Transcription
Bitcoin has seen 20 million coins mined. Only 1 million to go. And apparently, that's going to take 7,493 more years to be done. Yes, the Bitcoin supply is exceptionally limited and only going to become more so with time.
Meanwhile, it turns out that banks don't really like crypto. And not only are they jabbering off at the mouth and complaining about the Clarity Act, but they're actually willing to take some legal action against the industry. We're going to talk about all of that and more today, of course, with Andrew and Telman, but more importantly, someone we like more, Alex Miller. You guys don't want to miss it. Let's go. That's dope.
"Let's go."
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the show. I hope that you've had an absolutely wonderful day. I went down to Miami for what was supposed to be a three-hour trip yesterday to, uh, shoot a podcast with Haidider from OKX. Flight delayed, midnight arrival. Feeling good. Feeling very good this morning. And, uh, it'll probably, you'll probably notice it because I've chosen a stranger flavor of La Croix in my tiredness. Say, I've got lemon cello. Um, have you guys ever smelled industrial floor cleaner? That's what I'm drinking. That's what I'm drinking. It tastes just like it. It's disgusting. La Croix, I'm sorry. We're gonna need a new sponsor. Good morning, gentlemen.
"I want to know when you've tasted industrial floor cleaner. I, I want to know how you're making that comparison."
Andrew, Andrew, the first step in recovery is admitting your problem. And I've been going to industrial floor cleaner AA for the last decade.
"Whatever, man. This is my meeting. Gets weird around here, guys."
Bitcoin looking, uh, pretty decent today. Where are we looking at? We got Bitcoin at almost $71,000 American dollars. Altcoins not looking terrible. Decent market, and all of this, Alex, kind of as you pointed out right before we went on, in context of a very calm and easy-to-understand market and world, right? I mean, oil trading as it should. No, I mean, what's going on here, man?
"I, I would say I just, I'm amused by Bitcoin being the lower volatility asset in the market for once. That's a, that's a nice change in things. I don't know, man. like the, I, you know, I think for months now, we have been in a place where the market just has absolutely no idea how to price things, right? My favorite thing is like, you know, you look at like the AI companies and things, and they make one like tweet or something, and it tanks major trillion-dollar company stocks by 10% because even though those companies are actually very well insulated from AI and things and well-set up, nobody, nobody knows what things are going to look like in six or 12 months. And so it just is, uh, uh, really undermining the idea of the efficient markets hypothesis right now. I think."
"Yeah, I think, I think we all agree on that. When you see oil go from 120 to the 80s in a matter of hours, uh, pretty clear that markets aren't functionally functioning as you would have intended. I mean, we saw it in silver only a few weeks ago as well, right? I mean, kind of this massive blow-off top and what, 47% retrace in silver in a week and a half. Where is silver now? Like, I know it went up. I know it went down. I actually..."
"Bucks this morning."
"That's pretty good."
"Yeah, it's bounced back since its low. I think it's low in the 60s or maybe low 70s."
"Yeah. And now I see all the crypto traders are like, apparently professional oil traders."
"Is that amazing?"
"I mean, just like all the VCs are profession, or, you know, uh, uh, geopolitical risk analysts too. So..."
"Oh, I, I literally don't even have an opinion on the war until I watch the All-In podcast. I don't know what to think."
"Until Tilman tells me."
"Or Jason. Um, but yeah. Okay, so going back to the title here, we have Bitcoin obviously, and this is, you know, you've been building on Bitcoin for a long time, Alex. No surprises here, but I think it's a pretty big milestone that Bitcoin's total supply has now reached 20 million. It'll take another 114 years. I was hyperbolic in the intro, uh, before the final 1 million Bitcoin are fully mined. Uh, another kind of big day was yesterday. Sailor made his 101st Bitcoin buy. So, he got over the century mark. A lot of people cheering for that. And was able to buy 1.2 billion. I mean, Alex, you're, you're here building on Bitcoin constantly. Do we, by the way, do you still have to answer questions on what happens to Bitcoin in 114 years when there's no mining fees?"
"Yes, but actually, there, we kind of have a problem a lot longer, um, before that, um, where, uh, you know, what, so we'll have another halving obviously in 2028, 2032. By the time you get to even 2032, you're dropping down below, uh, one, one BTC per block as emissions. And so we do actually, that really is a longer-term problem that we're going to face and have to do. And, you know, some people, I think their plan is basically, while the price just keeps going up, that's good. But at some point, we are going to have to start transitioning into block fees, uh, sorry, transaction fees instead of just block rewards. Or, you know, I think option number two is that a bunch of big companies like BlackRock and Coinbase, just out of the goodness of their heart, will start running miners, uh, competitively since they make enough money by people using Bitcoin on their things that they want to make sure the network doesn't go away. And so, I, I personally look very forward to the day, uh, where Bitcoin is simply mined by like five giant corporations and nobody else."
"Is that sarcasm?"
"Yes. A little bit."
"Quite a bit. But like, you're building on Bitcoin. Yeah. Right. So..."
"These are more than just like existential threats or ideas to you, right? I mean, this is..."
