What Bitcoin Did - The Commodity Shift, Credit Crisis & Bitcoin | Eric Yakes

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

"If there's going to be printing, it's going to be the hardest printing they've ever done. There isn't another option." Eric Yakes returns to break down the macro landscape as global debt hits historic levels, private credit shows real cracks, and the commodity shift accelerates under geopolitical fracture. Eric explains why the gold rally isn't about one event but a structural inflection point decades in the making, why private credit could be the next financial crisis and how the only path forward likely involves the hardest printing central banks have ever done. We also get into AI's second-order effects on startups and job markets, why the agent economy could be a major bridge to Bitcoin adoption, the death of proprietary software, the quantum narrative versus the actual threat, and why Bitcoin at $70K is deep value. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN CLUB ORANGE FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Eric Yakes: https://x.com/ericyakes

We're getting closer to an inflection point. There's no escape valve when it's globally coordinated. This is it. And the escape valve means it deflates. And it can't deflate. Or it's over. The commodity trend is an opting out of the credit game. If you can manipulate the paper, you can manipulate the allocation.

These crises happen when the reality departs from what's on paper. Then that'll cause like a panic. Are you saying you think this could be the start of the financial crisis? We've seen stressors. We've seen people pulling money out. wants to admit reality for systemic reasons. Someone's going to have to print the difference. Debt's everywhere. It's cracking in all these different areas.

If there's going to be printing, it's going to be the hardest printing they've ever done. There isn't much of another option. Nuclear options, aggression, fourth turning type vibes. Really what's happening is we're restructuring how we organize. Where are these technology investors in gold bugs going to be rotating once they feel like they're really getting to peak you for you? I think Bitcoin's a very strong answer for that. And everything about the thesis for Bitcoin is playing out perfectly.

I think it comes from Sovereigns next. I just think we're going to start seeing more and more headlines. Once Bitcoin gets into the $5 trillion market cap range, that could be the suddenly moment. It's a sweet background. The space, man. The space. This place is cool. It is cool.

This is the best Bitcoin. I don't want to say it, but it's up there. Like, I like the parking Nashville. Park's all right. Just been a Presidio. That's real nice. What makes us different. Well, we're a 6,000 square foot building.

And what's really cool about this organization is it was completely just like a bottom-up thing. It was our bit devs that got big. And we were like, what if we tried to get a place and everybody started pitching in work and pitching in money, built up a balance sheet, found this place, grew our member base large enough. And it's cool because everybody like contributes in all these different ways. And that's basically led to us having our own self-hosted website. site. Like we have a server running downstairs 24-7. We have our own forum running on it. We have a GPU rack for self-hosting AI models. So we can run our own LLMs here locally. Not cheap, but we have

like the technical expertise of our members to do that. And we heat the floors with Bitcoin miners. We have a hot tub in the back heated with Bitcoin miners. Yeah, that's cool. A bunch of shit that we've created. It's a nice hot tub too. I remember being in Nashville for their energy summit. And That was the first time I'd seen that. They had a hot tub there where it was like heated by miners. It was snowing. It was like the worst weather Nashville had had in years. And there's like a load of Bitcoin and sat in a hot tub outside the park.

It's kind of fucking awesome. But that one's nice. Yeah. This is like a full-blown real hot tub heated with Bitcoin miners. And we just like hang out in it in the middle of the day. We'll do a quick little dip. That's awesome. Do you know what's funny about like the Bitcoin spaces is they had like a real moment after COVID

where everyone was like migrating from New York and California. And it was like people were going to Austin and Nashville. And then it feels like. like people have slowly moved away back to like maybe where they were living before or whatever. Right. And with like traveling to make the show, it makes it a lot harder. Because it used to be like you'd go to Nashville and everyone lived in Nashville. But like now, like I've just done a day in L.A., day in San Francisco. I'm here for two days and I'm going somewhere else. Like I just need the Bitcoin communities to build out again. Well, it's funny from your perspective as a podcaster too, because how many other, like, how many other areas could you be a podcaster in and how

have a local community hub that exists in a city for the people that you're generally talking to. Yeah, I don't know. Like, if you're into tech, I guess you got the valley, like Silicon Valley. You have Silicon Valley, but it's like, if you go to New York and you're like, I want to, you know, interview ex people and that's where all the finance guys are. Yeah, yeah. But like, you could go to like a company, but there's not like community organizations. No, that's true. You know? Yeah. That's what's cool. It's just like, here's the place that all the people I want to interview are probably hanging out at anyways. Yeah. I think what Pubkey do is really cool. in the sense that they've got something else that's not just like co-working, hangout.

Like I think, do you think these are going to be sustainable long term? It depends. For us, and anybody listening, we need sponsors and donations. That always helps us. Are you for profit? No, so we've filed for our federal nonprofit status. We're expecting that to go through within a few months. That was the decision we chose because we were different.

Like, when we started this thing, you know, we, I, you know, we were just like, we want it to be cool. We don't, we don't care about it being, you know, some massive new thing. We, we want to have smart people working here and, like, big projects to come. But at the end of the day, we just wanted to be something that's like truly community member run. Yeah. That was a cool thing about it. Nobody controls it. And we reelect our board every year. So, like, that nonprofit, you know, bottom up, decentralized type approach to this, I think it's what makes us, like, different. The for-profit model is cool, too. I don't know if it's the most profitable for-profit model in the world. But it is a way that I think's been working for now. The way that we kind of viewed it is the

way that we run things around here, we just run things like a nonprofit. Because we did have that question. We're like, okay, if we were to go the for profit route with an organization like this, how did we do it? And the answer we quickly got to is like, how do we even divide up who owns this? And we're just like, I'm like, I never want to even go that direction. Because it's like the community earn it really. Right. It's just like, how much do I deserve? How much do you deserve? And we're kind of it's like that doesn't matter and the second that becomes a part of this it's going to ruin what we have yeah like we don't even want to have those conversations yeah it's um when i first heard about this before i'd come and i knew it was like you doing it and tyler and i was like this is just going to be like

a gross frat house yeah but it's actually really nice it's really nice it's really nice it's got a nice woman's touch in here yeah it's not like your house right it's not like where i live yeah where eric lives is basically just a mattress on the floor a really nice area around my mattress on the floor yeah it's a very nice house yeah um anyway man we should get into it uh the world's going fucking crazy right now it's going crazy what's your read on everything because i've been doing a lot of shows like i think the iran war has changed everything when it comes like macro stuff yeah um i just did a show with nick battea and he was like you kind of have to throw your models out and reassess the entire thing like how are you reassessing things now the i think one way i would guess i would push back on that

is i feel like uh you know i'm not sure exactly what nick said but like we've seen a lot of these variables with long-term. Like, if you go, but if we were to rewind back to like 2019 Bitcoin community, 2020, 2021 periods, kind of right in there. Under when, you know, the, when the Biden administration sanctioned Russia, you know, that's when everybody's like, okay, this whole multipolarity thesis that wasn't that popularized yet had existed within people that were very focused on geopolitics, wasn't that popularized.

But when Biden cut off Russia from the Swift system, then it was like every blogger in the world was like, okay, now we're fracturing into this multipolar world. Here's the implications of that. And the implications where people are going to own more commodities. So I think from that perspective, like high level broad strokes, what we're seeing today, what is it?

Fracturing multipolar world, people are buying more commodities. Like that's, so I don't think structurally a lot, of those things have changed. But yeah, obviously a lot's changed this year. The commodity shift, like with gold obviously being like the front runner of that, happened before this though. And like since this war kicked off, like the interesting part is that they're basically talking to Russia now being like, maybe you can come back in. Right. Was gold run up basically the market predicting this more chaotic time? Or do you think they're sort of separate events?

Yeah, it's interesting. to start I'll give a cop-out answer of saying that not a cop-out answer I just think the reality is like people always want to associate a micro market trend with a broader price okay what are you calling a micro market trend there so what I'm saying is that how do we attribute the gold rally to like one specific thing right it's a confluence of a lot of factors that have been driving this and I think it's the long-term trends where like let's let's go back further than this gold trend last let's go back to, you know, post-GFC. And we've seen like a structural increase in commodity ownership

across major sovereign entities globally since that point in time. We've seen a structural reduction in U.S. treasuries in a lot of different, you know, categories for FX settlement, different trading relationships, you know, reserve holdings. That's all been happening. It's a question of like what's kind of the inflection point for a lot of it. And then last year, we started to see a run-up in gold. And like most people say that that's attributed to like we've witnessed that central banks and, you know,

sovereigns around the world are buying more of it. So is it we predicted the war or is it that Trump is an aggressor? Yeah. In a lot of different ways. And people are predicting some thing, right? Exactly. People, so like, we can categorically assume some of these things by the political behavior that we're seeing from people. And I think that, you know, that's a lot of it. It's really just we're getting closer to an inflection point. And we want to own commodities. And that's, that's historically been the case, you know, when Zoltan Pozar was writing about this and he had all these viral posts going off when he was at Credit Suisse talking about some of these fracturing trends when we were having like supply chain shocks, et cetera, et cetera. You know,

that was the thesis, it remains today. I think that it's simply just getting more exacerbated at this point in time. So like the major structural trends happening this year, like we had the Japanese credit crisis right at the beginning, but when did that start? That started in 2024. So that was known information, right? People were like, okay, there's a regime change in Japan. Yep. We're not like this net buyer of, you know, we're not like the U.S.'s treasury bitch basically anymore. And that's what it always was, and that structurally changed their economy to where they were the largest holder of Treasury still are. But the relationship with like new demand has changed and they've been tapering that off.

