We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC109: Bitcoin Taro, GBTC Discount, & More w/ Pierre and Morgen Rochard (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. This week I have a special show because I'm interviewing Pierre and Morgan Rochard. Pierre comes with a wealth of experience as he's been in the Bitcoin space since the early days. When he was at the Cracken Exchange, he was the program manager that brought immediate lightning payments and withdrawals to the platform. He now works in the mining sector as a VP for a riot blockchain. Morgan is a financial planner and has our own firm, Origin Wealth, advisors. We get into a wide-ranging conversation during the show from current events in the market

Starting point is 00:00:35 to technical aspects of Bitcoin versus other less or non-decentralized protocols, the GBTC discount, and plenty more. So without further delay, here's my chat with Pierre and Morgan. 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 Morgan and Pierre. Guys, great to have you together on the show. I'm kind of excited about this. Well, I know we've both been here individually, but happy to be here as a couple.

Starting point is 00:01:22 I love it. And when both the Richards are together. So the impetus for this was we were having dinner together out in L.A. at the Pacific Bitcoin Conference. And I'm just sitting there listening to you two. And I'm like, you all got to do an interview together because this is gold. This is Bitcoin. So guys, I guess where I want to start is what's something that has caught your eye recently or what do you think is important, noteworthy, that just is hot and heavy in the Bitcoin space?

Starting point is 00:01:52 I don't think this is important. And it's not in the Bitcoin space. But SBF just got arrested before we hopped on to this podcast. So I feel like we should bring it up. I have lots of mixed feelings about it. I think there's lots of different angles to the story. But overall, I just feel like we were warning about SBF being a charlatan, frankly, long before he ever had his company explode or be under suspicion of crimes.

Starting point is 00:02:22 But in any case, I think that there's this long track record of people who are in the crypto space and who are anti-Bitcoin. And they generally turn out to be criminals or just encompassing. competent. So continuing the pattern there. You know, the thing that never made sense for me with him was he's raising more money. He's doing round whatever, round C, round D. And we're not talking like small amounts. We're talking like billion dollar rounds. And he's just going out and he's saying he's going to buy the media was saying that he was the next J.P. Morgan, right? Like that was the branding stick that they were all

Starting point is 00:02:59 running. And it was like, how can this guy go out here and keep buying all these things when his company's clearly not profitable because he just keeps raising more money. None of it added up. That didn't make any sense to me as well. Mergers and acquisitions are extremely high risk under the best of conditions. And, you know, they don't always work out. But in a situation where you have a financial panic happening and he's out there making un-economical decisions, right? He explicitly said that, oh, he's doing this so that he can make the depositors whole instead of them getting a haircut through the bankruptcy process or from another acquirer. And that just doesn't make sense, right?

Starting point is 00:03:38 The assets are worth less than the liabilities. It is irrational to just assume all the liabilities at face value. How about the arrest? So he was getting ready to testify in Congress tomorrow. And all of a sudden, down in the Bahamas, they go and arrest them the day before. I guess they didn't like his I'm sorry tweets. they weren't enough. It's going to have to do a little better than that.

Starting point is 00:04:06 You got to say, sorry, a lot more than that. But I have to wonder on the timing of it, right? It seems very odd that it's right before, presumably he was going to incriminate himself publicly because otherwise he was saying a whole lot during that testimony. But I think that there was growing public pressure and also that I think there's very little coordination between an entity like the Southern District of New York

Starting point is 00:04:31 Attorney General and Congress and the House Finance Services Committee. I think those are two different worlds. And if anything, maybe the legal world wanted to kind of front run the legislative world on this. And they are kind of adversarial in a sense, not somehow conspiring together. Do you think that Bahamas are just going to extrad them back to the U.S. immediately? Or do you think that there's going to be a battle there? I think they're going to send them right away. I don't think they want anything to do that anymore.

Starting point is 00:05:02 They don't see any reason why they would keep him. Yeah. It's not like worth trading over. I don't know. When I said, I just read something that I guess the SEC is going to come out with something tomorrow. Yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Well, there, there, there were a lot of securities related potential violations at FTX, whether it's one, outright just trading of equity derivatives. And, right, they had, you could trade like Apple shares or a synthetic version of,

Starting point is 00:05:31 Apple shares at FTX to Really? Yeah, I didn't know that. With leverage, you know, short, it was a pure, you know, casino with everything on the floor. Unreal. It's just, it's kind of mind-blowing that it got to where it's at.

Starting point is 00:05:49 And then I also read today with Binance, I guess they're going to be criminally investigated as well. Or the Justice Department has been in a, what, a three-year investigation on them and where do you think that one goes? I think without insider knowledge, it could be a very wide range, right? It could be anything from them harassing Binance and it's just like a little violation

Starting point is 00:06:14 or there are serious issues of Binance. And we just don't have a way of knowing because Binance is not publicly traded. So they don't have to disclose anything. There's no... You don't even know where they're from. Right. Yeah. CZ says we're not from China.

Starting point is 00:06:31 So stop sitting there's China. It's like, okay, where are you from? Like Malta, I guess is... Tell us where you are from. But in any case, I think that... So I feel very torn on this. On one hand, it would be good to have lots of trustworthy exchanges that are competing against each other and driving down fees, essentially, for people who want to buy and hold Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:06:57 On the other hand, having exchanges kind of be a little bit... shady encourages people to hold their own keys. And so it encourages people to withdraw their Bitcoin after they've purchased them rather than leaving them at the sort of kind of shady exchange that seems to be under criminal investigation. I have mixed feelings about the reputation and what's going on there with exchanges. I would say that there's still plenty of reasons even if the exchanges on the up and up, right? There are exchanges here that are, I would say, more on the up and up than let's say a finance and serious of course an FTCX. But that exchange can still misallocate capital. And they still live in the Fiat world where interest rates are,

Starting point is 00:07:39 you know, we're close to zero, where cash is just sloshing around in the system, where people at higher levels in the top are not necessarily making the right decisions as far as what the business should be investing in, especially if, you know, they have sort of crypto brain rather than having, you know, Bitcoin on their mind and how they can actually improve their core product rather than adding all these ancillary crypto style services. I think from that perspective, yeah, it does. It's more of a jump though, right, then, okay, the shady exchange, I probably shouldn't leave my coins here. But meanwhile, an exchange that's on the up and up can still make bad investments, which could then still lead them to a place where they could potentially want to take customer

Starting point is 00:08:15 deposits or be tempted to do so and then therefore find a way to do so. So if you're leaving your coins at these places, you're still at risk. 80,000 Bitcoin, like negative 80,000 Bitcoin. on the balance sheet. At least that's what we're told. I mean, that is some significant amount of Bitcoin that are missing, that were paper bitcoins. What are your thoughts on the other potential paper bitcoins that still exist that haven't blown up? How about moving forward? How do we guard against things like this? What are some of your thoughts in this area? First of all, it's impossible to know, you know, with any level of certainty of third party custodians, whether they are 100% backing their Bitcoin liabilities with Bitcoin assets.

