What Bitcoin Did - 2024: BITCOIN IN REVIEW w/ HODL & ODELL

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

American HODL is an OG Bitcoiner & Matt Odell is host of Citadel Dispatch, co-host of Rabbit Hole Recap, managing partner at Ten31 and co-founder of OpenSats and Bitcoin Park. In this episode, we recap 2024 and get into Bitcoin's Strategic Reserve potential, the impact of institutional adoption, and the game theory behind nation-state accumulation. We also discuss Nostr, Ecash and get into Bitcoin's implications for global financial systems and freedom. MASSIVE THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/

Hyperinflation is demarcated by a loss of confidence in the currency. And so there are these various canaries in the coal mine, like the Treasury Yields are one, or the fact that people use the word fiat, that's one that's pretty crazy. We're now outside of the dogma of the dollar is just everything in the world, and we're now realizing that the dollar is just a choice we can make. You know, that's a tell. It's a canary in the coal mine, right? that people are beginning to lose confidence in the currency.

And if you look at Bitcoin culture, Bitcoin maximalism as a whole, we're canaries in the coal mine because we are people who have already lost confidence in the currency. I'm a professional and you've completely bugged me out. Now I don't want to say certain things. I promise you, I won't leave this in, but I might start it here. We should talk about the elephant in the room, though. You guys rug me. Wait, you're saying we rugged you?

I was expecting Peter McCormick. Who's this guy? We had this show lined up like three weeks and then you hopped on with Jack at Christmas. Oh yeah, we did. That's true. Yeah, we did kind of rug you. That was a good show, though. When the young Chad billionaire is like hop on, you're like, all right, you know, it's hard to say no to.

Pretty much nailed that one. It was a great rip. This will be a great rip as well. I hope so. But O'Dell, you've done these shows, like how many years you've done these shows now with Pete? Since the beginning, right? What has it been, has it been five years? Was the first one 2019, maybe?

The first one had to be, the first one was pre-COVID. So that means it was at least five years because COVID was 2020. I didn't feel like I could rip Pete off fully and do it just me and you, so Hoddle's here. And do you remember the COVID one? The COVID one was the only one we did remote? That was my favorite because that was the one where you rip Pete into asshole. And we both got trashed. I had to re-listen to it afterwards, but we were just yelling at each other.

That was one of the most epic One of the most epic shows Pete was so bad during COVID Yeah It's funny because he's not This is his show Yeah let's not don't compete here He's not here to defend itself

Yeah Pete's a good friend You can be friends with people That have shitty opinions sometimes That's what people forget Right we're not doing Dunkin on Pete show here So crazy fucking year right Right let's start this

I think the best way to go through this chronologically, because there's a lot to talk about. ETS, Hodel. I love ETF. Self-custody, Bitcoin. It's scary. And you're going to lose all your coin. No. Yeah, I think obviously the ETFs are a big part of the story this year. They've provided, you know, the capital structure that's needed to get us to the next level. Because obviously, it's not going to be retail mom and pop who's pumping this thing from $100,000 to a million dollars. That's, you know, a lot of money, a lot of capital that's needed. And so, yeah, The ETF structure has been incredibly bullish.

If you look at, I just heard yesterday that the sum total of Bitcoin ETFs have now surpassed the sum total assets under management of gold ETFs. So they did that in one year, right? The gold ETFs have been in the market for 20 years. The Bitcoin ETFs as a collective surpassed the gold ETFs in one fucking year. That's crazy. Wait, has that done it against all gold ETS? So I saw the chart that was like the BlackRock ETFs. All gold ETSs.

Holy shit. see that. The BlackRock ETF did it against the gold ETF, but just recently all the Bitcoin ETFs did it against all the gold ETFs. The BlackRock one is provocative because it just looks like a straight fucking uppercut. Right, right. But yeah, all the ETFs

combined, right? The largest gold one is Invesco GLD. But it's just a perfect example. And what people don't realize is this time last year, the overwhelming majority of

Bitcoin Twitter was fading the ETFs. They were saying they either weren't going to happen or they were a complete non-deal. Priced in. It's priced in, bro. Ridiculous. It's kind of exactly what I see happening with the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve right now, but we can talk about that later. But people were fading the ETFs. They said they were irrelevant. They weren't going to have much of an impact. They clearly have had a massive impact. There's a whole set of, like, I think the average person should just stay on a stack sats and learn how to self-custody Bitcoin. It's incredibly easy to do. It's easier than it's ever been. But it unlocked a whole pool of capital that just had no access to Bitcoin, completely front-run the usual halving cycle in terms

of price action, where we hit all-time highs way, way sooner in the cycle than we would have otherwise. That's just an objective fact. Now, I would push back a little bit on this narrative huddle that average people stacking sats don't have impact on the price anymore. Like, I think they're the, they're the gun to the head of everything else to make sure this doesn't happen like gold, right? Like, if you're just, if you're just humbly just going all in on Bitcoin and just constantly trying to increase your cash flow and buy Bitcoin and self-custody it, you're the market correction that makes sure, you know, you're that floor that makes sure that no paper Bitcoin shenanigans are happening. Like at any time, all these guys can get blown out because that floor is just

rising and rising and rising. No, I totally, I, I think we're in total agreement with that. I think that hodlers do set the floor and also hodlers are able to call bullshit. You know, hoddlers who keep their Bitcoin in self-custody are able to call bullshit in a way that people who are buying paper Bitcoin products are just simply not. Whether that paper Bitcoin is MSTR or whether it's ETFs or whether it's Bitcoin in a custody provider that you don't have access to any of the keys, those are all different forms of paper Bitcoin. And you're just not able to call bullshit in the same way on those. I'm just saying that the, you know, the amount of capital needed to take us from 100K to a million is a significant amount of capital. And the average person doesn't have access to that much capital, right? It's pretty simple.

But I do think that we, the hodlers, have a big. Okay, so like I said this on the Jack Miller's thing, but I'll say it again. Like between one Bitcoin and a thousand Bitcoin, hodlers that hold between one Bitcoin and a thousand Bitcoin control 50% of total supply. So the thoughts, beliefs, and opinions of the hodlers who have between one and a thousand Bitcoin matter a lot, a lot, a lot. And those are going to be very significant in terms of price discovery. How many people do you think that is, by the way? Yeah, I think it's about 100,000 people. Yeah, I think it's like, I would say like 250K.

Have you been doing the research on this, O'Dow? Yeah, I mean, you can look at on chain data on like the amount of addresses that hold a certain amount of Bitcoin. So you get upper bounds, right, because people can hold multiple addresses. And the upper bounds are quite low. It's like four and a half million, it's like four and a half million upper bound on people that in self-custody hold more than 10 million sats, $10,000. Wait, when you did that, though, how many, like, addresses were you assuming people held? No, the upper bound is like everyone just holds one address. Right.

And that's what, four million? Four and a half million. They'd have more than 10 million stats. Yeah, that's wild. Are you surprised that we didn't see... In self-custody. Yeah, of course. But are you surprised we didn't see more volatility in the ETF?

Because I expected these to be like the most paper-handed Bitcoiners that we would have. In fact, it's been the opposite. They're some of the least paper-handed. I don't think there's been any out-flow days at all on the ETAF or any... Maybe there's been one or two, but the overwhelming majority have been net inflow days. Basically no outflow days, which is crazy. Yeah, wild. So tell me where you think the capital comes from then to move us to a million dollar Bitcoin.

Well, I mean, clearly it's coming from pension funds, from index, passive index flows. It's coming from sovereign wealth funds. It's coming from institutional grade buyers, large family offices. Yeah, there are just nation states, I mean, potentially nation states. So yeah, well, there's rumors about the UAE already has 400,000 Bitcoin or something. And like the SBR in America is likely going to happen in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. So yeah, I mean, the capital players are much bigger that are needed to pump this thing. And they're coming into the market now.

And that's why we're seeing the prices so high. So, Odell, when do you think that starts, instead of being like bigger, whether it's like insurance funds or whatever, putting money into Bitcoin, when do you think that would start laughing at me? When do you think we start seeing like this repricing other assets and money coming out of things like real estate? I'm just laughing because it's all coming together, fam. Yeah. Like everything we said is just happening. It's reality now.

It's been a crazy year. I think that's already happening. I think it, you know, you recently had Parker on and I appreciated the mandibles than Bitcoin standard reference on it. I like Parker succinctly says gradually than suddenly and I think that's a very

you know every strong meme is based in reality and at every point in the cycle we've always seen it gradually than suddenly you see like there's a there's a quite there's a larger version of gradually than suddenly which is like overall overall Bitcoin adoption but every step in the cycle has had

sub gradually and then suddenlies and what do you usually see you see the challenger move first, right? Because the challengers have way more to gain. We saw Cash App move first on Bitcoin. Then Venmo followed, right? Because Venmo had bigger market share than Cash App. We saw El Salvador move first on Bitcoin. Then other countries started following because El Salvador had absolutely nothing to lose. We saw Micro Strategy in Sailor, who was like basically considered like one of the smallest fish billionaires in the world, right? He had a huge axe to grind, had absolutely

nothing to lose and he went all in on Bitcoin. So we're starting to see that in real estate circles. We're starting to see that in insurance circles. We're seeing that in downment circles. People dipping their toes in, people that have less career risk. And that is all starting to compound on each other. And I think it happens a lot quicker than people realize. I mean, if you just look back, what, four months ago, right, when we were like sitting, there was like people that strongly believed, like, we were going to sit at like $58,000 for like a year. year or something, two years, three years. And now we're sitting under 100K. People are panicking because we're like dropping down to 90-ish. It's a whole new world. Like people would kill to get

$58,000 Bitcoin right now. And so Bitcoin does this thing where it's like gradual, gradual, gradual, then kicks you in the face. Well, this is the thing like there's only, is what is it, all the price appreciation happens in 11 days or something crazy like that. So I want to jump ahead a bit, but we'll come back. But I think we should talk about strategic Bitcoin Reserve, because I have some questions on that. First of all, do you think that's going to happen? Yes. I do as well.

What kind of percentage chance do you put on that? 90%. I also agree with 90%. Right. You've got to explain this then. Why 90%. So, okay, let me give you, I'll give you both, and then Matt can give his take. So I think a sort of a ceremonial EO, which is just like, hey, we're going to keep the Bitcoin

that we've already seized that don't have claims. on them. I think that seems like a no-brainer. But I mean like the U.S. buying Bitcoin. Yes. So I think that's the thing that has a 90% chance likelihood. Like we're definitely going to see something like that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. And then I think, you know, a significant, you know, amount of buying by the U.S. government, like let's say they plan to get to a million, two million, three million coins. I put that at like a 35% likelihood. And I think if that does happen, it's going to happen via secret executive order.

So if you think about the nation state level game theory here, you don't want to let other nation states know that you're going first, right? And I know that there are people who are in the president here, alerting him to the game theory, the president-elect, alerting him to the game theory of Bitcoin and saying, hey, announcing it is a bad decision. You're going to get less Bitcoin if you announce it. You're going to have to pay a higher price.

