We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC185: AI Compute with Bitcoin Mining w/ Andrew Edstrom and Jesse Myers (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. On today's show, we have the insightful Andy Edstrom and Jesse Myers joining us. We explore the recent realization by major political parties that being anti-crypto is now an election losing proposition. We'll dive into the implications of this shift discussing how it impacts the Bitcoin landscape and what it means for the future. We also get into this very interesting AI discussion with the Nvidia results that just recently came out and how it's at the intersection of Bitcoin mining and AI training.

Starting point is 00:00:38 All right. So with all of that said, let's jump right to the interview with Mr. Andy Edstrom and Mr. Jesse Myers. Celebrating 10 years. You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I've got Jesse and Andy here. Thrilled to have you guys to have a fun conversation today. Welcome. It's always great to see you, Preston.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Really love our conversations. Happy to be here. Always. Super excited about it. You know, it's funny when there's two guests and I do the intro, you can always see the awkward pause between the guests. Like, do I go first and say, welcome back? Welcome to you as well.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Anyway, let's go ahead and start this thing off. Big news, big news here. Jesse, you had a baby. Your wife had a baby yesterday. Congrats. Thank you. What can you tell us? Yeah, it's funny to be on a podcast today, literally less than 24 hours since we've been.

Starting point is 00:01:52 She's going to kill you. First child was born. But, you know, have the opportunity to talk about Bitcoin with Preston and the end. Yeah, I can spare an hour. That's for sure. Yeah, so firstborn was born yesterday. It was 41 hours of labor. So a long haul.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Oof. Big boy, nine pounds, two ounces. Wow. Yeah, that is big. Yeah. Yeah. And I was, I was, it doesn't mean anything, but I was particularly proud that he had a very large head, 14 and a quarter inch head.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Wow. Felt good. Wow. Well, good for you guys. Big brain baby. Big brain baby. That's right. Galaxy brain baby.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Well, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Very, very exciting. I just want to say, Preston, when you reached out

Starting point is 00:02:41 about doing the episode, I knew that the baby was coming, but then Jesse told me, oh, wife's going into labor. But that was two days ago, and I'm like, oh, no problem.

Starting point is 00:02:51 Oh, yeah. A baby will be out. He'll have 24 hours to recover. Yeah, and then 40, almost two full days of labor. So, you know, my goodness. Jesse's a trooper.

Starting point is 00:03:01 He doesn't look, His wife is the trooper. That's right. That's right. I mean, I have already cracked jokes about how I did most of the work, but I didn't do anything. Oh, she's ready to kill you. She's going to backhand you. Oh, my.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and get down the business here. Guys, what are your overall thoughts as we look to just how Bitcoin has performed? The general markets have performed since the start of 2024. Anything that you guys find noteworthy or surprising that maybe you weren't expecting or maybe that you were at the start of the year till here we are at the end of May. Yeah, you go first, Jesse.

Starting point is 00:03:38 I definitely have some thoughts there. I think even though we're not talking about it a ton lately, I think 2024 for Bitcoin is all about the ETFs still. And the pattern of what has happened with the ETFs is very interesting and very promising, in my opinion, about going forward. because, you know, we had the ETS roll out. The Wall Street expectations about the net inflows for the first year were modest. Way different than what we saw.

Starting point is 00:04:10 And they've already been blown out of the water. So there's already a ton more demand than everyone expected. What is it about 5X more than what some of the, you know, the mainstream analysts were saying? Are we 5?10X? What is it? Would you say? I think it is something like 5X. Around that.

Starting point is 00:04:30 I feel like it was like a $3 billion mark and we're at like 12 or 15, something like that. That could be totally wrong. But anyway, so they roll out in January. The first month is really defined by GBTC outflows. And so net inflows to the ETFs overall are kind of zero. But then February and March, very net positive. The GBT outflow subsided.

Starting point is 00:04:58 people who wanted to get out of GBT took the opportunity in the first month. But then the flows we saw in the next couple of months were all inflows, people piling into Black Rock and an arc and fidelity in particular. And the reflexivity is what I found very interesting and I think is very promising going forward. As the price of Bitcoin started to run up because of all these inflows, we, on quite a few days, we were seeing $500 million. of net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, which amounted to the prices we were at 9,000 Bitcoin a day being absorbed. And at that time, we were mining 900 Bitcoin a day since the halving that's dropped

Starting point is 00:05:42 to 450. So we were seeing on some of those days 10x inflows into Bitcoin ETFs versus the amount of supply being created. And as the price started to run, that's when we got those really big days. So, you know, price starts to go up. The psychology with Bitcoin has always been that when the price runs, people want to buy it more. And so we saw that with the ETFs. And we had, you know, quite a, we pulled forward a lot of a post-market, post-having bull market rally because of the supply demand imbalance in February and March in particular. And then with the Genesis Gemini bankruptcy proceedings in March, April, we started to see a lot of a lot more GBT outflows again, which sort of negated the inflows we were seeing from organic

Starting point is 00:06:32 demand in the ETFs. And we kind of went sideways. We've been going sideways for the last couple months. And I think that's in large part spurred by the Genesis Gemini bankruptcy proceedings causing the GBTC selling that made the supply demand imbalance from ETFs go away. But looking forward, we're not going to see that kind of GBGC activity again. And so I think we're probably just a bit of a rally away from kickstarting that flywheel and that reflexivity to the upside again, which is very promising for the next 12 months. Andy? Well, well said. So I'll throw in the latest ETF news here, which is that surprise of all surprises, it looked like the Ethereum ETF was not going to be approved.

Starting point is 00:07:21 It looked like Terry Gensler. Yeah, exactly. Anytime soon. Yeah, excuse me. Never say never. It was probably, you know, unfortunately inevitable,

Starting point is 00:07:31 but there, but, but, but people didn't think it was going to happen soon. And then we had this wild about face in the political landscape. And maybe I won't dig into the weeds on that just yet.

Starting point is 00:07:46 other than to say, I feel like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings and the two towers, and he's standing in front of Theon, King Theon, and the evil wizard Saramon, right, has possessed King Theon. And like drawing blood from a stone, Gandalf exercises the evil wizard. And I feel like that's what just happened with Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic Party. and crypto policy. But the other thing I'll say about the Ethereum ETF looking forward is, I'd been thinking about scenario analysis and I'd been thinking about, okay, we had the wave of adoption of the ETFs that Jesse just described.

Starting point is 00:08:32 And now we're in this cooling off period. And we've been waiting for wealth managers, financial advisors, to do their due diligence and start hitting the buy button more frequently in the coming months. And then I was thinking, oh my, okay, now we got this Ethereum ETF. Is this going to confuse them, right? Now I got two, now I can get two things I can press the buy button on for my clients. But as it turns out, and correct me with if I'm wrong, it appears that what got approved

Starting point is 00:09:02 don't got yield, don't got staking. And I think that's actually a really good fact, relatively speaking, for Bitcoin price performance this year for the Bitcoin ETF. because I don't think that an Ethereum ETF product that does not deliver yield to the client or to the investor is nearly as compelling as one with yield. And yeah, it's just kind of a,

Starting point is 00:09:30 it feels like a much worse substitute for Bitcoin. It already would have been a bad substitute, but it's even worse. Not to mention for anybody that would be investing in that, I think the next question that the person would have is how many of these tokens exist? Oh, you can't tell me. What do you mean that they're, you know, we can't figure out what that is or what it'll ever be?

