The Wolf Of All Streets - The Next BIG Crypto Move? Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee's BOLD Prediction

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

In this insightful episode, we sit down with Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, to explore the future of one of crypto’s most enduring blockchains. We discuss Litecoin’s identity amid giants like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins, highlighting its status as the most transacted cryptocurrency and its impeccable network reliability over nearly 14 years. Charlie shares his views on government adoption of crypto, the evolution of the crypto community from libertarian roots to mainstream acceptance, and the importance of privacy and fungibility in Litecoin’s development. We dive into institutional involvement, treasury companies, and how Litecoin fits into the broader financial landscape. Finally, Charlie reflects on Litecoin’s legacy, its role alongside Bitcoin as “digital silver,” and why it continues to be a practical, fast, and reliable form of money. This episode offers a candid, forward-looking conversation with a true pioneer in the crypto space.

Today I sat down with Charlie Lee, the creator of Lightcoin, to talk about the future of one of the longest running blockchains in the space. We covered everything from Lightcoin's identity in a world dominated by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stable coins. Lightcoin has been the most transacted cryptocurrency, even more so than Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any of the stable coins. To how the network has maintained unmatched reliability for more than a decade. Ever since I launched it in 2011, almost 14 years now, it hasn't had any network issues, which I think is very important for money.

Charlie shared his views on payments adoptions, whether Lightcoin needs a new narrative, and what he wants its legacy to be 20 years from now. People use Lightcoin and those people that may not even know who I am. It doesn't matter who created Lightcoin. It doesn't matter when it was created, why it was created. All that matters is that it's useful to people as money. It's a candid conversation with one of Crypto's true pioneers

about where Lightcoin fits in today's market and where it's headed next. So the first question I have is you've been here since effectively the very beginning. What do you make of the developments of late 24 and 25 where the government is effectively adopted and accepted this technology, this asset class? We have a pro-crypto government. We have legislation going our way. As much as that was part of the vision, did you ever think it would really come to fruition in this quickly? It's been a while, right?

So I've been in the space since 2011. Not the beginning, but very early on. Yeah, I think one of the biggest hurdles that I've always seen is the government could crack down on crypto, right? It could kind of ban it, and that would really hinder adoption. So having, like, the U.S. government really, embrace it is something I didn't expect, to be honest. So it's a very, it's very welcoming.

Yeah, it's totally kind of a surprise, and it's a very pleasant surprise. We have this sort of interesting, I guess, bipolarity where certainly in the early days when you came into the space, it was very much libertarian ideals, you know, rage against the machine, against the government.

This was a way to opt out. And now we sort of have this situation where people, either because they believe it'll help the number go up or they're just excited to finally be in the majority, are cheering, I guess, the adoption by the very entities that they feel it was created to hedge against.

How do you feel about that? What do you make of that? Obviously, we can see a lot of that on chain with a lot of the early Bitcoin whales finding, you know, a reason to sell at these prices. I would say a lot of people cheering it on because of the number grow up theory I think what bitcoin crypto provides is is always ability to opt out right even if the government embraces it it's still the great part is you can

still opt out and do everything on chain and not deal with government bodies agencies controlling your money so that's always a feature of crypto and that I think that's something that makes it very valuable. Yeah, but you're right. Like early on, back when I first got into crypto, I mean, most of people are libertarian very, very much. I wouldn't say like anti-government, but more being able to have control of their own money was very important. And that's what Bitcoin and crypto provided. And that's still the case today. So with that being still the case today, where do you think Bitcoin, crypto in general, sort of sit now in the greater land. escape versus back then.

Obviously, back then it was a fringe. Yeah, I mean, back then, let's say there were like a foul, like in the beginning, right? When I started, there's like maybe a thousand people in the whole space, right? When did you actually get into crypto? 16, so much later, yeah. Yeah, so and out of 1,900 word were libertarians, right? So, but the space has grown quite a bit, right? There's like millions, billions of people in the space right now.

So majority of people are not necessarily libertarians, which is fine. So the space has definitely changed quite a lot. So it's not good or bad, but it is kind of the reality. Yeah, I think that's true. So for you, you're encouraged, obviously, by all the progress that we've made. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've kind of early on, like when I first got. the space I always saw Bitcoin as digital gold as kind of better money something

that is kind of free from government or any corporation control where government or corporations can can inflate away the supply and basically make everyone less wealthy because of that so that's that's still the case and I think yeah it's moving towards becoming the reserve asset of the world, I believe. Even Larry Fink said that, which just blows my mind. The CEO of BlackRock, who would have been like Darth Vader of the evil empire five or six years ago to the crypto community saying that if the government keeps treating their debt this way, that something like Bitcoin could become the global reserve currency.

