People come to understand Bitcoin in a myriad of different ways.
A lot of people have to touch the hot stove.
Bitcoin treasury companies are not, you know, in general, the equivalent of alt-season and altcoins.
But there's a very similar lesson that I think is going to have to be learned,
which is that it's a great way to get less Bitcoin.
If all else is equal to you, you know, it's like,
oh, well, you can either go buy Bitcoin at this company X, Y, or Z, or buy the ETF.
You are incentivized to get them to also buy your stock.
And that's where I see the greatest misalignment because it's predicated on constantly raising more and more capital and most of which should be people just buying Bitcoin directly.
The sentiment has never been worse for my 10 years around Bitcoin.
The fundamentals of Bitcoin have never been better.
And those two things are true at the same time.
And I think that there's also, in my view, there also never was an adoption wave since 2021.
And the next one will be particularly large because of that.
I mean, we've started now.
I was just having a chat, but we may as well just make this the show.
Like the adoption wave, like new people come into Bitcoin when Bitcoin is ripping.
Like they come in in the euphoria phase of Bitcoin price.
Like that happens every single cycle.
And I think because we didn't have that, we never got the kind of broader awareness.
Like you didn't see it like posted in all the sort of major news articles and things like that.
And I just think we never got that influx of retail because of AI, because everyone was going to AI.
And if people were going to Bitcoin, they were probably going to the treasury companies.
Yeah.
I think that's, I mean, just from my own vantage point of being at meetups, being at conferences,
of course, people are trickling in here and there in terms of new people, but there was
not a decided wave like there was in 2017 or 2020, 2021.
And why that is, I don't know if it was just that the price increase was a function of
the ETF and a lot of low conviction, small, you know, institutional flows rather than
an unlock of a wave of new people actually figuring out that there was signal on Bitcoin.
And then with the, you know, kind of everything happening in AI, sucking both capital out as
well as mindshare, which is like, you know, eventually they're going to print a shit ton
of money and people are going to figure out that the Bitcoin is right.
and the Bitcoiners will figure out that, you know,
that was the North Star and get back to the basics.
Yeah, I don't think retail's gone forever.
But on the treasury company stuff,
you've been fighting a lot online.
I've loved to see it, to be honest.
Do you think the treasury companies
have been a net good for Bitcoin?
Danny, everything's good for Bitcoin, okay?
Is it though?
Like in the sense that I think that
Bitcoin has to humble everybody.
And that
people come to understand Bitcoin
in a myriad of different ways.
A lot of people have to touch the hot stove.
Bitcoin treasury companies are not
in general the equivalent of
alt-season and altcoins.
But there's a very similar lesson that I think
is going to have to be learned, which is that
it's a great way to get less Bitcoin.
you know and like maybe a few people were the you know minority or exception and that created
you know this idea that the market as a whole could and that the market as a whole learns that
they can't and that markets might be efficient over short periods of time but as a function of
time it becomes more efficient and people learn from their past mistakes and that the people that
learned that mistake that they actually got less Bitcoin by buying a Bitcoin treasury company at a
large premium to the actual Bitcoin it held was why they ultimately got less Bitcoin. And they
will come to understand it and not make the same mistake twice. And so I don't think that it's
brought in this large amount of net new adoption that a lot of other people seem to think it has.
So I think it's been a lot more neutral to negative potentially on price.
But it is what it is and the market has to process information.
And I think the market is in part of what might get us out of this cycle is a bunch of people actually finding the real signal and rotating out of the treasury companies and buying Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I want to know what it is that you don't like about them.
Because if you look at, say, strategy, obviously easiest one, biggest one, like their business model at first, I actually really liked as they were a cash flow positive company and they were moving their cash reserves on the balance sheet into Bitcoin.
Makes total sense.
What I started to like, it just didn't vibe with me quite right when they started doing the preferreds and they did the convertible notes.
And it was becoming like a leverage debt play trying to get people to buy their common equity, which was then going to get diluted so they could buy more Bitcoin.