Starting point is 00:09:54 I think that that's going to raise a lot of questions for people. Now, you've got the whole narrative of all it's smart contracting and, you know, most investors aren't going to dig for more than three seconds in their research. And they might just buy into that and say, oh, well, it's newer. And so then I'm going to buy that because it's smart. our contracting and that'll be the end of it. So I guess when I'm looking at it, it almost just seems like we're just replaying everything from the previous cycles at a higher fractal with more people and more institutions than

Starting point is 00:10:27 we did on the last cycle. And it's just all just replicating itself all over again. Is that a fair? Same as it ever was. Yes. And playing that forward, Preston, I think what people are probably not anticipating, yet, but will probably happen, is that big names, like Wall Street names, some of them will blow up as they engage with Bitcoin or Ethereum the wrong way.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Like if you take on leverage, for example, and we'll see what happens in the next cycle, but the same hubris, the same lack of understanding of finite scarcity is coming into this cycle, same as it was last cycle and the cycle before. Last time it was FTX, we'll see who blows up this cycle. Maybe in the future, maybe this cycle, maybe it's next cycle. But I think we'll start to see trad-fi giants who engage with Bitcoin the wrong way and take on too big of a risk without realizing it, go out of business. Where do they draw the line for applications of ETFs of you name it coin?

Starting point is 00:11:37 I mean, yeah, like where do we go from here? That is what concerns me about Ethereum ETF, because if you're going to greenlight an Ethereum ETF, there's no reason you can't greenlight a Solana ETF. And then to your point, pressing, like, where do you draw the line? Is it that you can only do an ETF for the top 10 cryptocurrencies? No, that would be completely arbitrary. So what? I'm going to push back. I'm going to push back a little bit, though. I mean, not having yield matters a lot. I mean, no analogy is perfect. But like, imagine this version of Ethereum, ETF Ethereum, the kind that doesn't pay the yield. Imagine it's like buying a U.S. Treasury. It's like buying an ETF that has U.S. Treasury

Starting point is 00:12:23 securities, except for the U.S. Treasury securities, don't pay the coupon. That's a great point, Andy. Because that's, that's baked into the debasement. Like, because they have to continually debase it, that the debasement is paid to the validators. And if you can't participate it, in that part of it, well, then it, yeah, I see exactly what you're saying. It's even worse than the Fiat rails because of, now you're going to have, because of the really small market cap, there's going to be a lot of people that get duped into it as just more money enters this, quote unquote, space in the short term. But in the long term, it's exactly right. It's worse than a treasury, which is a very interesting point. Now, as you guys just look to the space,

Starting point is 00:13:04 How about you the question proposed Andy on like where do they draw the line? And I think the second question I got for you is what in the world changed in Washington and what appears to be the snap of a finger where everybody was like, oh my God, we need to approve this. I have a theory, but I want to hear your theory. I have a theory too. So the short answer is a bunch of politicians on both sides of the aisle found a way to remove their craniums from their rectums.

Starting point is 00:13:35 And what I mean is, let's call crypto, you know, I have to talk about crypto, not just Bitcoin, but the majority of politicians had either been ignoring it or fighting it for so long. And then it appears that Biden was going to, well, there was this proposal to reverse sob 121. sub 121 was this dumb rule that basically kept banks out of Bitcoin and crypto. That's the short version. And then the House decided to pass an action to reverse that. And the president, forgive me if I get the order wrong, by the way, the order of events, said he was going to veto it.

Starting point is 00:14:18 Biden said he was going to veto it. But the Senate passed it anyway. And then also candidate for re-election Donald Trump talked positively about crypto assets. I think it was literally the same day, maybe that it passed in the House, either House or Senate. And then you saw poll movements. So it appeared that Trump was gaining significantly on Biden. And it seems to be that the administration realized that anti-crypto is bad politics. And so we had the largest sea change in the attitude of politicians to crypto.

Starting point is 00:15:00 assets and Bitcoin, frankly, that we've seen, I think, in the entire history of the space in the last 15 years. So basically it was politics and it was electioneering and Trump figured out that this is something you want to be on the right side of, not the wrong side. And then Dems figured out in short order that that was also the way they wanted to go and that they had an opportunity to lose the election based on alienating young people who are into. to Bitcoin and crypto and they tried to avoid that outcome. Perfect summary. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to we're a large enough cohort now.

Starting point is 00:15:42 Maybe it's 1% of voters. Like that's their number one issue, maybe. And you know, in the election that we're coming up to, Democrats can't afford to alienate 1% of their young voter base that happened to also be into crypto. that's how you lose an election. And it seems like some pollsters and political consultants got the message out to the Democratic Party at the top level. And overnight, everybody changed their tune. I'm curious if you guys have read the prospectus or the initial filings as to the validators and collecting the, what do we call it?

Starting point is 00:16:26 when they're plugging it into the validators, they're getting the yield off of it. The yield? The yield. Like if I'm BlackRock and I'm doing this on behalf of all these people that are buying the ETF, can I still plug this into a validator, collect the yield and just not pay it out and be within compliance of the ETF filing? This is an interesting question. I have not read the prospectus.

Starting point is 00:16:47 I think the legal question is the interesting one, though, because the notion, which is sort of a novel legal concept. I mean, it comes from the Hinman speech, I don't know, 2018, I want to say. Bill Hinman was then senior at the SEC, I think, head of corporate finance enforcement.

Starting point is 00:17:08 And I think he presented this notion that, you know, the whiskey barrel that you make the whiskey in is not, that's a security, or you can sell that as a security, but once you've made the whiskey, then it's the commodity. Okay?

Starting point is 00:17:20 So that's sort of the notion with Ethereum. And another note, with Ethereum is, yeah, if there's someone paying you a yield from your activity, is that therefore a security? I don't know the answer, though, as to whether the validator can withhold that yield, and therefore it's like a commodity from the perspective of the ETF holder or the investor because there's no yield, but the issuer gets to scalp that. I mean, that would be a pretty interesting, a pretty interesting outcome. I have to admit that's not the scenario that I had

Starting point is 00:17:59 thought about in advance, but that'd be pretty wild. If you're Wall Street, wouldn't you be campaigning for that with the SEC is that, oh yeah, we're not going to pay this out as yield, but we can basically keep it. So this is my opinion on like what the swift tide change was. First of all, I think the fees that they collected on the Bitcoin ETF were astronomical, like way higher than they ever expected. And they're just looking at this space very generically and saying, hey, let's roll out another one of these things and make a whole bunch more fees. And all we have to do is just go bang a couple of these politicians over the head to get this approved. And then we're golden. And I think that's what they did. The other thing that I think it's just become politically popular.

