We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC104: The US FED & Treasury Need Bitcoin w/ Luke Mikic (Bitcoin Podcast)
Episode Date: November 16, 2022IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:14 - What got Luke into writing profound articles around Bitcoin. 02:48 - Luke's opinions on various long-term cycles. 06:30 - The comparison to the 1930's and 4...0's. 06:30 - Thoughts on wealth inequality. 17:15 - Historical Inflation Tipping Points. 23:52 - Currency wars and where we are in that dynamic. 29:04 - The quandary of Government treasuries potentially running out of buyers for their bonds. 29:04 - How the growth in stable coins actually demonstrates to world leaders why they need Bitcoin. 29:04 - The Bitcoin Milkshake theory. 33:32 - How stable coin operators become buyers for government bonds. 35:28 - The Green Swan Event. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Luke Mikic's Twitter. Luke's Article: The Big Bang to End all Cycles. Luke's Article: The 202s Global Currency Wars. Luke's Article: The 50th anniversary of the Fiat Fiasco 1971 - 2021. Luke's Article: The US Will Weaponize the Dollar by Backing it with Bitcoin. Luke's Article: Is This Bull Run Bitcoin's Final Cycle? SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover SimpleMining TastyTrade Daloopa American Express The Bitcoin Way Fundrise USPS Found Onramp Facet Public Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast.
Every so often you come across an article that really makes you think hard about what it is
you think you know and understand.
For me, this recently happened with an article from today's guest, Mr. Luke Meekich.
As you'll see during this interview, Luke is an extremely thoughtful individual and he has
some incredible thoughts when it comes to Bitcoin, stable coins, U.S. treasuries, and what might seem like
an unsolvable problem for any sovereign debt issuer. So without further delay, here's my chat with Luke.
You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish.
Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Luke. And like I said in the introduction,
we're going to talk about all these prolific articles that he has written through the years.
Luke, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to be here, Preston. I'm a long time.
It's none of the investors podcast, so thank you for having me.
I'm a little disappointed.
It's taken me this long to discover some of your writings because these things are epic.
Like, I've been going through it and, like, I just can't believe the depth and breadth that you go into in your articles.
People who are listening to this, I'll have all these articles in the show notes.
You've got to go through these things because you leave like nothing unturned and you provide what I love about it is you are able to zoom out into the
really big picture and you're able to then drill down into the really important parts for people
to kind of have this holistic point of view. With that, I want to talk about your first article
that you ever wrote. I want to say this was in, was this 2020 or 2019 that you wrote this?
So this one might have been late 2020. Okay. And this was titled The Big Bang to End All Cycles.
What got you into this? Like, how did you piece this all together in your very first article?
like the breadth for the first article was crazy to me.
Well, firstly, thank you so much for the kind words.
I really appreciate that.
And that's kind of how I like to kick off any sort of discussion in the whole Bitcoin
and macro space.
I like to zoom out and say, okay, let's actually have a look at a big picture here and
have a look at what we're actually going through in the world today.
Because a lot of people kind of understand the world's changing very quickly.
It's very chaotic, but nobody really kind of understands why.
So in that first article, I just simply looked at all of the,
kind of cycles that we're living through today in the 2020s. And there's lots of these events
as well as these cycles that we've actually never seen unfold before in human history.
The TLDR of that article was we're living through the conclusion of an 80-year long-term debt cycle.
We're living through the conclusion of a 250-year empire cycle as the US is being challenged
by Russia and China and countries all around the world. We're also living through the end
of a 250-year revolutionary cycle, 90-year fourth turn-in. We're living.
living through obviously the sovereign individual thesis. So we're kind of entering this digital age.
And then obviously all of these cycles are kind of unwinding simultaneously today in the 2020s.
And I believe that these cycles are all going to be the catalyst for probably igniting a Bitcoin
adoption curve that's going to actually surprise a lot of people. That's kind of my zoomed out
approach. That's kind of why I believe the world is so chaotic and transforming so rapidly today
in the 2020s. Because what we're living through is something that we've never seen before
in human history. That's where I like to start. I like to kind of zoom out and take a little bit
a bigger picture. Talk to us a little bit about this 250 year empire cycle. This isn't something
I've ever really kind of covered on the show. I know Mark talks about it a little bit, but I don't
know if we talked about it on the show. I don't think that we did. Yeah, so Mark's been a great
teacher of mine over the years. I've been lucky enough to work for him for about four months or so
now, which is a little bit of a dream come true for myself. I've learned a lot from Mark, and the 250
empire cycle essentially comes from Ray Dalio's books. He's written a number of great books,
but I think the most recent book he released was titled The Changing World Order. I think it was
November 2021. He popped that one out. And Dalio just essentially looked back at the past 500
years of human history. And he looked at the rise and decline of 10 of these great empires.
So obviously, you got the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Spanish Empire, British Empire,
and obviously the US Empire today. And he just, he noticed a similarity between all of the
these empire cycles and he just kind of noted that they go through these 250 year cycles where the
rising empire would rise, it would go through a period of economic growth, economic prosperity,
and then obviously it would take over the reign from the previous global empire. So the US has kind
of been on this ascending trajectory for the past 250 years, which kind of began back in the 1770s
with the kind of declaration of independence. That's kind of where I think the rise began
for the US. And the US kind of, in my eyes, definitively overtook the British Empire in the early
1900s when we took the global reserve currency off the Brits. And now Dahlio's kind of putting
forward the proposition that, hey, the US Empire is in a period of decline. We're about to see
the challenger, the rising Chinese empire as he calls it. I'm not sure if that fully answered
the question or not, but that's kind of where that 250-year empire cycle idea comes from,
Dalio. I disagree with Ray on the China part. I think that they've got some
definite, some control issues, and I just don't know if they're going to be able to. And
maybe it's my own bias. I've never spent any time on the ground in China. A lot of the
stuff that I get, it's kind of hard to know, like, how much of it has a media bias or whatever
when you're pulling it from online. I'm curious what you think on that. I'm wildly perished on
China. Mark and I've done a number of videos on this. They're suffering a water crisis and
energy crisis, demographic crisis, an economic crisis that a lot of people just don't talk
about. They just talk about the good things of China. And I definitely agree with your synopsis.