"Right. So, I mean, but that's the reason I think that that we do it is that it's the, the more, the more value, the more systems. You know, in the case I work on Stacks, where we're a layer two for Bitcoin, and the goal is about making it programmable and cheaper and easier to use for people. But the whole idea there is that instead of people trading Bitcoin on, you know, through, uh, uh, derivative instruments, whether that's like an ETF or something else, where the volume and the transactions happening off the network, and therefore no value is accruing directly to Bitcoin for that, we want those things happening on top of Bitcoin so that the network has that sustainability and like, there's actually enough transaction volume and action going on it that it is sustainable for the long term."
"Yeah, I mean, Tilman, you've been, you've been at this for a while."
"Yeah. I have some probably, um, you know, controversial opinions here, maybe. Uh, I, I don't necessarily think that the proof-of-work network that Bitcoin used to get to this point in time is needed, maybe going forward, as badly as other people do. I, I think the, the most valuable contribution that proof-of-work has shown us is the fair and equitable distribution on the supply curve. Like, the inflation rate is true. It's true based upon real-world dynamics, scarcity of electricity, real-world application of power, all of those things that we, you know, hold as our, uh, you know, kind of our mantras as it pertains to Bitcoin's true value going forward. Nothing can change that. In my opinion, the Bitcoin that have been created have been done so no different than a silver bar being mined. It took exceptional work to get that product to a reality to a place where everyone can identify it and use it as its primary, you know, mode of of transport. I think we're there. I think, you know, the, the, the fact that there's so little left to be mined, um, really should show us that the future of quote-unquote mining Bitcoin, to me, is really getting real-world capital applied to the purchase of Bitcoin through treasury applications and through corporate balance sheets as a savings tool, um, that provides a floor, no different than, uh, you know, a large group of miners would as it pertains to buying pressure. And whether it's on that chain or whether it's off that chain, I think the scarcity that Bitcoin provides will always hold its place as an incredible indicator of global inflation. And I think that's what ultimately you're buying at the end of the day. You're buying a very volatile asset that is the best indicator to where we stand from a macro fiat perspective. Um, and it can't be manipulated like a lot of the other currencies or a lot of the other, you know, speculative, um, you know, risk-on assets can be, like silver, for example. Um, and and oil. Both those commodities are highly manipulated. If you don't believe me, just go look at the, the court cases about it. Um, and, you know, it's, it's one of those things where Bitcoin has, um, an incredible resistance to that manipulation in the fact that it does have a real settlement, settlement layer apart from the paper. Um, I don't see that lasting very long. Forgive me, but I think the Wall Street guys don't want that accountability. Um, and they probably are going to, you know, create a world where the paper drives the, the product, not, not vice versa. But..."
"Andrew, any hot takes on, uh..."
"On mining? No, that's not really my..."
"Mining and all the things."
"Passionate about or should I bring up Larry? That's your vibe."
"I, what I'm passionate about is I do find it funny, interesting, more funny than anything else. Uh, you know, the hyperbolicness of of, you know, headlines, slash markets, slash panic. Um, it's, it's all been done before. You know, we're about 2.4% uh, from another new all-time high on the S&P 500. Um, you know, uh, and while at the same time, the world's coming to an end, um, about every other day, um, in in the world of media. Um, I find that..."
"Say in the actual world."
"Yeah, I mean, I, I, I find it all comical, uh, and and again, the way that that I had this thought the other day, and I came this close to sharing it on Twitter, but I'm like, this somehow this take will end up being a terrible take at some point in the future because on a long enough timeline, we're all right. On a long enough timeline, we're all wrong about something. And I just thought to myself, you know, the idea of, you know, a, a, a bare market, the way that markets now work with, generally speaking, this huge, huge, huge swath of investors who are dyed in the wool. Anytime anything they own goes down, they just buy more of it. I mean, that is literally the way that we watch markets work daily, weekly, monthly. Like, that's how it works right now. And so, I think to myself, how are we going to have, what is it going to take? What is it literally going to take in traditional markets to be down 20 to 25%? I, I don't know anymore. Like, I, I, I mean, we're at war with Iran and we go down..."
"War. We're, yeah, we're not at war. Out of war. Right."
"An operation."
"Yeah."
"Mission accomplished on the..."
"We didn't know that, and we didn't think that, and we weren't sure like five days ago, right? Five days ago, we're at war with Iran. Those are all the headlines, and we moved down like this much. I don't know. Can you see it? Um, so markets are a very, very, very, uh, interesting psychological, uh, playing field. And, um, the panic process, um, has proved to be wrong now for a very, very long time. A very long time."
"Well, I mean, you talk about them propping up markets, right? I don't know if you guys saw this, but the government's like casually just acting as the market maker in its own 27, you know, trillion dollar debt market here."
"Just in US Treasury projected to buy back 15 billion of their own debt today. Largest Treasury buyback in history. That's generally a sign of a very healthy bond market. I think you know..."
"Well, again, that that's a headline that for somebody like Zero Hedge, he would grab that headline and be like, 'See, something structurally broken, blah, blah, blah, there's a recession or a downturn, something bad is going to happen.' And nothing bad ever happens. Like, I, I mean, that, that, that headline is emblematic of what I just said, is that, you know, we, we, we can get two, three, for, I mean, heaven forbid, 5% down in, you know, the S&P, but it's going to be gobbled up by boomers shoveling more money into the markets, like, like every time. Every single time. I mean, you..."
"Well, there's, I saw an article that said there was over eight trillion dollars of capital sitting in money market accounts right now. That's kind of to your point."
"Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's that, that speaks to one, the wealth, wealth effect, two, um, the, the ability for boomers to extract capital from current assets, right? So, you extract capital with, you know, securities-based lending, put it in your money market account, it's been sitting there at, you know, four, five, 3% for a couple of years, and that in and of itself grows in a meaningful way. And so, you have almost infinite dry powder, and so you just, you're just shoveling money into your ETFs. Um, oh, look, it's down 4%. Hey, Barbara, should we buy more? Yeah, go ahead. Click."
"That's the name of the woman you kept in your basement that we..."
"No, it's Barbara. Alex, you haven't been privy to it, but there's a lot of noises that come from Alex Andrew's basement."
"Okay, good. That's, that's not terrifying and disturbing at all. Apparently, we have, we finally found out her name after all these."
"Almost done. Almost finished over here. Almost finished."
"Sorry for Barbara then."
"All right. The, the next sort of story is the state of legislation, right? So, market structure, state of place, state of crypto. Apparently, we're getting closer. I'm not buying it. I mean, Alex, are you even tracking this at this point, or is it completely like on your, what, what is the..."
"I'm just, I'm just waiting for a message in, in the, in the BA group chat for when there's substantial movement forward on it. I mean, I think there's, look, there's still a lot of people who want to see it happen. There's a lot of people who I think are being too purist, or their business models are dependent on certain things being included that aren't included right now. And some of those people are very heavyweight, and so I think it's not..."
"You can name, you can name names here. It's okay."
"Okay, Coinbase. Um..."
"Yeah. Um, but I mean, I, you know, the other problem is though, like, just Congress in general can't really move anything right now. Also, apparently Trump's now saying he won't sign any bills until, um, uh..."
"Yeah, thank you. The, the thing I'm not clear about is if, if he's going to actively veto bills, or if he's just going to stick them in a pocket and let them pass after tax."
"Well, if you stick them in a pocket, I think you have like two weeks, and then they become law. So, you have to do something if Congress or the president does have to make a decision."
"I will say it would be a very Trump thing to like make a big deal about not signing any laws and then do it in a way that it just means everything becomes a law. Um, but maybe he's planning to veto. I, I don't know. It's..."
"Right, but it is yet another sort of, to your point, obstacle potentially for all of this getting done because we're on a farm with midterms. I mean, that's just a fact."
"Look, I know, you know, I know it's a big deal to us. Like, again, I, I run a company where we like literally did the only SEC approved or qualified regga offering for tokens that work. So, like, trust me, I, I know, um, I, I know regulatory issues and where clarity had helped, but like, it's just not that big a deal right now in the grand scheme of things to like the country as a whole. All the more so because, you know, it's not like anyone's coming out and dropping like serious new projects for the most part right now, right? Like, we're very much in a pulled back market right now. No one knows when it's going to turn around. I mean, you know, because you can go gamble elsewhere too right now. So, like, it's just not, I think, that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I think there are plenty of people in Congress who still want to see it get done. I think a lot of the folks on both agg and financial services that started working this in the first place are still very serious about it and want to see it happen. But like, again, we can't even like pass the fundamental appropriations bills. And so this is just not going to be top of the list for people to blow all their political capital on or be able to get enough attention on, I think, to fully move it. Especially when you have, you know, real tensions and fight over it on both sides."
"I just see the whole stage building to the crescendo event. Quite honestly, it's like more doom and gloom, more uncertainty, more FUD, more fear, more everything that forces selling. Uh, is you, every card's been played over the last couple of months. Um, and I just think there's going to be a time where it ends. And I think there, whether that's strategic, or whether it's accidental, or whether it's coincidental, I don't know. I have my suspicions, but I think that there's a, a play that's literally being, um, you know, we're watching on center stage right now. And the, the entire global markets are going to respond, um, you know, to, to what's going to be the crescendo event. And so we're just all kind of waiting on pins and needles for that, you know, just like a good audience would. And we don't know what the outcome's going to be. But it's a play. It, it, they have so many levers. They have so many pulleys. You know, the, the notion that the world uses the US dollar because it's the best is, it's not. It's, it's by force. And guess what? We still have the force. So, I don't see the rules changing. Like, he who has the gold makes the rules. Well, you know, he who has the guns makes the rules, really. And so, as you look at kind of the shifts that are taking place, I, I don't see any major stance being taken by China or Russia against what's going on. I see them being short-term problems, is I guess the, the punchline. And so, you know, I don't know how short-term it is. I don't know what that looks like, but I do hear the printing presses starting to come on. And, you know, $15 trillion buyback, you know, that's, that's just all the signs that I'm looking for as it pertains to when we could find the bottom and start to, you know, really see some action from here. And if you look at the silver market, if you look at the gold market, if you look at the oil market, if you look at the copper market, if you look at all the markets, basically that, you know, the ones that have been the most boring markets to watch over the last 30 years are now, besides oil, are now just going crazy, right? Well, wait until Bitcoin goes crazy. And that's the, that's the age-old, you know, problem with humans is like, we're impatient people. But the best strategy with an asset that isn't going to zero, or you believe is not going to zero, is just to keep DCAing into it and wait until you don't have to be patient anymore. And then be prudent and smart about taking profits off the table so that you can buy cheaper at the pullback. Managing a healthy cash position ratio is is more important now than ever. And it doesn't pay dividends to you if you start now. You have to start prior to the pull down. And, and a lot of people didn't. And that's just the facts. And so I think, you know, as our market matures, as our, you know, community matures, as Wall Street continues to kind of drive the price through ETFs inflows, all of those things are going to teach everyone those hard lessons, which is like, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And that includes pricing zones. Like, you know, if you have your concentrated risk above 100,000 right now, well, good luck. I don't know when it's going to go back up, but you may be waiting a while. You may be waiting a week. It does, but the psychological effects of the waiting is what what we're dealing with in Twitter and everything else, right?"
