July 23, 2025 • 72 mins
Marty sits down with Scott (@DarkSide2030_), a former Wall Street options trader, to discuss his "Big Long" thesis about how Bitcoin's unique properties as a digital bearer asset will create an unprecedented short squeeze in derivatives markets that could trigger systemic collapse of the traditional financial system.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
(00:10):
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
(00:31):
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
All right, take two.
I think we're good to go here, Scott.
Thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure to be here, Marty.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm really excited about this discussion because, as I was telling you, I had drinks
a couple of times over the last two weeks with Puncher down here at the Jersey Shore,
(00:52):
and he was singing your praises and trying to explain your thesis around the big long,
which is what I would like to dive into during this discussion.
But before we dive into your thesis around the Bitcoin big long,
how about we jump into your background, introduce you to the audience?
(01:13):
Yeah, sounds good.
So not to date myself, I started on the Philadelphia Options Exchange in 1989 as a market maker.
And I did a 25-year sentence on Wall Street, trading Philadelphia, then out to San Francisco on the Peak Coast, eventually landing in Chicago at the CBOE.
(01:37):
Finally moved upstairs towards the internet bubble and was trading sort of an upstairs hedge fund, for lack of a better description.
and then after 9-11 kind of took some time off, came back to the business on the brokerage side,
which was very interesting, and eventually leading into the construction of Dash Financial.
(02:00):
So I saw the writing on the wall with the extensive electrification, for lack of a better term,
of the options markets, everything going electronic and digital, and began to develop algorithms
really focused around transparency in the options market and founded a firm by NIMP
(02:21):
Dash, Dash Financial, which I think today is one of the largest options executions house
on Wall Street.
2013, I was on a flight to Spain to visit our clients at Banco Santander.
And on that flight, I happened to grab a bunch of computer magazines.
And funny enough, one of the center cutouts of the magazine was the white paper.
(02:43):
And I remember reading it the first time.
And then I think seven consecutive times on that flight, landed in Spain and downloaded
an app called Local Bitcoins, met a random Spaniard behind the hotel in Madrid, took
500 euro out of the ATM machine and I became a Bitcoiner in October of 2013. Then two weeks later,
(03:05):
retired from Wall Street and set out on a journey to really explore distributed ledger technology,
blockchain technologies at a deeper level. Started a firm by the name of Alters Software Solutions,
really focused on database security using distributed ledger technologies and built
that firm into quite a nice size. I exited in 2019 and have been traveling the country with my wife
(03:32):
for the last five years in a 45-foot RV. Really set out to explore the country and
touch grass and get to meet the local people. It's been an amazing experience.
But yeah, now we're kind of retiring formally from the RV life and just living my best life, Marty.
(03:52):
I'd love to hear that we're very
I don't want to say similar
I wouldn't say similar because I think the
pedigree and the degree to which you dove
into options
and Wall Street is
way different than my
experience but around the same time 2013
fall of 2013
is when
(04:14):
I graduated college
earlier that year and got my first job in a
managed futures fund in Chicago
sitting in an
office with a bunch of ex-CBot traders, and they were talking about, reminiscing about
the days on the floor before the servers took over.
And that's when I got into Bitcoin in earnest, too.
(04:34):
It was that fall, winter, getting my first bonus check from the firm.
And it's just funny.
I always find that traders, particularly with options and commodities experience out of
Chicago, get Bitcoin almost intuitively.
Yeah, it's funny, right? I think there's a natural skepticism of the system that comes with having traded the markets.
(05:00):
You know, I like to think of options traders, commodities traders as the grease that makes the engine turn, right?
You know, we're so hands on every day and we see all the shortcomings and the failings of the system.
So that naturally, I think, is an inclination to get involved in Bitcoin, which is in a sort of an off ramp of traditional finance.
(05:23):
Let's dive into that. What are some of the boogeymen that you see up front and close and personal trading options and commodities?
Well, I see a lot of big boogeymen, unfortunately.
Look, the modern system as constructed is what I call a debt-based fiat policy scheme.
(05:45):
The way the system is constructed puts the banks and what I'll call the banking cartel above the people.
But, you know, having lived through 08-09 and being on the floor during that time period, you really got to see how the system moved to save itself at what I would call at the expense of the ordinary man.
(06:14):
A perfect example, and I think Larry Lepard touches on this beautifully in his book, The Big Print, was the banning of short selling.
Markets require a short selling in order to function.
You have to have two-sided markets.
But all of a sudden, with one day's notice, the rules changed.
And the system morphed into something that really was anything but free markets.
(06:37):
the money printing, which at that time seemed large by today's scale, extremely small.
Yeah, I mean, everything I witnessed and even going back well before that, we can go back to
the Russian default, long-term capital management. I've lived through these things
(07:03):
and I've seen the system kind of lurch and struggle at times.
And that's the way the system is constructed.
The system is constructed to be an inflationary system.
And when there's a problem, the only way out of it is to print more money.
And now we've sort of achieved escape velocity in the system
(07:23):
with money printing that I would call out of control.
And there is really one real off-ramp, non-centralized off-ramp, and that's Bitcoin.
And I would add, I was a gold and silver bug long before Bitcoin came around.
Right. You know, I was I was stacking gold and silver and staying out of markets as early as 2002 after the Internet bubble and seeing what Wall Street did there with the just mass printing of paper companies adding dot com to their name, you know, simply to try to get a valuation.
(08:00):
So, yeah, you become so skeptical of markets and of the status quo.
And then Bitcoin comes along and you see something that's peer-to-peer.
And probably most important and least talked about is the bearer asset that is Bitcoin,
the ability to take self-custody.
(08:22):
I remember back in the late 80s, there was still bearer bonds floating around Wall Street.
People would buy bearer municipals, right?
And they'd have little coupons on the bottom of them and you could clip them.
And then interestingly enough, the government did away with bearer bonds.
Again, in the name of, I guess, terrorism or whatever the term du jour is.
(08:48):
But yeah, the ability to take delivery of Bitcoin is what really separates itself from any other asset.
and in turn is going to create the big problem or you know to touch on the big long we'll touch a
lot about talk a lot about the bearer nature of of bitcoin and why that's going to present a real
(09:10):
problem yeah and while i haven't heard you explain the thesis in depth yet i imagine
it ties into the big long because it's a bearer instrument and i believe your thesis revolves
around derivatives markets, which are essentially paper synthetic positions on top of underlying
(09:32):
commodities, which become extremely popular since the 1980s.
I think famously, at least a couple of years ago, there was rumors swirling around that
Deutsche Bank alone had something like a quadrillion dollars worth of derivative exposure,
which seems crazy to me that that's even possible.
And so I think diving into the nature of derivatives and how they've evolved over the years is probably a good jumping off point.
(09:59):
Yeah, well, I think the nature of derivatives is that they are contracts between two parties.
Right now, one of the terms that became very famous during 08-09 was the term counterparty.
Right. Well, what type of counterparty exposure does Bank A have to Bank B?
(10:20):
Like we learned during the GFC that AIG, right, had such counterparty exposure to Goldman Sachs that it turned out AIG had to be bailed out.
If not, Goldman Sachs would have failed. And if Goldman Sachs would have failed, well, probably every major money center bank in the world, not just in the country, but in the world would have failed.
(10:42):
because they have massive counterparty exposure to each other.
And we saw this when Lehman failed.
I was running a self-clearing broker-dealer at the time,
and the day they shut down Lehman and people just walked out the door,
well, what about all the trades that were settling T plus three
that we didn't know whether they were good trades or bad trades?
(11:06):
So the entire street had massive counterparty exposure to Lehman going down.
Now, the government came in and made those trades good. But just imagine if they hadn't.
What does it look like when, you know, you could you could take a major bank like Society General, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, right?
(11:27):
Like right even UBS, right? The large Japanese banks.
If any one of them were to go down, the counterparty exposure that they have to each other is so great and nobody understands it.
Well, you're Warren Buffett called derivatives, weapons of financial weapons of mass destruction.
Ray Dalio touches on the subject quite a bit.
(11:48):
Right. Nobody really understands what the counterparty exposure looks like from institution to institution.
and the way i've understood it because it seems like the potential for mass re-hypothecation
of these positions and these contracts exist in derivatives and so it's like to your point of
(12:13):
the counterparty risks that exist the way i've come to understand it is that it exists because
the banks will sort of get use the same instrument to get multiple points of exposure across the
system. And so you may think you own one thing, but somebody else also thinks they own that as well.
Yeah. I mean, and now you're hitting on the main point, which is that Bitcoin by its very nature
(12:36):
and the ability to verify on chain, the ability to do chain analysis is a game changer, right?
Wall Street's never seen a product like this, right? We, you know, gold, gold, the gold market's
perfect example. Most of the gold is centralized. It's held in large vaults by banking institutions,
(12:58):
bullion banks. And quite frankly, we have no idea how many claims there are, how many times
those gold bars have been leased out to different entities. I mean, some speculate it's 100x,
some speculate it's 300x. But with Bitcoin, you have a different type of security or asset.
Bitcoin is verifiable on chain, right?
(13:22):
So when we get to the point that Bitcoin treasury companies, Bitcoin holdings, ETFs, Bitcoin exchanges hold, let's just pick a number, 17 million Bitcoin, right?
Well, then how are you able to short it, right?
We're going to reach a point where you can actually verify and audit the amount of Bitcoin that exists.
(13:46):
And just to kind of step back so the audience understands, any functioning derivatives market, well-functioning derivatives market, requires that the asset that the derivatives are based on is freely available for loan.
That is a fundamental characteristic of any derivatives market.
(14:09):
You know, I would suggest to you that Saylor hitting the ATM so hard in MicroStrategy in the previous year was partly, you know, because he was converting, you know, Bitcoin, converting shares into Bitcoin and capturing the spread between the premium to the net asset value premium to the price of Bitcoin.
(14:32):
But more importantly, he was producing enough shares into the options market and derivatives market that it was freely available to be borrowed.
And that was critical for him to have a freely functioning, well-oiled derivatives market on MicroStrategy or on strategy stock.
Now, with Bitcoin, we have a different scenario.
(14:54):
There's no CEO to turn to and say, hey, we need to print more Bitcoin.
There's a limited amount of Bitcoin, and it's verifiable and auditable on-chain.
So that's a very different asset than I've ever seen on Wall Street.
Nothing like this has ever existed.
And we can just look to two of them, the major short squeezes of the last few decades.
(15:17):
So let's start with Porsche Volkswagen.
I don't know if you remember that, Marty.
It might be before your time.
but there was a large short interest I think 13 short interest in Volkswagen At the same time Porsche was quietly acquiring a significant stake at some point in I think it was a way in that area
(15:42):
They come out and announce that they own 74 percent of Volkswagen and basically taking a controlling stake.
Well, the problem was that the local state, the German government, owns 20% of Volkswagen.
So 94% of Volkswagen, we now know who owns it, but 13% of the float was short.
(16:05):
And if you do the basic math, that means you have a problem.
So what happens?
Volkswagen goes up about 5x in a couple days.
I think a trade was trading somewhere around 200 euro, topped out at 1,000 euro.
But the way they resolved the short squeeze was they got Porsche to go ahead and sell 5% of their stake in Volkswagen to create the shares available for the shorts to cover.
(16:35):
Let's fast forward to GameStop, right?
That's a memorable short squeeze.
GameStop trades, you know, goes ballistic.
The first thing they do is they try to shut down the buy button.
If you remember at Robinhood, they shut off the buy button.
That didn't work. And then the next thing you know, of course, the company has agreed to sell $3 billion worth of common stock. And of course, the stock gets cratered. And then the company sells the common stock.
(17:05):
I believe the same people that tapped Robinhood on the shoulder and asked them to shut off the buy button are the same people that tapped the board on the shoulder and said, hey, we need you to sell stock.
Because if not, you can't stop these things.
Now, in the case, when you look at both of those squeezes, they both came to an end with the creation of more supply.
Right. But that's not going to be the case in Bitcoin.
(17:28):
There's nobody to tap on the shoulder.
Right. So ultimately, you have a derivatives market that's growing exponentially.
And at the same time, you have an underlying asset, which is infinitely scarce,
and you can't print more of it and you can't force people to sell it.
Now, make the situation even, I mean, unlimited.
(17:50):
I don't even know how to explain how much worse this is.
But imagine that in 08, 09, had we had Bitcoin, and as people became absolutely frightened about the stability of banks, imagine they had an asset that they could actually buy and take delivery of in a matter of hours.
(18:14):
What would have happened?
Well, everybody would have pulled their money out of the banks, bought Bitcoin, and taken delivery.
Now, I foresee in the next financial crisis, and we will have the next financial crisis, we at least do, you're going to have this feedback loop where hedge funds, asset investors of all types are going to run to Bitcoin and take delivery.
(18:40):
And when they take delivery of Bitcoin, it's going to be removed from the market.