What you should do is do it in secret. The president does have the ability to do secret executive orders. You should do it in secret. And then you should announce at a later date when you're done acquiring. This is the rumor that was coming out of Dubai is that the United Arab Emirates have already accumulated 400,000 Bitcoin, but they didn't want to announce until the U.S. government had gone first. And I didn't know if that was because of petrodollar relations or if that was because of their Bitcoin strategy. I'm not really sure. But something spooked them.

They got cold feet, and they were supposed to do an announcement. They didn't do an announcement. And so I think that doing it via secret EO makes the most sense and is the most important. most likely to happen if the U.S. government is serious about it, doing it as ceremonial, like I'm going to sign it on day one and I'm going to hold it up with the pen and everything. That's if you're not serious. You just want to do it for the Bitcoiners because they helped get you elected, basically. You were smirking at that O'Dow, Guam.

No, once again, it's all coming together, fam. It's beautiful. I'm laughing with you guys. I'm not laughing at you guys. I, uh, the, so I would put, so Hoddle's right. There's two things right here. There's an executive order, and then there's potentially a congressional bill, right? And Senator Lemmiss has already put forward a congressional bill to do this.

Now, obviously, Congress, everything just moves really slowly, right? I think the core fundamental here is the beauty of this versus other types of campaign promises is it doesn't require trusting a politician. All it requires is that you assume that politicians are greedy, which is the easiest assumption you could ever make in the world. So that's the foundational element for my conviction here. The second thing is I would put about 90% on an executive order right in the beginning of the presidency, whether that's actually day one or like basically day one.

You know, they say day one. But rumor is that good rumors are that Trump wants to sign like 1,200 executive orders, quote unquote, day one. So it's not like him debating over the SBR executive order. do it or should I not. It's like that is part of a stack of 1,200 executive orders. That makes it way more likely. That executive order that's been proposed by Bitcoin Policy Institute allocates $21 billion to Bitcoin. So that's about $200,000 Bitcoin at current prices, right? And obviously there's going to be slippage depending on how they execute that. That I would put at like 90%. I think it's a no-brainer. I think you're just assuming greed. I think it's not priced in at all,

just like the Trump election wasn't priced in, even though it seemed obvious for most of us, and just like the ETF wasn't priced in, because even though it seemed, like, most people can't think for themselves, so these things don't get priced in. And then I think we see a congressional, something happened on the congressional side, and that's going to take a longer period of time.

And I would put a lower percentage on that, but I'd probably higher than 35% or whatever Hoddle said. Now, I don't think this, like, secret thing happens. I think we have a massive bureaucracy, no matter how much Vivek and Elon say they're going to cut the bureaucracy, huge governments and huge bureaucracies have a disadvantage here. It's the same thing. When you have the UAE or El Salvador, it's like three people decide,

and they can do it in secret or Bhutan, right? You can do it in secret and you can just make it fucking happen, and you have no reason to tell the world because then you have a slippage and that's a negative to you. Or Putin in Russia. And the same thing happens with something like a micro strategy, versus Microsoft, right? Microsoft needs all these shareholders to come together while sailor can just say, hold my beer. Like, it's not in secret. He's like telegraphing it to the whole world exactly what he's

going to do and still does it. But he can move very quickly, right? And the U.S. can't move as quickly. So I think like a secret thing is probably unlikely. I think he actually like holds up the sign paper for the executive order in the beginning, but it'll be a smaller amount. The price will start running away. people, it'll be heavily memed, like how much the value of the 400,000 Bitcoin, the 200,000 plus the existing C's Bitcoin is, it'll be a huge meme on how much that value is appreciated in 20 days, in 40 days, and 60 days, and it'll cause all this pressure. And meanwhile, all these politicians, all the individual congressional people, all of their friends and family, like, they're all aping into Bitcoin because that's what they all do. What is the meme where they, like, show the congressional performance on stock picking? Like, they're, like, they're all aping. Like, they're all aping. Like, they're all aping. Like, they're all aping. They're all They're amazing geniuses. They somehow always pick the best stocks. No, there's inherent corruption there, and they're picking the stuff they know is going to win because of their policies.

And I think it just becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. So most people are sleeping on it. It's incredibly likely. All you have to do is assume greed in terms of politicians. I think it's great for America. I think it's positive for Bitcorners because our purchasing power increases, which is awesome. Like, life is easier when we have more money. and we can do other things.

And then I think from that point, it's a foot in the door and then hopefully we start getting real freedom benefits out of it in terms of repealing the Bank Secrecy Act or things a step below that. Tax treatment, like all these different things are kind of knock on effects that happen

after you get your foot in the door with them actually owning Bitcoin. The individual politicians owning Bitcoin and the government owning Bitcoin. Yeah, let me agree with Matt here real quick. think that there's a non-trivial chance that happens via Secret EO. But I think to Matt's point, if the U.S. government is making moves, it's going to be obvious, right? I mean, these are public, global public markets that you're going to be able to see the buys, basically. And you're going to

have leaked information because the Trump White House, we know, is leaky as a SIV, or at least it was during the last administration. And we expected to be during this administration. And I think, I want to talk real quick about the SBR from an American perspective, from a Bitcoiner perspective. I think the reason for, it's very easy to say, hey, I don't support the SBR because I don't support a bunch of Bitcoin bros getting an air quote bailout, which is what the people on like MSNBC are saying. And it's like, first of all, we don't need your fucking bailout.

We're doing very well without you. Thanks. Second of all, the reason to do it is to actually strengthen America by solving Triffin's dilemma. Triffin's dilemma is an economic problem that occurs when you have the reserve currency and the reserve asset is the same thing. And it's one of the things that America has been suffering under for the last 50 years since we went off the gold standard. And the reason the American manufacturing base got hollowed out is not necessarily because we have a bunch of evil globalists running our society, even though we do. The reason it got hollowed out is because of Triffin's dilemma.

Our chief export became dollars. And it was so much easier for us to export dollars than it was for us to export manufactured goods. So you buy Bitcoin, you separate the reserve currency from the reserve asset. Bitcoin becomes the reserve asset. The U.S. dollar stays as the reserve currency. You rehome the manufacturing base, and America keeps winning and we have prosperity into the next 100 years. If you're an American, that is why you should care. Wait, explain that Triffons dollar thing. Is that because you have to keep the U.S. dollar week? You know what? Danny, that's the economics question, my guy. All right, I'm not, I'm not prepared

for that. That's the crux of it, basically, is that we have an incentive to inflate our currency, right? We have multiple incentives to do that. Now, here's the thing. Like, we talked about, like, the low IQ way of looking at this on why it's good for America is, once again, born in memes. And we've talked about this for years. It's like, if you look at the current state of the U.S. government and our debt burden, literally the only way you could even conceivably imagine ourselves digging ourselves out of this

is to print money and buy Bitcoin. We have a unique opportunity here where we're the only country in the world where our debt is denominated in our own shit coin. And we have the ability to print that shit coin and buy the hardest asset that's ever existed. Now I used to joke about this. I actually thought it was never possibility. Like never going to happen. And we're starting to see the early signs of it.

Now, there's a delicate act here, right? Because you don't want the currency to go into free fall. That's where you end up in a true mandible situation. And even without the Bitcoin piece, we're already like kind of on the precipice of it. You know, we're already like people are starting, you're starting to see, you know, 10-year treasury yields go out of control, like people starting to realize, like, why am I lending the U.S. government money for 10 years at a low interest rate? And so the confidence there is already shook.

Now, if you shake confidence more, it could get really bad really quickly. So there's a delicate balancing act where you start to see things like in the Lummus bill. We're selling our gold that's not marked to market for Bitcoin. We're not going to print money to buy Bitcoin. But the real, like, grug brain move here is you print as much as the market can tolerate and you buy as much Bitcoin as possible. That Bitcoin appreciates some purchasing power over time. And all of a sudden, our government is solvent.

instead of not solvent. Who wouldn't want a solvent government? And you can't imagine any other possibility where that could even be possible at a current debt burden. By the way, you know who's doing this is Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor is diluting his shareholders in order to accrete more Bitcoin value to his books. And so far, the share, the market enjoys it and is continuing to pile money into that as an investment vehicle, right? And I think that one thing Matt said about the loss of confidence in the currency, that is the key. hyperinflation is demarcated by a loss of confidence in the currency. And so there are these various canaries in the coal mine, like the treasury yields are one,

or the fact that people use the word fiat, that's one that's pretty crazy. We're now outside of the dogma of the dollar is just this everything in the world. And we're now realizing that the dollar is just a choice we can make. We can make a choice between dollars, choice between Bitcoin, a choice between equities, et cetera. And I think that's a very, you know, that's a tell. It's a canary in the coal mine, right? That people are beginning to lose confidence in the currency. And if you look at Bitcoin culture, Bitcoin maximalism as a whole, we're canaries in the coal mine because we are people who have already lost confidence in the currency.

Right. So, I mean, it's a pretty big deal that there's a whole group of insane internet individuals and people listen to these kinds of conversations where we're all talking about our loss of confidence in the currency, right? So like hyperinflation can occur at any point and it can take you off guard. But that said, I'm hopeful that we just sort of Bitcoin eyes instead of hyper Bitcoin eyes. And it's a slow, orderly move to the off ramp so that people can get out intact. I hope that happens. Anyway, that's my wish. Say the line, Matt. I also hope that will happen.

I just don't think that's the likely scenario. I want to go back to what Matt was saying before, though. So I get that Bitcoin's money for enemies and you can't stop anyone buying it, whether that's like a person or a state. but do you see any risk in the sort of co-option of Bitcoin with this? And this is why I want to get to the Treaty Reserve next after ETS, because I feel like they're kind of in the same bucket. Well, let's talk it through, right? So Bitcoin is now entering into the traditional financial system.

It's now entering into nation state adoption. So it's going to be held. There's going to be a Fort Trump that holds Bitcoin. That's pretty crazy thing that's going to happen, right? So, I mean, you got Bitcoin, you could see it from one perspective as Bitcoin being subsumed and co-opting controlled by the traditional market. Or another term you could use as Bitcoin being ghettoized as a store of value, right? So we all know that Bitcoin has these amazing, you know, features as a medium of exchange and, you know, the Lightning Network and its uncensurable transaction capability, et cetera, et cetera, right? but if Bitcoin only ever becomes reserve assets, store of value, digital gold,

then it basically gets ghettoized. And it's still, here's the weird thing is like it goes to millions of dollars a coin and we all get rich, but we lose freedom money along the way. And that's a real concern. And I understand why people have those concerns. My personal perspective on this is that as Bitcoiners get rich, you know, because Bitcoin is, you know, air quotes co-opted as store of value, we continue to exert power and political influence. And we eventually, you know, have enough power and political influence

to sort of unleash Bitcoin's full potential and capabilities. Now, that's like maybe a rosy view of the subject because you are a, you know, hardcore crypto anarchist and you believe that the state, you know, should just cease to exist entirely. But I mean, listen, man, the thing is, Bitcoin doesn't do the thing that some people want it to do where it makes the virtuous wealthy and it makes the impure, impoverished. It just doesn't do that. People that have gains from various nefarious fiat activities, they're going to be able to port their money into Bitcoin as well if they're smart and they see the sea change that's

taking place. So there are going to be bad people, evil people on a Bitcoin standard too. It's not going to be this panacea where it takes all the, you know, awful people you don't like to zero while it makes all the, you know, people you do like rich, right? So like, I think that we're going to get about half the seats at the table of power and there's going to be a negotiation between us and the traditional, you know, money elite. And that conversation will be about what the rule set is. And the rule set, in our opinion, as Bitcoiners, should be fair, non-biased enforced by code and machines. I guess the fear, though,

is not necessarily like is making the virtuous rich. It's more, what are the Trump administration going to do? And they're still going to go after open source developers like the samurai guys? And is this just going to be like store of value coming through the front door, but they still attack self-costs through the back door? So look, I think, first of all, Bitcoin doesn't solve wealth inequality. Okay? It doesn't like magically solve wealth inequality. What it does do is it makes the actual monetary system, the ladder that we're all living on, a fair ladder that can be corrupted. And how does it do that? It does it because Bitcoin is incredibly difficult to change by default.