"It does feel like, to your point though, that something shifted as far as the selling pressure. Everybody conspiracy theory, whether it was like the likely non-existent Jane Street 10 a.m. sell-off mechanic, or whether it was just that all these kind of whale wallets that wanted to sell finally exhausted. Uh, you can look at on-chain data or even just anecdotally at price action and see that, you know, sellers got exhausted in the 60s, right? And so, I, I think that that's the case. I mean, Alex, I, you, you obviously track all this to some degree, just because you, you know, are looking at the actual blockchain and things like that. I mean, does it, does it align with kind of what you're thinking? And I'm not price predictions, it just feels like there's no huge sellers in the market."
"Yeah, exactly. I think the, I mean, I will definitely agree with Tilman. Lee, don't try and, you know, no one should try and time the market on it. You have less information than people who have far, far bigger bags and far, far more experience than this. So, like, DCA's really the only way to go on things. Um, but yeah, I think you keep finding resistance to the bottom in the mid-60s and to the top in the low to mid-70s on it. And I think, you know, at some point, something may happen that breaks it out one way or the other. Um, I think certainly, I hope it breaks it out to the top, not the bottom, um, on it. But yeah, no, I think it's pretty clear that like, I think you have a lot of folks who are both trying to put liquidity in the market and like make some money as it bounces back and forth, right? Like, volatility in a range like that is really, really good, uh, for market makers and and directional firms who just want to like pick up pennies, uh, for a while. So, like, I think, I think you're seeing a lot of that there. The biggest risk, as always, I think, is some kind of, I won't even call it a black swan event, because black swan implies like a giant thing, but, you know, someone doing some kind of weird, overleveraged trade in a foreign country with Bitcoin on one side and, you know, I don't know, oil or a stock indices on the other, and getting blown out and liquidated for $10 billion, and that hitting the market, and then cascading and hitting a bunch of more U because I think, you know, one thing I think we've certainly seen is that, uh, the market's had a really hard time recovering from those as of late, right? Like, it's, the, over the last 6 months to a year, every time we hit one of those, it legs down and it doesn't really come back up, right? It'll, it'll come back up some, but it kind of hits a new low level. And I think again, that shows that like, there's not huge movers on either side of the market right now. There's a lot of people keeping it in a 5 to 10% range. Um, but there's no one pushing big moves on one way or the other, except for when it happens unintentionally."
"Except for Sailor OTC for like 1.2 billion."
"Yeah. But even there, he's not moving the market a lot, right? His entire, they, you know, you don't buy a billion dollars. You're not, you're not like that, and you're not doing buys that move the market. You're doing very sophisticated, much smaller acquisitions that do not move the market."
"Obviously, much cooler if you would just like market buy 1.2 billion. Yeah, that would be great."
"On Bitstamp at like Sunday at noon."
"Tell us all that Bitcoin is like 94,000. Like, what are we doing here?"
"Yeah. Call Coinbase, can you, can you bump the limits on my account a little bit? I'm only at $100,000 right now that I'm allowed to trade."
"He could make market bets against what time he does it, and then he could use that as another hedging tool. I mean, it's just, we, I, I totally agree with you, Al, Alex. I think that, um, the market is waiting for direction. The big players, the people who are, are placing, like, I, I think a lot of folks don't understand that, you know, all of us, we were in Bitcoin early enough to where we count our holdings as a percentage of our net worth. And, you know, we are HODLers, right? And the people who are getting in now have a completely different mindset. They're getting in for exposure. They're getting in to a level of exposure that they are predetermined to get to. 3%, 5%, 7%, whatever it is. And so they're going to continue to buy on all the dips until they get to that number. They're not doing it emotionally like we all did in the beginning where we were like, Bitcoin's going to change the world. We're buying all that we can. They're, it's not like that for them. They're very unemotional about these purchases. It's, it's very systematic and it's very routine-based and it's, it's not what you know, the retail market is. It's complete opposite of that. And so they don't, when Bitcoin crashes by 10,000, they don't just go, well, throw it all in there now. The same allocation they were going to put in the 60s, now they just put in the 50s. They just want exposure to the time curve. And so, you know, all of those dollars being placed systematically through ETF exposure, through spot exposure, whatever it may be, um, it is, it is a rising tide. And to Andrew's point earlier, I just want to point out like, it's hard for perspective for us to see, you know, kind of the force for the trees sometimes. If you told me three years ago, Bitcoin's going to go up to 126, it's going to crash back down to 65, and we're going to be in wars, we're going to all the bad things that are in the headlines right now, and we're going to find a floor at 60. I'd be going, 'That's the greatest story you've ever told.' Like, 'Thank you. I'm going to, that's my nursery rhyme. I'm going to bed now and having sweet dreams.' Like, that sounds incredible. And yet here we are, and we're going, 'It's dead.' Like, what? What? Like, we, we've gone down from to 3500. We've gone down to 300. We've gone down to $80. Infancy bias is a [ __ ] and we, we've talked about it a million times. I mean, how many times have we heard already in the last few months that this is the worst bare market ever? It's sentiment is the worst it's ever been. And by the way, I guess the crypto fear and greed index somewhat confirms that. But like, give me a break, man. Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, back to back to back Luna. Like, are we going to literally get legislated out of existence now? It's like, price is down, but we don't know why, but it hurts."