So the amount of Bitcoin available for loan is going to decrease rapidly at the very time in which they need it the most.
And that's the kind of driving concepts behind the big log thesis is that we have an asset that's infinitely scarce.
(19:06):
There's nobody to tap on the shoulder to print more of.
And worse yet, in a time of crisis, every investor or the smartest investors will immediately take delivery, causing the derivatives market to lock up.
And I can foresee a scenario in which this becomes systemic well beyond just the Bitcoin markets and permeates throughout the entire banking system.
(19:34):
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(21:09):
to that, it's interesting because I think we've already had like a small example of this happen,
particularly within the Bitcoin space at the end of 22, beginning of 23 with that mini banking
crisis that played out. Like we saw it at 1031, a bunch of our portfolio companies,
They were playing basically bank hot potato after Silvergate went down or was taken, I would argue, taken down unlawfully, forced to close its doors.
(21:39):
Their hand was forced to independently and under their own volition close down the bank.
But then you had Signature, First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank.
Those were a few of the banks that were at the time amenable to banking Bitcoin companies.
companies and particularly when signature first republic and silicon valley um got in trouble
(22:01):
we saw a number of founders and portfolio companies just simply wire the funds they had
from the bank to exchanges like unchained uh and then put the bitcoin into a three multi-sig volt
because like we're just going to wait it out and put all of our cash in bitcoin because we have
this bearer instrument that we can have a high degree of certainty and we can be ultimately
(22:25):
certain that it's not going to get rugged by the bank because we hold the keys.
Yeah, that's it, right? That's exactly the thesis, except it plays out on a global scale
much larger than those three banks. Imagine a major money center bank and we get a cascading
(22:46):
of potential bank failures or bank trouble.
I would see, especially now that Bitcoin, I think,
has crossed the Rubicon from a retail product to an institutional product.
I think so many players, large players are well aware of Bitcoin.
I just think we're in a new world today.
(23:06):
And I don't see how they're going to stop this problem once it starts.
There's no one to tap on the shoulder.
It's global.
There's exchanges located around the world, right?
So it's not just a U.S. or a Western banking cartel situation.
This is a global asset, highly liquid.
I don't see how they stop it once it starts.
(23:29):
Well, let's dive into this and get into the dynamics of the landscape and how this may unfold.
And before we talk about the future, let's talk about the past.
And we've had examples, not necessarily of derivatives markets, but institutions within the Bitcoin economy that have essentially lent out Bitcoin to counterparties who destroyed it or simply lost it.
(23:56):
I mean, go all the way back to Mt. Gox.
When we were first getting into Bitcoin, they were hacked and a number of their customers had claims to X amount of Bitcoin.
But the hackers had stolen Y and they found themselves short Bitcoin.
And so that went under and it took over a decade for the Mt. Gox customers to get any other money back.
(24:18):
Fast forward to 2020 to 2022.
That's when Genesis was lending, Genesis BlockFi, Celsius.
Others were lending Bitcoin out, FTX, to traders who were taking risk in altcoin markets and promising that they would get a return and return the Bitcoin.
I mean, those markets blew up and you found many situations where people thought they had Bitcoin, but learned that their counterparty, their trusted third party, where they were storing their Bitcoin and lent it out and wasn't going to get it back.
(24:53):
So we're scaling up.
And now as a San State 2025, as you mentioned, across the Rubicon institutions getting in, how do you see something like that playing out moving forward?
And what are the different dynamics that exist today that could act as an accelerant to that process?
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
(25:14):
So, you know, today, the Celsius block by kind of thing of today is is now Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, you know, tremendously huge banks.
And now it becomes a systemic issue rather than a localized issue that can be stomped out by regulators and sort of the losses going to the investor.
(25:36):
What happens when the losses are taken by large financial institutions, which then need to be bailed out or bailed in whichever way we head?
I mean, that's another subject.
But ultimately, the game has now gone up upstream of small players to the largest players in
the world.
(25:57):
And that should be a tremendous cause for concern, because if you understand the very
nature of derivatives, like I said earlier, you absolutely need to have the underlying
asset freely available for loan for the derivatives markets to function.
You know, I'll give you an example.
A lot of people view shorting as betting the price is going to go down.
(26:22):
But that's really not how derivatives markets work.
A great example would be this.
I hold just as an example, I hold a thousand Bitcoin.
I'm an old school Bitcoiner.
I go to Goldman Sachs and I say, look, I'd like to buy insurance on my Bitcoin, you know,
price insurance.
I'd like to buy, you know, let's say Bitcoin is now a million dollars.
(26:46):
I'd like to protect it at 800,000.
So I'm going to buy the 800,000 puts.
OK, Goldman comes up with a price where they sell you an over-the-counter derivative product.
Well, in order for them to hedge themselves, they need to go out and short Bitcoin, right?
Because they have downside exposure.
Now, nobody in this transaction that I just explained is betting on Bitcoin going down.
(27:08):
Matter of fact, everybody in the transaction wants Bitcoin to go higher.
However, because of an insurance type product like a put contract or portfolio insurance,
you need to cover your downside exposure.
So in this case, Goldman has gone out and shorted Bitcoin, but they need to borrow that
Bitcoin to short it.
(27:28):
Now, if we end up in a situation where, like you explained, people take Bitcoin off the
market, they take delivery of their Bitcoin, throw it in unchained and a multi-sig.
well, where's Goldman going to get the Bitcoin? Right now, Goldman already has a short Bitcoin
position on, but all of a sudden they get a call saying, hey, we need the Bitcoin.
(27:49):
And now we end up in a short squeeze. So what started out as being a small problem
can quickly mushroom into a gigantic problem that's global. It's not just here in the US,
it's not just Europe, it's all over the world. And as this derivative market grows,
You know, we're adding potential fuel to a fire that could really grow out of control
(28:12):
at a very quick pace.
And again, the trigger to this can have nothing to do with Bitcoin, right?
We could see, you know, some banking problem in Japan having to do with the long end of
their bond curve or some crisis coming out of Europe.
But ultimately, Bitcoin will be the off ramp from the modern banking system.
And that off ramp combined with self-custody will lead us into a crisis the likes of which
(28:37):
we've never seen before.
Okay, a couple questions here.
No, I think it's a great point.
Describe, that's one thing I don't think
most people realize too
is with these derivatives,
like you can literally go to a bank
and if you have your sort of books in order
and your thesis in order
and you present it to them,
they will go and make the product.
(28:58):
I mean, most famously,
the scene in the big short
where Michael Berry goes to all the banks
on Wall Street
and sort of gives them the binder
about creating that credit default swap.
and they go and make a market for him.
So you're saying similar sort of dynamics
will come into play with people
who want different sort of derivative hedge products
for their Bitcoin.
(29:18):
They're going to have to go to the bank.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, look, as institutions pour into Bitcoin,
they will manage risk
because that's what institutions are paid to do
is to manage risk.
So they will be looking to create derivatives
to protect against downside price moves, right?
That's the way the system is built, is to manage volatility, to manage risk.
(29:41):
But Bitcoin wasn't designed for this purpose.
And therefore, we kind of have the immovable object hitting the immeasurable force at some point.
And it becomes a really scary situation.
Add to that again, and I think this is the part that most people take for granted, is the ability to self-custody in a matter of hours or even less.
(30:06):
That changes the entire game.
Because all of a sudden, in any type of crisis, people will pull their money out of Coinbase or out of any of the major exchanges or even out of banks.
And they will move it to self-custody.
right? Untrained will see their balances explode. And what does that do to the derivatives complex,
(30:29):
right? It only puts it under more stress. And you can almost see the feedback loop, right?
The worse it gets, the more people will pull money out of the system. And that will just
create more and more stress. So, yeah, when I look at this from a derivatives perspective,
What I see is a potential disaster brewing right now.
(30:50):
Right now it not a problem because Bitcoin is freely available to loan Funding rates are very low Add to that Marty that we now have futures perps right All different types of paper Bitcoin ETFs iBit right Like imagine what happens when all of those
markets lock up in a very short amount of time. So futures will trade at a discount to the spot
(31:15):
price, right? Funding rates will go through the brief. Perps will become extremely illiquid.
I-BIT puts will trade at an extreme premium to the calls.
I-BIT will become hard to borrow.
All of these things will happen in a very short period of time in any type of a financial crisis.
And everything just becomes, again, I'll keep repeating the term, it becomes a negative feedback loop where you just can't stop it.
(31:40):
And there is no solution.
You're not going to be able to turn to the regulators to solve this problem.
You're not going to be able to turn to governments to solve this problem.
I don't know how they're going to solve this problem. Once it starts, right, I don't see how it resolves itself. And that's why I call it the big law, right? The inverse on Michael Berry's big short.
and i think there's two important things first thing is really highlight the point that this
(32:08):
doesn't necessarily have to manifest within the bitcoin economy can be an external factor an
external crisis in japan europe here in the united states within the banking sector whatever it may
be and it does seem like some of the banks are are beginning to weaken materially i've read some
reports on wells fargo bank of america uh morgan stanley and others even though some of them have
(32:30):
had uh an increase in earning per share and revenues if you look into the balance sheets
it's really driven by um trading which isn't a sustainable revenue line if you look at like
loan origination deposits all are trending in the wrong direction which is a long-term
sort of revenue drivers, consistent revenue drivers of those companies.
(32:53):
And then the follow-up question,
I had like, we're led to believe,
and I led to believe being,
led to doing the most work in that sentence
that Wall Street finance types are some of the smartest people in the world.
And it is just baffling to me that none of them can,
(33:15):
would be able to recognize that Bitcoin is this digital bearer asset
with this ability to take delivery within minutes to hours
if anybody so wanted to,
that they wouldn't understand that these knock-on domino effect risks exist.
So I guess what I'm trying to get at is how does that not recognize on Wall Street
(33:38):
or is it simply a product of their mindset as we're going to go
for as many products as possible because that's how we're going to make money.
in the short term and there's just like no avoiding it this is what we're here to do
yeah with you know it's such a great point um the capital uh structures the incentive
the incentive structures of a wall street employee haven't changed since 08 or 09
(34:01):
right they're still paid on a quarterly basis or annual basis bonus and it's based on the amount
of money you made this year or the amount of money you made this quarter right and and all
of that is misaligned incentives, right? So people are incentivized purely to make as much money as
they can today. Today, Bitcoin is freely available to borrow. The derivatives market is exploding.
(34:24):
Companies like Susquehanna, Jane Street are making fortunes of money in the Bitcoin complex.
So we're in. The other problem, and we learned this through O8-0809, and I've experienced it
personally, is you're stuck in this situation when a large client comes to you and says,
I want you to build this derivative for me. You have the problem that if you don't do it,
(34:48):
another bank will and you'll lose your client. And we saw that in 08-09 and we see it today.
So why would somebody write a derivatives contract that could potentially become extremely
dangerous two years from now, a year from now? Well, because if they don't do it, somebody else
will and they'll lose their client. And I think that's the incentive behind, you know, getting
(35:11):
yourself into trouble and maybe trouble down the line. But what choice do you have when your boss
taps you on the shoulder and says, come up with a structure. We need to keep this client happy.
What do you do? You come up with a structure. You do what you're told.
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Yeah, you can see it getting crazy pretty fast.
And I guess that begs the question,
(35:56):
is this ultimately good for Bitcoin?
Is this a hard lesson everybody needs to learn?
Is it said could it potentially snowball into such a big event to become, like, as you mentioned, systemically a systemic risk to the global financial system that people will be pissed at Bitcoin?
Or is it how do you see this playing out?
(36:17):
Well, again, Bitcoin is money for your enemies.
Right. So I don't think Bitcoin cares whether the global financial system detonates itself through derivatives.
I think that the seeds for this problem have long been sown.
But yeah, I do think that at some point it could become systemic.
(36:37):
And that's probably I mean, please don't take this the wrong way, but that's probably a good thing.
Right. Look at the system we have today and realize just how toxic it is.
You know, we could go into suicide rates and all of the all of the metrics around, you know, where we stand today.
hey, young people, you know, not being able to afford a home, you know, multiple jobs,
(37:00):
the fertility rates, right, the birth rates, everything is pointing in the wrong direction.
And that probably has a lot to do with broken money. That's probably a full show of its own.
But, you know, are we better off having the current system, you know, implode? Probably.
(37:21):
Does that mean in the short term it wouldn't be an extremely painful event?
Of course it would be.
But out of the ashes of that old system would be born a new system based on hard money.
And abundance would flourish, right?
You know, I just think we'd find ourselves in a better world, right?
So ultimately, you know, you never know how much pain you're in until you get out of that pain.
