like Argentina is not hyperinflating. It's just having superinflation. It's kind of rapid like Argentina is not hyperinflating. It's just having superinflation. It's kind of rapid inflation, but not hyperinflation. And so the United States, if you look back in history, the highest inflation we reached was about 20% year-over-year, which is obviously quite problematic, but it's nowhere near 50% a month.

And so I can envision environments that are, say, pretty high inflation, but you'd have to do something structurally pretty problematic in order to get hyperinflation in one of these developed countries. You'd have to destroy the productive base enough that that currency becomes rather worthless. That makes perfect sense. So I'm curious, for your average investor, I know you do a lot of educational work. And, you know, we've always seen this sort of structure in the United States, you get your 401k and it gets matched by your company, or you invest in your Roth IRA and equities, and you assume that 40 or 50 years down the road, you'll have accumulated some wealth. Do you think that that's a viable approach

for people investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Do you think that that timeline and that sort of historic approach is correct? You mean if they start, for example, including crypto- Dollar cost averaging in Bitcoin for 30 years or in other assets, or if you have a self-directed IRA, putting it into those classic vehicles, something like that. I think so.

I think for most people, most people should not be professional traders, whether it's crypto or whether it's traditional assets like stocks and bonds. And so generally the best approach is dollar cost averaging over time. Now, the difference between something like an S&P 500 and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is a single asset. You're betting on the adoption of this specific network. And so, for example, I'm generally not one of the people that argues that people should put 100% of their net worth in Bitcoin or other cryptos. But as a slice, maybe owning their own home, maybe having an equity portfolio, maybe having some commodity investments, whatever they are knowledgeable in or bullish on, I think

that dollar cost averaging into something like Bitcoin, in addition to those other slices, can be an important part of, say, a long-term strategy, as long as they're continuing to be bullish on that network. Yeah, I want to go back to the other conversation a bit about hyperinflation, about the United States. I mean, obviously, there's the famous sort of analogy Taleb always touched on it, you know, you light small fires to prevent the big fire, right, to clean out the underbrush and all the things. It seems like our governments never learn, right? We keep doing it, keep doing it, crash, repeat it all again, crash. Do you think that we have an inevitable black swan event coming at some

point again, because they haven't learned their lesson or basically repeating the same behaviors of the past? Or can stocks really just kind of always go up and they can continue this path? There's a couple of factors. So one is, you know, I think 2020, as you point out, was a good black swan because it shows, you know, not only what a pandemic can do, but it's also specifically what any sort of disruption can do to a system that's this highly levered. And so it wasn't specifically necessarily the pandemic that caused a lot of what we saw. It's that people had so much debt, companies had so much debt. And basically, so any disruption to cash flows results in rather quick insolvency. In addition, because the United States has run structural trade deficits for so long,

we built up a deeply negative net international investment position, meaning that the foreign sector owns more US assets than Americans own of foreign assets. That includes, for example, the foreign sector owning a large amount of treasuries. And so when there was a dollar shortage during that period in March, the foreign sector had to sell some of their U.S. assets, including treasuries, in order to get dollars. And so what we saw, for example, is the treasury market became illiquid. It literally broke. And so it's funny.

For anyone watching, I mean, basically, it's one of the most liquid markets in the world, one of the deepest markets, one of the most kind of safe markets. And there are essentially massive bid-ask spreads in that market. It basically was essentially a broken market. And so the Federal Reserve had to come in and buy a trillion dollars worth of treasuries with new bank reserves in a three-week period. And then they slowed it down after that. But basically, they had to reliquify the treasury market. And so that shows an example of kind of how these systemic things have built up. We have such high debt levels. We have such large kind of dislocations in net international investment positions that these sort of disruptions can result in kind of the requirements for massive kind of responses. And so overall, there's a couple kind of tail risks that could end this.

So one is this whole kind of post-2008 period of basically constantly increasing central bank balance sheets, of running these sort of policies, is that we've a, generally a commodity bear market for this whole time. And so for anyone familiar with the commodity market, you go in big cycles, right? So there's, there's, you know, there's too much supply brought online. So you get a, you get a crash. And then eventually there's, there's not enough people investing in the space. And so eventually demand catches up to supply prices go up,

more people come into the space, but then they overbuild and it kills the price. And so, you know, from, from the early twos up till 2008, we were in a pretty strong commodity bull market. And so when we had the global financial crisis, that kind of damaged the oil market. It rebounded a little bit for a while. Copper kind of hit a peak, I believe, in like 2012 back then. So it was a little bit later. That's kind of the China's growth rate started to kind of slow down after that. And so that kind of resulted in a weaker commodity environment. And so ever since those few years, especially since 2012 for copper, especially since oil kind of fell off a cliff in 2014, we've been in a weaker commodity environment.