"Yeah, I mean, keep in mind that I've never, humans in general have the issue of recency bias, especially on pricing of financial assets, but with crypto, it's, I mean, it's absolutely insane, right? Literally, you will, you will go, you know, you'll move 10% in one direction, three days, two days, 24 hours later, you'll move 5% in the other, and people forget the 10% move from the 24 hours before. It's abs, it's absolutely crazy, um..."
"But like, I think what you're talking about on the sentiment side is just a larger, is, is just a microcosm of the larger issue I was talking about before, where it's not just that the market doesn't know how to price things, that nobody knows what the [ __ ] is going on, and just feel so unstable and unsure on things. And that's why, you know, if you rewind three or six months, even, you'll remember we were all referring to this, at least I was, I don't know, a lot of people were, as like the most glum bull market that people had ever seen, right? Where it was like, it kept going up, but like nobody was excited about it, nobody felt good about it. Obviously, a lot of that was very like institutional domain buying or people, you know, buying through asset, uh, through vehicles like the ETFs. So, it's kind of, you know, not the same, and especially if you're like setting up coins, they can go out."
"Yeah, that, that was definitely part of it. Um, the, yeah, I mean, altcoins have been in decline since December of 2024, basically. It's just..."
"2021."
"Well, I don't know. We had, we had a good run for a little bit in there and like in late..."
"Depends on which ones you have."
"Second of them did. But again, like this is just, it's, it just reflects what's going on everywhere else. You know, one of my, I was talking to people about it. You guys, someone brought up the S&P earlier. We've all, again, I'll just say we all, I'll do a group thing. Since like mid-2023, at least, we've been looking at the fact, you know, basically once printing stopped and pulled back and rates started going up, everyone's like, 'All right, a correction is coming at some point.' Right? If you got short on the S&P in the fall of 2023, right? The point at which we all knew a correction was coming at some point, you have missed out 70, 80% maybe increases in the S&P in two years. That, that's insane in normal times. But again, like, it's the same, it's the same problem in the traditional market where on one hand, you've had all this appreciation, you've had this incredible bull market, but everyone is like [ __ ] on edge, just waiting for the bottom to fall out. Um, and, you know, again, that you see with consumer spending, right? Consumer spending still through the roof. Now, that's also very skewed where like 50% of that spending is coming from like the top 10%, but the point is like..."
"Yeah, it's, I don't. We called it back during Biden. We called it the vibe session, right? Where it's just like the numbers are there, but everyone's like freaked and bummed the [ __ ] out. And I, I think it all just kind of goes back to at the end of the day, people just want it to be like 2019 again and pre-COVID and like, you know..."
"Yeah."
"We're not going back."
"If I was going to pick a year, it wouldn't be '19. But, but I agree with what you're saying. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a hard, it's a hard market to to exist in. There's, you, you get punished for the negative more than you get rewarded for the positive. Um, but I do think, I, I, you know, I would love y'all's opinion about this, but every cycle, like 2017, I was saying this one's about utility. Finally, the utility tokens are going to start shining. I truly think what we're experiencing right now is a true utility renaissance in in the crypto space. I don't think you're going to ever have the altcoin surges that we saw in the past unless adoption is causing it. Real-world value is being injected, depth of liquidity is present, transactional throughput is present. All the things that we kind of we abandoned during the hype of crypto, you know, mania now are kind of, I think, coming back to roost and we're looking at projects in a different way. And it's, it's, it's, uh, going to change everything. And, and how many times did we say through every cycle, man, the top 10 list looks a lot different. Man, the top 100 list looks a lot different. Man, the top, like, the crypto top 50 list has been just a game of musical chairs because all of it's been vaporware. Not all of it, but most of it's been vaporware. If you now are looking at the projects that are coming to, to fruition, they're being handled by some of the largest TradFi firms like, that we, we've seen the shift. You remember when Napster, LimeWire, and the 500 other torrent services existed when we were in co, when I was in college? We, I'd leave my dorm and I'd leave my t, my, um, dorm, uh, fiber line just running 24/7 downloading movies and stuff like that. If you think about that, all those companies got extinct by real-world legislation, real-world adoption rules, legal, like the law. And what, who took their place? Amazon, Apple, like all of, all the big companies. That's exactly what we're seeing in our space right now. It's like the technology is too good for them to pass up, and they're going to literally publicly scrutinize it until the day they have their entire system set up and they can sell it themselves. And that's, I think we're in that transition period right, right now, as we speak."