Starting point is 00:18:43 I think for anybody, it's just politically popular regardless of what party you are to support this. So like, why battle it? Here's another one. The dollar stable coin. I think they're finally starting to figure out that the only buyer of all this treasury issuance is going to be dollar stable points. And if they know that Ethereum, Tron, or whatever, is the turnkey way in which you can get these private institutions to basically become buyers of all these treasuries, while they need to somehow support this and embrace it because it's the only way out, especially when they're looking, I mean, they can clearly do the math at this point and they're looking at like what they're

Starting point is 00:19:22 going to have to print in the coming five to 10 years. And I'm sorry, the only buyer for this, the only buyer for this becomes short duration issuance of a stable coin into entity that would buy this up, all this garbage. So I think they're looking at it from that perspective. I'm sure you guys saw the Paul Ryan clip that went out, which I just like had to take a step back and watch his eyes like, oh my God, they finally like figure it out like where this is all going. And so I think that's another piece of why they're maybe embracing this. And then I guess the last one, this would be, this would assume that they have a really deep understanding of everything that's happening. And I'm not so sure that they're there. But if they don't approve any other ETF, and where I think

Starting point is 00:20:08 this is going in the coming year to two years with the amount of printing that's like on deck, I think they almost need something else. Some other, you know, Saylor calls it the ETF like an API to plug into the traditional rails to plug into the new Bitcoin ecosystem, if they don't have something else there to almost act as a distraction or an additional API to plug into, you're just going to see an ungodly amount of flows go into Bitcoin and it's just going to maybe rip the face off of the entire traditional Fiat system. So maybe the approval is, and I think that this is more tinfoil hat, but I'm still throwing it out there as an idea. maybe the approval of this and anything else is to slow that bleed out of traditional finance

Starting point is 00:20:57 directly into right into the veins of Bitcoin. Those are a couple of my theories as to why they just had this sudden realization like, oh my God, we got to get something else approved. Hey, Preston, I agree with you completely on all fronts and I'll throw one more in there, which is just taking the perspective of the banks, you mentioned stable coins like, yes, somebody's got to hoover up all this treasury debt. Yeah. Who's going to buy that? Right. Well, they talked about the supplementary leverage ratio, right, and allowing the banks to hoover up more of the stuff with no capital charge. Which they don't want to do, which they don't want to do, Andy. Exactly. Exactly. So imagine you're a bank CEO. Yeah. And you're looking at your congressman.

Starting point is 00:21:41 You're like, guys, you're delivering all this business to Coinbase. Yeah. You know, sob 21 prevents me for making my rake. Oh, and you want me to take down all this worthless treasury debt? You're out of your mind. You got to let me play this crypto game. Again, this is from the perspective of the bank CEO. So I think that's another angle. And they're also like when we look back, what was it a month ago, how they all want to become custodians and they're working that into the politics as well, tells, goes perfectly aligned with what you just said, which is we want to play in this space and Elizabeth Warren just shut your mouth and like support this or else we're going to start pulling all your funding.

Starting point is 00:22:21 And it's so funny to me how like she acts like she's against the big bankers, but she literally have their arm, you know, like she's a dang puppet, man. So she's just going to, you know, it's funny. When we were out in, uh, in California, I had made the comment that I think within the year, people like her were going to actually flip and, uh, become pro crypto or whatever by the end of the, you know, within a year's time frame. And sure enough, what did it take? Like six months and here we are.

Starting point is 00:22:49 They're already flipping. Yeah. Nailed it. Because it's just incentives, right? Like, it's not hard to like see that that's what's coming next when you just understand where the incentives are going. But did you guys see the news? I think it just rolled out today with Kenya and Mara, the mining relationship.

Starting point is 00:23:08 Did you guys? No, you guys didn't see that. No. Yeah, evidently. I haven't seen much news the last few days. Yeah, I guess that's true, Jesse. Evidently, there's a private public partnership with respect to mining that's happening in the country of Kenya.

Starting point is 00:23:22 I think that we're going to see a lot more of this. I'm curious if you guys would agree a lot more of this from a miners perspective because, like, one of the core pillars for them is they have to have some type of stability or understanding as to, hey, if we're going to spend all this money on infrastructure to get this cheap energy that's locked up inside of your country, like we have to have some type of assurance that you're not going to, the political winds are going to shift in six months from now and we're going to have to spend a ton of money, like moving all these rigs somewhere else. So I find this really interesting. I think this is one of the, I don't know if it's the first, but one of the very

Starting point is 00:23:58 early public partner relationships that we're finding between minors, and I would suspect that this should pick up. I'm curious, any of your thoughts on that. So I have mixed feelings and thoughts on this. So one perspective, I completely agree with you. Country, need expertise to help them deploy mining capacity and also they need, as you say, you know, flexibility. And it makes tremendous sense from the corporate perspective, from Mars perspective. Yeah. They have a whole fleet of A6 and the more jurisdictions they can operate in and move between it, you know, and widen their revenue base. It's great for them.

Starting point is 00:24:37 I wonder a little bit, though, from the perspective of this foreign sovereign from the foreign government because really like yes they want coins and so the miner can help them acquire coins but also what they really want is a way to surely and safely transact outside the dollar system so the strategic element there i think is really important for sovereigns and i don't know that you get that by hiring a u.s domiciled mining company right to do your deployment because the long arm of the U.S. government and the whole jurisdictional apparatus, I think still owns you even if those facilities are offshore. So I think it's sort of a mixed bag. It sort of surprises me a little bit that U.S. domiciled miners would have a big role in those foreign domiciled

Starting point is 00:25:36 deployments of mining capacity. But we'll see what happens. Yeah. Good point. Jesse? Yeah. I think this is just kind of an interesting evolution. I haven't seen the press release on that, so I don't know the details. But it's been very interesting to watch from afar what has been going on with Bitcoin mining in Africa. I'm thinking in particular of gridless compute, a very interesting company that's been

Starting point is 00:26:03 doing some super exciting work in Africa, going in and putting in micro-hydropower installations, So small hydropower generating electricity generating installations and then mining Bitcoin because the incentives are there basically. Like there's untapped hydropower. You just need a use case. You need the economics to be there in order to go and put the CAPEX into building that installation to generate the electricity because you need a buyer for that electricity. And you need it to be local because electricity is hard to transport.

Starting point is 00:26:39 And Bitcoin solves that problem, becomes the buyer of last resort that makes the economics makes sense to put that hydro, microhydropower insulation in. And boom, you're installing electricity production in remote regions of Africa that have never had energy production because it makes economic sense. The incentives are there. And so it makes sense that, you know, the sovereign level players are recognizing, you know, what, I could be incorporating that myself. I could be using this playbook. We have untapped resources. We just need expertise and rolling that out at a nation state level. It's just the

Starting point is 00:27:18 next evolution of, you know, as we know with Bitcoin, the incentives are there at every single level, the individual corporate nation state level. And it's all about tapping electricity production and turning that into economics. And so long as the incentives are there, somebody's going to entrepreneurial entrepreneurial do that and that can be a nation state as well so I think that's this sort of public-private partnership

Starting point is 00:27:45 is probably a sign of many more to come in particular in regions and countries where they have untapped energy production resources 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

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Starting point is 00:31:59 slash W.S.B. All right. Back to the show. For a lot of these countries, I think they need to have some type of policy in place in order to attract foreign investment. Because I think right now from a venture standpoint or any type of investor that's from the U.S. or Europe or wherever that's looking to take advantage of these opportunities that are all over the world, this one in Kenya, for example, or any other country, For investors, they're very suspect or very worried about the return on their capital and not getting rug pulled by the local government through laws and regulations that don't necessarily protect their interests.