It's very hard to get, you know, accurate data coming out of China. But from all reports,
like their property markets down 60, 70, 80 percent over the past 12 months, stock markets
in a shambles. They're more indebted than the U.S. I'm very, very bearish on China.
I'm such a huge fan of Ray's model and like how he kind of models things out. And you're talking
about his recent book, I know on the long-term debt cycle, like, it has shaped my thinking
from a macro and just even a micro level so much. And I have so much respect for him.
I just, I think he's just dead wrong about China. But in this first article that you wrote,
you talk about the comparison of the 1930s and 40s to what we're going through right now.
Talk to people a little bit about what you're seeing in that comparison.
Yeah, so the 1930s and 40s was the last time that we kind of lived first.
through the conclusion of an 80-year long-term debt cycle. And we also live through the
conclusion of the 90-year fourth turning cycle. So obviously, the 30s and 40s was a period of
chaos. We lived through the 1930s Great Depression. Obviously, the tail end World War I and World War
2 in the 40s. And then obviously you saw the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and all sorts of
dictators in there as well when these kind of wealth inequality or wealth concentrations,
is probably a better word.
When wealth concentrations are at these extremes,
you normally see a lot of political upheaval and turmoil.
But I'm kind of more interested in the economic comparisons to the 30s and 40s.
Lynn Alden's written some phenomenal papers on the 80-year long-term debt cycle,
and a lot of my frameworks being influenced by her work.
But she just essentially says in these 80-year long-term debt cycles,
once governments become too indebted and they're over-leveraged,
you go through a period of de-leveraging.
And the big question is, how is the government going to de-leverage itself?
It either comes through a deflationary de-leveraging or an inflationary de-leveraging.
And Lynn just kind of points out that in the 1930s and 40s, you kind of have two periods
to this de-leveraging.
The first period is like kind of the 1930s and you saw like a private sector de-leveraging.
And then in the 1940s, the second decade of that de-leveraging, that's when you kind of see the
inflationary period of your de-leveraging.
And obviously in the 40s, what you saw was the US run pretty much 10 years of
UID curve control.
They pinned interest rates pretty much near zero.
And I think inflation averaged something like 8 to 10% over that decade.
It was very volatile.
So it spiked up to like 18%, spiked back down to zero, back up to 12.
But for the period, for that decade when you operating on U.
curve control, you essentially saw negative real U yields of about 8 to 10%.
And what you saw was the US government debt to GDP got shrank from 120% to under 60% in a period of 10 to 15 years.
So I kind of, well, Lin makes the comparison first.
And she says, okay, that decade of 2008 to 2020, that is like a picture perfect kind of microcosm of the 1930s great depression.
You see a banking crisis.
You see private sector de-leveraging.
And now 2020, that's kind of when we've crossed this Rubicon.
And we've entered the second stage of the 80th long-term debt cycle, de-leveraging.
And I kind of believe we're going to see a very similar period of time to what we saw in the 1940s,
where you see yield curve control implemented and deeply negative yields for the rest of the 2020s.
But it's not going to be a straight line.
I think it's going to be very volatile.
But that's kind of like the big picture comparison I'm making to the 2020s to the 1930s and 40s.
When I look at where we're at right now compared to back then, I see all the similarities.
But if there was one thing that I would say is very different, is I think we've just had this
polarization of coordination amongst every global participant, all of Europe, Japan, together.
When I look at the debt markets of all these really massive interconnected economies,
they seem to be literally at the same breaking point simultaneously together all at once.
And I just don't know that that was necessarily the case back in the 30s and 40s.
And I definitely don't think it had the magnitude that's been basically pumped into it.
Like this 80 year cycle, I would argue that what led up to the 30s and 40s scenario
wasn't 80 previous years of global coordination that, like if we're talking about,
it like an energy system. It seems like there's just been pure energy, coordinated energy on a global
scale pumped into this thing for 80 years. And now it's like exploding, writing on our faces.
And it just seems like the bang is going to be, and I'm not trying to sensationalize this.
I'm just looking at the comparison. I'm looking at the numbers. And I'm looking at the magnitude
of like how much has been pumped into this over the last 80 years compared to that previous
point in time. And it just seems way bigger now. Would you agree with that?
that's exactly how I'm saying like we're living in this like we've seen hundreds of episodes of hyperinflation or government defaults before in history but we've never seen like a globally interconnected unbacked fiat currency collapse before in human history and I think that's what we're going to see in the 2020s and I try not to sensationalize things even but I think it's going to be enormous I think the 2020s is honestly going to be one of the most consequential decades in human history because I don't know how.
all of this plays out and something else that's different to the 40s is we're now living,
we're now living in, sorry, globally interconnected kind of digital world where we can see
these bank runs in Lebanon happening. We can see the Canadian truckers getting their bank accounts
frozen on the other side of the world. Like in these prior examples of hyperinflation, they were
isolated within borders and the propaganda machine was actually able to subdue the masses
into believing what they were seeing wasn't actually happening.
But today, with social media, anyone can get on Twitter,
which is a relatively uncensored social media platform.
And they can see what's pretty close to the truth happening all around the world.
Michael in, should be very interesting few years.
And it's the knowledge plus the ability to encrypt it.
So a lot of my opinions on China that we were just previously talking about,
where I'm just like, I'm just not buying it.
Come from some of these accounts that I follow on Twitter.
that I know these videos are, there's no way they're circulating inside of China.
There's just no way.
And they're hitting our accounts because people are able to encrypt the videos and send
them out of the country.
And the knowledge is still being passed in near immediate kind of terms, whether these
governments like it or not.
And I just, there's no way to contain it, right?
You were saying the sovereign individual earlier.
I mean, that's, that's it.
Yeah.
The technology is significantly empowering to the individual.
and I think we're probably going to get into it a little bit later,
but Bitcoin fits right in the middle of that.
Bitcoin combined with the internet,
I think it's going to do a very similar thing
to what the printing press did 500 years ago.
It's the same way the printing press separated church and the state.
Bitcoin combined with the internet,
combined with a lot of these other asymmetric technologies
we have today in the 21st centuries,
I hope going to separate money from state
for the first time in 5,000 years.
Yeah, the implications are just...
I don't even think we can begin to have an appreciation for the implications of something like that.
All right, in this first article, I'm still kind of picking through some of the ideas that you talk about here.
One of the main topics was just exponential printing.
What are you meaning by the, are you talking about just like how the Fiat system,
there's just no way that they can mathematically stop with where they're at right now?
