What Bitcoin Did - The Bitcoin Cheat Code | Mark Moss

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Mark Moss joins the show to talk about why Bitcoin is not just an asset, but a financial cheat code that exposes how broken the modern system really is. Mark explains why wages can never outrun inflation, why saving harder is a losing strategy, and why wealth has always been built through assets, leverage, and system design rather than hustle culture. We unpack Bitcoin treasury companies, MSTR, leverage, preferreds, and why most criticism of these structures misses how traditional finance actually works. We then get into Bitcoin as the foundation of a new personal and institutional playbook. Mark lays out how individuals can think about building a Bitcoin based treasury, managing risk, liquidity, and leverage without blowing themselves up, and why never selling Bitcoin requires building an engine around it. We also get into macro, global liquidity and the breakdown of the four year cycle. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Mark Moss: https://x.com/1MarkMoss

Bitcoin is the cheat code. And if all you want to do is buy Bitcoin, it's the cheat code because you can outperform Wall Street and you can outperform private equity and venture capital and all those things just buying Bitcoin. But not everybody is able to buy enough Bitcoin to really get the life that they want or set up their future generations the way they want.

And if you really want to build wealth, then you have to build a system around the Bitcoin to grow it faster. Forget the hustle culture. And instead, you have this asset base, the cheat code. It is the most liquid. best compounding returning asset that we have, your income can't outrun the inflation that's coming.

You cannot increase your income fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation that's coming. Wages have not kept up and they won't keep up. The only way that it will is with your assets. Man, your video with Sailor is getting some heat. My Twitter has been blowing up. It seems like, did you watch it? I didn't get to see the whole thing. I saw, so I saw people blowing up on it.

Yeah. I saw it, rudimentary guess, but 20%, 25% of the people were like, Danny, why would you ask such stupid questions? And 75% of the people were like, Danny, you blew sailor up. He got so, you know, whatever. More for you, obviously. I didn't even think it was that controversial question. I watched the intro. And I watched how you set it up.

and I could see how that could make him antagonistic right off the back. What do you think I did wrong on that? So what happens is in communication, if I ask you, if I make a statement and then I ask you a question and you answer the question, then you automatically agree to the frame I set. Okay. So that's like a communication. I can't even remember exactly how I asked the question. You said, 2025 was sort of a bad year, a disappointing year for Bitcoin. That's how you started.

So that started that started the conversation, but he didn't blow up me at that point. No, I know. But it, but it automatically kind of put this like negative tone where it's like, 2025 was a pretty bad year for, is a, I think you said called it a disappointed year for Bitcoin. I think I said Bitcoin price. I don't think you said price. I think, I think you just said maybe not, maybe. Anyway, but so he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, was anything but disappointed he went on this rant. Like we made a new all-time high in Q4. Yeah. And so then it kind of threw him on a skills, but it seemed like, I ran it through AI to figure it out. And it seemed like the crux of the matter,

the argument back and forth with you guys, was if a company drops below one times MNAV, how does it recover? It was kind of that. You were trying to get him to answer that, and he wouldn't answer it. That was actually a little later. I think, I've actually not listened back.

But I think the first question that set him off was me basically saying how many treasury companies can the market sustain. Because if you look at it right now, it doesn't seem like it can sustain 200 companies. Like almost all of them are trading below 1XMNAV. And it was really like, who do you think, like how many people are going to be like real winners out of this? You got a bit offended by that question.

He's so smart. You know. I mean, I've been to his house multiple times. I've had dinner with him three or four times. We're not friends. You know how he's very difficult to talk to. Yeah, yeah. Because his mind is like here, right?

But I think maybe he's so smart and analytical that maybe you guys were like talking past each other. Yeah. I could give you a layman's version as to why there could be 10,000 of them. But if you'd like. It was basically the thing I was most shocked about is that it was that question that set him off on me.

And I've had a few people being like he wasn't shouting at you. It was more of like a broader audience that is like skeptical on treasury companies. I don't know. I took it like he was shouting at me during the interview. And I was just like, I had far harder questions I wanted to ask him. But I was like, well, if that's caused a blow up, maybe. Yeah. I kind of wish I'd asked harder questions now.

Yeah. But hindsight. How did it end? Well, so we probably, he probably shouted at me for a half an hour. And then I just tried to move it on and we got into like other stuff. Yeah, but how did it end? Like at the end of like the heated part of it. No, like you wrapped up the interview.

Oh, you mean like after the interview? It was pretty awkward. Oh, it was awkward. Like he, I got like nothing against sailor. There's loads of people being like he shouldn't have talked to like that. I don't care. I don't care that he spoke to me like that. It's absolutely fine.

Like that's kind of what you expect when you go and talk to. a billionaire running an incredibly successful company. Like, I don't mind being yelled out of it. Yeah. And so at the end, I was just like, hey, thank you. Like, that got a little bit spicy there. And he was just like, yeah, kind of. And then, you know, he's got a lot to do.

He was just off. And he's like a tricky person to speak to at the best of times. Like, I don't think it was, I don't think there was any animosity there, but I don't know. Maybe there was. Yeah. I wasn't, like, personally offended by him. You would never know.

There's, to me, it always seems like it's edgy. Mm-hmm. Every, I mean, again, I've had dinner with him. I've had, like, spoken to him all these times, but it's, like, never, like, a friendly. Yeah, yeah. It's always, like, his brain's going, like, a thousand miles an hour. Totally.

If you even try to have a piece of friendly conversation, like, that ain't going to work. Yeah, no, 100%. And, like, he's got shit to do. Yeah. Like, I get it. Yeah. I thought it was great content, though. Yeah.

People seemed to realize it was blown up. Controversy sells. So, so it was good. But if I, if I can, let me just answer the question for you. So I think Bitcoiners, they take a Bitcoin view into the Treasury companies. And without realizing that your sound money thesis and anti-fiat and Jeff Booth, don't feed the system and perpetuated and all that, that is ideology. And that's correct. And as a Bitcoin Maxi, that's the view I have.

But that's not the world that we live in today. So what percentage of people would you. say have taken a 5% allocation to Bitcoin? What percentage of people? Yeah, 1%. Tiny, yeah. Less than 1%. And so that would be hardcore.

Like, they'd take a 5%. But even those people would have a 95% allocation to other things besides Bitcoin. So when you start asking, like, why would I buy a treasuring company and not Bitcoin? As a Bitcoiner, that's what we ask, because Bitcoin is our hurdle rate. But 99.9% of the world doesn't ask that question. They're trying to beat CPI inflation or they're trying to beat the S&P 500. So they buy a basket of stuff, right? So right off the bat, a Bitcoin treasury stock is not competing against Bitcoin.

And Saylor told me in Prague, we had dinner, he's like, I've never targeted Bitcoiners. He's like, I've never brought a Bitcoiner in. It's not a replacement for Bitcoiners. It's not a replacement for Bitcoin in cold storage. So the question that is most commonly asked in the Bitcoin space is, why should I buy a treasure company, not Bitcoin? And the answers you shouldn't. The answer is you shouldn't.

But they're not competing against for Bitcoiners. even the hardcore one percenters still have 95% allocated to other stuff. So most people are not asking, will it be Bitcoin, number one? Number two, I think this is just an APRI truth. If you buy a Bitcoin and I buy a Bitcoin and Bitcoin 10x's, who makes more money? Same. Same. If I borrow 30% LTB against my Bitcoin and buy more Bitcoin, and you don't,

and it goes up 10x who makes more money. Why? Because you've leveraged it. Leveraged, right? So that's just basic math, right? So why would a Bitcoin treasury company trade for more than one times? Because they're applying operational excellence, management, and leverage. So when you have like a fund, a closed fund, right?