"Andrew, I'm old enough to remember when you talked. I, uh, I'm just, it, it's funny to me that, um, we find ourselves in, like, like Alex was just talking about, you know, everybody was concerned that there was going to be a draw down. There's, there's, there's going to be an event, there's going to be a move to the downside, and, and talking about it since '23. So, coming from a, a wealth management background, um, you know, and I, and I still engage in that content. I still listen to guys like, you know, Josh Brown, um, and it's, it's, you know, the guys that are smart in the space, they are, they're knowledgeable, uh, about the goings-on of daily, daily conversations, right? And, and often the, you know, blood cells, right? So, negativity in media sells, but on a day-to-day basis, what the smartest guys in the business are telling their clients is most of it is not going to matter. Asset prices are going to go up. And if you, you, you think you're smarter than that, those two sentences, good, go for it. Go work with somebody else because it's not going to work here. This is how we do things. Keep allocating money into in assets that you believe in. And that's why since '23, nothing meaningful's happened. Um, that's why, um, again, even in the Bitcoin space, you know, we've, we've effectively capped out at 50% down when before it would be 80 to 85%, um, because we have a new investor class in the Bitcoin space, um, that every time their IBIT shares are down, they just put more money into it. Same thing with their Bitwise shares, they just put more money into it. And a case could be made, and, you know, I've said this several times on this show, and it probably makes the show somewhat boring, the ETFs, they, they are the showrunners, uh, with Bitcoin right now, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon."
"When you see, when you see meaningful inflows, generally speaking, the price goes higher. When you see meaningful outflows, generally speaking, the price goes lower. And so, you know, um, that may be boring. Um, but over time, uh, when Bitcoin gets meaningful outflows quarter by quarter by quarter by quarter, and then we're back at 116,000, um, that's not boring. It, the ride may be boring, the ride may be not as fun as it used to be, um, but the, the price appreciation is, is not boring. Um, and, and by the way, you know, there was a, there was a meme, slash movement, maybe a couple years ago, maybe it was during COVID or whatever. It's, it was the too online, right? I'm too online, right? I, I think that's become the norm almost with everybody's lives, especially people associated or plugged into the markets. Like, we are, we are so online all the time that we see and hear everything, everything. And so that, that intentionally or or unintentionally, that moves our brains and our thought processes and our commentary into a space where again, we're expecting something bad to happen because most of what we hear or see is something bad is about to happen. Promise. Prepare yourself. And then again, most of the time..."
"Well, the yen carry trade's about to fall. Remember the hammer is about to fall out anyway."
"What happened there?"
"Five minutes of downside. That's what."
"Well, I, I, I, something hit me as you were talking, Andrew. If you think about it, some of the best stories I've read are like when, um, Jeff Bezos's Amazon stock was as low as it was at the very bottom, and he was going like, 'Network traffic's up. All of all my metrics are rising, and yet my price is at the worst it's ever been.' What did he do? He bought a bunch of shares, right? So, you know, if that's the indicator of whether people are buying into the fear at a big money or corporate level, I just ask while we're on this, you know, how many buybacks are there significant buybacks going on right now? Exceptional buybacks are happening right now. Salesforce, Walmart, Pepsi, uh, Cheyenne Energy, Broadcom, Omnicon, General Motors, Travelers, Fair Isaac, United there, I mean, just the list goes on and on, above way above normal. So, what does it tell you? Well, it tells you that in those circumstances where prices are moving directionally against all of your metrics, what should you be doing? You should be buying back your own stock. Well, people don't have publicly traded companies to buy their own stock back. Bitcoin is that for us. If you're buying Bitcoin at those prices, you're doing exactly what I just said all those big boys are doing. They're buying equity at cheap prices so that they can experience the potential upside of when it goes."
"I had Gary on my podcast months ago, and he, you know, the whole premise was Bitcoin is a business, and he kind of broke down that entire mentality. Alex, I know you got to go in a couple minutes, but can you just give us the, uh, TLDDR right now on what you're building and actually working on because we had this massive moment there where the building on Bitcoin thing was the the hugest narrative that we had. Obviously, everybody was kind of launching things, and as with everything in crypto, you know, things or in the world, I should say, we have the memories of goldfish, so people forget that it happened."
"Yeah. Well, the, the also anytime something gets hot in crypto, right, a bunch of people who just want to glom onto the side will pour in and do it. So, I'm very proud to say that we're not dead, which honestly in this market is a, is a real accomplishment. I think..."
"We'll have some stuff coming out very soon. But I'll tell you, what I'll say is like, I think the thing that's very clear is we were talking, Tilman was talking about like product market fits or, you know, what people do. I'll call it product market fit. And there's two things I think in all of crypto that have found product market fit. And this is the reason that you do see so many cycling, right? Is that most people are just chasing things that aren't. But there's two things that have one is holding Bitcoin and, you know, hoping, hoping it goes up, right? And the second one is stable coins, which of course just ties back to that whole thing of why the banks don't like it, right? Those are, those are really the only two things I guess outside of like generic gambling and speculation, but that's pretty undifferentiated. I think as Bitcoin embeds more and more like the third thing that it's going to be, and that, you know, everyone's been talking about for a while, but hasn't really found a particularly good way to do, is yield on the Bitcoin, right? And especially in a way that is that is safe, you know, and protects the, the underlying, uh, asset without the risk of losing it. And so, I think ultimately, you know, our goal with Stacks is building, you know, the, the Bitcoin economy, as we call it, right? Like, ultimately, I'm, I'm a big free marketer, I'm a big like global trade person. I want everyone having, every entrepreneur in the world to have access to like the entire market on things. And so the way you get there, obviously though, is you need a lot of people in it. And so, I, I think the path through that is now, now that we've solved like the holding problem, mostly solved, we could still make it more user-friendly. Now that stable coins are out there, I think the third thing is how do we provide people like the ability to grow, to stack their sats, to, to grow their base for it. So, that's where our, a lot of our attention is right now, and I'll, I'll, I'll come back on in a month or two and share a lot more on that."
