What Bitcoin Did - Paper Bitcoin Summer | American HODL & Steven Lubka

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

American HODL & Steven Lubka get into the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies, unpacking how securitisation, jurisdictional arbitrage, and corporate leverage are shaping the next phase of Bitcoin’s financialisation. We discuss whether this new wave of Bitcoin-wrapped equities is a healthy Bitcoin on-ramp or just a speculative bubble, and what happens to these companies in a bear market. Steven breaks down Nakamoto’s strategy, from running higher leverage to building a global network of local vehicles and using M&A to accumulate Bitcoin at scale. We get into the “Paper Bitcoin Summer” thesis, the morality of treasury cos, if they are just another form of shitcoining, or a necessary step to embed Bitcoin into public markets and give millions passive exposure? In this episode: - The playbook for Bitcoin treasury companies - Why size, leverage, and jurisdiction matter for survival - MNAVs, premiums, and the risk in a bear market - The morality of treasury companies THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny American HODL: https://primal.net/hodl Steven Lubka: https://x.com/dzambhalahodl

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Hoddle the vlogger and Stephen Lubka, how are we doing, guys? Doing great, man. I'm pumped for this. This is going to be awesome. Yeah. Stephen the Cobbler. The cobbler. Stephen the Cobbler.

Where did that meme come from? I missed this completely. So the Bitcoin Bugle did this post. It was kind of they edited our SEC filing and said that, you know, Nakamoto had a supplied me with a personal. cobbler and you won't believe the number of people that took it seriously. I mean, it was really, really wild.

So it was fun. Are you saying they didn't give you a cobbler? You need to negotiate that contract, bro. Not yet, but I'm hoping after seeing the PR that this cobbler got that, you know, there's a little bit of room here. I think that needs to be memed into reality.

How are you doing, man? What's with the vlogs? You're bringing vlogs back? This is very like early 2000s. Bro, we're vlogging. is back and it's on Noster. It's on Noster exclusively. So if you want to figure out what's going on with the vlogs, you've got to fucking come to Noster, bro. Because I'm not going to tell you, man.

This is a tease for a blog that will happen at a later time on Noster. Download Primal. Check it out. Have you done your vlog today? I don't do it. I don't do it every day, you know. Somebody was like, hey man, why don't you just post them on YouTube? And I was like, because then I would be a YouTuber and that's gay.

So no, I'm not doing that. I don't know what you're saying about me there, man. I couldn't do the blog thing. It's cringe enough for me doing the clickbait YouTube titles. I'm not sure I can go full vlog yet. I don't know what's more cringe, vlogger or podcaster. I think it's like Sophie's choice. Hottle, you were early.

You were early to the podcast meta. I remember years ago, your thesis, while everyone was criticizing too many podcasts, was everyone needs more podcasts. And I think that turned out really correct over time. Yeah, I was saying, did you have a conversation with a family member in private about Bitcoin? That could have been a podcast. Why wasn't it a podcast? What are, why are you not doing enough for Bitcoin?

Yeah. And then the Buell guys just took that and ran. Well, and as we now know, you're not only, you're not just a podcaster, but you're a board member. Exactly. That is, that it's like the meme in Bitcoin is you, if you're in it long enough, you become a podcaster, VC and now it's a board member. of a treasury company. Absolutely. The podcaster to corporate governance board pipeline is, I mean, it's obvious at this point.

It's a natural, a natural evolution that occurred over time. The best podcasters just really moved up. They had the skill set. But are there even any Bitcoin podcast left? Are we all just Bitcoin Treasury podcast now? Yeah, that's true. That's true. It has been honestly, like, I can't tell you the last time I didn't talk about treasury

companies on the show. Really? I mean, Cali probably. because he's a fucking badass. But it gets, I'm super skeptical, Stephen. So I'm going to be like the skeptic here. But why don't you start by just explaining what's happening with Nakamoto? Yeah, sure.

So we recently completed our merger. So that's exciting. That was last week. And we basically had raised a pipe transaction. So we raised some money to go public and launch a treasury company. I think the unique thing for Nakamoto is, that it's playing on the, let's call it the playbook that UTXO had been running for over the last year.

And that was Metaplanet, SmarterWeb. It was a lot of these very, very successful international plays. And so Nakamoto was in part. That's not the whole thing. But it was an attempt to, you know, run that playbook, run that strategy with more capital and more reach. And, you know, there's other elements to it. There's operating businesses and synergies and kind of a lot. Well, you know, we're excited to do.

But it's the international thesis kind of playing out. So U.S. listed, but launching kind of first movers in each international capital market. Like, one of the things that I've been pretty skeptical about on this is the idea of, like, a Bitcoin treasury company in every jurisdiction. Because I don't know if they all need it. Like, the way I've kind of looked at this is there's going to be strategy, probably a few, others and then a really long tale of kind of shit. And like, why do you think every jurisdiction needs its own treasury company? Yeah. So I think the basic thesis and, you know, you could have some edge cases in very small markets where maybe that doesn't play out. But the basic thesis is that

there is a ton of capital. If you're in Brazil, if you're in India, if you're in Japan, there is a ton of capital that cannot easily buy U.S. equities and also in many cases can't easily buy big. So these are funds that have mandates. These are pensions. These are all sorts of vehicles, retirement accounts that have to invest in kind of local or regional equities. And then outside of the mandates and the have to, you have, it's a pain. It's difficult. It's like maybe you could, but it's actually very cumbersome. You have to set up a U.S. brokerage account. You need a U.S. bank account. You have to go through certain regulatory hurdles that are different country by country. And then finally, there's often elements of like a regulatory

arbitrage. So in Japan, people are familiar with this with Metaplanet. There was a tax treatment where you got taxed way more heavily on Bitcoin than on equities like Metaplanet. And so I think the people focus a lot on kind of the regulatory arbitrage, the tax stuff, and there's many other things besides tax treatments. But I actually think that the larger pool is there's just a lot of money that can't easily or won't easily leave the country. And so we're pretty high conviction, and I'm pretty high conviction, that having a local vehicle in every major capital market

is something that'll play out well. All right, I've got a ton of question on that, but I want Hoddle's perspective on this. Do you think that, like, this kind of long tail where it's Winner Tate most is the likely way this will play out? I think the way you described it is very close to my own thinking about it, where strategy, if you look at strategy versus the other treasury companies, you know, the other treasury companies combined, I think have one-tenth of strategies holdings,

right? So that's, that lets you know that they're the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And what we know about Bitcoin is that if you go first in size, it's very hard to unseat you, right? Like I, you know, as, as good as I think I am at stacking and hoddling over the years, I'm never going to be able to catch up to a person like Wences Cesaris or something. somebody from the very early days. They're just in a totally different class than I am. I think it'll be the same thing with micro strategy versus the other company, right? So, like, yeah, I think you're very right.

I think a lot of people, I think, like, you know, not to be offensive towards Stephen, but I think Nakamoto is kind of playing for second place. And a lot of, you know, I would put Jack Mahler's company in the same boat. I would, you know, certain other companies that are spinning up like strive. I forget the strive company, what it's called. But, you know, they're all in that same, like, let's play for, second category, but second is a big winner. Yeah.

So if you get second or third place, like, you win massively. If you're a treasury company number 1000, no, you don't win massively. But second or third, like, you know, there's going to be a lot of spoils for, for those players in the game. And then I think on the point that Stephen was making about the reg arbitrage and different jurisdictions, et cetera, I'll give you the flip side of that perspective, which I think he's right about that, but I'll give you the flip side about that perspective, which is, as an American, I have exorbitant monetary privilege in the.