(37:44):
And sometimes it just feels to me like it just continues to get worse.
so you know that that's my my take you know a lot of people will say well what you're presenting is
a doomer thesis and and i think it's the exact opposite right i think the doomer is the one who's
sitting in a burning building telling everybody to stay put we're going to put out the fire
right and what i'm saying is get out of the burning building there's a better way to do this
(38:09):
completely agree i think uh that's what we have outside of our studio in austin texas
currently not there but it's fix the money fix the world and i think i've been labeled a doomer
as well many times and i think that's like the big question because i remember in 2013
my wife my then girlfriend she would come to chicago we were long distance and we'd go to
(38:34):
brunch and i got in trouble the first long distance trips because i was so obsessed with bitcoin
and the financial system i was convinced in 2013 i was like this is there's not sustainable they're
printing too much money, too many derivatives out there.
Like Bitcoin exists now, like people are going to funnel in.
And I was convinced back in 2013, 2014, that it was going to happen rather quickly.
(38:56):
Fast forward to 2020, 2021, same thing.
But every time post-2008 specifically that a little crisis has bubbled,
2023 with the banking crisis, the system seems to be able to temporarily self-repair itself.
And that's always a question of my mind, I'm sure.
many others minds like you know that's why i think lawrence larry wrote the big print like it seems
(39:22):
like the big print could be on the way like how confident are you if at all that we're on the
cusp like is there a timeline to this or is it is it one of those things where it's like you don't
know when but you know it's definitely going to happen at some point yeah i think i'm in that
latter camp i i don't know when it could be next week could be next month five years ten years
(39:42):
I doubt we make it 10 years.
The metrics are just really bad.
I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a mayor of a town, Thomas Young, who's a mayor of a small town in New Jersey.
And he said currently they're having a tough time hiring police officers.
And he was pointing out that a young police officer, I don't know, cost their town $50,000, $60,000 first year.
(40:07):
But the health benefits and all the other benefits cost above $60,000.
They're $60,000 to $70,000 a year, right?
And that number is going up towards $100,000 a year.
So at what point does the system just break?
I don't know, but we're probably a lot closer to that point today than we were at any point.
Plus, I'll just add, I think the Fed used to back, let's go back to 08, probably owned,
(40:30):
I don't know, small single digits of our balance sheet.
They're now up to, I think, 26% of our balance sheet is owned by the Fed.
So, I mean, at what point does this become a problem?
Then just add in Japan, which we all understand is a complete train wreck.
But ultimately, they are, Japan, Europe, right, they are held afloat in any type of financial crisis by the U.S. government and the Fed's willingness to provide them dollar liquidity, right, swap lines.
(41:00):
If you look at where we're headed with a new Fed chair, assume it's someone like Scott
Bissett, I don't think the willingness is there to bail out the world.
I don't think the willingness, the political will is there to bail out the U.S. banks.
So I think we go more into a bail-in scenario than a bail-out scenario.
(41:21):
And that's the most scary, the concept of the great taking.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, Marty, David Rogers-Webb's piece.
You know, if we go down that road with the DTCC problems, you know, failures at the banks and the DTC recapitalize itself through great taking, you know, that that's absolutely catastrophic.
(41:42):
But you just get the sense that the willing the political will will not be there for the next bailout.
yeah part of david's thesis right like he's read all the legal contracts that exist and in the
the sort of small print details of the contracts that everybody has with the dtcc it's like you
(42:02):
actually don't own these shares at all at the end of the day correct yeah yeah no we live in an iou
world you know you don't own you can go out and buy apple stuff today but you don't own it
right? What you own is a claim on the broker dealer you bought it through. So let's just
assume you use Charles Schwab. Okay. So I buy a hundred shares of Apple. What I own is a claim
(42:25):
on Charles Schwab for a hundred shares of Apple stock. Charles Schwab owns a claim on the DTCC
and the DTCC owns your Apple stock. Now, post Lehman Brothers, and I think the case that
he's really pointing at was a legal case between J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers,
(42:45):
where the courts came and ruled that, well, J.P. Morgan was senior to Lehman Brothers,
and therefore the clients of Lehman Brothers would lose their assets to J.P. Morgan.
Well, that means that the DTCC is senior to your claim on Charles Schwab. So the DTCC's claim on
(43:06):
Charles Schwab is senior to yours.
If Charles Schwab was to fail, well, then they're not your shares of Apple anymore.
They belong to the GTCC.
Yeah.
And so what type of what type of data points are you following outside of like bond yields?
Obviously, this week, Japan's 40 year bonds screaming higher.
(43:27):
You have the 30 year UK guilt hitting 2007 levels.
is this in your mind the beginning like alarm bells going off that something's breaking
in terms of liquidity in the back end of the system well that's the other question too excuse
me for rambling here a little bit but is it like at this time around is it even a liquidity
(43:48):
crisis or is it more of a confidence crisis is i think more and more people are becoming
skeptical of the idea that government bonds are these grade a sort of savings vehicles for the
long term. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It starts as a liquidity crisis,
but quickly becomes a confidence crisis and made exponentially worse by social media,
(44:12):
where you can actually explain to people what's really happening, right? People are able to get
information outside of the traditional media, which would tell you, oh, this is just a small
problem. We're going to print money. Congress needs to step in. I just don't think that's going
to happen this time. But yeah, I mean, all of the things you mentioned, right, from Japan to the UK,
(44:35):
obviously capital flight out of the UK is a big one. We've seen all kinds of crazy capital flights.
And then let's just kind of throw stable coins in there since we just had the Genius Bill pass.
A lot of people are extremely bullish on stable coins and they're going to provide on ramps to
Bitcoin, which is all true, 100% true. But I think there's unintended consequences to where we're
(44:56):
headed with stable coins, and that is to destabilize smaller governments and then larger
governments around the world as we look to have dollar dominance. One of the things stable coins
will do is they will get dollars in the hands of everyone throughout the world on crypto rails,
right? So today, if you try to send dollars, let's say to Egypt, let's just use Egypt as an
(45:20):
example, right? It's almost impossible to get dollars to a friend in Egypt, right? You've got
to send them through the SWIFT system. They're going to get taken by the Egyptian government,
and then the Egyptian banks will take what's left. And the Egyptian citizen gets the Egyptian pound,
which is hyperinflating away. Now, if you go ahead and introduce stablecoins into that system,
(45:45):
my question to you would be, well, are we going to create more North Koreas?
Because as these countries begin to see their ability to print money taken away from them,
what do they do? In a world where they can shut off the internet and they can do all kinds of
crazy things to their people, are we running the risk of destabilizing the third world?
(46:10):
They're completely destabilizing the third world. And then what happens in Japan when people can use
dollars rather than yen, do we run the risk of hyperinflating away the yen?
And if we do that as we talked about earlier what are the consequences for Japanese banks and counterparty exposure I can just see how the introduction of stable coins which seems like a great idea right On its surface I understand it
(46:36):
But I think if you look to the second order effects and the knockdown effects of policy decisions like this, they can have lasting consequences, which may not be what we're looking for.
You know, I've learned in my my few years here on the planet that, you know, what looks like a good idea up front can usually when the U.S. government flexes its muscles abroad, it has negative consequences.
(47:02):
Yeah, the whole stable coins thing is very interesting.
I said this yesterday.
I think that's one thing I'm interested to see if it actually plays out.
We got a few points on this topic.
The Genius Act as it's written, it's unclear to me.
I think it seems pretty clear that the reason that the act came up in the first place, because Circle was pissed off that Tether is absolutely eating their lunch in the global stable coin market.
(47:27):
So they went to create some regulatory moat.
And I wonder, it's not clear to me the way the bill is written, that Tether can operate in the way it has up to this point outside of the borders of the United States.
And if that's the case, if they can't, like I could see demand for U.S. dollar stable coins falling significantly.
(47:49):
But I think they may still be able to operate an El Salvador entity and do what they've been doing, not trust KYC, AML compliance on their users and just have free floating dollar instruments across the world.
but your point too there like maybe it's like the second order sort of destabilization effect
is intentional in the sense that if you and this is where we get like alex jones like
(48:14):
like this is anybody listening to this is just a theory but it would um would be pretty interesting
it's like you get the stable coins out there you destabilize and in parallel on the back end
And as a government and as a country, individual citizens within that country really leaning into Bitcoin.
And I think that's the big question.
(48:34):
We've had this U.S. dollar reserve system for many decades now.
And that's everybody's talking about fourth turning, just like cyclicality of how this stuff happens.
And if you're the U.S. government acknowledging like, OK, it seems pretty clear the writings on the wall that the U.S. dollar is a reserve currency.
It's on its way out.
Like, how do we extend the American empire into the future?
(48:57):
It's like you push the dollar, destabilize everything else, get them all pissed off at you.
But then on the back end, accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible and be like, OK, we'll go to this neutral reserve asset.
And by the way, we've accumulated a bunch in our country.
It's going to be on good footing coming out of this.
Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable take.
(49:19):
albeit for me to take off my tinfoil hat. I tend to like to wear it. But yeah, I think that
if I listen to the administration closely, what they're saying is they want a devalued dollar
at the same time they want dollar dominance to increase. And those two things would seem
(49:39):
antithetical to each other. But if you look through the clouds, I think you see that stable
coins can accomplish both. But again, I get concerned when we begin to meddle in foreign
affairs to this degree. And you're going to remove the foreign government's ability
(50:01):
to manage their currency, and you're going to push dollars into the wild in all types of
countries all over the world. What is that second order effect? It scares me. I think it's
inflationary. Now, obviously, we'll export as much of that inflation as we possibly can.
(50:21):
But again, how much can you mess with the rest of the world before it comes back and hits you
on the head? I don't know the answer to that question, but it would seem that that's where
this is headed. Yeah, that's a question that has been lingering in my mind the last two years.
is there
I mean it was
(50:41):
basically
trying to think theoretically through
things like running with the meme soft landing
which Janet Yellen and
others put out there
post 2021
stimulus and trying to navigate the waters
of inflation and
Fed interest rate policy and I think it's pretty
clear that you can't really
they can't manufacture a soft landing but I do
(51:04):
and it's part of what we do at
1031 and why I have this show and the media companies to educate people about Bitcoins.
I do earnestly believe that if you can get Bitcoin into the hands of enough individuals,
if you can get it into structured credit products the right way, like that's the way
you manufacture a soft landing because you're going to have to hyperinflate the currency
(51:25):
at some points.
The writing's on the wall.
It's mathematically impossible that that's not going to be the ultimate outcome, whether
that's next year or 10 years from now is is another question but like can you integrate bitcoin
enough into the system where as everything's hyperinflating if you have enough bitcoin exposure
hopefully it's it's rising in value faster than your money's being debased and you sort of get
(51:51):
out of the other side of a a hyperinflationary superinflationary event whatever it may be
and you're somewhat okay because you have bitcoin expenditure yeah look that's that's the thesis
behind bit bonds and for the individual i've been talking a lot about bid annuities um these are
this is the way to improve the balance sheet but you're not going to improve the debt problem that
(52:17):
you know our system is based on creating more debt but what you can do is improve the balance
sheet, you can bring debt to GDP down to manageable levels. If you introduce bit bonds,
I know that theory has been out there for a while now. I think that's one way of taking on the
problem head on. However, that's not without major secondary and knock-on effects. If it turns out
(52:43):
that the real free cost of money is somewhere around 12%, what happens to mortgage rates?
What happens to long-term bonds?
What happens to the existing bond market?
Right?
So the reality is that we're in a box, right?
There is no easy way out.
Yes, if you introduce hard money into the system through bid bonds, bid annuities, whichever
(53:03):
way you want to do it, you're going to solve one problem and you are going to cause probably
a bigger second one, right?
Ultimately, the system is in trouble.
Um, inflation, the inflation boogeyman has just run wild.
The cost of everyday goods is going up, you know, at high levels.
(53:24):
And look, I don't believe the current inflation numbers as they're presented to us, CPI.
I don't believe GDP.
I mean, CPI is an example, right?
We count microchips.
We count things that are, that go down in value.
But how many, how many, how many SD cards do I need?
Right.
But I need steak, I need food, I need beef, right?
(53:46):
The price of steak goes up.
So then they shift to ground beef in the CPI number, right?
Like it's just constantly juggling, you know, the statistics to try to create a narrative.
But in the end, you know, you can't convince somebody who goes to the grocery store that
the price of goods today is only 2% higher than it was last year when they know it's
(54:07):
20% higher, right?
Like that's just a fact.
So, yeah, we're running up against the amount of lying that can happen in a believable society.
At some point, just everybody calls BS and confidence begins to break.
And I think you made the point earlier about confidence.
Look, we are a confidence-based system.
(54:30):
The U.S. dollar is based on faith.
What makes a $100 bill worth 10 times more than a $10 bill?
Well, they're both, the paper is worth the same, right?
So it's purely faith.
I like to say the US dollar is the world's largest religion.
But in contrast, if you own 10 Bitcoin, there's no question that you own 10 times more than
(54:52):
if you own one Bitcoin, right?
So that's the real difference in a hard money system versus a faith-based system like the
US dollar.