I mean, the guy sounds like Satoshi Nakamoto. Never thought I'd be in a world where you had that. Yeah. I mean, the government's been, or I should say, like the Fed's been printing, money like crazy the past few years ever since COVID right so it's it's kind of crazy I mean throughout history we've all seen like fiat currencies don't really last more than a couple centuries and the US dollar has been around for a while and I think the kind of the strength of the US dollar has been its kind of

reserve currency asset reserve currency status and that's but it can only take you so far right you can't just keep printing money and the great thing is that we have Bitcoin like coin and cryptocurrencies out there for people to put their kind of wealth in to protect their wealth over time. And we have this sort of interesting situation now where cycles of the past obviously you always saw sort of Bitcoin move and then there was this massive interest in all coins and it was sort of trickle down from the largest market caps down to the lowest market caps. It seems like now almost all the money stays in the stock market or in some sort of you know, basically any way you can get crypto exposure on legacy markets and hasn't really

trickled down so much to the entire all-coin market. Do you think that that is how we can expect things to be in the future, that the majority of the money and interest will be in assets that you can gain exposure to, you know, through your swap accounts? Yes and no. I think I would agree the majority would be there. but we'll still see like the all coin cycles right so i still expect bitcoin to lead away and then during the kind of the peak of the market we'll see like the alcoin explosion i think it'll

still come i'm just not sure that asset number 1,075 on coin market cap will uh you know catch a bit again i don't think we'll be able to i'm not quite sure we'll be able to just throw darts and everything goes up but uh i could be wrong well that's all that's always been the case right there's always it's always a there's always going to be coins that don't go up yeah yeah i mean it's but who knows i mean this we've seen like the four-year cycles for i mean i've seen like three or four of those cycles and it's always been consistent um and this year it's been doing pretty well but yeah who knows if this cycle continues if the cycles continue yeah so let's talk about what you're focused on now like in context of all of this we obviously

have a better environment. You're obviously still very deeply involved in the space. So what's exciting you? What are you actually spending your time working on? Yeah, I mean, I've always been focused my time on like coin, kind of like one adoption, working on like coin, making like coin kind of the best money there is. One of the things I've been working on is a, or at least a privacy layer, privacy fungibility layer on like coin. One thing that that's kind of holding like coin and I would say Bitcoin back, is the fungibility aspect of money, right? I think Bitcoin, Lightcoin has been kind of great sound money

checking all the boxes except for the fungibility part. And by that I mean the part where every light coin is equal to every other light coin. So when you go and spend your coins, you don't have to pick and choose which coin to spend because they're exactly the same. But that's not the case. So that's what you want.

want with good money, right? You want money where every dollar is the same as every other dollar. But it's not the case with Bitcoin and previous like coin because there's history attached to every coin, right? So the recipient, whether it's Coinbase or a coffee shop, could potentially discriminate between the coins you send them and say this is not good money because it came from a dark net marketplace let's say and it's not really well accepted and they can ban you or or block the purchase and that's not what you want with good money so that part is very important fungibility and with fungibility what's required is is privacy one thing we've been working out with like coin is adding the mweb kind of layer on top of light coin which adds mimble wimbo

which is a privacy protocol so what it does is makes like the coin more private more fungible by making the amount blinded so only the recipient and a sender knows how much was sent so this is very very important like right now if I pay for if I get my salary in like coin for example everyone can see on the blockchain how many how much money I make it a month or they can kind of deduce that right so that's not very cool for for privacy of money and privacy for yourself right for a financial privacy so having blinded amounts is important and also kind of keeping others from seeing like where you're spending

money where the money is coming from is very important for privacy eligibility so that's something that we've been working on and just just trying to make like when kind of a better form of money does that in any way erase effectively the history because I obviously the privacy is a huge aspect everybody agrees that nobody should see your bank transactions for example right so knowing exactly what I sent to you how much and why is a a huge violation of privacy. But specifically with Bitcoin, and I don't know for like coin, but what you're talking about

is like if a Bitcoin was sent from North Korea, they're going to know that, or if a Bitcoin was mine dirty, right? We can even have a future where it's like only green Bitcoin or accepted something like that that's been talked about. So is this erase that history effectively or at least obfuscate it away so that people can transact without worrying about what somebody did with that specific token in the past? Yeah, it's to a certain degree, yes, but it's not. It's not full complete privacy.

So certain coins are doing like better, I would say like better privacy than Mweb. But it's, there's tradeoffs with that. So I think for like coin, we're kind of striking the middle ground where it's enough privacy to make it fungible. And so if you're doing something like it's enough for everyday use, I would say, where people don't have to worry about kind of being tracked and also how much money they're exposing how much money they're sending to who. So what then are the other steps that Lightcoin or any other needs to go through effectively to reach another level of adoption, right?