Starting point is 00:09:02 Second, there are entities where we can have more confidence or we can, if we're thinking about it on a spectrum of just total bozos like FTX or Celsius. And then a little bit more certainty was like the block fies, right, where people were presumably managing their risk a little better, although with what has come out. about these unsecured loans and all of this. Now, you know, LockFie clearly is under question of whether it was legit or not. They were making questionable international loans as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:38 But then you've got companies like Coinbase that are publicly traded and they disclose all of their information and they have auditors walking around the building. And then entities like GBT and Grayscale where, if anything, I would actually argue GBT is kind of a reverse of paper Bitcoin in the sense that they seem to have more real Bitcoin in terms of value than the value of the shares that are trading in a discount relative to that. But the only way to have any confidence in you actually owning Bitcoin is to withdraw the Bitcoin to your own private keys, whether it's in the form of a single signature hardware wallet, a software wallet on your phone, or a multi-sig with hardware and software.

Starting point is 00:10:25 and then verifying that withdrawal with your own Bitcoin node. Anything less than that, you are trusting a third party. Like, that's just how the system operates. I want to read a quote. So, Duneberg, I'm assuming you guys are familiar with Duneberg. He recently wrote something on GBT. Here's the quote at the end of the article. He says, in my opinion, there are two likely possibilities.

Starting point is 00:10:49 First, they have been loaning out GBT Bitcoin. So if they show the addresses, people will be able to see Bitcoin, leaving and entering the trust when they should only be entering the trust. Alternatively, they have accepted stolen dirty Bitcoin from money launderers and gave them clean GBTC to liquidate. There's literally no security risk in GBTC showing where the Bitcoin are on the blockchain unless they've been doing something that they shouldn't have been doing. In that case, releasing the wallet addresses would expose them. What are your thoughts on those two conclusions? It's hard to take the security argument super seriously.

Starting point is 00:11:26 I would say here would be the steel man for the security argument. When they were talking about the security, they were referring to this proof of reserves idea of them signing some kind of message using the same private key that they are holding the Bitcoin with, that generated the addresses that were receiving the Bitcoin. And there is arguably a security risk anytime. that you are accessing the private keys, especially if you are feeding in arbitrary data that is kind of unrelated to signing a transaction. I would imagine that Coinbase custody has a very

Starting point is 00:12:04 well-established security protocol that they've been relying on for years and that they have a lot of confidence in, and that if somebody's asking them to modify that, it's not something that they would take lightly. And it's, I think in this situation, they're just weighing the fact that they would have to update all of these Sarbanes-Oxley internal controls documents in order to accommodate the proof of reserves, which is a headache. And I'm familiar with that from the world of auditing that you're a public company and somebody's, this is really the most sensitive part of Coinbase is signing things with the private keys. I can understand them saying,

Starting point is 00:12:47 hey, look, we're not going to bother with this. We know the Bitcoin are there. And if you guys don't believe us, then, like, too bad. Why not have some type of third party

Starting point is 00:12:56 come in and validate it for them? Like some corporate... They have Bank of New York Mellon and one other auditor on there? B.N. Y. Mellon's not an auditor. So I don't know what the relationship is there.

Starting point is 00:13:08 They have a custodial relationship, though, with both Coinbase and Bank of New York Mellon, was my understanding of the product. So it's not just that things are at Coinbase, it's also that Bank of New York Melan is in like a trustee capacity. I don't want to defend GBTCCC.

Starting point is 00:13:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I know. I know, I know. You know, because the discount stinks. I mean, the discount is screaming that there's something wrong. Well, me, the discount is... Yeah, I'll let you. Okay, well, this is why I loved our dinner.

Starting point is 00:13:40 This is exactly why I loved our dinner. Go ahead, Pierre, and then I want to hear Morgan's. There's a structural problem. problem with the product. Yeah. And so the problem is that this product was one that was really easy for people to buy during the bull market and it consistently traded a premium for a very long time. And there were a lot of arbitrages who put on this trade of essentially believing that they can buy GBT at par, right, at the real Bitcoin price because they are institutional investors who have the ability to do that, but then they have to hold it for a year. And then after a year, they can sell it

Starting point is 00:14:19 at a premium. And so in their minds, this is a risk-free return. And they put on a tremendous amount of leverage to execute this trade. With the bare market, the trade reversed. And with the reflexivity of it, that's why we now have, I think it's a 50% discount, because you had all of these leveraged traders, essentially be put into a position of forth selling on a really bad, bad trade. And so because they have to wait for that full year is why you just continue to see them getting out of that trade, not all at once, but maybe gradually. Is that why the discount continues to persist for so long? Dan, and the cascading liquidations that they're pairing interest. I think if you back up, though, about what the product actually is, then it makes a little bit more

Starting point is 00:15:08 So I think when people see GBTC, they automatically assume that it's an ETF and how an ETF structure works. But really, it's more like a closed-end fund. And it's even worse than a close-end fund because what they set up basically was they set up a private placement because it wasn't going to get approved by the SEC to create the ETF, especially at the time that it was created. And even more so, I mean, we're still waiting for a Bitcoin ETF here in the United States. So they created this private placement whereby they could skirt the rules of what an ETF would need. and they allowed accredited investors essentially to come in and be the only people to buy this. But then what they did is they listed it on the OTC Pink Sheets Market, and they allowed it to trade as a closed-in fund essentially.

Starting point is 00:15:49 Closed-end funds typically, when they operate like this where they allow investors to get in at NAV, they actually do persist at a discount rather than a premium. And what Pierre is talking about, it makes sense about it having the premium rather than the discount is because it was an asset back, and I think it was in 2014 that they first listed this, or even 2013 is maybe when the product came out. I mean, it was so early. It really weren't that many places for people to buy Bitcoin. If you kind of look back on time,

Starting point is 00:16:14 that's when like Mount Gox had issues, was when this product came out. There were other exchanges that Charlie Shrem's exchange went under for money laundering and other violations of money transmission at that time. Coinbase is one of the only ones who sort of made it through. I think Circle might have like first came out at that time as well. So there really weren't a lot of places for people to go and buy Bitcoin. And they weren't able to do it in a way.