Is that what you're getting at?
Yeah, I think kind of once you get to this second stage of a long-term debt site,
cycle. It needs ever expanding amounts of credit and bank reserves to be quote unquote printed
into the system to keep the thing afloat. I think that's what we're kind of watching manifest
itself all around the world today. I think a lot of people hyper focus on the US and saying,
look, look, the US is raising rates. There's nothing wrong with the financial system. The US isn't,
you know, going through any sort of deflationary depression, but they're not looking at the rest
of the world. Lebanon's blowing up its currency. Argentina's blowing up its currency. And
having to resort to printing and even the largest and quote-unquote safest central banks and
fiat currencies around the world are all capitulating on their hawkish attempts to normalize
monetary policy. We saw that last week with the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan still
doing what the Bank of Japan does best. And obviously, I think the Reserve Bank of Australia
kind of capitulated this week. They were supposed to raise rates maybe half a half a percentage
point and they said we can only raise it 0.25. I can't remember the exact figures. But what we're
watching is central banks all around the world capitulate at normalising monetary policy,
and they're having to resort to turning the money printers back on. And I just think,
once you get to these kind of debt levels, you kind of don't have an option. I think Herschman Capital
put out an amazing report in 2020, and they just said, hey, look, we've looked at the past
220 years of human history, and we've found that there's been 52 sovereign nations who have hit
debt to GDP levels of 130 percent since the year 1800.
and 51 out of 52 of those countries have defaulted on that debt within those countries
hitting that 130% marker 15 years.
Within them hitting the 130% they default on that debt within 15 years.
And the most politically palatable way for a government with a magic money printer
to default on their debt is typically through inflating away the debt.
So they just simply print money, devalue the money and pay back their enormous debt
with the devalued dollars.
So that's kind of where I think we are today.
Like the US, I recently did an interview with James Lavish list week,
and he was kind of looking at Japan, Germany, France, all of the G7 countries.
And he kind of showed that the average debt-to-GDP ratios of those countries is like 130%.
So the largest countries in the world at that Rubicon, they're at the 130% debt to GDP.
And I kind of think they have no other option but to inflate away the debt.
And that's the case I was making in that article in 2021, I think was the article I was talking
about the long-term debt cycle.
Inflation just popped up and everybody was on team transitory.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no.
This is the beginning of a very inflationary decade.
Governments not only need inflation, but they want inflation to inflate away the debt.
It's their balance sheet on the line.
They need this.
They want this.
And what you're going to see is a decade of inflation.
Yeah, and I think it just goes back to the point that you previously made, which is it's so much harder now with the flow of information and the access to straight past the gatekeepers of the media outlets that governments had at their disposal 80 years ago or before that your typical person just couldn't know or understand these things that are happening and how grossly they're being debased.
So you talk about this tipping point.
Is 130 kind of that magic number?
And I know Japan is far in excess of that number.
But they have been for a long time.
Talk to us about some of those attributes.
Yes.
So Japan is the one country out of the 52 countries that hasn't defaulted on their debt yet.
So they're the one country since the 1800 who've hit that one 130%.
And they've just moted their way all the way through.
and I think their government debt to GDP is something ridiculous, like 260 or 270% today,
but they own like 70% of the stock market.
I don't know, I can't remember how much of the JGB market that they own, but it's a ridiculous
amount.
So, but in most other cases around the world, once you hit that 130% debt to GDP ratio,
you're looking at a government default within 15 years.
So that obviously varies from country to country.
I think Argentina's defaulted eight times in the past 100 years.
and then you've got other countries like Japan who are yet to default.
But I think they're very close to actually defaulting.
You did a really good episode a while back with James Lavish,
and he broke down the Japan situation in depth.
So I'd encourage the listener to go and listen to that one,
if they want to get brought up to speed on the Japan situation.
But I think most central banks around the world are going to try to play the Japanese playbook
and just introduce your curve control.
But I think once you see other developed nations around the world,
printing out of the wazoo and implementing,
YCC like Japan, I think it's just a recipe for currency crisis. And in today's digital age and age
of interconnected social media, I think people are going to find the store of value that they
desperately need and that they didn't have in the 1930s and the 40s a lot easier because
obviously 6102 in the 30s and 40s, it was illegal to hold gold. You pretty much, you had to
hold the milty fiat currency that lost 50 to 60 to 70% of its value in a decade.
Today, the people have an escape valve, as Christine Lagarde calls it, Bitcoin is the escape hatch and the people are going to try and use it. And I think just all roads lead to Bitcoin in the end of it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Back to the show.
So you've written about currency wars in general.
Talk to us about some of the broader thoughts.
Help educate people on like a framework maybe on how to think about currencies and how they
interact with each other that kind of simplifies it for them.
And then give us some of your thoughts on the currency wars that are taking place.
Yes, I'm a dollar milkshake theory maximalist.
Brilliant thesis put out by Frank Johnson.
I just think that's what we're watching.
Manifers itself all around the world today.
the US dollar is pretty much the only asset that's positive this year and it's decimating currencies
of every large sovereign nation around the world. I think the euro is at like a 25 year low
measured against the dollar, British pound, like a 38 year low measured against the dollar.
Japanese yen is also at like a 20-something year low measure against the dollar.
And what you're watching is the United States aggressively raise interest rates
and that's causing an enormous dollar short squeeze manifests itself all around the world
because for better or for worse, the US dollar is still the, what do they call it, cleanest,
dirty shirt in the hamper basket.
I think that's what they call it.
But the US is essentially still the global reserve currency, still conduct something like
60% global trade.
So when you have fears of a global depression or a global recession rising around the world,
people run to what's considered to be the risk-off asset today.
That's still the US dollar.
and just the fact that the US is raising interest rates aggressively, while the rest of the world is capitulating on raising interest rates, that means capital is fleeing even more aggressively to the US than it otherwise would in times of a recession.
I think that's a really interesting dynamic to keep an eye on because the US is bankrupt in its largest friendly countries, countries that we're supposed to be allies with, such as Japan and Europe.
Like we're supposed to be on good terms with them, but we are literally bankrupt in their financial
system by raising interest rates as aggressively as we are.
I think the Fed just came out.
Was it yesterday?
I mean, raised by another 75 basis points.
And you're watching like the United Nations get on their knees and beg that the Federal
Reserve stop raising rates.