And there's, by the way, why would there be more than one treasury company? There's a thousand closed funds in the U.S. alone. Yep. Why is there a thousand? Why isn't there just one fund? Right. There's a thousand. Each one has a different risk return profile.

Right. So with a close-end fund, a lot of times we'll trade a one-time, sometimes a discount, sometimes a positive, right, a multiple, positive multiple. Why? Because there's a market and people trade it. But when you look at what like a treasury company is more analog to would be a bank, right? So a bank take customer deposits, they pay a yield on the deposits and they invest the money and they make the arbitrage. It's also very comparable to a like gold mining company. a silver mining company. So I'm asset heavy, right? So I have the gold in the ground, but I don't trade at one time as my gold value, my book value, because I'm an operating

company. And so I'm going to get a multiple on top of my asset. So the banks are going to trade a two to three times book value, price to book. An operating company like an oil company or a gold company would trade two to three times that because it's not just the gold in the ground, it's also the potential future value of the gold. Yep. Right? Oil is a little bit different because oil is so volatile, but like gold companies are priced a little bit different.

So if you look at a Barrett gold or a Newmont gold, for example, you'll see there them like a two or three times book value because the gold will be worth more in the future. Plus they have the operating leverage. They can use credit, equity. They can expand. They can do all types of things. So when you look at a treasury company, you go, well, they're more like that. They have an asset like gold.

I believe Bitcoin's better than gold. So do you. I believe it's more explosive. So just right off the bat, they should have an increased premium than a gold company because their asset is better than oil or gold, in my opinion. Then we have the operating efficiency. Now, some treasury companies have terrible management and they should be discounted. Some are really good and they should get a benefit.

So then the operating company itself, the management, etc., is going to get a premium or a discount based off of that. Okay. So that's why it would trade more than one times. This type of a company should never trade one times. It's not a fund. Like an ETF, right? They apply no leverage, right?

It's just there's arbitrage against it, which is why the price fluctuates. But really, it's negative. Really, it should trade at a discount to NAV because they're charging fees every month. With Fiat money constantly debasing, wealth preservation isn't optional. That's why I recommend Swam Bitcoin, a team of dedicated bitcoins who work with families and businesses to build and secure generational wealth with Bitcoin. Strong relationships with clients are at the center of everything Swan does. A dedicated Swan private wealth representative,

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But before we had preferreds, like, the way that people were going out and buying Bitcoin was just diluting the shareholder. So, like, there's always, there's that gravity to one, because like, once it goes above one, there's more incentive for them to then dilute and buy more Bitcoin. Yeah. So I'd say, one, you can't ignore the prefs because the preface is how we get the leverage. Yeah. No, but like, out of the 200 plus treasury companies, there's probably only, is there only two doing preferred so far?

Three, I think. I think strive, the meta planet and MSTR, right? But that's the goal. Yeah. So, well, okay. So the goal, if we just pick it back down to first principles, the goal is to have an asset and then use leverage against intelligent leverage against the asset, right? Because as we've already previously discovered, if you apply leverage, you're going to outperform Bitcoin. So an operating company that has management, has access to credit and equity markets,

and what can they do creatively to apply leverage in a safe, intelligent way? Prefs are one way to do that. Convertible debt's another way. Selling stock is a other way. Raising money is another way. So while there's only three companies that have gotten what I call stage two, stage one is start buying the Bitcoin. Stage two is get to that pref leverage. While there's only three that have gotten there so far, that's the path that everyone's

hoping to be on. But there's other ways that they can lever up the Bitcoin besides prefs. But so that's one of the questions that I think annoyed Saylor as well is that I was basically trying to ask if preferred to change the game and what happens to the other companies doing this. So let me explain that for you. So what happens is, again, from a Bitcoiner lens, it doesn't really make sense. So we have to sort of get rid of that and think about it from our traditional financial market lens. What Bitcoin Treasury companies are doing is they're soaking up the demand for yield. Think about that for a second. The demand for yield, that's the fixed income market. The fixed income market dwarfs the equity market, dwarfs the commodity market. The fixed

income market is the biggest market in the world. Why? Because there's always a demand for yield. Some people have assets that they want yield on, and some people need to borrow. Google will drop a bond because they need to build a new data center. So there's always a borrower, and there's always a somebody that wants the yield. Yep. That's never going to change. Bitcoin is not going to change that. Like, that doesn't change the way humans work.

We have consumers and creators. Creators create more than they consume. They have savings and they're going to loan that savings out for yield. That's the way, whether it's Bitcoin, gold or Fiat, that's how it works. So the fixed income market is the largest market in the world. Right now, the bond market has built the fixed income market on a dollar standard. What can happen now is we can build the fixed income market on a Bitcoin standard. So there's an incentive.

unquenchable desire for yield. And so we need to build the yield products. Now, to your point about micro strategy, why would there be more than one? Like micro strategy's got to cover. They got four prefs out there. Like, that's all we need. Then why do we have 10,000 bonds in the United States?

Every bond is different. Every bond is a different risk and reward profile. Every bond is a different company. Every bond is a different term. Every bond is a different yield. There's 10,000, not one. Even just U.S. treasuries alone, there's whatever, 10 or 15 of them, right, from months to 30 years, right? So there's 10,000 bonds.

Why is there not just one bond? But with, so when it comes to the preferreds on Bitcoin, like what strategy you've done, they've come out, they let's say they're offering, is it 11% on stretch right now? And then they think they have their model where they think Bitcoin's going to go up 21% a year. So they're basically paying out 11% and they're hoping to get 21% return on their Bitcoin. So they capture that difference, right? Over a two-decade period, yes. Yeah, so, but that doesn't give that much space for other companies to come out and offer preferred.

Like, they can maybe offer it 12, 13, 14%. But think about what you're saying. Are you going to take that risk when you could just buy strategy, which is, has the most Bitcoin by a order of magnitude and is also, like, fairly low leverage. Think about what you're saying. Hang on, but think, I understand. Think about what you're saying for a second, though. So what you're saying is, stretch is such a good preferred.

Why would anybody else like they're they're so secure. They're so stable. They have such a good track. Why would you buy anybody else's preferred is what you're asking, right? You know a preferred is an equity. Yep. Most of the world can only buy commodities or I'm sorry, can buy bonds. They can't buy equities.

A preferred is a stock. It's an equity. But most of these fixed income funds can only buy bonds. Micro Strategy doesn't have bonds, nor is he going to create bonds. But we were talking about people coming out and competing in the preferred market. Right. But there's, well, I think what we're talking about is treasury companies competing for the yield market, not necessarily the preferred market. Okay.

So you think basically they're just going to come out with new products? There's 10,000 products that can come out. Now, why would I buy a bond from Apple instead of a bond from Google? Why would I buy a bond from L.A. County versus L.A. County. Why would I buy a bond from L.A. County versus L.A. Department of Water? different risk profile. But like, why didn't he just say this to me? Because he's here. So that's why I want to give you like a layman's view of this. So think about insurance, Danny. Like how many types of insurance are there? Who knows? Just types. Health, home, whole life, term life, travel,

disability. Like, there's hundreds of types. Why isn't there just one type of insurance? Why does there have to be hundreds. Okay. Of the hundreds of types of insurance, how many insurance companies? Thousands, tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. Why isn't there just one insurance company? Why do I need more than one insurance company? That doesn't make any sense. Why not just one insurance? The aim is the biggest insurance company. They've been around for 100 years. They have the best policies. Why is there room for any other insurance provider in the marketplace? So why do you think that basically all the Treasury companies are now trading a discount? Yeah, so a couple things. So obviously, number one, the volatility of the nature of the company,

which is a multiple of the volatility of Bitcoin. So I had dinner with Michael Saylor when I was in Prague last year. And he gave us this story. And he said, imagine that God came to me in the middle of the night. And God told me that the market was going to crash tomorrow. So I woke up in the morning and I went and hedged micro strategy. And sure enough, the market's crashed, but micro strategy didn't. That'd be great, right? The shareholders would be stoked, right? No, because they expect MSTR to trade two times volatile to Bitcoin.