Starting point is 00:16:36 where they could easily get money from point A, their bank account, into the exchange. So it was a much easier way for them to just say, hey, I can buy this thing on the pink sheets. And it's okay if it has a premium because who cares, I just want to have access to Bitcoin. Basically, if you were an accredited investor, you were able to get in at NAV. And then you had the holding period, which I guess I thought was six months, but maybe it's a year. And then you could basically sell it at a premium in the market. So people started piling in on this arbitrage, which of course started to unwind for multiple reasons. I would say one being the leverage that was included in these arbitrage trades,

Starting point is 00:17:10 two, the bare market for sure. And three, actually, just the proliferation of the ability to buy Bitcoin in so many other places, you don't need GBTC now. You just don't. The fact that people think that this is going to go back to a premium is probably unlikely given that closed-down funds typically do trade at discounts because they're not as marketable. They just aren't given what the product itself is. How much of a discount do they normally trade? Are you like 10%, 5%. Yeah, I usually talk about it. 15 to 30 percent, depending on what the closed-on fund. And then the other thing to take into account regarding what, I think, Hottle Magoo is who we were talking about, he said their withdrawals coming out of,

Starting point is 00:17:46 they've been selling assets this entire time to pay their 2% fee along the way. So that's what the sales are, or basically to cover that fee. And they pass that through to the investor. Anyone who holds this gets a 1099 that basically says that they sold small amounts of Bitcoin on a monthly basis, or small amounts of GBTC, actually, I should say, not Bitcoin. The fund itself is selling the Bitcoin to pay their fee. So there's that too that's going to get embedded in the discount is the fact that yeah, maybe at one point in time they had the amount of Bitcoin for the NAV value. But as they're paying as they're paying themselves

Starting point is 00:18:17 over time, that discount is going to increase just based on the amount of fee. And that's 2% a year that's been now going on for almost, I mean, eight years now, I guess. Going back to the paper Bitcoin discussion where we were saying that FTCX had 80,000 paper Bitcoins that went poof and were already sold into the market, whether people realize it or not. Do you find Fetiment and some of these technical solutions may be assisting in self-custody and making it more accessible as we kind of move to the right in the timeline here? My perception of Fetiment's strength is kind of for the low-value payments-related custody. and for high value, I think that you'll always want to have something very simple with just your single signature or your multi-sig.

Starting point is 00:19:12 And I think that... So you see it more of from an adoption standpoint in low-income markets and things like that, where it's really going to have the most impact as far as user adoption rates. Was that correctly? Yeah, although not just low-income. I think that even in developed economies, there's a place in the market for Fetament, kind of just your checking account in a sense. It's arguably, it has interesting tradeoffs with regards to a lightning wallet.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Maybe you wouldn't have to worry about inbound and outbound capacity and channel management with Fetiment. And you're just trading for, frankly, having to trust a third party a little bit more. but far less than, for example, a custodial wallet at an exchange or anything like that. These are really granular tradeoffs, and I think that it's just going to take the market process to see where people end up. But I don't think that there's a tradeoff where it's like easier to understand or easier to use. I think that if we look at the U.S., my friend Skyler had a tweet yesterday of the U.S. of writing a check. and he was like, there's no way people are going to write checks. It's just crazy.

Starting point is 00:20:30 You have to write the number twice. Like what? This doesn't make any sense. And whose handwriting is perfect. I think that every new technology has a learning curve to it. And there's a lot of hand-wringing in Bitcoin about, oh, is this technology simple enough for people to learn? Or do we have to figure out something of a smoother learning curve?

Starting point is 00:20:53 And part of it, I think it comes. It comes up a lot more during the bear market where people are just really desiring to increase adoption so that the price starts going up and they are looking for all sorts of creative solutions there. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord. in every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year,

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Starting point is 00:25:25 How are you viewing the... I mean, this year's been pretty brutal, but we did have a balance here recently. But more on long-term looking at it. Like, what are your thoughts? I wish I could be optimistic, honestly. I think it's one of the greatest gifts that God ever gave me was to be married to Pierre because he's one of the most optimistic people I know. And it keeps me from being like negative Nancy, I guess.

Starting point is 00:25:52 But it's a hard backdrop, right? I mean, we're still in an inflationary environment, which I think is being sort of controlled by sales of oil, which at some point we're going to run out of the ability to do so. The Fed does need to hike interest rates, but I mean, we've got so much government debt relative to any other period in time that it seems simply impossible that they will actually be able to raise interest rates. my accelerationist husband over here thinks that it would be great because then we'll get to live in our Bitcoin world much faster if we don't have interest rates arise. But it also just seems like we're in an environment where they're sort of dead set on raising them despite consequences and therefore seems like maybe they'll crash markets and the real estate market as well

Starting point is 00:26:36 in order to achieve ends or maybe start doing so and then push forward and then have to pull back is probably more likely a scenario that happens. But in the meantime, I mean, it seems to me like volatility is probably around to stay for a while that like the real estate market is certainly cooled off. Housing is unaffordable now for people. Yeah. Yeah, isn't it? It's gotten crazy. It's done.

Starting point is 00:27:00 I mean, just based on the fact that prices really haven't come down all that much, they've come down a little bit. It's cooled off. It's definitely not a seller's market anymore. But with where interest rates are, I mean, people's housing costs are basically doubling if they want to go move. So you have a bunch of people who are basically stuck in their houses. So hopefully they like them. And if they don't, right, then they really can't move. And then people who, you know, for life reasons or anything else,

Starting point is 00:27:21 are going to be forced to move and take these new interest rates, right? It's going to be unaffordable. So I think that it does lead to more consumer debt, unfortunately. But I guess in an inflationary environment, that's not necessarily the worst thing. But, I mean, people really should be saving, right? At the end of the day, that would be ideal. And that's just, it's much more difficult to do with 8 plus percent inflation per year. So I'm not super optimistic.

Starting point is 00:27:44 but then again, markets seem to do what they're going to do, regardless of my thoughts about them. So I could be totally off base and things could just, you know, go up 100% between now. Well, I think. To that point, so much of it is a manipulated market. And essential bankers could reverse course because bank XYZ blows up and it could create this total contagion and credit markets. And so now here we are in an easing environment. kind of at the snap of a finger that nobody saw coming because you got three people in a room deciding how many, you know, Fiat units are in the system. And so I think that's on with you.

Starting point is 00:28:24 Like, I hate sitting down and saying, oh, well, it's going to be doom and gloom because if we're looking at it right now, everything points, the math all points towards that. But if they come and they drop another five trillion units into the system because of credit contagion that pops up next week or whenever, it can just change everything on a dime. So, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's definitely hard to have price predictions right now for sure. I also, I mean, I think that it's all the more reason showing us why something like Bitcoin is incredibly important.

