Institute For Fiat Abolition Studies Ep 270

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Thank you.

(00:30):
Well, good morning, everybody.
We are back and excited to be with you this morning.
It is Bitcoin Veterans Spaces.
Wow, it just keeps on climbing.

(00:50):
Number 270, where we tend to talk about Bitcoin and other stuff.
My name is Bob Van Kirk.
And again, I'm fully doxxed and not fully vaxxed.
That's okay.
I'll be your host this morning.
And it looks like I have a few people up here, which is great.

(01:11):
But if you'd like to join the show and come up, ask your questions, give some ideas,
make some crazy remarks that we can argue about for an hour,
please do hit that microphone button in the bottom left.
Otherwise, we appreciate your comments and questions in that little purple pill in the bottom.
If you hit that, it's not purple right now, but it will be as soon as someone leaves a comment.

(01:35):
You can actually type in there, and we will see it, hopefully, and talk about it during the show.
All right.
Let's see.
No co-hosts this morning, but I do have our good friend, Pubby, and Eric, producer Eric, as always, BFP.
Why don't we take a look at the time chain today?

(01:56):
It is Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025, and we are at Bitcoin block height number 916,037
with the Bitcoin price hovering just above 113,000, which means you can still pick up 885 sats for each U.S. dollar.

(02:18):
With that, I wanted to make a couple of announcements as we've been talking about.
We'd love to see all of you guys at the Bitcoin Veterans Second Annual Summit, November 10th and 11th in Nashville, Tennessee.
The 10th will be a conference day with a bunch of great speakers and other hands-on things like maybe building a node or coding or workshops, things like that.

(02:48):
And then day two will be a day out at the range so you can test your skills with the firearms.
And we'll do that safely, but it will be a great time to be with everyone and hopefully get some learning in in a variety of ways.
And then also looks like we got a few more people joining here.

(03:09):
It is Tuesday, so maybe people have that Monday hangover.
We'll get weighed up here.
Lots of different things to talk about today.
But, yeah, with that, I want to go around and say good morning to everybody.
I think we'll go with producer Eric first.
You want to hop on the BB handle and say good morning, Eric?
Good morning, Bob.
How are you?

(03:30):
Good, other than that opening song.
No, I'm just kidding.
Pubby, how are you?
All good here.
Yeah, thanks for taking one for the team there and docking yourself.
Originally, I thought it was Kirk Van Bob, but I'm glad that we have that sorted.
Bob Van Kirk, good to meet you again, sir.

(03:53):
Wade, good morning, sir. How are you?
Good morning, guys. I actually took TC's advice, and I pulled one of my old Android tablets out and put it up in the office,
and the time chain is just here cooking, and I get a lot of questions about it.
It's been a very positive development.
Nice. Yeah, I love that you can have, because it's a progressive web app as well as an app,

(04:17):
you can display it in a variety of ways. And yeah, it's persistent and it's a pretty cool thing. So
love that. BFP, thanks for joining. Good morning. How are you?
Hey, good morning, Bob. Yeah, I need to do the same. I'm slacking on that department.
Got to put that time chain calendar up.

(04:40):
I don't get a lot of visitors in my house, though.
Good stuff.
Yeah, so we can take this anywhere you guys want.
I'm still traveling, although my connection should be much better today.
Lots of crazy things going on in the world, obviously.

(05:02):
Bitcoin's hash rate has hit new all-time highs once again, which seems to be continuous.
And this is, at the same time, gold is hitting new all-time highs and just keeps running.
I see it's up about 40% this year with no end in sight, I guess.

(05:26):
All kinds of other things.
US is going to bail out Argentina
Over 60 million Americans now own crypto
Thanks to primarily ETFs
But yeah, just wondering what's on your guys' mind
Looks like we have a couple of requests to come up and chat with us
I see we have Captain Trips coming up

(05:46):
But yeah, any of these things or anything else guys
That you want to chat about this morning
What's on your mind?
I'm just wondering how long can so many significant proportions of the public and of the economy say that the gold price doesn't matter and the Bitcoin price doesn't matter?

(06:09):
I mean, I have heard for like a decade that gold doesn't matter.
I have heard for six years that the price of Bitcoin doesn't matter.
And I don't know.
I mean, it certainly looks like it doesn't matter.
Yeah, it's interesting because you see gold hitting new all-time highs, and usually Bitcoin price follows.

(06:31):
Bitcoin price usually also follows hash rate.
And so, you know, this is lining up for something, and we'll see.
I do think, though, Wade, to your point, a lot of people are just not in tune with the broader economy.
Like we've had Infra on here, Robert talking about macro, and there's all these different signs.

(06:57):
And most people, I think, their frame of reference for where they're invested,
a lot of folks, unless they're gold bugs or Bitcoiners, are just looking at stock market,
continuing to rip and thinking incorrectly, but believing that they are getting wealthier.

(07:19):
And a lot of people are okay with that. And so they just don't realize, and we've talked about it
a bunch, that the denominator is broken. And so, yeah, if you continue to measure in dollars,
it looks like number go up, but when you have, I don't want to say runaway inflation,

(07:39):
but when you have cost of everything going up and the government skews the numbers or flat out lies about them,
I think most people can see that prices of everything are going up,
but they can't understand that, you know, their purchasing power really hasn't increased in nominal terms.

(08:02):
So, yeah, I wonder if other people have thoughts on this.
You know, I'd simply add on this is we equate so much of Bitcoin and the scarcity and everything else when this number goes up.
And man, you don't realize just how much of it is just how much it's just holding on to its value, like gold at an all time high, just how messed up the debasement really is, how valueless this fiat is becoming.