So if Bitcoin goes up 5x, MSTR should go up 10x. But if Bitcoin goes down, we should also go down 2x. How far did Bitcoin drop? 30, 35 percent? What's micro strategy down? 60 percent, exactly two times, exactly what? what the market is expecting it to do, a two times volatility. Now, some of these are 80, 90% down, whatever. So, like, we could look at Nakamoto, for example, right? So if you look at, like,

Nakamoto, the company I'm working with Satuma in London, we're also sort of the same victim, but you have to kind of like peel back and look at the nuance of that, right? So again, if we just look at like traditional market finance, the way, let's just use Uber as an example, first of all, right? So Uber started as raising money from Fens and Family and then Angel rounds and then VC rounds and eventually they do a pre-IPO, right, which is the last investors come in privately before it goes public. So now after six, seven, eight years, it finally goes public. What happens?

All the insiders sell because they bought it and they were hoping for liquidity. And the pre-IPO investors got in because they wanted to sell as soon as it went to do it with public. And it's not necessarily like mean or malicious, but they dump on retail. Not because they're mean or malicious trying to rub pull retail. It's just like they've been waiting for six, seven years for liquidity. They finally got it, right? So what happens is naturally, as soon as we hit the public market, all those insiders dump and then, unfortunately, retail bought it and whatever.

Okay. Well, a lot of these treasury companies did something similar where they took an already existing trading company, like a public company. And then they did an RTO, like a reverse takeover. And then they raised a pipe to raise the money. Yep. Okay. So what happens is, and I can tell you firsthand, because I've, through my fund, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, we've invested in dozens of these and I've helped launch a couple now. So like what happens is.

Like with Satsuma, for example, we announced, because there's already a publicly trading company that you could already buy the stock, we're required by a law to make a press release that we're going to raise money. So a press release went out in July and said, we're going to raise a hundred, our goal is to raise $100 million into this company at the price of one pence. And that was the, that was the public price at that day. So today it's one pence. We're going to raise $100 million at one pence. And we put the press release out. As soon as we put the press release out, the speculator started driving the price set. Of course.

And what we did as a company is we were like, no PR. It was like, it was a policy. David Bailey, he didn't really follow that. And so like there's nuances to all this. But this generally applies to asset like Strives Company or Mallor's company or Nakamoto or Satzuma. David Bailey did talk it up quite a bit. So that was problem. What we tried to do is not talk it up at all.

But we had to put the press release out. So we tried to like let it go quiet. But they drove the price up 10x. They did it from one pence to 10 at 10, right? And then we're still raising money. So that went on for a couple months. Then the haters come out. How dare you raise money for the insiders at one when the public price is 10?

It's like, yeah, that's just the market. There's not a lot you can do about that. So then we got delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, and then it finally just got approved right before New Year's. And now the price is down 90%. But 90% from what? The company wasn't even an office. operating company. We just got approved two weeks ago. So all that price action in the stock isn't really reflective of what we're doing. And so same with Nakamoto, right? So Nakamoto did this.

Now, again, David Bailey was very loud about what he was doing and how much money he was raising. And so that's a whole other topic that's above my pay grade. And, you know, when Elon Musk tweeted about Tesla stock, he got in trouble. And so maybe there's some wrongdoing there. I'm not alleging there is. But my point is, it drove much more attention, Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin Inc. obviously, right? And so the speculators really drove that price up big time. They got delayed, delayed, delayed. And then same thing. It dropped 90%. And so it's just a function of what happens when you take a private raise and you go public. It's amplified in that type of a market because you already have a publicly traded company. And so then the speculators start driving the price up.

And so it's a function of how it's work. But I don't think it's reflective of the operating company because they haven't really been up and operating yet. Yeah. Do you think there's a limit to how much Bitcoin these Treasury companies should own, like the public companies? Because I think sailors are just over 3% now. Like, I think we can agree if he owned 100% of Bitcoin, that's a problem. Like, Bitcoin's not interesting at that point. Like, where do you draw the line? So we understand as Bitcoiners that Bitcoin is a system of rules, not rulers. So unlike crypto, Ethereum, et cetera, those run on proof of stake, which means that the more tokens I have, the more tokens I stake, the more votes I get on the protocol and the consensus, right?

So then people who have more tokens get to basically run the network and change the rules as they see fit, sort of like our fiat system we have today. But Bitcoin doesn't do that, right? So I could own more Bitcoin, but I get no more votes in the system. So as far as like how much Bitcoin is it good or proper? I mean, that's for the free market to decide. What is safe? I mean, we've seen where like in 2008, the banks were too big to fail. So we've seen, you know, potentially where maybe one institution gets so big that if something happens, it could.

destabilize the market temporarily. So we could argue like a safety thing. I don't think it's a control issue. No, I agree with that. I don't see a problem on the control issue. We could argue like a safety thing. But like if Michael, if if micro strategy got in trouble and dumped 650,000 Bitcoin into the market today, the market would barely shrug. Do you think? We saw 900,000 Bitcoin get dumped twice this year. Well, in 2025, right? Wasn't that like nine, it was a nine billion dollars? So there was, there was the big like whale sold that sold through Galaxy. I think that was 80,000 coins. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry, 80,000. Yeah, not 600. That's a big difference. Because that's like, what, 40 billion, I think is what he has, 40, 50 billion.

Yeah, I think it's about 50 billion. About 50 billion. So it's a big difference from 9 billion, you're right. Yeah. But obviously, anybody would know, like, nobody would dump 50 billion in a day. Yeah. Because if I want to sell 50 billion, I don't want to have the slippage. So I'm going to, of course, roll that out. So even if something were to have hypothetically, which I don't see this, so I'm certainly not saying this is the case. Michael, Michael Saylor has built like an impenetral fortress. So there really is no forced liquidation there. But even if, you know, went through bankruptcy, changed hands, they wanted to liquidate the stock, unwind the company. They're not going to dump 50 billion in a day. So I just don't see a lot of risk there.

But what I would say, again, sort of drawing parallels to other markets, when you look at the gold market, how concentrated is the gold market? How concentrated is the equity market? You know, three companies own like 85% of all the stock. Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. Own like 85%. So when you talk about 3% position by one company, it seems like inconsequential. And again, sailors only do in equities. There's a whole market of bonds.

The other thing is that, again, trying to understand the financial market, most of the financial market and things we can talk about that was in my outline is matching liquidity, risk, and duration. So most of the liabilities, so assets and liability, are trying to be matched over durations or like when the banks collapse in 2023, they had a mismatch in durations. They had 30 year debt, but they had cash that was due now, right? So most of the debt

is typically over 5, 10, like your auto loan, your house loan, right? It's termed. Sailor's doing perpetual. Mark, it doesn't really know what to do with perpetual. So when I sat down with him, he's like, hey, you could have a hundred billion dollar business just with 30 year bonds alone. You should do that. I'm not. You could have a hundred hundred billion dollar business with 10-year bonds. I'm not going to do it. You should do it. You could have a hundred billion dollar business with just five-year bonds. I'm not going to do it. So it's like there's like a million flavors of ice cream that could be done. And he's just going to do stretch, right? And so, and then you have all the different districts. So like, for example, he just,

was it on your show? He said, like, he's not going to go to Japan. He's not going to go to the UK. So then you have all the different currencies, all the different markets. Like, dude, all of a sudden, you could see how there could be 10,000 of these. But really, I think if we, if we, We just take the lens and we'll put a pin on this. The pin, the plug is that it's soaking up the demand for yield. Yeah. Which is the single largest market in the world. You know, we're talking, I mean, 300 trillion.