Starting point is 00:28:55 And if people aren't getting it this time, then, you know, I don't know how many times you have to be bashed over the head to see that you don't want a group of people making decisions about where money goes, what interest rate should be. I mean, they're just as human infallible as the rest of us. I'd say they're more fallible. Yeah, they're more fallible also because they think that they know. Whereas, you know, if you have a little bit of humility and you accept the fact that you don't know, you're not going to try to make these decisions.

Starting point is 00:29:20 And so it's better to have a stable monetary policy that you can know and rely on to make economic decisions, both for your household and your business and for everything else around you. That's going to help people more. Even with price volatility, that's going to help people more than wondering what a group of people in some FMC meeting are going to decide. I wanted to talk to you, Pierre, about Taro. This is something that keeps coming up quite a bit right now. And I think a lot of the people were talking about it because there's talk of issuing stable coins on Bitcoin Lightning.

Starting point is 00:29:53 Can you explain what Taro is? And then also kind of your thoughts on how technically sounds something like this is. There's people saying that this is going to cause problems for lightning. just kind of walk us through all your thoughts on it. The concept is that basically you would be able to issue any kind of asset using an on-chain Bitcoin transaction that is creating a special kind of output and then you would be able to transfer that asset in a lightning channel. As far as I can tell from a technical perspective, it works fine.

Starting point is 00:30:30 To me, the real questions are on an economic and kind of almost legal level. And utility. Utility. Well, I would put utility under economic, but. Oh, sorry. You go. Yeah. There's a lot to unpack on this topic.

Starting point is 00:30:48 First of all, just in terms of asset issuance, there has been asset issuance, quote unquote, on Bitcoin before, point to like counterparty, for example. And I find asset issuance to not be interesting because I think that it distracts from BTC, from Bitcoin, the money. anytime people talk about asset issuance on top of Bitcoin, I kind of roll my eyes because to me it's just, it's neither here nor there in terms of how important it is for the world because, you know, fix the money, fix the world. The other part, I don't know if you wanted to respond to that. Well, yeah. So when we look at stable coins to date, there's obviously a huge amount of demand for stable coins, especially if you go into, we'll just use the terminology, third world nation states that just want access to some type of sound. currency relative to their local currency, which is a disaster, they want to hold something that

Starting point is 00:31:43 can protect their buying power as they're paying expenses each month. And so when we look at stable coins across all these other protocols, whether you're talking about Ethereum, Tron, or whatever they are, right? I don't know what the number is, but we're probably talking $60 to $100 billion in stable coin issuance. When I talk with you out in L.A., I didn't know the answer to this question, but I asked you, I said, how much if I wanted to send you $1 as a stable coin on the Ethereum network? I said, how much would the fees be for that? And you laughed at me, and you said it would be about $5. And then I just, I was aghast. I couldn't believe that to send a small transaction in a stable coin would have such enormous

Starting point is 00:32:28 fees to do something like that. So when I look at this, I suspect the fees are extremely low on lightning to send a $1 stable coin over the tarot protocol. Is that correct? And do you see value there? Let me just clarify that that high fee was in reference to on the Ethereum network. And it turns out there's a lot of tether stable coin activity on Tron because Tron is the low fee network. And it's kind of you call the B cash of Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:33:05 and just as centralized on both of them. Centralized. Yeah. Become more centralized. And it's a knockoff of Ethereum, right? It's all the same kind of underlying engineering, which is really convenient for folks. But the fascinating thing is that I get DMs on Twitter

Starting point is 00:33:22 from people who have gotten scammed by an impersonator of mine or of my employer. And they got scammed out of a stable coin on Tron, right? It wasn't out of Bitcoin that they got scammed. And also people just like asking me for money and, you know, they always send me a Tron address and ask for a stable coin. So without a doubt, there is demand. I'd characterize it as there is demand for dollars everywhere in the world.

Starting point is 00:33:54 It is a known brand. Well, for now. And the convenience of having this be digital is tremendous. and especially having it be permissionless so you don't have to have KYCAML bank account. Instead, you just generate a private key and you can receive dollars. Now, I think that it's important to recognize the regulatory arbitrage happening here, which is that normally when you're looking at ACH or wire transfers or Swift, there's KYCAML involved, right, where both the recipients and the senders are known to the banking system.

Starting point is 00:34:29 and the stable coins on blockchains, somehow, someone somewhere decided that there's an exception for this rule. And there doesn't need to be any KYC for sending a stable coin from one wallet to another. Now, that is a reversible decision, right? So tomorrow, the authorities, the regulators, whoever, could shut down the bank account of any stable coin issuer. and say, hey, look, like, you guys are operating this network and you're not complying with AMLKYC, so you're shut down.

Starting point is 00:35:07 So that's the centralized stablecoins. And then you have the decentralized stable coins like Terra. They still have those dependencies that you're referring to, right? So you're saying, no matter what, it's going to be centralized at some point. So whether you're using a decentralized protocol alongside with the centralized stable coin issuer, you're still centralized. Right. We regularly see stable coins get frozen on chain. So it's not like it's a free-for-all. At the end of the day, the stable-coin issuer is the one who decides who is actually holding the asset or not. For example,

Starting point is 00:35:44 when Ethereum had its hard fork with the merge, USDC came out and said, hey, look, all of the USDC that is on the proof of work chain is no longer valid, and we won't honor that. Only the USC on the proof of stake chain is a real USC. It is 100% centralized. There are the algorithmic stable coins, and the problem with those is that they just blow up like Tara did with Luna. Those just are perpetual motion machines that don't work. And then you have folks like Maker. And when you look under the hood, Basically, they have 70% of their portfolio is USDC. So it's a centralized stable coin. And then 30% of it is some variety of other crypto assets.

Starting point is 00:36:33 And then it's worth a dollar. This is basically repackaging centralized stable coins into decentralized grapping paper. But that would not work out very well if USDC was to be frozen by the regulators or whatever. It's so funny. I'm sorry. I was just laughing. Because like anytime I feel like I might have a different opinion than Pierre and then I hear his rationale why I always then revert to his same opinion. Go ahead and work.