I was looking at an article recently.
There was someone in the finance ministry in Europe begging the US to stop raising interest
rates.
So I think that's a really interesting dynamic to have a look at.
when we're kind of talking about currency wars, we have to kind of mention the dollar milkshake
theory put out by Brent. And then obviously you have another dynamic. I can go on all sorts
of tangents presence. So feel free of explain Brent's thesis. I think most people in the space know
it, but we have a lot of listeners that have maybe never even heard of it. Just explain it real
simply for folks. Dollar milkshake theory just essentially says the world runs on US dollars
and it has been the global reserve currency for the past nearly 100 years now. And
essentially, as this Euro-dollar market has proliferated around the world, it's not just the
United States that has a lot of US dollar denominated debt. The rest of the world has US dollar
denominated debts. Turkish corporations or let's say corporations in Europe, everywhere, all around
the world, everybody has US dollar debt. All the dollar milkshake thesis kind of put out by
Brent says is the next time we have a global slowdown, we're going to get into this sovereign
currency crisis.
And Brent believes that the United States is going to be the last currency to run into significant
issues, all because they hold the global reserve currency.
And Brett kind of says, as these countries get into issues, we're paying back the US dollar
debt.
They're going to have to resort to devalue in and printing their local currency in order to get
their hands on the short supply of US dollars that's circulating around the world to pay back
their USD denominated debt. So whenever the Dixie or the US dollar index rises in strength,
all of a sudden these countries such as Turkey, Argentina, Peru, these countries that have
US dollar debt, their debt becomes more and more expensive to pay, the higher the dollar index
rises. So it's kind of like a feedback loop and Turkey all of a sudden has to print even more
local Turkish lira in order to go into the foreign exchange market and swap that lira to get
US dollars to actually pay back their USC debt. So that's the other kind of interesting part
of the United States interest rate rises that comes into the equation. Because the faster they
raise interest rates, the faster they're bankrupt in the rest of the world and the bigger a recession
they're causing. And this just causes an even shorter supply of dollars to be circulating around
the world. And these countries and these corporations have enormous U.S. dollar debt. That was a little bit
of a long tangent, but I suppose the TLDR of the dollar milkshake theory is we're heading into
a sovereign currency crisis. You're going to watch Domino's fall all around the world. And Brent
just believes the United States is going to be the last currency left standing in a wave of
global sovereign debt bubble versy. You have a article that's titled, The U.S. will weaponize the
dollar by backing it with Bitcoin, and you start off this article with the Bitcoin milkshake theory.
Explain this to us.
The Bitcoin milkshake theory, I couldn't help myself.
I had to steal that one from Brent.
I hope he forgives me for it.
I couldn't think of a better name to add dessert for the thesis.
But it essentially rides on the coattails of the dollar milkshake theory.
A lot of people believe, let's move forward on the hypothetical assumption that the dollar
The Milk Shake Theory plays out, and we do watch a global sovereign debt crisis, and countries
around the world have their local Fiat currencies hyperinflate, and we move into like a global
depression or a massive global recession.
Everybody's first instinct is, okay, this is bad for Bitcoin.
I actually don't think that's the case.
I think that as countries around the world have their local currencies hyperinflated and decimated
into pieces. I believe that a lot of these countries are going to be forced to dollarize.
I think that's what the large majority of countries will do. But I think some of these countries
will actually accept and adopt a Bitcoin standard. And I think the countries that adopt the Bitcoin
standard, they actually won't be able to use Bitcoin as a unit of account because it's still
going to be far too volatile today. Only 1 to 5% of the world has adopted some Bitcoin. The price
the Bitcoin is still very volatile. So the case I'm kind of making with the Bitcoin milkshake is
at these countries that adopt the Bitcoin standard, they're not only going to adopt Bitcoin.
They're also going to be forced to adopt something to use as a stable pricing mechanism.
So I think that's going to be probably the US dollar. So I kind of see as the US continues
to raise interest rates, I believe that the US dollar milkshake theory is going to play out.
And you're going to be maybe it's 12 months down the line, maybe it's five years down the line.
but I think you're going to be left with the majority of the world dollarize and a kind of consequence
of that.
And so as these countries adopt Bitcoin and the US dollar, what I think's really, really interesting
is they're going to also be adopting stable coins like USC and Teva and stable coins like this.
And what's really, really an interesting dynamic that's been playing out recently is all
of these US dollar stable coins, they've all been backing themselves with US government.
debt. You obviously got Teva. They've been known for years and years to be very risky as they
hold a majority of their reserves in a risky commercial paper. But over the past six months,
Ted has kind of gone through this phase shift and they've been selling their commercial paper
and buying more US government debt. And obviously, USC, the other largest stable coin,
to 100% backed by US government debt. And BlackRock just recently ran like a $450 million
Meller fundraising round in USC, which enabled BlackRock to be the primary asset reserve manager
of the USDC stablecoin.
So I think that's also an interesting thing to keep an eye on for the listeners.
But essentially, as countries adopt Bitcoin, I think they're also going to adopt US dollars.
And whatever country that adopts Bitcoin, you also see a higher rate of adoption of these
US dollar stable coins because they're easier to use over the weekends.
And if these USD stable coins 80 to 90 to 100% backed by US government debt, what you're watching is a massive demand for US government debt emerge itself around the world as Bitcoin monetizes.
And I kind of think this is potentially a solution for the US to get itself out of the unwinding of the petrodoller system.
So everybody's watching China slow down its US debt purchasers over the past 10.
years, Russia is completely de-dollarized.
The BRICS nations are trying to de-dollarize himself and have even recently announced,
hey, look, we're going to create a new reserve currency.
We don't want to use the US dollar petrodolar system anymore.
And obviously, Japan's having a resort to sell treasuries.
So everybody's selling treasuries and the US government needs a new buyer of treasuries.
And I think as Bitcoin monetizes, the demand for stable coins rises.
And that means if these stable coins are backed by US government,
that means Uncle Sam could find a buyer of U.S. government debt, which is, that's kind of
the Bitcoin milkshake theory in a nutshell.