Starting point is 00:32:42 So if somebody's listening to this from any one of these countries, that would be the thing that I would really try to press upon them is in order to attract foreign investment into your country. There has to be some type of legal structure that puts those investors at ease. And I think that you can turn on the floodgates on a lot of this infrastructure, especially if you got energy prices below 4 cents per kilowatt and you have excess abundant energy there because maybe the World Bank and the IMF went in there and built a bunch of stuff and then never fully, you know, utilize that energy. I think there's just huge, massive opportunities all over for this kind of stuff. There's going to be a big opportunity here for mining consultants. I'm talking about like traditional metals. mining like oil and gas drilling, U.S. businesses and European companies, some of the biggest companies in the world, have been in the business of figuring out how to safely profit on the extraction of resources and foreign countries, developing countries for, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:48 as long as there's been history, at least since colonial period. And including, you know, the more recent century in decades. And so, yeah, it's a tricky, you know, it's a tricky business. There are different ways of doing business and opening doors for big Western foreign companies in African and Asian countries. And yeah, it's an unusual art. It's partly a dark art, but those who have been doing it successfully to extract normal traditional commodities

Starting point is 00:34:23 that developing countries probably will have a big opportunity to do it here again with Bitcoin mining. Yeah. Here's one that's off topic, but I just have to ask you guys. In video. Your thoughts.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Holy moly. I mean, it's insane. It's totally insane what they're doing. And the growth is just absurd. Here's the thing that has me so confused. So I saw Stan, Drunken Miller, had sold his Nvidia position, what, a week ago, a week and a half ago, something like that. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, boy, this next earnings is going to be just destructive.

Starting point is 00:35:05 Like, if I, if I had a position, which I, I don't, unfortunately. But if I had a position. So by his own admission, Stan Drucken Miller talks about, in interviews, he talks about, historically he has made most of his money on the bear side. he has made most of his money trading over decades by buying bonds, often buying duration at just the right time when things fall apart. So, you know, I'm not going to tell you that he's a bad stock trader.

Starting point is 00:35:36 And it sounds like he missed this one. And he may be kicking himself. But on the other hand, he himself would admit that he's made most of his money. Yeah, trading FX, trading bonds, trading rates, especially with stuff going sideways. Yeah. I will say another thing, though, that really interests me with respect to Nvidia is this other

Starting point is 00:35:58 dynamic that's now playing out in the mining spaces, besides sovereigns getting involved, now there's so much more competition for rack space, right? Yes. So if you have... This is really big. So, yeah, lay this out for us, Andy. This is really big. And I think this is somewhat new for people that maybe haven't heard this before.

Starting point is 00:36:15 So really lay this out for everybody. Yeah, yeah. So historically, the Bitcoin mining business was you need a site, you need an energy source, you need the physical A6, and you need internet, you know, interconnect basically. And when I say the site, I mean, actually you have to build the structure. You need cooling. You need all the things that keep the machines cool and running all the time. Well, that's also true of regular way data centers.

Starting point is 00:36:47 For the most part, although regular way data centers have a higher requirement in terms of being close to where the data that they crunch is going to be used. So that's the amazing thing, of course, about Bitcoin mining. You can put it anywhere on earth. You got an internet connection. You can put a Bitcoin mine. That doesn't work quite as well if you're serving up Netflix videos. You can't be serving up Netflix videos from, you know, from Svalbard or New Zealand to the United States, right? Royal Kenya.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Good example. Okay. However. And for people that are not understanding that, it's just because of the speed at which you're basically pulling that file and sending it. So like, let's say we found a really great spot from an energy standpoint that's like two cents per kilowatt, but it's down in Antarctica or whatever. and you want to then start housing and storing data and servicing that data in that same location, it's not very opportunistic for call it Google or you name a data center or some AI farm that's servicing inquiries and then returning the data packets to that person from

Starting point is 00:38:00 call it Chicago or wherever. So that distance poses an issue for data requests and servicing the data. Exactly right. Okay. And to spell that out a little bit more, that it's specifically the 10 minute block time that makes it fine because, you know, you're not,

Starting point is 00:38:17 you don't have to meet like a 100 millisecond requirement or something like that for latency. You can be 10 minutes and it's okay. Yeah, on the Bitcoin side, yeah. On the Bitcoin side. So now enter machine learning and AI and specifically LLMs and foundation models. So now there's huge incremental demand

Starting point is 00:38:37 for good data sites. capacity. So there's a competition between Bitcoin miners and guys running machine learning models for similar sites. But then it's further complicated by the following. To train models, to do training, actually you kind of can do that remotely. And I'm no expert on the requirements here, but like you could have a data center in, I don't know, the desert of Morocco, where you're doing, you're training these models. But then when you're doing inference, you're actually serving customers like,

Starting point is 00:39:15 you know, your chat GPT and you're asking it a question. For to answer the question, now you have to reduce that latency like we just talked about. And so as the large language models develop, and as more of the overall work is inference, and as that data center capacity, has to move toward the user, you get a shift in the mix of how these data centers are built and constructed and how the equipment is moving through them. So it's all very complicated.

Starting point is 00:39:49 I don't pretend to know how it's going to play out, but clearly there's sort of a competitive dynamic here, but there may be a complementarity aspect as well. You know, if you can build a data site where, oh, you've got some curtail, you got to keep the machine learning algos running all the time, but maybe you have some swing curtailment capacity on the Bitcoin mining side. So, sorry, that was a long-winded answer, but those are some of the issues that I see. So to give just a little bit more context on what Andy was describing, so when you're training the data or you're training the AI model, you're pulling all of the data that you're ingesting into it to train it.

Starting point is 00:40:29 And that's all fixed data. There's no time requirement where you have to pull this piece of data in within three seconds and service it back to the original person that was requesting the return on the initial send of the data. And so when we're looking at AI, you could literally store all of the files and all the indexes of the information that you're pulling when you're training it. And so you can do that remotely. You could do that from very far distances from where you have major population sources. After you train the model, then it's a single file. And for it, For example, I just pulled this up.

Starting point is 00:41:09 GPT3, I asked what it was for four, but it wouldn't provide me the information. But just to kind of give people an idea, GPT3 had 175 billion parameters. And the file size, the output file size was 350 gigabytes. Think about how insane this is that you could ask any question to GPT3. Now, it's not as good as four, but you could ask GPT3, any question. and get a pretty dang good response. And the file size, let's say you have a one terabyte laptop, you know, sitting on, it's only taking up a third of the memory on that entire laptop to answer any question.

Starting point is 00:41:52 That's insane. So, like, it's mind-boggling. So how much bigger is four? I don't know. But I would be surprised, and I'm no AI expert, but I would be really surprised if it was larger than half of a terra in size. for GPT4. Okay, so the sizes that we're talking about here.

Starting point is 00:42:11 So now you can take that file and let's say you stick that file. Obviously, they have to keep all this stuff encrypted. They don't want the file to get out. But let's just say that they stick that in Chicago. After they developed it remotely off-site, which is what Andy's describing of why there's going to be like this relationship between training models and Bitcoin in remote locations is because you can do it in remote locations without having to worry about servicing the the data packet responses.

Starting point is 00:42:39 But then you can take that file, let's say it's a 500 gigabyte file and you could put it in, you could put it in Chicago, you could put it in LA or whatever, which is close to where the population hubs are and they're getting pinged and it's just, it's spitting out the answers to all these things. It's totally nuts. The relationship, the, what's the word I'm looking for? The symbiosis between Bitcoin mining and AI training is somewhat miraculous and much mind-blowing, if you ask me.

