You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 94: Is Bitcoin’s Institutional Wave a Trojan Horse or the Tipping Point? BHB 2025

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

This episode is a recording of the great panel I moderated at Baltic Honeybadger 2025. Willy Woo, Max Kei & Preston Pysh break down ETFs, treasury strategies, custody risks, CBDCs, and why self-custody still matters most.-- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES --→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn → Shield your bitcoin with time-delayed transactions over multisig with BitVault: bitvault.sv → Get 10% off on Augmented NAC, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat → Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat → Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson

Being your moderator today is the star and the host of the You're the Voice podcast, Efrat Feniksen. I don't know if you guys have listened to her podcast. If you haven't, you 100% should. Efrat, please come up onto the stage. Thank you so much. i i have been a guest i have been a guest yes that's true max kai uh you need no introduction he's back max is back here thank you preston you're back up on the stage to talk about this one as well and willie woo is just making himself uh up here so willie thank you willie all the way from new zealand thank you very much willie for coming across and the uh the the title of this panel is bitcoin's institutional phase trojan horse or tipping point and just to help get this

one spiced up a little bit did you guys see american hoddles meme who's trojan horsing who no that was very interesting and uh his message behind that was are we being trojan horsed by the institutional adoption so anyway off to the panel thank you very much guys give me a big round of applause okay thank you for being with us after lunch um i'm sure you would have preferred being in the sun, but we are going to be just as shiny. In the past 12 to 18 months, Bitcoin has entered a clear institutional phase. ETFs, treasury companies, mainstream stacking. But Bitcoin was not originally built for Wall Street. Bitcoin evolution is being shaped at the moment, not just by ideology, but by capital flows. As someone who truly appreciates self-sovereignty

and freedom, me, I'm opening myself up to this inevitable evolution of Bitcoin in our fiat reality, and I'm learning much about it, so I'm keen to have this discussion with these three masterminds. The overarching question here is, are we seeing a Trojan horse or a real tipping point? And let's start with what defines this phase that we're in. How would you personally define the institutional phase of Bitcoin? What triggered it? who wants to go first

yeah this works right so you can think of Bitcoin as a little Pac-Man and we'll be eating these little dots gobble gobble gobble now the big cheese digging into that

I think the tipping point I think it really was a tipping point was last year when the BlackRock ETF came on board and the high priest Larry Fink said with doing this ETF, then now you can talk about buying Bitcoin for the rest of the traditional world, right?

That encapsulates $900 trillion of wealth assets. Bitcoin at this point is $1 trillion. And we always hear talk about liberty, separation of money and state. That means that the government can't overspend and then tax everyone through dilution, effectively stealing from the poorest. that doesn't end until that Pac-Man gets big enough to displace the US dollar flips gold and becomes a monetary standard

and that's not going to happen until you get the large gatekeepers of capital opening up to Bitcoin and pouring that money in and so it's a necessary step with it comes risks we can talk about the fragility of centralisation If big pools of Bitcoin get stored in one location, that might get nationalized and so forth. But that's a different discussion.

This is always going to happen if we're ever going to, you know, effectively change the way the world uses or what we use as money. In short, I would just say that it's in Bitcoin's culture to be very skeptical at all times, which is a very healthy thing. and uh one of the main reasons why it's done so well to date um when i think about just an an image of of what where we were for the last you know since its inception until right now i would say imagine two galaxies if you've ever seen like these memes of two galaxies they're like coming towards each other and then they're hitting and that's just particles and

debris and planets and whatever just kind of flying all over the place i would say that we are right at that point where these two galaxies are starting to touch. You have this legacy system that has been pretty much gated off, and the flow of capital from that traditional system has been somewhat limited, pretty limited, as it flows into Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is really that counterforce. I would argue that all of the crypto tokens that are stable coins are actually a manifestation of the of the legacy system and not actually bitcoin and that those were like the early tentacles of the connection between the two but now you're you're really starting to make impact and i would say the thing that's causing that impact to really take place is the massive shift in policy coming

out of the united states which is then having a repercussions all around the world that they're also saying okay well if they're doing it and their dollar you know the king of the dollar that's dominated the planet for the last, you know, however many decades, like there must be something here. And so that's causing the policy shift. With respect to, is it the Trojan, are they Trojan horsing us? I'll give you a real simple example. The last administration, when they approved the ETFs, they purposely did not allow in-kind redemptions. I would argue that that act of gary ginsler and the sec at that moment in time was very trojan horse like in its action um as soon as the new administration came in all of a sudden now you have i mean they're