(08:32):
It is just getting slammed so hard.
These things have nothing else to do but go up in a way.
I know Peter Schiff is out there dancing on graze at the moment.
But where else was gold going to go?
They can bust out.
They can continue mining.
But, man, the inflation is just so out of control that many things, there is nowhere else for them to go but up, really.

(08:57):
Yeah, and really there has to be an outlet valve somewhere, right?
And I think what's happening to some degree is you have, you know, we get reports that central banks are accumulating non-sovereign assets such as gold.

(09:17):
And so this is going to continue to push the price up probably for gold for some time.
because I think central banks are looking at it,
and they're not really interested too much in taking profit.
They just want something that's not tethered so much to the dollar

(09:39):
and the immense amount of debt that the U.S. has.
I'm not saying that all treasury buying is going to stop.
I just think that they are clearly moving value into gold.
And I do think like in a future world that that will also drive the price of Bitcoin.
I don't think central banks have figured out Bitcoin yet, but it's it's coming.

(10:05):
And so maybe this isn't the time where we get central bank adoption.
Maybe it's, you know, two, three, five, 10 years from now.
Who knows? But when that day comes, you should probably be holding on to the scarce asset that we know Bitcoin is.
I wish we had Coleman up here because he has been a big,

(10:28):
he likes Bitcoin obviously, but he's a big,
he's been talking quite a bit about gold and I think he likes it.
And I wonder if he still likes it here,
but anybody else think we're getting close to a top on gold or you guys think
this thing keeps on running?
I like gold.

(10:49):
I just don't like it as much as Bitcoin.
I mean, that's why I sold – I had one ounce of gold, but the gold guy before,
when I was buying stocks and trading all that, I thought of gold as money,
and the dollar just represented gold because I read all the history of money and all those books back then.

(11:10):
But gold's just the old money, Bitcoin's the new money, and the fiat was the bridge to get there.
I have a question for you on that because it is exactly right.
You know, from all the people from Ron Paul and the Fed and all the gold bugs,
if it wasn't for Bitcoin right now, where else would you go?

(11:30):
Is gold not the secondary drop back point?
If there was no Bitcoin, where the hell else would you go?
Gold would have to be the leader in many cases.
Or is there something else that I'm missing?
I mean wouldn't it just be
wouldn't the majority of the adoption just be centralized
controlled paper gold though
I mean how many people would all be
invisible
yeah not as many but that's the whole point

(11:56):
there's nothing else out there but
gold and other metals
what else would you put above that I mean you can
do a crapshoot and throw it
at the stock market
but after Bitcoin
there's a major drop off
I think gold would be very much going higher faster because information is so much more readily available and people would be figuring out, you know, gold's a safe harbor and a sea of, or a trash fire burning out of control.

(12:33):
But then again, I think Bitcoin also exposed, you know, since the Great Recession, it's exposing the chicanery that goes on.
So I don't know.
It's good to theorize about it.
It's $3,700.

(12:54):
I remember buying it in the $300 to $1,500 range, and it would just oscillate.
But it was manipulated. I knew it was manipulated.
But you can only manipulate a commodity so long before, you know, reality takes over.

(13:14):
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad for the gold bugs.
They're finally starting to see a serious return, you know, on their money here.
And it just kind of feels like the dam's breaking.
There's just so much demand.
There's just no way to paper it over.
And that's great for them.
So when do normal people like, you know, obviously it seems like retail will come into assets when it's already kind of already found out.

(13:41):
Right. And so I wonder, like, every time we continue to get these news articles or just people talking about it out there, wherever people are about gold, new all time highs.
At what point does retail start piling in and maybe the smart money takes some profits?

(14:04):
I think this time is a little bit different because central banks are the ones accumulating.
Sorry, Wade.
There's an indicator on TradingView called COT, which I believe stands for Accumulative On Balance Trading or something like that.
And it's supposed to, I don't know where the data is actually coming from, but it's supposed to signal or show the balance of trading activity between commercial being like hedge funds and just general commercial players and large speculative players like family offices and then retail, which would be what we're all talking about here.

(14:45):
And I haven't looked at the gold chart. As soon as I get done talking here, I'll check it out.
But for the S&P and for Bitcoin, the balance is now retail is largely the long positions here at the tops on everything.
And commercials have slightly shifted short. So that might be an answer, but I'll check on the gold chart real quick.

(15:08):
A great book on gold is Gold Wars by Ferdinand Lips,
and that's where Saifedean Amos got a lot of his stuff from for the Bitcoin Standard.
It was written, I can't remember the copyright date,

(15:29):
but it tells the whole story of the manipulation of gold,
and it was a Swiss banker that wrote it, Ferdinand Lips.
Good book.
two years ago i tried to buy canadian uh silver maples from my local precious metal dealer because
the price was the 16 an ounce on silver and i could not get an order on i would literally walk

(15:53):
in and try and make an order and there were retirees i won't forget this there was a woman
in her mid to late 60s she walked out with an entire case of canadian silvers uh silver maples
and the guy said that that was the entirety of the order
and so as of two years ago there were people max buys
at $16 an ounce on silver and I expect that that was basically

(16:17):
the same with gold. These people are kind of premium at the
dealers for it and at Costco, at least at the Costco
that I go to, all the gold is almost bought out instantaneously.
So as far as I can see, retail's been in this for two, three years.
Yeah it all about friction right And now that you can buy it at just a local retailer

(16:43):
even though I think, I don't know if anybody's looked into this,
but I've heard that the gold at Costco,
like they disclose that it's not entirely, you know, 100% gold or, you know,
whatever the, it's not like 0.99% like a lot of places.
So I wonder, like, you know, that's just another form of, like, coin clipping, right?