Starting point is 00:37:00 And what do you got? The point you made to me that I really liked when I was asking about Tarot was the ripple argument that basically Ripple's argument a long, long time ago about why they were valuable was that they could take Fiat, roll it over the Ripple. So you go from Fiat to Ripple and then back to Fiat and your Fiat gets there very quickly. and we'll be the rails that get your fiat there. When you brought that up, I mean, it's just so, it's exactly, it literally is what Elizabeth Stark was saying in her interview about Taro, is that we could be the rails for Fiat. And so you're just thinking to yourself, okay,

Starting point is 00:37:34 why do I want to go from Fiat to Bitcoin to Bitcoin to Fiat? Like, why are we doing this to ourselves, truly? And Ripple didn't have a use case back then. It doesn't have a use case now. And so I see the same fate for Taro, really. I want to preface this, though, with I have a tremendous amount of respect for Lightning Labs. Yeah. They have been a key part of my Bitcoin journey.

Starting point is 00:38:00 I've really only ever used L&D, their Lightning Note implementation. And there is a case for asset issuance. I just don't think that it's one that I'm interested in today. I think that the focus should be 100% on Bitcoin. The other point on the XRP ripple parallel is the cost. As you mentioned, shouldn't the cost be lower with lightning? Well, not necessarily if you're having to flip in and out of BTC, whereas on Tron, you just send the stable coin along at a very low fee.

Starting point is 00:38:36 You don't have to ever convert it into the native Tron currency or anything like that. I think that what's missing in this equation is the regulatory arbitrage. piece, which is that the reason why stablecoin issuers don't just operate a SQL database with a Rest API and a website where you can just transfer dollars, you know, pseudonymously, is that they need to externalize the data onto the blockchain, onto some kind of public ledger so that they can point to it and say, hey, look, we're different than a bank. It's the aura of decentralization. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:12 We're not a money market fund. We have a blockchain here. My understanding with the lightning, and this is, I think, Mr. Magoo was pointing out, which is that you're lacking the regulatory arbitrage if the issuance is only at the edges, like what is being proposed with Taro. And so the issuer has none of the, it doesn't have the benefit of just having this public blockchain that they can essentially dump their externality onto, but they also have a clearer liability of, hey, look, this is your asset that you've issued here. Now, I don't know that that

Starting point is 00:39:49 part really matters. I think the bigger issue is kind of how long are regulators going to allow dollars to move around without any KYCML? One argument would be forever because this allows the dollar to maintain its position globally. And so essentially, this is a CBDC that is private, right? So it's a private company that issues it, but ultimately in that bank account that is backing the centralized stable coin, they are holding U.S. treasuries. And so this is creating demand for U.S. treasuries. And as we've discussed, there is a lack of demand for U.S. treasuries currently. So the argument here would be that these stable coins are, even though there is regulatory arbitrage, the regulators are in no hurry to crack down on it, because from their perspective, this is actually

Starting point is 00:40:39 beneficial to the overall financial system. And for people that might not be dialed into what you're describing there, so the idea is as inflation continues to run hot, or at least that's what many of us expect to happen, what happens in the treasury market is you have continued sell-off trying to chase after the in order to get the yields up to where these inflation prints are. So if that continues to play out, there needs to be a buyer of all. these treasuries. And what Pierre is saying is these stable coin operators become those buyers. They are the ones that have to have something in a treasury that represents the digital

Starting point is 00:41:20 token that they're issuing. So they become a natural buyer, which is very ironic. And I think what many might not ever suspect being the scenario becomes a convenient relationship for the Fed, for stable coin issuers, and for just buyers of treasuries worldwide. for any large currency. Pierre, when I'm looking at this and you describe it as basically like two centralizations, one is happening at the stable coin issue. They're centralized. And then also at the protocol layer, they're also centralized. So when you look at that double whammy and we look at, and I'm not trying to just focus on Ethereum, but when I'm looking at how they're now, quote, unquote, OFAC compliant because they have a majority of their validators that are OFAC compliant.

Starting point is 00:42:09 and they have the highest fees, it almost seems like that would be the worst scenario for somebody to be dabbling in stable coins or if you were receiving a stable coin, that that would be the absolute worst scenario because it's so centralized, because you got the OFAC compliance, and because you have the highest fees relative to everything else. Would you agree with that? Or do you think that that's over the top? I think the OFFAC compliance part is probably overstated. It needs to be tested, right?

Starting point is 00:42:40 We need to see OFAC make a big move and then see things get censored. Now, the other part of it, too, is that there's a question of... So you're suspect of whether that can actually be censored? I think that it could be routed around. And so, for example, even if it's like 90% OFAC compliant, all that means is that the OFAC violating transactions take longer to get into the blockchain because they've got to wait for somebody who's not OFAC compliant to pick it up. I don't think that the stress test scenario has been played out there.

Starting point is 00:43:15 In my mind, Ethereum's centralization always has to do with the issuance of ETH. And so they're always going to have pressure to issue more ETH to increase staking yields. And that's where all the interests are aligned, except for the people who are not staking. But they're not part of the governance process either. Who cares about them? For the stable coins, I think that Tron is going to continue to be the premier blockchain. But the other part of it, too, is that there are significant network effects. And so the Lightning folks will say, hey, wouldn't it be nice if we built these network effects on Lightning?

Starting point is 00:43:52 And so Stablecoins are essentially a Trojan horse that allows us to have adoption of the Lightning Network. And today they are adopting it for Stable Coins, but then tomorrow Lightning Network will, you know, be used with BTC. And so this is just a way of introducing people to lightning, which is a plausible theory. The problem is that these people have already been introduced to Trump. There's already an incumbent network here. And maybe they would switch over to lightning, but they would have to have a value proposition where I don't see the value proposition yet.

Starting point is 00:44:27 Maybe it'll evolve and we'll have a different conversation. I would also point out, I was skeptical of lightning when, the lightning white paper came out in 2014. I read through it and I thought to myself, this is just far too complicated. I don't think it's going to work out. I have a terrible track record and of judgment on this. I think it's important for people hearing all this because if people are joining us and they don't have a lot of depth and a lot of this stuff, they might be hearing this and saying, oh my God, like there's, so there's the competitor to Bitcoin. And I think for people that are in that scenario, you got to understand what Pierre's

Starting point is 00:45:02 talking about here is he does not see Tron or any of these other things as a competition to Bitcoin. And don't let me take words out of your mouth, Pierre. If you want to state this differently than how I'm kind of summarizing for the audience, Bitcoin is a completely different value proposition of sound money versus what a lot of these centralized protocols are trying to just make it easy for people to basically create equity tokens is what they're effectively doing. That's right. And the Bitcoin could have asset issuance on a native level inside the ledger. The reason it doesn't is that it's very resource intensive for running a Bitcoin node. And so we want to minimize the cost of running a Bitcoin node. And that means that we have to put on resource constraints, which means that we want the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin nodes, the Bitcoin blockchain to be a ledger for BTC and not a ledger for any other asset. As an accountant, this makes a lot of sense to me because if somebody came to me and was like, hey, we're going to have 10 companies using the same QuickBooks file.