Yeah. A hundred and forty-five trillion of that is tradable securitized. So like actual trading stocks, a lot of it is not. So 145 trillion alone. In the U.S. alone, 28 trillion of just cash and cash equivalence. So it's like, bro, you can have 10,000 companies all make a trillion dollars each. Yeah. I did one of the things he said after it had calmed down a little bit was that he had no interest in like strategy becoming a bank.

Yeah. Which is something I'd always assumed was sort of the engulf him, which is interesting. Like he's laser focused on these products. A hundred percent. But you think there's a lot of, a lot in the sort of treasury company playbook that just normal bitcoins can take from and actually use their Bitcoin in a far better way. Well, what I think is that if we want to talk, and I talked about this through before, like the game of money. And if we think about how to build wealth and how what wealth tools do we have available to us, we understand that Bitcoin is the cheat code for us to do that.

And Bitcoin allows us to use all these tools that the 1% typically had. So Bitcoin allows us, but we have to build a system around, a system for building wealth around Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin Treasuries can be one piece of that system that we can build. See, I think this is, for me, like, when I go into Bitcoin, I'd never done any, like, investing before. I was pretty young still. Like, Bitcoin was the first thing I found, like, changed my life. Like, the only thing I've ever been focused on since that day. And I don't think I think about Bitcoin necessarily in the right way when it comes to, like, building wealth and, like, setting myself up for the future. Because, like, the thing that I just never want to do is sell

Bitcoin. Yeah. So, like, I really want to get as a family home. Like, we've just been renting. And it's like, do I want to sell the Bitcoin to do it? But you think I need to, like, adjust the framework that I'm thinking in. 100%. And one, I never want you to sell Bitcoin. I don't want your great grandkids to sell your Bitcoin. So we want to build a wealth engine around Bitcoin that allows you to grow your wealth faster, utilize all that capital, and even feed your great, great, great grandkids without ever selling the Bitcoin. So we have to build an engine around that. Yeah. And so let's just take traditional finance. So you have maybe the champion of that would be like a Dave Ramsey. And Dave Ramsey would say save percentage. of your paycheck and put into mutual funds and never use debt. He's the bold guy that.

See, like, people call them up and say, I mean, yeah, okay. Right. And so, you know, he makes hundreds of millions a year. He's not just some old, you know, country folk guy. Like, he's really smart. But his advice to everyone is don't use debt, work hard, save, put it into mutual funds, let us sit there for 40 years and compound. And then what happens is traditional finances, at some point in 40 years from now,

you can sell 4% of your assets per year. And if you time it just right, hopefully you'll die before you run out of money and you'll die with zero. Yeah. There's a whole book, a whole movement around die was zero, which as a Bitcoin or seems like the worst idea. That's a fiat idea. Yeah. If we think about our life as like a blockchain, like my life, I should have a proof of work that I was here. What is the stamp I'm leaving on the world?

What is the proof of my life? And then my kids should start on the next block. Totally. And then they should add to that block. And why should my kids start from zero? So I think the Dave Ram's nutritional financial advice is a Fiat mindset, say for 40 years, spend it down to zero. Hopefully I die before I have zero and my kids start from zero, whereas we're Bitcoiners. We want to push value in the future.

So right off the bat, that system is broken. But again, yes, I never want you to sell your Bitcoin. I want you to set up a system where your great grandkids don't sell your Bitcoin and they don't need to. But what it really comes down to, and we can come back to this, but passing down the Bitcoin is the asset, but that's not the enhancement. What we want to pass down as a system that allows my great-grandkids to continue to grow the wealth and use the wealth without selling the Bitcoin. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets. Complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKee fixes that.

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miner purchased. Okay, so let's start right from the start. Like, how should people be approaching this? Like, what are the first steps to doing this? So if we reframe it, we want to to understand a couple things. And I'm going to use Michael Saylor as an example for this. But we want to understand that what traditional people do is they work for money. And what most people try and do is make more money. So they're going to go back to school. They're going to get new skills. They're going to work harder, longer. They're going to get a side hustle, start a new, whatever, right? They're going to try to make more money. Then they're going to pay taxes. They're going to live on whatever's left. And then hopefully they have a little bit

left to save. And they'll follow Dave Ramsey's advice. But what the wealthy do is they use income to buy assets. And then those assets compound and the assets pay for their life and they never run out. Okay. Now, let me give you an example. We'll talk about Michael Saylor. So, I'm sure, like you and I, we both watched hundreds of his interviews. There was one he did with Jordan Peterson. Did you watch that one? I did. Yeah. Right. So he talked about how he spent, he spent, he did 10 trips around the world and he couldn't get micro strategy to grow. Remember, he's like, I tried everything. I hired this person. I tried that. I merged with this company. I bought this company, I was competing against Microsoft, I couldn't win. I couldn't increase revenue. So,

just like you and I, but at some point, we can only work so hard. He couldn't increase the revenue of micro strategy. He tried everything. So he had assets. He had 500 million of assets, but it was melting. And he's like, what do I do? I could try to buy another company. I could try to hire more people, but I've proven now for 10 years, I can't grow the revenue, right? So like most of us, as a mom and pop, a homeowner, we have a little bit of assets. We have equity in our home. we have some Bitcoin, but we can't work harder. I've got a side hustle. Like I can't increase revenue that much.

Okay. So that's Michael Saylor. So what he decided to do was change the business from micro strategy to strategy. Drop the micro and instead of trying to grow revenue and sell more software, I'm going to just build the asset base that I have. I'm going to run my treasury, right? Within five years, he took micro strategy from $3 billion to $50 billion. So he spent a decade and,

couldn't grow it. And within five years of the new strategy, he went from three to 50. So you and I, what can we learn from that? Well, we understand that the rich don't work for revenue, the rich work for assets and the assets built. So what we want to do is instead of trying to make more money, how can we leverage the assets that we have today to build well faster? That's what he did. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes total sense. Now, then we would ask, well, how did he do it? Now, look, he didn't invent this. He sort of invented this category for businesses, the Bitcoin Treasury Company is that. But this is what the wealthy, this is what Donald Trump, before he set out to become the president, he was known as the king of debt. He built the Manhattan

skyline. This is how Robert Kiyosaki, this how these guys become billioners. So what Saylor did is he used credit, debt, and equity. So I had assets and I used debt and credit and equity. And you and I have credit and equity. So we have assets. You have Bitcoin. and they have credit and equity. Yep. Right. So how do we do the same thing? So what we want to do, and this is the end goal, depends on how much income you have today,

how much assets you have, if you have 50,000 a year or $5 million a year of income. But the goal is, again, to go from earning income, paying taxes, let's just use in the United States a 40% tax margin rate, you know, it depends on what country you're in. But if I make $100,000 a year, $40,000 goes to taxes. I have $60,000 to live on. Yep. Good luck. Maybe I have 5,000 left. I buy some Bitcoin. Okay. But what we want to do is I want all 100,000 to pay no tax and go all into Bitcoin. So how do you do that? Yeah. So I'm going to show you that. And then I want the Bitcoin to pay for all my living expenses without selling it.