(17:09):
It's debasement.
Like, what's it mixed with?
But it is interesting to see some people buying it probably at a premium.
And, yeah, I don't know, guys.
I think really what it really comes down to is it's just a matter of time.
And so it kind of reminds me, and we've said it a million times in these spaces, not to trade.

(17:39):
It's a buy-and-hold strategy, and you really don't have to worry about it.
It'll just all come about because the system, unfortunately, is crumbling.
I'm not saying it's completely broken.
Maybe it's an inevitability that it's broken.
But I do think like all these signs point to higher prices on all assets, but especially risk assets.

(18:08):
So interesting stuff. Go ahead, BFP.
Yeah, I was going to say a couple of things is I went to Costco and I bought a this is a while ago.
I bought a 10 ounce silver coin or silver little thing of a jigger for three nineteen just to show my children.
And now it's $4.69 for the same exact one, and it's been less than a year.

(18:32):
Now, I sold mine along with my gold coin to buy more Bitcoin.
But that being said, asset inflation is always the precursor to, you know, your grocery store items going up.
So as these stock markets go flying and people are like, even my neighbor guy, he's like, he just don't get it.

(18:52):
He's buying the trash coins and he's trading the stocks.
everything's going to get bonkers, you know, bonkers.
Like things are going to go up faster and faster and faster before people realize
what's really going on because it's going to be a giant casino.
And that will trickle down to the person who's, you know,

(19:12):
picking strawberries for a living and they've got to pay bills,
and it's going to end badly.
So the asset inflation is first, and we'll see it.
And we're seeing it.
I mean, when's the stock market had a 20% correction or 15% correction, even 10% correction?
Come on.
Yeah, you see people talk about, especially in Bitcoin and gold spaces, about hyperinflation and the Weimar Republic and all of those things.

(19:43):
And some people would say, oh, that's hyperbolic or that's not going to actually happen because they have too many controls that they can put into place.
But like, I don't know, it kind of gets me thinking, like, maybe it's closer.
And I don't want to say maybe hyperinflation, but maybe it's closer than we think.
Where, like we're talking about, like the stock market just kind of continues to bleed north to unprecedented levels.

(20:10):
And maybe people start figuring it out.
Maybe they don't.
It's interesting.
Wait, I see your hand.
Go ahead.
as we see some of the some people pile into the bitcoin miners here and some serious appreciation
and the value of some of the bitcoin or at least the spot price of some of the bitcoin miners
i'm seeing there appears to be some like capital rotation from spot silver and gold into gold and

(20:36):
silver miners i was just wondering what your guys thoughts were is when do we start to see
a significant amount of new supply come online in response to the price and in response to the
money being dumped into into the miners and then what are your guys thoughts about inelastic
supply on bitcoin then in response to that as well
yeah i'll go back and say like i'm no expert on gold but you could conceive where um you know the

(21:06):
gold price keeps going higher. There's just miners that have rights to mines that can now
profitably mine gold. And so that should put more supply on the market, which then decreases,
maybe puts pressure on the price because there's more supply. But I do think it's an interesting

(21:28):
dynamic that people have to observe.
And maybe this, in the end, just draws people into a greater understanding of what's actually
going on.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, though, too, because, I don't know, it just does seem most
people are not in tune whatsoever with these, I would say, these fluctuations in price.

(21:54):
The only thing people see is the headline, right?
Gold at new all-time highs, approaching 4,000.
Some analysts say it's going to hit 5,000 this year.
And so I don't know.
I'm a little jaded because I think it's like, well, my S&P 500 keeps running, so I'm pretty happy.
I feel pretty rich, despite the fact, again, like I was saying earlier, that on the other side of things,

(22:21):
my rent or my groceries or any of these things.
They just keep going up as well.
Bob, are you having anyone around you scream that it's overvalued,
the market's overvalued, Bitcoin's overvalued,
the metals are overvalued, the indexes are overvalued?
And I see people that are not in the market right now.
I know people that are in straight-ass positions right now

(22:44):
because they're just saying, no, this is totally overvalued.
There's going to be a correction or a major dump.
I mean, are you seeing that as well? And I don't know what to tell these people.
I mean, I think they're all Warren Buffett followers, which is nothing wrong.
I mean, the guy's been right so many times, but he's just sitting on.

(23:04):
I think he did recently make an investment, to be fair, but there's still a ton of cash sitting there.
And I think there are a lot of people on the sidelines just waiting for a calamity.
And so it's like, I don't know. It's interesting because they're not in gold.
They're not in Bitcoin. They're in cash. And they just don't realize that, yeah, it's a melting ice cube and that all the pressures that are in the financial system are to push the dollar down.

(23:33):
and these asset prices are going to keep ripping.
And so people just expect that there's going to be this crash
and they're going to be able to pick up cheap assets.
And I'm not sure this time.
I'm not sure where a crash comes.
Maybe there's people in the audience that want to come up and hit the microphone
and come up and give your opinion as well, add to the panel here.

(23:57):
But, yeah, I just don't know.
Like, I don't see a place where this, at least in the short term, where this, like, big correction happens.
I think they've kind of made their bed, and all signs point to higher asset prices, and, you know, they're going to print more money, and they're going to stimulate.

(24:21):
And so, yeah, if you're holding dollars, it's kind of a mess right now.
Yeah, it just seems as if the market is reacting to just continually debasing the X-ray,
like just debasing time together.

(24:42):
With Trump in office...
Go ahead.
I was going to say, with Trump in office, his scorecard is stock market.
He needs the stock market to go up for him to feel secure in his manhood,
or not even that, just he wants, you know, that's his winning.
He's winning if the stock market's going up because that's, in his mind, how it works.