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So if you're on there, drop me a DM and say hi. And if you want to find out more and download the app, just search for Club Orange on your app store or go to cluborange.org. Just from a total left curve take on the Japan stuff, the idea of the carry trade, which was, you know, worked for years and years and years, how can that happen? Like, how can that keep going forever? That doesn't seem, that seems like the market has to fill that gap at some point. Sure, sure. It's a question. And that's what happened with Japan.

Why did they shift? Inflation finally started to become persistently higher for them. And that was always the idea was that, like, I think where people go wrong is the look at an economy in isolation. And they'll say, like, okay, if this variable happens and we would expect this other variable to happen, you know, we would expect inflation to emerge if they keep just like printing and printing money. and buying up a bunch of assets with it and keeping interest rates artificially low. But it comes down to, that's just one variable. It comes down to what else's impact in this country?

Why would we have suppressed prices? And there's a lot of variables for like the type of economy they are, what their outputs are, where they can kind of export some of those characteristics that normally would happen domestically, now they're happening in a foreign way. So like I think like the left curve take on Japan is really just,

carry trade existed because inflation didn't react to this because of the nature of their economy. And because of that, they were the perfect person to be the U.S. Treasury buyer for a long period of time. And now that that's starting to shift, we are getting into this environment where it's like, okay, well, where is the demand for the Treasury's going to come from? And then when we start to see cracks in the market and we say, okay, well, what's, what's going to be happening next, and we start to see persistent inflation pressures on them as well, and we start to see,

you know, they're just as dependent on commodities as the US is. And that's not good for them in an inflationary environment. So this commodity shock that we're kind of witnessing from the war, the way that I kind of look at this in like a simple way is just there's like, there's like white-collar economies,

and then there's blue-collar economies. And the blue-collar economies are winning. for a lot of reasons other than like commodities are good. AI plays into that as well. And they're not subject to the same creative destruction that I think can emerge from some of that. So one of the things that I'm not quite sure of is what this around war means for the petrodollar.

Because like if you're talking about like buyers of treasuries, then that's one of the large buyers of treasuries right there. Maybe it's worth like explaining exactly what the petrodoll system is and if you think this will have an impact on that. Like do you think this is going to push people to start settling oil in, you know, Chinese one or whatever. Yeah. Petro dollar system is really simply put.

And I think it's helpful to understand it in a broader context of what was happening. But, you know, as the, when the U.S. kind of emerged post-World War I is like a de facto global hegemon for the dollar, but not de jure. Post-World War II, we were de jure. that period of time is one where the gold leaving England, coming to the U.S., making us much stronger, you know, a capitalist economy, technological innovation, rapid growth, all these variables that made us a very wealthy country. And then our currency gets more and more entrenched because we proved to be a dominant global military power. And people are like, okay, well,

you know, we kind of become this, you know, paternalistic state to take care of the world. And we came up with different ways where, you know, the fundamental trade is if you guys, we're going to have the strongest military in the world because we have the wealth, the capability, expertise, et cetera, to do this because of freedom and we built a capitalistic economy and we've protected property rights. Here we are. We're powerful now. We're going to protect all the trade routes. We're going to have the strongest. military in the world, in exchange, you guys conduct trade in our currency. Like, that's the broad trend. And then there's different ways that that has existed throughout the world. And a lot of

contract denomination happens outside of oil in the U.S. dollar in pretty much everything in a most dominant form. The question of how we measure that comes through different variables, like foreign exchange, trade volumes, contract denominations, credit market denominations. And then we've watched that kind of like structurally decline now that the largest you could argue in terms of trade is you know petroleum products and that fundamental commodity and then a lot of that's coming from and happening through the Middle East and we through the petro dollar have entrenched that system with an agreement with Saudi Arabia however many decades ago and say you know we're going to conduct trade in the US dollar and then the US says we're going to protect those routes and ensure that you know, OPEC, etc. is going to get the things I want to allow oil trade

to work for the world. And that's something that's good. It's deeply entrenched the dollar. I think that, you know, when we're fighting wars in the Middle East, it's ultimately to protect our interests within that system. And I think that's what's overlooked when people think about geopolitics.

you know, there's a really good book. I've mentioned this a few times. I think I mentioned it on this podcast before, but there's a really good book called Geopolitical Alpha by Marco Pappich, which is a great way of, like, getting a framework for how to, like, say, I'm an investor and I want to think about geopolitics

and apply it. What I think, in one of the kind of fallacies that I think a lot of people fall into, when they're discussing geopolitics, people always think in terms of what other countries want. And like, that's good. That's the first step. But, you know, you don't make decisions,

based off just what you want, I want a lot of things. It's what you can actually get. It's what you can actually get, which means what are you constrained by. And if you can understand what people want and what they're constrained by, then you have like a reasonable framework for trying to think through, okay, here's what actually could be happening here. And here's what we could expect other countries to be doing. And I think that, in Marco, he was one of the guys who, like, popularized this like

multipolarity concept within geopolitics. When we kind of apply this framework of like what different countries are constrained by and what the U.S. is constrained by, I think it becomes a little bit clear to people that we have some economies in the world that have been playing this commodity game for a period of time. And then we have some economies in the world who've been playing this credit game for a period of time. So the constraints to the U.S. is not really that like we don't. have enough guns, what's really hard is to point your guns at markets and say, make treasuries more valuable. You know, that's a constraint for us now. And I think that, you know, this, why is this a constraint for us? It's a constraint because, you know, as many people who listen to this podcast probably are well aware of, when Nixon repealed the gold standard in 1971, and we had the famous Nixon shock, and we went on to a Fiat denominated system.

And since we've had globally coordinated central banking policy that's expanded debt through governments, and more broadly in private systems as well, to the largest proportion against GDP it's been in history. So debt's at all-time highs, and for the first time, what's novel, we've had debt be very high before, proportional to GDP. But for the first time, it's globally coordinated.

It's universal. And that means that there's no escape valve when it's globally coordinated. This is it. And the escape valve means it deflates. And it can't deflate or it's over. And it can't deflate or it's over. And so that's what's really unique is you can play this game

where it's like before it's just like, okay, well, it can have an escape valve and the value can move somewhere else. But now it's just like, we're talking about the world here. So that's what's different. That's what makes it so much bigger. And it's similar to like, You can use a similar argument, however, for dollar dominance.

And I think that that's one of, like, when people are like, okay, well, you know, treasuries have to go bust, look at what the government's doing, look at our federal deficit spending, et cetera. The question's like, okay, well, if you think about it as like a simple market and you say, what's the demand for U.S. treasuries? Where do they exist? The reality is, is we haven't consumed that entire market. So if there were, say, for some reason,

some large potential buyer of treasuries, maybe it's somebody like a rush where we say, okay, we want to let you back in. And then that all of a sudden unlocks quite a bit more demand for our debt. Unless we've consumed that entire market. But would they ever come back in size knowing that at any point?

Probably not. They can just be shut off. Probably not. I don't know what the inflection point is, right? But what I'm saying is more that until we've consumed, like until the entire world owns U.S. Treasury, the system can expand around demand for it.

Like that variable still exists, which means that we can still export our own inflation to other countries. And like, so that's kind of like the other side, I guess, of it is that that isn't fully consumed at one dimension of it. But the reality of that everybody's kind of acting in accordance with this new system

that's highly levered, the most levered in history, you know, that hasn't gone away. So ever since we've kind of gone this direction, we've expanded credit to these levels. Now we're in a position where the only alternative for people is some sort of alternative system playing these credit games. And that's where the commodity trend is coming. The commodity trend is an opting out of the credit game.

and proportionately so. So, like, tying this back to gold running up last year, like structurally, that's what we're seeing is just a greater inflection point in people playing the commodity game. To be expected, you know, this has been talked about for decades. Everybody's just been waiting for what is the, when World War III, what's the inflection point?

When people get desperate, they have to do things like this. And we have to protect these types of systems. So there's nothing, I would say, that at a high level has been necessarily surprising. It's kind of been an eventuality is the way I viewed a lot of this. But maybe Trump sped that timeline up a little bit. Exactly. Trump can act as like a catalyst with a lot of this, and then there's arguments for, you know, how he's even able to handle some of it. But with the debt, like you're saying this is like a global issue now and there's no escape valve, like what options do they have? So if they, if the debt, if that all deflates, the system breaks down, it's

over. Yeah. They can try and grow their way out of debt. Maybe AI is a catalyst in that. Or I guess they can inflate away the debt. Are they basically the only options they have? So because defaulting on it, the game's over as well, right? Yeah, 100%. It's like defaulting is just like, they're, they're playing a game where, you know, the costs to what they're doing. aren't their own. So that means that it's like, you know, it's like you're playing a video game and your character dies and like you don't die. Like that's kind of the game they're playing. Where so you take that to the end, you know, you're going to take as much risk with that character as you want for the most part. And like obviously it impacts you because you lose the game and you

don't want that. But I think because there's a misalignment of the consequences of their decision making, that that that will ultimately lead them to taking on, you know, as much risk as possible to try to beat the game, basically. Do you put any real probability on them actually being able to grow themselves out of this debt? Yeah. Okay. So I guess, let's get into the AI question. So, but before that, I think, like, to recap, it's just like, you know, U.S., Japan, and then Iran, and then credit for fracturing that's stemming from all of this. We think about all the credit that exists. We think about consumer credit. We think about job losses. This ties into the AI piece.