Yeah.
And bring this back to Bitcoin and how it reacts in a situation where things begin to unravel in the global financial system.
I mean, you mentioned that it's the big long.
(55:14):
Like how big are we talking?
Like how weird is this like hyper Bitcoinization?
What does it look like?
Well, you know, obviously I don't exactly know what it looks like, but it doesn't look good.
Right.
I think that the existence of Bitcoin and the institutional adoption of Bitcoin will create a systemic problem for the entire system.
(55:39):
The ability to have capital that you're able to take delivery of as a bearer asset through self-custody, that's not something we had during 08, 09.
That didn't exist.
That's sort of why Bitcoin was created, I would like to suggest.
right satoshi's vision was a monetary system outside of the banking cartel so what does it
(56:02):
look like when the banking cartel you know implodes it probably looks really bad but really
really bad and they will um try you know a cbdc of some type you know i imagine going back to
david webb's thesis uh but i i just think bitcoin wins in the end and um i think we'll we'll end up
on some type of hyper bitcoinization what do you think the system looks like on the other side
(56:27):
let's just assume that the big long thesis is correct and it plays out like how do we reorient
the global economy around a bitcoin standard in your mind that's a great question i've kind of
speculated that by at the time that happens and of course it depends on timing um will we have a
fully built out layer two, like lightning and people will live on Bitcoin. And I mean, imagine,
(56:52):
you know, I like to look back at history, right? So we go through the dark ages. How did we come
out of the dark ages? The Medici family in Florence introduced the Florin and the government
of Florence, right? They had a hard currency. It was a standard unit weight measure of gold,
a gold coin that was then adopted throughout Europe. And it came out of the dark ages and
(57:16):
went into the renaissance uh what did it look like i'm sure it didn't look good right uh but
um you look you get to a point where you're in so much pain that the next system's better
right and i think we're we're quickly going down that road i mean the system we're on now
with the inflation rates we have is not sustainable
agreed and that's like the other thing i'd be interested to get your thoughts on this
(57:43):
this sort of flogging of Jerome Powell publicly over the last month. It's really accelerated.
It's really been going on since before the election, even last year, Trump's been berating
him. But now you've got pile on effect from senators and representatives and other academic
economists sort of in the Trump circle. And it seems clear to me that the ultimate goal
(58:05):
is to merge the Fed and the Treasury, just eliminate any illusion that there is an independent
and Fed and just get the people in place that the Fed are going to move in
lockstep with the treasury with whatever they want to do.
And that's my big question, going back to like confidence.
And this is a confidence game.
Like that is like emerging market, like activity.
(58:30):
Yeah, that's crazy, right?
That would happen.
Like I know they have goals and intentions to just really turn it on turbo
and you need the Fed and the Treasury to move in lockstep to effectuate your policy goals.
But is that a step too far in the minds of the public in terms of their confidence in the system overall?
(58:53):
Well, I don't really think the public even understands the Fed nor less has confidence in it.
Look, you know, we're at a point now where we can't even print our own money the way the system is designed
without paying a bunch of banksters interest for the pleasure of doing so.
And so when the Fed goes out into the open market and buys back a bunch of 20-year bonds,
(59:14):
essentially monetizing the debt, we're printing money.
But at the same time, the Fed now owns those bonds.
And we as the citizenry kept the pleasure of paying them interest for printing our money.
That's a ridiculous system.
Everything about it makes no sense.
I would suggest to you, Marty, that we replace the Fed with the difficulty adjustment.
(59:36):
Completely predictable.
Everybody will understand how much money is being created, when it's being created, on what time series it's being created.
And we can get past our monetary issues and focus on creating a better society.
um and as somebody who's been in this for almost 12 years now like how how do you view this cycle
(01:00:01):
compared to cycles of of years past is it i hate to ask the question does it feel different
question yeah so look i believe that the four-year cycle is dead i i actually think it died last the
last four years but of course choke point 2.0 uh i believe ftx celsius all of these things were
sort of born out of a government's desire to kill Bitcoin. I just, in my heart of hearts,
(01:00:29):
I have a tough time understanding why at the same time that they were cutting off
and debacking any entrepreneurs in the space, right? At that same time, we had FTX,
all of these things, and they all seem to be in one way or another attached to government. FTX,
obviously giving a tremendous amount of money back to politicians. So yeah, my take is that
(01:00:52):
those cycles are dead. The four-year cycle is dead. We're in a new era for Bitcoin. That doesn't mean
there won't be better markets in US dollar and bull markets and US dollar price. But yeah, I'm
one of those that focuses on one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. And what really is volatile right now
is the U.S. dollar, right?
(01:01:13):
So when you see the U.S. dollar price in Bitcoin,
focus on the fact that it's really the dollar
that's fluctuating in value.
One Bitcoin is equal to one Bitcoin
and that hasn't changed.
Yeah, and you mentioned a couple of things
like BitBonds, BitAnnuities.
You'd like to see second layers
like Lightning Network mature.
What else sort of tickles your fancy
(01:01:36):
in terms of like Bitcoin products
going into the cycles?
Just to your point about bit bonds and bit annuities, like that's what like we're the sole outside capital for battery finance.
And that's something that we've been really bullish on for years now.
And it seems like they're really at a point of maturation where they're going to be able to go out and create these structured credit products with dual collateral.
(01:01:58):
commercial real estate and Bitcoin.
Like, I think that this, in my opinion,
this is the cycle of Bitcoin not only being recognized,
but preferred as collateral in debt instruments.
And when you think about what that does
for the market structure of Bitcoin,
particularly if you get longer duration credit instruments
(01:02:20):
that Bitcoin is playing with,
and that is like, I think I'm in agreement with you
that the four-year cycle is not going to look
how it has in the past, simply because of products like these coming to market
that allow you to create like a forward looking duration curve of Bitcoin that you can have
certainty is going to be locked up. Yeah. And to that point, look, I think that's what
(01:02:41):
Saler's up to, right? So when he's introduced Strife, Stride, Strike, the three perpetual
preferreds, Strife is really, I mean, if you really think about what that product is, it is
a high, essentially, he's creating a fiat yield curve on Bitcoin, right? And we saw that come out
(01:03:05):
at somewhere around 12%. It's now down into the eights. As that approaches the sixes and the fives,
I think that product will absolutely at some point trade better than long-term treasuries.
And boy, is that going to be an interesting time. But the circle back to the big long
and what you were just talking about, structured products, mortgages, annuities, BitBonds,
(01:03:28):
you know, all of these products require the sequestration of Bitcoin.
You can't have a BitBond unless you have Bitcoin backing it.
If you're going to do a 10-year BitBond, you're going to have to take Bitcoin and sequester it for 10 years.
Right?
Well, that Bitcoin is not going to be available for loan.
But you can see where all of where we're headed with the financialization of Bitcoin
(01:03:51):
is that it's going to create a lower supply of Bitcoin for the derivatives market.
So when I look at these products, what I see is just more trouble on the horizon.
And I think the BitBonds thing is coming.
I don't know who goes first.
I imagine it's coming really soon.
I know CJ Konstantinos has talked about it, People's Reserve.
(01:04:14):
I know you guys are working on that.
But when it comes and people are able to get essentially AAA rated paper that looks to
yield north of 10%, what does that do?
I mean, what does that do to our markets?
What does that do to the derivatives market as all of this Bitcoin gets sequestered on chain with proof of reserves And that another thing Like when Jack Ballard and 21 went full proof of reserves you know again these are all of these things
(01:04:42):
all of these pieces to the puzzle that are going to create extreme tightness in the Bitcoin market.
And when you're able to actually identify on chain where this Bitcoin lives, well,
we're going to get to a point where, you know, what happens if we know that the Bitcoin treasury
companies own 22 million Bitcoin. Well, that would become a problem, wouldn't it?
(01:05:05):
Right. So, I mean, this is this is what I mean by keeping the system honest. And Wall Street's
never seen a product like this, right, where you can verify and audit the network every 10 minutes
on average. Like this is something new. And while it's working well and everyone's making money
today, I can see where this is headed tomorrow. Yeah. And that's why I've been a long term
(01:05:27):
advocate and i really am happy that jack and 21 to prove reserves but like i wanted to go a step
further like bring the unchained collaborative multi-sig model to all of these products just to
basically force the hand of we're not even going to give you the potential to re-hypothicate because
(01:05:47):
i want it in this two or three three or five m of n multi-sig whatever it comes out to be
and I want to be able to look at it and have certainty that it's not moving
and that you're not rehypothecating.
And if you're trying to give somebody else a claim to that Bitcoin,
they can also see that it's in this multi-sig and sort of assume,
wait, it seems like that's tied up with some other instrument right now.
(01:06:11):
I don't really trust this.
Yeah, I think that's where we're headed, right?
I really do.
I think that the market's going to demand it.
More people are going to offer it.
And as it becomes popular, these Bitcoin treasury companies,
are going to compete with each other, not just on their ability to buy more Bitcoin,
but also on their ability to show proof of reserves.
I think that's where we're headed.
(01:06:33):
Yeah, it's a brave new world.
And do you see the, I mean, they're going to compete on that.
And I think that's a big question in my mind.
I think there is a level of complacency that exists in the market right now
that really isn't forcing people to take delivery of UTXOs.
(01:06:53):
And that's not your keys, not your coins.
January 3rd, sort of historically, but in recent years really hasn't been that big.
Like pull your coins off the exchange and make sure they have it like.
Part of me where is that sort of mentality has been getting weaker over the years and complacency can drive people just to not take custody and allow these problems to become exacerbated or blow up even more than they let the bubbles blow bigger than they otherwise would
(01:07:24):
If self-custody was taken more seriously than it is today.
And with that being said, I think more than half of all Bitcoin on the market today isn't self-custody.
But you could squint and see the trend going in the wrong direction if people get comfortable with IBIT, with banks, cussing Bitcoin for them, all stuff like that.
Yeah, that's a great point.
(01:07:45):
And obviously, Bitcoin in self-custody is the gold standard.
I think it's going to take that financial crisis we were talking about earlier to reverse the trend.
But the trend will reverse.
We will hit trouble.
you know one thing i've learned in markets is that there's always there's always troubled water
over the horizon um so yeah i'm i'm convinced that you know the next financial crisis might
(01:08:10):
be the last one but will certainly lead to a mass exodus from traditional custody solutions
can't wait to see that day take control of your bitcoin it's a beautiful thing
it's a it's a digital bearer asset the first one we've ever had it's fun
it's a bit unnerving at times can can uh can be a bit stressful but practice makes perfect
(01:08:34):
there are options on the market we've explained uh unchained others out there that'll help help
hold your hand as you're taking self-custody but i think uh don't wait too because that's last
that's the other thing like you you don't want to be complacent because when shit does ultimately
hit the fan, there is a chance that when you go to get your Bitcoin, it's not going to be there.
(01:09:00):
Better to be safe than sorry. Safe now, as opposed to sorry five years from now or whenever a crisis
may emerge. Yeah, I think that's great advice, Marty. Look, you've got to get out in front of a
crisis. Once the crisis hits, it will be too late. The coin bases of the world will probably be
(01:09:24):
shut down by the government, as we saw. Let's just go back to 08-09 when you couldn't short sell.
They will do the same thing around taking delivery to Bitcoin. So yeah, the time is now.
Get your Bitcoin into self-custody. Enjoy it. It's an incredibly empowering experience.
and the options that are available today compared to 2013 oh boy I mean yeah for a year Unchained does an incredible job They walk you through the process They create a really safe environment for you to self Bitcoin
(01:10:01):
And that's just one example.
There's a whole bunch.
Yeah.
Yeah, you don't have to spin up an Electrum wallet on your desktop and save a wallet.dat file.
It's much easier these days.
And only going to get easier from here, too.
So, Scott, thank you for taking some time to discuss all this with me today.
Is there any parting notes, final thoughts, things we didn't touch on that you think the audience should be aware of?
(01:10:26):
No, look, just thank you so much.
Be careful.
Self-custody or Bitcoin, I think we hit on all those major points.
Be prudent.
Hope for the best.
But it's a plan for the worst.
And you know it's coming.
It's just a matter of time.
So get out in front of it and do the right thing.
(01:10:46):
Get on it, Freaks.
Get on it, Scott.
I hope you have a great rest of your day and great weekend.
And hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future.
Absolutely, Marta.
I really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right.
Peace and love, Freaks.
Okay.
Freaks, thank you for listening to the show.
I hope you liked it.
If you did like it, please make sure you subscribe, rate, review the show.
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(01:11:07):
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okay
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
(00:10):
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
(00:31):
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
All right, take two.
I think we're good to go here, Scott.
Thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure to be here, Marty.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm really excited about this discussion because, as I was telling you, I had drinks
a couple of times over the last two weeks with Puncher down here at the Jersey Shore,
(00:52):
and he was singing your praises and trying to explain your thesis around the big long,
which is what I would like to dive into during this discussion.