(25:07):
He's not going to change his worldview or his paradigm.
But as he gets near his end term, we're going to see, like, this uncertainty
of where the future of the American regime or stock market is.
And that's when we can see some type of uncertainty in the market.

(25:33):
But I don't see it for at least another year or two.
I disagree. I think the uncertainty is there.
TXMC actually put out a tweet about an hour ago that I retweeted that you look at some of the activity in the actual fundamental economy,
and it's not showing signs of strength like the stock market is showing,

(25:53):
which will take some time to bleed into throughout the actual economy and get reported and then
actually affect asset values or asset prices i'm sorry but i i mean we know here how long it takes
for data to actually make any effect it could be the end of q4 into the holiday season which is
kind of like a natural business cycle for the market of selling off the end of q4 taking profits

(26:18):
right before like you know christmas like around uh thanksgiving christmas time uh or like 2018
when everything dumped basically as soon as january opened um i could see that but i also like i'm
i'm most concerned with when everybody and i'm talking everybody is talking about being bullish

(26:40):
when everything's at all-time highs um especially with bitcoin we've been basically straight up into
the right for two years guys like two almost three years like that's like with no real meaningful
like retracement or correction um yeah i'm i'm but my cautious i'm most cautious here than i am

(27:00):
like when bitcoin's like looking like it's forming a bottom like i'm it makes more sense to be
bullish down there than to be bullish up here where we've been sucking a lot of oxygen out of
the room it but mike it seems like you still view the world and like you know fiat and bitcoin and
valuing bitcoin through the fiat lens and what i see around me is nobody pays attention to bitcoin

(27:30):
bitcoin is just this little you know we're all in here because we're bitcoiners so we're in the
bubble but in the real world it's it's just halcyon days and you know they're yeah i could
see a a bubble forming in the stock world but with bitcoin they just started the inflation machine

(27:53):
they just started the the easing cycle i don't i don't see it happening this time to where
I mean, yeah, we can get a pullback, but are we going to go below $100,000?
You kind of contradicted yourself a little bit, though, because if nobody is talking about Bitcoin, that means that there is zero interest in getting into it, which means that Bitcoin would need a retracement to attract new participants, right?

(28:21):
I don't know. I think the higher it goes, the more people start paying attention.
it validates their uh worldview when it goes down if you're talking about retail if you're
talking about retail and we're already up over a hundred thousand people that i know i don't know
about you guys but most of the retail people that i know are not meaningfully putting a whole lot of

(28:44):
money into bitcoin because they already feel like it's too far gone and they can't get a position
in it regardless of how much i talk about like the facts of bitcoin having a hundred million
pieces and that they don't need to own a whole one and a unit bias and all of that.
Like people just the average American or the average individual is just not interested in getting in right here.

(29:05):
OK, but we're four point two percent of the world's population and Bitcoin is a worldwide market.
That's what I think you're missing.
We're we're it's spreading like a like a spider web bill or a spider builds a spider web.
it's spreading slowly through the minds of 8 billion people and you can't measure that

(29:29):
i know that but you have to look at where the vast majority of the economic activity also occurs on
the planet if you have a like millions upon like let's say tens or hundreds of millions of people
in the poorest countries in the world that can do a lot i will give you credit that can do a lot if
they're putting in like if they're all putting in a dollar every day but we like we've had

(29:51):
conversations about how far a dollar goes somewhere down in south america versus up here
and like how little they're actually making an income so you like you have to balance these
things it's not just the fact that it's global that means it's going to go up
okay fair point bob a couple weeks ago when bitcoin retraced down to 112 i made a significant

(30:15):
can't buy it because I felt like that was really good support.
And then it was really interesting to see this Sunday,
the 112 acted as that support during whatever.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about the technicals of whatever this,
this tactical short was that was done.
It looks like for like somewhere between 200 and $400 million of Bitcoin was

(30:36):
shorted slash liquidated in the event on Sunday.
And 112 looked like there was a buy wall there.
It looked like really, really good support.
And it just we've seen we've seen these dumps of 10,000, 20,000, 80,000 coins over the last couple of months, which is kind of put a damper on the price appreciation.

(30:56):
So I was just kind of wondering what you felt about 112 as support and these continual like sell orders that keep coming into the market to keep the price down.
well i i do think that like the short-term games uh that people are playing um especially with
leverage like we're seeing anytime the the price really gets a nice little you know say one half

(31:22):
to three percent pump everybody gets all excited again you draw in maybe some new participants
or people who were on the sidelines waiting for a dip saying uh-oh this is the time it's going to
keep ripping. And usually when that occurs, there's liquidations because people had,
there's too many leveraged shorts. And, you know, on the opposite side, as we've been seeing,

(31:46):
there's a lot of leverage longs that have been getting liquidated on these dips. And so I think
there is some manipulation going on, certainly just to kind of clean out some of this, this
leverage, which is healthy, but, you know, we could definitely see further downside as these

(32:07):
games get played. But at some point, I do think Bitcoin catches up to some of these assets that
have been ripping as people go further out on the risk curve. It also gets me thinking like,
you know, we were, Mike and BFP were kind of talking about not, you know, this little bit

(32:28):
of back and forth. I think that this is really like nobody's out there talking about Bitcoin,
except for the main driver of adoption in the last year, as we've been straight up or year and a half
is the ETF. And you do have quote unquote, new salespeople out there saying, hey, you guys need

(32:52):
to be allocating to this. You know, we've seen some reports of in the 80% range is like a good
allocation, I think, from a BlackRock paper. But, you know, undoubtedly, like, you have Larry Fink
and some of these other guys out there on CNBC and other places saying Bitcoin is here to stay It something that everybody needs to have access to And so I do think that as as you have you know trying to tie it all together as you have Trump

(33:26):
his scorecard is the stock market going up.
It is interesting that that correlates with
how do I want to say it? It's more like you have
all assets are going up, but you have policy driving a lot of this asset appreciation.