Well, and for the stable coin operators, they don't want U.S. debt with a lot of duration
if you're dealing with crazy inflation prints because the longer the duration, the more that
it's impacted on the market value of it. When we look at what you're talking about, it really
does make a lot of sense that these stable coins are going to need to buy up some type of short
duration bonds that are performing better than cash through a short duration maturity. Wow,
that is something else. Let me ask you this. The U.S. doesn't seem to be super excited about a
central bank digital currency like you're seeing over in Europe and some of the other places.
Do you think that that's because they understand this dynamic and they also understand
how many offshore dollars there are to feed this monster of global economy to kind of feed
this dollar milkshake theory?
This kind of part of the thesis kind of, it was inspired by Tom Luongo.
I also recently had him on my podcast this week.
But in late 2021, my mental framework was, okay, what we're watching is global central
banks are coordinated. They're all going to keep interest rates low, let inflation run hot,
and they're going to inflate away the debt. That was my mental framework in late 2021.
And then I was a little bit confused as we went through 2022 because there kind of looked to be
some signs that the US was kind of diverging from a lot of these global, we'll call them like
global policies, like climate change. So I noticed the US Fed wasn't very interested in climate change
like Christine Lagarde was.
I also noticed, obviously, the CBDC divergence.
There's some factions within the US that are really not keen on CBDCs,
whereas Europe is like heading, they want full speed.
They were.
They were.
We'll see if they keep that up here in another year from now.
Yeah, well, that's the other thing.
I don't trust our competent leaders in the central banks to be able to pull off
the technical capability in order to actually roll out a CVDC.
But I read a really good article from Tom Longo.
And he kind of made the case that the United States is now no longer friends with Europe.
And they're now kind of acting in their own best interests because Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve just essentially does not want to go along with the CBDC future.
So the case that Tom's kind of making is, okay, the reason that the Fed's raising rates aggressively is because they're trying to drain the offshore euro dollar market.
And he kind of pointed out a very interesting coincidence in June 2021.
If anyone wanted to actually pull up the chart of the US dollar and the euro,
you'll be able to see that June 2021 was when the actual bottom of the US dollar and the euro pair
happened.
And a lot of people are like, why is that?
Like the US didn't actually start raising rates until early 2022.
And they didn't even start talking about tapering until November 2021.
And it's very interesting that Jerome Powell and Christine Lagarde,
they were having this little conference call at this annual green center.
central banking meeting. I think they call it like the Green Swan Central Banking Conference.
And there was this little bit of a back and forward. But Tom in his article points out a very
interesting squabble between Christine Lagarde and Jerome Power, where Jerome Power just says,
where drone power says, you know what? No, we have a dual mandate in the United States.
It's stable prices. And we're not going to go along with this central banking for climate change
agenda. We're not going to bail out the rest of the world and print money for the rest of the world
in attempts to, quote unquote, save the planet. And Chris Anguard was not very impressed. She was
infuriated. She was visibly not happy with Power's comments. And then just days after that
squabble at that annual meeting, Jerome Power raised the interest rates on the reverse repo window
by five basis points. And what happened over the next couple of months was two trillion dollars
flowed into the reverse repo window and the euro just essentially got decimated against the
US dollar because people were sending money out of the euro dollar market.
They'll sending it to the reverse repo window at the Fed to get those extra five basis points.
And it's essentially, it was like a self tightening or stealth QT.
And this kind of began in June 2021.
And also since then, we've seen Jerome Power kind of reaffirm his stance that he's just
not interested in this global green central banking agenda that's being pushed out of Europe.
And Tom kind of makes the case that a lot of these large banks in the United States, such as
JP Morgan, they're the largest shareholders of the Federal Reserve.
And maybe sometime in 2021, they came to the realization, oh, hang on a minute, this whole
great reset agenda, this is going to put us out of business.
Exactly.
CPDC is terrible for commercial banks.
And they might have said, hey, drive.
Jerome, this is the plan. We don't want this. We want you to actually look after the interests of
the United States and the US banking system. We don't want to go along with this green central
banking policy and just hand the global reserve currency over to China or Europe, all in the
name of CBDC. So it's quite a little bit of. It seems like Larry Fink is probably the biggest
ESG here on Wall Street. And then I would say Jamie Diamond seems to be the polar opposite. And you're
seeing some of this in their testimony. But you're exactly right. If they go along with this,
it does not end well for them at all. Not at all. Not at all. Yeah, it's a very interesting
dynamic. It's something I'm watching very closely. Jamie Diamond recently came out and he was
bashing on this kind of green agenda and how it's hurting the US. And you're watching pension funds
all across the United States pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of BlackRock.
Yeah, tell people about this because this is fascinating.
And I mean, these are very big numbers that you're talking about.
I honestly haven't even looked into this as deeply as I should.
I just saw there's a few counties that were pulling out.
It was billions.
I mean, some of these pension funds are multi, multi-billion dollar pension funds.
And they're sick of being stuffed into an ESG fund that is drastically underperforming
just basic market indexes.
And to the point where they're raising legal battles with some of the larger banks,
I think BlackRock was the one that was targeted.
It just makes no sense.
Like you've got oil and gas companies mandated to investing like solar and wind.
Solar and wind projects makes no sense.
And it's about time people actually started voting with their money and pulling their money
out of BlackRock and their pensions managed by BlackRock and saying,
look, you need to actually look out for shareholder interest, shareholder value and not invest in
this flawed and failed green agenda.
They sure aren't engineers.
I know that.
That's a good way to put it.
Then you have this other, this is another section in the US dollar will be weaponized,
backing it with Bitcoin, where you say, here comes an open revolt, a reeling Europe lashes out
at the Fed and for bringing us to a world of recession.
and said this gets to exactly what you were talking about there with that green swan event in
2021.
When do you think that the rest of Europe is going to come to their senses on this?
Because I think most in the U.S. are seeing it and they're saying, we don't want any part of
this.
This is insanity.
But I don't know that Europe's there.
And it almost seems like they're about to be paid a very up close and personal situation,
this winter, and maybe even in the next winter, of the result of some of the,
these decisions. God, I think Italy's there. They're recent prime ministers talking some sense.