And so that's actually been a pretty strong deflationary force that has allowed for a lot of this kind of money printing to occur. Now, if you were to try the same thing in a decade where commodity markets are a lot more tight, well, you could quickly kind of run into more stagflationary problems or have inflation running hot, even different ways of measuring it. Even if you kind of measure it in a way that's not perfect, it's enough inflation that even those metrics are showing pretty high inflation, like we're seeing now with, say, 5% year-over-year prints. And so if we get into an environment where oil prices are going up and these commodity prices are kind of persistently high, that could put a

check on the ability of these central banks to continue what they've been doing. And so that could push down valuations of, say, growth stocks, for example, right? Because part of why growth stocks are so highly valued is because inflation and interest rates have been pretty low for a long time. And so you can factor in a pretty low discount rate when you're kind of looking out at these long-term cash flows of these growth stocks. And so I think that some of the tail risks for currency devaluation would be a stronger commodity bull market, and especially some of these countries that are reliant on importing commodities,

or like in today's case, we're very reliant on importing manufactured goods. And so I think that you can have some pretty big currency dislocations when you have persistently 3%, 4%, 5% inflation while you're trying to hold interest rates at zero. And so I think that we are due for ongoing currency devaluation. Yeah, in the United States, we need those slap chops and salad spinners imported from Chinese factories, of course, our consumer goods, as you said, we need them. That was a much more, by the way, what you just described was a much more eloquent summation

of what Mike McGlone had to say and what I was trying to say about commodities earlier. And that was actually it. But when you step back, if you're an average person and you listen to what you just said and the complexity and the balance between all of these factors, it sounds like a game. And it sounds like when you understand that any single one of these spaces having a crack in the

facade can collapse the entire thing, it's really scary. I mean, it's really scary. And I think that your average person just has no idea. I agree. And it goes back to, I often like to talk about Ray Dalio's conception of the long-term debt cycle, which is the idea that every 50 to 100 years, you have so much debt pile up in the system that you generally get a currency devaluation and kind of a big reset of a lot of things. And I think the reason why this period is so crazy is because ever since around 2008, we've been in this kind of, by most metrics, the apex of a long-term debt cycle. And you have to go back to the 1930s and 40s in many countries to find a similar level of indebtedness and similar kind of dynamics of central banks hitting the zero bound,

you know, doing the types of fiscal policies they're doing. And so it is kind of a crazy macro environment. And so when you have these sorts of environments, historically, you know, people pay more attention to macro, people pay more attention to investing. It's not always a good thing because people can get you forked, they can lose money. And so, for example, an often described case is that in the Weimar Republic, and I'm not saying this is like that, but I'm saying in that example, in the early stages of that inflation that was happening, you had a lot of speculation in the stock market among retail investors. And so, because they started to get the early signs of it, right? And so, they might have not known what was happening, but they knew that, hey, assets are going up a lot

as denominated in our currency. And so why not buy assets? And so that was kind of a popular thing to do. And so that tends to kind of go along and it's kind of the whole kind of constant of a crack up boom. And so while I wouldn't describe the current situation as anything like that,

I think that we are in kind of an unusual macro environment of persistently negative real yields on cash and bonds, a lot of speculation. And so I think that it is a very challenging environment for investors to navigate. And really, one of the only ways around it is to try to be somewhat diversified, to try to have their own financial situation as robust as possible. So they live below their means, they diversify their income sources, they make debts manageable, either no debt or appropriate types of debt, like say a fixed rate mortgage or something like that. And basically, just try to navigate that without running into a major wall somewhere. But it is

challenging because in most environments, you should just be able to save money, you should be able to, you know, hold conservative investments, and you shouldn't have to worry about, you know, the dollar index compared to other currencies. You shouldn't have to worry about what the net international investment position is. You shouldn't have to worry about trade deficits. The normal person isn't a professional investor and shouldn't really have to pay attention to that sort of thing. But it's just unfortunate that the environment that we're in is just more extreme than normal because of where we are in the debt cycle. I literally like two hours ago did a conversation with Jamie Rogozinski from Wall Street Bets on Real Vision. And that was basically the context where it was talking about

this new wave of retail speculation. And I wonder if that's subliminally what's happening, right? Because I don't think your average person sits around all day and thinks about the devaluation of the dollar. But I do think that they feel it in their day-to-day life when prices get more expensive and maybe they start to gamble a bit more to try to get ahead of that. I mean, do you think that that is what the GameStop and the AMC and the Robinhood trading and, you know, Davy Day Trader, do you think that that's underlying what we're seeing there