So that's the goal. That's where we're going to walk everybody too. But how do we do that? So it starts with, and again, depends on your income level, what assets you have. But it starts with, let's say you're a $100,000 a year person. What am I'm going to do you? I'm going to do is I'm going to start with credit. What did the sailor do? Start with credit. He did converts. So I'm going to go to the credit market. Most people should have credit. If you don't, go get it. Clean up your credit. Whatever you got to do. Like, that's, that's 101. We're in a debt-based system. And I recognize that a lot of Bitcoiners are going to hate this message because Jeff Booth says we're perpetuating the system. And that's fine. But like, I also want to build wealth from my family. So we're in a

debt-based system. You're really like exploiting the system. We're in a debt-based system. And I'm going to do a speculative attack against system like everybody else to do a speculative attack against system. Yep. And I and I can not, I can be a Dave Ramsey and not do that, but half of baby boomers today have zero savings, half of them. That's wild. And the half that do have savings, the median is 240,000. What is 240,000 going to do? You're going to live for 10 years, 20 years, you're going to 12,000 a year? Yeah. Like, how is that going to work? So, anyway, this is not for the, no, now, now, I'm going to tell you right now, everyone that just heard that has said, Mark, what you're proposing is very dangerous. It's very risky.

And we don't like it. And I'm going to tell you how to de-risk it. So we'll get there. And I guess one of the points in there is, like, what kind of credit you go now and getting? So, first of all, what credit do you have available to you? So I have a friend, Jack, he helps people get credit lines, like credit cards. And typically, he gets the average person $100,000 to $200,000 of credit cards with like a 0% APR for 12 months. So you can do that.

Maybe you can get a small business loan. Maybe you can get a home equity line. Maybe you can get a personal credit line from the bank. Maybe you have, like, maybe you have Bitcoin you can borrow. Like, so there's a bunch of ways that you can get credit. And we can explore that if you want. But I think most people in a debt-based system know they can get credit. Go to your bank.

Call your credit card company. Like when you're on the airplane, you know, they offer you credit cards on the airplane. Like, you can figure it out. But what kind of percentage should you be trying to take credit out at? and what's too risky. Yeah. So I want to get to the risk management because that's a key piece, not getting blown up, but maybe we can come back to that in a second.

Yeah, yeah. So the first step that we would want to do is I can't, I don't want to work harder. I don't want to try to travel around the world like Saylor did 10 times. I want to build my treasury. So the first step I would do is I would, I'm making $100 grand a year. I'm already working 50 hours a week. I'm maxed out, right? So I'm going to use some credit and I'm going to buy an asset that gives me tax depreciation.

So the way this works is if I, have a if I have one dollar of income that's taxable I owe tax on that money yeah there's no there's no getting out there's no loopholes for that but I can buy in almost any country in the world I can buy certain things that the government will give me credits or depreciation for so if I get a dollar of income I have a dollar of depreciation and I cancel each other out so in the United States I can buy real estate even if I'm a full-time employee I could buy like a short-term rental which has an exclusion Trump's one big beautiful bill that went into effect here January 1st allows us to take bonus depreciation or all depreciation in year 1. But even in China, by Bitcoin miners.

You can buy Bitcoin miners, right? So I built a product called Tax Shield, partnership with arch lending and blockware. It's called Tax Shield. And we have a turnkey product just for this. But even in China, you can get tax credits for investing in tech, R&D, things like that. Even in China, you can get them in any country. Okay. So I'm going to borrow some money to get depreciation.

And right off the bat, I'm going to get some of my tax money back. So let's say that I only get 20,000 in tax depreciation. So instead of giving 60,000 to the government, I only get 40. Now I have an extra 20 grand to go into Bitcoin that I didn't have. I didn't work harder. I didn't work longer, no extra hours. And I have 20 grand a year going in there. Okay.

Now, let's say again, I'm only, I'm barely scraping by. I'm only 100 grand a year. After five years, that's 500 grand. Not even accounting for any Bitcoin appreciation. Okay. Now, obviously, if you're making more money, you have some assets, you can get there faster. Now, what I want to do is I want to continue doing that until my asset base is built up and I can borrow against my assets. I can borrow against my Bitcoin.

I can borrow against it from strike. I can borrow with arch lending, whatever. I can get more credit cards. I can borrow against my home, whatever. And I'm going to keep getting more depreciation and keep building my asset base. And then I'm going to borrow against my asset base to start offsetting my income or my spending, my lifestyle spending. So, but there is inherently risk in doing this. Yeah, and I'm going to tell you how to mitigate that.

But let's start with, like you saying, borrow against your Bitcoin. Like, what percentage of your Bitcoin stack do you think you should actually be borrowing against? So, okay, so I'm going to answer that question next, but let me just finish this. So then what I want to do is I'm going to continue borrowing against my credit lines, whatever credit lines I have available to me, or tapping into my equity, just like Saylor, use equity and credit. I'm going to continue using that until I build up my asset base. I'm going to keep borrowing against that.

until my income is 100% offset, and then until I can continue to bargain to offset my lifestyle income, then I get to the point where 100% of my earned income goes into the assets, and the assets are now paying for my life. Now, when I'm borrowing against my assets to pay for my life, I'm not paying tax on that money because it's debt. Yeah. Right. And so now the fly, imagine if you could put 100% of your earned income into Bitcoin,

100% and pay zero tax. Yeah. How much faster could you grow your wealth? A lot. A lot. Now, but it's inherently dangerous. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that danger. So the danger is liquidation. You're a surfer. By the way, man, I didn't get us. We were going to search Slater's pool in Abu Dhabi together. It was so much fun. I paid for a spot. I didn't even get a go. But thank you for that because we all got extra ways because you weren't there.

Yeah. It's like when I die with my Bitcoin, I donated to the, I donated to everybody. So I'm glad you got it. Okay, but let's talk on surfing. So Danny, we're both surfers. So if you're from the inland, you've never seen the ocean before. but you want to surf. Could I take you to pipeline in Hawaii and throw you in the water? Of course not. Why? Because you might die. But there's 100 people out there surfing every day that don't die. So what you would say is the risk isn't in the water necessarily.

It's in the person that goes in the water. So what you could say is that it's dangerous to go in the water if you don't know how to swim. But you could learn how to swim. Yep. You couldn't put a life jacket on. You could take a float with you. You could make sure there's a jet ski. You could make sure there's a lifebook.

So what we can do is we can de-risk it. So we don't pretend there's no risk. What we do is we can de-risk it. So just like we wouldn't take a beginner to pipeline, you and I would, well, I have served pipeline, but I probably wouldn't today. But we could work our way up there, but we'd have to increase our skills.

Yeah. Okay, so how do we do that? So what we want to think about is the real risk is the, not the volatility, it's the liquidation that could happen, right? Okay. We want to set a list of rules, treasury doctrine. So I want to build a treasury operating system. So my treasury doctrine, so for example, these are rules.

I will never borrow more than X percent LTV. I will never borrow, I will never pay cash for a depreciate an asset. I will never borrow at a higher rate and pay a less rate, a negative carry. So we'd set a set of rules. So for example, with Bitcoin, Bitcoin is volatile. So if I borrowed at the top of the market, so based off of four-year cycles or looking at on-chain data, if I borrowed like 80s. 80% at the peak, there's a chance it could drop 50%.

You want to be up 160% LTV and I'm going to get either liquidated or margin called. So I had two things. Either one, I have the income or cash reserves to cover a margin call if that comes or I borrow less LTV. Right. So let's say that I understand market cycles and we're at the 200 day moving average, which is historic low. I could borrow 60, 70%, probably pretty safe. We're at the peak.

I'm probably only going to borrow 30, 40%. And when you're borrowing that, you think people should be looking to borrow against the Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin? No, the first thing I want to do is I want to get rid of my taxable income. Okay. I want to buy an asset that will wipe out my taxable income because that's instant money. Right. So we talked about Bitcoin miners. So I could borrow against some of my Bitcoin.