So that's reassuring. Yeah. Yeah. She seems to be switched on to what's actually going on with
reality around the world, but you make a really good point. Like Europe needs to, you would think
that maybe Germany in particular, they would start to really say, hang on a minute, you're selling
our bonds to bail out the Pigs nations, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, and this new tool that
Christine Lagarde calls the anti-fragmentation tool, you'd have to think Germany wouldn't
really go along with that for many more months or years, especially when they're watching an
energy crisis manifests itself all around Germany. So I think Europe's the epicenter of this
energy crisis in like in 2021, well before everything kicked off in Ukraine in February,
they were already going through an energy crisis. Like we saw the charts of natural gas and
fertilizer up by 500, 600, 700, 700 percent in 2021. And that's all the result from Europe being
aggressively transitioned away from reliable forms of energy like oil and gas and nuclear.
And they tried to transition many of these powerhouse countries in Europe to operating solely
on wind and solar. And obviously, when there's no wind and there's no sun, your power grids
left awfully susceptible. That's kind of why you saw the energy crisis pop up in Europe first in
2021. And I think it's only been exacerbated by many of the geopolitical events that have gone on in
2022. God, I think countries like Germany would try to opt out of the Europe sooner rather than later.
It just seems like there's no way that there could be this much stupidity built into the
decision-making, the strategic reliance on Russian energy to the level that it was.
and all these policies, I just don't understand how they could have possibly gotten this far for so many years to be that reliant on Russia without thinking that there's, I don't know.
And I guess the question I'm trying to get to is how does that happen?
Like, how can they, are there Russian individuals that were influencing some of these key people on purpose in order to sway them in these ways that are very qualitative in a feel good kind of way that,
totally neglects quantitative analysis, or do you think it was just not paying attention?
What are your thoughts on how you get to something like this?
I think it could be a combination of many things, purely incompetence.
I could go down a few different rabbit holes here talking about the World Economic Forum
and Klaus Schwab.
But I think the whole Davos crew, they're centered obviously in Switzerland and Europe.
And I think those European countries, they probably get a lot of the,
the strongest influence from kind of this whole
Darvos agenda of trying to turn the world into this green
utopia and transition us away from oil and gas.
I'm not sure how much influence Russia has in the cabinets
of, I suppose, governments in Europe.
I'm not sure what to read into that.
I mean, Donald Trump called it years before anyone.
I think it was 2016 or 2017 in a video.
He said, look, Europe's reliance on Russian oil and gas.
This is never going to end well for them.
I think what is it, 50 or 60% of oil and gas in 2021 flowed that Europe got, it all came from
Russia.
So they kind of left themselves out to dry there with some of the policy decisions they've made
over the previous few years.
I'm not really sure what to read into the whole geopolitical aspect of any of that.
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slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Yeah, it's a sad situation.
Let's talk about Bitcoin adoption curve. You have an article that is so thorough on this particular
topic. Again, I'm going to have links in the show notes so people can check this out.
Walk us through some of this framework that you use. I mean, you have exponential technology.
in a digital asset network effects.
You have a J curve.
There's this one called the Big Fish who will trigger escape velocity.
I'm curious to hear a little bit about that.
The second S curve, there's just so many different points that you have in here.
Walk us through some of them.
Essentially, Bitcoin's an emergent technology,
and emergent technologies get adopted in exponential waves.
And these kind of exponential adoption waves,
if you were to plot them on a chart, it just looks like an S curve.
I looked at the average of say, I think it was three or four different technologies.
I think it was like the personal computer, the internet, maybe the smartphone from memory.
And like on average, it takes a transformative technology 10 years to go from zero to 10% adoption.
And then it takes an additional 10 years to go from 10% to like 90% adoption.
So like mainstreaming.
And all that kind of S curve says is, okay, after a new transformative, disruptive, disruptive technology,
has been around for somewhere around 10 years on average.
It kind of hits an inflection point.
A critical mass is reached.
A technology has reached sufficient network effects.
And the rest of the world, the other 90% of people who haven't adopted that technology,
will phomo into that technology.
And that's kind of where you get a steep part of that S in terms of its adoption.
I was just kind of making the case, hey, look, Bitcoin is also a transformative technology.
Money is a technology.
I think it's going to go through a similar wave of adoption. Bitcoin is 14 years old now.
Most estimates say it's somewhere between 1, 5, 6, 7%. I think in the 2020s, we're going to watch Bitcoin go from somewhere around 5% adoption to 90% adoption.
I think all the catalysts are there to send Bitcoin on an adoption wave or an adoption curve that I think a lot of people simply aren't ready for.
So that's kind of the framework I looked at in that article.
Like there's many catalysts that I think will actually make Bitcoin's adoption curve even more wild than most people will expect.
That's obviously Bitcoin, we've never seen a technology before be adopted that has a monetary value attached to it.
So for every incremental one or two percent adoption in Bitcoin, you see that directly translated to the monetary price of Bitcoin going up.
So I think that's something we've never seen before in history.
Normally, when a technology goes from 10 to 20% adoption, the everyday normie won't really notice
that difference.
Maybe one or two of their extra friends might be using that technology.
But if Bitcoin goes from 10 to 20% adoption, the price of the thing doubles.
So that's the equivalent of watching Bitcoin go from $600,000 to $1.2 million.
I think there's lots of things different with Bitcoin that are very different to other technologies
is that I think are going to make it adopted in an even more violent and exponential manner.
We could obviously talk about the supply suffocation as well going on with Bitcoin
because I think you're just going to get into a situation in the not too distant future
where all of these Michael Saylor-like entities or nation states or sovereign wealth funds
just simply gobble up all of the available Bitcoin for sale that's sitting on exchanges.
And like Michael Saylor says, he's not selling the thing for 100 years.
I think there's lots of different rabbit holes we could go down in terms of the Bitcoin
adoption curve, but I'll pause there for a minute. I raise a few different points.
No, it's fascinating because I think people are so, they're so used to looking at the price
chart and equating that with what's happening. And when you look at the tech and you look
at what's happening on the engineering side, it's such a, it's such an explosion of talent and
building that's taking place in so many different directions and the nodes and you just look at
the infrastructure that's being stood up around. I think if some people could walk into a mining
facility down in Texas, like one of these really large mining facilities, they'd be like,
what in the world is happening here? Like it's so large and so substantial the infrastructure that
it's totally lost on market participants that are just looking at the price action and saying,
oh, it's down 50%. That thing's dead. I never really,
big thing, I couldn't agree more. I think people looking at the price chart of Bitcoin over the past
18 months are confused. The normies are saying, okay, Bitcoin's down 70%. It's dead. It's not
advancing. But like you say, the network effects of Bitcoin have only advanced over the past 18 months.