If you have more Bitcoin, you don't have more power over the network. That's a key fundamental C change from every other institution we rely on, including all the proof of stake, shitcoins, but you look at equities, you look at governments, everything. The more you own, the more power you have, and then you can corrupt it with your power to give yourself an advantage. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Now, I look at it more, it's key here.

that you don't look at this stuff in a vacuum, right? Well, first of all, obviously, we already said this. You can't stop anyone from buying Bitcoin. That's a key point. But the second thing is, from a regulatory perspective, particularly as an American, it has been absolutely brutal out here. The status quo has been brutal. We've seen massive KYC AML overreach, burdensome regulation that doesn't actually stop criminals in the name of stopping criminals, but it doesn't stop criminals because they use stolen or bought information while average people get fucked. We've seen companies have to deal with tons and tons of legal expense and vague regulatory environments.

And from every sign right now, it appears that the Trump administration is moving in a positive direction from a very, very low bar. And I think the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve gives them incentive to continue moving in that direction. Because not only does it enrich their own coffers, but it enriches the coffers of their supporters. And there's this nice little virtuous feedback loop. Now, the real concern, and I've talked about this on previous shows with you and Peter, has not changed.

And the real concern is not whether or not Bitcoin is freedom money or not freedom money. Bitcoin's a protocol. It's incredibly hard to change. You can use it today without permission. And that's core, right? Because just because you can't save without permission if you can't spend without permission. If you save your money and then you have to ask someone if you can spend it, then you don't have any money because you can't spend the thing. You can't actually realize the value.

The problem is, is people can use it how they choose to use it. And most users are captured. Most users will continue to be captured. So when you look at Bitcoin as adoption grows, what I expect to happen is you see a world where 95% of people are using it in a surveilled, controlled way. and, you know, 5% or less are using it in a freedom-oriented way without permission. And so the goal for people in the community that care about this stuff should be increasing that bottom number, increasing the amount of people that use it as freedom money. And the way you do that is you do that through tools and you do it through education,

and we've made a lot of progress there. Now, the second piece, I would say, is, particularly on the ETF side, we saw a lot of the same concern from people. But to Hoddle's point, ideological bit corners that actually care about that, this stuff can reverse that trend and actually make it a positive. And we've seen that with OpenSats. OpenSats is my charity that I co-founded with a bunch of great bitconers. And we take management fees from the ETFs and we deliver that to open source contributors. And the key there is the ETFs aren't dictating where that money goes. Right. They're giving us the money. They're getting

a PR advantage. They're also getting indirect benefits to the underlying protocol being more robust, which is what their products rely on. And then open source contributors are getting no strings attached grants. We've also seen it on the 1031 side with Venture, where we've had rich family offices, endowments, and whatnot. They don't allocate the money directly. They give it to us. We're ride or die bitcorners,

and then we allocate it to freedom-oriented projects. So it goes in both directions, and I think it's key here that you realize that we don't live in a vacuum. And you can't pretend, like, the last five, eight, ten years in America hasn't happened, and then say, like, oh, it's just going to get worse from here. Because the status quo is that it was getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And for the first time in my lifetime, and the first time since I've been in Bitcoin,

it actually, there's some signs that it could be getting better. And yes, Bitcoin doesn't care about any of this shit, for the most part, on the protocol level. But as an American, like, I would much prefer if my government wasn't bankrupt trying to go after me and everything that I've tried to build in this country. and instead was aligned at least indirectly with my interests. And that's what we're seeing play out right now. So are you saying that you expect the Trump administration to go easier on the KYCAML laws and like self-custody devs?

Or is that what you mean? I think if you look at all the horrible KYCAML stuff and self-custody stuff, at its core is this 1970s piece of legislation called the Bank Secrecy Act. And I think for the first time in my lifetime, there's a non-zero chance that we can repeal that thing. Now, I'm not saying it's a high chance.

It's definitely not 90% like the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but it's non-zero and that's massive, you know, like 5 to 15% or something. But how does Bitcoin play into repealing that? I think what plays into it is if you make the regulatory environment in America, the best environment for Bitcoiners, Bitcoin companies, Bitcoin individuals, then America will greatly benefit from that. and they see almost direct benefits from it if they're holding a strategic Bitcoin reserve. But also Trump himself and his you know group of his his his

posse right like Vance is quite young like they see significant benefits in that voting block and that set of supporters actually getting getting direct benefits. So the incentive it's all about incentives and the incentives are really lined up here and then the second piece is just anecdotal But for instance, like Trump was one of the only presidents who didn't submit his tax returns voluntarily to the public when he ran. I think specifically, like, he is, you know, more aligned with this idea that there's too much financial overreach. There's too much, you know, government surveillance. He was the subject and target of multiple government surveillance operations.

So I'm not saying like he's perfect. I'm not, you know, expecting the world. I'm just saying that the bar was so low. the bar was so low. If you go back even just a year, two years, like we were trending in a horrible direction. And there is some light here. There's some light here.

We'll see how it plays out. And there's a lot of Bitcoiners behind the scenes that are trying to push it in the right direction and make that reality come true. Matt, listen, Matt said it the nice way. And I'll say it the real way, which is the lesson of this election

was that if you fuck with Bitcoin, you lose. That was the lesson. And everybody took that lesson home. And there are a bunch of people that are upset about it, especially on the Democratic side. But they picked a fight with us for no fucking reason. And we were not that. Listen, we're not even that political, to be honest with you. Like, we just want to be left alone.

And the reason we got political in this cycle was because of that fact, because we want to be left alone and they wouldn't leave us alone. And so the entire, it wasn't just Bitcoin. There was a lot of crypto money that was sloshing around as well. But the lesson was if you fuck with crypto, you're going to lose. And also, I think like the crypto lobby and the Bitcoin lobby in general were like, you know, they were like a baby just flexing their powers. Like we actually don't know how powerful yet we are politically. We made a meaningful difference in this election and we're going to make meaningful differences. And I think every election going forward.

And the crypto lobby is going to be something that you're going to have to contend with. So don't do things to piss those people off. Simple. I mean, why do you want to pick a fight with a bunch of rich millennials? It doesn't even make sense. Like the millennials are on their way up as the next most powerful voting block in the country after the baby boomers. And you want to pick a fight with the richest subset of them. That makes no sense.

You're going to get wrecked if you keep it. Do you think this is Bitcoin is getting a seat at the table? I still don't think we have a seat at the table, no. But I think we were able to make a dent in this election in a way that was meaningful. You know? I mean, I think it's important to realize here that most people that seek the, the proverbial seat at the table tend to be the worst of us. And bit corners aren't perfect.

So be careful what you wish for. It'll probably happen regardless. It doesn't mean we agree with who's ever sitting at the table. But I think the key here is incentive alignment, right? And I mean, I have another anecdote. We've seen over the last one positive trend that we saw pre-Trump was on the state basis. Like one of the beauties of America is that we have states' rights. and the states have some general autonomy in how they govern.

And the states have become very competitive in terms of luring Bitcoin talent. And I'm here, I'm recording out of Bitcoin Park in Nashville. And we've quickly seen Tennessee trying to vie with Texas in terms of one of the best places to start a Bitcoin business. And we had our annual energy and mining summit last year. And these guys were like these energy people, there weren't bitcorners, right? gray hair energy people, they've been in the energy industry for 40 years, they're like looking around, they're like, I've never seen young people so excited about energy innovation, right? Like, it's infectious.

Like, you see a bunch of young people that are motivated, that they're independently, they're financially independent, right? It's not that they're just like mooching off the welfare state or mooching off their parents. They're financially independent. They're motivated. They're quite intelligent. and they want to get shit done. And you have to be an idiot to be like,

this is the worst path for our country to go in. Like, it's clearly the best path for the country to go in. And politicians realize that, at the lowest levels, they realize that. And slowly it's starting to seep up. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor and Massive Legends, Iron. The largest NASDAQ list of Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They're also providing cutting-edge computing resources for AI,

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but also at the same time, there's people coming in like David Sachs, whose incentives are not necessarily aligned with Bitcoin. Like, he's a massive shit coin. How do you kind of deal with that? Well, this is what I was saying, the seat at the table thing, is, you know, I think that's a perfect example. Like, I think the A16Z PayPal Mafia can go fuck themselves, and they're part of the

problem. They caused a lot of these problems. And obviously, they have more influence and power than they've ever had. You know, David Sachs, Peter Thiel, Mark Anderson, Elon. And it's a give and take. But you also can't, once again, we don't live in a vacuum. Right. And so you have to compare it to where we were previously.

And it seems like a clear net win to me and trending in the right direction. And you watch how it plays out. I'm like, we shouldn't. You hope for the best, but you assume the worst. And the beauty of tools like Bitcoin is that it empowers individuals to take matters into their own hands and not have to rely on someone else to get shit done for them. Yeah, I would also say, just to add to that, that politically, if you are a shick-coiner who's attacking Bitcoin, that is effectively you throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because Bitcoin is pristine in a way that your shit-coin is not.

And so if you're trying to regulate against it, your shit-coin or various shit-coins that are like your shit-coin are likely to be even worse examples or recipients of that type of regulation. right and so i think that you know like to be bullish on sacks here i agree what matt said it's amazing that we have a crypto czar in the first place um we were going to have a world in which we were going to be constantly attacked and maligned uh and elizabeth warren was going to get a lot of power and be able to wield it against us in a way that was very um you know it would it would have been a much harder four years we would have made it through but it was going to be tough and then i think you know, that Sacks and the guys like Sacks, I don't think they're hardcore Bitcoin maxis, but I think they respect Bitcoin.

I think they realize that Bitcoin is a very important part of the story. And I do believe Sacks has owned Bitcoin for quite a long time, probably longer than many of the listeners of this podcast, right? And he talks to people who I would consider more Bitcoin Maxi, like Belaji Shrinivasan or Chumath Palah Phappatia. I mean, neither of those people are actual Bitcoin Maxis, but they're more Bitcoin maxi, and they'd certainly understand the Bitcoin case.