American stock market and I don't really want to go into other capital markets. I want to give my money to a company like Nakamoto and have them do it on my behalf, right? And so I want to go with an American domiciled vehicle with an American company with American disclosures and I don't want to have to do the work of going and diligenting every foreign market on the planet because it's just a headache and a half. Yeah, see, that's the point that I really agree with. And Stephen, I'd be really curious to hear your take on this because I'm not trying to give you a hard time as well. I'm just trying to understand it in that like I live in Australia from the UK and in both those places, they're their own treasury companies that are popped up and are doing like a local treasury

play. But at the same time, I could still just go and buy micro strategy. And so like what is the capital you're attracting in these countries? Because again, with things like smart web company, they obviously did amazingly well. They're down quite a lot since like the top. But they're on acquies, which is a tiny exchange in the UK. Like do they actually get retirement account money into that exchange? They do. They do. There's a ton of domestic volume. So even with, you know, an OTC ticker listed in the U.S. So there's easy U.S. access.

I think on a lot of days, it was 50-50 or 60-40 trading volume. And that was kind of later on once they had grown. So there's a material chunk of that. And you think the U.S. is a very big market that really is coming from local players. And, you know, in the U.S., this was pretty remarkable, I think. And obviously, that was U.TXO that wasn't Nakamoto. I'm just kind of speaking from the outside here. It was before I joined.

And it's a different, you know, it's a different entity. But there was a huge kind of local, almost nationalist, like a patriotic element to it that happened, where in these groups, there was a lot of people that really liked the fact that it was a British company, a UK company with UK operators, and they wanted to support something locally. That's even more true right in Japan. Right. In Japan, they love that Metaplanet is a Japanese company. And they would much rather give their money to a Japanese company than to micro strategy, assuming, you know, quality is there and those sort of things. And so I think both we see that kind of observationally in the discourse. You also see it in the trading volume. But there is a real, it's not just a thesis. There really is capital that.

comes from those jurisdictions and goes to these vehicles. And I want to echo, you know, something David said, like, yeah, our goal is second place. Like, our goal is not, we're not coming here saying, oh, Michael Saylor, you know, da, da, da, da, da, like what Hoddle said is correct. It's like when you have that much of a lead, that's a huge lead. That's difficult to surmount. And but to get second or to get third, that's a huge, like, that's a huge accomplishment, right? You don't have to say like, oh, yeah, this is going to this is going to overtake strategy.

It just has to be this is going to be an effective vehicle for accumulating Bitcoin at scale. And also Bitcoin's going to go up over time. So is the planet Nakamoto to, obviously you're investing in all these companies all over the world, but are you also running your own Bitcoin strategy in the US? Correct. Yeah, absolutely. So we have the US NASDAQ listed vehicle. that is, and I should be, it's kindly MD is the current listed name, and I should be clear about that.

But we plan to run the full treasury playbook, so raising capital, buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet, you know, taking on debt, buying more Bitcoin, these sort of things. The difference is that while we're running that playbook, we're also going to take a percentage, like a portion of that Bitcoin on the balance sheet, and we're going to deploy it. in kind of equity investments or other investments in these international jurisdictions or other strategies. So I think we're going to be more active, is what I will say. Like, we definitely are going to be a little bit more active, while still conservative. It's not like the whole balance sheet gets deployed.

And even on a regulatory basis, we couldn't do that if we wanted to. But we're going to be a little bit more active. And I think that'll be interesting as I think more of that comes to market. So the plan there, I assume, is to be higher leverage and the rest of them because you're not only doing your own treasury play, but you're investing in others. And so I assume that's your plan to get to second place. Yeah, I think we do want to be higher leverage. I actually think micro-stratt, I think Saylor would agree with this, but I think micro-strategy is actually under-levered.

And a lot of what they've been trying to do has actually been to get more leverage. If he could sell five times as many preferred and raise the leverage ratio, I think he'd do that in a heartbeat. And when you think about the concept of having leverage in one of these vehicles, that's actually very self-reinforcing to the MNAV. Like if you have embedded leverage that is cheaper than what an individual can get, it makes sense you're paying a bit more for that vehicle because you're acquiring the leverage with it. Hold on, again, we're kind of talking on behalf of you here, Stephen, but like, do you think the risk there with that strategy is, that this is going to be a long tail. There's a lot of stuff that's going to fall by the wayside. And by investing in those, you're adding quite a lot of risk to the business. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, listen, higher leverage, higher risk, right? Like, I think that, you know, I'm sure Stephen

will admit this, that, like, it absolutely is a higher risk play than something like micro strategy. And when you, if you're an investor, I think the question you have in your mind is like, okay, micro strategy seems like a guaranteed winner. Seems like there's kind of consensus about that. And And like, I feel confident. You know, I've owned Micro Strategy now for five years, and it's performed very well, despite, you know, all the recent drama on Twitter. There's a lot of new investors in Micro Strategy who are like, what the hell, man? I thought this was lower Bitcoin.

What the fuck, dude? It was supposed to go up more, bro. We talk about that in a minute. But, like, for me, as like a long-term holder of Micro Strategy, I've been very happy with its performance, and I will just continue to hold it into the future. Full disclosure, I do also own some NACA. And I view NACA as a, you know, fast horse in the race. But if NACA, you know, underperformed over, you know, some medium period of time because

of some of these risk factors, it wouldn't necessarily surprise me. Now, I do have, like, a decent degree of confidence in leadership. But when, you know, when you're taking a bet on, these are two completely different things. Like, Saylor has shown that he's, you know, genius savant level at financial engineering and financialization. I mean, nobody is. better at him than that. And if you're going to compete with him, you've got to not only do that well, but you are

going to have to differentiate yourself from him. And I think some of the interesting things about guys like Nakamoto or Jack Mallors is that these are more Bitcoin nativist. If we're going to, one piece of criticism I would give Microstrategy and Sailor, even though they've been lighting the world on fire, is that every time they try and do something endogenous to Bitcoin, some type of Bitcoin, you know, technology play, it seems to kind of fizzle out, not really go anywhere. Everything they've announced, you know, they had like a digital identity announcement.

I mean, there was a business analytics announcement. Where do these things kind of go? They just kind of fizzle off into nothing. And I think that's like actually an opportunity for the young guys who are coming up, like, you know, Stephen and David or like Jack, you know, or some of the guys that are, you know, working over it, strive. Like there are opportunities there to differentiate themselves from MSTR and those that do it correctly are going to, you know, they're going to print money.

They're going to make, they're going to get very rich. But obviously, like, walking the tightrope is difficult and you can fall. And that's, you know, something that investors should be aware of, I think. Do you have plans to do like any Bitcoin, like have a Bitcoin business model within this as well as just doing the Treasury plays? We absolutely do. And that's another point of kind of differentiation here. And I think it's an important one in the long term. So I think just speaking theoretically, I think the end state of Treasury companies is they need to.

find a way to either to synergize the balance sheet with operating businesses. Like, I don't know when that is. Maybe that's five years, 10 years, who knows? But at the end of the day, this kind of current opportunity compresses. And then it's like, okay, well, what do you do with this balance sheet? You've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin. How are you going to leverage that?

I don't mean leverage, but how are you going to use that to drive returns, to drive cash flow? And that's actually where, to Hoddle's point, it's valuable to have a company that is like operators in the Bitcoin industry that actually are from the industry that know how the industry operates that have a track record. Because there's more, there's a better capacity to not just achieve, but also think about that transition and setting up for it and having those, like even to achieve Bitcoin denominated. cash flows where the more Bitcoin goes up, the larger those cash flows go. To us, that's like the gold standard, right? If you can really do that well, that's way better than like uncorrelated operating businesses that, you know, just don't track Bitcoin performance at all. So one thing that's very simple is as part of the transaction, we have an option to acquire

BTC Inc and UTXO. And so obviously that's the conference, that's the media, media business, asset management. So that's kind of something that is already known to the market and on the table of kind of rolling that in and also working to synergize that and also working, hey, you know, I'm adjusting to the public company role and you're limited in what you can say if I'm speaking a little differently than usual. But what I would say there is that like if you think about having a network of treasury companies and you think about the existing business, contemplate what synergies you could do

there. There's a long list of things you could do that would cause those to enhance the growth. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is actually looking at like M&A activity and saying, hey, are there Bitcoin businesses that we could acquire that are going to synergize with the balance feed or the activities of Nakamoto and, you know, make this just increase the, that kind of operating revenue. And so, yeah, that's a goal for us. I think that's important long term. And while I don't want to state that as like the number one priority in the short term,

obviously the top priority is buy more Bitcoin and get more Bitcoin on the balance sheet, that's absolutely something we're looking at. Yeah, it's funny because I totally agree that long term, these Treasury companies are going to have to have a business model. That probably has to be a Bitcoin business model. But right now, it seems like they're just kind of memes. I don't know if you agree with that, but it's pay for Bitcoin summer, bro. I think it's, well, you know, I'm a big paper Bitcoin summer fan.