Like another big reason why I think the 2020s is going to be this big kind of inflection
point in terms of Bitcoin adoption is because Bitcoin is fundamentally a different asset.
for the first 10 or 12 years of Bitcoin's life before 2020,
none of the big money around the world paid any attention to Bitcoin.
It was a joke, it was a speculative token.
99.99% of the trading volume was all dominated by retail.
And I think when the money printers got turned on in 2020,
I think that awoke a lot of the biggest and the smartest money managers all around the world.
I think nation states are now watching Bitcoin.
I think sovereign wealth funds are watching Bitcoin.
You're watching public corporations like micro strategy stack Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset.
You've got all the largest money managers, Paul Trude Jones, Bill Miller, Stanley Drucker Miller.
They're all watching Bitcoin.
So I think 2020, it's kind of like there's lots of indicators there that are also kind of confirming,
okay, Bitcoin, the asset is actually transforming.
And we have a different type of asset allocator in the Bitcoin space.
So I kind of think people who are looking at the past 12 years of Bitcoin price performance and saying,
okay, this is how Bitcoin's going to perform in the next 12 years, I think they're going to be left
wildly shocked because instead of the market being dominated by 99% of retail participants,
I think moving forward, the market's going to be dominated by the largest money managers all around
the world.
And there's, I know a lot of people don't like on-chain, but there's one chart that I really like
with on-chain data.
and it shows the available amount of Bitcoin's available for sale on exchanges.
For the first 12 years of Bitcoin's life, coins were sent to exchanges.
The balance or the amount of Bitcoin's on exchange only grew.
And it peaked at 3.1 million coins in March of 2020 when those money printers got turned on
and when I think the rest of the world were awakened to the fact that, hang on a minute,
the monetary system is broken.
We need a solution for this.
And since March of 2020,
what you've watched is 800,000 Bitcoin leave the exchanges.
And the beautiful thing about on-chain data is you can see where those coins are going to.
And they're going to the wallets of entities who don't have a history of selling their Bitcoin.
In the past 24 months, what you've watched is 35% of the available Bitcoin being absolutely
evaporated from exchanges and put into the wallets of, we don't know who they are,
but they're people who aren't selling their Bitcoin.
And I also think that's very interesting that in the past 24 months, you've watched really
volatile Bitcoin price action.
So we ran up from 3K to 65, back to 30, back up to 70, back down to where I was 17,000.
And all throughout that time, you've watched people with very strong conviction, just take
the Bitcoin off the exchanges and put it into their wallet.
So I do love to speculate.
And if I had to speculate, I think that is the large and the smart money, again.
accumulating Bitcoin, whether that be corporations, nation states, sovereign wealth funds,
I don't know who, but if you run that extrapolation forward, and if you watch seven or
800,000 coins leave the exchanges every two years, I think it's 2027 or 28.
There's all of a sudden no Bitcoin on exchanges for sale.
I think that's going to be really, really interesting.
And I think people trading paper Bitcoin on exchanges could be left in a little bit of a
root shock in the coming years.
I think that point that you just made is so profound that when I talk to people that are not in this
space, that's the one thing that they do not understand. They do not understand how much of a
psychopath the typical hoddler really is. And when I say psychopath, this is because I forget
who was calling some media company was trying to brand this community of psychopaths and
and everybody in the community just doubled down and embraced it.
But what they failed to realize is that psychopathic conviction that Bitcoiners have,
they're not selling.
They've been buying.
They don't care how volatile the price gets.
They're going to continue to buy and they're going to continue to put it away and never
drop it back into the market as best they can.
And like you said, on-chain data is showing you the conviction that these coins are
being clawed off the market.
They're going into some of the strongest.
hands and are never putting them back on the market ever to be seen again. What did you say it's down to?
Like 2.3 million coins.
Out of the 21 million coins, only 2.3 million are available on exchange for purchase.
If my math is correct, it's a little bit late here. It's 9 o'clock, so my math's brain might
be working. But is that 23 Michael Saylars? He has 100,000-ish coins. And there's 2.3 million
coins on exchanges. That means if another 23 Michael Saylor's stepped into the space and said,
hey, I want 100,000 coins. I don't want Gigacad Michael Saylor to become the world's richest man.
So if I want to, I want Michael Saylor to not overtake me in terms of wealth on a Bitcoin
standard, I need to accumulate a stack of Bitcoin to an equivalent size of Michael Saylor.
So you, what's going to happen if Microsoft thought, yeah.
It's not going to happen. They'll bid the price.
so far that they're never going to be able to really catch up with them, especially if you have
a little bit of a feeding frenzy happening amongst a couple of them. It's the thing that
so few talk about is just the amount of coins that are left, the amount of people who have
absurd conviction, psychopathics conviction, and they're not putting them back on the market.
And I think even if the price would run aggressively, I think there's a lot of people that are
very comfortable in their lifestyle and don't have to put them back on the market. They don't need
some fancy lifestyle. And it's a little bit more than just making money for a lot of people in
this space. I think you can probably attest to that, Luke. Exactly. And as the biggest pushback
I get when I bring up that on chain data and the coins leave in exchanges is, but Luke,
when Bitcoin hits a million dollars, lots of people are going to sell their Bitcoin. And yes,
they are. I agree with that. There's going to be a lot of people who maybe takes them off the
table when Bitcoin hits $500,000 or a million dollars. But the argument I make is, okay,
As the plebs take some profits and they buy some shit coins like real estate with their Bitcoin,
what's going to happen is I think the buyer on the other side of that seller is someone like a Michael Saylor
or someone like a sovereign wealth fund who is just going to indiscriminately allocate to Bitcoin.
It doesn't matter what price it is.
As it gets to $500,000 or as it gets to a million dollars of coin, they say, okay, we just need a
1% allocation to this asset.
Doesn't matter what price it is.
Buy me a billion dollars of Bitcoin.
And I think as the price goes up, yes, you're going to get sellers.
Yes, people are going to send Bitcoin to an exchange to sell it.
But I think the buyer who's going to step in on the other side of that is going to have a lot more capital.
Like, for example, Apple, Microsoft, what do they have, $200 billion of melting fear currency sitting on their balance sheet?
They need to start putting that to work, but they can't today when Bitcoin's a $300 or $400 billion asset class.