You know, the job loss report in like February of like $90,000 or whatever it was. That was big. The block announcement. That surprised me. I was of the mindset that when that announcement happened, that we would start seeing this in about a year. So to be fair, and I think this is one of those, well, actually. But, like, I think their head count was huge. I think it was probably this was, like, an excuse to cut head count. Although, I think it also very clearly shows the trend. I think there's kind of, there's two sides of that story. Yeah. I, well, the reason I think that I agree that there's, like, the actually, like, they were bloated on head count type argument. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Like, I think it is a little tricky to totally say,

but regardless, like. It's quite a positive spin to put on it for the market, that you're actually getting rid of these people. Exactly my point. Exactly my point. It's a positive spin for the mark. Everybody's, everybody's saying, you got Mark Andreessen running around like, oh no, we're not eliminating jobs. We're eliminating tasks. Yeah. It's like, no, look at the numbers. And they're just going to get worse. Like, because jobs emerge as contracts. And employers don't care as much. Like employers want to eliminate contracts

because contracts cost money. Yeah. And I don't see how we argue against that. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of people talking out of both sides of their mouth on this. But the interesting piece of that is that like for every company now in Silicon Valley that's like, shit, our head counts too high, this is costing us a fortune. They can now do it in a way that will probably bump their share price. They can be like, we're getting rid of these people, not because we're struggling, but because of AI bro. Totally. Yeah, AI bro. And then we're AI native.

That's all price goes out. Yeah. Exactly. And like, so like that job loss is trying to scary. That's a huge question mark for people right now, I think. And then we had like the private credit crash as well alongside this. Yep. And like that, I think is, that's another huge question mark. I'd say like AI, huge question mark, private credit, huge question mark. And the reason private credit's a huge question mark is it's a very

easy thing for people to point their fingers at. Like it's a very, because if there's not that much information on something, then it means it's not a complex topic for people to understand. So it's easy for people to say, ooh, look at that. Because it's just like, oh, there's not a lot of transparency in that market. It's like, you know, people estimate it's a shadow banking mark. So like people are estimating size around like two to three trillion of this thing. 20% of that market is like publicly filed report earnings. And then like 10% of that is like actual like publicly traded liquid. So the rest of the market is just like a private black box.

Like you know, us big venture capital fund, we have an LP base who's aware of the investments we're making. We report our portfolio companies on our website, but if we didn't do that, nobody knows. You don't have to be an investor to know our information. So like the intelligent investor, the guy who has the best perspective in private credit, is the guy who's invested in every private credit fund in the country and gets reports from all these guys.

Yeah. Maybe that guy exists. But it's really hard to actually know what's going on. That said, people draw parallels to GFC and they say, well, look at this. Here's markdowns and certain assets. how big are these category of assets is there more. It's a very easy thing in the same way that private credit has persistently expanded,

as long as it has, like, you know, I remember five years ago when I would, you know, for like fundraising for venture capital fund, we go to the Tradfibro type things. And I'm at an RAA summit and all these guys are just like large RAs managing, um, on behalf of, you know, high net worth and institutional type clients. And, um, private credit, private credit, private credit. It's free money, you know, 11 to 14%, it's like no risk. There's this really funny post from Chimath last year,

basically saying that about private credit. He's full of good takes. He's just always. He's the canary and the coal mine on everything. And it was basically that. It was as a bunch of people hopping on stage, like, we're getting our clients private credit. You know, and like that's been persisting and persisting.

And like, I remember being at that summit back in like 2020 and be like, oh, God, you know, because it's all these people talk about. And it just becomes like this huge narrative. The reality is, is we can't look into, to like Michael Burry and the big short, right, he was able to pull a bunch of mortgage value. And like these guys, you got to go run around

and look at these homes and talk to people. And that gives you enough of a sense of like, oh, these things are trash. That's hard to do in private credit because it's everywhere. You know, credit is everywhere. What's the different types? Who owns what? There's definitely very large categories

that we can look into, but it's not all publicly reported. So for the same reason it can persist for a long time is the same reason people can get scared very easily about it. Because they look at this, like, okay, these guys just gated their fund. That's bad. These guys are changing credit terms here.

Oh, they just marked that one to zero. Like, there's a bunch of things that are going to be, that's bad. But to be like, oh, private credit's going to completely collapse. Still going to be hard to say. So it could be very much bank run type mechanics just because everybody gets fearful, which is why the narrative needs to be managed publicly. So there's a ton of pressure on people to make sure that they're not causing fear about it. But in any event, that's a question mark is kind of how I view it.

It could very much be another financial crisis, but nobody just really knows. We can look at like 20% of the market and start making bets on a few things based off that. I did a show with Jeff Snyder recently, and he was talking about this private credit issue. And he was saying that he's not sure. But there's like there is just maybe small signs that this could escalate into being like an actual financial crisis. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, gating funds, the amount of write downs that they've had, like, these are serious numbers. It's intuitive to people who have looked at this market.

And like, I think when you're on the inside talking to a lot of people that allocate to these things, like when you talk to financial allocators, these are guys who are working with the person who has a lot of money directly and they're saying, we're going to allocate you X percentage into venture capital, X percentage into head funds, X percentage into the stock market. and they kind of form financial opinions on a lot of things. I think I kind of have a bit of a thesis that financial crises are driven by allocators just because they have a very bird's eye view of everything, enough to think they know about them and enough to also completely not understand all the categories that they're allocating into.

But their actions can spark something. But their actions are actually consequential in terms of what gets allocated to. These are the people at the summit who are all pushing all their money in private credit. because these people rely on paper. They rely on what's on paper because they don't, one, have the expertise

to go look under the hood, too, have the time to go look under the hood. And the games, the guys who are like, a guy running a private credit fund who's taking on a lot of risk, how is he thinking about things? He's like, well, you know, I'm going to get my probably like one in ten

type terms on my fund and I want to raise and I don't report good numbers to these people because that means more money comes in the door. historically speaking, you know, we've been able to manage this like open-ended fund or closed-ended fund at, you know, or open-ended funds that like, you know, 10% of the flow will ever withdraw. So as long as we can stay pretty liquid on some of our investments for that, I'm just like printing money on my 1% fee and then, you know, we'll make some money on the carry-up side.

But, like, they're not thinking in terms of, am I starting a financial crisis and taking on too much risk, they're thinking in terms of, I want to have a big fund where I make a lot of money. A lot of guys are thinking this way. And so I think that the managers, if they see good paper, and they do their due diligence, but they don't know about these actual investments. And all they see is on paper if some of these mortgages look good or some of these business loans look good, that that's good. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured

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loans with all collateral held by Leiden directly or their funding partners. Your Bitcoin's never lent out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Leiden. The whole process was super easy. The application took me less than 15 minutes and in a few hours I had the dollars in my account. It was super smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to leaden.io forward slash WBD and you'll get 0.25% off your first loan. That's L-E-DN.I-O forward slash WBD. But my question there would be like, so I understand their incentive is they want to make money on their fund. And to do that, they have to bring in more capital, they have to invest more capital. But when does the investments that they're making go from being investments to

sort of malinvestments? Yeah. Like what changes that? When there's a phone call one day that I can't pay. Like it's, it is the, when you, when you think about any sort of transaction, like we invest in startups. We do due diligence. When we make an investment, you know, when you invest in a founder, three months into it, you figure out reality, you know, after the investment. You get a lot of closer like okay here's some of like the skeletons in the closet here's some of the major problems that's just the reality of any investment due diligence is a really hard thing unless you're incredibly patient um i think the only way to really be incredibly patient and do it is to be incredibly rich um those are the guys you can sit they don't have to do a deal they can sit around

they don't have to make a living they can sit around and then they just like sit there get to know people learn about situations and then like when a home run just emerges out and over it's like let's go do that. I think for everybody else there's more of a, you know, there's a need to allocate capital. And I think from that perspective, it changes some of the incentives. Like, due diligence is just something where you're never going to get

everything. And when you don't have as much of an incentive, because the check that you're receiving doesn't care as much, they just care about certain things on paper. If you say they're good loans and they're good loans and they look at some credit rating agencies, we've seen the perverse incentives that exist

within credit rating agencies, if you can manipulate the paper, you can manipulate the allocation. That's kind of what it comes down to. And then these crises happen when the reality departs from what's on paper. And there's always very few people actually doing that due diligence. That's what like Michael Berry was doing is actually trying to figure out, how do I match paper with reality? And nobody's going to be able to do all of that within private credit.

But if enough people get fearful and spooked, and like if that 20% of the publicly reported market really does go into like, you know, 45% withdrawals on, like, like a major black rock or blackstone fund within that area, then that'll cause like a panic. So I don't know what you're saying here. Are you saying you think this could be the start of the financial crisis? Certainly.

What I'm saying is that there's some sort of, like, I'm saying a bunch of hand-wavy bullshit because that's all you can say. Like, all you can say right now, because we don't have enough in the numbers, is that we've seen stressors. We've seen people pulling money out. We've seen increasing credit terms on things. where like the arguments, it's called like with credits,

either you're in like a covenant light type situation where there's not a lot of restrictions on the credit. Like that's one of the arguments people say about private credit. It's true of a lot of things in credit. Since I was, you know, a budding analyst coming out of college, people have been talking about the covenant light environment within credit and things have been going up since then.

But nonetheless, it is true. And then they start like changing the terms on these things where people aren't paying back. There's something called like a pick up, note, a payment and kind note. And that means you have an option instead of paying your debt in cash, you can pay it with more debt. Okay.

And there's like things like that are increasing. So there's all these little variables we're looking at that basically say people don't have the money and people aren't able to get their money out as easily from these funds and they're marking some of the loans down. But like during the great financial crisis, like that was the problem if you kind of remember in the big short when like Steve Corral. is, you know, like, what the hell? This whole thing's crumbling,

and these things are staying marked to market, or they're not being marked to market right now. They're saying this thing's worth like 90 cents on the dollars. This thing's not worth anything. And like, that's what we're going to see on paper is like nobody wants to do this because the more- No one wants to admit the reality of it. Nobody wants to admit reality for systemic reasons, too.