(33:50):
And so I do think that in the long term, BlackRock gets it, and they're telling their clients,
you could be happy about the S&P flying high because of Trump's policies,
but you might want to have non-sovereign assets. And I don't see them really pushing gold. I mean,

(34:11):
their gold ETF does well, don't get me wrong, but like when they're out there talking about this
stuff, it seems like all the opportunity is with Bitcoin. And that flies in the face of gold
hitting new all-time highs. So I don't know. I do find this stuff interesting, just kind of like
as a observer watching like all the players and, you know, who's saying what and is it true? Is it,

(34:34):
you know, who's long-term, who's short-term? BFP, you got your hand again. Go ahead.
Yeah, I just, it's kind of your ideals and beliefs shape your behaviors.
But you have NVIDIA, for instance, is the number one market cap out there right now.

(34:54):
It's $4 trillion.
The market cap of the future of all currencies, in my belief, is like $2.something trillion, $2.2, $2.3, I don't even know.
But if what I believe is going to take hold, it's going to pale or it's going to dwarf.

(35:18):
NVIDIA makes chips.
They design chips.
Jensen Huang is a beast of a man when it comes to intelligence and technology.
But they make chips for computers.
It's not the future of, you know, our next money in evolution.

(35:43):
I mean, we are evolving as humans into a better form of money, in my opinion.
And that's what Bitcoin represents to me.
So as people start to figure that out throughout the world, it's just going to, you know, change.
There's no way to stop it. It's impossible. And Trump, he's an equivocator professional. He's very good at saying one thing and doing another and making it look like that's what he was doing all along.

(36:15):
So he's still in the trash coin foundation. BlackRock, you know, they're still trash coining, too.
So I don't trust these actors. I think they want to co-opt Bitcoin and they don't want it to become the next currency because they're making too much money.
Yeah, I'll say there's a little of that going on, but I'll push back a little on these altcoins that they seem to be getting involved with.

(36:40):
It's more driven by their desire to tokenize everything.
And that, I would say, is where they're trying to control.
Maybe they want to co-opt Bitcoin, but I do think they're really pushing towards building on these other chains and tokenizing assets.
And it's probably a mix of both.
But I did want to say good morning, TXMC.
Curious on your thoughts, but let's first go to the hand.

(37:01):
Chad, thanks for coming up.
Yeah, guys, good morning.
I just see from what I'm seeing in the news, the smart money is quietly moving in.
So it's like we're dealing with a situation where the top 1%, let alone the top 10%, there's a bigger income discrepancy now than at any other time in the history of the world.

(37:24):
And there's a lot of big money, smart money, looking for somewhere to park their wealth and secure that wealth.
And you look at like when they ruined the money in 1971, they introduced the 401k in 1978.
Bitcoin or land became a viable store of value and became a viable pathway to build wealth in the 80s.

(37:50):
You know, really after that, because the boomers had to find a place to store their value.
And which, like I said, when a commodity has a use case, the worst thing you can do to that is speculate on that commodity and store it away so that you're keeping it from humanity.
And so that's why Bitcoin is the perfect money.

(38:12):
And people are starting to see that.
I mean, it's up to 131 million percent since its introduction.
And there's going to be a lot of big money to see that.
And they're going to want to get on the fastest moving horse.
And I think we're moving into a situation where the stock market isn't reflecting what's going on in economics.
It's not a good mirror of what we're seeing on Main Street, you know, because it's become its own beast, its own entity,

(38:38):
where people are just mildly stocking money into it through their 401ks or trying to store money in it.
But the fact of the matter is real estate and the stock market have become so big and such a monstrosity because of the boomer generation that holds 60 percent of all the world's wealth.
They've stocked a tremendous amount of their net worth into these two assets, but they didn't put them there to never draw on them.

(39:04):
And you're going to see a drawdown when they start to draw on that money.
They start to downsize their homes.
They start to move into, you know, I'll land my I'll land my plane there.
Thank you, guys.
no great comments and uh you got probably to raise his hand so go ahead
yeah just to sort of piggyback and chad is absolutely right uh you know it used to be our

(39:25):
the generations before us was you worked at that company your entire life and had a nice little
pension and they wanted to take that off the books and they transitioned into this thing
called 401k to put the risk onto the onto the employee you could you know sort of roll it over
and take it with you. But yeah, overnight, apparently now you've got to be a goddamn investor
and figure this out. And I'm looking up here and people that are 65 and older,

(39:50):
the median retirement they have is about 100 grand. Now, if you go by average, it's like $399,
$400. But that's at the high end of people. And you're thinking to yourself, Jesus God,
for 40 years, I've been saving in this, having fees take away from it. And 100 grand 40 years,
It was a lot different than $100,000 today.

(40:11):
And I'll land a plane there.
It's just hard to talk to this generation and see what happened before.
Their only hope truly is a Bitcoin, man.
Yeah, and to Chad's point, though, and, Wade, I'll let you go here in a second, about real estate,
it is interesting because there was a survey that came out recently that people were saying that they made more

(40:34):
from the appreciation of their primary residence than they did their entire career working at that
job for, you know, 40 years. So I do think like there are things that point to that. And it's,
it's an interesting, maybe it's an interesting time period. Does it last? Probably not. But
the market will have to adjust to this reality. And I'm interested to see how this plays out and

(41:00):
like where that wealth goes as we do see, you know, kind of the money turn over.
Wade, go ahead.
Just a public service announcement for the vets out there who have TSP 401ks and folks with 401ks in general.
James Lavish gave a talk maybe 12 or 18 months ago where he talked about he and his wife ported their entire 401k investments into spot Bitcoin.