"Awesome, man. Can't wait. Thank you, Alex. Everybody, give Alex a follow and, uh, have a wonderful, have a wonderful afternoon, and, uh, hopefully, you know, we won't have any more wars to talk about or huge news stories to be fearful by tomorrow."
"I hope you didn't just jinx it, is all I'll say. So, thanks very much, guys. Good to see you."
"I can't believe I jinxed that. That was terrible. Uh, all right. Well, our heads just got really big. Look at it. I did that. I'm drunk with power, to be honest with you, guys. This is disgusting. Disgusting. I'm, I'm, I'm 90% of the way there. Anyways, so listen, we always like do the whole thing, but we have a different thing, which is that we're doing something I've never done before, uh, which is a webinar today at 12:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And so instead of doing it here, you guys can literally go sign up. It's down in the description. Hey, are you guys going to be on this with me, or am I just going to be there like anybody joining me?"
"Well, yes, we and 500 pre-registered people so far. So, yeah."
"No, but I mean like talking."
"Yeah, of course. Yeah, we're going to be there the whole time. We're going to, it's going to be a deep dive. Uh, you know, if, if, if you're really interested in learning more and not doing it in a cursory or, you know, 50,000-foot level, this is the call for you. This, we're going to dig into the algos, um, each one and the settings and go through all the triggers and the trades and, you know, kind of really, really pull back the, the curtain on your trades specifically."
"I mean, listen, you, you find out in a bare market if [ __ ] works. I mean, that, that, that's the best way to look at it, right? Like, if you think you've got a leg up and you've got a product, or you've got a system, or whatever it happens to be, um, you're going to find out if, if that's worth anything in a bare market because it's going to strip it down to bare bones. And so you're going to talk about the fact that in a bare market, you're able to make decisions based on the strategies that you've set up with us that you wouldn't have made those same decisions, right?"
"You, you just wouldn't have. And, and that bears itself out in a bare market, um, in a way that affects performance in a meaningful way."
"Well, there's a psychological thing that you just touched on that we've been very cognizant of as we've built the software, which is, I would rather have 85% of the upside and 15% of the downside than vice versa. And so, a lot of people, even though they'll say that, their actions aren't proving that, right? And so, what does it mean? It means that you have to be counterintuitive. You have to move against the markets. You have to buy when there's blood in the streets. And during bare markets, and specifically this one that we've seen, it's, it's been a very difficult, difficult task for people to find out when they should buy or when they should start accumulating again. And, uh, Scott has done a, a really brilliant job of doing it with the team and setting up so many instances that he's..."
capitalized on that. And so what, what better time to have a show and tell during a bare market than, uh, during a bare market. So it's a good, it's going to be great. It's going to be a really, um, fantastic, very information-rich time. So I'm excited for it.
Yeah. I seem like an opportunity to also do it privately rather than sit here for an hour, you know, and break it down one by one. Uh, and so I think it's going to be great. I'm really excited about it because I've obviously been a huge cheerleader for it. And listen, part of it is I could have, you know, like I, I could have started not at the dead top and it may look a little better, right? But I think what's compelling is that, you know, I'm less, you know, I think I haven't even looked, but I think total portfolio is maybe 15% down in a market that's down 45%.
Yeah. If you were an actual hedge fund, we call this a hedge fund in your pocket, you know, kind of as a joke, but people forget the days when hedge funds' job was to outperform the market to the when there's downside, not actually to make a [ __ ] ton of money, uh, on the upside and outperform. But hedge funds traditionally, you know, you performed a bit worse in a bull market, but wildly better in a bare market and save people money. That's why you invested in a hedge fund. That's why you started one. That's what we've accomplished here in my mind. Now listen, if Bitcoin never goes up again, okay, that I lost money, but nobody here believes that.
Well, it's risk-adjusted returns, right? You want to have exposure to as healthy of a cost curve as you can get. And you know what Alex said is true. Uh, dollar-cost averaging in its simplest form is been the most time-tested method for dealing with volatility risk of of any market, forget just crypto. Uh, and so when you take that approach, when you, when you start with the premise of that no one can time the market and you build a strategy based upon that foundation, you get better outcomes, you get better risk-adjusted returns. You're taking off a little bit of the upside. No one will argue that if you're the perfect market timer and you can pick the bottoms and you 10x leverage at the bottoms, there is nothing that will make you more money than that if you're right. The problem is is that you're right very, very low percentage of the time. So building a strategy, uh, around a low percentage hit rate is not a good thing to do. You want to build a strategy over, uh, a high hit rate is something that gives you the least amount of risk with the most amount of, uh, potential returns or asymmetric upside. So, uh, Scott's portfolio is a perfect example of that. And when prices do rebound, he will have greater earning potential than people who have a, a worse off cost exposure curve. Like what someone who's gotten in at 100 plus, which most of these firms are, um, their their cost average are 100 plus dollars, uh, or $100,000 plus a coin. If you think about that, you know, unless you have a new means to come up with a lot of dry powder to come bring your cost basis down, you're kind of stuck up there. And that's a decision that was made, um, that was most of the time anchored in emotion and and not in a prudent execution strategy.