So this started with, like, how can these countries around the world grow themselves out of debt? Is what you're saying here, if this is the case, then not only can they not grow themselves out, but debt's going to increase because someone's going to have to print the difference. Yeah, it's just like somebody's going to have to print the difference. I think that it's more important to understand that,

like, the high level things are easy. It's to the broader points I was making. Debt's everywhere. It's cracking in all these different areas. We're looking at different pockets of it and trying to see where it's cracking earliest. Multiple variables combined is usually what creates, like, structural drawdowns. We can see it at a geopolitical level

that there's inflationary things happen. which puts us in a very tight position as it relates to Fed policy going forward, because if we have to tighten under an inflationary environment, it's a precise opposite thing that we'll need when credit is contracting. A hard place in Iraq, they're going to print. I think we all know that. I think we prove that in 2020, and there's really no other option that they're going to have through some of it.

So that's what the white-collar economies are going to have to do because of their exposure to debt. and then the commodity-based economies are going to be, you know, growing a lot of wealth. So the movement from credit to commodities is the huge structural shift for everyone. That's the trade. So it seems like we're in a hell of a predicament where if the private credit market is breaking down, if inflation is ramping up again because of like oil prices, which an oil is an input to almost everything in the economy.

Yeah. And alongside that, we've got like the geopolitical uncertainty of what's happening in the world, like Trump throwing wildcards out, left, right and center. Like, do you think we have a big print this year? So here's the argument against.

Give me the argument for first. I mean, we've just done it on the private credit side, but do you think that is the sort of, is that your base case? I think that when we look at, like, the, I think if we look at job losses and consumer leverage, like, if you go look at the, like, consumer credit chart on Fred, type consumer credit Fred, and then type per capita after two.

Whether you look at it in absolute terms or per capita, it's just, it's crazy. So everybody has more debt than ever. Because no one owned anything. And everybody's getting laid off. And everybody in the U.S. is like, you know, generally speaking, some sort of like email job. And those are worthless. And they've been worthless for a long. I've thought they're worthless for a long time. It's just credit makes it easy for companies to let those exist. But with AI, it's just way more obvious how worthless

they are. The labor market is going to change everything. And that's just why was Powell kind of holding out, I think, on a lot of the tightening, was because he was following a lot of what was happening in the labor market.

And I think he was saying that the labor market's really strong. And I think that all changes. So, we have the consumer, we have private credit, we have geopolitical tensions that are inflationary. So that creates a balance. It creates, if there's going to be printing, it's going to be the hardest printing they've ever done. But nonetheless, there isn't much of another option. And, you know, nuclear options, aggression, fourth turning type vibes or things that I think come from being in a hard place in Iraq. That's the stage. The thing that saves us, the thing that,

you know, Scott Bessett was saying about when we're announcing, you know, an increase on deficit spending with the Trump administration, you know, last year was like, we're going to grow our way out of it. Yep. It was cool. I really like him. He's definitely small. Yeah, yeah, he's smart.

You'll say shit like that. And he, you know, threatens to punch people in the face. Like, it's so funny. Yeah, my guy, dude. He's just like another dude, you know, trying to. manage the most indebted country in the world. But, like, I don't feel like we've got into how they would possibly grow the way out of it. I know.

I keep dancing around it. It's AI. Yeah. Like, I know they want to bring a load of production back to the US. Maybe that will happen. And that's, I guess, more blue-collar jobs, which won't be taken by AI as quickly. But is AI the only way out of this? It depends on what happens with productivity.

We don't, because, like, what we don't understand yet are the second-order effects of AI. And I think people are framing a lot of those. in a negative sense because it's easy, like everybody's very, I feel like everybody's been very, or at least from the commentary I've seen, like, egocentric about their perspective on AI where- In what way?

From the perspective, we think about it in terms of like, will AI take over humans and like, will we be controlled by AI? And people talking about that, I think from more of like a macro perspective, or not macro perspective, I think a pragmatic view of it is that we kind of know,

I have a different case, which we can get into at the end. It's not as important of what intelligence might actually be and what it means when an AI is actually, like, you know, going to be conscious or something to us. But putting all that aside, it's just like, okay, we know AI is increasing. We know the rate's going to increase significantly more. We know the smarter it gets, the smarter it can increase its improvement because we're developing it through it now.

So like anything that's software. AI is building the next AI. AI is building the next AI. That's an exponential growth curve. Yeah. So that's like, whoa. and everybody's freaked out. And I don't know if it's as much of a cause

to be freaked out as much as, like, what I'm trying to think about is what's a second order impact on industry? It's not just like, okay, people get laid off, but it's what changes in the cost structure of things. How are we going, because really what's happening is we're restructuring how we organize. Like, if we look at, from the inception of like the corporation

to like these very old, century old forms of construction and property, right so we've had amongst people. That's changing. That's the thing where we're saying, can I start a business as a single person now and run it and become wealthy doing that? What's my cost structure?

I mean, we see it as a venture fund all the time. We talk to our founders and we're talking about raises. It's very like practical, tangible things where they're saying we're doing this raise where we initially wanted to allocate, you know, X percentage of the proceeds towards multiple developer hires, we don't need those anymore. Startups are just one of the most efficient things

that you could be looking at. It's very easy. The cost is so much lower so that there could be a new model emerging for the individual to be an entrepreneur. And then we're witnessing how people organize around that. So people are like, okay, well, if I'm going to run it myself and you see all these posts going viral of like AI slop about how to use AI, people saying, here's how you prompt best.

But there are really valuable things in all of this because now the skill set is changing to, how do I get the outputs using the English language from this LLM model? I just did a show with Jesse Posner on this yesterday from Vora. And he said something really interesting there as well, where he was basically saying, the developers we have today are not going to do people that are good at vibe coding. Yeah. Because it's all about language now. Right.

And he thinks it's like the philosophers that are going to have the next leg, basically. Totally. Yeah. People who are strong linguists, I think, is, that's it. That's an interesting take. Because semantics now matter encoding. Totally, totally. I think with, yeah, it's interesting how much,

yeah, semantics matter encoding because semantics are inherent to the training. That's interesting. And that makes a ton of sense, right? So there's knock on effects like that that we're going to be looking at. How many English majors that were like, you know, starving artists working as a barista at a coffee shop, maybe they're going to be exceptional vibe coders, you know, things like that.

That's a second order effect. What happens to startups? Like when we look at it, the way I see it now is that the marginal cost, any sort of industry, you want to go start anything. There is some sort of upfront cost that it takes you to do that. I've got to hire these people, got to raise this amount of money. Some are much easier than others. At one end of the spectrum, you just have like, you know, starting up a services business. You do consulting.

I just go talk to people if they like my advice. They pay me money. You know, not a lot of fixed startup costs. The other end of the spectrum, you have something like starting like a bank where you got to go spend millions of dollars to get a federal charter to even begin to play in the game. And a million other things you got to worry about. The fixed cost to participate in something is kind of, you know, at a aggregate level dropping off a cliff. And for businesses within software, it's completely dropping off a cliff. So much so that it may not even be a business anymore because individuals can create that.

in the same way that, you know, you don't have a service for, you know, cleaning because it's so easy for you to clean or something. You know, there's all these different things that we do every day. And like, that's kind of what software is becoming is something that we, it's going to become so simple. We may not even need to outsource it. So that trend has so many knock on implications for other industries and people and how we structure and organize. And I think what's really interesting for us is, you know, how we've been looking at, you know, know, AI as it relates to founders for having a playbook of different hierarchies and structures. We're in the experimentation phase with all that this year. I think next year it's going to be a lot more tangible. I'm not letting you get away without answering how we grow our way out of debt, because I think you've just done some of the groundwork for it. But like, what has to happen?

What has to happen is that the cost of things and the pro, so, okay, let me, let me make it simple. So we need to have some sort of, you know, exponential increase in productivity and wealth. Meaning that, so you have like a Cobb Douglas production function, that's your, you know, macro economics 101 productivity within an economy. and that has the, you know, amount of capital in the economy, the amount of labor, the changes and growth within those times technological productivity. And when labor times, labor and capital times technological productivity is this variable that is like from the macro, you know, astrologer economist types is just like a plug. It's just to say like, here's what the output was.

we know that labor and capital we estimate around here. Okay, so technological productivity must be this variable to get our output to this. So it's just like that's kind of how we'll like think about growth within an economy. And I think so it's that technological productivity variable is where we say, okay, the multiplier of the technology we use means that for any hour I spend trying to accomplish a task, technology allows me to do it much more quickly. That's obvious to all of us for a million different things that we do.

And the greater that increases, the more it multiplies our economic growth. And that question means... Because less capitaling gives you more output because of technological deflation. Yes, exactly. Yeah, less could mean more, depending on what the variable is.

But like all else equal, increase it, the same amount equals more. Okay. So the same amount of labor and capital will create more output. Yep. And in that view, I think what it means is that if we think about it for how did the US grow

in the first place in terms of, you know, us protecting property rights and extracting native commodity resources that we have and, you know, building engineering and capital around that, there's all these different industries that we grew very rapidly and then moving into the you know age of technology we've been the preeminent power in the world so much so that we created

far more competitive industries in the US that have you know effectively drained human capital from all the other countries you know where do the smart wealthy send their kids from China to the US to go to our top schools or Cambridge Oxford yeah US is probably a bit better is a thing but but you You know what I mean? Like there's so much brain drain into these economies. And for a period of time, it was Wall Street. And then tech showed up and then now it's tech.