But before we dive into your thesis around the Bitcoin big long,
how about we jump into your background, introduce you to the audience?
(01:13):
Yeah, sounds good.
So not to date myself, I started on the Philadelphia Options Exchange in 1989 as a market maker.
And I did a 25-year sentence on Wall Street, trading Philadelphia, then out to San Francisco on the Peak Coast, eventually landing in Chicago at the CBOE.
(01:37):
Finally moved upstairs towards the internet bubble and was trading sort of an upstairs hedge fund, for lack of a better description.
and then after 9-11 kind of took some time off, came back to the business on the brokerage side,
which was very interesting, and eventually leading into the construction of Dash Financial.
(02:00):
So I saw the writing on the wall with the extensive electrification, for lack of a better term,
of the options markets, everything going electronic and digital, and began to develop algorithms
really focused around transparency in the options market and founded a firm by NIMP
(02:21):
Dash, Dash Financial, which I think today is one of the largest options executions house
on Wall Street.
2013, I was on a flight to Spain to visit our clients at Banco Santander.
And on that flight, I happened to grab a bunch of computer magazines.
And funny enough, one of the center cutouts of the magazine was the white paper.
(02:43):
And I remember reading it the first time.
And then I think seven consecutive times on that flight, landed in Spain and downloaded
an app called Local Bitcoins, met a random Spaniard behind the hotel in Madrid, took
500 euro out of the ATM machine and I became a Bitcoiner in October of 2013. Then two weeks later,
(03:05):
retired from Wall Street and set out on a journey to really explore distributed ledger technology,
blockchain technologies at a deeper level. Started a firm by the name of Alters Software Solutions,
really focused on database security using distributed ledger technologies and built
that firm into quite a nice size. I exited in 2019 and have been traveling the country with my wife
(03:32):
for the last five years in a 45-foot RV. Really set out to explore the country and
touch grass and get to meet the local people. It's been an amazing experience.
But yeah, now we're kind of retiring formally from the RV life and just living my best life, Marty.
(03:52):
I'd love to hear that we're very
I don't want to say similar
I wouldn't say similar because I think the
pedigree and the degree to which you dove
into options
and Wall Street is
way different than my
experience but around the same time 2013
fall of 2013
is when
(04:14):
I graduated college
earlier that year and got my first job in a
managed futures fund in Chicago
sitting in an
office with a bunch of ex-CBot traders, and they were talking about, reminiscing about
the days on the floor before the servers took over.
And that's when I got into Bitcoin in earnest, too.
(04:34):
It was that fall, winter, getting my first bonus check from the firm.
And it's just funny.
I always find that traders, particularly with options and commodities experience out of
Chicago, get Bitcoin almost intuitively.
Yeah, it's funny, right? I think there's a natural skepticism of the system that comes with having traded the markets.
(05:00):
You know, I like to think of options traders, commodities traders as the grease that makes the engine turn, right?
You know, we're so hands on every day and we see all the shortcomings and the failings of the system.
So that naturally, I think, is an inclination to get involved in Bitcoin, which is in a sort of an off ramp of traditional finance.
(05:23):
Let's dive into that. What are some of the boogeymen that you see up front and close and personal trading options and commodities?
Well, I see a lot of big boogeymen, unfortunately.
Look, the modern system as constructed is what I call a debt-based fiat policy scheme.
(05:45):
The way the system is constructed puts the banks and what I'll call the banking cartel above the people.
But, you know, having lived through 08-09 and being on the floor during that time period, you really got to see how the system moved to save itself at what I would call at the expense of the ordinary man.
(06:14):
A perfect example, and I think Larry Lepard touches on this beautifully in his book, The Big Print, was the banning of short selling.
Markets require a short selling in order to function.
You have to have two-sided markets.
But all of a sudden, with one day's notice, the rules changed.
And the system morphed into something that really was anything but free markets.
(06:37):
the money printing, which at that time seemed large by today's scale, extremely small.
Yeah, I mean, everything I witnessed and even going back well before that, we can go back to
the Russian default, long-term capital management. I've lived through these things
(07:03):
and I've seen the system kind of lurch and struggle at times.
And that's the way the system is constructed.
The system is constructed to be an inflationary system.
And when there's a problem, the only way out of it is to print more money.
And now we've sort of achieved escape velocity in the system
(07:23):
with money printing that I would call out of control.
And there is really one real off-ramp, non-centralized off-ramp, and that's Bitcoin.
And I would add, I was a gold and silver bug long before Bitcoin came around.
Right. You know, I was I was stacking gold and silver and staying out of markets as early as 2002 after the Internet bubble and seeing what Wall Street did there with the just mass printing of paper companies adding dot com to their name, you know, simply to try to get a valuation.
(08:00):
So, yeah, you become so skeptical of markets and of the status quo.
And then Bitcoin comes along and you see something that's peer-to-peer.
And probably most important and least talked about is the bearer asset that is Bitcoin,
the ability to take self-custody.
(08:22):
I remember back in the late 80s, there was still bearer bonds floating around Wall Street.
People would buy bearer municipals, right?
And they'd have little coupons on the bottom of them and you could clip them.
And then interestingly enough, the government did away with bearer bonds.
Again, in the name of, I guess, terrorism or whatever the term du jour is.
(08:48):
But yeah, the ability to take delivery of Bitcoin is what really separates itself from any other asset.
and in turn is going to create the big problem or you know to touch on the big long we'll touch a
lot about talk a lot about the bearer nature of of bitcoin and why that's going to present a real
(09:10):
problem yeah and while i haven't heard you explain the thesis in depth yet i imagine
it ties into the big long because it's a bearer instrument and i believe your thesis revolves
around derivatives markets, which are essentially paper synthetic positions on top of underlying
(09:32):
commodities, which become extremely popular since the 1980s.
I think famously, at least a couple of years ago, there was rumors swirling around that
Deutsche Bank alone had something like a quadrillion dollars worth of derivative exposure,
which seems crazy to me that that's even possible.
And so I think diving into the nature of derivatives and how they've evolved over the years is probably a good jumping off point.
(09:59):
Yeah, well, I think the nature of derivatives is that they are contracts between two parties.
Right now, one of the terms that became very famous during 08-09 was the term counterparty.
Right. Well, what type of counterparty exposure does Bank A have to Bank B?
(10:20):
Like we learned during the GFC that AIG, right, had such counterparty exposure to Goldman Sachs that it turned out AIG had to be bailed out.
If not, Goldman Sachs would have failed. And if Goldman Sachs would have failed, well, probably every major money center bank in the world, not just in the country, but in the world would have failed.
(10:42):
because they have massive counterparty exposure to each other.
And we saw this when Lehman failed.
I was running a self-clearing broker-dealer at the time,
and the day they shut down Lehman and people just walked out the door,
well, what about all the trades that were settling T plus three
that we didn't know whether they were good trades or bad trades?
(11:06):
So the entire street had massive counterparty exposure to Lehman going down.
Now, the government came in and made those trades good. But just imagine if they hadn't.
What does it look like when, you know, you could you could take a major bank like Society General, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, right?
(11:27):
Like right even UBS, right? The large Japanese banks.
If any one of them were to go down, the counterparty exposure that they have to each other is so great and nobody understands it.
Well, you're Warren Buffett called derivatives, weapons of financial weapons of mass destruction.
Ray Dalio touches on the subject quite a bit.
(11:48):
Right. Nobody really understands what the counterparty exposure looks like from institution to institution.
and the way i've understood it because it seems like the potential for mass re-hypothecation
of these positions and these contracts exist in derivatives and so it's like to your point of
(12:13):
the counterparty risks that exist the way i've come to understand it is that it exists because
the banks will sort of get use the same instrument to get multiple points of exposure across the
system. And so you may think you own one thing, but somebody else also thinks they own that as well.
Yeah. I mean, and now you're hitting on the main point, which is that Bitcoin by its very nature
(12:36):
and the ability to verify on chain, the ability to do chain analysis is a game changer, right?
Wall Street's never seen a product like this, right? We, you know, gold, gold, the gold market's
perfect example. Most of the gold is centralized. It's held in large vaults by banking institutions,
(12:58):
bullion banks. And quite frankly, we have no idea how many claims there are, how many times
those gold bars have been leased out to different entities. I mean, some speculate it's 100x,
some speculate it's 300x. But with Bitcoin, you have a different type of security or asset.
Bitcoin is verifiable on chain, right?
(13:22):
So when we get to the point that Bitcoin treasury companies, Bitcoin holdings, ETFs, Bitcoin exchanges hold, let's just pick a number, 17 million Bitcoin, right?
Well, then how are you able to short it, right?
We're going to reach a point where you can actually verify and audit the amount of Bitcoin that exists.
(13:46):
And just to kind of step back so the audience understands, any functioning derivatives market, well-functioning derivatives market, requires that the asset that the derivatives are based on is freely available for loan.
That is a fundamental characteristic of any derivatives market.
(14:09):
You know, I would suggest to you that Saylor hitting the ATM so hard in MicroStrategy in the previous year was partly, you know, because he was converting, you know, Bitcoin, converting shares into Bitcoin and capturing the spread between the premium to the net asset value premium to the price of Bitcoin.
(14:32):
But more importantly, he was producing enough shares into the options market and derivatives market that it was freely available to be borrowed.
And that was critical for him to have a freely functioning, well-oiled derivatives market on MicroStrategy or on strategy stock.
Now, with Bitcoin, we have a different scenario.
(14:54):
There's no CEO to turn to and say, hey, we need to print more Bitcoin.
There's a limited amount of Bitcoin, and it's verifiable and auditable on-chain.
So that's a very different asset than I've ever seen on Wall Street.
Nothing like this has ever existed.
And we can just look to two of them, the major short squeezes of the last few decades.
(15:17):
So let's start with Porsche Volkswagen.
I don't know if you remember that, Marty.
It might be before your time.
but there was a large short interest I think 13 short interest in Volkswagen At the same time Porsche was quietly acquiring a significant stake at some point in I think it was a way in that area
(15:42):
They come out and announce that they own 74 percent of Volkswagen and basically taking a controlling stake.
Well, the problem was that the local state, the German government, owns 20% of Volkswagen.
So 94% of Volkswagen, we now know who owns it, but 13% of the float was short.
(16:05):
And if you do the basic math, that means you have a problem.
So what happens?
Volkswagen goes up about 5x in a couple days.
I think a trade was trading somewhere around 200 euro, topped out at 1,000 euro.
But the way they resolved the short squeeze was they got Porsche to go ahead and sell 5% of their stake in Volkswagen to create the shares available for the shorts to cover.
(16:35):
Let's fast forward to GameStop, right?
That's a memorable short squeeze.
GameStop trades, you know, goes ballistic.
The first thing they do is they try to shut down the buy button.
If you remember at Robinhood, they shut off the buy button.
That didn't work. And then the next thing you know, of course, the company has agreed to sell $3 billion worth of common stock. And of course, the stock gets cratered. And then the company sells the common stock.
(17:05):
I believe the same people that tapped Robinhood on the shoulder and asked them to shut off the buy button are the same people that tapped the board on the shoulder and said, hey, we need you to sell stock.
Because if not, you can't stop these things.
Now, in the case, when you look at both of those squeezes, they both came to an end with the creation of more supply.
Right. But that's not going to be the case in Bitcoin.
(17:28):
There's nobody to tap on the shoulder.
Right. So ultimately, you have a derivatives market that's growing exponentially.
And at the same time, you have an underlying asset, which is infinitely scarce,
and you can't print more of it and you can't force people to sell it.
Now, make the situation even, I mean, unlimited.
(17:50):
I don't even know how to explain how much worse this is.
But imagine that in 08, 09, had we had Bitcoin, and as people became absolutely frightened about the stability of banks, imagine they had an asset that they could actually buy and take delivery of in a matter of hours.
(18:14):
What would have happened?
Well, everybody would have pulled their money out of the banks, bought Bitcoin, and taken delivery.
Now, I foresee in the next financial crisis, and we will have the next financial crisis, we at least do, you're going to have this feedback loop where hedge funds, asset investors of all types are going to run to Bitcoin and take delivery.
(18:40):
And when they take delivery of Bitcoin, it's going to be removed from the market.
So the amount of Bitcoin available for loan is going to decrease rapidly at the very time in which they need it the most.
And that's the kind of driving concepts behind the big log thesis is that we have an asset that's infinitely scarce.
(19:06):
There's nobody to tap on the shoulder to print more of.
And worse yet, in a time of crisis, every investor or the smartest investors will immediately take delivery, causing the derivatives market to lock up.
And I can foresee a scenario in which this becomes systemic well beyond just the Bitcoin markets and permeates throughout the entire banking system.