Starting point is 00:46:07 Like, that's insane. Like, why would you not create 10 files, one for each company? I can attest that even having two companies using the same Quickbook file. I have two companies and I tried that one year and that was a disaster. And one of my businesses literally only had like five or six expenses for the year. So I can tell you firsthand, that's not a good idea. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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Starting point is 00:49:52 And so the reason that Tron and Ethereum are doing those things is because they need to have an angle for competing with Bitcoin. They need to have features, quote unquote, things that differentiate them from Bitcoin. But from Bitcoin's perspective, their differentiation is actually undermining the long-term decentralization of their network because they're making the cost of running a node too high. Let's talk through that. So if I'm running my node and people start using Taro, I don't have to run that. I don't have to store that data on my node. But the few people that maybe are running it, let's say that five people want to issue token XYZ on TARO. Now they have to have extra memory on their full node. And what is it? Those five people are basically keeping the ledger of whatever token XYZ is doing. Is that how that works? Yeah, so there's kind of an overlay network of the Taro network that is, it's still anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain in the sense that there are still outputs that have kind of, you could call it, hidden data that is in, that you could verify, but the data ultimately resides outside of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Starting point is 00:51:09 It's on this secondary network. And this is really, this goes back to the regulatory arbitrage, is that if you, if you If you're doing any kind of defy type stuff, you want to put as much data onto the blockchain as possible because then you can say, hey, look, this is all decentralized. And so I don't have any liability as a centralized entity. Yeah, sure, we deployed the smart contract, you know, uniswap or whatever decks or compound and whatever defy protocol. But ultimately, they want to not have any kind of regulatory concerns with these SEC or the CFTC.

Starting point is 00:51:45 And they want quote unquote transparency because people love that. Right. Well, I'm glad you put air quotes around that because I don't think anybody. I mean, if anything, it's like, okay, it's bad for privacy. And now, you know, people are going to front run you. Yeah, I don't know why people want transparency. But yeah. They don't.

Starting point is 00:52:03 They don't. They think they want transparency. I really think that it's a way of rationalizing why this is all on chain is, oh, it's for transparency. But really it's about we want to avoid legal liability. for unregistered securities and also unregistered derivatives in the case of CFTC regulations. You know, with Bitcoin saying, hey, look, you can't put any of this on chain. You can only put a very compact signature proof on chain and everything else has to be off-chain, whether it's the business logic of the computation of the contract or keeping track of the asset

Starting point is 00:52:39 issuance and all this. Well, that means that, let's call it, toxic waste, has to reside on centralized third parties that now have legal liability with regulators. That, I think, is the challenge of building on Bitcoin is that you don't have as many opportunities to dump your toxic waste onto the blockchain as you do on Ethereum or Trump.

Starting point is 00:53:04 So there's some serious nuance take on what I think many in the community get all excited about. They share on Twitter. I know I share a lot of this stuff on Twitter because it's exciting news. But I think when you really do dig into it, and going back to what your original comment was, is I see it as a lot of noise. And it maybe is a distraction away from sound money and all the incredible things that we all know that Bitcoin can bring to the world if we get enough people focused in on it. There's a reason they call Pierre the Orthodox Bitcoins. I'd like that. Because he stands by first principles.

Starting point is 00:53:41 Yeah. And that's important. But that was really good, Pierre. Morgan, we had a question from the audience in reference to tax lost harvesting. This year, Bitcoin's down. I know that it's changed from the previous years with the way that this is treated or at least how long you have to have the cell complete before you're able to buy it back. Talk to us a little bit about this and maybe some ideas that you have on tax harvesting in general, because I know the broader markets are down as well for people. The way tax loss harvesting works is that you are allowed to take a loss in your asset, provided that you actually take a step back from that asset and really come away from that asset. So originally the way that the loss rule was written was that you can't just sell your GE shares at a loss

Starting point is 00:54:29 and then buy them back a second later. that would be considered that you were still holding it the whole time. And then it would be a disallowed tax loss. And it would be subject to the wash sale rule, which would basically mean that you wouldn't be allowed to take that loss against your tax return. And so in order to not have the wash sale rule applied to you, you have to be out of an asset for 30 whole days.

Starting point is 00:54:53 And you can on the 31st day, go back in and buy the asset. And so removing yourself from the market for 30 days, shows that you are no longer in that asset, that you've actually taken a loss, that you took a step back from the asset, and then you have taken some time to get your head back together before you go back into that asset. There are ways around this rule in standard markets. So what people like to do is, let's say, I don't know, they own some semi-conductor stock, right? So they decide they have a loss on the semiconductor stock.

Starting point is 00:55:21 They sell that semiconductor stock and they buy a different semiconductor stock. So that way they're still in the semiconductor market, quote-unquote, but they are not out of the market. for 30 days. And then people took that even broader to indexes. I'm in the S&P 500. I have a loss on S&P 500. Instead of buying back the S&P 500, I still want to be invested in U.S. stocks. I'll buy the Russell 3,000 instead. And so thereby I'm not buying the same group of stocks. I'm buying a different group of stocks. I'm still invested and I don't have to be out of the market in 30 days. And should I want to sell that asset in 30 days and go buy the S&P 500 back, I can do so,

Starting point is 00:55:55 in which case I can take a loss on my tax return. The losses that are, the government allows you to take, I mean, they're not great. I'll put it that way. The government allows you to take up to $3,000 per year. If let's say you have a $50,000 loss, you don't get to take the whole $50,000 loss in one year. You can use that $50,000 loss to offset any other gains in that year. And anything that you have left over, you can then use as a tax loss, and then you can carry forward anything in excess of the $3,000. So let's say on this $50,000 loss example, you also had $10K worth of gains. Now you have a $40,000 loss. You deduct $3,000. on your tax return, whether or not you're married or single, you only get $3,000.

Starting point is 00:56:33 And then the next year, you would have a $37,000 loss carry forward. I should have used smaller numbers, huh? That's how it works. With Bitcoin, though, because Bitcoin is not an MBTC, like the same rules would apply with the wash sale. But Bitcoin, you can actually sell your Bitcoin and immediately buy it back. So the wash sale rules don't apply currently. They're trying to change that.