And we've just been a world leader within those categories. So what's the impact on our GDP from all of that? That's the question. When we have companies like meta, et cetera, all growing here, it's a major impact on our GDP. So for US, like we have this AI arms race right now, if there were, and maybe there won't, But if there were a very dominant U.S. AI provider globally,

then that means a massive amount of a wealth will accrue within the U.S. because everybody's going to use it for the AI needs. So let's assume that we end up in an oligopolistic market for AI. And two of the four most dominant providers are in the U.S. And they control 70% of the market. Then the wealth productivity that accrues to us, and that means ultimately the tax receipts to pay off the deficit. Let's say it doubles GDP, doubles tax receipts, all of this,

changes the calculus of our deficit. All of a sudden, we have a little bit more wiggle room than we did before. And what does that mean in terms, if we do have some sort of increase in productivity like that, what does it mean? Well, I see a bunch of businesses right now. Well, sure, people are getting laid off. But what does it mean?

It means their cost structures are going down. So if we were to assume that the, operating costs of every business in the U.S. is roughly like 20% of their capital structure for small business, maybe 30%, then what happens if that requires 10% of what it needed before? How much more profit margin does everybody have now? What does that mean in terms of how much cheaper they can now sell you goods for? Yeah, see, this is where I struggle. And I don't like being a duma. I don't feel like I'm a very duma person. Yeah, you need to be more positive. I can't see how there's not a really tricky interim period in this.

Oh, it's going to be horrible. Because let's say GDP is going up rapidly because of all this boosting productivity. But at the same time, there's huge job losses because AI is replacing people. And companies getting way more efficient, selling products cheaper, making the same profit. Those two things can happen at the same time. And if you have a massive layoff in jobs, people don't own their homes. They don't own their cars. they don't own, like they have credit card debt.

If people start defaulting on all that debt, then you go into financial crisis. And it doesn't need to be that many people. Totally. So like how do you get through that interim step? Well, let's simplify the model down a little bit and like take a lot of the terms out of it. What happens when you have one group of people

controlling a valuable resource that's going up rapidly and valuable? And then you have other people whose resource they control is dropping off a cliff in value. They end up working for the people that, are going up in value. But they're not hiring. Maybe. I don't know.

But it could lead to a UBI situation. There's not an argument against it. I get told off this in the comments being like, why are you pro UBI? I'm not pro UBI in any way. I don't see what other option they're going to have. It could be far too drastic. I think the problem with like structural changes is,

I think that the reality is is that AI is going to change a lot of things. But for you, if I'm a 45-year-old white, collar guy who has a job in marketing at a company and my job's gone. What am I going to do? And people say you'll retrain. You'll learn to use AI. Like bullshit. Well, you can learn to use AI. But there's a bunch of other things you can do. You could literally go to a trade school and literally be a plumber. Yeah. South Park already did an episode on this like five years ago of like all the like white collar guys like working for the plumbers and stuff. And like it and like, you There's tons of things like that that will happen.

I think there, but there's, there's plenty of jobs to exist. It's weird, though, because like, what does, like, I think if you, if you're a plumber right now, you've picked a great career. And I think it's awesome. But, like, do you think that, like, lawyers are going to want to become plumbers? Oh, they're not going to want it. I don't think any of those happens because they want it. So what does that do to society, like, as a, as a whole?

I think a good bet on some of this is to, like, get really long, you know, exposure to like alcohol and things like that. Exactly. Yeah. This is like, I totally agree. Yeah. It'll be like, it's an economy of despair. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a lot of, I'm not saying that there's not going to be massive structural shifts and things won't change. But the reality is, is like people adapt. And like people will learn need skills. So there's retraining. There's also learning AI.

And then you pair that with how much cheaper things are going to be able to be produced with. I mean, the second we do get a robotics, once we crack robots, products pretty efficiently. Which is probably not very far away. It's not that far away. That's when cost drop off a cliff. That's when it becomes, that's when being a plumber doesn't even work anymore.

There's going to be a lot of, yeah, there's going to be a lot. And then that's when we get to a state where it's just like, okay, most like things just become so cheap. It's very easy. There's going to be this handful of things that, you know, AI still can't do. And it's probably just going to be a question of like who wants to, some of those are going to be commoditized. Some of those might not be.

I think of the commoditized ones, it's just a question of who feels like putting in the time to do it. And it's kind of like, yeah, I want a little bit extra money, but everything's so damn cheap. But if I get a little bit extra money, I could go to this thing. Yeah, I'll put it in the time into the commoditized thing. And the non-comodotized is going to be more like highly academic things

that people, you know, you're not getting out of school until you're like 35. Because if I asked you, in 10 years, do you think you'll have like an AI robot guy in your house? As much as I would think, I don't know. I still drive cars from the 90s, and I love them. Okay, do you think more than 50% of Americans will? Yeah, if it's economic. I view it as something that's probably

just because there's such a materials cost to it, it's probably something that's just not going to be economic for a lot. Like, I think it'll be possible to have good robots. I think it's not going to be that economic and widespread to have robots for people for a period of time. Okay. Because of materials cost is high. Whereas like with LLM, it's compute.

that's the expensive part, but it's, you know, just software really is what you're buying. Because my question really is, like, if you do get to that point, and that AI robot in your house can do the plumbing for you, it just needs to download from the mothership. Like, at that point, what jobs are left in the economy? I agree. And I guess the point is, like, because that's all speculation, the point is, if you assume that happens at some point in the future, how does Fiat move from the system that we live in today to that system? Can it survive that change? I don't, I don't think so. I don't think this is, okay, so yeah, let's like tie this to Bitcoin.

So, no, I don't think a persistent, like, I think that it can delay. I think it can delay fiat. I think the major exponential trend that we're going to witness from this as it relates to Bitcoin is as this, you know, as this economy restructures, as the, like the order of an organization is completely changed, the scale of it, the flatness of it, the volume of it, like as all of these characteristics fundamentally change.

And we have an economy where decisions are being made by non-people. And I think that, you know, people have talked about this ad nauseum, right? And this was something that's been around for a long time where people are talking about, what about Bitcoin payments with AI? and is this an inflection point that you pair this with the whole macro environment

we talked about at the beginning of this, it makes a lot of sense of people to use Bitcoin. Now, I think when this first, there's two things. I'll give my devil's advocate take and then where I kind of think now, but when this narrative first started emerging,

people like, AI is going to use Bitcoin's best money for AI. You know, I was just like, well, bullshit. Like, the reality is that like these LLMs aren't decision makers, they are trained. They'll use whatever you tell them to use. They'll use, yeah, yeah. So, and that's, I was kind of alluding to this earlier of like my take on like what will be intelligence for AI.

I think the reality is, is like, because this is important because it decides what is a true decision or not. To say that when you work with an LLM, I think it, it kind of ironically teaches you more about how people work. When you think about what's the memory context window I'm dealing with with a person. and very real thing. I've noticed it as I've gotten older. I feel like I just have like the memory of a fish.

You know, like, I'll like, whenever, because you get an avopilot more and I'll, like, go into my room and I'll be like, what the hell did I go in here to get? And then I have to, you know, when I was younger, I didn't do that as much. So, like, my memory context window, or I don't know, like, there's things, my gray matter is not as prevalent as it was when I was 25.

Like, I was smarter at 25 fundamentally. I was less experienced and knowledgeable, but my, like, engine was a bit faster. I think that, and you kind of think about how people work more, and you realize like, oh, this structure of an LLM, and then you think about training. And you're like, okay, well, there's this like training in the model that makes it like no matter what produces outbooks.

That's basically what your genetics are. Like your genetics are just like these kind of like unchangeable things that are like hardwired into you. But you can provide a context that makes it respond differently in different situations. And like when people started creating these open claw instances, it was kind of like you're raising a kid. And you're just like, for sure.

Things I say to it and the first like few things in the context window and what it, what I ask it to do, all these things have either direct or indirect impacts on how I build this. Like a genius teenager that's not great making decisions. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, and you have to like give it all the right

and you have to give it a ton of context. You have to teach it all these things. It's like you're raising a kid. So it has this genetics. That's the model you're plugging into. And then you gotta raise it right. And then once it kind of gets is when you're kind of dealing with this.

So like we're kind of learning all that and it's cool because it does seem very human-like. But I think to truly like the missing piece, to truly have independent decision-making from these to where they would, you know, when people are scared about this like AI future of control, is they need to have an incentive. And I don't think that they have a true fundamental incentive yet.

People are like, AI says that it wants to be a person. It's just like, well, AI just is repeating an average of things that it's talked about. But a true incentive would be if there is a way, and this is like, you know, call it wherever, but the fact that we naturally have a nervous system that produces pain and pleasure, that makes us human. That makes us say, this is good, this is bad. And we behave in ways that exist from that reward mechanism.

So if we can produce, you know, some sort of whether it's directly that or something akin to that in decision-making, and then, you know, and it's consuming its own data in the real world, like, we do and not just the data that's being force fed to it. Now we're talking about an independent person, basically, with its own motivations that are determined by pain and pleasure systems. So will that come? Yeah. But I'm not too concerned about any of that happening near term. And then to tie this back to what money is it going to use, it's going to use the money that's most practical for the people that are leveraging the agents for what they use. And I think that, I don't think that's a bad thing for Bitcoin.

I think that stable coins are very obvious. And like all the VCs are like stable coins and money of AI, stable coins of AI, because we own stable coin companies. And obviously it's true that it is in a lot of different ways.