It's another case of you got to, we don't exist in a vacuum, right? Like Chamath is clearly not a Bitcoin first person, but he's also clearly a bitconer. I think actually like the shit coin stuff, that's past cycle shit.

Like, shitcoins have never been a threat to Bitcoin. They're a threat to individuals that speculate on them. They're the threat to retail who thinks, oh, this is Bitcoin 2.0, and they lose their life savings buying that instead of stacking stats. But they've never been an actual threat to Bitcoin, and that has become more and more apparent, I think, over time. I think that's almost standard logic now. Like, very few people are arguing that some latest and

greatest shit coin is the new Bitcoin. What they do say is that it's better than Solana or it's better than Ethereum. They're like all gunning for each other, but not Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin and everything else. The bigger concern I have with this new, like, tech elite rise to power is actually only tangentially Bitcoin related. And that's like they seem very, you know, pro automation, pro surveillance. Like I could 100% see them be like, oh, you want to secure the border? Well, the best way for us to secure the border is if everyone had biometric, you know, scan everyone's eyeballs, let's do the full scan the eyeballs. We'll have the Android drones, you know, policing everybody and making sure like you're doing your speech is correct.

well, hook in all the ring cameras, like that tech surveillance elite thing where they're all about that type of policy is a concern and obviously has knock-on effects for any freedom-loving Bitcoiner. But the whole shitcoin versus Bitcoin thing, like I think Sachs is almost perfectly aligned with Bitcoin in that regard. I mean, you even see someone like Trump, right? He launches his shitcoin. Like, they're all going to do their own like shit coin games or whatever.

It doesn't really matter to Bitcoin. Does that surveillance elite thing not concern you with Bitcoin, though, in the sense that they could be like, yeah, just only the ETF, bro, you can't have self-custody Bitcoin? I think that the technologists understand that they also are anti-tradfi. I don't think that the West Coast really likes East Coast traditional financial elites. That's not something that's within their purview. So they would much rather have it, you know, be unleashed from a technological standpoint. So I think we're in alignment there with them. I would say another thing is, you know, just thinking about the tech elites or what Belaghi calls the grays, right? You got the reds, the blues, the grays, the oranges were the oranges. The grays are the tech elites. And there's been a fracturing between the grays and the reds in just the last couple of days.

Over Christmas, there was a big discussion on Twitter about the H-1B immigration status. And, you know, effectively the tech elites, just to sum up the conversation, the tech elites want unlimited or uncapped H1B immigration. And the MAGA movement is saying, wait a minute, we're anti-immigration. And also we feel like a lot of this H-1B stuff is you gaming the system in order to undercut American workers. And then they're fine, you know, because the way it's built is that the H-1B thing is the elite and it's America skimming the cream from the rest of the world, which is great.

I think everybody agrees with that. But then you dig into the details and you're finding out that actually a lot of, we're hiring a lot of junior devs and undercutting. Americans. And the MAGA movement is not happy about that, especially because these are the same people that were censored and abused by the tech elite during the Biden administration, because the tech elite are weak cowards with no spine. And they'll basically like do whatever the powerful, you know, person telling them, you know, which direction should we march? How high should we jump, et cetera. So I think we're seeing a fracturing already between MAGA and the grays. And, you know,

it's it's trump as decider and king who will figure out you know which which direction to split the baby you know they live in their own little bubble right because they can have privacy but everyone else doesn't get it and they're cool with that and they'll just live that hypocrisy they'll just bold face live that hypocrisy and be fine with it that's what their actions i've shown in the in the past i think that's what their actions show in the future i mean you have a perfect example of it with Elon himself. There's this guy who makes an Elon jet tracker because it's public information, and you can see where it lands everywhere you go. And he also has like a Zuckerberg jet tracker and all the different tech billionaires. They're banned from every platform. You can get them

on Noster, but they're banned on every platform because they want privacy themselves, but they don't want other people to have privacy. And their actions have spoken loudly in that regard. Now, the key here, and this is how they whitewash it, is they don't think the government should surveil you directly. What they think is we should privatize it. They should make billions of dollars off of that surveillance and then sell it as government contracts to the government ending around our constitution because the constitution doesn't say the government can't buy it from third-party companies. It says the government can't surveil us without a warrant. And we've seen that in practice as well. The government right now is using quote-unquote anonymized, um,

location data that different advertisers get from our phones as the main way of tracking people about where they go and who they see. Luigi Mangione was caught in McDonald's, right? And McDonald's has those self-serve kiosks now. And I'm pretty goddamn sure that they got his face off of that self-serve kiosk and sent the data directly to the FBI. Pretty sure. There's no chance that was just a McDonald's worker that founded.

It's zero chance. It's honestly a zero. I think that... Danny, before you go real... I just want to say on Matt's point here is that I think as Bitcoiners, we should view all of these relationships we have, these parasycial relationships, whether it's with tech elites or, you know, Wall Street guys or politicians as ambivalent relationships. These people are our frenemies, okay? We're not actually in full alignment with them. And we should, you know, when they're useful to

us, we should use them. And when they're not, we should dispense with them, period. See, I agree with that. But I want Odell to answer that question. Because are you not concerned about this, like, surveillance coming to Bitcoin? I am. But once again, like, the status quo was horrible. Right? The status quo was horrible. Like, 99% of users that come into Bitcoin, pre-ETF, were coming in through exchanges

that required full identifying, identifiable information, and they were reporting all of that to the government with their full Bitcoin transaction history. Now, obviously, the ETFs take that another. step above, right, where you can't even withdraw or deposit it. But I will say that when Robin Hood first came on to the, one of the things I got wrong was when Robin Hood first came on to the landscape and to the industry and started offering Bitcoin, I never a million years thought they were going to open up withdraws and deposits self-custody Bitcoin anytime soon. And they did it within like eight, 10 months maybe after launching Bitcoin. And why do they do that? They did it because they had to

compete in a free market. They had to compete in a world where other people could do that. So I think is the status quo good? No, it's horrible. We've been under attack for very long. I think one of the key things here is that users get to decide how they interact with this thing, right? And at the end of the day, like, we can say like, oh, you know, an ETF's an IOU, it's not real Bitcoin. Like, I'm also not going to tell someone they can't buy the ETF. Like, they have to make their own decision on how they want to interact with Bitcoin. And the fact of the matter is we need to give people the avenues that they can use Bitcoin as freedom money.

But then ultimately, those people have to choose whether or not they use it. And that will always be, I think, a longer stretch. Personal responsibility takes responsibility, which means it's more difficult. And most people will not take the difficult path unless they have to take that path. So I think it's really two different questions. I would say, if you want to use the Samurai case specifically, their outlook on that case is way rosier today than it was six months ago. And still not rosy, don't get me wrong, but the bar was incredibly low of where we were sitting.

And, you know, maybe there's a non-zero chance we see a pardon depending on how that case plays out. You can't, I mean, who the hell knows? I don't really know, but. Yeah, or more likely drop the case is something I've been hearing from some of the attorneys who are working. on the Samurai case is that before they had no hope. And now with the incoming administration, they think that there's actually a non-trivial chance that they just straight up dropped the case, which would be fantastic for the Samurai guys and for Bitcoin privacy in general. I want to pull on something Matt said about, because I think this is important going

forward about the ETFs that you can't withdraw or deposit from the ETFs. That's currently correct. But I expect that to change in the new year. So I had heard some months ago from a representative at Black, Rock that they were going to seek like-kind treatment as soon as Gary Gensler was removed, and they expected him to be removed no matter what the outcome of the election was. By the way, that tells you how much power they have. They were just waiting for him to be fucking removed, right?

So anyway, he's already tendered his resignation. He'll be out soon. BlackRock will seek like-kind treatment. When they seek like-kind treatment, you will be able to put Bitcoin into the ETFs and withdraw Bitcoin from the ETFs. So what does that mean? That means that Bitcoiners are now going to be able to put Bitcoin into the

ETF, then margin against the ETF, all without cap gains, right? And so you can run a buy, borrow, die strategy, the same strategy that Michael Saylor is always talking about, where you can spend Fiat debt and keep your Bitcoin intact.

That's going to be incredibly seductive for a lot of Bitcoiners. It's seductive to me when I hear the idea. And I think to myself, like, but why would I do that? I want to keep control of my Bitcoin. Like, I don't want to give it to black, Rock, but then I'm like, oh, free money.

I could use the free money for things, you know, whatever. So, like, I understand where Bitcoiners are going to be at with this. And I kind of want to, like, I'm not raising a red flag, but I'm just saying, like, this is something that's going to be a big deal over the next, like, let's say, four to five years of Bitcoiners engaging with these types of products. And I'm not really yet sure what the second and third order effects of doing that are going to be, but it certainly is going to mean that more Bitcoin are finding its way into the traditional financial system.

Yeah, I mean, this is where I was going with the Robbins. neighborhood analogy and then I got a little bit distracted. But yeah, like this is because of competition, right? And so BlackRock BlackRock Bitcoin from their ETFs because they want to be competitive in a global free market. Now, the other piece here is there's competition between countries. Now, a little bit less so with the United States because we have one of the most predatory exit taxes in the world that keeps us locked in here, even though I have no intention of leaving the country regardless. I'm very grateful that I was born here and I can raise my family here, build businesses here. We have a very predatory exit tax, but you're seeing globally what

you're seeing happening is governments that are very harsh on Bitcoin, very negative against Bitcoin, people are moving to jurisdictions that are very beneficial to Bitcoin. There's a free market competition happening. And to a lesser extent in America as well, if America is not careful, we'll start to see more and more Americans leaving, paying the exit tax, you know, paying their 30 percent or whatever, long-term cap gains, so 20 percent, paying the exit tax, and then never coming back and building businesses, other places. So that competition is our major advantage we have in this global system. Now, to huddle a specific point about depositing Bitcoin into an ETF and then loaning against

it, I mean, we already see Bitcoin who's doing that. There's self-custody ways to do that, like with unchained or whatever. You'll get way better terms if you do it with something like an ETF. And yeah, I think of that as a lobster trap. These are the types of soft incentives we see of capturing as much Bitcoin as possible because you wave a dog treat or you wave some lobster bait and you get them into the trap so that you know everything that's happening and Bitcoin's being used in more of a permissioned way. I see how it could benefit certain people and maybe that tech.

makes sense, depending on stack size and depending on threat modeling or whatnot. But this is the technique we've seen, even with self-custody stuff, right? So like unchained, for example, unchained allows you to do self-custody loans against your Bitcoin. Why would you do that? Well, the rates are actually incredibly high. I think last I checked there were like 14%. At one point, they were 12%. But the reason you do it is because you're arbitraging against cap gains tax.