(41:23):
And I was really intrigued by that. And I did a deep dive and I was looking at the various 401k TSP funds, which we had available to us.
And this is a BlackRock managed fund that you veterans, your TSP or your government workers are in.
And the best performing fund in there is the C fund, which is the S&P 500 analog.

(41:44):
And inside the S&P 500, a significant portion of that fund is invested in the bottom 90 percent.
Now, obviously weighted, right? But there's still a significant portion of that fund, which is weighted and invested into the 90 percent bottom shittiest companies in the S&P 500.
And you have effectively a gun pointed at your head stating that the 401k is the only investment vehicle which you can have to help avoid inflation and currency debasement.

(42:14):
And we finally had enough of it. We withdrew the funds. We took the penalty and we invested it all in spot Bitcoin, which is in cold storage.
And, you know, if you folks have the opportunity to do that, if you can take the tax hit, it's really something worth looking at because, you know, you have to ask BlackRock for permission to withdraw those funds.

(42:35):
You have to provide them with a justification for why you want to withdraw those funds.
And the reason we wanted to withdraw the funds was, you know, it would have been one thing had we could have invested in the top seven stocks and the S&P 500.
But they don't even trust you to do that.
They point a gun at your head and they say, no, you need to you need to invest a significant portion of your retirement funds in the bottom 90 percent of the S&P 500.

(42:59):
And it's bullshit.
that. Yeah, definitely not financial advice on this show, but I think Wade brings up some
points that people have to think about. One thing that I was also thinking about from Chad's
comments earlier is that in the, I guess we'll call it the zeitgeist of what people think,

(43:20):
especially retail, is they saw this pandemic and then they saw the Fed decrease rates very quickly,
which, you know, then we saw an asset bubble to some degree.
And I think people expect that same repeat now where they're starting to see rates decrease.
And, you know, while we don't know exactly how fast they'll be doing it,

(43:45):
I think people are starting to look at that as well and say, oh, we're going to get a repeat of, you know, 2020, 2021.
And I think TXMC, who has his hand up, had a tweet out that says it's not the same as 2020.
So feel free to chat with us whatever you'd like to, sir.
But I'm also curious to hear your thoughts on if you can kind of expand on your recent post.

(44:13):
Sure, Bob. Thanks. Enjoying the conversation today.
I came up originally because you guys were talking about, I think it was, I think, Bob, you said something about maybe there's some market manipulation going on.
And that's not even probably the best point I could make because you guys have been talking about some, I think, more important things.
But just on that, I would push back on any suggestion that there's like manipulation.

(44:38):
It's just a market. And like Bitcoin is traded around the world and it currently has like 30 billion dollars of outstanding open interest.
And even in that huge wasn't even that big, even in that liquidation event a couple of days ago, it was only like a two percent down day.
You know, it's like it doesn't matter. None of this stuff matters.

(45:00):
It's just the market. Some speculators always get a little over their skis, thinking that the move in their favor is imminent.
and they go too fucking hard on the leverage.
And then the natural mean reversion of the market kind of smacks them back a little bit.
And that's going to always happen.
And actually, I hope that it continues to happen because those people provide the fuel

(45:22):
for the volatility, which makes this a compelling asset in a lot of ways.
Without the speculators, it probably wouldn't have performed nearly the same way as it has.
But something Pubby said kind of resonated.
I know a lot of people feel like they can't just save their money and they have to be some kind of super smart investor.

(45:44):
And the system is set up to absolutely fuck them because most people who have a 401k, what do they get funneled into?
Target date funds.
Right now, if you're sitting at your computer, I want you to go to Google and type in target date fund and then go 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050.
Hit max on the chart and look at them.

(46:07):
Anyone who's retiring in the next 20 years, their target date fund is still below the all-time high from 2021 because those stupid fucking instruments are constantly balancing themselves into bonds as they get closer to maturity.
And bonds are literally certificates of confiscation.
And so, like, I'm looking at the target date fund 2045.

(46:28):
That's people who are my age, like I'm in my low 40s.
Those are people who are looking to retire in about 20 years. And the target date fund just now barely broke above the highest point it was at in 2021. Fucking four years later in the middle of an absolute rager of a bull market in the stock market.

(46:49):
And this is what most people's 401ks are going into. So like, yeah, they're getting something out of it. But just the general nature of the system is to fuck them raw and not care what happens. And if people don't pay attention and go in and actually manually change their allocations or get an advisor who is incentivized to see them succeed rather than to sell the products of their employer, then that's the only way they figure this stuff out.

(47:18):
And, you know, some people in this audience have taken it upon themselves.
You guys are talking about James Lavish.
He just ripped it all out and stuck it into Bitcoin.
Someone else said something like that.
And those people are the minority, unfortunately.
And it just really pisses me off.
And I actually hadn't looked at these target date fund charts in well over a year, I think, was the last time I looked at them.

(47:41):
And I figured I just looked at them now while Pubby was talking.
And I was like, oh, surely some of these have gotten a little better.
Nope. They all still look like fucking ass. And it's not until you go to like 2050. Let me see.
Yeah. Like it's not until the 2050 and beyond where they're actually notably above their highest
points. And it's just because they're far enough out that they haven't rotated fully into bonds.

(48:06):
So if you're listening and I'm not a financial advisor, you need to make your own decisions.
But if you are in a 401k that is just allocating to a target date fund, you should go look at it and ask yourself some hard questions and maybe talk to someone who does know who is not financially incentivized to sell you whatever bullshit their fucking broker wants you to sell and will actually give you good advice because you are getting hosed.