I like that's where the whole thing got too complex for me and I just kind of fell out of I just didn't I didn't I don't really get it anymore.
It's just this complex financial engineering thing.
Yeah.
So from my side, one, they did the converts first and actually made more sense to me when they were doing the converts because they were tapping cap, you know, money that capital that wouldn't otherwise have come into Bitcoin.
now i you know truth be told like i didn't really have a an issue when they started doing the
prefers for me it was really more when i started seeing things being said that i viewed as
confusing the nature of bitcoin as a means to get people to buy stock
rather than bitcoin so this is like digital credit narrative yeah i mean truth be told it wasn't it
wasn't really even that um it was you know we turned bitcoin into money which i think just by
its very nature begs the question of well if you turn bitcoin into money then what is bitcoin
bitcoin is this very difficult thing to understand as money because it doesn't you know behave like
the money that people are used to.
And then when you start deviating away, say, oh, it's not even money, it's capital.
It's like, well, that stands to confuse far more people than it is.
It's like, hey, you think that money is fiat and that it can be easily printed and that
it's stable in the short term but collapses in the long term.
This is a different kind of money.
It's volatile, but it holds its value because there's a fixed supply.
And as more people opt into that, it will become less volatile over time and it will evolve from a nascent and early store of value that's volatile into a form of commerce that's being used every day for transactions.
And so that was probably the first one.
then there was a post from a guy who I know and like from strive talking about how
digital credit is the most important inflection point in Bitcoin.
And that I,
I looked at and I said,
so you're telling me that,
you know,
in my own view estimation,
no more than 1% of people understand Bitcoin.
But the thing that's going to make sense to them is,
a professional preferred equity that is, quote, backed by Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't have any yield, but you're going to pay 13% to them.
And that's going to be this transformational thing for Bitcoin.
And what he said in this post or this video was that Bitcoin is too volatile for 99% of people.
And again, that's where I started to observe this and say,
okay now you're actually saying things that confuse people about the nature of bitcoin
when bitcoin is already hard to understand is is this an is this a net net benefit you know like
what what what is going on and when i started to call out what i perceived to be misleading
marketing around these products people doubled down and um and then when i dug into it i started
to see what in my view is a really broken incentive structure, which not only are they
complex financial structures, but at a higher level, their whole strategy is to get people
to not buy Bitcoin, but to buy their stock instead.
And for one end of the bookend, which is the people investing in the common equity with
The idea of getting more Bitcoin, and I have logical reasons to describe why you won't get more Bitcoin that way.
The companies will.
But you as an individual, if you were saving in Bitcoin, you'd be better off just saving in Bitcoin.
And then on the other book, the people that they're shepherding or trying to shepherd into these preferred equity instruments that are fixed dollar equity instruments that are ultimately going to be left holding the bag as fiat loses its value and eventually hyperinflates.
That the last person to hold those is the one holding the bag.
And that those people would be better off just buying a smaller amount of Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin is too volatile to you, you are the volatility.
The market is the volatility.
People pricing Bitcoin for the first time are the volatility.
And Bitcoin doesn't have a yield.
So the better thing for those people would be simply buying a smaller percentage of Bitcoin.
And then learning and reading a book, rabbit holing, spending the 100 hours to understand how to keep your money.
But there's actually a disincentive.
And the disincentive also extends to the shareholders.
That people who have bought the stocks have a direct incentive to get people not to buy Bitcoin, but to buy their stocks.
And I'm not saying that everybody operates or effectuates that incentive, but the incentive exists.
And the same incentive does not exist with the ETF because the ETF has managed to net asset value.
So you could hold 90% Bitcoin in cold storage, but you decided to buy the Bitcoin treasury stock.
You suddenly need people to buy your stock and not Bitcoin to validate your thesis around that 10%, which is meaningful, right?
Because if all else is equal to you, it's like, oh, well, you can either go buy Bitcoin at company X, Y, or Z or buy the ETF.
You are incentivized to get them to also buy your stock.