So if long-term cap gains tax is 20-ish percent, you're saving money by, you're, borrowing against your Bitcoin instead of selling it outright, which is what we see all rich people do with all of their assets, right? They are always borrowing against their assets. They're not selling it. It's their loophole to get around the tax treatment. Now, the negative there is you are attaching that, even though you're not giving up custody, you're attaching that to your identity. You're attaching that to your identity and you're linking your transaction history going past and forward with your identity to shave off that 6%, 7% arbitrage opportunity. So the reverse is true too. That means that if you want to keep relative privacy with your funds, you have to

end up paying an additional 7% over someone who doesn't. Right? And so there's an additional cost of using Bitcoin in a freedom-oriented way. And I think we'll just see that continue. That trend will continue. It'll always be more expensive and it'll always be less convenient to use Bitcoin in a freedom-oriented way than use it in a captured way. I don't know if you've seen, but you can actually already do in-kind deposits and redemptions with the monochrome ETF in Australia. I know that the US doesn't go a fuck about what happens in Australia, but it's true. Where's Australia? It's the big place, really far south.

Did you know, sorry, if we get this strategic Bitcoin reserve, hat tips to Marty Bent here, what are the chances of a super cycle? Fuck, a bajillion percent. What do you mean? It's going to go straight to a million dollars if we get a... No, but a million dollars is not a super cycle. right right right well i you know something that's more i mean i don't even know if it's based on the sbr but i think it's based on the ets more because when you saw the gold etif come in uh gold had a eight year bull market

right and gold was just up up up up up and so i think for bitcoin if that does occur like we could have an eight year like bitcoin bull market where it's just like a new all time high every year but then also like we're constantly still getting 50% drawdowns because this is fucking bitcoin and the volatility is not going to go away so it would be this weird thing where like new all-time highs consistently over the course of like a decade, but also like lots of 50% and 30% drawdowns on the way. Right. Like a cycle break.

Yeah. I would just say like I think it's important to be definitionally accurate in terms of when you talk about these things. Like if you're going to say super cycle, right, we have three cycles that we can compare against. We have the 2012 cycle, the 2016 cycle, and the 2020 cycle. Now, the 2020 cycle, I think, was artificially suppressed and broken because of FTX, Celsius, gray scale, Barry Silbert, all the different paper Bitcoin games that were played out, and then blew up. So it didn't go as high as it would and went lower than it would have in the bear. So if you go and then you compare it to the 2016 having cycle, right? And why are there cycles? There are cycles because every four years on average, Bitcoin has this pre-planned supply shock, but because people are retarded,

it's not priced in. Like at some point you'd expect all future havings to be priced in, but we're still far away from that. So if you compare it to the 2016 cycle, if it was exactly the same top and bottom of the 2016 cycle, you're talking roughly 2 million Bitcoin top, 400,000 Bitcoin bottom. Now I think like some people without thinking about the math

would be like, oh my God, that's a super cycle, that's insane. Like how did we pump that much? No, that's just doing what we did in 2016. So I think you'd have to see, for it to be definitionally considered a super cycle, you'd have to see it blow past $2 million. I don't think there's many people that are calling for that right now. I would love to see that. I'd be cool with seeing that. But what I expect here is we'll see a slightly amplified traditional cycle because of nation state foam, because of ETFs, because of all this new money that has been unlocked.

We'll see a cycle that probably would have been amplified if you didn't, factor in that new demand compared to not factoring that new demand. But I still expect at some point an 80% drawdown where everyone gets wrecked. And when that will happen, I don't know when that'll happen. It'll happen when we're all incredibly bullish and we think it's not going to happen. And the important contrast, I think, with gold is like gold is, you know, bowling with bumpers. Like there's a circuit breakers. Like it's a completely controlled market. Like Bitcoin is a is the closest thing to a free market humanities ever. seen. And humans are inherently volatile and we panic and we do all this crazy shit. We do

degenerate shit. All the suits are going to do crazy degenerate stuff that we can't even imagine. Like we're already seeing the early innings of it. Vivek is launching an ETF that buys Bitcoin bonds, the bonds that are then lent to microsatistriety. So microstit you can buy Bitcoin while Bitwise is making an ETF that buys the Bitcoin companies that buys the Bitcoin. And they're going to do all this different stuff on top of all that stuff and collect fees. and everything. So the degeneracy is going to be ridiculous. There's no circuit breakers. People will panic, and we'll probably have another 80% drawdown at some point. And I would say that would also break the definition of super cycle, which is like we wouldn't have like a traditional bare market-ish type

of scenario. By the way, if you know how to read between Matt's lines, that sounded a lot to me like he was calling for a $3 million Bitcoin price. No price predictions of cycle for me. Nope, nope. When I'm making the price predictions, which probably we're about to dump. But I'll just say outright, like my strategy is quite left curve IQ. Like, I just humbly am all in. As I try and increase my cash flow as much as possible, so the amount of money I make as much as possible, try and reduce my family's expenses as much as possible. The remainder goes into Bitcoin. And then I just spend it as life expenses happen.

So if there is an 80% drop, I will not expect it. probably hold all the way to the bottom and I'll just be constantly spending when I need to spend and I will not be tried to trade these markets. I am the same. I am 100% all in. I will be hoddling through the next significant correction and I will cry a little bit, but not a lot, just a little bit and then I'll just get on my big boy pants and I'll keep hodling. That's my plan. What's your million dollar bottle of wine huddle? Um, 1989, uh, Chateau-Hopri-on. Do you already have it?

Nobody knows what that is, but I'll hear, I'll pull it up. It's ridiculous. You actually already have it. That's nice. It looks nice. You've not written on it yet, hold on. No, no, I didn't write on it yet. But this is, we're pulling this boy out. How much is that bottle cost?

Um, in sats or in dollar? In Sats. In Sats, it's 2.7 million Sats. Okay. So currently $2,700. That's pretty humble at $1 million. So at a million dollars. Well, not measured in Sats.

It's like $27,000. Oh, I want to hold up for this. He's our micro strategy influencer right now. Have you ever owned micro strategy map? No, I don't own stock. No, me neither. The only thing I own is I own private equity. in Bitcoin startups through 1031 and then I own Bitcoin. I don't have public equities.

All right. You said you're 100% in Hoddle, but... But he will when some of those companies go public. Yeah, what Hidal just said is like the goal for a lot of these companies is to go public. So then at that point, I would. I'm, listen, I'm 100% all in in Bitcoin and Bitcoin related companies. It's all Bitcoin shit. Like, it's funny to me because sometimes people like really puritanical Bitcoiners give me shit. Because they're like, how fucking could you, dude?

You're fucking American hoddle, bro, and you own my grassroots strategy. Fuck you. You're fucking phony. Fuck you, dude. And it's like, listen, guys, I had a retirement account before I got here. And then I yolode it all into Bitcoin shit back in 2015, 16. Like, what do you want for me? I did the best I could.

Yeah, I mean, that's the key difference. I was like, I never had a retirement account. And maybe like the accountants out there are like, oh, like you should have done and you could have done self-directed or whatever. But like, I never had a company provide me one. I never went out and did it myself. I found Bitcoin when I was pretty young. My biggest issue was that I was poor when I found it.

And so my retirement account is just stacking stats. So that's the difference. I'll also say that a lot of my MSTR position is actually in my wife's account because she had a dumb 401K from her old job. And this was like back in 2020 or whatever night. I was listening to a Michael Saylor podcast. And I was like, this guy gets it, man. And I was like, hey, you still have that dumb 401K?

And she was like, yeah. And I was like, give it to me. Give it to me. And I just put it all in the MSCR. So how many companies do you think are going to blow themselves up trying to do the micro strategy play this cycle? Well, it's going to be a popular copycat trade on Wall Street. Especially, you know, I had thought that if anybody copied micro strategy, it would be somebody above him, like a meta or something. But actually, it's the opposite.

And all these companies underneath him are also running the strategy for them. selves. And now there's, you know, Bitwise has a ETF that is going to, you're, you're allowed to be in the ETF if you have a thousand Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet. So any company with a thousand Bitcoin can get a waiting in Bitwise's new Bitcoin Treasury ETF. I don't remember what the name of it is. But yeah, I mean, I think that's going to be a popular trade, because if you're a loser, nothing burger of a company, you know, you're making, you're out here making like sinks and faucets or something. I don't know what companies do. But, you know, something like that.

And then you just say, you say, hey, fuck these sinks and faucets or whatever. Let's buy a thousand Bitcoin get added to this ETF, financialize the fuck out of this company. That seems like a lot of companies are going to do that. And now, could there be something there that's like some sort of weird, you know, human centipede daisy chain of awful leverage in the commodities bond market, blah, blah, blah. I don't know, probably. Well, because you have, so, I mean, this is still the early endings, right? But you have two ETFs. You have one is the bitwise one.

which incentivizes the companies to get to a thousand Bitcoin. And then there's the Strive Funds one, which is Vivek's company, which buys their bonds, which incentivizes them to take out debt to get to there, right? And this is just the early innings. This is just very basic stuff that is getting pushed out there. I'm a little bit...

So there's a couple of things. First of all, challengers, we've said this in the beginning. Challenges first, they have nothing to lose, right? And so we're seeing that with this Bitcoin Treasury's strategy, the micro strategy strategy. And then I also believe that at the end of the day, every company will have this strategy. Every person will have the strategy. Every government will have this strategy. You make profit and you hold your profit in Bitcoin. Like every person will own Bitcoin as their personal reserve asset. Every company will, every government will. It's just

saving good money, right? So there's this interim period here. And I do want to, wonder, like, how much, like, it's basically an arbitrage opportunity in this, like, Fiat transition period. But, like, I don't know how effective it'll be for company number 35 or number 50 or something in terms of, like, the arbitrage. Like, it's still good to own Bitcoin. Like, you should own hard assets. But at some point, like, the most successful ones we've seen are, like, in different jurisdictions, right? So like Metaplanet is in Japan, you can't easily buy micro strategy in Japan. So you buy the knockoff micro strategy in Metaplanet. But like the number 45th American company to do this, like they are not in their micro strategy is so far ahead and he has such

good strong brand and like reputation and reliability in terms of what you get. Like why are you buying that instead of buying micro strategy? Like that I still haven't wrapped my head around. Like I I think like the market is not properly pricing this stuff because it's just so new. Well, I think one reason you might buy it is that it's a classic value investor play. I've lost total. Can you hear him? No, but. Oh, shit. Can you hear me? He's being recorded locally, right?

So I assume, did you just make a compelling point that we didn't hear? It was very compelling. Can you hear me now? Okay. Yeah, one thing I was going to say is that it's one reason you might do it is it's a classic value investor play in where the share price is trade, the total market cap of the company is trading below their holdings of Bitcoin. So anytime you can find that, it just recently happened with this little shit coin called GNS, which holds like $16 million worth of Bitcoin or whatever. And what was funny was I was like, oh, hey, this is a good buy because it's below the net

asset value of the Bitcoin. So I bought some and then dipped even harder. So I was like, all right, I guess I got to buy some more because it's still. my thesis is still intact, right? So yeah, as a value investor, that might be one reason why you would do it. Yeah, but that's like the floor price, right? Like the floor price is assets minus liabilities, right?