they're pro bitcoin they're pro everything um everything um but what i what i find interesting is i suspect but i don't know for sure that blackrock and some of the larger banks that have the ETFs. We're actually the ones pushing for the in-kind redemption. And I find that to be extremely healthy and not a Trojan horse. And for people that don't know what the in-kind redemption is, it's, you know, if you have $5 million worth of iBit or some number like that, is that the right number, Willie? Do you know? Is it five? It's like a $5 million threshold and higher. If you have that many shares of iBit, you can actually go to iBit and you say, here's the shares give me the bitcoin in no exchange so that's that's a big and the fact that that was

purposely left out of the past administration just shows you they were really wanting it to be a cash settled market so that it could be compromised just like the gold market's been compromised because it's cash settled and not physically settled so things like that are refreshing it doesn't mean that we're like out of the gate or that you can let your guard down but But that would be my argument for why we're not just, you know, getting scammed. I would say, I would commend on the current cycle. You know, in developed markets, I think it's institutional bull market, right? We don't see many retail in developed markets, obviously.

But in developing markets, it's actually a retail bull market. So I think that, yeah, the beginning was BlackRock ETF. And before that, it was Michael Saylor. So if we look at the longer cycle than 2020, I think Michael bought first something, something Bitcoin. I don't remember the amount. It was 500 million in 2020. Yeah. And that kickstarted. But it took four years for other companies to understand the purpose and to like Bitcoin treasury thing.

And it's only after four years now we're seeing five years. actually we see that every day there's like new treasury company coming in which is kind of unhealthy as well at this point but i mean it's part of the game it was a year ago when i interviewed sailor and i asked him are any other ceos approaching you to try and copy your playbook and he was like maybe one here or there it wasn't happening in june last year and in one year look where we are at it's crazy the acceleration of this phenomena okay so the institutionals that are now stacking are they furthering bitcoin's mission or are they capturing it i know you said preston that it's not so much scamming us right now but where do you think that's leading us

well on the on the treasury thing i think the reason that it's taken off so much just in the past six months is because I think that there was a massive realization by Michael and MicroStrategy that using preferred stock is very different than using convertible debt. And so what's so different about that is you really never have to pay back. You don't have to pay back the face value if it's not convertible. So he's raising, he just did a new issuance the other day and he's raising $4.2 billion. He immediately sweeps that into Bitcoin that benefits the common shareholder, but he never has to pay back the face value of the $4.2 billion like you do if it was a bond. And even if it was a convertible bond, that face value is dilutive

to the common shareholders after five years. So even if the convertible debt was running, he still gets that massive dilution factor. So I think that they kind of cracked into something that was really big, which is when you use preferred stock, you get very different economics that you're still servicing the fixed income space in the way that they want, but you never have to pay back the face value. In preferred stock, it's called book value. And I think that was a big unlock. And so when the space saw that, you now have this big influx of Bitcoin treasury companies that are trying to do the same thing. Most of them don't even have access to the markets yet, which is an issue for all of them. But to Max's point, that there's

concern there, and I agree, I share that concern when you have a Solana treasury company, or you have an Ethereum treasury company, and you got, I mean, it's totally absurd what is coming to market, and it's going to be a lot of froth, and there's going to be a lot of dead bodies that kind of come out of it but um i do with all that said i do think that um where it is healthy is in uh incentivizing more institutional custodians because right now when you look at the etfs um you could strongly make the argument that it is very captured with coinbase being the custodian for almost all of these and um the whole reason that unfolded is the first one got through with the sec and everybody was like oh well let me look at their paper oh they use

coinbase just use coinbase use coinbase and we'll get approved so like everybody got coinbase but the bitcoin treasury companies like you had adam back this morning on stage he's he's getting ready to do one with you know a lot of bitcoin in it and if you think adam's gonna go to coinbase i have no idea where adam's going but if you think he's going to coinbase i would be blown away that he went to coinbase for his institutional custody so what you could do is you can make the argument that the Bitcoin treasury companies are actually going to help decentralize institutional custody, which is something that I think is really healthy. I think that because if you think that these publicly traded companies are going to self-custody, you don't understand

how the public companies work and how their auditing mechanisms work and how their reporting mechanisms work. It will be institutional custody. Whether people like these changes, I would help you go back to the visualization of the two galaxies coming together and they're colliding and now there's just a different environment we're operating in a different as it grows up things are going to change and people might be comfortable with that and other people are going to be looking at the old way that things were done and saying it needs to still be done like that and i would argue things are changing so you're the voice is brought to you by trezor the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets

since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code AFLAT. Self-custody is powerful, but what if someone forces you to unlock your wallet? Bitcoin settles instantly, and that freedom can also be a risk.