Starting point is 00:56:53 They haven't yet actually changed the rule on it. So you can still do this before year end, where you literally go. to your favorite exchange, you go and sell your Bitcoin, you immediately buy back that Bitcoin, and the cost to you is basically the transaction fee for selling that Bitcoin and then buying it back. There are other costs, I would say, that are associated with doing this too. If you're going to wash sale, or sorry, not wash sale, but take a tax loss on your Bitcoin, you also get to conveniently check that box on your 1040 that says that you have disposed of cryptocurrency. And so if you're a private Bitcoiner, it might not be worth the risk of checking

Starting point is 00:57:28 that box, right? Because then all eyes are on you potentially with the IRS about what Bitcoin you do or don't have in excess of what you've tax loss sold. So that's something that's a consideration. The transaction fees are not nothing if you have one Bitcoin, right? And you sell it. Maybe you pay 50 bips, right? You've got 0.995 Bitcoin. And then you have to go and buy that back. You're going to have even less, right? You might want to replace that Bitcoin with by adding to your Bitcoin stack so you can keep it whole if you like whole numbers or if you don't care. But I would try to maybe replace those transaction fees because if like Bitcoin does become let's say a hundred trillion dollar asset class and you did some tax loss harvesting when it was 300 billion dollars,

Starting point is 00:58:06 that tax loss that you took $3,000 per year is going to look very expensive in the future potentially if you didn't replace the transaction fees. So I would say that that's probably the biggest tradeoff there as well. But it's a legal loophole right now that people should take advantage of if it's something that they want to do. And the other thing is that because you get that loss carry forward, you can use it to offset gains in the future on your Bitcoin. I know there are some Bitcoiners out there who think that the government's not going to exist, so why do any of this stuff anyways? And maybe that's fair.

Starting point is 00:58:35 But in the meantime, maybe you want to play by the rules or not, but at least know what they are. Earlier this year, the FastB adjusted their treatment of Bitcoin on the balance sheet and Gap accounting. There was a lot of people saying that this was a pretty big deal. I'm kind of curious how you two viewed it. And do you see this as something that could lead to broad, adoption, especially from institutions moving forward.

Starting point is 00:58:59 I would say any competent financial analysts who is doing a valuation of a company would mark to market the Bitcoin on the balance sheet so that they remove any kind of effect from that gap treatment. Now, look, there are lots of, there's a wide spectrum of financial analysts out there. Not all of them are carefully doing all of that. Furthermore, there are investors who just look at kind of, okay, what's the earnings per share? And they don't go in and make any kind of adjustments to anything. They don't have an Excel model, right?

Starting point is 00:59:37 They are just looking on Yahoo Finance. And so I think that it certainly makes it more palatable for CFOs out there to have it on the balance sheet if it is going up as well as down. because right now it only goes down, right? It can only get impaired. So, Pierre, as much as any person with an accounting degree just got a kick out of your comment, people who don't have an accounting degree or maybe a CFA probably maybe missed the nuance

Starting point is 01:00:07 of how funny that was. But I'm just going to break it down for people real fast what Pierre said here. He's basically saying that, like, if you're not an idiot and you can go in there and kind of read the financials and you can mark to market the Bitcoin, you can realize real fast. that it wasn't a loss on the income statement because of the way that it was treated according

Starting point is 01:00:27 to the old gap accounting rules and that the company didn't lose a billion dollars, that they were just forced to mark their books differently. With that said, there are tons of retail investors that if they see micro-strategy is a perfect example that had to mark their earnings per share deeply into the negative prior to this rule, do you think that that had an impact? on the market price or do you think in general the market pretty much understands the nuances of what was happening? I'm assuming you're saying the latter. Yeah, there is kind of a redistribution effect where that means that micro strategy shares got redistributed from unsophisticated retail investors who panic sold into the hands of folks who are running the numbers. So you like the old rule.

Starting point is 01:01:17 You like the old rule is what you're saying. Now, because I don't trade it. I think that the new rule is good because ultimately it does legitimize and it drives adoption. But I also don't think that it is a massive bull catalyst of, okay, now it's changed. I'm with you. I think it also speaks to the fact that when you start to involve like products like a GBT, like we talked about earlier, or companies like a micro strategy or miners not to knock the company that you work for. But the average person can't really take into account all of the factors. that affect a business and including, right, just changing in accounting rules.

Starting point is 01:01:56 These are things that analysts are looking at all the time, that they're up on, that even the best of analysts get wrong, unfortunately. And so for the average person who's just going to go look at Yahoo Finance and look what earnings per share is, right, you're not going to really get a good indicator of whether or not the business you're looking at is really a good business to be purchasing, in which case, Bitcoin is there for you to just go buy Bitcoin, right? I think that it's so hard for people to just look at Bitcoin and say, okay, I'm just going to go buy Bitcoin and I'm not going to worry about the rest of this stuff.

Starting point is 01:02:23 But every single signal points people to that direction of this is the only thing that you need to do. This will make your life more simple. This will take a lot of the angst and other issues out of investing and make it easier for you to just save money the way we were meant to save and leave investing for the people who want to take extra risk. It just seems like time and time again, we're being pointed in this direction, but people just have blinders on them and they can't see it. I think from if you're filtering, if you're using tools and you're saying let me filter, all the unprofitable companies out of this filter and you're using it that way, I think the new accounting rules are going to be very helpful for people that are maybe looking at things that way. But great points, guys.

Starting point is 01:03:03 Last one I have for you, believe it or not, we've already been talking for more than an hour here. So that went fast. Okay, so transaction fees. This one seems to be coming up a lot. I don't know if this is fud or what's driving this, but there's a lot of people that just keep bringing up this idea that in the long-term Bitcoin's reward for mining blocks continues to go down, and it's not going to be enough of an incentive to continue to secure the network long-term or that there's going to be these issues that materialize in decades from now.

Starting point is 01:03:38 And Pierre, you wrote a comprehensive response to this question. It was a 23-page report. We'll have a link to that in the show notes for people that want to really kind of dig into the granularity of this, but give us the down and dirty on your response to people that are bringing up this argument. I think the place to start would be kind of, okay, what's the extreme outcome here? The extreme outcome is that what we call the subsidy, which is the new Bitcoin being added to the ledger, that's what gets cut in half every four years worth of blocks. And so by the year, I think it's 2130 or 2140, it goes to zero, but it's already immaterial long before that.