(48:30):
It is fully in your ass and the throttle is on max.
You are getting hosed.
And it just really upsets me because this is like my aunt and uncle and like your fucking aunt and uncle and like your grandmother, however old you are.
Like these are people you care about. And if they literally just took their own cash rather than put – I know you get employee matching in a lot of businesses.

(48:52):
And like so that's good. But unless you're taking some autonomy over it, the system will find ways to grind against you and take from you without you even noticing it.
yeah i think those are excellent points and yeah thanks for the last two because i could tell you're
annoyed i think we should all be pissed off about it uh wick that got your hand go ahead

(49:13):
um just one more follow-up public service announcement from conversations that i've
had with individuals in the office these are like actual firsthand events which i've talked about
first off um individuals who do get you know company matches and who are investing in their
401ks. I know people who have put the wrong decimal point inside their withdrawals from their

(49:36):
allocations to their 401k funds, and people completely and totally missed their company
match. And second off, if you do not, please go in and review what funds, exactly what the previous
speaker was saying go in and review what funds you are actually investing in I know a guy in this office that I am currently in who spent 15 years investing in the government G fund He was investing in government treasuries and made almost no return for

(50:03):
for 10 years and had no idea what he was investing in. It's, I mean,
these are actually happening to people guys.
I think the hard part though, too, is like talking to people about it.
Like a lot of people aren't willing to make a change because they, they just say,
well, I got that money there. It's done okay. I haven't really paid attention. I don't even look

(50:24):
at the statements. And you're probably telling me something like super risky. And I'm just not,
I just don't have that outlook. And what's interesting, or maybe what's ironic about it,
is that the risk is in them staying with what TXMC is saying, which is, you know, these

(50:45):
overexposed to bond portfolios, whatever it is.
And the interesting thing there, too, is like those target funds are like have a relatively cheap expense ratio.
So people are like, oh, see, I'm not paying a lot for it.
And they don't realize they're giving up a tremendous amount of upside.
And it's unhealthy for sure, especially considering what's going on.

(51:07):
The world has changed. BFP, go ahead.
Yeah, I got an anecdotal story.
Now, my sister has worked two jobs her whole life.
She's raised two children, and one of her jobs works at a bank, which got taken over by J.P. Morgan.

(51:28):
She is in these targeted funds, and here I am.
I was a financial advisor at a certain point just for a short period of time, and I was a fee only, so you would pay the fee up front, so it was a different version.
And anyway, I her knowing that she should at least give me some type of this guy's done a little bit of homework.

(51:50):
She's four years, my elder, 52.
And I told her I'm like, you know, three years ago or maybe 2022, I was talking about Bitcoin.
And I kept saying the word fiat.
Here she is.
She's like she calls me Bubba.
Bubba, what is fiat?
after I said it like three or four times, I'm like, Fiat,

(52:13):
the dollars that you're giving to all your people at the bank,
you don't know what Fiat is?
And so it's just an example of people being fundamentally incurious.
They're just happy getting by and doing their thing,
and they're just not paying attention, and you really have to,

(52:33):
or else you're going to get what TXMC done to you,
what he says, but yeah, it's sad.
I do think though, you know,
we come in these rooms and spaces and talk about this stuff and it does drive
us further. Like I think for a lot of us,
you're listening to this and it just builds even more conviction if you weren't

(52:57):
convicted already.
But what it does is it drives you a little bit further away from the normal
person. Right.
And so I think we do have to be really careful to make sure we're still meeting people where they are and coming at it.
I do think a lot of times when I say fiat, like I get this little tick in my head, like maybe I shouldn't be using that word.

(53:19):
Maybe I should say, you know, government issued slave paper or something like that just to get people actually thinking.
No, I'm just kidding. But I think we can call it all kinds of different things.
But there are, you know, still the market does still think that bonds are as good as as dollars, you know, like they're as good as like it's it's it's liquid.

(53:44):
It's it's easy. Like it's there's full faith in currency or full faith in the currency backed by military.
All of those things like people still think that and a lot of people maybe to be a peace point.
I would be surprised, like if somebody who doesn't know what fiat is, if you said, hey, did you know that the and we've talked about this before, but the dollar isn't even backed by gold anymore.

(54:08):
Like a lot of people. And I see some people in the audience who we've had discussions with this outside of the space.
But it's like, yeah, this a lot of people don't realize it's been over 50 years.
And these are the repercussions of not having, you know, that's that's what fiat is.

(54:28):
Right. It's just not backed by anything. It's just by decree.
And we all live in this land of mass psychosis where we're just all part of it.
We accept it and people go around trading their time and energy for it.
And then we all participate in it by, you know, exchanging it for what we deem valuable in our lives.

(54:48):
And so I think it's, I don't know, these simple things that we take for granted sometimes makes it so we're not as good at communicating in Normeland.
And I would just encourage everybody to maybe take a step back and try to figure out how to meet people where they're at so that you can have more fruitful discussions on these topics.
It's not always an easy thing to do, but asking questions, I've found leading questions,

(55:15):
and seeing where people are usually helps a lot more than just trying to slam home some of these ideas right away.
And so, anyway, that was a long response.
But I wanted to start wrapping up the show.
I want to see if there's other thoughts on this as we start looking at the end of the hour here.

(55:39):
I'm doing a little bit of traveling.
I'll be back in the normal studios tomorrow, 10 a.m. Eastern.
And so it should be a little bit more organized and put together.
I do appreciate you guys coming up, but I wanted to go around.
I haven't heard from BitPetro, who I think is on the FortBitcoin handle.
Do you have any thoughts this morning, sir, before we start winding it down?