I'm not going to say like full mainstream adoption for billions of people, but I would assume that, you know, there's always kind of the next step and the next step and the next step. kind of getting the word out there is very important. So like you said, there's like thousands of all coins out there, right? So how does, what makes like coin different? Just kind of getting the word out there, getting people to use it,

making it very easy for people to access like coin, whether it's like buy like corn from exchanges, buy from Coinbase or wherever, and also be able to spend it, right? Having like a very good mobile wallet or many different mobile wallets where they can spend their coins, their coins, use Mweb for privacy and fungibility, and all that. Just making it very easy for people to use is extremely important.

Also having places where people can spend their points, right? So Bip Pay, for example, is one of the largest crypto payment processors. They make it very easy for, for merchants to accept crypto and have it automatically convert it to their Fiat currency of choice if they want to. Yeah, and on Bip Pay over the past year and a half, Likorne has been the most transacted Cryptocurrency. Really? Yeah, even more so than Bitcoin Ethereum or any of the stable coins.

So that's very, very nice to see. It's because light coin is easy to use. It's fast and cheap. It's also never gone down. Correct. Ever since I launched it in 2011, almost 14 years now, it hasn't had any network issues, which I think is very important for money. right you don't want well you can't really have the network go down on you when

when you're trying to buy coffee for example so it may not be the it may not be that important for some other coins but for a coin like like coin and even Bitcoin that is acting as a store value and also means of exchange it's very important that the network is is always up and it always works it seems like like coin is always one of the first to be adopted by any new platform. I don't know if it's because you were so early or you had more clarity on the commodity security issue, but I mean, it's not just BitPay, PayPal, I believe, right? Venmo. I mean, Lightcoin is pretty widely available for people who want to use it. I'm sure there's always steps to be more available, but it's one of the ones that's always been there. I think it's a combination of both being early, one of the early coins, and also just being reliable. And like you said, a commodity aspect of it, right? There's no, there's no to very little question about whether or not

like coin is a security. And alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum has also gotten kind of gotten there. I mean, I would say Ethereum in the beginning was much more so in this security, but it has been kind of gratified it in as a commodity. So Bitcoin, Lightcoin, Ethereum, to a certain degree, Bitcoin Cash, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So these four have been kind of have, have, has kind of a certain status of just longevity and also commodity status. So a lot of sites like PayPal, Venmo, when they launch initially, they would pick these four or maybe three or the four and launch with them. So Lycoin has kind of benefited from that and that's great to see. And like when you see it on CNBC and there are mainstream media all

time. Whenever they talk about cryptocurrencies, they show the Lycone ticker symbol. And it's kind have, it's gotten a lot of exposure with, with mainstream, with retail. And I think that's, that's great. So I think the biggest narrative right now in crypto, going back to legacy market exposure has obviously been treasury companies, right? And Lightcoin has been a part of that, obviously, MEI pharma, MEP, which I believe you're on the board of directors, right? Is that the, I haven't dug too deeply into how many treasury companies there are for each asset, but I would imagine the leading treasury company for Lykegon right now. That's correct. There's, there's one out there

there's one in Canada but in the U.S. the largest market, MEP is the biggest one and yeah I've been involved with them since the beginning well not with the company but once they started deciding to do the

like when treasury strategy I've been involved with them and I'm on their board of directors so how does that how is that business now currently structured right because there's always I think people are confused as to how these happen there's reverse mergers there's SPACs. There's some companies that are basically a shell and the treasury company becomes the entire operating business. And then there's companies who actually have a business and are just

adding the asset to their balance sheet or there's sort of two businesses within one shell. So how is this actually structured and what was the process like, I guess, of starting it? Yeah. So this was structured as a pipe investment. So MEP was originally a pharma company, right a health care company they decided to pivot into a light coin strategy like one strategy company so we got a hundred million dollars invested into the company and using that hundred million dollars to buy light coin so right now the the company has a little bit over a hundred million dollars worth of like coin a little bit over one percent of all the all like coin in existence and yeah it's a it's a treasure play so I'm on the board we're looking into other ways to

kind of provide value like maybe in terms of like mining like coin and other things that can help the ecosystem and also help the bottom line for the company it's always interesting to me how these companies form and how they choose which asset they want to make their treasury asset and why so I guess why is like coin a viable treasury asset what was the same specific interest there and you know how does that work yeah so i mean there are like dozens if not more bitcoin and theorem treasuries right so doing doing another one of those is kind of a me too that didn't really seem very attractive like like when being especially like coin being one of the oldest cryptocurrencies and clearly a commodity and a asset class right