(19:34):
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(21:09):
to that, it's interesting because I think we've already had like a small example of this happen,
particularly within the Bitcoin space at the end of 22, beginning of 23 with that mini banking
crisis that played out. Like we saw it at 1031, a bunch of our portfolio companies,
They were playing basically bank hot potato after Silvergate went down or was taken, I would argue, taken down unlawfully, forced to close its doors.
(21:39):
Their hand was forced to independently and under their own volition close down the bank.
But then you had Signature, First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank.
Those were a few of the banks that were at the time amenable to banking Bitcoin companies.
companies and particularly when signature first republic and silicon valley um got in trouble
(22:01):
we saw a number of founders and portfolio companies just simply wire the funds they had
from the bank to exchanges like unchained uh and then put the bitcoin into a three multi-sig volt
because like we're just going to wait it out and put all of our cash in bitcoin because we have
this bearer instrument that we can have a high degree of certainty and we can be ultimately
(22:25):
certain that it's not going to get rugged by the bank because we hold the keys.
Yeah, that's it, right? That's exactly the thesis, except it plays out on a global scale
much larger than those three banks. Imagine a major money center bank and we get a cascading
(22:46):
of potential bank failures or bank trouble.
I would see, especially now that Bitcoin, I think,
has crossed the Rubicon from a retail product to an institutional product.
I think so many players, large players are well aware of Bitcoin.
I just think we're in a new world today.
(23:06):
And I don't see how they're going to stop this problem once it starts.
There's no one to tap on the shoulder.
It's global.
There's exchanges located around the world, right?
So it's not just a U.S. or a Western banking cartel situation.
This is a global asset, highly liquid.
I don't see how they stop it once it starts.
(23:29):
Well, let's dive into this and get into the dynamics of the landscape and how this may unfold.
And before we talk about the future, let's talk about the past.
And we've had examples, not necessarily of derivatives markets, but institutions within the Bitcoin economy that have essentially lent out Bitcoin to counterparties who destroyed it or simply lost it.
(23:56):
I mean, go all the way back to Mt. Gox.
When we were first getting into Bitcoin, they were hacked and a number of their customers had claims to X amount of Bitcoin.
But the hackers had stolen Y and they found themselves short Bitcoin.
And so that went under and it took over a decade for the Mt. Gox customers to get any other money back.
(24:18):
Fast forward to 2020 to 2022.
That's when Genesis was lending, Genesis BlockFi, Celsius.
Others were lending Bitcoin out, FTX, to traders who were taking risk in altcoin markets and promising that they would get a return and return the Bitcoin.
I mean, those markets blew up and you found many situations where people thought they had Bitcoin, but learned that their counterparty, their trusted third party, where they were storing their Bitcoin and lent it out and wasn't going to get it back.
(24:53):
So we're scaling up.
And now as a San State 2025, as you mentioned, across the Rubicon institutions getting in, how do you see something like that playing out moving forward?
And what are the different dynamics that exist today that could act as an accelerant to that process?
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
(25:14):
So, you know, today, the Celsius block by kind of thing of today is is now Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, you know, tremendously huge banks.
And now it becomes a systemic issue rather than a localized issue that can be stomped out by regulators and sort of the losses going to the investor.
(25:36):
What happens when the losses are taken by large financial institutions, which then need to be bailed out or bailed in whichever way we head?
I mean, that's another subject.
But ultimately, the game has now gone up upstream of small players to the largest players in
the world.
(25:57):
And that should be a tremendous cause for concern, because if you understand the very
nature of derivatives, like I said earlier, you absolutely need to have the underlying
asset freely available for loan for the derivatives markets to function.
You know, I'll give you an example.
A lot of people view shorting as betting the price is going to go down.
(26:22):
But that's really not how derivatives markets work.
A great example would be this.
I hold just as an example, I hold a thousand Bitcoin.
I'm an old school Bitcoiner.
I go to Goldman Sachs and I say, look, I'd like to buy insurance on my Bitcoin, you know,
price insurance.
I'd like to buy, you know, let's say Bitcoin is now a million dollars.
(26:46):
I'd like to protect it at 800,000.
So I'm going to buy the 800,000 puts.
OK, Goldman comes up with a price where they sell you an over-the-counter derivative product.
Well, in order for them to hedge themselves, they need to go out and short Bitcoin, right?
Because they have downside exposure.
Now, nobody in this transaction that I just explained is betting on Bitcoin going down.
(27:08):
Matter of fact, everybody in the transaction wants Bitcoin to go higher.
However, because of an insurance type product like a put contract or portfolio insurance,
you need to cover your downside exposure.
So in this case, Goldman has gone out and shorted Bitcoin, but they need to borrow that
Bitcoin to short it.
(27:28):
Now, if we end up in a situation where, like you explained, people take Bitcoin off the
market, they take delivery of their Bitcoin, throw it in unchained and a multi-sig.
well, where's Goldman going to get the Bitcoin? Right now, Goldman already has a short Bitcoin
position on, but all of a sudden they get a call saying, hey, we need the Bitcoin.
(27:49):
And now we end up in a short squeeze. So what started out as being a small problem
can quickly mushroom into a gigantic problem that's global. It's not just here in the US,
it's not just Europe, it's all over the world. And as this derivative market grows,
You know, we're adding potential fuel to a fire that could really grow out of control
(28:12):
at a very quick pace.
And again, the trigger to this can have nothing to do with Bitcoin, right?
We could see, you know, some banking problem in Japan having to do with the long end of
their bond curve or some crisis coming out of Europe.
But ultimately, Bitcoin will be the off ramp from the modern banking system.
And that off ramp combined with self-custody will lead us into a crisis the likes of which
(28:37):
we've never seen before.
Okay, a couple questions here.
No, I think it's a great point.
Describe, that's one thing I don't think
most people realize too
is with these derivatives,
like you can literally go to a bank
and if you have your sort of books in order
and your thesis in order
and you present it to them,
they will go and make the product.
(28:58):
I mean, most famously,
the scene in the big short
where Michael Berry goes to all the banks
on Wall Street
and sort of gives them the binder
about creating that credit default swap.
and they go and make a market for him.
So you're saying similar sort of dynamics
will come into play with people
who want different sort of derivative hedge products
for their Bitcoin.
(29:18):
They're going to have to go to the bank.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, look, as institutions pour into Bitcoin,
they will manage risk
because that's what institutions are paid to do
is to manage risk.
So they will be looking to create derivatives
to protect against downside price moves, right?
That's the way the system is built, is to manage volatility, to manage risk.
(29:41):
But Bitcoin wasn't designed for this purpose.
And therefore, we kind of have the immovable object hitting the immeasurable force at some point.
And it becomes a really scary situation.
Add to that again, and I think this is the part that most people take for granted, is the ability to self-custody in a matter of hours or even less.
(30:06):
That changes the entire game.
Because all of a sudden, in any type of crisis, people will pull their money out of Coinbase or out of any of the major exchanges or even out of banks.
And they will move it to self-custody.
right? Untrained will see their balances explode. And what does that do to the derivatives complex,
(30:29):
right? It only puts it under more stress. And you can almost see the feedback loop, right?
The worse it gets, the more people will pull money out of the system. And that will just
create more and more stress. So, yeah, when I look at this from a derivatives perspective,
What I see is a potential disaster brewing right now.
(30:50):
Right now it not a problem because Bitcoin is freely available to loan Funding rates are very low Add to that Marty that we now have futures perps right All different types of paper Bitcoin ETFs iBit right Like imagine what happens when all of those
markets lock up in a very short amount of time. So futures will trade at a discount to the spot
(31:15):
price, right? Funding rates will go through the brief. Perps will become extremely illiquid.
I-BIT puts will trade at an extreme premium to the calls.
I-BIT will become hard to borrow.
All of these things will happen in a very short period of time in any type of a financial crisis.
And everything just becomes, again, I'll keep repeating the term, it becomes a negative feedback loop where you just can't stop it.
(31:40):
And there is no solution.
You're not going to be able to turn to the regulators to solve this problem.
You're not going to be able to turn to governments to solve this problem.
I don't know how they're going to solve this problem. Once it starts, right, I don't see how it resolves itself. And that's why I call it the big law, right? The inverse on Michael Berry's big short.
and i think there's two important things first thing is really highlight the point that this
(32:08):
doesn't necessarily have to manifest within the bitcoin economy can be an external factor an
external crisis in japan europe here in the united states within the banking sector whatever it may
be and it does seem like some of the banks are are beginning to weaken materially i've read some
reports on wells fargo bank of america uh morgan stanley and others even though some of them have
(32:30):
had uh an increase in earning per share and revenues if you look into the balance sheets
it's really driven by um trading which isn't a sustainable revenue line if you look at like
loan origination deposits all are trending in the wrong direction which is a long-term
sort of revenue drivers, consistent revenue drivers of those companies.
(32:53):
And then the follow-up question,
I had like, we're led to believe,
and I led to believe being,
led to doing the most work in that sentence
that Wall Street finance types are some of the smartest people in the world.
And it is just baffling to me that none of them can,
(33:15):
would be able to recognize that Bitcoin is this digital bearer asset
with this ability to take delivery within minutes to hours
if anybody so wanted to,
that they wouldn't understand that these knock-on domino effect risks exist.
So I guess what I'm trying to get at is how does that not recognize on Wall Street
(33:38):
or is it simply a product of their mindset as we're going to go
for as many products as possible because that's how we're going to make money.
in the short term and there's just like no avoiding it this is what we're here to do
yeah with you know it's such a great point um the capital uh structures the incentive
the incentive structures of a wall street employee haven't changed since 08 or 09
(34:01):
right they're still paid on a quarterly basis or annual basis bonus and it's based on the amount
of money you made this year or the amount of money you made this quarter right and and all
of that is misaligned incentives, right? So people are incentivized purely to make as much money as
they can today. Today, Bitcoin is freely available to borrow. The derivatives market is exploding.
(34:24):
Companies like Susquehanna, Jane Street are making fortunes of money in the Bitcoin complex.
So we're in. The other problem, and we learned this through O8-0809, and I've experienced it
personally, is you're stuck in this situation when a large client comes to you and says,
I want you to build this derivative for me. You have the problem that if you don't do it,
(34:48):
another bank will and you'll lose your client. And we saw that in 08-09 and we see it today.
So why would somebody write a derivatives contract that could potentially become extremely
dangerous two years from now, a year from now? Well, because if they don't do it, somebody else
will and they'll lose their client. And I think that's the incentive behind, you know, getting
(35:11):
yourself into trouble and maybe trouble down the line. But what choice do you have when your boss
taps you on the shoulder and says, come up with a structure. We need to keep this client happy.
What do you do? You come up with a structure. You do what you're told.
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Yeah, you can see it getting crazy pretty fast.
And I guess that begs the question,
(35:56):
is this ultimately good for Bitcoin?
Is this a hard lesson everybody needs to learn?
Is it said could it potentially snowball into such a big event to become, like, as you mentioned, systemically a systemic risk to the global financial system that people will be pissed at Bitcoin?
Or is it how do you see this playing out?
(36:17):
Well, again, Bitcoin is money for your enemies.
Right. So I don't think Bitcoin cares whether the global financial system detonates itself through derivatives.
I think that the seeds for this problem have long been sown.
But yeah, I do think that at some point it could become systemic.
(36:37):
And that's probably I mean, please don't take this the wrong way, but that's probably a good thing.
Right. Look at the system we have today and realize just how toxic it is.
You know, we could go into suicide rates and all of the all of the metrics around, you know, where we stand today.
hey, young people, you know, not being able to afford a home, you know, multiple jobs,
(37:00):
the fertility rates, right, the birth rates, everything is pointing in the wrong direction.
And that probably has a lot to do with broken money. That's probably a full show of its own.
But, you know, are we better off having the current system, you know, implode? Probably.
(37:21):
Does that mean in the short term it wouldn't be an extremely painful event?
Of course it would be.
But out of the ashes of that old system would be born a new system based on hard money.
And abundance would flourish, right?
You know, I just think we'd find ourselves in a better world, right?
So ultimately, you know, you never know how much pain you're in until you get out of that pain.
(37:44):
And sometimes it just feels to me like it just continues to get worse.
so you know that that's my my take you know a lot of people will say well what you're presenting is
a doomer thesis and and i think it's the exact opposite right i think the doomer is the one who's
sitting in a burning building telling everybody to stay put we're going to put out the fire
right and what i'm saying is get out of the burning building there's a better way to do this
(38:09):
completely agree i think uh that's what we have outside of our studio in austin texas
currently not there but it's fix the money fix the world and i think i've been labeled a doomer
as well many times and i think that's like the big question because i remember in 2013
my wife my then girlfriend she would come to chicago we were long distance and we'd go to
(38:34):
brunch and i got in trouble the first long distance trips because i was so obsessed with bitcoin
and the financial system i was convinced in 2013 i was like this is there's not sustainable they're
printing too much money, too many derivatives out there.
Like Bitcoin exists now, like people are going to funnel in.