BitVault is the first Bitcoin wallet built to protect against both physical attacks and digital hacks. It creates a banking-grade vault on-chain with two of three multi-sig, time-delay transactions, two hours to 15 days, giving you space to react, Trustless recovery after one year, works with trusted hardware wallets, open source, and built with one focus, beyond keys, protecting humans. Only 42 lifetime subscriptions are available at $199 forever.

Head over to bitvault.sv to sign up. Willy, your take on that? I don't think centralization around Coinbase and that being hacked is the danger. I think it's really the nationalization path, which happened with gold, and it's happened before. And if the U.S. dollar is structurally getting weak and China's coming in, I think it's a fair point that the U.S. might do an offer to all the treasury companies, incentivize that. It could be then put into a digital Fort Knox, create a new gold standard. you could then rug it like happened in 1971.

It's all centralized around this digital Bitcoin. The whole history repeats again and back to fiat again. And now we're in this position where we tried this Bitcoin thing, but that didn't work, you know. So it makes the second temp harder. I think that is the centralization risk when it comes to a very big and powerful nation state. So do you think it's more probable, sorry,

it's more probable that the U.S. may acquire an existing company with a lot of Bitcoin and treasury? rather than holding their own treasury? Yeah, I think that if you were like, say you wanted to get, say, 4% of the, 4 million of the Bitcoins, you're going to buy it on the open market and drive the price to infinity

and, you know, Michael Saylor becomes probably the richest person alive and therefore, well, let's say most powerful person alive because it's common stock held. or are you just going to do a share offer and effectively nationalise in a very free market fair way you've got this big bag of X million by then Bitcoin, you haven't run up the price

and then everyone who's just sold their microstrategy stock, let's say, now has to buy back their Bitcoins and then it runs up, I think that would be the smarter way to do it but just thinking about the dynamics of how would you get a big bag of Bitcoin and then create dollars trading off it or you know backed by it and then how do you rug that into fiat i think that's a path that's been done before if you want to try to predict the future you start with the incentives and you try to deeply understand how the incentives are going to interact

so when i look at every developed nation state in the world right now they've got a massive addiction and that addiction is to spend way more than they actually bring in or the value that they add. And that trend is only accelerating. It is only becoming more popular to promise a bunch of money. Hey, I know you went to college and you made these decisions

and you were going to pay back this debt, but don't worry about it. We're going to just print some money. We're going to pay off that debt for you, even though people that went to school five years ago paid for their debts, right? because they want the political vote so that trend against bitcoin is a massive issue because where this is going to go is they're going to be so

in debt up to their eyeballs and more importantly their collective cognitive decision making is to just get more votes by wishing away more printing right and you're up against this thing that is immutable. And so once the politicians eventually get to the point where they realize, oh no, like it's literally an oh shit moment that's on the horizon. And that oh shit moment is going to be, well, who can we rob? Okay. Where can we get the Bitcoin to rob? And this is thinking through their incentives. How does a politician think? How can I get the most amount of Bitcoin with impacting the least amount of people possible and what i would argue is number one on that list is a private entity that has a lot of bitcoin that's like number one on the list okay because

you can scrape that bitcoin and you might have impact you've made it made it made 20 people upset but when you're doing it with a public company now you have to ask yourself is that pump public company in the S&P 500? And how many people in the S&P 500 own it? And I'm not saying that they won't rug it. It might be the first place they go. You never know. But I'm thinking through the incentives of the politician and the politicians want, they're going to rug somebody. I can tell you that right now. They're going to take the Bitcoin because it's going to have an institutional custodian that does not want to go to jail. So that's their incentives. I don't want to go to jail. So yes, I'll give you the Bitcoin. Okay. And then after they give you the Bitcoin, you know