made a lot of sense to be the first and to be kind of the like coin treasury company so yeah so with all that and also with my involvement it kind of made sense to do this I felt like having something like this would be good for like coin it's also with the ETF like the like coin ETF being kind of on the horizon but it's been pushed back quite a bit. So having something like this to kind of fulfill the needs of the institutional demand for like coin as an asset class made a lot of sense. And also I think a company like this could help out with light coin itself, right? With a kind of a huge investment in like coin, they're very incentivized to to help the

coin itself grow in terms of adoption and also price. So I think it's definitely a win-win partnership. Yeah, because it's always this balancing act, I think, with treasury companies, with whatever asset on whether you're offering exposure to somebody who couldn't get it before. I think that was the micro-strategy initial playbook, right? We didn't have Bitcoin ETFs. Maybe we had GBTC, but before the ETFs, the reason people bought micro-strategy basically was for Bitcoin exposure when they couldn't get it, right?

So I've got to imagine there's still a lot of people out there who, or certainly institutions that either can't because of the way they're structured or just wouldn't buy the underlying asset because of custody and things like that. So is this basically a vehicle to offer exposure like Micro Strategy was sort of in the early days to the asset since it doesn't have an ETF yet and some people aren't going to buy a spot? Yeah, it is. I mean, a lot of people, not that they won't buy spot, they can't really access the spot market. So this is definitely a vehicle for exposure to the asset class for a lot of people. And so who are the people right now that fit that mold, you know, specifically? Is it foreign investors?

Is it companies in the United States? Is it, you know, sovereign wealth insurance companies? Who do you think is the most interested in this sort of vehicle? I would say it would be like the investors that are kind of, interested in getting to crypto right and are very familiar they obviously aren't able to the ones that aren't able to kind of use crypto exchanges or or store their own crypto in in hardware wallets would would use a vehicle like this that would that would be safe way to invest in in like coin so you mentioned hardware wallets there's this just because i have you

there is obviously the not your keys not your coins ethos that still remains in crypto but was very, very, very much more a part of it in the early days. Now, to some degree, many will argue that exchanges have really upped their security massively. There's a lot more compelling ways to custody or coins. Just generally now, where do you stand on the self-custody versus hot wallet versus cold wallet versus using exchanges, especially I guess when it comes to like coin? I think the most important thing is always that you have the option of custody yourself. right this is not the case for most other assets right so being having the option to do it yourself gives you gives you power um makes it valuable so you can always um custody your

your coins with an exchange or or somewhere else right but just having the option you can always pull the coins out and put into your own hardware wallet and uh protect it yourself is is kind of key to why crypto is so powerful so in a new person comes in at this point, what is the general recommendation on how they should gain exposure to like coin? Like, you know, an average person says, I've been doing my research on crypto. I want some like coin in my portfolio. We still have treasury company. We'll probably have an ETF soon, right? You can just go buy its spot. There's people who will find a way to leverage it one way or another. And then there's, I'll keep it on Coinbase. I'll keep it on crack in, you know, or I'll go find some deeper way to

multi-sig this, how do you recommend that people, I guess, get started? Well, see, that's the best thing, right? There's, like, a lot more options today than there was a while ago, right? When I first started with Bitcoin in 2011, the kind of the only way to access Bitcoin is if you download the Bitcoin client, Bitcoin QT client on your computer and then store the coins yourselves, right, with possibly a password-protected wallet file, and buying an buying coins buying coins from from mount gocks in japan right so that's but today like it depends on your kind of your your comfort level like if i'm talking to someone new who only has a brokerage

account i would say just buy um m a p right if you want access to you like when buy map if you want to access to bitcoin there's some ets you can choose from black rock or or whatever or go with um micro strategy, right? If you want some kind of leverage exposure. So that's easy, right? And then if you, if they're, if they feel more comfortable, they can actually buy spot from coin base, crack in or pick your exchange, right?

And store the coins there. Like you said, the security has been, has gone better. I think like the FTX implosion has kind of help clear out the bad actors in the space. And you're left with. exchanges that are actually very competent at protecting the coins so unless you're putting a lot of your wealth in it if you're just dabbling in it storing it in Coinbase and Cracken is fine in the short term and then once they get used to

kind of crypto sending receiving crypto they can start trying to figure out hardware wallets or using companies like Casa that provides like a solution with multiple hardware wallets to protect your funds So there are a lot of options, right? And that's the best part of it. Depending on your comfort level, there's a lot to choose from. We've had this conversation before, but it's been years since you and I have sat down actually recorded. Not in person, because as I joked, we've seen each other at many conferences and such.