I could buy Bitcoin miners. The Bitcoin miners wipe out my tax debt and they give me more Bitcoin. Then next year, I take some of the newly mined Bitcoin. and I borrow against that and I buy more miners and I wipe out my taxes again. And it becomes a perpetual Bitcoin machine. The government is buying my Bitcoin for me. And do you think this is the sort of thing that just like your average Bitcoin and people like me out there should be doing?

Dave Ramsey is wrong, in my opinion, if you want to build wealth. But he's right for 90% of the people. 90% of the people should never go in the surf. Yeah. Most people should never go on the surf, Danny. but you like to go in the surf. And so if you like to go in the surf, then you'll learn how to surf. Most people should not.

Where I have a house down in Cabo and down in Mexico, and a lot of the resorts, they don't allow tourists to go in the ocean. And I'm a surfer and I would go in the ocean. And one time I was at this hotel and they pulled me out of the water so many times. They said, if you go in the ocean one more time, we're going to kick you out of the hotel. Really? You know, because people drowned all the time, right? So most people, Danny, should not go into the surf.

You would agree with that. Yeah. Especially without some practice. Without some practice. So if you ask me the question, should people like you learn this, I mean, do you want to learn how to surf? Yeah. Because the fear that I have with stuff like this is that people can work a long time to just stay humble, stack sats, keep doing their job, and then try and go out on the risk curve here and end up blowing themselves up. Yeah.

Just like they would jump on a jet ski and get dropped off their pipeline and they'd end up drowning. So they should not do that. So imagine, so like even think about like with surfing to even get on a board and try to paddle off the waves are very difficult. Yep. And to even paddle the board out to pipeline, you would have to be pretty good to even get out there, right? But imagine if you could jump on a jet ski and they could just drop you off out there.

So people should not do that. Don't do that, right? Like start on little waves and work your way up. And so you could, I'm never going to borrow more than 10%. If I never borrowed more than 10% LTV against my Bitcoin, the chance of me getting liquidated is like essentially zero. Yeah. Right.

Now, what if I make a high income and I could just cover the margin requirement? If I borrowed 40% against my Bitcoin and it dropped 50% I'm at 80% LTV. There's no margin call it 80% LTV. So when you say people, let's kind of want to. People can choose how aggressive they want to be. Do you want to go surf one foot waves or 50 foot waves? You can get to choose that. Yeah.

Let's start from like the credit part. What percentage is too high to be borrowing? Like I don't think anyone should be going out and getting a credit card at 18% APR. So here's how I would do this. So first we would need to understand. liquidity. You've done plenty of shows talking about Michael Howell and global liquidity. So you understand liquidity. Liquidity is not cash. Liquidity is the ability to get cash, right? So when you look at Michael Howell's index or you look at like Nick Bodia, the Bitcoin layer, they have a really

good one, they take the available credit because they're trying to look at how fast could the liquidity expand, right? So the first thing we want to understand to set to answer this question is, what is my liquidity look like? I have to answer that question first. What are my skills? Yeah, Right, right. So there's four ways we want to gauge this. Is the reason there being that if things go sideways, how quickly can get out of the debt? well, how safe can I be? So going in the water's dangerous. Let me do a safety check. Do I know how to swim? Check. Do I have a life jacket? Check. Do I have a lifeguard check? Right. So there's four liquidity measures that we want to know. And once we know those, then we can understand how much risk we can take. Okay. So do I have a life jacket? Do I have a jet ski? Okay, I can go surf 30 foot waves. I don't have a jet ski. Okay, I'm going to go 15 waves. Okay. So there's four liquidity. So number one, liquidity layer number one is my operating capital. So like, what is my operating expenses? That's my month. the expenses. That includes my debt service, my business, my payroll, my household,

whether I'm doing it. If I'm doing this for a personal business, same thing. But how much do I need to spend every month? And then how many months of that operating capital should I keep? Three months, six months. Depends on what your income looks like. If I'm a sales rep working off commission, my income's lumpy, so I probably want to keep more. If I, if I'm a government job, then it's maybe less, right? So that depends. Then level two liquidity is cash equivalence. So this is money market accounts. This could be stretch making 11%. It's really totally stable. It's actually freaking crushing right now, right? So I could put money into there, and that's not cash, but it's a cash equivalent. I mean I can get it less than seven days. I can sell

the stretch. I could have the money wired to my account and I have it. Okay. Level three is assets that are collateral assets that I can borrow against. I can get a loan against my Bitcoin in a couple of days. Yeah. I have a home equity line already standing on my house. My bank has given me a business credit line. So these are assets that I could take collateral against, but they're going to take a longer. It could take me a couple weeks to get a refinance my house, to get equity line. So now I know my liquidity. And then level four are assets that are really not going to borrow against. It's land somewhere on a beach that I can't really refinance or whatever. It's like a, it's a private equity deal or venture capital deal. So it's an asset, but it's not a collateral.

asset, right? So once I understand how much I have in each of those buckets, the goal is, is how much can I build up? So, for example, if I want to borrow 60% LTV against my Bitcoin, if it drops 50%, it's going to go to 120. I'm going to either get margin called or I have to add collateral. Okay. Well, do I have the income to cover that? No. Okay. Do I have liquidity number two to cover that? I do. I have $100,000 in stretch. Cool. So I could easily just grab $75,000 from stretch and to cover that. Yeah. No problem.

Right. Or, shoot, I only had 50,000 in stretch. I need 70. No worries. I'll just go to layer three and pull 25 there. So it's an asset that's compounding. And it's a house. It's a rental property.

It's whatever. But if I needed, I could get the liquidity to cover that temporarily. Does that make sense? That makes so sense. Yeah. I can't hold my breath forever, but, you know, I could come up and the Jesse could grab me. Right.

So now, once I've established layer one, layer two, layer three of liquid. quiddity, then it tells me how long I can stay alive for my layer four, my asset. Okay. So it's different for everybody. Now, if I have, you know, a ton of money in layer two and three, then I can be much more risky. I'm a big believer that Bitcoin will probably change the way that the real estate market works over the long term. I think it's further out than people sort of suggest. But do you think owning property is still like a reasonable financial decision, especially if it's one of those second home rental properties? So, again, I started my career. in real estate. I fixed and flipped over 100 properties here in LA. I built dozens and dozens of

multimillion dollar projects. I think at one point I owned over 200 doors like rental doors. We call them. I think it was 2021. I sold my last apartment to put into Bitcoin. So I don't own any rental properties, but I still own properties. So I got a beach house. I got my house here in California. I got a beautiful ranch property. So I still own properties, but they're not like rental income properties. I should put it all into Bitcoin. Yeah, makes sense. Because Bitcoin has a better return profile than what the real estate does. The real estate is going to go up, you know, it's going up at 10% a year. And, you know, I can use leverage on that. So maybe my IRA is 20%. If I'm lucky, 15, 18%. But I think Bitcoin will perform that. And then I'll have to deal with maintenance and taxes and

tenants and all that. And so I'm all in on Bitcoin, not rental properties. But there is a case for owning real estate. So again, at some point, you have enough assets. What are you going to do with them? Well, I buy the ranch property in Texas. I get the tax depreciation from it. I get to use it whenever I want to go to Austin. And it's a rental property. It's Airbnb, so it makes income. So I have income.

I get tax depreciation. I get to use it. It's not going to outperform Bitcoin. Of course not. No. Do you think Bitcoin does demonetize the housing market? Because I was looking, right, this place we're in now, we're in Manhattan Beach, which is a nice area of L.A.

This place is like, it's okay. It's a fine house. It's probably one of the worst houses on the block. It's like $3.5 million. I had to look on Zillow. Yeah. I don't think it demonetizes real estate the way people think it does. Okay.