what they're going to do? They're going to jam dollar bills down your throat and Bitcoin's going to be moving like that. Okay. And the Bitcoin's gone, but you got the dollar bills and you got them here and now they're that compared to Bitcoin. So there's a lot of people that are going to have a really, and so when we talk about treasury companies can, and this goes back to what I said this morning. Can they outperform Bitcoin? Yes. Do they come with more risk? Yes. Are you accounting for the nationalization of a treasury company in your risk assessment of your position size of Bitcoin versus owning a treasury company? I would argue most aren't. And that's why from a sizing standpoint i think the sizing should be pretty minimal relatively speaking if you want

to try to outperform bitcoin at least today because we just like all the incentives are pointing to what willie just described in and i would tell you i think that's a very probable event it's just how how it actually unfolds is the question and we might be five years we might be 10 years i don't know when that happens but based on the incentives that i'm looking at and how they're going to interact it it leads there pretty quickly no words of wisdom to add to that nothing to add i get you sailor's model is debt-fueled bitcoin stacking is this innovation or risk to bitcoin's fundamentals i don't see it any different than borrowing and lending for the individual only it's happening at an institutional level so if he's over collateralizing

bitcoin by 5x and he can kind of peg it between like 4x and 5x if you go and you want to take out a loan and you put bitcoin on deposit the ltv on it right and it's you know you're you're depositing 200 worth of bitcoin to borrow 100 that's over collateralization uh you know of two and he's over collateralizing out of five but he's doing it at an institutional like size like the sizing is just different and for a lot of people that don't understand the financial terminology they just can't wrap their head around like what he's doing but um when when we say these ratios like he's over collateralized five to one what else i think is really interesting is those dividend payments are denominated in fiat if you run the power law

let's just say power law is valid. We had Mr. Machinskis up here earlier today talking to you about the power law and the R-squared values and all that. If we take that model and we take the dividends on preferred stock and you model it out for the next 10 years, those dividends that, you know, if it's issued at 100 and he's paying a $10 dividend annually, Do you know what that $10 looks like 10 years later if you swept all the book value into Bitcoin? It's almost zero in relative value. He's still paying the $10 per share. But you know what the value is in Bitcoin terms?

It's almost zero. After the first year, it's like $6. It's not $10. It's $6. So, there's something to be said for a person who understands the idea of stacking your assets in Bitcoin and denominating your liabilities in fiat. It's a very powerful concept if you really understand it. And I would argue it's maybe even, and this is very controversial, but I'll say it anyway, I would argue that the backing is better than 5 to 1 simply because of this assets or Bitcoin liabilities are fiat. Right. Willie, do you want to add something?

well you know strategy is probably the most robust of these companies and you see in this cycle everyone's following the model but it's not the exact model you know uh and we have to be careful the risks that are being taken um strategy originally when they were doing the convertible debt was, I think it was a five-year out debt and so, you know, I think MicroStrategy might have been close to liquidation in the last

bear market had the debt not been pushed out five years so I see a lot of these companies now have quite short-dated debt using the older model of convertibles where strategy went to eight to twelve years

and now they're doing the preferred stock you look at MetaPlanet They're doing this sort of hedge fund play where there's a hedge fund. They're doing a back and forth, back and forth to simulate a at-the-market offering to effectively simulate the ATMs that market strategy are doing. But they're taking big tranches of debt, $300 million at a time, and then selling that into the market to replenish to then pay off the debt. If the market turns on that at the wrong time

and they cannot do this market operation, you're going to get liquidated. And it's not four-year debt, it's not eight-year debt, it's immediate debt. And so you really need to look at the copycats and look at the dangers in the debt structuring and liquidation risk. And my opinion of Metaplanet

is that they are quite expert at timing the market. Maybe that's the game that they played. They absolutely bought the bottom wick of the last major dip and unloaded almost $300 million in that one buy. So maybe they're proving they can time the market, but that's what you're buying. You're buying a treasury that has opted to time the market, and they think they can unwind the debt at the top

from the looks of how they've structured things. And, you know, there's a lot of these treasury companies, a lot of paperwork to work through. You want to know what you're buying. There's risks in it. My strategy is the blue chip. Very, very robust. Still risks, obviously, with everything.