And I think, I think memes are powerful. But it's, I think it's more than memes. I have to say that. And the reason it's mostly Bitcoin acquisition now is because, like, think about you have capital. What's the best return you're going to get on that capital? Is it buying Bitcoin or is it investing in an operating business? Like, what's the rate of return going to be?

And the thing is, at this stage in Bitcoin, it's very hard to outperform Bitcoin. So it's rational, I think, for a lot of these businesses to say, hey, on an incremental $100 million, we're going to just buy the Bitcoin. And later on, that math might change, and I expect it will change. It will have to change. So this isn't like a permanent state. But I think it makes sense that right now we're in a bit of a land rush.

And it's saying, hey, it's a bit of a race right now. Who's going to be number two? Who's going to be number three? how much Bitcoin can you accumulate? And that's just the phase we're in. I think I understand why people have kind of hesitations there, but I think you just need to understand that, yes, that doesn't last forever. But it also could last for a while.

On the M&A thing, I think something may have just clicked for me. When you're investing in all these treasury companies in different jurisdictions, obviously some of these are going to be big, some will be small. And at some point, we're going to see a load of treasury companies start training at a discount. in my opinion, I think. Would your plan there on the M&A side be to acquire those treasury companies and essentially stack Bitcoin at a discount as well? So it's definitely an option that's available to us.

Either treasury companies, there's even, there's a lot of companies actually that have Bitcoin on the balance sheet. But so basically the angle there is whether it's a treasury company or another entity that you could acquire Bitcoin through that or acquire a business and. Bitcoin. Those are options that are available to us. Obviously, it depends on like when that moment is in the market and like, there's a challenge. Like, you have to, there's a, there's like a balancing act for those companies, like from the perspective of the company that's trading at a discount, generally they could probably sell the Bitcoin close to market price. And unless they had enough

Bitcoin where they're worried about slippage and they're worried about moving the market. And so if you really have a decent chunk of it, then it probably makes sense to entertain like a buyout offer. It makes sense to be like, hey, just come in and buy this whole amount. I don't want to bring this to the market. But if it's a tiny one, you know, I think they probably just sell it. They just kind of, they can get market price unless there's other complications. Bitcoin is absolutely ripping. And in every ball market, there's always a new wave of investors.

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So I definitely want to get into what happens in a bear market with these things. But Hoddle, before we do, like Bitcoin price is down like 7% or something. It's like a tiny, tiny drop for a bull market, but people are freaking out. And I don't know. The read I have from that is that people are too exposed to treasury companies. which have been pretty slammed over the last few months. Like, how do you take that in? There's definitely some of that going on.

I think, you know, you have this perspective with treasury companies. Part of my thesis has been that there's a bubble forming in treasury companies. And, you know, when I say that, people give me this pushback where they go, well, I don't see it. Like, they're not taking too much leverage. There's only 60,000 coins that are outside of micro strategy. Like, where's the bubble? And it's like, that's fair. I think we're in the infancy of a bubble.

I think this is like zygote stage of a bubble, right? but I think the bubble is going to grow because I think the average investor, what do they really want now that they understand? Like, the Bitcoin story is implicit in the hearts and minds of almost everybody I talk to who's under 45 years of age now at this point. That's a new phenomenon. Like, I went out for drinks with some friends, and every single person, these are guys I know from high school, every single person at the bar knew the price of Bitcoin without me

mentioning it or bringing it up. Wow. That's a big deal. It's the first time that's ever happened. And I'm now noticing that. people have realized they watched bitcoin go from nothing to $100,000 and they realize that the Bitcoin story is going to happen. But for some reason, they have a cognitive bias where they think that they are not going to be a participant in the Bitcoin story. So for those that do choose

to participate in the Bitcoin story, what's their next thought? I'm late. I need to catch up. How do you catch up with leverage? What are the Bitcoin Treasury companies levered Bitcoin? So, you know, there's this sort of idea, I think, amongst the public, especially retail investors that, you know, these treasury companies can be like a time machine back to 2017 Bitcoin prices. And that idea, I think, is the ember that grows into a massive bubble. And also, you know, Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come and the market's starting to realize that.

Similarly, you look back in history to like the dot-com bubble. The internet was an idea whose time had come and everybody could see the value of the internet, but the internet had not yet been built out. And some of the promises of the internet that would later be real, like YouTube, which, you Mark Cuban was selling as Broadcast.com, they were these kind of janky versions, or like, you know, Pets.com eventually became chewy, and it sold the Petsmart for $3 billion. But like back in 1997, there was no ability to ship bags of dog food through the mail, right? So like, whenever there's a big Leviathan idea, like this new network that is Bitcoin,

the internet of money, the public is not stupid. Eventually they get wise to what's happening. I think that's happening now. And, you know, that's why I say we're in the infancy of a bubble here. They get wise to what's happening. and then they start to go through the same machinations that those of us who've been in Bitcoin for a while have been going through the last 10 or 15 years

where you go, oh shit, Bitcoin's going to change everything. It's going to do this. It's going to do that. It's going to do this other thing. And then what happens, people come along to sell you those dreams for cash. I'm not saying that Nakamoto or Stephen are doing that, but I'm saying there will be companies

that are going to do that and that is going to be like sort of the formation of the bubble. Every big new idea ever resulted in, like what you can call a bubble. Like, you know, and really what do we mean by a bubble? We need a market that goes way up and eventually contracts because it went up so high. But it, you know, like Hoddle was saying with the internet, it's not that the internet wasn't a world-changing trend.

It's just that like it's rational from the perspective of the market. When there is a big new idea, what the market does is saying, hey, let's invest, let's bring as much capital as we can as fast. fast as we can to this, and we're going to push the boundaries, and we're going to find the limits, and we're going to find what works, and we're going to find what doesn't work, and then we're going to cull all the stuff that doesn't work, and we're going to double down on the winners and the survivors. And that's like, there's an economic logic to that, and it happened with the internet,

it happened with railroads, it happened with telecom. It also happens with financial structures, investment trust, leverage buyouts, mortgage trust. So it's not just hard technology, but sometimes people invent new financial structures that are just like how to package investments in capitals, new forms of securities, reits, private equity. The roots of private equity and the roots of reits both found themselves like were created in, you know, what you could call bubbles in financial instruments. It wasn't so much that it was technology. it's that people were packaging assets in new forms, getting a premium on those assets, and using that to raise capital and grow. It's a similar angle.

I'm not saying those are exactly the same or it will end the same way, etc. I'm just saying that financial structures are economically valuable just as much as technology because they allow capital coordination. And so it's like it's natural, I think, to assume if there is a big new idea and it's a winner, there is going to be this enthusiasm that comes into the market. And it's reasonable, I think, to expect a lot of investor interest. But I also agree with Hoddle that, like, we're in the early stage of that. Like, he made a point, there's like 60,000 coins outside of micro strategy. Treasury companies have not, as a group, deployed capital at scale yet. So,

you know, to say that this is kind of, you know, kind of like this is the zenith, I think, isn't right. I think this is a big idea. And it is, it fundamentally is leveraging the structure of public markets to deliver a growth rate. And like, the structure of public markets doesn't change anytime soon. And I don't think Bitcoin stops going up. And so as long as Bitcoin keeps going up. And as long as a public company can access financial tools that an individual cannot access, there's a very straightforward way to deliver incremental returns.