And that's where I see the greatest misalignment because it's predicated on, you know, constantly raising more and more capital and most of which should be people just buying Bitcoin directly.
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That makes sense.
So that's like the misaligned incentive for the shareholder.
But for the companies, what's the misaligned incentive?
Is it that they have to sort of market this
as Bitcoin being too volatile or too hard to self-custody,
let us do it instead of actually just buying Bitcoin yourself?
I think the misaligned incentive is...
that their incentive with their future shareholders is to get them to not buy Bitcoin, but instead to buy their stock.
And selling their stock at a premium to the underlying value of Bitcoin, which in my view,
and this has been a lot more controversial than it should be because I'm mostly talking to people that own the stock.
But if you talk to a disinterested third party and ask them whether Bitcoin in a stock wrapper with leverage should trade at a premium to Bitcoin that's not leveraged, that's not in the stock wrapper, that doesn't have the implications of corporate taxes, double taxation,
they would say that the underlying asset should trade at a premium and the stock should trade at
a discount just from a pure risk perspective but the companies have an incentive which is where
there's misalignment of selling that premium as a trading multiple and then they make analogies
compared to things but they're really harvesting the premium to their benefit to the detriment of
the person that's buying the stock.
How were they doing that?
Is that by diluting shareholders
when it's above 1XM NAV to buy more Bitcoin?
Right, but also think about the person
who's buying the stock,
the person who's providing that money.
They're paying, you know,
50% premium in the context of Strive.
Today, the strategy premium is much smaller,
but it was very large in 2024 and 2025.
Those people were,
what they were functionally doing
was getting less Bitcoin
than the Bitcoin equivalent
that they were buying into because of the premium.
And again, the incentive of the company is to do that
where it's misaligned is the person who's actually buying it,
in my opinion.
If your whole strategy wasn't predicated
on getting new capital in the door,
new equity capital in the door,
and you were producing Bitcoin-denominated returns
not as a function of harvesting a premium that shouldn't exist,
and again, because that premium exists,
They're able to do it, but then they have to tell a story about how they're going.
They tell a story about how they're going to be able to get more Bitcoin by raising these preferreds.
The preferreds, in my opinion, are bad instruments for the people buying the preferreds.
But the whole idea of making more Bitcoin is predicated on their ability to get people piled in to the preferreds.
So it's kind of two ends of the barbell.
and in both cases I think people would just be better off buying Bitcoin and that same
misalignment wouldn't exist if it wasn't predicated on getting new equity in the door in my view.
Why do you think that these companies aren't going to be able to sustain above 1x MNAV?
Because for people buying the shares in these companies presumably they're betting that the
companies can continue to increase their Bitcoin per share. Is that right?
No, that's how it's been sold. I think from a risk perspective, that is fundamentally illogical. Why is that?
Well, because first you have to start from this idea that there is more risk associated with the stock companies.
Yes, there's potentially more upside dependent on whether or not you price the risk appropriately.
But at a, say, one MNAV or whatever, which effectively means, and again, the way that I look at it is common equity to the net asset value attributable to common in the Bitcoin equivalent.
If that was at one-to-one, then anything more than that would say that Bitcoin is riskier, the underlying asset is riskier than owning the stock.
In which case, if you own the stock, you don't own Bitcoin.
You own a stock.
It's in somebody else's control.
They have an expense load.
They have execution risk.
Are they going to be able to get the incremental leverage?
Is something going to go wrong?
In the context of GameStop, Citadel basically just said, or Robinhood said, you can't buy the stock.
Censorship.
A lot of censorship risk.
That going from one to greater than one is an expression that the stock is less risky than Bitcoin.
At a discount, it would signal that Bitcoin is less risky than the stock, which it is.
Then if the stock was trading at a discount, there's an opportunity for that stock on a Bitcoin per share basis to both outperform Bitcoin and trend to one.
It's always going to be riskier because there's more counterparty risk, there's more execution risk.