But maybe it's worth revisiting why in 2011 when you came in, you were obviously a passionate Bitcoiner. This was before there were a lot of ideas to launch new things. what made you want to launch like coin and i guess maybe to put it more in present terms why are you still sticking with it in 2025 what keeps you excited what keeps you going what you know what are you looking forward to in the future for it yeah so back in 2011 i kind of was just just got into the space with a software background i kind of was able to understand the code and see how everything takes and i was just playing out the code base there were quite a few other there all coins out there and i kind of just decided to just make one myself and more more for fun

than anything else just to see if i can do something better than what's out there and one of the key features of like coin is is the fair launch i wanted to make something that was not like pre-mined um did not have kind of coins created for the founders um to enrich the founder and um so fairness was very important and i also saw like throughout history, how silver and gold work together as money. People would actually spend silver, but keep gold as kind of the reserve assets, so to speak, for themselves. And I saw like coin being positioned as silver to Bitcoin's gold. And that was kind of the interesting thing about it, having both Bitcoin and like coin kind of worked together instead of competing

against each other. And so yeah, so that's how it kind of like one came about. And it, it, became wildly successful, much more so than I expected. And yeah, I kind of stuck with it. It's like, I built this thing. Now people really like it. I better take this. Kind of, right? I mean, if like coin kind of just sputtered and kind of failed, it would just be,

oh, okay, cool. That was interesting. I learned something new. Yeah. Yeah. And then I worked at Coinbase for four years. And then in 2017, I decided to kind of focus my energy back on like coin. And kind of, yeah, it's been a wild ride, I would say.

Do you still view it with the gold, silver narrative? I mean, to some degree, at that time, stablecoins weren't a thing yet. Right. So Bitcoin was kind of slow and clunky and could be expensive. And light coin offered a much faster, obviously, and cheaper way to do what Bitcoin could do, right? But to do it better, it seems like now we have digital fiat, right? and you could do that fast and cheap, but it's still Fiat. I mean, that's the point, right?

It's still Fiat. So it's not gold or silver. It's not like a commodity. It's not something that the government can't control. It's still, stable coin is still priced in Fiat currency. So if Fiat gets inflated away, your stable coin gets inflated away. So yes, it's fast, efficient, and useful, but it's still Fiat currency. So, like coin is still, I still see the gold and silver analogy.

People use like coin because it's fast and easy to use. use fast and cheap. So it's still the case today. And I think what stable coin provides is if let's say like a merchant only accepts via currencies and stable coin, you can easily convert your light coin or bitcoin, whatever coins you have into the stable coin of choice and spend it. So it makes the kind of the off-ramp simpler where people can store the value in whatever is the best form of money, whether it's light coin, where it's Bitcoin. or some other coin and easily spend it and I think that's that's key do you still consider yourself to be a bitcoiner or a bitcoin maxi even though obviously you created and are building on like coin

yeah I would say so I mean I me too but I they don't they don't allow me I always think like bitcoin is is the king right it's it's going to be the the main cryptocurrency the potentially the world reserve asset right and like coin is kind of the one two punch of crypto with Bitcoin I think the big the term Bitcoin maxi has kind of change over time a lot of like Bitcoin maxis or self-procling Bitcoin Maxis are really like I would call them like Bitcoin extremists they think like it's Bitcoin and nothing else yeah fundamentalists which makes like Bitcoin fundamentalist which is kind of crazy but it makes no sense at all

you're saying like you're basically giving people zero choice right it's like the only money out there will be Bitcoin and nothing else, like no like coin, no all coins, maybe even no fiat currency, right? I don't think that will ever be the case. I think Bitcoin will always always be number one, but there will always be choices for people to use other cryptocurrencies. I agree in the Bitcoin Maxi conversation for sure. It's interesting because, at least anecdotally, when we started seeing these massive sales of Bitcoin, 80,000, you know, by Galaxy and 25,000 recently, these were probably a lot of people that would have been viewed as people who would never sell, right? You know, diamond hands till the end, they made it to 2025, probably from 2009 or 2010, if they're holding that many coins.

And something, whether it was just sheer wealth or age, finally triggered some of them, right, to sell. I spoke to Bruce Fenton about this. I spoke to Yago, like at the times that they were happening, a lot of kind of guys, you get. insight on early bitcoins. And they actually said that a lot of them felt disillusioned with what Bitcoin had become because of the institutional and government adoption. And we're like, okay, well, now I'm rich. Bitcoin's not what I wanted it to be. So I'm going to go ahead and cash out. I guess I can understand that. But what I don't understand is how they expected Bitcoin to become the global reserve asset if it didn't go through those. Exactly. And create adoption.

Yeah. I think like, you know, Yeah, I mean, in order for Bitcoin to become what it is there, even to grow bigger, it has to be accepted by everyone, right? So whether you're a libertarian or not, right? So I think the most important thing about Bitcoin is that you can always opt out, right? You can always opt out of storing your money with an exchange and just storing it yourself, right? You can send transactions. So even it doesn't matter who supports.