I think my friend Bitcoin Tina actually is the one who nailed this when he had a heart. His thesis was called the hardest trade. And the core of that thesis was that Bitcoin is going to bore you to a million dollars. I think that's what we're living through now. And I think actually, you know, Bitcoin Tina's story is that he got, you know, he sold a lot of his co. He got scared and sold a lot of his coin. It really was the hardest trade for him. Yeah, I think it's ironic or, you know, it's sort of a Greek tragedy in the sense that the

hardest trade was literally so hard. The man who coined the hardest trade couldn't hold through the trade, right? So like, it's going to be a very long, you know, there's an old saying idiom in Wall Street called wear them out, scare them out. And, you know, I think something that we've been grappling with in Bitcoin this year during this, like, bull market, this hasn't really been much of anything, in my opinion. But, like, something we've been grappling with is we don't understand what's happening. And that's okay. And I'm just going to admit that freely is, like, I don't understand how the Wall Street guys think.

I don't understand what they're doing. I don't understand the way they move capital. I don't understand the way they trade these markets or the way they view them over a short, medium, or a long time frame. And none of them talk to me. They don't call me on the phone and say, whereas I have a lot of conversation with four-year cycle guys, we're like, dude, it's got to October. It's got to go up in October.

It always does, man. It's always got to go up in October, you know. So I think that we need to like break off a slice of humble pie and say, we're in a new phase of Bitcoin, the financialization of Bitcoin, you know, a broader part of the speculative attack, if you will. And these treasury companies are a symptom of that, what's going on. And I think we need to just sit back and look and say, you know, maybe like, our map is not matching the territory anymore, and we need a new map, you know.

It's funny, because I totally agree with you. I've called this bull market boring a load of times, and I speak to a checkmate pretty regularly. He's a good friend of mine, and he's always like, you just need to, like, manage your expectations because this is now, like, we're in a different world at this point, I think. But I want you to convince me of something, because you're both saying you think this is, like, the early stage of this cycle, this bubble. In my opinion, and I could be completely wrong here, but.

we're much later in that cycle than I think people understand. But we've seen MNAVs get crushed across the board. Like I think strategies at one point, what is it, 1.4, 1.5, something like that. Metaplanets come way down. Like across the board, MNAVs are getting crushed. Like, why do you think this still has legs? And just to add to that, like, I think Saylor changed the game with these preferred. And is the idea of just selling common stock to buy Bitcoin now just an old, boring idea?

I don't think it is at all. I think that, you know, if you look at these assets, I mean, there were numerous points where, I mean, Micro Strategy traded at a discount at one point. Like, MNAVs have compressed in the past. For Metaplanet, I think there's been three distinct periods where the MNAV compressed, like, materially, very, very heavily. In the past, have they ever been when we're, like, very close to all-time highs, though? Micro Strategy did peak early. It peaked early last cycle.

It did peak way before. I think there's maybe one Metaplanet correction that was definitely, I mean, maybe not at all. all-time highs, but at very positive Bitcoin prices. I'll speak to the point you're making, though. There was a massive run-up in these assets that actually happened while Bitcoin was going slightly upwards to sideways. And so what you saw was the Treasury companies in the spring, in May, they put in multiple hundreds of percent gains. Like, there is a massive, massive move higher for meta planet, for SmarterWeb, for H100, for all of these names. And the market is now digesting that fact. And I find it somewhat funny because Bitcoiners, when you're a Bitcoin guy, every time Bitcoin

would have a drawdown, the people would come out of the woodworks to be like, look, it's down 30% Bitcoin's over. Don't you feel stupid? And Bitcoin people would say, hey, you know, zoom out. It's still up this much. It's still, it's gone down before. It's come back. And I mean, you look at these, these companies and they're still at like, if you know, if you bought before, they're still generally at like very good prices. They're still, they've grown tremendously. There's been a material contraction. And I don't mean to, you know, make light of that. Obviously, if you purchased it at the top or, you know, that, that stings. But, um, I, I just think the, the structure. So anyways, It's happened before, and this is a volatile asset class, and I just didn't, in that, I don't see an idea or a trend that really got exhausted or that had a fundamental event occur.

Like, something happened that, like, really interrupted it. And so then they compressed. I think they just went up a tremendous amount. They had to blow off top, and they are consolidating. Time will tell, of course. But the reason I, like, outside of just speculating on what happened in the past, the reason I'm optimistic in the future is because I do not believe that Bitcoin becomes a global asset without there being securitization along the way. Not that Bitcoin needs that. I'm not saying Bitcoin needs securitization.

I'm saying you can't invest, invent the hardest monetary asset in the world. and not expect it to come into securities markets and not expect Wall Street to do things with it. And the size of these things is like this big right now. Like I don't believe that that that there was like, oh, there was a, you know, six month attempt at Bitcoin securitization and now it's over. Like, again, time will tell. But I think this is a big idea. And I think so I speak with a lot of investment banks on a day to day basis now. I speak with analysts, I speak with investment banks.

I was surprised, very pleasantly surprised. They all love the idea. It actually makes more sense to them than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was hard for them because there's no cash flows. There's nothing to model. You can't really plug anything into a spreadsheet. With these, it's much more speaking their language. There's capital being raised.

There's a growth rate. You can calculate various metrics. You can model this out. And there, as I've talked with a number of investment banks, many analysts, some who understand this really quite deeply, they're all very excited. And it's still the early days for them. They're wrapping their heads around it. But they're very, I think there's a very positive reception to having something like this and being able to participate in the Bitcoin landscape from a, from, you know, from a securitization lens. Firstly, I want to like put a disclaimer here and say like I'm not trying to convince anybody to buy I wouldn't try and convince you of it I don't want to convince the audience of it I do it myself with about 20% of my portfolio right still 80% Bitcoin and the 20% has grown to 20% mainly because of MSTR's overperformance right and so like that's where I'm at with it and even you know the guys I talked to in the background who are like the biggest treasury guys tell me they're 50% Bitcoin okay so like that's kind of where people are at

And if you want to go 100% in some treasury company that you just heard about, you know, in Bangladesh, like, that's on you. And I'm not recommending you do that. Like, I think we all know that the best way to get from here to there is in self-custody cold storage Bitcoin. That is without question. Now, some people are choosing to go further out on the risk curve, going to the casino, it's all right.

And that's okay. They can do that, but I'm not going to, like, promote it. Okay, the other thing here is, like, I think when you talk about, like, like, you know, you're not quite seeing it yet. I think one thing that's been interesting to me is that, like I said, the Bitcoin story is now accepted. Bitcoin earned that. It fought tooth and mail for years and years.

It scratched and clawed its way in the hearts and minds of market participants. And it proved itself, you know, indisputedly in its price performance and in its history and in its, you know, robustness, its decentralization, et cetera. And it's funny to me because even people who I don't think believe in Bitcoin, like Jim Chanos, who are shorting micro strategy are out here saying, well, hey, yeah, I believe in Bitcoin, but I don't believe in micro strategy. So I'm arming the difference between the two.

I think that the micro strategy, you know, it's interesting, like the micro strategy shareholders have been very displeased lately on Twitter. I don't know if you've noticed. But there's been a lot of whining and kvetching about the price, you know, the ATMs and the this and that, the MNAP. I think what's going on is like, we know this from being early Bitcoiners

is that you're going to have to go through this process of the market, you know, the market sort of proving out why these MNAVs deserve to exist and expand into the future. And there's this sort of idea that, you know, having a very large hoard of Bitcoin, there's a speculation that having a very large hoard of Bitcoin will be very useful in the future for XYZ reasons. We don't really, nobody can really quite articulate the reasons why having a large hoard is better than having a small hoard, because theoretically, you should be able to do the same things you can do with a large horde with a small horde. But there's this idea sort of when you invest in micro strategy that long term, like, and you know,

like speaking of vibes, like this was my vibe when I first invested microstrategy is like, company with the most Bitcoin wins, dude. I don't know what to tell you. Like, that's just how it goes. So I think that there's a process here that the market has to go through where it digests these new substrates and Bitcoin treasury companies are a new, there are a new modality. and if you're an investor in MSTR, Nakamoto, 21, whatever it is, you're going to have to go through the process as well.