Starting point is 00:43:09 Yeah, the data center managers, people in the data center management business are going to be pretty busy for the next few years. It also reminds me of, I remember when the news came out as like a decade ago, that Google had first implemented AI systems to optimize energy usage in their own data sites, right? In their own data centers, they cut energy usage by like 30% by implementing their own machine learning algorithms. So it's going to be the algos that are doing the optimization work, right, to shift capacity around the world between these different, you know, load-bearing facilities. It's going to be wild to see. My understanding, go ahead, Jesse.

Starting point is 00:43:55 Well, Preston, you struck me with that comment about the miraculous link between the AI processing and Bitcoin mining, but I think it, I guess it makes sense in the context. of, you know, we're living through the digitization of everything. And with the internet to date, it has historically been like how we call and retrieve information. But as we progress through digitization of everything, that is now including security of money and also processing and thinking, you know, and stuff that's not call and response. And so I guess it fits in with that sort of mental model of the internet is just the the tip of the spear of digitization of all functions.

Starting point is 00:44:40 And some of those later functions are not call and response. And so it goes together. Which gets us just back to the first principle. I mean, it's Andreas Antonopoulista. It's like internet of money. It's like, yes, Bitcoin is special and amazing. Oh, but also it's just the inter, you know, the digitization of everything. And it's just kind of joining the rest of the pack.

Starting point is 00:45:02 For some reason, people think of Bitcoin as this. strange animal. They just can't get their heads around it. And oh, yeah, no, it's just, you know, it's just the internet implementation of money. Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird to me also that when you think about like these, you know, all of this Nvidia and AI training happening in concert in the same location as call it a Bitcoin miner, you literally have both poles happening. You have deep pattern, synthesizing patterns into a 350 gigabyte or 500 gigabyte file that can answer any question, right? And then on the other side of the poll, you have Bitcoin mining, which is absurd amounts of entropy that is just guessing at, you know, a solution and just they're literally opposite sides of the pole and they're happening inside this thing that you're flowing tremendous absurd amount. amounts of energy through to perform these two actions.

Starting point is 00:46:06 Yeah. What the hell is that? Yeah. It's that security needs entropy and so that you design that system around not allowing for thought or synthesis, but then on the flip side, the thought or pattern recognition or, you know, processing requires the lack of entropy. We were going to talk about Nvidia, I guess we kind of did. very passive.

Starting point is 00:46:34 A round hole there. We all just went right back to Bitcoin. But yeah, I know some some crazy, crazy just thought. What a time to be alive. Yeah. This is what it comes back to.

Starting point is 00:46:43 And like the most incredible time to be alive. Yeah. I think that I feel like everyone, even Bitcoiners, fails to recognize that like the internet revolution isn't over. Yeah. Like it feels like the internet is done. It feels like,

Starting point is 00:46:58 oh, wow, like the dot com era and then, you know, what Google and Apple have done. over the last couple of decades. That'll never happen again. But that was just call and response information. And now we're entering into, you know, we're still in the early stages of that happening

Starting point is 00:47:12 to money and then thought with AI. You could argue the whole Google, like the last 20 years, was really kind of the initial organization of all the thoughts and patterns and data so that it could then be ingested into these AI models for further consolidations. Like creating the library. Yeah. That is then going to be used for all of the work. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:35 By the way, I literally have this sitting on my desk. This book, A Brief History of Intelligence. Nice. I cannot recommend. This book is so good by Max Bennett. Really, really good. All right. Let's, uh, if you haven't read this one.

Starting point is 00:47:50 That's good too. Yeah. Super intelligence. It's a little dark for me. It is a little dark. Yeah. Yeah. This is extremely dark.

Starting point is 00:47:57 That was the book that I read it in 2016. That was the book. that put me into my first bout of depression that I've experienced related to AI. Well, Elon was a very big fan of that book, the superintelligence book. And I think that might have jaded his, like, why he's so deeply, not that I don't think, I'm not trying to suggest that we shouldn't be concerned or, or that it can't go in a dark direction. But yeah, this one here just real fast for, because this book just came out, it's basically

Starting point is 00:48:30 this history on the evolution of how the human brain evolved and then looking at other animals and how their brains have evolved in the pattern that was constructed in order to get to the neocortex with like this deep basically modeling capacity and then how they're using their understanding of the biological brain in order to do all the AI stuff that they're doing right now. It is amazing. I love that. holding up the physiology of behavior, which is the best textbook for my neuroscience degree. I love learning about it. Jesse, I totally forgot about this.

Starting point is 00:49:07 Yeah, this is right up your alley, man. Yeah, that whole, that whole shelf is all neuroscience. Yeah. We forget about that part too, about the brain is the lens through which we see the world. And it's the, to date, it's matter making sense of the world, the universe, which is beautiful and crazy to think. about. It's the only matter that strives to make sense of the world, of the universe. And part of the reason, the reason, you know, we can even scratch the surface of understanding

Starting point is 00:49:39 is because we've evolved those big brains and congrats on your kids' big brain, Jesse. And of course, the downside, by the way, is that's how you end up with 41 hours of labor. Yeah. A big brain does not an easy delivery make. Um, random anecdote. Daddy was a neuroscientist. So unfortunately, it's going to be 41 hours for you, sweetie. Sorry, honey. Um, we're basically kangaroos or marsupials in that sense. We're not supposed to be born when we're born. Think about any other mammal like any deer or wildebeest or anything like that. They come out functioning, able to walk and run within hours. But for a human baby it takes 18 months. And the reason is because we can't stay in the womb any longer. Our brains

Starting point is 00:50:27 get too big. Our heads get too big. So we have to come out. And then we're useless for 12 to 18 months. And we're basically like a kangaroo, you know, go in the pouch and be carried around. And then you can function. So just wrapping it all together. So I've seen wildebeest being born on the serengeti, you know, and stand up within minutes. And so I highly recommend people take a trip, you could see two things. You could see this miracle of nature we're describing in action. And also, you could go see the mining deployment that Marathon is doing. Nice combo there. Two birds with one stone. Bring you back to Bitcoin, baby. So I'm going to take it back to the brain and AI here. Okay. So, Jesse, I'm curious after,

Starting point is 00:51:12 you know, I'm not complete. I'm almost done with this book. There's a couple different courtesies and things like that that have just kind of blown my mind as I'm reading this. As somebody who's studied this deeply, what is, you know, what is a region in the brain or something that you had studied that just kind of blew your mind and it just continues to stay with you that that is, like for me when I'm reading this book, like the relationship with information or modeling coming out of the neocortex into the basal ganglia over to the thalamus and then back up again was just fascinating to me. So go ahead. I'm curious what you would say. Oh boy. It's impossible because that's, that's, we, we know so little about the brain ultimately. Like we, we know about the brain

Starting point is 00:51:57 because of when things go wrong. So we, we literally learn about the brain because of, uh, brain damaged patients. Yes. And then you figure out, okay, so this region of the brain is ablated. Yeah. And, and then they, one of the best, uh, um, authors, in my opinion, and the kind of in the neuroscience basis is Oliver Sacks. He was a, yeah, he would write beautiful. stories about his patients. This most famous book is the man who mistook his wife for a hat because that's a literal problem that one guy faced when a certain region of his brain had brain damage. He mistook his wife for being a hat.