It doesn't matter if the government embracer or not. The power is still in the people. So shifting to actually building, you know, which you kind of alluded to the fact that you did it as an experiment, what would you say to people who now are coming into this space, choosing what to build, how to build, where to build. Obviously, there's a ton more tools that seemingly we have infinite blockchains, and a lot of those people still choose to build their own blockchains.

So the lessons that you've learned having created like coin and focused on it for so long. A, would you say, hey, just come build on like coin? Or B, you know, what advice would you give them building elsewhere? Good question. I think starting your own coin is really hard today. Obviously, there's just so many out there. Just getting, in hindsight, starting like coin in 2011 is, was quite easy, right,

compared to what it is today. So just kind of just because there aren't that many out there, it's easy to differentiate yourself from others and getting kind of adoption by the by people back then today if i if i were to start like when today there's no way it would succeed right um really i mean that was literally like kind of my next question was like okay let's pretend you didn't do lycoyd in 2011 but you came here with the same excitement in 2025 would you build it i wouldn't be because there's no way we succeed right there's no way to kind of so the reason why like like when was fairly launched um there's no like it's

almost impossible, I would say it's impossible to launch a fairly launched coin today and have it succeed. Because you would just, you just wouldn't have the capital, right? All these coins today are launched with with pre-mines, with VC backing, with millions of dollars. Yeah, with foundations. Marketing budgets. Like the Lyquem Foundation has very little money, right? It runs off a true string budget. Because we didn't print our own coin. We didn't, we don't have coins to sell to raise funds, unlike like the Ethereum Foundation or any other foundation you can think of right they have millions even billions in their in their um treasury um to kind of hire developers they can hire like hundreds of developers to work on the coin hire marketing team and kind of for

outreach and just getting getting the word out there paying money to get the coins on exchanges stuff like that right that's not something that you needed to do back then but today without the capital just there's no way you can get the awareness debt at thousand other coins incentives are always misaligned with the current. Yeah, I mean, the incentives are misaligned in terms of, like, making it fair money, right? For something to be money, it has to be fair, it has to be commodity. There's no, like, company that controls a lot of it, a lot of the supply. And it kind of, it just doesn't work today anymore.

So we have Bitcoin, we have like coin, we have a few other coins that kind of fall under that kind of moneyness aspect. What else do you think falls under the moneyness aspect? Dare I say maybe DeVosch falls under the moneyness aspect, even though it's a meme and we maybe can't take it seriously, but it does have the theoretical qualities. It should fall in that bucket by those criteria. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think Doge is a coin that would be, it's very fair.

Like Bitcoin and like coin, Doge, maybe a few others, but the main ones would be Bitcoin, like coin, Doge coin. So what do you make then, you know, through the, lens of having been there early of the ways that people have attempted to launch things, the outright speculative insanity of the meme coin cycles, those things. Because obviously when you all were creating this early, I don't think you saw building a huge online casino as part of the future use cases, but obviously speculation has, for better or for worse, driven a lot of the adoption of asset class and the technology.

I do think that's changing and maybe that's dying a little bit. But I'm, let's just say that in 2011, I can't imagine you thought that a president would launch a meme coin two days before he was inaugur. I mean, I still can't believe it today. Same. I actually haven't been following. How well is Trump coin doing these days? I literally have. So maybe that says something that neither you and I can, or I can tell you remotely what the price is at this point.

I'm going to look it up while we're talking. Trump. Well, now we have to look at World Liberty Financial. right, because that launched this week. But it looks like it's $8 and at a market cap of $1.68 billion. And that was at $60 billion on the launch date. Yeah, I mean, I heard he... So that is a wild charge.

I heard he or the team made billions from it. I mean, it's pretty crazy for... I mean, I don't want to pass judgment, but it's kind of crazy to see something like that happen. Yeah, it's the world we live in. What does that say, I guess, about the market? Right, I get the question I'm getting at is that that wouldn't have happened unless meme coins, specifically on Solana,

but meme coins have become such a huge phenomenon that went so beyond Bitcoin and light coin and the original ethos. Because even I got in in 2016 and 17, right? And even for me at that point, even though I didn't really quite understand what I was doing because I came in trading, you had to buy Bitcoin to go get anything else. There was no stable coin pairs, so I bought Bitcoin on Gemini or Coinbase. I sent it to BitTrex, and that's how I would buy Ethereum and, you know, ripple and all these other things that I was very much speculating on the beginning.