Like, who knows? Why would you pay up? Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a strong argument. And once again, don't own micro strategy. I'm not encouraging people to buy it. But I think there's a strong argument that his premium is not only justified, but it's below market in terms of what his premium is.

And he's made very compelling arguments. that like if you do a revenue multiple on like an Apple or Navidia, like that premium is way higher than if you're doing a similar multiple on micro strategy. But I don't know, I think, I don't know how these smaller random bullshit companies that own basically no Bitcoin can justify any kind of significant premium. And they're all kind of diluting themselves. It's also like it's like shit coin.

It's like shit coins. It's like every time there's another one, like they're all, it's like they're all in the same pile of bullshit. So I do own a little bit of like Semler and I own like a tiny amount of GNS. I took a flyer on that one. But like in general, like most of the money I have allocated in sort of this Bitcoin treasury space is 100. It's like 97% to micro strategy because I think this is going to be a winner take all market. Like I think micro strategy is going to be the 800 pound gorilla. in terms of like, you know, Bitcoin treasury.

Well, what is your opinion? The other piece is like, sorry, Danny, this is my show now. What is your opinion on like the, like if a big dog comes in, right? Like these guys hold so much cash. Like a meta. Yeah, meta or an Apple. Yeah. I think that the reason why the micro strategy premium would continue to endure even if meta,

you know, because one thing you have to remember is that when people add, when people, copy this strategy or ape this strategy, it pumps the price of Bitcoin, which meaningfully pumps Sailor's bags. And so there's this virtual accretive flywheel where the more people that, that's why he spent so much time on podcast open sourcing his playbook, because the more people that employ his playbook, the more his underlying holdings go up and the more he can do. So I think like if you have a large meta or Google or whoever come in and start doing the strategy, number one, they're not going to be able to fully commit to the strategy like Sailor. Number two, it's accretive to sailors' bottom line.

And number three, I think Sailor will already be well positioned in the market and have the capital partners. He's already part of QQQ, which means that the type of debt offerings that he's able to get, it's not on the same level as like what MET is able to get because they're part of the QQQQ and the S&P 500. But, you know, I think probably within a year, micro strategy will be part of the S&P 500 as well. and it just allows them to do even more of the things he's already doing. Now, in addition to the passive flows, because once you're part of the cues and once you're part of SPY, then the flows that most people in their 401K, by the way, if you don't know what we're talking about, most people in their 401K don't know what they're investing in.

They just buy a broad market of basket index funds, and they don't even know now that they own micro strategy, which, by the way, this is a great thing for people who hold the NASDAQ because you now have Bitcoin exposure. even though you're too stupid to understand anything about Bitcoin. So boom, 400,000 Bitcoin just found their way into your portfolio. That's pretty sweet, right? And you're getting like a market cap weighted adjustment on that. But like let's say I think it's 0.4% or 0.46 or something right now.

The sharp, we know about Bitcoin sharp ratio that if you add 1% Bitcoin to, you know, a portfolio allocation that it outperforms over time, massively so. And so that 1% continues to grow. it moves higher up in the weightings, it gets higher up in your personal portfolio, the entire NASDAQ is buoyed by the Bitcoin, et cetera, et cetera. It's a massive deflationary force that's been added to the NASDAQ and will soon be added to the S&P 500. So not only is micro strategy good for micro strategy shareholders, it's good for pensioners

and, you know, different indexers across the board. See, I get that argument in terms of like a 401k or an index fund, but there's obviously a lot of people who are just investing in this. And what I can't is, like last bear market traded at like a pretty significant discount. And so what would make you think that it won't just drop massively in price next bear market, which I think there will be. I don't believe it will. I think it will. Sailor's been on record continuously saying volatility is vitality. So if you're in micro strategy and you expect it not to be volatile, Sailor and the team who are running the Treasury strategy, they want it volatile

because volatility is the product that they're actually selling their customers. And the customers are not you, the retail trader. The customers are the guys that are doing the convertible notes and the bond offerings and the convertible debt. Even downside volatility? Yeah, they want both because they can hedge it both ways and make money both ways.

Volatility is good for the bond traders. Why is like downward volatility good though? Well, they just have different, you know, sophisticated strategies where they're putting on options trades on either side and coloring the trade. And then they're, can you guys hear me? Yeah, we hear you. Okay, okay. I think Matt's just laughing

because I'm explaining high level bond leverage trading. Yes, that's why I'm laughing. It's heard in as well, by the way, just to let you know. But no, but I mean, basically they like it because they can arbit either direction. It's pretty easy to see. They just take a trade going short or long

depending on what they think the market's going to do. This episode is brought to you by River. There are many places to buy Bitcoin, but there's no exchange like River. They have innovative products, phone support, and a dedication to security that I haven't seen anywhere else. With River, buying Bitcoin is easy. You can set up zero-fee recurring buys to automatically build your stack,

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half and i know that hoddle's got limited time um so tell me what's what's going on with noster this year matt master's blooming i feel like momentum is quite strong so nostr is um to your listeners who don't know, Noster is a protocol for speech that has a lot of similarities to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is freedom money. It's a freedom of money protocol that allows you to spend and save without permission. And Noster is a protocol that allows you to communicate without permission. It also has an identity element. And it uses a public key, private key pair similar to Bitcoin.

So with Bitcoin, you generate a private key and a public key to store your Bitcoin. In Noster, you do the same to create your account or your identity. And then you can communicate with the world in a verifiable way, an assigned verified way. So you know that there's no fake news. You know, if I say something, it's what I said. And we can build a bunch of stuff on top of it. And what's really cool is it's incredibly complimentary with Bitcoin. So we've integrated Bitcoin payments.

You can send ZAPs to each other. In its current form, the most usable current form of, of it is basically a social media competitor that you can't get banned on, you can't get censored, and you can send Bitcoin to each other without permission. The easiest way to use that is an app called Primal, which you can just download in your app store. So I would just implore people to download it and try it out and just play around with it. But the cool part is there's 100 plus, way more than that, apps that accept Noster key. So you can just move between apps. Once you create your key, you can create as many keys as you want, just like Bitcoin. Once you

create your key. You can just move between apps, have the experience you want to have. We don't have all the bitcoinsers on Nostr yet, but we do have the best Bikriners. And I encourage you to join us. Yeah, it's funny. Me and Matt were talking about this yesterday, but I'm a frequent Noster user and a poster, and I'm always on Noster. I like Nostr more than I like Twitter. I feel like Nostr is like a version of the world in where Bitcoin has won, and it's a preview of how that's going to look. And Twitter is the world

does it currently exist where we're still fighting to win? One thing I love about Noster, by the way, is Noster feels very much currently like the early internet in that there's no algorithmic like sort of control. And you realize like when you're on all these other social media platforms

that your mind is being fucking corrupted and brainwashed by the engagement bait algorithms. And when you have just a normal, you know, timeline based algorithm, you just don't feel that upset about things anymore. You're like, no big deal, whatever. But when the algorithm knows the thing that enrages you and then it shoves it into your feed right at the top,

I mean, I swear, I wake up and I open Twitter, and every day I see six murders. And it's like I've just gotten, I'm habituated to that at this point, and seeing six murders before breakfast does nothing to me anymore, which is probably not a good mental place to be as a human being, you know? It should shock you when you see a murder on video. but it doesn't if you're a frequent Twitter user. That said,

like Noster is, it's just a really good vibe, man. I mean, that's the reason to go hang out over there. It's like the vibe is good. The people are good. You get a, it feels like a mental break from the rest of social media. And it's all our favorite people talking about our favorite subject, Bitcoin,

and building out the future in a meaningful way. Like, Primal, I think is a really interesting example because Primal builds itself as a social Bitcoin wallet. And if you start to think about, you know, a Noster as less of a social media and more of a social Bitcoin wallet, you start to realize, like, oh, there are these really cool, like, ways we can, you know, do capital formation on here. We can have different types of community on here. We can send, we can do charity on here. We can send each other's apps.

We can do value for value. I mean, there's just a million things that come with, like, having money embedded into the, you know, into the social media feed. And, you know, other social media feeds are going to try and do that as well. But I don't think they're going to do it in the same way that Noster, you know, clients are able to do it because it's primary on Noster. And also, Noster is a strong Bitcoin first, you know, focus and ethos. So that makes the difference. All right.

Tell me if I'm mid-curving this because obviously, like, what you're talking about here is Nostra of social media. When I first saw Nostr, I thought we were going to get way more radical shit. Like, I thought there would be, like, drugs markets on Noster and all sorts of stuff. but it seems to have like kind of got stuck in social media right now. Am I missing something? No, look, I mean, I think, first of all, there's an order of operations to these types of things. I think first and foremost, the protocol does not use a blockchain because that would be retarded,

is the trade-off model prioritizes censorship resistance, not privacy, which is a key thing to keep in mind here. So you can broadcast to the world, but if you're not careful, the world might know your IP address, and might figure out who you are. So that's one reason why we haven't seen, you know, straight up illegal things being done on Noster. So even though they can't stop you from doing it, they can figure out who you are and then put a gun to your head and, you know, do good old-fashioned law enforcement. So one piece here is Elon's Takeover X and his illusion of free speech. and they're like in like this honeymoon period, which has slowed our adoption down a little bit.

I think at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if he's a god among men and he actually means well. Having a central ruler and control will always be corrupted and always break down. You can't have centralized control over this. It shouldn't be why did someone get banned? It's why were they able to get banned in the first place. The second piece here is on Hoddle's comment about algorithms. I think algorithms get a bad rap. I think actual people want algorithms.

There's a reason why TikTok is so successful and has 2 billion people on it. And that's because the algorithm addicts them and makes discovery easier. Now, the problem and the reason why people just automatically assume algorithms are bad is following incentives. And our current exposure to algorithms are centrally controlled algorithms that are black boxes that are designed around the surveillance ad model, add-moding you as much as possible, selling your data to advertisers and selling you product. You are actually, you are the product. You're not the user.