Yeah. So I think we should just, uh, encourage everybody to join. Will we have a recording of it?
We will. Yeah.
I like to ask these things in real time as.
Yeah. Yeah. We, we will. Um, and, uh, yeah, I, I did want to touch on it's in my brain. Alex said something at the end of his call that I want to applaud him about, which is, you know, helping people get into the Bitcoin economy and making it simple and the yield component of what he mentioned is, is a, it's very similar and near to near and dear to our hearts and why we developed the software. The software's intention is to get people into Bitcoin with less risk so that there's more happy outcomes. So there's more people that say, you know, there's a positive outcome when I experienced Bitcoin for the first time versus, um, if you got into Pump Fund, um, and you got into some of these other like there's a lot of people that are just out, absolutely have gotten burned or are getting burned, um, and the prudent way to address that is to go right behind Larry think as Andrew says and start accumulating what they believe is is one of the hardest assets that has ever been created. Hated.
Yeah.
Bitcoin.
Yeah. It's a, uh, um, you know, Scott's strategies, uh, have proven, um, to again, change the way that he's looked at, let's call just trading, right? I mean, he, he mentioned several months ago that he'll never manually trade ever again. Like, like what these strategies do for him has changed the way that that he thinks about the process. And by the way, you know, he talks about, well, it would be great if I didn't start at the top. Like, I don't know if everybody knows this, but most of retail in any movement starts at a top or the top somewhere. Like, if we had a dollar for every one of our customers that said, "Well, I kind of bought in at the top in '21 and I've been working through it or I bought at the top in 2017 and I, you know, worked through it." Uh, that's how, um, economies of scale grow. They have to grab attention first and they grab attention at the top. Um, also, you know, we're, we're currently sitting at last cycle's top, um, which is how Bitcoin quote unquote cycles go. Like right now the low and it feels terrible. What a bare market. Oh, I never thought this would happen again. And yet we're at the top of last cycle. Um, so again, all of that commentary can be mitigated with having strategies that work on your behalf while you sleep. Very simple. Just got to do it. Just got to choose to do it.
So, come listen to Scott talk about and our team talk about what it is that we do and how we set it up. And more importantly than anything else, what have the outcomes been versus 50% drawdown? Like, what, what portion of that has been, um, you know, h has Scott not taken part in there in life?
I'm also setting up a new portfolio. I, not that we're doing that live, but I like it so much and, uh, I'm switching over to OKX and going to run a portfolio there.
Well, I will say add this note just for anybody who's out there going, you know what, I don't know if I want to come to the. Here's the great thing about coming to the call. There is zero pressure. It's a free product for you to download. It's not watered down. You can download the product and you can set up the exact instances that Scott's running with the exception of the amount of money he's trading. Um, but you can do it on a smaller basis and run those instances exactly like he's running it and see, see what we're talking about for for absolutely no cost and be educated along the way. Our staff is incredible about really bringing people into the process. These are your tools. They will operate the way you tell them to. And it, it's our job to just show you how to use them and get you set.
I don't know if this is the appropriate time today because we don't have enough time, but like we could actually do this also for me setting up my next.
Yeah. For your new, your new one. Yeah, that would be a great one. That'd be a great.
By the way, there's going to be a Q&A session as as part of this webinar. So instead of just listening to our faces talk, you're going to be able to actually.
Interact with us.
Actually, we were trying to pitch it as one more hour of this show for all of you who are dying to let other people talk. Yes.
We could just, you know, my idea actually is we just run this show till 12:15. Can you imagine the numbers? I mean.
Yeah, I can. To the downside. I can imagine. Honestly, I can't, I can't believe some of the numbers that these spaces do. I get in some of these spaces and it's just the same conversation over and over again.
And not because I don't think it's good content, but we cut Crypto Town Hall down to Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Yeah.
It was daily and it was just like it was too redundant. You could tell that people were, you know, getting fatigued and, you know, let's talk about stuff when there's stuff to talk about and it down a little bit. So, yeah, I agree with that as well. So, the link is down below. We'll obviously get more deeper in the weeds on everything. Uh, and like you said, no pressure. It's just literally an.
I just will tell you, we've had over 500 people sign up so far, and we haven't even announced it until now. There's only a thousand spots, I think, that Zoom will let us do. So, if you're interested, go ahead and sign up so you don't.
Someone basically just said we're too cheap to upgrade our Zoom.
I think I don't, I think we've got the top model. I don't think you can have more than a thousand people on a call at once.
$47 more dollars.
It's not happening.
Alex, he's calling us out. Upgrade that plan now.
All right. Well, we're out of time here. So, thank you guys. Please, Seriously, it's down in the description. There's a Zoom link there. I, I even checked to make sure it worked. There it is right there. Uh, beating the bare market with Scott Mel, Arch Public. Just your name and email address. That's all we need. Uh, so that we can fish you. We can sell it all, all your data on the black market. Uh, yeah, and send you Coinbase emails all day. Uh, no, we won't do any of that. Okay, guys. We'll see you at 12:15. Appreciate it.
Bye, guys. That's dope. That's dope.