But when that's, I don't know, $500 billion or say $5, $10 trillion asset class, that's,
when they'll actually start allocating to Bitcoin.
Any other comments on the super cycle or the adoption curve that you think are really important?
I think prepare yourselves.
I think a lot of people just simply aren't ready for a hyper-bitonized world or the path we're going to take to get there.
So I think, like, in my eyes, Bitcoin's a very binary bet.
Bitcoin even becomes the next money of the world or Bitcoin fails.
And like if Bitcoin becomes the next money of the world, you can run some relatively
conservative maths and you're looking at least a 10 or a $20 million price tag per Bitcoin.
In that article, I ran some maths and I said, okay, there's $900 trillion of wealth in the
world. If you're obviously ignoring the derivatives market, I didn't even look at the one quadrillion
dollars of derivatives, but say there's 300 trillion dollars of real estate, there's hundreds of
trillions of bonds, there's 100 or so trillion of Fiat. I took what I thought was a conservative
estimate and I said, okay, let's assume 30% of that flows into Bitcoin on a Bitcoin standard.
I ran the numbers and I kind of found that the price of a Bitcoin would be $65 million
a coin on a Bitcoin standard.
If 30% of the world's wealth and store of value wealth flowed into Bitcoin, you're
looking at a $65 million Bitcoin and that's obviously in today's dollars.
That's not taking into account hyper inflated dollars.
That's a $65 million Bitcoin in today's dollars.
and if a Malibu Beach House is costing $10 million a pop in California,
I think a Bitcoin is going to buy a six and a half Malibu Beach House is in the future.
That's the kind of purchasing power equivalent that I think Bitcoin could have on a Bitcoin standard.
How about on the low side?
The low side.
I even think that's bearish, to be honest.
Because I think, so that math takes into account that for every $1 that flows into Bitcoin,
it has a 3x multiplier effect.
So if you try to buy one dollar Bitcoin, it pushes up the market cap 3x.
And that's simply because not all the available Bitcoin actually available for sale.
There's only 3 to 4 million coins that actually circulate on exchanges and circulate on
and off exchanges on a regular basis.
I actually think that multiplier is going to rise the closer we get to a Bitcoin standard.
So I think a larger and a larger portion of the 21 million coins are going to end up in the hands
of nation states, sovereign rules.
Well funds and Michael Saylor-like types who will simply not sell their Bitcoin for 100 years.
So I think instead of that multiplier being 3x, it's actually an average of the past five years
of Bitcoin price data.
Willie Wu has a child on his website and he shows that for every $1 that flows in, it has a
2.6x multiplier.
I think in the future that's only going to rise.
So I think it could be 5, 10 or 15x multiplier as the available amount of Bitcoin that actually
circulate in the circular economy, get smaller and smaller. So I think $65 million a coin is my
conservative estimate. That's so much higher. That's so much higher than anything I've really heard
from folks. I've heard five to ten pretty standard amongst people that study the space a lot.
But I also have never even considered the multiplier. And I understand exactly what you're talking about
because it's not a linear type situation because as they become really scarce there at the end,
everybody's just, you know, any fiat they've got, they're throwing at the new currency in order
to bid it. That's an interesting piece there. Let's be conservative for a minute. Yeah.
I also ran some conservative maths. And in another article I wrote, I said, okay, let's be
conservative. And let's say you think the price of Bitcoin is only going to be $5 million a coin on a
Bitcoin standard. Well, then I kind of laid out the case, well, okay, when we're on a Bitcoin standard,
the GDP is still going to grow.
And like if GDP,
I ran some bullish numbers on a Bitcoin standard,
I think GDP's going to grow by like 10% per year.
But like you can run whatever compound annual growth rate you want.
But all of a sudden,
if you think GDP is growing by 10% a year and you say,
okay,
5% of the world's wealth is being stored in the world's store of value,
which I think is going to be Bitcoin.
That means like Michael Saylor says,
Bitcoin is going to be going up forever.
Bitcoin is going to be.
accruing and growing at 5% per year into perpetuity or for a very long time. So even if you have
conservative numbers like a $1 million Bitcoin or a $2 million Bitcoin, then I would encourage the listener
to also go and have a look at the compound annual growth rate of, say, global GDP and just run the
numbers. If you think GDP is going to grow by 3% or 4% per year, you kind of figure out how much
of that is going to be stored into the best savings account that we've seen in human history.
and all of a sudden you're looking at some pretty bullish Bitcoin numbers,
even when you started a relatively low base at one or two million dollars of coin.
I often think about, like I have one of these $100 trillion notes from Zimbabwe as one of my bookmarks.
It's actually, there you go, in one of my Ray Dalio books over there.
And I try to think about like that.
So like the purchasing power of that, like if you would have gone back to Zimbabwe prior to that event
and you would have said, all right, like what would be the purchasing power of this five
dollar note before it turned into, and I know these aren't the actual numbers, but I'm trying
to use it as an example, you get to a point where the old currency is so broke that it makes
as little sense as I think Bitcoin makes for people as they're trying to think about its value
in the future. It's all inverted as you're looking back at the old currency and you're saying
like a million dollars, like that was a lot of money and like that buys this now. Like those numbers
don't even make sense. And I know that you had said that in purchasing power today or in buying power
today, you were saying that you think it's those numbers. I'd have to think about that more. But you
have it all laid out here in your article. So I would highly encourage people to go read. If anything,
hopefully I'm wrong and you're right. And hopefully people can go there and check out your article
and kind of read up on the methodology that you got. Luke, any other comments or things that you
want to cover before we wrap things up?
I think we've just about crushed it.
We've touched on all sorts of different topics, and I've gone down all sorts of different
webinars in this one.
I think we've got it all present.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, give people a handoff where they can find you, your Twitter feed and your
podcast and anything else you want to highlight.
Yes, I'm all over Twitter.
My handle is just Luke, Mick H-21.
I write lots of articles for Amber, so they're a Bitcoin-only company.
Based in Australia, what used to be my home country, I write lots of articles.
was for Amber. They also help produce and edit my podcast, such as Bitcoin Made Simple. I have
YouTube channel, podcasts, do lots of educational videos on YouTube, and I'm always talking smack
on Twitter so you can find it. Awesome. Luke, what a pleasure and thanks for your time tonight.
Thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute pleasure. If you guys enjoyed this conversation,
be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires,
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appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week.
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