You're the product of the service you're using. And they're basically milking you. You're like cattle, and they're just milking you for as much data and surveillance as possible, and they need you addicted. Now, we've already protocolized a spec in Noster that lets anyone create an algorithm. So you can choose which algorithm you want to use. You can choose no algorithm. You can make your own algorithm.

someone else can choose your algorithm. So you have choice and you have different options in how you want to use it. And you can even use it, of course, without an algorithm. And then the last piece I would say is this idea that I like, I've heard this many times, I like Noster, but not for social media uses, is similar to saying I like blockchain but not Bitcoin. The social media aspect is what is letting us bootstrap this, verifiable reputation system, this network of keys that follow each other, that communicate with each other. That is what is bootstrapping everything. The PGP guys try to bootstrap Web of Trust for

years. They couldn't do it. It turns out you need to be able to post memes and post shit posts in order to actually bootstrap this stuff. And the perfect example of a non-social media use case that is not illegal that I would put out there is something like Airbnb. I've used Airbnb for 10 years. I'm a great guest. I have great reputation, but I'm stuck in their walled garden. I can't use my, I can't use my Airbnb rating or my Uber rating for other things. I have to use it with their product or service. In a Noster world, you can take this verifiable reputation and you can use it for all sorts of things outside of that walled garden. It gives users more choice. It lets the free market run wild. You have Bitcoin at the core. And none of these tech giants, yes, they could

theoretically compete. Yes, X could add Noster support. They could add open lightning support. None of them are going to do it because they like their walled gardens. Their walled gardens are their entire product. They're walling themselves in more, not less. And it's similar to me, once again, everything I view as a Bitcoin lens, and that's one of the beauties of Noster's, it's bootstrapped by Bitcoiners, is Safedin's argument about Bitcoin. Like the biggest risk to Bitcoin, he's always said this,

is that governments were going to responsibly manage their currencies and switch to the gold standard and not carry debt, which, yes, theoretically you could say that, but if you're not retarded, you know that's never going to happen. There's just never going to do that. And it's the same case here. Like, you have to start from grassroots, foundational, make it corruption resistant at the core. Otherwise, it'll be corrupted. And there's obviously loads of people that have, like, criticized Nostras like maybe it's not censorship resistant. Do you think that it's proven that it's censorship resistant yet? Look, I make every post in caps. That pisses off a lot of people,

and they can't stop me. You know that's not what I'm talking about, though. I mean, it kind of is why I started it, you know, is like I always joked around like the first censorship war of Nostr was going to be caps versus no caps. Look, I think, you know, a lot of these things are theoretical. And the way Nostr works is so anyone can run a server, we call them relays, and anyone can broadcast messages to relays. and then you can read from any relays you want. So there's no strong guarantees of who will run the relays, just like who will build the roads, you know, who will store your notes.

But if you're someone like the president of the United States or someone influential or saying something that matters, thousands of people are going to store your shit. And the beauty of having it all signed is that you know it hasn't been changed. So anyone can store your shit and then anyone can locally verify that it happened. And I would say as an example is we live in a much worse situation right now with status quo social media. But whenever something happens and let's use, Hottle already brought up this Luigi guy, the guy who was assassinated the healthcare CEO. The first thing they do is they take down their social media.

Like whatever, the powers would be, call up the other powers would be, they're like, you've got to take down the social media. And what do you see? You see a million screenshots of everything the guy's posted since like he was four years old. And the negative there is we can't verify those screenshots haven't been faked. The difference in Noster is I can press one button and I can store everything you've ever said locally on my own server. And it can be verified by anyone that I haven't changed it. And so I think that guarantees enough. Like maybe if you're just spamming the network and you're not saying anything interesting, you'll be. quote unquote censored. You just

no one will know you said something. But I think overwhelmingly it's just a massive status quo win and I think anything of importance will just practically not be able to be censored. And I think we only kind of see this as it goes out at scale. That's, you know, the big thing. But the beauty in it is its simplicity

and that's the tradeoff you get in the simplicity. You can't get a hard and fast guarantee that something will be available, that that data will be available. Someone's got to storage somewhere. So are you saying that I am mid-curving this and social media is the killer. You're straight up mid-curving it.

That's okay. It's the mid-curve meme. Most of life is the mid-curb meme. You can pretty much plant the mid-curve meme on anything. I also think you should fade, you know, the idea that you need to be maximally in boosting engagement at all time. Even if you have a job like you do Danny where you're like a podcast host, right? Like it's like Matt's not on X and like you could argue that that's a detriment to Matt's, you know, career ambitions, et cetera.

Right, right. But, you know, it's also like you got to engage where you feel called to engage and not be thinking, hey, what am I getting out of this? Like, to me, I use Noster because I just like it. I like all the people there. I like talking to them about things. I like hanging out there. That's why I'm on there.

Do you engage in Noster differently to Twitter? Yes. I do, yeah. Much more so. I'm much more open and unguarded on Noster. Whereas when you go to Twitter, it feels like, I don't know, it feels like going into a crowded bar and then just being like, who wants to fight? You know, that's like the vibe on Twitter. On Noster, it's just like, hey, good day, everybody.

Nice to see you. I think that's part of just like where we are in the adoption cycle. Like if everyone's using Noster, it's going to also be, we're going to have like the most, the worst people in the world and the best people in the world, just like with Bitcoin. I think, you know, Noster has this, like we see, once again, with my bias on Bitcoin, it has a bootstrapping, not necessarily an issue, but a bootstrapping hurdle, which is in the beginning, people that bootstrap it are actually taking a significant sacrifice, right? Like, if it was 2011, everyone's like, oh, I would have bought Bitcoin in 2011. If it was 2011 and you went all in on Bitcoin, your life would be materially more difficult

than if you just kept your money in S&P 500 and borrowed against it, and then use the fiat system to conduct your life. But now, if you hold Bitcoin, your life is materially better. And I see the same thing happening with Nostr. Particularly, we'll use Danny as an example again. Like, I've talked to Danny and Peter at length over the years. It's like, if Twitter just bans you, like, you are materially worse off, right? And so as Nostr bootstraps and then Nostr becomes the standard, you end up in the opposite situation,

where Noster is the only place, the only place in the world where you can post, you know it can't be changed, you know it can't be altered with AI, and you know nobody can stop you. And that empowers people. But you need the bootstrapping mechanism in the beginning. And that requires people to take risk and take some sacrifice. I mean, to Hoddle's point, I think one example I've had is on the venture side, there is a venture fund that will go unnamed that, like, in their raising, deck, I've seen the raising deck, lists their blue checks and the number of followers they have on Twitter, right? And instead, I've deleted my ex. And so, like, does that put a disadvantage? Yes, it puts a slight disadvantage. But I think the benefits get paid out in generations, and it takes people to actually take that risk and move the ball forward for this to actually happen. And then everyone else gets to benefit too. But the people that take the risks in the beginning tend to benefit more from, you know, just like Bitcoin. Do you benefit more from being Nostra-only instead of on Noster and X? Yeah, because I can look my kids in the eye and say that I fucking wasn't complicit in that dystopia, right? And I think I also will benefit, they'll benefit from the freedom benefits long term. And, you know, I, there's, look, at the end of the day, like, I think Bitcoin taught a lot of us that it's, life is short. Lifetime is scarce and integrity and authenticity and like living your keeping yourself to a high standard is like the single most important thing.

And what's the point of saving and fuck you money if you don't say fuck you sometimes, right? And I'm grateful that I'm in a position where I can still pay my mortgage without my surveillance ad payout on X. You know, like that's good. I'm grateful for that. This episode is brought to you by CASA. For those of you out there who want to protect your Bitcoin, I want to tell you about CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. So if you're serious about protecting your Bitcoin, then you need a rock, a solid security plan, and CASA gives you

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All right, we're like an hour and 40-in and we've done three topics. I had like 12. But one thing I do want to talk about... It's just lightning around all the rest of them. We can lightning around them. But I do want to mention e-cash because this year seems to have been like a real breakout year for e-cash.

And it's kind of like tied into the Nosser thing a little bit. I'm curious on your take on this, Odell, actually both of you, because there's a funny thing with eCash where it seems like one of the most cyphabunk things happening in Bitcoin right now, but it's also building on sort of custodianship. Where do you think this is going to fit in in the next two, three, four years? So there's only three things in my life that I've seen incredibly organic, viral developer interest on the open source side. and without any VC funding, without any kind of top-down planning, and that's Bitcoin, Nostr and E-Cash. They all share that.

And so recently I've been way more focused on Nostr and E-Cash because there are these fledgling new ecosystems and new projects, and that's always extremely exciting, like being there on the ground floor. Maybe you should do a quick TLDR on E-Cash just in case anyone doesn't know what it is. Okay, so Bitcoin is a open protocol

for freedom money. Lightning is an open protocol for batched freedom money payments, so batched Bitcoin payments. E-cash is an open protocol for Bitcoin banks, and Nostor is an open protocol for communications to link them all together. And so when I say an open protocol for Bitcoin banks with e-cash is we operate under that we don't live in a vacuum. Most people are using Bitcoin with custodians already. Let's make the custodians as good as possible.

And how does eCash do that? It gives you very strong privacy guarantees. It's programmable, so you can do very interesting things with it. You can make offline payments, which is incredibly useful. If anyone's ever used Apple Pay, one of the really understated, important aspects of Apple Pay is that you don't need reception to tap your iPhone and make a payment. A lot of the world, like if you want to have reliable payments, you need to be able to do offline payments. And then the last piece is an interoperable protocol. So it separates the custodian from the app.

If you use strike, if you use the strike app, you have to use strike as your custodian. And everything that comes with it, you have no user choice. If you use a cash-U app like cash-u.me, you get to pick your custodian when you start up. So you can have this global marketplace for custodians that are competing on reliability and fees and reputation. And just to bring it all back to the four open-eastern. protocols, that reputation and communication can be done using Noster, and payments between them can be done using lightning. And so it all comes together and all compounds on each other. But to the end user, what is the end user getting out of this? Maybe their eyes are rolling over. It makes it

incredibly easy, incredibly cheap, and incredibly fast, and incredibly private for you to make Bitcoin payments, with the main tradeoff being that you're trusting someone else withholding your Bitcoin and you have the custodial risk. To me, the coolest thing is that it removes all the shitty ux from bitcoin like it just works really well like obviously with that you have the trade off having custodian but how do you like how do you try and weigh up that balance where you have like this this new payment thing it's building on top of bitcoin it seems to be like where um bitcoin is actually going to scale it it works right now but it's still being built on a custodian well so callie the lead maintainer of cash you pushes back and calling it a scaling solution because

it's custodial um he thinks um anything that's custodial should not be considered scaling. Now, it does give you a lot of the same benefits that a scaling solution would give you, right? Which is low cost, easy payments with the benefit of being private, offline, and programmable. I think you just think about it, like, you should just think about it from a practical sense. Like, it's the cash, well, maybe half the listeners or more than half the listeners don't use cash anymore. But it's the cash that people historically have put in their back pocket when they go out at night. You might lose it. You might get robbed, you know, but you keep your savings in cold storage,

and you use a cash-you wallet for spending. Worst comes to worse. You end up getting rugged by a custodian. You lose, you know, what, like 0.1% of your savings? It's no big deal. You can survive. You'll be fine. And there's interesting things that can be done here because it's programmable and because it's an open protocol that are being worked on, stuff like, instead, let's say you have $400 in cash you. You know, that's different amount for each person depending on what their level of savings is,

what their cost of living, whatever. But let's say you have $400 in cash you. You could actually split that between 10 different custodians, 10 different cashew mints, and using lightning multi-part payments, the user doesn't even realize when they make a payment, it can pull from all of them. So then I call that like the Titanic approach, which is maybe not the best metaphor because the Titanic sank, but the Titanic had this concept that if one section of the Titanic leaked, you would only lose that section, you wouldn't lose the whole ship, right? So if one of the

mince goes down, you only lose one-tenth of the money you had in there. And like, is that perfect? No, that's not perfect, but like in practical terms, that's like a completely decent trade-off for someone to take. It worked out good for the Titanic. Yeah, really great metaphor. I need to fix that metaphor with something else, but it helps me visualize it. All right, hold of anything say an e-cash before you're out. I don't have any thoughts on e-cash, honestly. Just none. Have you used it? No.