My concern is the copycats that aren't doing it at the same level or have, you know, how many of these guys can offer preferred stock? What are their options? They, you know, a lot of the latest vogue is to really start small and run up the leverage, get the yield right up and grow fast. So, you know, we're tail end of a bull market right now. So I think a lot of people are going to get hurt and we'll have massive MNAV compression.

and we're going to have liquidations of some of the weakest treasury companies and we'll see who's going to survive and what's going to break over the next bear market. And I'm wondering about what the commentary from Tradfire will be. Is, oh, look at those Bitcoin or crypto people. Look what they did there and look what broke. And, you know, another cycle of jokes on us. yeah there'll be survival of the fittest and a lot of fud around that right so in terms of

adoption willie you've estimated 1 billion bitcoin users by 2030 do you see treasury companies in corporate adoption accelerate this pace i'm not sure to be honest i'm not even sure if that projection will um it's very hard to count like what do you call an adopter like do i Today, it's hard to say. To your point, it's like if strategy gets included into the S&P 500, how many people own SPY index? Exactly. De facto, they have Bitcoin through...

You call it surrogate, right? Yeah, so it's very blurry right now. We own a lot of assets. Everyone pretty much has exposure to the S&P 500, even if it's in a pension fund. and then you're saving for retirement. You don't know what you're owning, but it's going to be the S&P 500 in there.

So that means Bitcoin's in there. So I think these metrics have become a little bit more clouded. I was tracking self-custody and exchange custody. But it's growing at a decent click. Almost 5% of the world population has exposure to this asset, excluding the sort of S&P 500 pattern. so yeah and given that it's still quite early

I think it's still quite early yeah we're still early I think in terms I'm thinking in terms of generational sort of times, we're 16 years into this asset and it's only 2 trillion dollars I mean we've got

it's probably gone 100x to grow and it's probably going to take decades to get there What about longer term projections because I've heard you speak about thousands of years from now, like 10,000 years I've heard you give really long predictions about Bitcoin

I value long term thinking, that's for sure and we are trapped inside this fiat world in 1971 to now and I think of that as a paperization of a liquidity crisis and we had gold and silver as money

for 6,000 years and it's been the agrarian age the industrial age we're in a digital age and i think the fiat will blow up eventually the only thing that's special about now is the whole world got rugged all at once so um you know we're all sort of debasing ourselves to oblivion where you know when one kingdom debased they blew up really quick because um you know everyone ran to the gold-backed um kingdoms so So this will blow up, and then what replaces gold, and it's not going to be gold again, because you can't get, it's no longer scarce, not in 100 years, not in 1,000 years, I mean gosh, who knows what technology we'll have then, and it's only a few decades away to

mine asteroids, given the pace of that technology, so you have to secure the scarcity, the ledger, something that grows with technology and that's energy and bitcoin's had the five percent adoption it's very hard to catch something like that for money there's only two definite two different prop two properties of money one is it's accepted number two it's um secure and robust and that was the scarcity element of gold and all the other stuff was just um people thinking about gold it should be divisible it should be you know durable and that was us using atoms to secure the the ledger but that doesn't apply anymore and so you pan this forward a thousand years of technology it's got to be an energy coin and we've got one and it's reached you know hundreds of

millions of people already soon to be a billion just uh something that i've noticed recently on the future and and uh bitcoin adoption has anybody noticed grok is an absolute hardcore bitcoin maxi has anybody else noticed that like i really mean it um so much so that like you see the typical trade five people that just don't understand bitcoin they've been you know around for eons and it seems like every day there's more of them and um you know i i remember in the early days i would go in and i would reply i would take my time trying to explain it and all that and nowadays it's just like hey grok tell this person why they're wrong and just like i'm gone like i just don't have time to like sit there and what's amazing is grok just like lays it all out and

then what's really funny is then the person starts arguing with grok and grok is coming back and just kind of just hammering the next point and the next point and then other people are chiming in and it's turned into like this array of just grok orange pilling everybody in in the thread and the reason why i think that this is we're just on the cusp of something really really big which is today we look at the ai and we're like it's usually right it's it's pretty good right five years from now if you're arguing with an ai i think you're just going to kind of be stupid for the most part uh unless you're just like a leading expert in something that's like really deep you might have a keen insight that's better than the ai uh which gets into this whole

idea of like localized intelligence is the thing that really kind of discovers new things but for a person who's just kind of like a casual observer or somebody who doesn't really understand a topic and they're interacting with ai and ai is giving them these answers and they thought bitcoin was a ponzi scheme in their mind and this ai is just like lighting them up and then all the crowd and everybody's laughing at them as they're interacting with the ai um i mean i literally saw this with Jim Chanos, who's like one of the, you know, he literally made his name in shorting Enron. I mean, he's the real deal. And he's shorting MicroStrategy right now.