And it's kind of interesting. I was thinking about the MNAVs in terms of like, remember co-integration from last cycle? It's almost like the MNAVs are kind of co-integrated with the Bitcoin price. It's like the, you know, the plan B gave the analogy of the drunk walking the dog. And it's like, yeah, this is levered Bitcoin, but it doesn't mean it's always like perfectly 2x levered. It's going to move around quite a bit.

And you as the investor have to make sure that you can endure that volatility, which is why the spot products of these companies are probably the best long-term bet rather than, you know, getting deep in the options game or some of the leveraged DTF products, etc. I've got millions of questions in there. But Stephen, I want to go back to something you said first. Like, I agree with you that the securitization of Bitcoin is inevitable. It's going to happen. I'm not against that in any way because, like, Bitcoin's money for enemies. People are going to use it however they want to use it. But the question I would have is, like, why are you so convinced that this is the model?

Like, this is the way that Bitcoin will get securitized. And then to add to that, you also said, like, when Bitcoin goes down, we're all like zoom out, bro. But if you ask me, is Bitcoin going to exist in 20 years, 100% yes. Like I've quite literally, we all have like bet our lives that Bitcoin is still going to be here in 20 years. If you ask me if like XYZ penny stock treasury company is going to exist in 20 years, I'm probably at less than 5%. So like I think there's a difference there. But like why is this the model? Why is this how Bitcoin will be securitized? Yeah. So I mean, I think it's and let me, I hope I can keep all these points in mind at the same time.

I first want to say my goal in coming on here is also not to tell people to go buy treasury stocks. I've never said that. I've never been like, oh, yeah, man, you got to go put all your money in these things or do something like that. And I think me and David have both been very vocal of like, you know, cold storage Bitcoin is irreplaceable. So just like throwing that out there. Like now to your question, yeah, I mean, you're, I am in no way saying that like some

individual treasury stock or corporation or any corporation, really. I mean, you could even, I think Bitcoin's going to be around longer than Amazon. I think Bitcoin's going to be around longer than Ford. Like, you know what I mean? When you start talking about an individual corporation, you're talking about a corporate entity with operators, with business decisions and all these things. Like, those things don't last as long in many cases. Sometimes, you know, I'm not saying no corporations stick around.

And I think there's a lot of virtue in trying to build something. And we would like to be in that category of building something that lasts. But it's different than a decentralized network, right? And so I think there's just this thing that, like, I don't, I'm not saying. I think few people are saying that Bitcoin, the asset or Bitcoin the network and treasury companies are comparable in the same way, that they exist in the same place of the risk curve, especially if you're talking about like tiny new ventures that are just getting going. And that's to a point that I agreed with from Hoddles that this is, this is early. These companies don't have a lot of coins. Like, I'm a lot more confident that micro strategy will exist in some form than one of these new companies with under a thousand coins, right?

And that's just you have a risk curve now. But the risk curve is BTC denominated. That's kind of the cool thing. And like, that's a side point. But so I agree with you. Like these are not at all the same thing or comparable. and but risk isn't exactly a bad thing. And I know there's a big, I think, I think the Fiat world is like there's no savings.

Savings doesn't exist. There's only investing. You have to invest to save. And Bitcoiners are like, screw that. You should be able to save your money. That's Bitcoin. I don't want to have to take like operating risk just to keep my value. That's beautiful.

I love it. But if you take that all the way to the other side, all we should ever do. do is save. No one should ever invest in any, any venture. No one should ever deploy capital or go out the risk curve or anything like that. I don't think that's right. First of all, I think it's very obviously not right because if everyone did it, the entire economy would stop because no one would have businesses, right? So you need actors that are investing in enterprises to keep everything going. So anyway, so these things, these things are different. Now, your question was why does, Why is this the vehicle?

I think this is the beginning of a shell of a vehicle. Like I'm not even saying like this, we've got it all figured out. This is how you do it. And I think that's been evidenced in the micro strategy story where it's evolved over time. What he was doing in the beginning and what he's doing now are very different and there are new products and there are new angles. And it's because this is in very many ways being worked out. And but do I think there is a strong value in having an operating entity or a business that is touching Bitcoin directly that has the express corporate mandate of acquiring more Bitcoin? Yes, I do.

And I think there's evidence to this today. When you look at these filings, we had the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, report they doubled their micro strategy position, roughly speaking. They had a large increase in it in their last reporting. We had huge investment banks that are constantly reporting this. Why didn't they buy the ETF? Because they want to invest in equities, in corporation. There's mandates. There's tons of restrictions.

There's all of these different reasons. But you see these very large pools of capital are buying micro-strategy stock. In some cases, also even Metaplanet. These represent mediums. that capital allocators need. And so one of the reasons I'm confident on this is because when you understand kind of the whole investment landscape and securities landscape, there are,

there's just people that need something like this. And so in many ways, treasury companies are very pragmatic and they're responding to like what's right in front of us, which is that people have demand for blevered Bitcoin, there are many actors that have demand for, they need to buy corporate equities, they can't do the spot ETF or they don't want to do the spot ETF.

And due to the structure and moment in time of Fiat, of where we are, of Bitcoin and Fiat, that there is value to be provided by leveraging the tools of public finance to acquire Bitcoin. And that's the thing I'm really bullish on. Like you said, like why do you think these are the right vehicles. Because when you think about this moment in time where capital markets

are like, hey, like Hoddle was saying, fine, we believe you on Bitcoin. Like, we believe you. It's going to be a thing. Bitcoin's going to be a thing. BlackRock did it and the president. And the next question is like, okay, how do we acquire enough Bitcoin? How do we acquire more Bitcoin in the most capital efficient way possible? And the answer to that question is always going to be a public vehicle, a public vehicle will have a lower cost of capital. And so in many ways, like, that's the concept. And so, like, I'm willing to bet on that concept. And I'm willing to say that, like, if people want Bitcoin, there will be demand for capital efficiency in deploying it from the perspective of the corporation, right? Obviously, if you buy it at, like, the maximum MNAV and then

the MNAV contracts, that wasn't capital efficient for you. But it was capital efficient for the vehicle. And that's why these things exist. And that's why I think they'll continue to exist. And I think it will evolve. That's my other point is this is not a finalized, hardened form. These vehicles, I think, will evolve dramatically. So I know I'm with like a bit of a domer on this, but I do find kind of the bear take one of the most interesting and something that people should be sort of aware of and potentially ready for. Like in a bear market, what do you think happens? And with this, I think it'd be worth separating strategy from everything else just because of their size and I think they're going to be fine. Like, they're pretty under leveraged. I don't

think there's a real risk that they go under at any point. So let's start with strategy. What do you think happens with strategy in a bare market hoddle? Do you think they go below 1XMNAV? It certainly could. It certainly could. And I will tell you as somebody who had a large position in GBTC last time around, GBTC went 50% below now. And I, and I will tell you as somebody, and it had been trading at a premium, which was, you know, 200% above Nav at some point. And so to go from, you know, 200% above to 50% below, it hurts. It stings quite a bit as an investor. And you have to be incredibly convicted in order to make it through.

And what happens is with GBCC, and I can predict this will happen for microstradity because we're already seeing this with like the proof of reserve comments and all this stuff is At the very bottom, when you're at your most vulnerable and most fearful and most shell-shocked, people come along and they go, they don't even have the Bitcoin, bro. They don't even have it. Fucking Michael Saylor spent it on Coke and yachts, dude. It's gone, dude, right? Like, that's what happened with GBTC.

People started saying that the Bitcoin wasn't even there. And I had to spend two days' diligently in it and being like, wait a second, no, no, it has to be there because of this and this and I had to go through all the facts. And of course, they did have all the Bitcoin that they purported to have. And so, you know, it got repriced when the ETS came in and blah, blah, blah, but like there was a tough period of time there where you had to make it through as an investor. And I think that you should be prepared if you're investing in these treasury companies for a very difficult period of time. I mean, the volatility, listen, like, like Saylor is volatility. But like, hey, man, there's a lot of highs and lows in life.