Starting point is 01:04:19 I think in the 2040s, it'll just be very few Bitcoin or Satoshi's. And so if we take the extreme of, okay, that goes to zero, and let's assume for a second, the transaction fees grind down to very little as well, so little that there's only enough revenue for one person to be mining on their laptop. And the outside observer looking at this would say, hey, look, Bitcoin is 100% centralized. You got one person who is mining Bitcoin on their laptop. And the entire global economy,

Starting point is 01:04:56 what we would use as trillions of dollars of transactions, but at that time, the dollar no longer exists. The entire global economy runs on Bitcoin. And there's one guy with his laptop who is settling all these transactions every 10 minutes. So the outside observer would say, hey, this is clown world stuff, right? That doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 01:05:16 Here's why it makes sense, though. if that one guy decided that he's going to start censoring transactions or doing deep reorgs, then what happens is that you have transactions start accumulating in the mempool, in the backlog of transactions that want to get into the next block, but are unable to because this guy is censoring them, and they start bidding up their transaction fees, and this attracts other people to start mining. And so now suddenly the revenue for Bitcoin mining has grown,

Starting point is 01:05:47 and now there's enough revenue to justify there being competition from other miners. And the thing about Bitcoin mining is that it's permissionless. Even when there's only one person mining, it's still permissionless. Anybody can start mining and start competing with that one person. It's not a monopoly in the sense that they have a closed legal way of excluding competitors. Rather, it's really the most open possible market. That's, I think, the crux of the argument, but that's not the only reason why transaction fees go up of censorship. The other reason transaction fees go up is when there's more demand for block space than there is supply.

Starting point is 01:06:28 When you've got lots of people trying to use Bitcoin, people call it network congestion, but really what it is, is it's transactions that are competing to get into the next block. There's a limited amount of space in each block so that we can keep Bitcoin decentralized by keeping the cost. of running a Bitcoin node low. And so when you have network congestion, the transactors are competing with each other by bidding up transaction fees, as we saw in 2017, but also in 2019 as well.

Starting point is 01:06:56 Transaction fees did significantly go up. That, to me, is why long term, I would expect transaction fees to continue to oscillate. They're going to continue to be volatile because I think the Bitcoin adoption waves are going to continue to happen. eventually we'll reach 100% adoption.

Starting point is 01:07:16 And at that point, we can have some idea of, okay, here's what the equilibrium is for transaction fees on Bitcoin. But it's not just a demand story either. There's also a supply story on the technology side. For example, Segwit increased the amount of block space supply significantly. Taproot increased the efficiency of multi-sig. So now multi-sig looks like single-sig going forward. There's lots of, and then of course, lightning,

Starting point is 01:07:42 layer two type scaling improvements that really compress the amount of transactional data that you can put onto the blockchain. There's technology improvements that we don't know about yet that will be invented in 10, 20 years and 30 years. And so that's where on the supply side, there's uncertainty. But in any case, I think that it will be to the benefit of the users of the system and that there's nothing wrong with low fees. There's nothing wrong with high fees. It's just a market equilibrium that is constantly emerging, but there's not like a situation we would have where fees are too low. There's no such thing.

Starting point is 01:08:21 You hear Michael Saylor talk a lot about this idea of not changing things and trying to almost like the laws of gravity and the laws that we deal with nature. And he talks a lot about the conservation of energy. And I think you're talking a little bit about some of those ideas in what you're saying there, do you see it that way that by not changing it, that the incentives of mining and for people to have uncensored blocks and all of these, all the game theory works itself out if you continue to keep your hands off the controls and allow the laws that have been put in place at a very early point in the protocol to naturally come to a remedy and mark it equilibrium

Starting point is 01:09:05 amongst all the key players? Is that what you're really describing here? Yes, I do. see it that way? I think what the critics would say is that Bitcoin is changing every four years with the having. And so the economic incentives are changing because you're cutting the subsidy in half. But I think what they miss is that this subsidy has no effect on transaction finality. And it also has its purpose is purely about preventing seniorage. That we need to add units to the ledger. You need to do it in a way that is costly so that there's no free money being handed out, right? The miners are having to expend real resources in order to add the units to the ledger, and it's a competitive process. It's not monopoly seniorage like you have, for example,

Starting point is 01:09:51 with dollars. The fittest participants receive the rewards, like what you see in nature. Awesome stuff. Morgan, you are working on a book right now. We're wrapping things up. Tell people about what you do. Also, tell them about your book. If you have anything that you want to hide it, highlight, please highlight it. Same for you, Pierre, and give people a handoff where they can learn more about you too. I wrote a book called The Personal Finance Quick Start Guide and it had a small section about Bitcoin and I started marketing it on Twitter because I felt like there was a dearth of financial planning content that both combined the psychological aspects of what happens to us with our money with also the fundamental principles of what you need to do with your money and to give people a framework to make those decisions. with or without the help of a financial planner. And in doing so and in marketing it on Twitter, I found that it's not actually,

Starting point is 01:10:47 I mean, it's great and it adds to the market, but there's a plethora of financial planning books obviously out there. But there are actually zero financial planning books out there about Bitcoin, specifically. And I get Bitcoiners asking me questions all the time. My practice, I have a registered investment advisor that's been around eight years now. We predominantly deal with Bitcoiners actually now over the last few years. We only have Bitcoiners coming.

Starting point is 01:11:10 through. And so we're dealing with issues that have really, that nobody has really laid the ground workforce. I'm feeling really excited about writing content that will hopefully enable many bitcoins to not only save lots of Bitcoin, but to also work out all of the financial planning issues that may arise as they grow and build wealth. So that's the purpose of the book. There's also going to be sections on concentration issues that should come up hopefully for people who own a lot of Bitcoin, right, or own a little bit about a bit of Bitcoin that grow. over time and dealing with how to approach retirement and other aspects of financial planning. So it should hopefully be a comprehensive guide to Bitcoin personal finance.

Starting point is 01:11:49 If you want to hear about the book or be interviewed for the book, I'm going to have a, I will send a link to Preston that you can find in the show notes for a landing page for that. You can also DM me on Twitter. I'm at Morgan with an E. Rochard. And I'm on Twitter at Bitcoin Pierre. And if you're interested in industrial scale mining, go follow, riot blockchain as well on Twitter. Awesome.

Starting point is 01:12:12 We have a podcast too called Bitcoin for advisors. Oh, awesome. We kind of put those out monthly, but we missed one last month, but otherwise we're on a good It's a grind. It's a grind. Okay, we'll have links to all of those things. I got a bunch of things written down here. We'll have those in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:12:30 Guys, thank you so much for making time and coming on the show. We need to do this more often. I thoroughly enjoyed these conversations, but thank you guys. we had a blast right thanks for having us on we enjoyed it as well and I think our son enjoyed it as well too I hear him playing yeah I heard him playing for at least the last 20 minutes yeah I'm dead or podcasting time to go play duplo I love it all right guys I won't hold you any longer and thanks for joining me then I thanks for us then I if you guys enjoyed this conversation be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use just search

Starting point is 01:13:08 for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC109: Bitcoin Taro, GBTC Discount, & More w/ Pierre and Morgen Rochard (Bitcoin Podcast)

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