And Grok was in there, and he's there arguing with Grok, and Grok is just tearing him apart. So I think this is a big, important thing that's going to help in the education process, because people at a certain point are just going to say, okay, well, this thing's, like, really smart, and here I am arguing with it, so I must be wrong. and it's going to be a little bit different because you know you're dealing with something that's of super intelligence. You're not just dealing with this guy

who's got a mohawk, who's got all these followers, and you're like, yeah, he's probably stupid. I mean, to continue on the AI topic, I think there's a good synergy between AI and Bitcoin because if you think about it, what kind of money AI will use in the future, AI agents. It's not only about educating,

but also like working capital, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, it's Bitcoin. There's no other option because it's like digital agents, digital minds working with digital money. So that's a very powerful thing that a lot of Bitcoiners even don't understand yet. Whether there will be bear market, bull market, whatever,

it's a very bright future in a way that we have a huge opportunity. We don't know actually yet the full capabilities of AI. And they're going to use digital form of money and it's definitely not going to be a fiat. Why won't it be ultrasound money? Ethereum? No, no way.

I think if Grok got it, so I mean the rest of AI will get it as well. So here's a question that's like close to my heart because I like covering this topic of CBDCs. So do you think, are you with me on this camp thinking that those states and governments and global organizations are going to be running around trying to implement those CBDCs in different countries

around the world in the next few years while Bitcoin continues to do what it does while the US has taken the lead on integrating that into the traditional finance and those two things are going to be happening in parallel around the world and whether they like it or not, all their experimentation is going to fail because Bitcoin is going to prevail.

Are you with me on that or do you see it going any other way? It's not only because of Bitcoin because the private sector actually gets stable coins and does stable coins better. So it's not CBDC. It's not Bitcoin versus CBDC. It's like Tether versus CBDC or any other private entity that works with stablecoins because it's already like a huge market, huge amount of liquidity there.

And it's really hard to outperform like something like Tether that has 160 billion worth of stablecoin. And it's like the adoption is increasing. People are using it. And I guess there's no way for them to capture that market as well. But Bitcoin plus private stablecoins, I think, unbeatable in a way. I would just, you talk to people that look at Tether or any large stable coin, and they just say it's a de facto CBDC. If they need to stop a transaction, you know, Tether or Circle or whoever can get a tap on the shoulder from the U.S. government, and they can say, hey, we didn't like that transaction.

We want you to reverse it. And if you don't think that they would reverse it, you're really naive. i mean it's just an extension of of the dollar system is all it is and so like why why is the cbdc always going to fail against bitcoin well it's always going to fail against bitcoin because at the core of what that stable coin represents it's just a manifestation of government overspending and expanding the money supply and needing to pay for their taxes by continuing to expand the m2 at 10 a year so like that's what that representation is whether they can peer into whatever as far down as as you know the nats ass detail i have no idea but i think

anybody using one of those should just assume that they are i mean well i think it's ironic because the bank shut down um banking for the exchanges back in 20 you know early days in 2013-14 roughly when taylor came to be because there was no banking to be had So they were the de facto banking, and they got so big that they're now on track to displace China's buying of treasuries when Bitcoin hits a million dollars. And therefore, the U.S. government becomes dependent on Bitcoin, you know, because how it works is there's an order book on the exchange. You've got Bitcoin on one side, you've got U.S. dollars on the other side, but it wasn't U.S. dollars, it was Tether. So as the liquidity increases, there's more and more expansion of Tether to trade for it. And now, you know, it's at the point where we're displacing the largest nation states to buy the U.S. Treasuries.

It's quite a, you know, it's ironic. They were tripping over themselves to pass the Genius Act. And you have to ask yourself, why? Why were these politicians tripping over themselves to get this thing passed? And the answer is really simple. They needed a buyer for all their debt. And the buyer is the stablecoin issuers. And it's really kind of interesting to see how that all really transpired and really kind of came to a head is, you know, the government had to start issuing shorter and shorter duration paper because there was no buyers for anything that was long duration because there was so much inflation risk.