Like, this can suck for quite a while before it gets better. So, like, yeah, if we hit a deep bear market, be prepared for rocky waters ahead. The thing that I think warrants the most conviction is that there is a way to structure a public vehicle with the express purpose of acquiring as much Bitcoin as you can that makes all the sense in the world. And if you're bullish Bitcoin, you should be bullish this element. And like one of the things, and there are many kind of evolutions this market could go through. For example, if strategy or treasury company starts earning a return stream on the Bitcoin, let's say strategy starts generating 3%, like I don't even anything crazy or 4% or 5%. There's now a growing cash flow component that's coming that then gets a multiple.

And so if they have a $100 billion in Bitcoin or whatever it is, and then they now have leveraged the treasury, they're either issuing financial products, they're earning return from it in some way, you know, there's development in the market. They now have the value of the assets plus a multiple on the return stream, which is growing every year. And that, and that marks the equity above the nav. Like it trades for more. That is a, you know, like a like a price to earnings multiple is similar and different. And, you know, I appreciate the, you know, there are people in traditional finance that would push heavily back on that a P.E. Multiple is the same as an MNAV, and they're distinct. But they're both examples of the market pricing future growth to today.

Like, that's what a P.E. multiple, like, what a P.E. multiple is, is it saying, you don't get to buy my business for just the net present value. You have to pay me for how fast I'm growing. because if I hold on to the business for another five years, well, I, you know, I'm worth 30% more, right? And so we discount that back to today. And I would argue there's a very similar structural thing with the MNAV because there's a growth rate. There's a growth rate on the Bitcoin per share. So maybe, you know, I mean, some of these companies are growing it at a ridiculous rate. But even if, you know, you were growing it at 30% per year and able to do that consistently,

like, that's worth more than just the net present value. you how much more, who knows? Like, just like, what's the right PE multiple for NVIDIA? Nobody knows. Like, these are, there's no, there's no right answer there. But there's a, there's a simple point that, um, you have to pay a multiple for future growth.

And so if these companies get to a point where they're, they're able to synergize the treasury with return, with cash flows, um, that expands the, the MNAV or the valuation. which they can then use more effectively to buy more Bitcoin, which goes into the return stream, like the operating like the cash flows. And so there's just, there's a lot here. And it's, again, like, I think it's early. I don't think this landscape is fleshed out. And at the end of the day,

packaging Bitcoin acquisition efforts in a corporate vehicle gives you just such a wider landscape to operate from it. And that's the key principle. That's the thing that I think you can be at this kind of stage, like pretty confident about. I know I'm a bit of a duma here. But assuming strategy survives, I think that the rest of the companies, let's say they hold less than 100,000 Bitcoin. I don't know the exact figure. I don't see that as like an existential risk to Bitcoin.

We saw someone come and sell like 80,000 Bitcoin a couple weeks ago. But I do think the more interesting side will be what happens with those smaller companies in a bear market. So like if you take, let's say any coin, any company that has, has less than a thousand coins. What I don't know is if there's sort of a doom loop scenario where if they're trading at a discount to NAV for a long period of time, if they'll ever be able to get out of that in the sense that like if there's little liquidity on the stock and they can't just issue more common stock to buy more Bitcoin to try and pump nav, like what happens? Do they end up having to sell Bitcoin to repurchase their stock to drive the stock price higher? This is the thing

that I'm not very sure about. Yeah. I mean, if you're a small, a very small company with no cash flow that's trading at a discount to nav for a long time. That's not a good position to be in. But that's a, that's not like a category criticism. That's a like, this is a, a poorly operated,

a company that was just not able to succeed. And I'm sure there will be many of those. And I'm sure there will be, you know, you've talked a lot about like the long tail of treasury companies. I don't know that I've ever responded to that. That long tail will almost certainly exist. They will, you know, like, I mean, we were talking about dot com and we were talking about, you know, there's always that long tail.

That's almost certainly going to happen. I think the more interesting question is like, are there, what do the winners look like? What is the landscape for the winners? Like, how many winners? Like, what do those companies, like, turn out as? And what role do they play in the future? So, you know, I'm not here to put lipstick on the long tail of, you know, quick companies that don't know how to do this poorly. Like, they will certainly exist.

And they won't be in a strong position. And like, to survive a downturn, you need cash flow or you need capital or you need access to debt or you need, you know, and so on, right? There's a number of factors that'll help a prolonged downturn in Bitcoin. Now, how prolonged are those downturns going to be? One of the points Hoddle was making at the beginning was like, the quality of this market is different. Wall Street's here. They're operating under different rules.

And God, I mean, I know every cycle people come out and they say, for your cycle's over, bro, not going to happen. And then they're wrong. And so it's like incredibly like intellectually risky to take that stance. but I truly struggle to imagine a two-year 70%. Like, I don't think you can get both. I don't think you can get a magnitude of a drawdown of like 70% and a two-year duration.

I think you could obviously still have drawdowns. I think they're shorter lived. I think they're less extreme. I think Bitcoin at this point has, I really characterize the Bitcoin bear markets as a large segment of the market. losing conviction existentially in the asset. It's not like, oh, man, this thing's going to correct for a year and I just can't handle it. It's like, no, it's like they think Bitcoin's over.

Like it's done. Like, and it's that sort of existential fear in the asset that I think has driven the historical Bitcoin bear markets. And I think with a combination of like the level of integration, the capital that's available to buy these things. Like, it's not just, you know, individuals that aren't seasoned investors. Like, you have $90 billion in the ETFs. You know what I mean? Like, there's capital that has come into this thing. And it will deploy on a discount, especially in a world where, given the macroeconomic environment, given the fiscal environment, given the landscape we're in, Bitcoin's a very attractive asset. And so all of that to say, like,

I think companies need to be profoundly prepared for bare market conditions. They need to have a strategy. Like, you can't just like, if you not having a constant, highly elevated MNAF to operate at, like, is the end. Like, you don't, you know, that that's not a sufficient strategy. But also, like, outside of that, I do expect that these, the direct. of these kind of moves are going to be shorter, and that does make the landscape easier. I think also as we talk,

I've become convinced that, like, the small treasure, the long tail, like, they just don't have enough coins to cause a significant correction here inside of treasurer. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with that in terms of, like, Bitcoin price.

But Hoddle, like, one of your, maybe your second biggest meme after 6.15 is green, green, green, red. Do you think that that is dead? I have to say, like, I'll go out on the intellectual limb because what do I have to lose anyway. I've said every stupid thing you can say in the space. Yeah, I think it's dead. I think it's dead. I think we're in, you know, the new era of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is trading like something like Nvidia or like a tech stock. It's not trading at all in any way where I have any understanding of how it's trading. I can't anticipate how it's trading. I'm bored by it because I think I'm addicted to the dopamine of its early volatility. And, by the way, I think that's a thing that we should talk about. One of the things that's causing people to go into treasury companies, OG Bitcoiners to go into treasury companies, is the addiction to dopamine. Because as Bitcoin matures and the vol recedes and the returns are more stable, early

Bitcoiners are like, this sucks. This is unbearable. I want to get 10 times more wealthy every four years. I'm getting wealthier every day. It's unbearable, Danny. I can't stand it. I need to be poor and then rich again and then poor again and then rich again. So I think that's part of the behavior that's motivating people to take more risk, more leverage, higher volatility.

You know, we're addicted to it. We're addicted to it. I totally agree. And one of the funny things is, like, I've not been in this as long as you. I got in in, like, 2016, 2017. But, like, normally you just get a vibe of what's going to happen. And I don't have the vibe anymore. I don't know what's happening.