(56:07):
Got nothing.
Pubby had to drop.
Let's see.
Who else?
Anybody else have maybe some things to cap it off here?
Wade looks like Captain Trips is still up here.
TXMC.
Mike, thanks for coming up.
Anybody have any thoughts on this?
Just to close, what percent of those target funds
were certificates of confiscation?

(56:28):
Again, how much of them were in bonds?
Well, it depends on the target date.
They rotate over time.
I don't know if that was a real question or not.
Yeah, I think, but the point is,
is that they're actually,
I think it's probably due to the expense ratio.
It's pretty algorithmic, right?

(56:49):
TXMC, where they basically, as the time decays,
they just put more and more of an allocation into bonds
to take the risk off the table, which is just lazy and stupid.
Yeah, like I was just looking at them.
The 2035 fund, the target date 2035, currently has 31% allocated to bond funds.
And the 2045 fund, which is 10 years further out, is only at about like 18% or something.

(57:15):
I can't remember the exact number.
I moved off the page already.
So but it kind of over time, it moves you out of riskier assets and towards what it perceives to be less risky fixed income products, the closer you get to your retirement date.
And if you if you like myself think that we are probably in the early innings of a multi decade bond bear market with some chop in the middle, it's not going to be linear.

(57:41):
But if you are like me and believe that to be true, then I don't want anything rotating into bonds fucking at all.
I want to own completely different things.
Not financial advice, just some dude on the Internet's opinion.
Yeah, I mean, but the thing is, is that the data is there.

(58:02):
And I think all of the, you know, the tailwinds we keep talking about with Bitcoin and obviously we're seeing gold rip all these different things.
It's really it's like it's staring you right in the face.
And I don't know about you guys, but I'm not positioned to own much cash, let alone bonds.

(58:28):
Right. So, you know, you make your own choices.
Uh, let's see. I think, um, I did get a request from Petro. There he is. Go ahead.
Oh man, I'm just coming back. I've been trying to come in and out. Uh, space has been a little wacky.

(58:48):
Yeah. Oh, good. Well, I do want to say, uh, I do appreciate everybody coming up and, um,
hopefully you guys haven't enjoyed the, the space titles lately. I've just been kind of messing
around with AI and trying to figure out some good ones just to maybe make light of the fact
that we are up here talking about getting rid of this system.

(59:12):
And not all the ideas are good, but sometimes I just I get a kick out of them.
So hopefully some of you guys do, too.
But do appreciate everybody for joining us each and every weekday, 10 a.m. Eastern.
We'll keep doing this as long as you guys keep showing up and enjoying it.
And I know I do. It's fun to kick these ideas around and learn new things and get some good perspective.

(59:34):
All you guys, whether we fully agree or not, I think these discussions hopefully help people think every day.
And biggest thing for me is I'm just trying to do the best that I can with what I've been given and also like, you know, seek truth.
And we've been talking about that in light of the events that have been going on.
So hopefully we're getting a little bit closer to that each and every day.

(59:58):
And, yeah, appreciate you guys.
So if you guys are in the audience and you haven't followed these folks up here, we've been getting some new speakers, which has been great.
And love to have people back.
It's always good when we're getting new voices in the space.
And so follow these guys and hopefully gals.

(01:00:19):
Sometimes we get.
Yeah, go ahead.
You prompted me.
I'm going to go ahead and take you up on it.
uh so if you're going to talk about the fiat abolition studies i think a good topic for
for this uh class of yours that i'm going to be taking in undergrad in my bitcoin undergrad is
going to be uh probably a section on the lindy effect in anti-fragility and for those of you

(01:00:44):
that are not familiar with the lindy effect is this idea that once something has been around for
a certain time. Just the fact that it's still around makes it likely that it will be here longer.
So that is interesting in that it exhibits anti-fragility. So the alchemical quality where

(01:01:06):
disorder doesn't break a system, but tempers it. So something that I think we will find is that
that as Bitcoin begins to evolve from a nascent asset to something that's a little bit
more established and adopted, and we get to a lifespan that's, say, approaching the average

(01:01:29):
lifespan of fiat currencies, which is 24.6 years, then you can see that fiat is just doomed
to the fall of history while we have a system that,
because of its decentralized and open source nature,

(01:01:50):
is able to juck and jive with the times.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
And I do think what I'll work on is creating a syllabus for this class,
and then we'll go down the line and create our definitions.
and we can all laugh but also learn something maybe.

(01:02:10):
But, yeah, guys, this has been fun.
I am going to wrap it up just being that I'm trying to get some things done while traveling.
But I do, again, want to say from me and Texas Toast who couldn't be here this morning because of a meeting,
we want to just say thank you guys for doing this and coming and hanging out with us.

(01:02:32):
Hopefully you guys learned something, and we try to keep it positive.
But we'll do it again tomorrow, 10 a.m. Eastern.
And just want to remind you guys, whatever you do, don't shitcoin.
It's like wearing jean shorts to a wedding.

(01:03:05):
Thank you.

(01:03:35):
and find it.
Crazy baby
cause you're fine
and you're mine
and you're just so divine.
Come and get your love.
Come and get your love.
Come and get your love.

(01:03:59):
Come and get your love.
Hey, hey, what's the matter?
Did you feel right?
Did you feel right, baby?
Hey, oh, yeah.
Get it from the main bank, all right.

(01:04:22):
I said, find it, find it.
Go and love it if you like it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's your business if you want something, so get it together, baby.
Come and get your love.

(01:04:45):
Come and get your love.
Come and get your love.
Come and get your love.
Come and get your love.
Thank you.

(01:05:33):
Hey, hey, what's the matter with you, feel right?
What, did you feel right, baby?
Hey, oh, yeah, get it from the main by, all right.

(01:05:54):
We'll be right back.

(01:06:24):
Thank you.