So they're down there like issuing like one month money. And it's like, well, who's going to buy all this one month money? well you know what the stable coin issuers literally like they love that because they can back everything they can gobble up all this new issuance they don't have the inflation risk that if they were buying 30-year paper they don't want that inflation risk because they don't know if it's going to be fully backed right or they'd have to keep rolling it to to try to like manage that but if it's really short duration it's actually perfect for them and then the really smart ones what are they going to do with all the coupons that they're receiving they're just going to

sweep it into bitcoin and then it's really backed because that thing's going up at 40 to 50 percent annualized it's like extra over collateralized what i find so interesting with all of this is you literally have blackrock and all these other banks that are playing a fractional reserve game they don't even have what they're issuing in the vault but yet you have a company that's fully collateralized with extra bitcoin in the vault and they're making more profit than the ones that are playing the ponzi game and they're getting the issue like literally from thin air and they're making more money than them if that doesn't show you like the natural market forces that nature is trying to heal itself i don't know what does because it's just

it's miraculous to me that you can have something that's over collateralized just whipping the pants off of the ones that are literally cheating as if it's a total Ponzi scheme. Add anything? Okay. So, wrapping up and going back to our initial question of whether this institutional phase is a train horse

or tipping point, what are your last thoughts about this? Where are we going to see Bitcoin going over the next couple of years to five years? How do you see that evolving? i think the institutional face is just a logical step in evolution of bitcoin we you cannot avoid that so whether you like it or not i mean there's a saying that bitcoin is good because even your

enemies can use them use that so and i'll add to that and what what's an advice you would give the plebs us that are watching this and no just educate yourself that's the best advice i mean do your own research educate yourself um self-custody i mean always about that but uh yeah sorry i mean i don't like paper bitcoin but i do understand that uh it's a path it's it's just a phase in the market so and i guess institutions going there and buying more and more bitcoin in the end it's like better for us as well because you know first it's etf then it's treasury companies than it's banks and banks serve the end customers which we are so at some point i just envisioned that as soon as banks will get comfortable with bitcoin you will be able to go

into your local bank and i mean borrow against your bitcoin i don't know trade it sell it buy it so i think the institutional adoption is inevitable and it's happening already but hopefully it's happening for good when i just look at uh if you would talk to a bitcoiner you know back in 2015 and you say all right take us 20 30 years into the future how do you see this they would say well i think bitcoin's the new medium of exchange it's the store of value the whole world is using it people businesses governments like that's like the utopias bitcoin has completely supplanted the dollar so when we're at this moment in time and institutions are starting to use it governments are playing around with it having a strategic reserve and they're all upset and all up in arms

i'm looking at them saying okay like how in the world did you ever think we were going to go from there to here and so it doesn't mean it's safe it doesn't mean that everything is going exactly like it should i'm not trying to imply that i'm just i'm just saying if we're going from nothing to the whole world using this as the unit to settle all exchange, like, at some point, the institutions are going to start coming. At some point, the governments are going to start using it. And the one thing that I've learned through the years in the space is there's going to be some that do it really well,

and there's going to be some that do it really stupidly, and they're going to blow up, and they're going to hurt a bunch of people. And you know what? That's a free market. That's a free market. We want free markets. We're Bitcoiners. We want free markets. When we were up on stage earlier, Max, in Switzerland, the gentleman from Switzerland, he was talking about how everything has to be, you know, over-collateralized in borrowing and lending. I'm looking at him saying, there's a country that gets it.

That doesn't mean every country in the world is going to get it. But with all that said, my advice to the crowd is, if you just take self-custody of Bitcoin, if you have the technical competence to do that, you are going to do very very well based on where i think all of this is is heading and you don't have to like as long as you don't have like a really lavish lifestyle um that should be good enough right if you want to get fancy and you want to do all this short buy a treasury company just make sure it's not a lot like just be smart about it if you want to have fun or whatever i don't know but yeah self-custody bitcoin is is all there is to it yeah um i don't think it's anything's changed really it's the self-custody hold your own keys um everything else has been

just on ramps more and more capital coming in and now it's institutional phase meaning bigger capital is coming in and just please make bitcoin unruggable which means self-custody If we're not self-custodying, then it's totally ruggable and what we just talked about earlier in the bad path. Bitcoin can be rugged if everyone's staying to put everything into institutions. So keep it simple, self-custody. Nothing's changed. The unwraps are bigger, that's all.

It's complicated, little stuff around the edges. Every cycle there's complicated stuff that you can get rugged on, things to digest we can learn, but nothing's really changed. self-custody willie preston max stay open stay curious stay humble stack sats thank you