It's because Larry Fink doesn't call us up and be like, hey, bros. Yeah, like, we're going to. We're out of the loop. We're out of the conversation. We have no clue what's going on. You know. It's going to be wild. I do agree, though. I don't think that these are going to cause any real impact on Bitcoin. Assuming strategy survives, which I think it does. Stephen, what's your take over the next few years on Bitcoin? What do you think's going to happen? I know Hoddle's got a big bet with Pete, which we can talk about. Yeah. I'll point out something. You know, many times in this conversation, I don't ask you a question, but many times in this conversation, you've been like, I think strategy is fine. in that is a, like, there's a little bit of an admission there that is saying, well, if you get big enough, if you get X, Y, Z, then this, this thing can work. And, you know, then it's kind of- Can I clarify my point there? Because you are right. I do think it's size. I think size is probably the most important factor. And I don't know what the right size to hit is. But I think also it's, I'm bullish might be the wrong word, but I'm very confident that their preferreds are going to work pretty well. I think that's tapping into a huge market. It's exciting. Are they preferred something that you would look to do at Nakamoto?

Carry on your answer, but also. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the preferreds are very exciting. And that's an example. Like, this reinforces the thesis I've been trying to present that only an institution with a large enough balance sheet of Bitcoin can issue those products because you need a counterparty that's taking the directional risk. And Goldman's not going to.

to do it. And JPMorgan's not going to do it. They're not going to hold $100 billion at balance sheet. They can't, first of all, because of regulation. So you need an institution that says, hey, will stomach the vol for you, volatility as a service, and then we'll peel off some of that excess return for you so you can make your 9%. And that's a, that's a Bitcoin collateralized financial product. I think you see more of those things. I think that's part of what's evolving here. And this is what I mean by the securitization of Bitcoin. I didn't just mean treasury companies. I mean products, security products that treasury companies produce that require Bitcoin

collateral. If you really think Bitcoin becomes a crucial part of the global financial system, these sort of things need to happen. You need actual Bitcoin financial products and securities and things. And I think this is the early stage. I don't know where it all ends up. I don't know what it all looks like. But I agree with you.

And I think it's important, and I think it's part of the, it is a real product they're producing. And Saylor has said this. I'm iterating his phrasing, but, you know, he's called it like refining or this is what Solomon brothers did. So there was like a tronching of bonds. But in traditional finance, there's a something similar here where they broke out the bonds into different buckets for different risk profiles and categories of it. investors. And so this is something with a history where you take an asset class and you kind

of extract certain properties from it and you bundle it up. And that's what Sailor's looking to do here. And I think there's a lot more room for that of kind of taking some of the properties from Bitcoin and giving different investors, different buckets. Yeah. These are the CDOs of Bitcoin. That's what we're doing here. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. And Nakamoto is like a CDO of a CDO. It's a synthetic CDO, yeah. I'm looking at Bitcoin Treasuries. Yeah. Shout out MVP. So,

21, I've got like 40,000 coins. Adam Bax Company's company is 30. You guys were at 5.7,000. Yeah. Like, what is big enough, do you think? That's the question, right? So, like, coming back to, you know, where I tangent is it, like, you know, you said, like, yeah, size is what allows, you know, you're going to make it if you get big enough. The answer is nobody knows. Like where where is that bar? But if you handed me, I mean, if you handed me, or if I handed an operator, a structure that had a couple billion dollars of Bitcoin in it and said,

no more equity sales, you can't use an ATM, you can't do any of this stuff, sink or swim, can they make it? I think so. I think if you get handed an operating structure and you're somebody that understands the ecosystem that understands Bitcoin, could you take a $5 billion wrapper without doing an ATM and without doing some of these things and make a company? Like, I think you could, right?

That's a lot of capital, especially if you're bullish Bitcoin and Bitcoin's growing, and you say, hey, I mean, in it, you know, in a few years anyways, this thing is, you know, worth quite a bit more. So I don't, you know, nobody knows where that kind of threshold is, but I don't, I don't think it's anywhere near strategy. I don't think you have to get to strategy scale.

I don't think it's like if you don't have $100 billion in Bitcoin, you're in trouble. I would think it's substantially lower. Now, is it 200 coins in a microcap stock, XYZ? Like, probably not. That's not sufficient scale if suddenly all of these other advantages turned off. But I think, you know, I think as that kind of grows, you got a couple billion dollars. and I think it's probably closer to that mark. But I'm also like, there's a theoretical there,

which is we're saying like these other factors kind of go away and you kind of can't use the current playbook. I'm obviously bullish that the current playbook persists. I know me and Hoddle of both said we don't really have a great vibe check on this bull market, Stephen. But how much of an impact are the Treasury companies having in terms of by-side pressure? Obviously, there's an answer to that question with and without micro-strategy. I'm just going to like exclude micro-strategy here. and I don't think it's been very material at all,

because I don't think there's been a huge amount of Bitcoin bought. And, you know, when you look at that listing that you read off, some of those were existing coins, right? So in some of those structures, there wasn't like buy pressure that came in there. It was just coins into a structure that's still pending. So of the ones that actually have done buys, I think it's, I mean, it's less than the galaxy seller.

So we saw in real time someone unloaded, 80,000 with a negligible, you know, one or two or three percent, right? And so that's got to be one of the most bullish things that's happened this cycle. Yeah. That made very little different. Absolutely. I mean, it's, yeah, and I'll be, I have to be careful what I say here, but like, we recently did a large purchase, right?

Like, we, we did it. It's a liquid market. Like, that's what I'll say. It's like, it's a liquid, it's a real liquid market. And that's great. And so, you know, if you can't even if you just take all those treasury companies and, you know, add it up, it's sub, it's sub the galaxy seller, or at least it was when I did these calculations last time. So I don't think it's been mechanically like a big component. Maybe the narrative has added a little special sauce to it where everyone's like,

whoa, there's all these treasury companies. Let me buy some more Bitcoin. But I think it's, I don't think it's been a huge driver on like the price of Bitcoin, which has been, I think it's had a great year, but it's been lower volatility. And then I think this is a point Hoddle made that I wanted to jump on. Yeah, I think these companies, like in some ways like volatility as a service

or there are a way to go get higher vol on Bitcoin like and like Bitcoin's trading at lower vol in some reasons in some ways you could even like including micro strategy you could argue that the treasury companies are stabilizing it a little bit there's they're almost they're almost exporting the ball they're saying hey we're gonna we're gonna bid Bitcoin every week no matter what and that's going to stabilize Bitcoin

and then we're We're going to trade it a higher volatility. Do I think that that has really happened at scale yet? Not to a huge degree, but I think it absolutely could be part of the landscape you're looking at. Well, I guess that also plays into the hands of your narrative in the sense that if the cargo of Bitcoin is dropping over time, that makes the Treasury plays more interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there's, after so many years, I think there's demand for higher volatility than Bitcoin's currently given. I think there's interest in that. That's not saying go put all your money in this or XYZ, but it's saying, hey, like, let's put 5%, 10%. I'm going to, I'm going to take a portion of my portfolio. Let me do it on a higher of all asset. Like, I think there is demand for that. Yeah. Hoddle, you've got a million dollar Bitcoin bet with Pete by the end of 2027. How confident you feel? I feel decently confident in that, actually. Still. Still. Still. So you think we get a 10x basically? I have until January 1st, 2028.

So I get all that bad 2027. So we got I got two years in change for that bet to pay off. I mean, after having been in Bitcoin for a long time, that's that's not that big of a move from here to there. You know, I mean, we just went 15K to 100 and, you know, 24K, right? Like, it's pretty damn close to the same amount needed to go from here. to there. So really it's contingent on is the four-year cycle over, right? And so I guess, you know, implicitly and explicitly, I'm in on that thesis with the bet with Pete, you know. The thing that I could see playing into your hands, I don't know if it'd be anyway near

big enough to get to a million dollars in two years, but like I think Trump is going to run things insanely hot next year. Everybody thinks so. Like going into the midterms, I, yeah, like maybe that's the problem. Maybe everyone thinks that and it won't actually happen. but that's a scenario I could see playing out. Why do you think it can hit a million in such a short period of time? Well, just I think that, I mean, first of all, that's, you know, it's not that short of a period of time. It's two years, right?