But it's, when we pair this with the global geopolitical environment that we've been talking about this whole episode, and we say fractured system, people want to use commodities, et cetera, It's like, okay, and then why would large-scale institutions, whether it's through AI or themselves directly, want to use money that can be blacklisted and censored?

We basically, like, that's what Tether is. Tether is something that gets blacklisted and censored. And that isn't solving a very, like, very important problem for international money transfer. Because it isn't final settlement. a stable coin is not final settlement. It's settlement of receipt that is effectively backed by the reserves of a company like Tether, which are, you know, holdings in U.S. cash and cash equivalents and gold in Bitcoin, which is sweet.

But nonetheless, like that is not a revolutionary system. That's not something where if I'm trying to operate independently within an economy, whether I'm a large-scale sovereign that has a conflict of interest with the, US or if I'm, you know, an individual person who wants to freely conduct what I'm doing, that's not valuable. On top of that, I, I'm expecting that, and I think it'll take a long time, I'm expecting that there's going to be like a credential layer that starts getting added to stable coins. And like, that's what makes people want to use stable coins in Bitcoin today when they're

with an agent is it doesn't require credentials. And I was making this point on X that any sort of system that doesn't require credentials is the agent type of system. Yeah. Because when you go play with these agents, you're like, oh, damn it. Like, I got to go get an email to use this shit. Like, what's the thing where I don't have to get an email and I don't have to have all these credentials just to use a software app? And whether, if that doesn't exist today, there's going to be a whole economy of it that does eventually. And we're starting to already see that happen. And it's happening at a rapid pace. So there's like an agent economy emerging that doesn't require credentials. That is an

interesting case for Noster. Totally. And that's what's really cool about Nostr. is I think that the non-credentialed version of pseudonyms. You just give them a public-private key pair and off you go. Boom, it's easy. And there's all these other startups being like, here, let's use these old, like, email-based protocol systems to, like, conduct this. And just like, dude, the systems, it's fundamentally better.

It's flatter. It's simpler. It allows agents to operate in a certain way. So that could be, I remember when Dorsey was making the point about Noster after it took off. He's like, look, it's a hobbyist thing that we care about today. I believe there's some sort of use case coming. I don't know what it is,

but there will be some sort of use case coming. It's like, this could be it. This could be it. That would be super cool. So the hard thing is like whenever you talk to like your AI, whichever LME use, like it knows about you. So like mine knows that I'm into Bitcoin because I talk to about it all the time. So if I ask it to try and give me like an unbiased take on what the best form of money is, it's probably going to come back with Bitcoin. But I know BPI just had a report on this and it was saying like AI overwhelmingly picks Bitcoin as the sort of preferred choice of money.

Yeah. If you asked a completely unbiased, clean slate, LLM, that question, is that an inevitable answer? Because, like, they can't pick gold. They can't use gold. Like, it has to be something digital. And Bitcoin, obviously, in our opinion, and I think the facts are on our side is the best form of money. I think the one problem, the one reason that I think in an unbiased way that you would want to use something like a stable coin is just simply acceptability. Like that's that's the number one reason that and that's that's the best problem to have like that we all own a stake in Bitcoin

and we benefit from it growing. I love the fact that we're early to Bitcoin. I love the fact that it's not as accepted yet because that gives me the ability to invest in more people that will accept it over time. That's the edge. That's that's the edge. So that's it's the best possible problem. I think the last time I was on this podcast, you know, I was making the point. It's like it's like it's like, you know, being able to invest in LeBron James' career when he was in high school, you know, which is like everything else is there. All the fundamentals, all the characteristics you want. It's just early and young. So that's ideal, but it does make it, I think, a less desirable form of money for an AI today.

And that's fine. Let them, let's get everything set up on stable coin rails. And then all of a sudden we have an entire economy running on stable coin rails that everybody wants to use because everybody wants to use agents for everything. So we're going to watch this whole shift into commerce happening through that type of economy And guess what it's using? It's using payments where you are producing a signature. You're producing a signature that's verifying your digital address.

You're using digital signatures to sign payments. That's like, that's the rail. That's the new economy. Sure, it's some sort of stable coin that's issued on a bunch of different types of blockchains. But the reality is, we're getting everybody away from taking a credit card and typing the number of the credit card in to digital signature button. And that means that it is this easy to start paying in Bitcoin.

And that's all that matters because now we've just opened the floodgates. So if we have a huge, we have a very wide transition of capital into this agent-type economy and everybody's leveraging stable coins, I just view that is one of the largest, that is going to be one of the largest ways to open access to commerce and capital. within this system. And this is, this is like a broader point for, I think, the way that I view Bitcoin adoption that's got more nuanced over the years is just, when we say we're still early, it's like, okay, so what makes us late? You know, what creates that environment of where things are actually late? When do we cross the chasm? When do we cross the chasm? What needs to exist

are avenues? Because what does Bitcoin need? Bitcoin needs capital to flow into it. How do we get capital to fluent it. Well, there's a lany of areas around the world where capital exists. How do we ingrain that into Bitcoin? This agent economy example could be a major one. But if we go and we isolate, what are the largest capital pools and how do we get institutions, regulations, leadership, all of these different variables that impact whether or not it's easy for that capital to move in and out of Bitcoin? that's the step that we're all fighting right now. You know, that's what's valuable about what all these treasury companies are doing is that they're fighting in capital markets.

They're creating more capital access towards Bitcoin. It's not in the way that everybody would want in like Bitcoin world. Guess what? There's more of that coming because there's a lot more pools of capital. And there's a lot more other people that are going to fight. And they're going to make money off of it because they're spending hours of their time. And if they didn't make money off of it, that would suck. Because then people aren't going to do it.

we're not going to get the access to the capital. And so that's the idea is we're creating avenues for people to ultimately say, if you want to transfer this to Bitcoin, it's easy. And getting people on digital signature payments is like massive for the money, global vision of Bitcoin and the economy over time. So if you take into account the fact that there's going to be a really rough interim period, if AI does start replacing jobs in a meaningful way, at the other side of that we have AI agents potentially using Bitcoin,

that becoming its whole new economy. is this is AI the way that we move to hyperbitonization i i could see what i think so we've yeah to answer it in short form yes i think it's a major catalyst and i think we've kind of answered this like productivity side of it right um the there's a few other interesting things about it well we've we've answered productivity we've talked about here's how it could restructure the way an organization works. I think one of the last very interesting inflection points is what it's going to do to like open source software. Well, everything is going to have to be open source. Exactly. And it's not going to matter as much anymore because proprietary software is just not that valuable. Yeah.

So that that's that's interesting because if you open source has always been valuable for X, Y and Z reasons. But it's had a bit of a tragedy of the commons that always existed where you had a very, very, very small number of developers that were pushing the vast majority of the most impactful open source projects. And then a bunch of other people that just kind of, you know, are like barnacles on the ship. They're just kind of leaning on them. And it always felt like a very hobbyist, like ethical thing to do. Hobbies and ethical. Yeah. Exactly. It wasn't something where we had some, here's some persistent growing business model around this. And the question was in the problem, because it was this, you know, natural tragedy of the commons where we have a common resource.

and some people consume it too much without giving back to it, that was always, you know, you needed to donate to open source and people who contribute their work. And there was an incentive. Like the incentive as a developer is like, I want to go work in a certain area of software. I'm going to start contributing to open source projects. It's in the same way where you're like,

if I want to be an influencer online, I'm going to go give out a bunch of free content until I have a million followers, then I'll start making money off of it. Yeah. Kind of like that. So that's a good incentive that allowed it to be a very large thriving ecosystem, but it doesn't mean that there's not an issue

because code is easier than shit posting, you know, pictures of yourself or whatever. So it wasn't quite that easy because you still have to manage code bases, and that was kind of the problem. But now that the marginal cost of production for code has dropped off a cliff, it's like, how does that change open source?

And it changes everything, because now the labor costs associated with almost nil. And they're creating these own, like, you know, there's like the agent GitHub now. and agents are just kind of interacting around this. But I think the reality is, the majority of software is probably just going to be like an open source,

common resource, like utility almost for people. Because if not, if you have a closed source piece of software that it's very expensive and very valuable, we're going to be, if we're not already at the point, we're going to be at the point very soon

where you can go to your AI agent, look at this and build it me. Totally. And it will just spin that up for you in a few hours. Totally. And like, where's it going to even, like,

and we think that's going to happen in a year. Yeah. Where's it going to be at five years? We can't even, you know, we don't even know. And it's like, cool. So like software is just like, software is like air. Yeah.

You know, like that's where we're heading. And, and I think that that's cool because it actually changes the open source community, I think, in a lot of ways for the better. We'll see new business models emerge. Like the business models in open source software traditionally were like, you have some sort of like open core. Or like the core of the software is open. Other people are using that, but then you have extra features or you have like a freemium type model for it. or you have like a managed services. And I think that'll be the big thing is like, cool.

There's going to be a ton of open source software up there. You're a business. We'll package it specifically for like your needs around something. Because like for me, I have a million things I have to do every day. You just want something to work. I need something to work and not think about. I don't have the bandwidth to think about these things.