And I was convinced back in 2013, 2014, that it was going to happen rather quickly.
(38:56):
Fast forward to 2020, 2021, same thing.
But every time post-2008 specifically that a little crisis has bubbled,
2023 with the banking crisis, the system seems to be able to temporarily self-repair itself.
And that's always a question of my mind, I'm sure.
many others minds like you know that's why i think lawrence larry wrote the big print like it seems
(39:22):
like the big print could be on the way like how confident are you if at all that we're on the
cusp like is there a timeline to this or is it is it one of those things where it's like you don't
know when but you know it's definitely going to happen at some point yeah i think i'm in that
latter camp i i don't know when it could be next week could be next month five years ten years
(39:42):
I doubt we make it 10 years.
The metrics are just really bad.
I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a mayor of a town, Thomas Young, who's a mayor of a small town in New Jersey.
And he said currently they're having a tough time hiring police officers.
And he was pointing out that a young police officer, I don't know, cost their town $50,000, $60,000 first year.
(40:07):
But the health benefits and all the other benefits cost above $60,000.
They're $60,000 to $70,000 a year, right?
And that number is going up towards $100,000 a year.
So at what point does the system just break?
I don't know, but we're probably a lot closer to that point today than we were at any point.
Plus, I'll just add, I think the Fed used to back, let's go back to 08, probably owned,
(40:30):
I don't know, small single digits of our balance sheet.
They're now up to, I think, 26% of our balance sheet is owned by the Fed.
So, I mean, at what point does this become a problem?
Then just add in Japan, which we all understand is a complete train wreck.
But ultimately, they are, Japan, Europe, right, they are held afloat in any type of financial crisis by the U.S. government and the Fed's willingness to provide them dollar liquidity, right, swap lines.
(41:00):
If you look at where we're headed with a new Fed chair, assume it's someone like Scott
Bissett, I don't think the willingness is there to bail out the world.
I don't think the willingness, the political will is there to bail out the U.S. banks.
So I think we go more into a bail-in scenario than a bail-out scenario.
(41:21):
And that's the most scary, the concept of the great taking.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, Marty, David Rogers-Webb's piece.
You know, if we go down that road with the DTCC problems, you know, failures at the banks and the DTC recapitalize itself through great taking, you know, that that's absolutely catastrophic.
(41:42):
But you just get the sense that the willing the political will will not be there for the next bailout.
yeah part of david's thesis right like he's read all the legal contracts that exist and in the
the sort of small print details of the contracts that everybody has with the dtcc it's like you
(42:02):
actually don't own these shares at all at the end of the day correct yeah yeah no we live in an iou
world you know you don't own you can go out and buy apple stuff today but you don't own it
right? What you own is a claim on the broker dealer you bought it through. So let's just
assume you use Charles Schwab. Okay. So I buy a hundred shares of Apple. What I own is a claim
(42:25):
on Charles Schwab for a hundred shares of Apple stock. Charles Schwab owns a claim on the DTCC
and the DTCC owns your Apple stock. Now, post Lehman Brothers, and I think the case that
he's really pointing at was a legal case between J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers,
(42:45):
where the courts came and ruled that, well, J.P. Morgan was senior to Lehman Brothers,
and therefore the clients of Lehman Brothers would lose their assets to J.P. Morgan.
Well, that means that the DTCC is senior to your claim on Charles Schwab. So the DTCC's claim on
(43:06):
Charles Schwab is senior to yours.
If Charles Schwab was to fail, well, then they're not your shares of Apple anymore.
They belong to the GTCC.
Yeah.
And so what type of what type of data points are you following outside of like bond yields?
Obviously, this week, Japan's 40 year bonds screaming higher.
(43:27):
You have the 30 year UK guilt hitting 2007 levels.
is this in your mind the beginning like alarm bells going off that something's breaking
in terms of liquidity in the back end of the system well that's the other question too excuse
me for rambling here a little bit but is it like at this time around is it even a liquidity
(43:48):
crisis or is it more of a confidence crisis is i think more and more people are becoming
skeptical of the idea that government bonds are these grade a sort of savings vehicles for the
long term. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It starts as a liquidity crisis,
but quickly becomes a confidence crisis and made exponentially worse by social media,
(44:12):
where you can actually explain to people what's really happening, right? People are able to get
information outside of the traditional media, which would tell you, oh, this is just a small
problem. We're going to print money. Congress needs to step in. I just don't think that's going
to happen this time. But yeah, I mean, all of the things you mentioned, right, from Japan to the UK,
(44:35):
obviously capital flight out of the UK is a big one. We've seen all kinds of crazy capital flights.
And then let's just kind of throw stable coins in there since we just had the Genius Bill pass.
A lot of people are extremely bullish on stable coins and they're going to provide on ramps to
Bitcoin, which is all true, 100% true. But I think there's unintended consequences to where we're
(44:56):
headed with stable coins, and that is to destabilize smaller governments and then larger
governments around the world as we look to have dollar dominance. One of the things stable coins
will do is they will get dollars in the hands of everyone throughout the world on crypto rails,
right? So today, if you try to send dollars, let's say to Egypt, let's just use Egypt as an
(45:20):
example, right? It's almost impossible to get dollars to a friend in Egypt, right? You've got
to send them through the SWIFT system. They're going to get taken by the Egyptian government,
and then the Egyptian banks will take what's left. And the Egyptian citizen gets the Egyptian pound,
which is hyperinflating away. Now, if you go ahead and introduce stablecoins into that system,
(45:45):
my question to you would be, well, are we going to create more North Koreas?
Because as these countries begin to see their ability to print money taken away from them,
what do they do? In a world where they can shut off the internet and they can do all kinds of
crazy things to their people, are we running the risk of destabilizing the third world?
(46:10):
They're completely destabilizing the third world. And then what happens in Japan when people can use
dollars rather than yen, do we run the risk of hyperinflating away the yen?
And if we do that as we talked about earlier what are the consequences for Japanese banks and counterparty exposure I can just see how the introduction of stable coins which seems like a great idea right On its surface I understand it
(46:36):
But I think if you look to the second order effects and the knockdown effects of policy decisions like this, they can have lasting consequences, which may not be what we're looking for.
You know, I've learned in my my few years here on the planet that, you know, what looks like a good idea up front can usually when the U.S. government flexes its muscles abroad, it has negative consequences.
(47:02):
Yeah, the whole stable coins thing is very interesting.
I said this yesterday.
I think that's one thing I'm interested to see if it actually plays out.
We got a few points on this topic.
The Genius Act as it's written, it's unclear to me.
I think it seems pretty clear that the reason that the act came up in the first place, because Circle was pissed off that Tether is absolutely eating their lunch in the global stable coin market.
(47:27):
So they went to create some regulatory moat.
And I wonder, it's not clear to me the way the bill is written, that Tether can operate in the way it has up to this point outside of the borders of the United States.
And if that's the case, if they can't, like I could see demand for U.S. dollar stable coins falling significantly.
(47:49):
But I think they may still be able to operate an El Salvador entity and do what they've been doing, not trust KYC, AML compliance on their users and just have free floating dollar instruments across the world.
but your point too there like maybe it's like the second order sort of destabilization effect
is intentional in the sense that if you and this is where we get like alex jones like
(48:14):
like this is anybody listening to this is just a theory but it would um would be pretty interesting
it's like you get the stable coins out there you destabilize and in parallel on the back end
And as a government and as a country, individual citizens within that country really leaning into Bitcoin.
And I think that's the big question.
(48:34):
We've had this U.S. dollar reserve system for many decades now.
And that's everybody's talking about fourth turning, just like cyclicality of how this stuff happens.
And if you're the U.S. government acknowledging like, OK, it seems pretty clear the writings on the wall that the U.S. dollar is a reserve currency.
It's on its way out.
Like, how do we extend the American empire into the future?
(48:57):
It's like you push the dollar, destabilize everything else, get them all pissed off at you.
But then on the back end, accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible and be like, OK, we'll go to this neutral reserve asset.
And by the way, we've accumulated a bunch in our country.
It's going to be on good footing coming out of this.
Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable take.
(49:19):
albeit for me to take off my tinfoil hat. I tend to like to wear it. But yeah, I think that
if I listen to the administration closely, what they're saying is they want a devalued dollar
at the same time they want dollar dominance to increase. And those two things would seem
(49:39):
antithetical to each other. But if you look through the clouds, I think you see that stable
coins can accomplish both. But again, I get concerned when we begin to meddle in foreign
affairs to this degree. And you're going to remove the foreign government's ability
(50:01):
to manage their currency, and you're going to push dollars into the wild in all types of
countries all over the world. What is that second order effect? It scares me. I think it's
inflationary. Now, obviously, we'll export as much of that inflation as we possibly can.
(50:21):
But again, how much can you mess with the rest of the world before it comes back and hits you
on the head? I don't know the answer to that question, but it would seem that that's where
this is headed. Yeah, that's a question that has been lingering in my mind the last two years.
is there
I mean it was
(50:41):
basically
trying to think theoretically through
things like running with the meme soft landing
which Janet Yellen and
others put out there
post 2021
stimulus and trying to navigate the waters
of inflation and
Fed interest rate policy and I think it's pretty
clear that you can't really
they can't manufacture a soft landing but I do
(51:04):
and it's part of what we do at
1031 and why I have this show and the media companies to educate people about Bitcoins.
I do earnestly believe that if you can get Bitcoin into the hands of enough individuals,
if you can get it into structured credit products the right way, like that's the way
you manufacture a soft landing because you're going to have to hyperinflate the currency
(51:25):
at some points.
The writing's on the wall.
It's mathematically impossible that that's not going to be the ultimate outcome, whether
that's next year or 10 years from now is is another question but like can you integrate bitcoin
enough into the system where as everything's hyperinflating if you have enough bitcoin exposure
hopefully it's it's rising in value faster than your money's being debased and you sort of get
(51:51):
out of the other side of a a hyperinflationary superinflationary event whatever it may be
and you're somewhat okay because you have bitcoin expenditure yeah look that's that's the thesis
behind bit bonds and for the individual i've been talking a lot about bid annuities um these are
this is the way to improve the balance sheet but you're not going to improve the debt problem that
(52:17):
you know our system is based on creating more debt but what you can do is improve the balance
sheet, you can bring debt to GDP down to manageable levels. If you introduce bit bonds,
I know that theory has been out there for a while now. I think that's one way of taking on the
problem head on. However, that's not without major secondary and knock-on effects. If it turns out
(52:43):
that the real free cost of money is somewhere around 12%, what happens to mortgage rates?
What happens to long-term bonds?
What happens to the existing bond market?
Right?
So the reality is that we're in a box, right?
There is no easy way out.
Yes, if you introduce hard money into the system through bid bonds, bid annuities, whichever
(53:03):
way you want to do it, you're going to solve one problem and you are going to cause probably
a bigger second one, right?
Ultimately, the system is in trouble.
Um, inflation, the inflation boogeyman has just run wild.
The cost of everyday goods is going up, you know, at high levels.
(53:24):
And look, I don't believe the current inflation numbers as they're presented to us, CPI.
I don't believe GDP.
I mean, CPI is an example, right?
We count microchips.
We count things that are, that go down in value.
But how many, how many, how many SD cards do I need?
Right.
But I need steak, I need food, I need beef, right?
(53:46):
The price of steak goes up.
So then they shift to ground beef in the CPI number, right?
Like it's just constantly juggling, you know, the statistics to try to create a narrative.
But in the end, you know, you can't convince somebody who goes to the grocery store that
the price of goods today is only 2% higher than it was last year when they know it's
(54:07):
20% higher, right?
Like that's just a fact.
So, yeah, we're running up against the amount of lying that can happen in a believable society.
At some point, just everybody calls BS and confidence begins to break.
And I think you made the point earlier about confidence.
Look, we are a confidence-based system.
(54:30):
The U.S. dollar is based on faith.
What makes a $100 bill worth 10 times more than a $10 bill?
Well, they're both, the paper is worth the same, right?
So it's purely faith.
I like to say the US dollar is the world's largest religion.
But in contrast, if you own 10 Bitcoin, there's no question that you own 10 times more than
(54:52):
if you own one Bitcoin, right?
So that's the real difference in a hard money system versus a faith-based system like the
US dollar.
Yeah.
And bring this back to Bitcoin and how it reacts in a situation where things begin to unravel in the global financial system.
I mean, you mentioned that it's the big long.
(55:14):
Like how big are we talking?
Like how weird is this like hyper Bitcoinization?
What does it look like?
Well, you know, obviously I don't exactly know what it looks like, but it doesn't look good.
Right.
I think that the existence of Bitcoin and the institutional adoption of Bitcoin will create a systemic problem for the entire system.
(55:39):
The ability to have capital that you're able to take delivery of as a bearer asset through self-custody, that's not something we had during 08, 09.
That didn't exist.