Starting point is 00:52:36 How does that happen? What has to go wrong? And it also reveals how weird the inner functions of the brain are. But to your question, I mean, everything you learn about in neuroscience is like, wow, that's a weird system for how that connects to that and how you process like visual spatial processing is this very strange matrix of areas of, you know, the surface of that portion of the brain. And each one does a different thing and processes the patterns and macro and micro and colors and puts it all together. And if like, you know, you have a little bit of damage in one area,

Starting point is 00:53:13 that's what, you know, you're, you don't see. There's a thing called a left right blindness. where you can look at a plate with food on the left side and on the right side, and you can literally not see the left side of the plate. You can think that the left side of plate is empty, just because a certain little spot is busted. That's the story of every region of the brain. Yeah. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Okay. Let's talk about OnRamp. So for people that aren't familiar with OnRamp, explain what that is and then tell us what you guys are passionately working on. Yeah, OnRamp is a company that I co-founded about two years ago with Michael Tanguma from previously from Unchained Capital. And it is a multi-sig, multi-institution custody company. And so that takes the idea of multi-sig, which is inherently a self-custody sort of idea of you split your Bitcoin custody between three hardware devices. And those three keys control the vault that holds your funds.

Starting point is 00:54:23 And you need two of three of those keys to sign in order to move funds. But ultimately, you are in control of two or three of those keys. So it's a self-custody thing that you've set up and you maintain and securities on you. Multi-institution custody is taking that idea and saying, let's have institutions hold those keys on behalf of the end. end user. And the important part here is that each key is held by a different institution. So no single institution has a quorum of the keys necessary to control the funds in the vault. Instead, it's the end user who the vault is in their name that has a legal relationship with

Starting point is 00:55:08 each of those key holding institutions. And those keyholding institutions can only sign at the direction of that end user. So it's a way to have multi-sumption. SIG without having to set up and maintain your own keys while still maintaining control of your keys, because the not your keys, not your coins mantra is right. But really what that's trying to get at is not your control, not your coins. And multi-institution custody manages to have a system where you don't have to become a pro or proficient even at setting up and maintaining your own keys. but you can maintain control through the system of relying on three different institutions holding

Starting point is 00:55:54 keys on your behalf. In OnRamp's case, the three key holding institutions are OnRamp, BitGo, and CoinCover, which, you know, BitGo and Coin Cover have been fantastic partners for us. Some of the best, my opinion, the best companies in the industry for key management and the infrastructure from Bitco has been fantastic. And so that's where we've been working on. building and scaling up. And it's been a great ride that Andy's been a part of.

Starting point is 00:56:22 It's been great to have Andy along for that ride as we onboard more and more Bitcoin and help people solve the problems that they have with having to figure out what's the right custody solution for me. And a lot of people have the tension of, you know, I don't trust myself enough or I don't want to have vulnerability to a wrench attack by having unilateral control of my funds at home or within driving distance. And this solves for that. It also solves for the inheritance problem that many people face when storing their funds. How do you ensure that in the event you get hit by a bus that your beneficiaries can access your funds? If you set up a treasure

Starting point is 00:57:08 map with hardware wallets, that may not be accessible, but with a legal relationship with multi-institution of custody, it's a pretty seamless transition from you to your beneficiaries. I want to share a chart. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Andy. What would, well, no, no, that's what that's well said. I was just going to say a couple things. First of all, yeah, the wrench tech, you know, issue is big. By the way, remember when you could buy a wrench for $5? Remember when it really was a $5 wrench? What are up to now? Like eight, nine? Yeah, I got to believe more like 20. So that's one thing. And then, yeah, just, you know, in terms of my role at, uh, at on ramp, you know, it's been my mission for a while. I did it for Swan, you know, doing it for helping out with on-ramp as well,

Starting point is 00:57:51 to just try and divert some small percentage of buying power for Bitcoin, you know, away from the Roach Motel paper Bitcoin structures like the ETFs and into actual coins. And if it's going to be into actual coins, you know, that means that those coins can be withdrawn to self-custody in the future, I suspect that U.S. citizens, but not exclusively U.S. citizens, people, bitcoiners that have a significant stack, you know, a lot of them have their role your own ninja self-custody setup. But they're a little bit worried that not all those coins are going to make it to their wives and kids if something happens to them. And so kind of makes sense to have part of the stack in multi-institution custody. And I think, it makes sense for managed wealth as well. And then, of course, as part of that effort, we, you know, we've been, we've been having some fun. Me and Jesse run the scarce assets podcast.

Starting point is 00:58:55 We had an amazing launch of that show because, of course, episode one was you, Preston. And it was a lot of fun. We had Jeff Booth and we had Lynn Alden and Pierre and Morgan Richard and Alex Gladstein and, you know, Vijay and. Breed love and a bunch. And it's just been a blast. So I just want to thank you for helping us launch that podcast as strongly as we possibly could. There's no one else I would rather have started it with than you. And it was a lot of fun. Love it. No, it was. Thank you, wrestling. We had a fun conversation, I remember. We did. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 01:02:57 I've got one more question for you. So, uh, Sailor was up on stage. I don't know where this was at, but he was presenting a slide that Jesse had created. I love this slide because I think it really allows a person to zoom way out and see the really, really, really big picture. And I am sharing this slide right now that Jesse created. And for the listener, if you're not on YouTube watching this and you're just listening to it, it lays out all the buying power in the entire world, whether it's equities, real estate bonds, just the currency itself. art, gold, collectibles, you name it.

Starting point is 01:03:40 And it shows that the total value of all of this stuff is $900 trillion U.S. dollars today. And, you know, at a 10% we'll just call it a 10% growth rate of M2, which I think it's even more, the global M2 is a faster pace than 10%. But let's just say it's 10%. Next year, this should be a quadrillion. Yeah, a quadrillion. So walk us through how. a person, when we're looking at this, Jesse, obviously you think Bitcoin's going to continue

Starting point is 01:04:13 to grow past the one trillion, but what is contracting or what is shrinking in size on all these different asset classes as we're looking at this chart? Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for us. Yeah. Saylor has been using this chart because what it helps tee up for him is as he phrases it, the all assets are in a constant continuous competition. And that is to say that some of these asset buckets are growing and some of them are shrinking

Starting point is 01:04:46 based on how investors are allocating their capital any day, month, year, decade. When I see this lens, when I put together these numbers and assembled it all and put it on the page, and you see Bitcoin is one trillion dollar asset class, that's 0.1% 1-1,000th of the total asset landscape. And gold is 12, arguably 16 trillion. So, you know, that's kind of your closest competitor. It's a 12 to 16x from, you know, where we are with Bitcoin. And that's small potatoes in the grand scheme when you look at all of these asset classes.

Starting point is 01:05:26 To me, the thing that really sticks out is bonds. We were talking earlier about what it means to be holding bonds now in any. into the future, I think that because of the amount of sovereign debt levels, 35 trillion in the U.S., and our deficits in the U.S. now normalizing $2 trillion annual deficits, we haven't balanced the budget in 22 years, we're going to keep adding to those deficits. And that means we're going to keep adding to our national debt. And we're printing to do all that. So we're adding more bonds And what that amounts to is that the nominal yield on a bond, I don't think will outpace inflation over the coming decades, 10, 20 plus years. It's already not.