with this tremendous increase in speculation by retail? Is it similar to what you were talking about in the 30s? I think that, yeah, that's a big factor. I do think that basically the growth of the money supply kind of encourages this sort of activity, even if they're not aware, even if they can't tell you how much the M2 money supply went up over the past 12 months, they feel it. They feel the price is going up. They're getting the stimulus checks. You know, they're just kind of responding to that as you'd expect. In addition, I think it goes deeper than that because it's also kind of a distrust of institutions that generally kind of tends to accompany these kind of long-term debt cycles, right? So anyone familiar with the book, The Fourth Turning, for example, knows these kind

of, you know, rotations that can happen in terms of, say, rising populism and lower trust of the establishment. And so we've been in an environment for the past decade where the economic recovery in most countries was not very robust. So the United States, Japan, Europe, emerging markets in general, except for a handful that did very well, most of them have kind of had a pretty slow recovery. There's – especially in the United States, there's very high levels of wealth concentration, higher than normal in history. We have to go back again to like the 1920s to kind of find a similar environment. And so, you know, with all those factors, even though say financial assets recovered very well,

I mean, the S&P 500 got to new all-time highs and then blew past those all-time highs, even though the economy kind of, you know, didn't spring back very quickly in the past decade. And so people feel, they kind of acutely feel the separation between financial assets and the past decade. And so people feel they kind of acutely feel the separation between financial assets and the real economy. And so they kind of feel like it's rigged against them. And I think in many ways they're correct. And so there's kind of that natural tendency of,

hey, you know, you know, like Wall Street bets, like we can go in and stick it to the hedge funds. We can go and kind of, you know, do similar things that they're doing. And so I think that's kind of naturally playing out. You have that kind of anger towards the establishment, as well as that kind of general sense that currency was devalued this past year. And that in some ways, it makes sense to kind of go into assets rather than just hold that cash. Again, it's just scary how cyclical it is and predictable. And that once again, people and the government sort of never learn. I mean, there's people who have made the argument.

Obviously, I'm a huge fan of Jeff Booth, who I've had on here before. But maybe in 2008, they shouldn't have bailed out the banks. And they should have allowed the system to be a free market and react in a natural manner. And that that's sort of what's been the catalyst for all of this. And so inevitably, we will have this huge event next, as opposed to the little fires stopping that big fire. What do you think the world would look like if we had allowed a depression or a longer recession at that point? Do you think that 10 years down the road, we'd be in a better or worse situation? So there's so many variables there that it's hard to say, because when you have that sort

of extreme environment, you can get even more extreme politics, for example. And so on one case, we never got to the high unemployment rates we saw during the Great Depression. We generally saw employment rebound somewhat faster. Now, one thing I'd like to point out, though, is that there are shades of bailouts, right? So for example, when the economy is that sort of illiquified, right? So if you look at how much debt there was in the system relative to the broad money supply, you can basically kind of soften the blow a little bit without bailing out the

people that caused it. And so an example would be, say you look at General Motors, for example. And I'm not saying it's a perfect example, but it's an example where they were kind of bailed out, but equity holders lost everything. So people that took that risk, they were bailed out. The company basically went through bankruptcy but was not liquidated in a way that they might otherwise have been, and then they were kind of re-IPO'd. Whereas if you look at the banking system, a lot of these banks that imploded, the vast majority of them stayed in businesses. Their CEOs got golden parachutes, right? So they ran their company to a ground, then they left for the $100 million. And while literally someone who took out the wrong type of mortgage lost their house, for example. And so multiple parties there

made mistakes, but it basically turned out that if you made a mistake while rich, you did fine. Whereas if you made a mistake while you're poor, middle class or working class, you had to face the full consequences. So basically what you had was socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And so there were ways that you can say, stop the whole banking system from, say, collapsing, but equity holders get wiped out. CEOs don't leave with golden parachutes. And so basically you kind of, you know, punish a lot of that behavior while still kind of, you know, maintaining some semblance of order as that kind of debt works itself out. And so, you know, my approach probably would have been somewhere in the middle there to kind of avoid some of those big problematic blind spots.

But I think regardless of how it could have gone, the way that it was gone was one of the worst outcomes because you only build out people that run the higher end of the spectrum and especially the people that are responsible for what happened. I have a feeling that's what we can look forward to in the next event like this as well. I don't think that that will ever change, unfortunately. I know we kind of ran out of time here, unfortunately. So there's a lot more that I wanted to discuss. But where can everybody follow you after this and keep up with what you're doing? So I'm at Lyndalton.com. I have like public articles, free newsletter, also low cost research service. And then I'm active on Twitter at Lyndalton

Contact. Well, thank you so much for doing this. It was so much insight and not even necessarily the direction I expected the conversation to go in, which is always when they're the best. So thank you so much for taking the time. And like I said to you before and in the intro, I was in the front row and your speech, and I was one of those people giving you a standing ovation. I thought it was really spectacular. I absolutely love what you do.

I appreciate that. Thank you.