That's sort of why Bitcoin was created, I would like to suggest.
right satoshi's vision was a monetary system outside of the banking cartel so what does it
(56:02):
look like when the banking cartel you know implodes it probably looks really bad but really
really bad and they will um try you know a cbdc of some type you know i imagine going back to
david webb's thesis uh but i i just think bitcoin wins in the end and um i think we'll we'll end up
on some type of hyper bitcoinization what do you think the system looks like on the other side
(56:27):
let's just assume that the big long thesis is correct and it plays out like how do we reorient
the global economy around a bitcoin standard in your mind that's a great question i've kind of
speculated that by at the time that happens and of course it depends on timing um will we have a
fully built out layer two, like lightning and people will live on Bitcoin. And I mean, imagine,
(56:52):
you know, I like to look back at history, right? So we go through the dark ages. How did we come
out of the dark ages? The Medici family in Florence introduced the Florin and the government
of Florence, right? They had a hard currency. It was a standard unit weight measure of gold,
a gold coin that was then adopted throughout Europe. And it came out of the dark ages and
(57:16):
went into the renaissance uh what did it look like i'm sure it didn't look good right uh but
um you look you get to a point where you're in so much pain that the next system's better
right and i think we're we're quickly going down that road i mean the system we're on now
with the inflation rates we have is not sustainable
agreed and that's like the other thing i'd be interested to get your thoughts on this
(57:43):
this sort of flogging of Jerome Powell publicly over the last month. It's really accelerated.
It's really been going on since before the election, even last year, Trump's been berating
him. But now you've got pile on effect from senators and representatives and other academic
economists sort of in the Trump circle. And it seems clear to me that the ultimate goal
(58:05):
is to merge the Fed and the Treasury, just eliminate any illusion that there is an independent
and Fed and just get the people in place that the Fed are going to move in
lockstep with the treasury with whatever they want to do.
And that's my big question, going back to like confidence.
And this is a confidence game.
Like that is like emerging market, like activity.
(58:30):
Yeah, that's crazy, right?
That would happen.
Like I know they have goals and intentions to just really turn it on turbo
and you need the Fed and the Treasury to move in lockstep to effectuate your policy goals.
But is that a step too far in the minds of the public in terms of their confidence in the system overall?
(58:53):
Well, I don't really think the public even understands the Fed nor less has confidence in it.
Look, you know, we're at a point now where we can't even print our own money the way the system is designed
without paying a bunch of banksters interest for the pleasure of doing so.
And so when the Fed goes out into the open market and buys back a bunch of 20-year bonds,
(59:14):
essentially monetizing the debt, we're printing money.
But at the same time, the Fed now owns those bonds.
And we as the citizenry kept the pleasure of paying them interest for printing our money.
That's a ridiculous system.
Everything about it makes no sense.
I would suggest to you, Marty, that we replace the Fed with the difficulty adjustment.
(59:36):
Completely predictable.
Everybody will understand how much money is being created, when it's being created, on what time series it's being created.
And we can get past our monetary issues and focus on creating a better society.
um and as somebody who's been in this for almost 12 years now like how how do you view this cycle
(01:00:01):
compared to cycles of of years past is it i hate to ask the question does it feel different
question yeah so look i believe that the four-year cycle is dead i i actually think it died last the
last four years but of course choke point 2.0 uh i believe ftx celsius all of these things were
sort of born out of a government's desire to kill Bitcoin. I just, in my heart of hearts,
(01:00:29):
I have a tough time understanding why at the same time that they were cutting off
and debacking any entrepreneurs in the space, right? At that same time, we had FTX,
all of these things, and they all seem to be in one way or another attached to government. FTX,
obviously giving a tremendous amount of money back to politicians. So yeah, my take is that
(01:00:52):
those cycles are dead. The four-year cycle is dead. We're in a new era for Bitcoin. That doesn't mean
there won't be better markets in US dollar and bull markets and US dollar price. But yeah, I'm
one of those that focuses on one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. And what really is volatile right now
is the U.S. dollar, right?
(01:01:13):
So when you see the U.S. dollar price in Bitcoin,
focus on the fact that it's really the dollar
that's fluctuating in value.
One Bitcoin is equal to one Bitcoin
and that hasn't changed.
Yeah, and you mentioned a couple of things
like BitBonds, BitAnnuities.
You'd like to see second layers
like Lightning Network mature.
What else sort of tickles your fancy
(01:01:36):
in terms of like Bitcoin products
going into the cycles?
Just to your point about bit bonds and bit annuities, like that's what like we're the sole outside capital for battery finance.
And that's something that we've been really bullish on for years now.
And it seems like they're really at a point of maturation where they're going to be able to go out and create these structured credit products with dual collateral.
(01:01:58):
commercial real estate and Bitcoin.
Like, I think that this, in my opinion,
this is the cycle of Bitcoin not only being recognized,
but preferred as collateral in debt instruments.
And when you think about what that does
for the market structure of Bitcoin,
particularly if you get longer duration credit instruments
(01:02:20):
that Bitcoin is playing with,
and that is like, I think I'm in agreement with you
that the four-year cycle is not going to look
how it has in the past, simply because of products like these coming to market
that allow you to create like a forward looking duration curve of Bitcoin that you can have
certainty is going to be locked up. Yeah. And to that point, look, I think that's what
(01:02:41):
Saler's up to, right? So when he's introduced Strife, Stride, Strike, the three perpetual
preferreds, Strife is really, I mean, if you really think about what that product is, it is
a high, essentially, he's creating a fiat yield curve on Bitcoin, right? And we saw that come out
(01:03:05):
at somewhere around 12%. It's now down into the eights. As that approaches the sixes and the fives,
I think that product will absolutely at some point trade better than long-term treasuries.
And boy, is that going to be an interesting time. But the circle back to the big long
and what you were just talking about, structured products, mortgages, annuities, BitBonds,
(01:03:28):
you know, all of these products require the sequestration of Bitcoin.
You can't have a BitBond unless you have Bitcoin backing it.
If you're going to do a 10-year BitBond, you're going to have to take Bitcoin and sequester it for 10 years.
Right?
Well, that Bitcoin is not going to be available for loan.
But you can see where all of where we're headed with the financialization of Bitcoin
(01:03:51):
is that it's going to create a lower supply of Bitcoin for the derivatives market.
So when I look at these products, what I see is just more trouble on the horizon.
And I think the BitBonds thing is coming.
I don't know who goes first.
I imagine it's coming really soon.
I know CJ Konstantinos has talked about it, People's Reserve.
(01:04:14):
I know you guys are working on that.
But when it comes and people are able to get essentially AAA rated paper that looks to
yield north of 10%, what does that do?
I mean, what does that do to our markets?
What does that do to the derivatives market as all of this Bitcoin gets sequestered on chain with proof of reserves And that another thing Like when Jack Ballard and 21 went full proof of reserves you know again these are all of these things
(01:04:42):
all of these pieces to the puzzle that are going to create extreme tightness in the Bitcoin market.
And when you're able to actually identify on chain where this Bitcoin lives, well,
we're going to get to a point where, you know, what happens if we know that the Bitcoin treasury
companies own 22 million Bitcoin. Well, that would become a problem, wouldn't it?
(01:05:05):
Right. So, I mean, this is this is what I mean by keeping the system honest. And Wall Street's
never seen a product like this, right, where you can verify and audit the network every 10 minutes
on average. Like this is something new. And while it's working well and everyone's making money
today, I can see where this is headed tomorrow. Yeah. And that's why I've been a long term
(01:05:27):
advocate and i really am happy that jack and 21 to prove reserves but like i wanted to go a step
further like bring the unchained collaborative multi-sig model to all of these products just to
basically force the hand of we're not even going to give you the potential to re-hypothicate because
(01:05:47):
i want it in this two or three three or five m of n multi-sig whatever it comes out to be
and I want to be able to look at it and have certainty that it's not moving
and that you're not rehypothecating.
And if you're trying to give somebody else a claim to that Bitcoin,
they can also see that it's in this multi-sig and sort of assume,
wait, it seems like that's tied up with some other instrument right now.
(01:06:11):
I don't really trust this.
Yeah, I think that's where we're headed, right?
I really do.
I think that the market's going to demand it.
More people are going to offer it.
And as it becomes popular, these Bitcoin treasury companies,
are going to compete with each other, not just on their ability to buy more Bitcoin,
but also on their ability to show proof of reserves.
I think that's where we're headed.
(01:06:33):
Yeah, it's a brave new world.
And do you see the, I mean, they're going to compete on that.
And I think that's a big question in my mind.
I think there is a level of complacency that exists in the market right now
that really isn't forcing people to take delivery of UTXOs.
(01:06:53):
And that's not your keys, not your coins.
January 3rd, sort of historically, but in recent years really hasn't been that big.
Like pull your coins off the exchange and make sure they have it like.
Part of me where is that sort of mentality has been getting weaker over the years and complacency can drive people just to not take custody and allow these problems to become exacerbated or blow up even more than they let the bubbles blow bigger than they otherwise would
(01:07:24):
If self-custody was taken more seriously than it is today.
And with that being said, I think more than half of all Bitcoin on the market today isn't self-custody.
But you could squint and see the trend going in the wrong direction if people get comfortable with IBIT, with banks, cussing Bitcoin for them, all stuff like that.
Yeah, that's a great point.
(01:07:45):
And obviously, Bitcoin in self-custody is the gold standard.
I think it's going to take that financial crisis we were talking about earlier to reverse the trend.
But the trend will reverse.
We will hit trouble.
you know one thing i've learned in markets is that there's always there's always troubled water
over the horizon um so yeah i'm i'm convinced that you know the next financial crisis might
(01:08:10):
be the last one but will certainly lead to a mass exodus from traditional custody solutions
can't wait to see that day take control of your bitcoin it's a beautiful thing
it's a it's a digital bearer asset the first one we've ever had it's fun
it's a bit unnerving at times can can uh can be a bit stressful but practice makes perfect
(01:08:34):
there are options on the market we've explained uh unchained others out there that'll help help
hold your hand as you're taking self-custody but i think uh don't wait too because that's last
that's the other thing like you you don't want to be complacent because when shit does ultimately
hit the fan, there is a chance that when you go to get your Bitcoin, it's not going to be there.
(01:09:00):
Better to be safe than sorry. Safe now, as opposed to sorry five years from now or whenever a crisis
may emerge. Yeah, I think that's great advice, Marty. Look, you've got to get out in front of a
crisis. Once the crisis hits, it will be too late. The coin bases of the world will probably be
(01:09:24):
shut down by the government, as we saw. Let's just go back to 08-09 when you couldn't short sell.
They will do the same thing around taking delivery to Bitcoin. So yeah, the time is now.
Get your Bitcoin into self-custody. Enjoy it. It's an incredibly empowering experience.
and the options that are available today compared to 2013 oh boy I mean yeah for a year Unchained does an incredible job They walk you through the process They create a really safe environment for you to self Bitcoin
(01:10:01):
And that's just one example.
There's a whole bunch.
Yeah.
Yeah, you don't have to spin up an Electrum wallet on your desktop and save a wallet.dat file.
It's much easier these days.
And only going to get easier from here, too.
So, Scott, thank you for taking some time to discuss all this with me today.
Is there any parting notes, final thoughts, things we didn't touch on that you think the audience should be aware of?
(01:10:26):
No, look, just thank you so much.
Be careful.
Self-custody or Bitcoin, I think we hit on all those major points.
Be prudent.
Hope for the best.
But it's a plan for the worst.
And you know it's coming.
It's just a matter of time.
So get out in front of it and do the right thing.
(01:10:46):
Get on it, Freaks.
Get on it, Scott.
I hope you have a great rest of your day and great weekend.
And hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future.
Absolutely, Marta.
I really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right.
Peace and love, Freaks.
Okay.
Freaks, thank you for listening to the show.
I hope you liked it.
If you did like it, please make sure you subscribe, rate, review the show.
It helps us out a lot.
(01:11:07):
And also, if you like these conversations, I've come to realize that many people listen
to the podcast.
They don't know we have.
another sort of layer of this media company.
We have the newsletter,
the Bitcoin brief,
go to tftc.io.
Make sure you subscribe there.
A lot of the topics that are discussed on this podcast,
I write about five days a week in the newsletter.
(01:11:27):
We also have the TFTC elite tier.
If you sign up for that,
become a member.
We have a private discord server for the elite freaks out there where we're
dropping ad free versions of this show.
and having discussions about everything we talk about a day early.
Logan wanted me to make sure if you want to get the show a day early,
(01:11:50):
become a TFTC elite member,
you will get that.
We have our discord server right now.
It's conversation between myself and TFTC elite tier members,
but we're going to expand that.
We'll probably do close Q and A's with people in the industry.
I may be doing macro Mondays.
So join us at tftc.io.
(01:12:11):
subscribe
find the button
in the top right corner
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thank you for joining us
okay
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