So as I said, and I'm a real estate guy, I sold all my rental properties and bought Bitcoin. So that means there's less demand for sticking money into investment properties, right? Because there's other places to invest that are better. But a lot of the premium in real estate is supply and demand. You're like two houses from the beach in Manhattan. And it is absolutely gorgeous out there right now. And so it's supply and demand here. And so there's only so many homes in downtown Manhattan or on the lake in Austin or on the beach here in California.

And so I think the supply and demand are for the bread and butter homes in Kansas City or Indianapolis or San Antonio, Texas. But when you talk about scarce what I call trophy real estate, let me give you an example. Austin was the best performing real estate market in the country for two decades for 20 years. Now it's like the worst performing, but for two decades, it was the best performing market. Okay. And it was a little bit above the median average. It did about 40% in the left from like 2020 to like 2024. But in Austin, there's a lake called Lake Travis and there's only so many homes that on the lake.

Yeah. And when you had all the big tech companies, Tesla and Facebook moving to Austin, those guys make 30, 40, 50 million a year. What do they care if the house is three or four million? Yeah. Right. I want a house in the lake. And I don't care if it's six, like whatever, right? Those homes went up 250%.

So Austin went up 40, but the lakes went up over 200%, right, because of the supply and demand. So I think it demonetizes it from like a, I'm buying three bedroom, two bath houses across the country for rental income, but it doesn't demonetize it for like high demand areas like this. That makes sense because I was walking back from, we went out for dinner last night, walking back and there's like one in five houses probably has lights on. Like I don't think anyone actually lives around it. Yeah.

It's, I'm sure it's all just investment properties. And I doubt it's even all investment from people within America. Yeah, probably a good chance of that. So what is like the key takeaway that you want Bitcoiners to take from this? The key takeaway that I want Bitcoiners to take away from this is that Bitcoin is the cheat code. And if all you want to do is buy Bitcoin, it's the cheat code because you can outperform Wall Street. And you can outperform private equity and venture capital and all those things just buying Bitcoin. But not everybody is able to buy enough Bitcoin to really get the life that they want or set up their few.

future generations the way they want. And if you really want to build wealth, then you have to build a system around the Bitcoin to grow it faster, just like Michael Saylor did. And so instead of trying to follow hustle culture and Alex Hermosia is telling you just to work harder and grind harder and don't stop and work your weekends, you're wasting, like forget the hustle culture. And instead, you have this asset base that is the cheat code. It is the most liquid, best compound returning asset that we have. And if we use it properly and smartly, we can grow our wealth much faster. We can achieve our goals. Most people could achieve, we'll call it retirement income, meaning replacing their income from working to asset based in like five years. How much you think

people need to retire? Like obviously depends on how old you are. But like that's a good question. So I think retirement's a scam. That's another that's another fiat mindset. What do you mean? So what I mean is that most people are dreaming of 40 years, I'll have enough money, where I can quit, I can live a life of leisure, and my money will pay for me. Yeah. And I think that's a scam. That's a fiat system. And I can prove that in a sense by saying or just asking a rhetorical question, why do all billionaires still work? I mean, I think there's probably a multiple answers to that. I think a lot of them get addicted to work. It's because there's two types of people in the world. I talked about this when we opened.

There's two types of people in the world. There's creators and there's consumers. Warren Buffett retired. Well, he stepped down from the head of the board at 93, right? I think it was 93 because he's just a creator. That's what he does. He just creates. And he just creates more than he consumes.

The Fiat mindset has turned us into consumers, right? But we're meant to be creators. I believe we're made in God's image. God is a creator. we're creators, we're meant to be creating. So what I think that what we should retire from, what we really want is not the freedom to not work. We want the freedom to work on what we want to work on.

Yeah, I agree with that. Like, my idea will be spend as much time with the family as I want and then pick and choose what work I do want to do. Yeah. That's the perfect scenario. Pick and choose what you want to work on. And like what happens, as you know, right, as you've come up in life, as you've made more money,

you start to want to solve bigger problems. Right? Like I'm sure 10 years ago, you were kind of living hand to mouth and you were just thinking about how do I make a buck. But today you're like, how can I help the country of El Salvador? Right? Like you're thinking about bigger things. And so that's really the point that we should all get to and really push that value into the world. So you don't think, will you never retire? I feel like I'm retired now. You know, I mean, like I get a fly to a conference. I mean, I unfortunately I missed Abu Dhabi, but we could have been there surfing and Slater's pool together. We would have been having dinner. I'm going to. the parties with Michael, say, like, that's like, people pay for that, right?

So, uh, I feel like I say this never feels like a job. Yeah. And so like, and that's like freedom from from doing things I don't want to do to freedom I do want to do. Uh, I'm going to go speak in, uh, Vancouver at a conference I go to every year here in a couple weeks. And then I'm going to dip up into the back country and spend a few days into snowboarding in the back country. You're in heli skiing again. Heli skiing and snow biking. And so like, you know, I'm doing it, right? Um, I have daughter. My, my daughter's in high school. I am starting to think maybe when she's done with high school, maybe I'll slow down a little bit and add a little bit more travel for my wife and I. But like, I took her,

I spoke at Bitcoin Prague and her and I went to Budapest for a few days. And I took her to Bitcoin Asia and then we went to China for a few days. So it's like, I don't know, I'm kind of doing it. Yeah, I feel the same thing. Like my wife and daughter is chilling on the beach right now while we record this. Yeah. All right, before we close out, can we talk a little bit about macro? Because I know you're following this pretty closely. Um, 20206 is set up to be a pretty interesting year, I think. Did you see the recent Jerome Powell hostage video? What do you think's going on? What are you expecting this year? What my base case is, what I'm expecting, what is my above average probability is that Trump gets what he wants. Yeah. Trump says he wants 1% rates.

I'm guessing before he... Is that what you said? Has he said one percent? He said it multiple times. I think before he leaves office, we'll get close to that. Not this year. But I think before he leaves office, we got with three more years. I think we're close to that. He wants Jerome Powell out. That's no secret, obviously, based off of what you just brought up. But even if you look at his first term, he was fighting with Powell. Powell raised rates on him in 2018 and 2019.

And he thought that was like a personal attack back then. Trump's a real estate guy. He wants low rates. And now he called him all kinds of names back then. And now he's calling him names again, calls him too late. And he's always buying the curve and all these things. So there's no mistake. He wants Powell out.

He wants rates at 1%. So what I think. my base case for this year is he gets what he wants. Yeah. Powls out. A dove is installed. Rates start coming down. And we get a big liquidity boom. We see that other central banks, Japan, China, they're waiting on the U.S. to sort of move. And I think the liquidity spigots really come on strong in 2026. That's my base case. So you think it's going to be a good year for Bitcoin? I think it's going to be a good year for Bitcoin. So that kind of blows out the idea of any other four-year cycle. That's over then.

Well, isn't the four-year cycle already over? I think so. I mean, Technically, no, because per four-year cycles, the peak should have been in November. And our peak was in November. It was in October. October, yeah. But I do think, like, if we even get close to it again in the next few months, like, there's no way the four-year cycle is real at that point. Yeah, I think the four-year cycle is over, in my opinion, because I think it was never

about the four-year supply demand shock. It was always about the global liquidity cycles. Yeah. And now there's, you know, I've been hearing about this from Michael How, I've been hearing about this from Rao Paul. He does really great work. I know Bitcoiners don't like Raul, but Real Vision does a lot of really good work. He's got terrible, like, quote unquote, crypto takes, but good macro takes.

Really good macro takes. And I know a lot of people want to throw the baby out of the bathwater, but I can not agree with his suey or whatever, his NFTs, but I could also appreciate he's got good macro takes. And Real Vision has some really good global equit charts. They were the first one that really opened my eyes to the ISM business cycle, which we see a lot of Bitcoiners running with right now. And so I think. the macro is always in the driver's seat.