There's still going to be people doing that that are going to say like, I don't have the bandwidth to vibe code and fuck around with whatever the software is. But still, even in that scenario, it's going to drive the cost of that software down. Totally. So it'll be like a lot of like consulting type businesses that I think emerge around AI agents that are managing some of this. And that'll be the way to monetize open source in a lot of ways. So so that's that's pretty cool. I think that'll create like what and I think what does that mean for productivity? There's a lot of people that have made before I used to be very pro like intellectual property rights before I got involved in this industry. And then I kind of learned about the, a lot of the perverse incentives that exist. I think when you think about the idea of like, oh, if you create something,

you know, the fundamental idea for property rights, if you create something and you can't control it, then it's going to kill the incentive to create the thing in the first place. We want to protect intellectual IP for people in the US because we want people to create intellectual IP in the US. And that the reality around how people control gatekeep, litigate, you know, if you read into like patent trolling,

all these different mal incentives that come from trying to create protection over something that's hard to protect because what truly is an idea and where truly does it come from. It's that gray area that leads to all these problems with intellectual property. That is something that I think has created these fundamental issues that over the long term have been less undesirable, but there's never been an easy answer for it. And at least as it relates to software, we're going to answer it by kind of just eliminating the other side of the market around it and saying, well, you don't really care about those property rights anymore because they're not that valuable to you.

So that's an interesting trend as to like, you know, how I think it's really going to be impacting our belief in what is a property right. And then there's all these other questions around that that start to emerge as well from, well, who owns what from AI? What is intellectual property when it's trained on your intellectual property? when it's trained on your intellectual property and I'm producing ideas because my AI told it to me. And it's just going to be far too much of a great.

It's a mess. Yeah. So I think we agree on like the path. Yeah. Why does the market not agree when you look at the price of Bitcoin? And it's like $74,000. Oh, man. People are so wrong about Bitcoin, man.

They are so wrong. It is awesome. Like I love it. I didn't think it would get this low. the market doesn't agree because I think gold sucked a lot of the wind out of the sales. I think that... And the AI trade. Yeah, and the AI trade.

There's a ton of capital. What people forget is that like we're, Bitcoin is a massive asset. The culture of the buyers, I think is still a very small minority of the world. Yeah. And for that reason, when you think about, and when you think about there's some theoretical base of potential Bitcoin investors that exist today, whether or not they own it, but would be open to owning it. And then they have a set of constraints based around what else they could own. And I think a lot of those investors come from either technology or they were gold bugs.

So a lot of them might have moved into gold and a lot of them probably moved into this AI trade. We see that in broader crypto. We're like, crypto's basically dying and there's just a bunch of people moving into AI from all of that. Because it was never really about the project. Because it was never about the project. Exactly. It's those types of people have been in that in the first place. They're more like mercenaries for like, where is capital today?

Okay, I'll build stuff in this area. And back in 2021, it was the most heavily invested venture capital industry in the world. So like, that's where they all showed up. Now they're going to the next biggest one. We'll see where they are in another five years. So I think with like those two variables of, you know, AI and gold, the win out of the sales, that's kind of part of it. Uncertainty, risk off asset.

You know, there's all these things that we can say. Everybody's been trying to, I said this on the last podcast. Like, everybody's been trying to attribute a narrative. And I think the more that this year has unfolded, it's been too hard for people to. Yeah. And now there's all these counter narratives that's like Iran war starts risk off asset. It's going up. Yeah.

Like, you know, and it's such a question of scope. And it's just like, I agree that these, way too soon to say that. Yeah. And it is like a question of growth. But it has been interesting to see Bitcoin go up when everything else has been going down. Totally. And that makes you think like it's just, it's trading from the capital flows of specific

people within this. So like as the substitute investments change, as more people are kind of like, okay, like this AI trade was, it's funny. There was, um, somebody posted this picture of like the FTX asset ownership and how much it would be with. I saw that. That was insane. And they'd have made like billions and billions of billions of billions.

at all is. Yeah. So it's just like what happens when like capital allocation and like the valuations of these AI companies is based on very extreme expectations. Maybe it fulfills it. Maybe it's a bubble. Where's that capital? Where are these technology investors in gold bugs going to be rotating once they feel like they're really getting to peak you for you? I think Bitcoin's a very strong answer for that. And everything about the thesis for Bitcoin is playing out perfectly. I'm not worried about any of that at all. Credit's going to be entering the ecosystem much more in the future. I think when we get into from a regulatory standpoint the amount of institutions under the Trump administration that have been getting federal charters, et cetera, to provide financing to the industry. I won't say financing

to provide financial services to the industry. That's been at historic rates. And we expect more of that to happen. And that'll change the way that I think, the type of credit and the expansion of that credit and how it exists within Bitcoin. All of these variables and what I said on the last podcast is just Bitcoin is always and everywhere a major announcement away from some significant rally. You know, more central banks participating. What happens is it fractures? Some of these were, I think it comes from sovereigns next.

I just think we're going to start seeing more and more headlines. Pretty simple thesis. World's fracturing. People want to own commodities. Bitcoin's, you know, LeBron James in high school a commodity. commodities and it's the only one that you can permissionlessly send with final settlement in the world. Look what's happening with trade routes and settlement as we start to compete against the eastern economies. Bitcoin just makes absolute perfect sense.

The only thing it's limited by is the depth of liquidity in its capital market. If I go try to liquidate 100 billion tomorrow in Bitcoin, it's going to drastically move the market. Yep. That's not how it exists within gold. Gold, you can go liquidate 100 billion in gold, and you're not going to move the market that much because it's the deepest, most liquid commodity asset in the world. Bitcoin's getting there. Best problem to have.

That's what you're investing in is will this thing that's better than gold for every other respect of its monetary characteristics get as big as gold? That's your bet. That's an easy, easy bet to me. I think that's a best risk-adjusted bet you can be making right now. Do you think the gold trade starts rolling over into Bitcoin at some point? I find it funny that Bitcoin has been like anti-gold during this, right? I think it's cool because I think it's the world waking up.

Sweet. Gold is sweet. This is the world waking up to the needing a non-government issued money. Yeah. And that's where Bitcoin is going to fit perfectly. But do you think at some point people think the gold tray might be, you know, running out steam for now and start moving money into Bitcoin? Yes.

Totally. I think there's a large percentage of those people. I think, you know, gold is kind of like the, the blue chip, you know, first mover on all of it. And there's going to be a bunch of people that start to think like, okay, gold has now risen they're going to look at historical charts under prior regimes of gold rallies and say gold is now risen to become this is like a fourth standard deviation outcome yeah with how much it's it's rose proportionally over the past few years and then they're

going to be like okay not the worst time to take money off the table you're going to have your like you know die hard gold bugs and they're going to say no why they're probably still be right why mar yeah exactly and like and they're just going to hold it but i mean you're Even if it's like if let's say gold doubles over the next two years now we're talking about a 60 trillion dollar asset That's massive. What if one percent of that you know moves into Bitcoin that's 600 billion on a two trillion dollar asset? That's massive. What if 10% of that moves into Bitcoin? That's six trillion. That's three times the current size of the Bitcoin or that's sorry Bitcoin's at a trillion right now. I'm forgetting one point three or something yeah that's how chief it is. It's at 1.3. So it's like six times the current size of Bitcoin's market cap. And it doesn't mean a six times increase because it's all marginal, right? Exactly. And it's

marginal. So who knows how high it could go? Because what if people really just don't like to sell Bitcoin? A lot of people really don't. So I look at these numbers. That's just, that's the gold market. Let's look at like sovereign wealth. Let's look at the size of like private capital assets. It's like, you go talk to all these RAs around the world right now. In the U.S., I go to these meetings all the time. You talk to these people. And all I do is sit there and, you know, just orange pill these guys. It's always like Socratic seminar is what I have with them,

where I just start asking them questions and point out contradictions and their beliefs against Bitcoin. That's the best way, I think, to get people open-minded about it. And you do that enough and just literally none of them understand this. And they get there. I mean, I was just this past week. with a few finance people and they just started like trying to drill me and after an hour they're like oh like I you know light bulbs around a room and it's just everywhere still I see it

all the time on the ground if you know what I'm looking at as representative of it there's a reason that such a few percentage of portfolios are still in it the pools of capital and that are you know 20 trillion or whatever that's in private assets and like 100 trillion that's in like more like global like, or sorry, private wealth. Like that is, these numbers are so large, they're not worth talking about. It's really why I don't spend much time thinking about the precision around them. I just know there's a bunch of massive numbers out there. So many of them don't get Bitcoin yet.

And the ones that probably do get Bitcoin, haven't allocated everything just because it's a bit too small for a lot of what that allocation would be. all it takes is, you know, another rally like we see. And then, you know, once Bitcoin gets into the $5 to trillion market cap range, that's when it starts to become, okay, a lot larger organizations can take pretty large positions in it without moving the market. That's when it starts to catalyze more towards a larger asset. That could be the suddenly moment. Yeah.

So you think this is like golden opportunity, excuse the pun, to buy Bitcoin. Yeah. Like, when I look at the price of Bitcoin right now, I'm like, this is, is as good value as an ever. It's crazy. Like 70K doesn't seem expensive anymore. I look at this now as like, this is cheap Bitcoin. It's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. It's such a, it's such a good time to be getting in. And I can't when you, if you try to take it's just like, okay, let's not be ideologs here. Let's assess what could destroy Bitcoin. What would be fundamentally against its structural narrative? What are the things that could like, you know, kill off any of this thesis? And that

would either be it not working the way that it used to or some sort of new better thing emerging crypto spent you know however many over a decade trying to say that they could do that they can't do that hundreds of thousands of attempts yeah um you know billions and billions of dollars in funding dead uh wrong because people think it's facebook of my space wrong you know bitcoin is a protocol at the beginning with the first mover advantage it can't be replicated once people finally get around to that is when they understand how to look at this industry. And now that we're in this position, it's like, you know, with the competition, you know, piece pretty much being gone. And then it's just like, okay, well, what's, what's something that it could destroy how it works?