But as those liabilities do trend to zero, it would then trend toward one.
And it's a backward risk view that they basically sold on like it's a price to book value like a bank might be valued.
But the difference in this context is you can actually own the underlying exact asset with less risk, but you are paying a premium to take more risk and not own the underlying asset that all of your return or quote outperformance would be predicated on.
Why do you think that people don't understand this? Because is it as simple as people think that basically trying to take leverage? I think leverage is a way to become an OG.
They think that leverage plus number go up means more Bitcoin. And the big thing that is missed is depending on what price you bought in at. And what is going to happen, what has happened to this point is like, you know, as it's traded at a premium, the company sells stock to buy Bitcoin or to hold cash, that they basically harvest that premium.
Well, the market figures this out as a function of time that they were the premium and that as their understanding of Bitcoin goes up, because by and large, these are Bitcoiners that are buying the common equity as this way to get more Bitcoin.
And to a person, when I brought up this idea, and again, I don't go around talking about my background, but I've worked for a hedge fund. I've worked for an investment bank. Before that, I've worked in credit restructuring.
there seems to be an entire absence from this entire evaluation of applying discount rates to
future scenarios to basically NPV or to calculate what, you know, based on what scenario you are
ascribing in the future to say what the value of the stock should be today, that that's entirely
absent from the discussion. They also seemingly none of them contemplate the consequences of
corporate taxes. They say, well, why would they ever sell the Bitcoin? I say,
it doesn't matter if they sell the Bitcoin. The value of a company is based on
return of capital and the timing of that return of capital to you.
So in order for it to get out of the corporate structure into your pocket so that you could go
get something of actual value, like a car or a home or what value really is, they would
have to incur that tax.
So it doesn't matter if they're not incurring it today, you would have to contemplate it
in your own valuation of it, totally absent from the discussion.
And so I think that it is really a simplistic view of leverage plus number go up equals
more Bitcoin.
And that just certainly is not true if you are not accounting for the other variables. Again, if you set aside all risk and simply isolated the premium that the stocks are trading, which is a backwards risk to how risk should be priced, along with the impact of corporate taxes.
They'd be like, you basically have to out, like on a Bitcoin-denominated basis, you would have to outperform by 20% if it was one-to-one, if Bitcoin went to infinity and fiat went to zero.
But nobody brings that up.
And when I bring it up, I was just on a spaces, that concept was like foreign to people.
And for me, having valued companies, like if you valued a stock, say, outside the Bitcoin world that doesn't currently return any capital shareholders, you're still having to apply a tax rate at the corporate level because your whole reason for buying it is actually capital return to you.
um and and it it seems to be just a very you know you know people are not
precisely or like really um you know they might say oh i know that there's risk but they're not
pricing the risk is what i'm saying the interesting there is like i remember maybe six months ago fong
lee came out and said that 80 of the people are buying stretch were retail investors do you think
this is why because the sort of institutions are looking at this company in the same way that you
are and actually risking this appropriately yeah i think the reality is that it's a heavy retail
base because it's the people who are buying the common equity are the people most bullish on
bitcoiners and it is hard for an institution you know if one out of 100 people understand bitcoin
it's hard for a group of people managing institutional capital to,
you know,
get over 50% consensus.
Right.
So I think that that's,
that's mostly what it is because also it's like institutions.
I don't,
you know,
they're,
they make a lot of boneheaded decisions,
you know?
So it's not like retail's not as smart as,
as institutional capital.
Like everyone who's early to Bitcoin is,
smarter than those
institutions. So I don't think that it's that
but I do think that
there then is a lack of rigor
or lack of thought process
as to the risk or how to quantify those
risks and it's more of like a feels
and then the feels gets resolved
over time because anytime
the premium emerges
somebody, whether it's the companies themselves
or a shareholder
will harvest the premium
to realize
it and
you know that becomes zero sum so what do you think the long term looks like for these companies
do you think obviously you think trading below 1xm now but will will they survive do you think that they can continue to pay the the preferred dividends like what do you think will happen yeah i mean like my my expectation is that no i can say for every one of them right but like i would expect
strategy to survive i would expect strategy to materially underperform bitcoin i think that the
the strategy shareholder base is going to figure that out and start selling the stock to buy bitcoin
um now companies that are in worse positions more leverage um less reason you know to exist
um higher expense base because like that's what you have to think about some of these companies
have a really you know people say well the etf has a expense ratio of 0.25 well start looking at
the expense base of these corporate treasury companies.