So from that perspective, I expected to be a good year. What I'm watching for, what the gray swan is, what I'm cautious of is that it's a political reason. And that is that Trump is really kicking the hornet's nest, let's just say. He's certainly trying to disrupt the deep state from taking down the NGOs with USA to blocking, you know, fraud in Minnesota to maybe Venezuela being part of taking out some CIA deep state stuff. Like there's a lot of Hornets Ness that are being kicked up. And they, the deep state, the powers that be have never wanted Trump in office. So when he took office the first term, they came up with the steel dossier, the Russia collusion

hoax, all of that. They tried to impeach them, you know, multiple times. They piled in, you know, whatever, 100 lawsuits against them. they shot him. And so they, whoever those people are that are doing that, don't want him there. And one really good way to make sure that they get out in 2026 being a midterm year is to not let the markets rip. He needs those markets firing out. He needs the markets firing or that the Republicans could lose the midterms this year in 2026.

And so it could happen. and this is what I'm paying attention to, potentially using the markets, the Fed, the interest rates, the banks to bring the markets down into the midterms so that they could change the, you know, the power. And do you think if Trump does instill some person who's basically like a stooge in the Fed, that that kind of loss of whatever independence is there might spook the markets and make things a bit wonky? Well, so first of all, it's sort of like a misnomer.

Like, Trump can't just elect whoever he wants. but he will get what he wants. Well, what happens is the Fed governors give you, they give him the options to choose from. Yeah. So they're going to say, hey, freedom to choose, but here's a few people to choose from. So he doesn't just get a bring whoever he wants in. So they're not going to say, hey, you can choose a stooge. Like, they're going to have a curated selection. But to answer the independence question, I don't think the Fed has been independent, nor do I think the Fed should be independent.

Okay. Let's do that one at a time then. Because even if it hasn't been fully independent, which I probably agree with, it can get less independent. And I think it probably will do. Well, you and I would agree that we should not even have a Fed. Yeah, for sure. But like, the world we live in, we do. And like, Powell, as much as I think he's got things wrong over the last few years, like, he has done a relatively good job of not taking too much influence from Trump, I think. And like, if someone steps in, like, it's clearly not getting more independent at that point, if someone steps in who just wants to do whatever Trump says. So do you think the Trump, do you think the fed should just be totally independent?

I think it's better being independent than an army of the government. Do you not? I don't. Why? Because the government is supposed to be we, the people. But it's not. But it's supposed to be. Yeah. And so anything that we can do to get it closer to that is good. Anything that goes further from that is bad. So I understand that nothing is black and white. Things can be good and bad at the same time. things are spectrums. So things that get us closer to freedom, I'm for those, things that get me away from freedom. I'm against those. And so Trump has done many things that are anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, like taking

equity in Vindia, for example. That's a terrible idea. I'm not for that at all. But he's also been repealing regulations left and right, and I'm totally for that. So, like, we have to understand there's a lot of nuance here. So I don't think the Fed should be independent. I think that, well, one, we shouldn't have a Fed. Number two, it shouldn't be independent because we, the people should.

should have more control over that. I think the other thing is, and this is sort of a newer view that I've developed, and it was listening to Scott Besant, but when you understand, like, the economy and you understand where we're at right now and you understand, like, the shift in global energy and, like, the race to get AI, for example, you might agree that the country that comes out ahead with energy and AI is going to have a head start to the rest of the world. Yep. Right.

So you might agree that that's, it should be. be an imperative of most countries to try to keep up at least, right? And it's certainly between the US and China right now. But you would also then understand that we're going to have to build that capacity for that future world. In order to do that, we need energy. We need mining. We need refineries. We need data centers. Like, we need to bring chip manufacturing. Like, we need a lot. Yep. Okay. But that's a long-term vision. And maybe we need the central bank and the monetary policy. to help accommodate that. So maybe the monetary policy should help achieve the goals of the country for we, the people,

as opposed to be like, no, we just protect the private interests of the private bankers. And we're just trying to extract as much liquidity as we can and screw what the country does. But do you know, I think there's an issue with if the Fed was not independent, it consolidates even more power in the president. And it kind of, I don't think we have free markets in the world apart from Bitcoin. But it makes the markets even less. if that's the case. Because then it gets to really picking winners and losers.

The central bank should fall under executive action. And the president is the executive. Now, the reason why the creatures from Jekyll Island sold us on an independent bank is so that it wouldn't be swayed by four-year presidential cycles and they could take the longer view. Yep. Right? But in a wartime effort, like World War II, or in a time of reindustrialization, like right now,

maybe the monetary policy should help accommodate what the government needs to get done. But nothing so permanent as temporary measures. Yeah, I mean, obviously we both agree that it should just be disbanded. And we could argue at the end of the day that how much power does the Fed really even have? Because they can set Fed funds rate, but the bond vigilantes are going to set the price of the bonds. So what the Fed is going to do is they're going to, you know, use the banking system that they've created to manipulate the price and they'll buy the bonds down and they'll try to control that yield. That's anything but a free market. Yeah.

And so if we have a boom of liquidity, whatever happens with the Fed happens with the Fed, this is going to be a pretty good year for Bitcoin. I think, I mean, that's my base case. My base case is it's a good year for Bitcoin. I think we end the year higher than we started. I think we make new all-time highs. That's my above average base case. I think that, as you've had many conversations, the Fed has been in between a rock and a hard place for a long time,

but the space keeps getting tighter. The interest on the national debt has gone to levels that are just, they don't work any longer. And so we're at a situation where if they lower rates, potentially we have more inflation. And if they don't, then the banking system plumbing blows out. right but the problem is is that we started I think before we started recording we were talking with the fixed income markets and the fixed income markets are the largest

markets in the world right and you have I want to say 65 million retirees in the just to develop in the West alone we have 10,000 a day in the United States and they need fixed income they need income to pay for their medicine their rent etc but the problem is that what the government is forced to do right now is run an IMF white paper playbook called the liquidation of government debt, which is to liquidate the bondholders. And so we're in the situation where the government is forced to liquidate that debt. It's the only way out. And inflation on one side, destruction of the financial system on the other. You pick inflation. I think if people were given a

choice, would you rather your income gets cut in half, all the assets, your home, your stock account, everything gets cut in half, but gas prices come down 10 or 20 percent. Or your income goes up and all your assets go by 50 percent and gas goes up by 10 percent. Of course. Easy question. It's an easy question. Yeah. But it's easy for us. It's not so easy for people that have no assets. Yeah, but even them, like their job and their income is on the line. Because when deflation happens, businesses don't have as much income. Businesses shut down. You're a sales rep. You're not making as many sales as you were before. So it's like even for the savers, it hits them because their their incomes takes a hit. Yeah. So if we are like, if the four year cycle is over, which is why,

Danny, everyone needs to get off their income and run off their treasury. Because you can't outrun, your income can't outrun the inflation that's coming. You cannot increase your income fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation that's coming. Wages have not kept up and they won't keep up. The only way that it will is with your assets. So back to that hypothetical choice that people could be given, if I stop living off my revenue that will never run fast enough to keep up and start working off of, so like for example, maybe the cost of living goes up 10%, my weight is to go up 5%. But my assets won up 20%.

You're winning. If you stop trying to live off your revenue and start living off your assets. I did have another question, but that feels like the perfect place to end. Okay. Mark, thank you, Your Honor. Thank you for coming down to do this. pleasure i'm sure we'll do it again at some point soon yeah this has all been about the bitcoin cheat code are you going to finally come to cheat code this year i would love to you got to come whisper in peter's ear

for me i mean you can just come there's soared it's the end of march in bedford uh we'd love to have you there man yeah yeah i want to come awesome thank you for this mate that's been great thank you