Which is like the same amount of time it took to go from here to there. And I think, again, like the four-year cycle could be over. And so that's the reason why is because this is trading in an entirely new way that's, you know, unknown to most of the actors in the space. So, like, yeah, if we get the right macro, environment, that could definitely happen. I think right now the bet would be to fade me and think Pete is going to

win the bet. But I'm I don't know, I still feel like I have a decent 50-50 odds in order to win. I fucking hope you win that bet. Well, we all hope. We all hope I win that bet, right? Even Pete hopes you win that bet. All right, before we close out, anything you want to

finish on. This maybe isn't the closing note, but you mentioned like running it hot. You have to. Like, you have to. That's also part of the landscape here is we tried to rein in the spending. We tried to cut.

We tried to rain it in. We tried to shore it up. The market pitch to fit. It was politically challenging to do. And, I mean, you know, like it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a, a effort in in many ways but like what ended up happening was the reality of like you got to grow your way out of it or at least try like try to grow your way out of it uh and you're seeing that messaging coming out of the treasury that's this whole stable coin like the state it's like a it's like a twin stable coin AI bet where it's like we're going to get a lot more buyers for the debt we're going to issue a ton more debt we're going to invest a astronomically huge amount of money and to like AI infrastructure and data centers. And like we're going to,

we're going to try to drive growth. And that means like a huge amount of money coming to the market. It's very bullish for Bitcoin. And it's, you know, it's at a time where I think there are significant uncertainties in the larger world that are both like fiscal and macro that are reasons. why you'd want to own Bitcoin, like expanding fiscal deficits, more money. Also, AI in a way,

I think that people aren't talking about if like, if you do actually get like the bullish AI scenario where there is like a real disruption of like certain jobs and things, that puts a whole lot of variability into like equities, right? Like there could be a lot of equities that, um, their future earnings are very unpredictable. Like if AI starts moving fast enough, it's very hard for me to be like, well, this database company, like, what are they going to be like in five years? Or McKinsey, is McKinsey going to be around in five years? Like, I mean, if AI goes fast enough, I legitimately don't know.

Will that happen? I don't know. But all of it has to say, it gives you a kind of unique thing where it's like, well, do you want to keep betting on the forecasting of specific earnings or do you want to own a fixed supply monetary asset that's just going to kind of broadly benefit from these net trends, right? I think that becomes a more compelling pitch to somebody, right? I think it just, it's more reasonable. It's got the backing of BlackRock.

There's institutional level liquidity. It's accepted now. So all of that to say, like, I do think one of the other stories. and this whole thing is that we're in an incredibly constructive environment for Bitcoin's growth. And Bitcoin keeps growing robustly. It's not hard to bet on companies that are just saying, hey, we're going to pull all the levers we can to buy more Bitcoin. You know what I mean?

Like, obviously, things are tougher in a big Bitcoin bear market and all those sort of things. And I do believe fundamentally, like, you need a management team that is, has a plan for that, that is preparing for that, that doesn't, like, the whole business isn't betting on this going up forever. That being said, I think it's a very constructive landscape. And it would not surprise me at all to see Bitcoin up this year, next year, the year after. I just, it wouldn't surprise me.

Green, green, green, green, green, green. That's the new meme. No, I, I'll close with this. I, you know, when we were in Vegas together, you asked me. about the morality of treasury companies. And, you know, there was kind of this pause in the conversation where me and you were both like, hmm. I've thought about that a lot since.

I've thought about it a lot since that moment, too. And I think I've come to a conclusion, which is, if you look at this from the outside, I mean, let's just call it what it is. This is shick-coining. It's a form of shick-coining. Everything that's not Bitcoin is a shit-coin. So this is in some sense a form of shit-coin. And some of the things that are going on in treasury companies,

they mirror what went on in shik-coin. right like with the you know private placements insider access um you know the in some the the the worst chair the most uncharitable view of treasury companies i could give you is that it's a classic you send me one bitcoin i send you two bitcoin back scam and but the two bitcoin is in the form of the mnav right so that's the most possibly uncharitable view i could give i i don't believe that to be true i think it is like a straight up game and that's why it's you know morally defensible to play but then i thought that's the about, you know, the conversation that me and you had, and I was thinking, what is the deeper meta here? Why do I have a feeling that this is okay? Whereas when we were participating in the

markets a few years ago, I had a feeling that it was immoral to shit coin, right? And I think a part of it is about alignment. So we have had a tremendously, all of us, we've had a tremendously difficult time getting horses to drink. We've been leading people to the water, but we cannot make people drink. So like we, you know, we're all the annoying, probably everybody that listens to this podcast, unless they're brand new, is the annoying Bitcoin guy in their friend circle or their family circle.

And you've been giving the rant and, you know, all Jay Powell's gonna do this. And the geopolitics of the situation in the Ukraine are this. And oh, did you know that Bitcoin is strictly limited to 21 million? And oh, by the way, Satoshi Nakamoto, this and that, blah, blah, blah. We're all that guy, right? And, you know, to be frank, most of our family members look at us, like we're a combination of insane

and retarded. And then they choose not to buy any Bitcoin because we kind of are unkempt and unwashed and uncouth and, you know, just not really well-mannered in society. And that's on us. You know, maybe some of us should take a shower and put on a nice shirt every once in a while, you know. But I was thinking about this and I was like, okay, like it actually pains me that I can't save people. Call it what you want. It's Survivor's guilt. It's this or that. But I'm actually kind of unwilling to leave people behind. And I was like, what, what does all this have to do with the Treasury companies? Is that via passive indexation, we are embedding a shitload of Bitcoin in the public markets. There's 162 million Americans that invest in the public markets, either in the

form of straight-up stock investment, 401Ks, or pensions. So we are giving those people 162 million Americans, plus investors from foreign markets who invest in the American markets, either via their sovereign wealth fund, you know, or straight up, we are giving them access to Bitcoin exposure. So they are getting Bitcoin, whether they like it or not, and we're able to actually put them in a lifeboat because we know the Titanic hit the iceberg two hours ago and the water's up to our ankles. And we're not going to be in denial about it.

We're going to get people in the lifeboat. And I think that's part of what is going on in treasury companies is we're embedding Bitcoin in the markets in a way that's accessible to a vast majority of passive indexation investors, right? of which there are 162 million. So that plus combined with the SBR is how you get the rest of the Americans in, and then you basically, you get to live in a world

in which your Bitcoin goes way up, but you don't have to suffer and watch everyone else suffer alongside you as you're getting richer, because that's not a world that anybody actually wants to live in. I don't want to, like, that's Citadel theory. I don't want to live in a Citadel while people are dying outside the walls of the Citadel.

I want to do my best to ensure that the people that live around me are taken care of and that everything is going to be copacetic. Now, okay, I can hear the people being like, awfully high-minded bullshit for a shit corner, dude. What happened to you, dude? I used to listen to you, dude. I brown bagged my lunch because of you American Hoddle, dude.

I fucking, I named my kid after you, dude. I live my life by some of your mottoes, dude. I have 6.1-5. What happened to you, dude? You think it's okay to do treasury companies? Do fuck you, dude? Fuck you, man. Fucking piece of shit.

So I can hear that. I understand. But that said, that said, I do think that this is the meta on the morality of shickling treasury companies. And to be, I said, that's a Freudian slip there. I said chiquin-jured companies. But to be, to be honest, like there's alignment with us, too, because, you know, if Bitcoin goes up tremendously and our friends and neighbors and family don't have any Bitcoin, they're

going to want to kill us and take our big one. So let's prevent that from happening by embedding Bitcoin deep in the public markets so later it can be seized by the government. Y'all, I'm American Hott. It was great to be here. I hope you have me back something. What a way to close out. Stephen, any last things? Where can people find you? Where do people find out more about Nakamoto? Yeah. Show your links. Hodel, that was fucking amazing. Yeah, I'm on Twitter. Stephen Lubka, look up my name, DMs are open, reach out anytime, Nakamoto. Also on Twitter, Nakamoto.com. got a great URL. Yeah, just, I run investor relations.

So if you have questions or you want to learn more, I'm the right guy to reach out to, and happy to chat. And go to primal.net 4 slash huddle for Hoddle's daily vlogs. This is amazing. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Yep, absolutely. Good to be here.