So, so Hottle, homework for you. Cashu.me. Yeah. C-A-S-H-U-D-Me. It's a PWA maintained by Cali. You can just run it in your Safari browser on your phone or Chrome on your phone. And then just send, you know, it does lightning deposits and withdraws. Just send a, you know, a little bit of money in there and play around with it.

It's incredibly, incredibly useful. with fantastic privacy guarantees. All right, done. I'm downloading it now. All right, let's close out with a prediction. I knew I wasn't going to get a price prediction from Matt. So instead, let's predict who you think the next... Kind of already did.

Well, you kind of already did. Who the next big, like, public Bitcoin buyer will be? Three million cars. Because obviously we've had like Dorsey, Sailor. Who do you think the next one will be? Well, I mean, don't we think it's going to be the U.S. government? It's not like that. No, give me a person.

Yeah, we're already assuming they're doing it. What a individual. Okay. Let me think. Which individual? Oh, I said this on the other one and I'll back it up again. I think that this cycle we're going to see Warren Buffett buy Bitcoin. That's a good one.

So Berkshire Hathaway is going to buy Bitcoin. I think at a certain point, it just becomes something you can't ignore. And Buffett is a hardcore capitalist. And now that Charlie's dead, you know, there's nobody to be like, hey, stop doing that. He's the only guy. So I think there's a high likelihood that Buffett buys some Bitcoin the cycle. That's quite both cool. I think I'd fade that one. Yeah. No, no, it's very, yeah, it's very unlikely to happen. But we're doing like fun predictions. I mean, Hoddle said this on our show with Mallors. But I mean, I think, I think meta, meta is probably the most,

likely to be a big company to do it. I think Zuckerberg already has a bag. Yeah, for sure. I think there's a strong, compelling argument that he's still salty at the Winklevost twins, so that gives him an extra incentive. They're sitting on a ton of cash. He has, if he doesn't have control over that company, he has near control over that company in terms of how they proceed. So he has a lot of control over how they move. He's done way worse decisions like changing the name Kometa. So I could see that happening. On a person basis, I don't know.

I think everyone's going to own Bitcoin. I think people are not even close to bullish enough. Like this is going to be a ridiculous cycle in terms of at least like the financialization or like the Bitcoinization of the financial system. Where, I mean, we have Larry Fink is shilling Bitcoin. Like the BlackRock is the largest. They manage, I think, over. over $13 trillion worth of money.

Like, I think people don't really, they're the largest shareholder of almost every major company passively. I think people don't appreciate what effect that has in terms of the suits. So that's crazy. And then, since this is a year in review, I would say that I think one of the biggest things that people are sleeping on that we didn't bring up is the bit key from Block, their hardware wallet. I don't know if you guys have used it, but it's effectively retardation.

proof. It's like almost impossible to lose your Bitcoin. And so in terms of self-custody innovation, yeah, and it feels great in hand. Now, yes, is it as secure as a cold card? No. Like, is it as private? No. But it's strictly better than ETFs. And anyone who can buy Bitcoin on Charles Schwab can store Bitcoin on a big key. And so I think, I think people are sleeping on this. Like this is now, like when I give Christmas gifts or stuff, give them a bit key. They set it up. They don't need a tutorial. They just download the app.

Register their fingerprint on the device. Tap it, save it to iCloud. Perfect. It's not perfect. You know, is it NSA proof? Definitely not NSA proof. Neither is the ETF. Neither is keeping their Bitcoin on Coinbase.

But it takes a very deliberate tradeoff balance and it's very difficult for you to lose your Bitcoin, which is, let's be honest, the way most people lose their Bitcoin is not. not theft, it's from actually losing it. This is not brought to you by Bitki. No, they don't sponsor me. I think it's a great device. I know some of the guys who helped build it. I think it's great for under one Bitcoin.

One Bitcoin or less. I don't agree with that. You would say you'd put like 150 Bitcoin on this thing? Yeah, so. I mean, so there was the tweet that went viral. If somebody rich and a thousand Bitcoin they want to put on this, You think you would be able to go about it. It depends how wealthy you are.

You know, like if you are worth a billion dollars, having 10 Bitcoin a million dollars on a big key as I think is like a great, you know, fuck you bag or whatever, like your self-custody bag. I like, I don't, should people have their entire life savings on a big key? Probably not. Here's my.

Yeah. That tweet went viral. That tweet went viral that someone was like, if you have over a million dollars, you should buy an ETF instead of having, of having it in self-custody single-sig. I would say I would recommend someone to have a million dollars in a Bitkey than having in an ETF.

That makes sense to me. So here's what I would say about the bit key is that there are some tradeoffs about it that I don't like. And I think Matt agrees with those points. We don't need to get into it and litigate it all here. But I think if you have over $100,000, I mean, one Bitcoin is $100,000, right? That's pretty crazy. So if you have over $100,000 in a device like this, which is, you know, there's some significant level of trust here between you and the developers of this device, I think that it would be very appropriate in order to slowly educate yourself and, you know, move over in time to a much more trustless security setup, which is also probably a multi-sig enabled security setup.

So one thing I like is that the BitKee onwards people to collaborative multisig, which I think is just, you know, the best thing for most people in the beginning. There's this, you know, there's a big debate between single sick and multi-sig and the Bitcoin community. But like, I think really that just comes down to a lot of people being very comfortable with their, you know, with their custody arrangements over many years. I like personally, I like to always be moving to the newest and best and greatest and latest Bitcoin custody solution. and, you know, that is some type of geographically distributed multi-sig at this current moment in time. I think in the future it's going to be some type of geographically distributed multi-sig plus time locks with hierarchical key control. But that's a topic for another time. This thing is great, though, to onboard people to multi-sig.

But it's just like, I don't know, once you have over six figures, I would start to do some more research. That's just me personally. I wouldn't keep more than a Bitcoin in this thing. But Matt, you know, Matt's point about solid. My point is, is not an amount. right? I agree with you. Like, look, I would never use a bid key, right? And so there's a lesson there in practice, right? Is why wouldn't I use a big key? Is because I would rather use something more secure and more sovereign. And I've been active in the Bitcoin space and I've done the work. So I'm able to do that, right?

Now, I think it's just, it's a beautiful top of funnel. So if you, so it's not an amount, right? Because if you're, you can do two top of funnels right now, right? You could do an ETF or you can keep it with a traditional custodian or you can start with a bit key. And then in either situation, you should improve your setup over time. I think people that start with a big key are probably more likely to actually improve their setup than someone who starts in an ETF and just leaves it there. And we both know that there are many people with over $100,000 in the ETF. That they just like go, they call their broker. They're like, okay, I would put $1.5 million in the ETF. And the trust model there is just strictly worse. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. I think it's equivalent to like the

F-35, you know, a fighter jet versus like the serious vision jet, which is made for dentists who fly part-time and has a big parachute and like an onboard computer system, you know, et cetera. I mean, BITKee, neither me or Hodel are paid by BITKee. No. But we do have a financial incentive to promote Anchor Watch. I think Anchor Watch could be a massive development in the space of ultra-high net worths that don't want to keep an ETF. They can self-custody in a smart, you know, very technically sound way, multi-sig, with degrading time locks with Anchor Watch, and then they can get it insured by Lloyds

of London. And they're going to have to pay a premium for that, right? They're going to have to pay, they're going to have to pay a fee for that insurance. But I think that's something that a lot of high networks will be very comfortable with. And also strictly better than an ETF. I agree with you on Anchor Watch, and I'm bullish on insured self-custody in general. And I I also think that Anchor Watch is not just insurance, but it's a – Matt's got me doing a commercial here now. But it's literally like it's Mniscreet-enabled hierarchical key control, which the guys that like Leanna Wallet are also doing. So there's, you know, open-source cypherpunk versions of this as well. And I think just in general it's a much more robust form of custody.

And the insurance is for people that don't want privacy but do want enhanced security and want all the benefits and tradeoffs that come with self-custody versus the tradeoffs that come with owning the ETF. And so, yeah, I'm super bullish on those things. I am an investor, full disclosure, et cetera, et cetera. Are you going to be the first customer of Anchorage? I was usurped by another investor. Somebody else usurped me. But, you know,

I think with some portion of, yeah, with some portion of Bitcoin, not with the entire stack. I think there are different, not to get into all the details of my personal situation, but there are, you know, areas where I want privacy and areas where I don't want privacy based on different like launches of Bitcoin. You know.

Yeah, the tradeoff with Anchor Watch is privacy and the fee. You have to pay an insurance fee. All right. To close out, Hoddle, how are you feeling about your bet with Peter by the end of next year? Super good about it. No, it's by the end of 27. I have until January. Oh.

So I bet with Peter, Bitcoin would hit a million dollars before January 1st, 2028. So I have until, yeah. So, I mean, I'm basically taking a bet on the super cycle, you know, more or less. No, it doesn't even have to be a super cycle to hit that. That's true. Would you take the over or under on that map? How much is the bet? One Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin. Wow, he's fucking idiot. Why would he take that bet? I know. It's a good bet for me. I mean, it's only betting the Bitcoin that Hoddle's already given him. He's been very confident about all our bets. Well, actually, I got paid back of Bitcoin from Block 5.

But anyway, that's neither here, no back. One of the former sponsors of this podcast. Not from Peter, though. Yeah, not for fees. But like yours is open, your side of the bet is open-ended. Like, you don't know how much a Bitcoin is worth if you win that bet.

Well, that's the thing. It could be... If you lose, you know it's less than a million. Yeah, I could be paying Pete $900,000 or whatever, right? And Pete could be paying me $3 million. Yeah. We don't know. Yeah.

That's a fun one. I mean, I would take a hot-l's side of that bet. Listen, if I lose that bet, I'm going to end up supporting the Bedford Football Club, which I'm okay with. And if I win that bet, I'm going to spend Pete's money on something just so stupid. It's going to be glorious. I'm going to waste it. Are you going to come back to Bedford this year, hold on?

I think I will, yeah. I think I'll be there. Good. Matt? Matt, you should come. I'm not going. Is the conference? You're going to do the conference again?

Yeah, we're doing it in April. I think I'm done with conferences. I think no more Bitcoin conferences. Yeah, but this isn't like a normal conference. that's what everyone says that's what all the we can put a pin in it but I'm not committing

we can put a pin in it but no alright cool let's close out where do you want to send anyone cashew dot me go play around with EK co-signed primal.net

slash O'Dell if you want to find me on Noster and I would just implore people once again just search primal in your favorite app store and just play around

with it get started and I guess disclosure 1031 my venture fund is an investor in primal and anchor watch and cold card I don't know if we've talked about any other portfolio companies on the stream today but if you want to learn more about 1031 you can go to 1031.vc cool appreciate you guys thank you for that beautiful thank you great rip