Starting point is 01:06:21 And so holding bonds today, in my opinion, is a net negative proposition. You are losing purchasing power by holding bonds and receiving that nominal yield of four which sure might be above the stated CPI numbers, but I think is actually below the true inflation rate. So if you're holding bonds and everybody is, right, like if you go look in your Vanguard account and see what percent of your 401k is tucked away and, you know, safe, quote unquote, safe, low risk bonds, it's going to be a significant portion, 20, 40, 60, 60. 80%, and that's losing in real purchasing power every year, in my opinion. So, and that contrasts with Bitcoin, which in my view, the secret sauce of Bitcoin is it's increasing scarcity, the function

Starting point is 01:07:20 that's built into it every four years, that the amount of Bitcoin being created gets cut in half every day, every month, every year. And, you know, we just dropped from 1.8% annual supply growth to 0.9%, which means that we're now lower than gold, because gold is 1.5 to 2% annual supply growth every year. So on this page, Bitcoin just became a better store of value asset, a more attractive store of value asset, and it has reason to get better into the future versus gold. The fact that it's still not as large as gold is a lagging function of the world's recognition that Bitcoin is a better store of value asset, a better savings technology, ultimately, than gold because people don't recognize that it has increasing scarcity built into it.

Starting point is 01:08:09 It will grow and the price will appreciate every four years because of that increasing scarcity function. And that's Bitcoin versus gold. But then there's bonds and bonds are already a negative real return, in my opinion. So those are the three buckets that stand out to me. Andy, you actually summarize this on the show in a nice way. when you were talking about how you're viewing it for your clients of those three asset categories, do you want to tee that up?

Starting point is 01:08:40 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So first I want to say, I love this analysis, Jesse. You know, I did my own version of this analysis in 2019 when I was writing Y by Bitcoin. And, of course, you improved on it, Jesse, by putting it into beautiful graphical format. So I love this. I love this version of it. And, yeah, one of the ways, first of all, one of the ways I pitch it. to clients.

Starting point is 01:09:04 I can't remember where I got this, got this, but basically Bitcoin is the new gold and gold is the new bonds. Right? So it's like the bonds, as Jesse so eloquently pointed out, are going to lose your money

Starting point is 01:09:16 in terms of real purchasing power over the long run. And so gold is better than that and gold is taking share. By the way, the way I implemented that as a practitioner for my clients was first back in 2016 in the then 30-year history.

Starting point is 01:09:33 or almost 30 year history of my firm, my wealth management firm, we had never owned what I call hard money assets, right? We'd never owned gold for clients ever, right? It was a pet rock that didn't generate cash flows. But we started to figure out what was going on with the bigger picture macro, and so we bought gold for the first time. And then, of course, Bitcoin raised its hand, so to speak. It had shown up earlier, of course, but I found it when I found it some years ago. And so that, for my clients has been taking share out of gold. So it's a little bit the, you know, the Pac-Man eating the Pac-Man, eating the Pac-Man, where the ultimate eater of everything, of course, is Bitcoin,

Starting point is 01:10:17 but the intermediate eater of bonds is gold. I think that perhaps the simplification of where this chart, I think, is heading, is a better asset than gold, and gold is a better asset than bonds. And right now, the current valuation of those three buckets is reflects the opposite. And I think that economic reality and the demise of our fiat structure because of the debt levels that we've taken on will osmotically, organically cause people to realize that they're better off putting their capital in Bitcoin rather than leaving it in bonds to continue generating a negative real return. And I think the end state of this, if we're only looking at those

Starting point is 01:11:06 three buckets, is that Bitcoin flips bonds in the general role and size of those categories, those buckets here in the global asset landscape, which is to say that, you know, in my Bitcoin's full potential valuation piece where this chart comes from, I landed at what I think is a probably conservative end state of Bitcoin siphoning off capital from all of these buckets, most of all from bonds, and eventually growing to become 200 trillion of the 900 trillion in global asset value, which would mean $10 million per Bitcoin in today's dollars. And I think that's where we're heading. The only thing I'd add to there besides, as if that wasn't enough of a bunch of,

Starting point is 01:11:58 a mic drop is, oh yeah, don't forget the largest box on that graphic, which is real estate. And I was giving a chat to the local office of Berkshire Hathaway Realty about a month ago. And that conversation to your average realtor would have been outlandish and or offensive until very recently. Yeah, they just laughed you out of the room. Exactly. Well, this time was not the case. It was well attended. People were listening very carefully. They were asking really good questions. And I think there is more than ever a realization that Bitcoin taking a bite out of that giant piece of the pie real estate is also likely to happen. Because the cap rate on all that real estate changes. And I mean, it's so drastically mispriced right now because of fixed income, it being a premium above the fixed income, quote unquote, risk-free rate. So, you know, whatever that multiple turns out to be as that, as the cap rate changes on all real estate, I mean, Andy, what do you think, are we talking a multiple of three? Is it going to, is it going to be cut into a third of where it's capped today because of those discount rates and what hurdle rate you're going to need by just holding Bitcoin? And, and, and because equities are going to, because equities get repriced, right? And so then, of course, the cap rate on on real estate gets reprised. So what, what is it?

Starting point is 01:13:27 Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, order of magnitude, I think of 50% ish. And it easily could be because you're conservative. It could be more than that. Yeah. And this gets back to Preston's whole thing here, which is, you know, from a, from a value investor point of view, nothing makes sense out there. Uh-uh. And the thing that I think will restore sanity. Is Bitcoin being such a better asset to hold that it sucks capital away from all of these insane premium asset categories? Until there's a natural equilibrium again. Sorry. I think there's a reason what we're trying to say here is there's a reason that Preston launched the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast,

Starting point is 01:14:20 not the Gold Fundamentals podcast or the fixed income bonds, treasury's, but a bettals podcast. is correct so so all of that is basically saying that your 10 million is a conservative number what that's really saying that's right I mean in that article I put together a table and and I didn't know that that Andy had had done had done this exact exercise the years before me so props to Andy you did it better it's okay you did it better well what does is sailor saying 200 trillion or is he saying 300 trillion sailor hasn't said what he he hasn't put a flag in the ground on a number like that. But he has,

Starting point is 01:15:03 he hasn't been very kind about my analysis and put it forward as, you know, a very interesting, thought-provoking bit of analysis that I, you know, reading between the lines, he tends to agree with. I mean,

Starting point is 01:15:15 when I'm looking at the buckets, it's like, and something that I did while you were talking there, Jesse, is I converted all of those numbers from a percentage as to like how much Bitcoin that would be. So the Bitcoin, which was one trillion of the 900 trillion total pot there would only be 23,000 Bitcoin of the 21 million

Starting point is 01:15:35 percentage-wise. The bond size, which was what was it, 300 trillion, would be 7 million of the 21 million Bitcoin. Assuming all the Bitcoin are still there and haven't been lost, we're just assuming all 21 million are there. That would be 7 million of the 21 million Bitcoin would all be representing the value of the bond market. The real estate market, it would be 7.7 million Bitcoin,

Starting point is 01:16:02 and then stocks would be 2.7 million Bitcoin. Yeah. So that's, those numbers are very thought-provoking. I do think that this was one of the reasons I wrote that piece of, ultimately, I don't think we end up in a world

Starting point is 01:16:19 where there's 21 million Bitcoin worth of value. I think we end up weird as it is in a world where there's, 50 million Bitcoin worth of value, or maybe it's 30 million Bitcoin worth of value. Because of cap rates and because of... And that's because there's always going to be value in other assets. Yeah. And if you price it in your unit of account of Bitcoin, you're saying, well, I've got one Bitcoin worth of real estate, but that's not included in 21 million of Bitcoin because you own the real estate, you don't own the Bitcoin at that moment in time. Because the illiquid is, you don't own the Bitcoin at that moment in time.