That's long gone. Like, you don't have to touch the early coins anymore to get exposure to the market. I think that's been one of the biggest differences. You just buy a stable coin or use your credit card, right? And you can go speculate on meme coins, and you don't even need to know that Bitcoin and like coin ever existed. I mean, I think that's like there's always, every cycle there's, there's euphoria for something. right whether it's meme coins a cycle whether it's um nfts or iCOs in the one of the earlier cycles

it's always something that that gets people in the space and i mean i think the best part of it is it kind of draws people like speculation and gambling and stuff like that draws people in but i hope people actually learn from once they're in in in a space yeah and actually learn about sell money, learn about the OGs of cryptos, Bitcoin, like coin, and see the kind of the importance of that, right? Even though you might come for meme coin, but you stay for for sound money, I would say. Yeah, it's funny. I think, you know, I can only speak of it. Again, I think it was, you were more inclined back then to find your way back because you were holding Bitcoin, right? You were already holding it to trade. So there was this moment I remember, whatever portfolio app I was

using delta or blockfolio or whatever the early iterations or those were where I thought I was making money, you know, and you look at your USD balance and you're like, wow, Bitcoin's going up, alts are kind of whatever, but look at me, my dollar amounts going up, this is great, and then one day I clicked over to the Bitcoin balance, and I was like, holy shit, I have a lot less Bitcoin than I originally bought before I started doing this, right? And I didn't denominate things in Bitcoin, even though it was the base currency of my trading because I just didn't get it. And that was a real light bulb movement.

And then, of course, like, you go through your first bear market and you see that even as bad as Bitcoin is, it wildly outperforms everything else, and you have this deep belief. And that sent me down. It almost was like coping with watching my portfolio go down and the first bear made me go justify the fact that I was still holding it all. And that's when I really found this deep understanding of money.

I just wonder if now the people who come in to buy a meme or an NFT were just people buying a lottery ticket in the first place just aren't the right, like would have never. found their way to Bitcoin anyway, right? It's like, at least we were touching it. Well, it takes, I mean, we don't know for sure, but I think it will take a full cycle. I mean, it always does take a full cycle for people to kind of learn their lessons, so to speak, and kind of figure out like the importance of holding their wealth in something that is more stable than the meme coins, right? So we'll see. I deeply wonder, like, as we're thinking,

through this. Like, what percentage of people who have ever bought some sort of crypto are completely washed out at this point? Like, either they still own it in some dust wallet and haven't thought about it, but or have lost their interest or they got angry and quit? I really bet that's a very, very high percentage. When you consider how many people only bought an NFT or only bought some meme coin? Possibly. Possibly. But I would think people bought like NFT or meme coins actually also have some exposure to, to, they probably have some ether, some salana, right? If they bought, if they bought those things. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So obviously, you've mentioned the cycle quite a few times. So it seems that you're still

a believer that we are in another cycle and that it's intact. So projecting that forward, having been through four or five of these now, is for what do you see coming in the future months, right? If we really deeply believe in the cycle, I think we think fall will be very good. I think the end of the year will be good. I mean, I've always expected us to hit in terms of Bitcoin price, $150K. But who knows, right? It could be, this could be the top today, or it could go to like. You've been here long enough to know that maybe not.

Yeah, I for sure don't know. Yeah, nothing will surprise me. Like, it won't surprise me if next month we drop back down like 80%. It also won't surprise me if it goes like up like 300% next month. So it's always going to be a wild ride, whether it's up or down. It's a roller coaster. You have a long history of being an exceptional trader, though, and reading the cycles well and actually playing them well.

Are you still actively trading and in and out of coins or in and out of the market at this point? Have you become more of a kind of a long-term holder? How do you kind of approach the market now? I've always been kind of buying and selling Bitcoin. I would sit, like, basically, that's all I trade, Bitcoin. But just kind of my philosophy, believe it or not, is buy low and sell high. That's kind of, I know, it's crazy. Mine is buy high and hopefully sell high.

I don't know, which I think is, by the way, a totally good momentum strategy. The problem is most people get in the space at the kind of like near the peak, because that's when they hear about it. Yeah. And then they get wiped out when the price. drops like 80%. So do you think we still have 80% drawdowns in our future? Like there's this notion, obviously, that because of institutional and government adoption, that maybe there's a higher floor, right?

At least at this point, seemingly, there's a lot of people lined up, and very transparently, because we know that these treasury companies have raised money and haven't bought yet, and maybe governments come in, that there are people lined up to buy this on the dip, right? And seemingly, there's still a lot of people who want to buy the dip that maybe would not have been there before. And it's interesting because I think it's a different holder that's providing the floor now. Like maybe those early whales are not interested in buying more Bitcoin at this point when it dips. And those were the people who you always knew would be the buyer of

last resort. Yeah. I don't know for sure, obviously. I think I wouldn't be surprised if we see another 80% drawdown. I mean, you think that there will be people buying a dip. But a lot of those people are actually already heavily invested. So when it drops, their capital is already tied up with, with, there's no drive out. Yeah. So. You had to have sold to be able to buy. So, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I would think over time it becomes less volatile. I mean, I would expect it, right? It's not going to always be this volatile as a, as a kind of the, the market grows. So over time, it will be less volatile. That's what I think. Um, whether or not this, like, there will be a large dip, who's to say?