I do believe it is pretty prevalent within the investment community on the quantum narrative. 100%. I was skeptical of it at first, simply because I wasn't spending a ton of time talking with people at that point. I think we should be clear that this is the narrative is prevalent. Not the narrative is prevalent. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to the Bitcoin or commenters in this episode that are going to go off if I say that.

But the reality is, it's like for me talking to people in Tradfai, you know, I was just on a few calls over the past week where, you know, like, how it works is like investors will look at me as like an expert and they'll want to like talk with me. Like, what do you think about this in Bitcoin? What do you think about that in Bitcoin? Quantum is something that people ask. quantum something that is it's prevalent not just in Bitcoin.

It's prevalent outside of Bitcoin. This is being driven by the likes of the chmats and who won't shut up about the quantum. Yeah. And then yeah, you have these big voices for all these like tradfai people that like listen to the all in podcast and whatnot and they ask all the same questions that those guys talk about

and then those guys just talk about things that pump their bags. It's awesome. They are like puppeteering a bunch of large people in capital. Yeah. It's large capital pools that they puppeteer with their narratives. And I think that, yeah, I mean, there's much more intelligent people. We wrote in our annual report a section on quantum, that got a ton of attention from Tradfi people.

So what is your take on that? Because like for me, I've done a couple of shows on it. I'm skeptical that the threat's even real in the next, you know, short period of time. Yeah. At some point, potentially. But if that threat ever comes into existence, we're going to have plenty of warning and there's things we can do to mitigate it. Right. But like, what's your take on?

The threat is just people are comparing what they call on quantum Nevin's law to Moore's Law. Explain what I ask for people. Yeah. So like Moore's Law was just this belief that we're going to be, you know, getting an exponentially greater degree of efficiency in computing hardware over time. But it wasn't a belief. It was an observed historical reality. Yeah.

Where a 256 bit became 128, became 64, became 32, et cetera. And we kind of like witnessed that efficiency stemming from Lithuanian. within semiconductors. And so that's cool. And then people are like, Nevin's law is that quantum's going to follow a same rate of efficiency being found. One's an observation,

one's a projection. Right. One's an observation. One is, yeah, it's like, it's a projection and it's like a narrative, you know,

but all, like, I guess we'll put that aside. But nonetheless, like there's kind of a false comparison, I think, that's being made within how, the expectations of growth are going to be happening within quantum.

And I think that with that, there's these degrees, there's drivers that they look at to say that. Drivers are not the same thing as outcomes. You know, I can look at things and I can say they're very like deterministic relationships in the world that we can look at. And I can say that like, you know, if I drink 50 beers, I am going to be in a hospital. You know, like we know that's a pretty deterministic outcome for the most part within the small margin of error. And then there's very like, there's some relationships that we aren't sure what that relationship is. And I think when we're looking at these relationships of quantum bits, of qubits, and then the different types, those are kind of the drivers that people are saying represent.

What is the ability of a quantum computer to conduct factorization? and factorization is the output. That's what's scary. That's what could undermine cryptography. So people are saying if the rate of creation in qubits, specifically logical qubits, gets high enough that factorization will be large. And I don't think we've gotten very high in terms of logical, but we have in physical. And I think it's like, so if physical qubits are growing, then eventually logical qubits are going to grow.

And then eventually we're going to get to some sort of larger. degree of factorization, but there's one more variable. And the other variable is the rate of error as you scale a quantum computers factorization. And that's something where there could be a very big fundamental issue if we can't get that figured out. Because it basically means that as you conduct higher volume over time of a quantum's calculation, that the error rates will increase almost,

I won't say exponentially, but the error rate increases over time. So like the more you want to go after bigger numbers, the greater your degree of error. It's the opposite of what you want. And so with that problem, it's like, I think the statistical relationship would be like heteroscadasticity. It gets more variable over time and continues to spread. And I think that that problem is something that would certainly need to be solved. It really makes the argument that even if we do see all this cubit productivity, if they can't solve this, this could be, you know, devastating to the future. your productivity of quantum in terms of factorization. So then the question is, well, where are we today? Today, quantum computers can't factor above like 21. Do you know the crazy thing about that? Do you know when they did that? 2012.

Oh, okay. I did not know that. So they factored 21 in 2012 and they've not improved since then. Right. So that's output, right? Like, that's, okay, if that was 20. And there's some, like, weird nuance in that where they factored larger numbers, but they were, like, basically told the solution.

So people put higher numbers on that, but it's not actually it doing it from start to finish. I think with them saying being told the solution, that was actually with a much larger number, that it quote unquote factored. So like that was being used to say like, no, they've actually broken the digital signatures of some like very low grade old forms of cryptography, whatever that number required to factor was, I can't recall. But in the reality behind it was, it's like, okay, well, classical computers are actually much better at all these other things than quantum computers.

So we can kind of set up a lot of the very variables. of the problems using these computers, and then given those things being done by classical computers, and we feed them into a quantum computer, that got to this factorization that broke this cryptographic signature, but it was kind of like giving it the answers in advance, basically. Yeah. So I don't know enough to like a pine on every detail about that,

but I do know that nobody takes that seriously. Yeah. And the reality is, is like the hard number. I didn't know it was in 2012, but like- I mean, that's what AI told me. I think that's right. So like, but the point is, is like, the outputs of it are low. So if, you know, if you're telling me like you're, you know, some sort of like genius CEO and I should partner with you.

And then, you know, I talk to you and you don't know the first thing about how to strategize about a business, then I'm not going to take you that seriously. If you tell me, well, I've been reading a lot of books or I've been getting a lot of experience and all these things, I'm like, that's great. you know, talk to me when you have a little bit more experience and strategy and then I'll see what the outcome is. That's something that that's kind of how I view a lot of this. Is it like, I get the argument of the purveyors who are like, this is a legitimate concern. This is something that we should be talking about and getting into. Completely agree, you know, let's do that. But I think when we get to not only here's where we're at with the risk today, the expectations for how that could evolve and what the potential solutions are for.

for it and how we can plan around that as it specifically relates to Bitcoin. I'm not particularly a concern. The biggest concern about Bitcoin not adjusting to quantum security isn't really that we can't adjust it to a form of quantum security. It's that the form that we adjusted to could be premature if we do it too quickly. And that's a major issue. And that's what's hard with the narrative as well. Like if people are unsure about Bitcoin because of the quantum threat and they ask a Bitcoin

and the answer is very nuanced, it's like, well, maybe these things exist in the future. If they do, we have mitigating solutions. Yeah. But we don't know what they are yet because between now and then they might get much better. So we can't say definitively what the answer is. And then it's like, yeah, but this guy over here said quantum's going to break Bitcoin. It's like that's an easy narrative.

Whereas like the nuance narrative is like, we will be okay. We just can't tell you exactly what the answer is today. Totally. Yeah, exactly. We don't know what would be the most efficient because there's a fundamental tradeoff. If we have, you know, current signature schemes that exist within Bitcoin, if we implement a quantum resistant signature scheme, then that is a less, it's a much more, it's a much less efficient scheme. So it's more data intensive. And because we have fixed block size for good reason,

it's going to fill more blocks, which means that the throughput of the Bitcoin L1 is going to be less. And that tradeoff, if we were to wait, let's say, let's assume a scenario where quantum isn't a problem for the next 30 years. And maybe 10 years from now, we say, okay, quantum resistant signature schemes or some sort of mathematical breakthrough, they're so hyper-efficient. It makes zero sense. They're just as efficient in the prior- Let's not wait. Let's just do it now. Let's not wait. Let's do it now. That's something that'll get through consensus. Yeah. Like, that's something where people are like, duh, no-brainer. The big risk is what does Bitcoin consensus look like in a decade? That's the other side of that

argument because we don't know. Bitcoin Consensus is a, you know, empirically observed experiment that we're all trying to decipher right now. So we don't know what that would be, but the belief is that simply it should work in a way to where if all the interests are, you know, pretty aligned or the vast majority of interests are aligned on something and it has no cost, then it should exist. And that'll be pretty simple when it's not debatable. And we're simply just not there yet. If there was a very legitimate threat of quantum computers, you know, within the next year. So we have backup plans to protect coins and things like that. If you read the report from chain code labs, like they kind of break down two different time horizons of, you know, next two years plan and then next seven years plan for the long term solution around signatures.

And I think that's fair. And I think it's legitimate to look at and to check out like BIP 360 and some of the stuff they're working on. but it's uh you know it's just it's just not the most uh it's it's totally overblown and i think in the investment community if you're trying to like look at the what could destroy bitcoin tomorrow um that this isn't the primary concern to be thinking about i think it's um fud doesn't go away it just changes but doesn't go away it just changes but to be fair i will say if with quantum there have there have been a decent amount of changes in quantum. Like I do understand kind of why it's coming back. The problem with it that we

put in our annual report is just like we kind of fuded ourselves. Normally fud is something that's created the mass media and then we have to respond to it as a community, whereas this is something we kind of created that got into the mass media that we now have to go respond to as a community. I feel like we have good responses. The big question then is like what happens to the funds? Do we freeze old Bitcoin. And there's no easy answer to. And I mean, I don't think we change anything. You can't, you can't. You can't freeze old funds in my opinion. Totally. I don't think you can, but I'm not saying that that still isn't an easy answer, you know. But I mean, the truth is there'll be a chain split and you'll get told both. Right. That's true. Anyway, Eric, we've gone for ages there.

This was awesome. How long did we go? I think that was nearly two hours. Hell yeah. Let's go. That was good. We've got to go play ping pong. Yeah, let's go play some ping pong. I got to And there's no chance. I can't wait to make some money. All right. Thank you, man. Let's go. Thanks.