Starting point is 01:16:55 Because the illiquidity of the equity and what the market is trading it out as a multiple of earnings is why you're seeing in excess of $21 million, correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's important. Perhaps a different way of thinking about it is one of the things that I disagree with in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin landscape, meme landscape really is infinity divided by $21 million. I think that's directionally correct, but wrong. I think it's a very helpful meme for thinking about Bitcoin as, you know, all important.

Starting point is 01:17:31 But I think that Bitcoin doesn't become everything. You're still going to value a Monet painting. You're still going to value a thousand acre ranch. It turns out you can't live in your Bitcoin. Yeah, right. It turns out. Some people would like to. Many would like to.

Starting point is 01:17:51 So there is a difference between Forever Laura. And infinity divided by $21 million. Yeah. Well, let's just take Invidia. Like if you were going, let's say the whole world has been Bitcoinized, right? And that's the only unit that anybody wants to accept or wants to deal in. And you're looking at, well, Nvidia just banged out this many, this many Bitcoin on an annualized basis. And I'm going to pay 10 times those earnings in order to own this equity.

Starting point is 01:18:18 So if you're paying 10 times the number of Bitcoin units that are flowing through it from an income statement standpoint, top line revenue standpoint or bottom, I guess it would be have to be measured off of the top line to start getting the multiples above $21 million. That's how it happens, correct? Yeah. And there's, and there's, yeah, and there's, you know, there's the other reality here. Another way to frame it is there is money in the system and what percent of the total value is the money and money plus the credit, right? So the the pyramiding of the credit in the banking system on top of the base money. So yes, the work. world is full of productive assets that are worth something, they should be worth more than the

Starting point is 01:19:02 monetary asset that doesn't generate cash flows when that monetary asset, you know, reaches its valuation potential, which is happening before our very eyes over a period of years and years and years. And some days, I wake up and think it's, I can't believe how quickly it's happening. In other days, I can't believe how slowly, because it's so obvious what's going on. Yeah, exactly. But that's another way to frame this, you know, total potential of, oh, it's the unit of account, but there are other valuable and productive assets. And yes, someday Preston will put in a bid on Nvidia stock or whatever other stock that generates

Starting point is 01:19:44 cash flows, but the valuation may not be at, you know, whatever, 50 times, two-year forward earnings. Oh, you are? I'm already buying equity, micro-strategy. or at least I haven't like added to the position but like I do have an equity but I would buy the I was smart I would have bought the Dylan Leclair thing at the uh the Japanese equity that he's doing the same micro strategy move on yeah meta planet I if I was smart I would have done it right during the announcement but now I'm like you know I'd had to go in there and look at the treasury

Starting point is 01:20:15 and market price right now but there's another one that it's like hey that that is something that actually might make sense now my my position size with micro-structure strategy is taking on a much larger percent than I would like in my overall portfolio just because of the 6102 risks that I, you know, I waited at. But I am. If a company is demonstrating that they are making money, they have a Bitcoin balance sheet initiative, and it's actually priced, and I think they have some type of competitive mode to continue to make money, I'll buy it today.

Starting point is 01:20:50 I'll buy it today if the numbers make sense. It's just mad. Great news. It means there's, it means there's now a, a strategy that meets your criteria as a Bitcoin value investor to generate Bitcoin in excess of what. Moreover, the investable universe of companies that meet your criteria, Preston, can only grow. It can only go up.

Starting point is 01:21:15 There are more. There's only going to be more and more names, more and more tickers, more and more companies that are meeting Preston Pish's. value investor. Bitcoin value investor. I'm a Bitcoin, boy, there's some value investors that their stomachs are turning hearing me say that. That's the winning formula.

Starting point is 01:21:35 Is it? Hurry up and figure out that you have to be a Bitcoin value investor in order to outperform Bitcoin. Otherwise, just hold Bitcoin. Amen. Amen. We're trying to do it on the VC side too. I mean, it's, I don't know where else you could outperform it, to be quite honest with

Starting point is 01:21:51 you, unless you are getting it. at a discount to the treasury and you're making money as a publicly, a large, publicly traded company or you're stepping into an industry that is ripe for disruption and you can get it an early stage and you think it can, you know, 100x from the purchase, if you have the luxury of stepping in and buying it at that price. I don't know how else you can outperform it. But so I'm trying to be in both of the spaces in addition to obviously holding Bitcoin. But risk adjusted, a thing, yeah, a thing probably each of us said years ago was on a risk adjusted basis, I haven't found a better investment opportunity than Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:22:27 Ever. And on a risk adjusted basis, I still haven't found a better investment opportunity than Bitcoin. I wonder what the risk adjusted would have been on Nvidia over the last decade. Because I know, I think somebody just posted a chart today that the last 10 years, Nvidia has outperformed Bitcoin. Oh, yes, it has. Oh, it definitely has. It is the one asset that has outperformed Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:22:50 I found this earlier this year. It's like the one thing basically that's outstrip Bitcoin's performance. There's no way. But the inverse of that, remember, dear listeners, it's now a what, two and a half for three trillion dollar market cap company. And the tree does not grow to the sky if you're a company. But if you're a monetary protocol, it does.

Starting point is 01:23:16 The tree can grow much farther into the sky. To this guy. Yeah, much higher, not forever, but much higher. Not to infinity. That's a great point, Andy. I love that. Yeah, no, if I had to bet Nvidia versus Bitcoin in the next five, 10 years, Bitcoin's going to obliterate it.

Starting point is 01:23:33 What company can 5x from a multi-trillion dollar valuation? Much harder. Not impossible, but very difficult. Very tethered to physical reality. And good luck with those supply chains. Good luck with long lead items. Good luck with all the subcomponents. and the proper coordination and the timing and the lack of or the potential competition

Starting point is 01:23:55 and the governance of, you know, this country trying to take over your chip manufacturing or whatever, good luck competing against Bitcoin. Guys, this was a blast. Go ahead, Jesse. What were we going to say? I was just going to say Bitcoin is a whole lot more certain because you can just go look at the supply function and know that it's going to keep appreciating value without you having to risk anything.

Starting point is 01:24:18 Yeah. If you accept that it is a sound system to begin with. Yep. All right. Jesse started off, tell people where they can find you and anything else that you want to highlight. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at creasis underscore BTC.

Starting point is 01:24:35 You can also come check out on ramp at onrampbitcoin.com. And yeah, to check out our episode with Preston on the Scarce Assets podcast. You can find that on YouTube or any podcast app that you, use. That's right. Scarce Assets is in the on-ramp feed along with the other great content that we're producing. And yeah, Edstrom, Andrew is my Twitter handle. We will have that in the show notes. Jesse, congrats. Congrats to your wife. Thank you. Massive news. So exciting. So excited for you guys. And guys, thanks for making time today. Thank you so much, Preston.

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