50% would still be a big dip and that would be really small for a cycle. Yeah. Right? And I think it would have the same effect, especially with treasury companies. I mean, a lot of these guys are going to puke on a 25 or 30% dip at this point or even be forced to. Yeah. I would expect, like, 50% that would be, only a 50% that would be nice. But who knows where, I mean, it could, the price could go up to like,

It could be from 200. Exactly, right? It could be from like 300 to 150%. 300 to 150 and you're like it's a huge dip but it's still higher than today it's that mentally modeling that is always the craziest thing to me you know you always see the memes it's like bitcoin at 100 on the way up and it's like this buff guy or something it's like Bitcoin at 100 on the way down it's like a homeless guy on the side of the street right it's the exact same price and it's within like three months but the sentiment is entirely different around it whether

on the way up or on the way down yeah I mean I think the key is like I would kind of advise against like leverage right that's what that's what kills me right if you're if you're if you're doing leverage even for these treasury companies if you're if you're highly leverage a 50% drop would would kill you and that's not i mean that's yeah and then you're you're right but you lose all your money before you're right because it goes back up do you think that so there's a sentiment that the treasury companies could be the next major catalyst for a future bear market right they could be if they're if they're highly leverage it could be a disaster right it's kind of be like the short squeeze problem right there will be they'll go bankrupt that they're

forced sellers and there will be forced to sell which leads to more price drop but yeah that that could be the the event that would kind of cause the bear market to happen so you sort of mentioned 150 as a conservative i guess top for you know this uh bull market the i know that that's not a very specific guess but i think that's in mind with a lot of people are thinking that said Do you think that when we get future cycles, it's still years of bare market and then these parabolic advances, then years of bare market and parabolic advances? And even if it is that way, how high do you think this market can still go? I mean, are you in the Bitcoin hits a million dollars by 2030 camp?

Or even, you know, there's much more hyperbolic guesses than that, certainly. But we almost have this like Bitcoin hitting a million is inevitable. It might be. It might be. I mean, I think I'm pretty bullish with the whole. market, whether it's a million, like in the next cycle or the one after, I think, I think we'll get there. It doesn't matter.

I think the real problem is not, the real problem is that it's based off of the U.S. dollar, which is being inflated away, right? So, Bitcoin will, will, of course, hit a million dollars if the U.S. dollar keeps, if the Fed keeps bringing more money, right? It's just, it's kind of inevitable because of that, right? And is there, do I see a future where kind of the U.S. dollar can, where they stop printing the money? No, right? I just don't, that feature is not possible, right?

Because with the amount of money we owe, we just have to keep printing more money. And the amount of money we spend, it's just kind of inevitable. So Bitcoin will inevitably reach a million dollars just because of that, not with anything Bitcoin is doing itself. I wonder how much is going to cost to buy a house. or a car or back at that point. Because they should have the same kind of a parallelic growth in prices as Bitcoin has. If it's not unique to Bitcoin, it's just because of the inflation of the denominator. It's really crazy, though.

We've seen it accelerate just as Bitcoiners have predicted since Bitcoin was created. And so no reason to really change the thesis, I think, at this point. So I know we're kind of running out of time here. Let's say it's 2031, 2041. You know, you're looking back on 20, 30 years of like coin. A, where do you think like coin will be at that point? And B, how would you want people to view like coin as a part of the history of money? I'd love to see like coin.

I mean, I expect like coin to still be around then, right? I think like coin has the longevity. It's something that is, it's very decentralized. it's kind of out of my control like I can't I can't kill it I don't think it would yeah so it'll be around I hope to see it kind of still be used by people more and more people obviously and be kind of used alongside Bitcoin as as as money I think the most important thing is that it's it's a good store of value against the US dollar and also it's easy

and fast and cheap way to transact right to spend your money so it really sounds like you don't think light coin needs many more bells and whistles to serve the function that it was intended and to serve a function moving forward yeah i think having fungibility is very important so that's something that we're working on but yeah i mean it kind of it kind of just works and people use use like coin for everyday purchases and the best part about that is people use light coin and those people that may not even know who i am right it's not it doesn't matter who created like coin doesn't matter when it was created why it was created all that matters is that it's useful for two people as as money i think that's the kind of the most important thing

well i know we uh ran up against time i feel like we could do this for hours but i really appreciate that you took this hour with me to talk about it we need to make sure that it's not as long of a break next time. Yeah, for sure. I'll call you at 150, and we'll see if we think it's going to go to 200 or if we're selling. Sounds good. Thank you so much, Charlie. Always a pleasure.

Nice talking to you, Scott.