And you'll see that they have expenses too,
and they're higher.
And so, at some point,
the companies will just return capital.
I would expect this strategy continues to operate
and ultimately shifts the strategy.
Once their equity begins to trade
at a steep discount to NAV,
it's like, hey, Bitcoin can go up
with a stock not going up.
And that's part of the misaligned incentive.
It's like there actually has to be a market for stock
and their incentive is to get people to buy stock
so that they can buy Bitcoin and not buy.
But the incentive of the shareholder is to figure that out
and also if there's ever a premium there to sell it to buy Bitcoin.
But that might be how Bitcoin goes up and the share price doesn't,
but the company still has the Bitcoin.
And then the incentives start to align with the remaining shareholders, then, you know, are living in a world where it's much more difficult for them to be diluted. They do have a large base of Bitcoin. And that, again, I can't predict the future, but I would expect in that world that strategy becomes a, you know, an allocator of capital to generate cash flows rather than raise capital to buy Bitcoin.
If I had to factor it in, but I think that anybody who's in it today is going to materially underperform Bitcoin because of the very overwhelming – when I zoom out, one of the things that I struggle with, why people can't see this is why when they zoom out that they would think that the market for a single-name stock would be bigger than the global demand for buying Bitcoin.
directly, you know, because somebody still has to buy the stock for the value of the stock to go up.
And it's like, why are there going to be a lot more people that demand buying that stock with
leverage, with more risk when they could just own Bitcoin? You know, and even that, like, you know,
genuinely, that was always the case. And it was always uninteresting to me. But it wasn't
problematic in my mind until they start talking about Bitcoin in a way that confuses the nature
of Bitcoin. Because that's what I view. It's like that actually retards an understanding of Bitcoin.
It does it, you know, intentionally, not intentionally, however you want to describe
it, to the ends of selling stock. And, you know, Bitcoin working is predicated on more people
figuring out Bitcoin, not less. And they will over time. I think it will just be better off for
everybody if more people figure it out sooner. So I think confusing the nature of Bitcoin of like
avoiding talking about it as money is really what, you know, perked me up and got me engaged to dive
in and look into it. Because it's not semantics. Like it's not semantics to expressly go out of
way to define Bitcoin as the one thing that makes it unique.
Yeah.
And also, you know, someone like Michael Saylor has, on public record, been critical about
the use of Bitcoin for payments.
There was some interview that he did with CNBC in 2024, I believe it was, where the
host asked him, you know, does Bitcoin need to be used as currency to be successful?
And he described it as like, you know, that was a misfortunate history of, you know, Bitcoin's narrative. And, you know, it's controversial, you know, that's controversial. But, you know, Bitcoin is, you know, digital real estate in cyberspace or, you know, in Manhattan.
You know, it's like, that's where I view, you know, I put these things together and I say, hey, it's confusing people about the nature of Bitcoin. That's slowing people's understanding of it. And if you have an incentive for Bitcoin not to be used as money, and you have a view that this is controversial, are your incentives actually aligned with, you know, Bitcoin and your shareholder base? Like, that's what I see to be more problematic.
it's interesting that um like bitcoin i think last cycle from bottom to top did something like
a 7x and people are still not seeing it as volatile enough and are trying to chase additional
leverage with with things like um these treasury companies but how do you try and explain to people
that the asymmetry and just owning actual bitcoin is still there because of how few people understand
And, you know, like by whatever metric you want to look at, I would say a conservative estimate is still 1%.
You know, no more than 1% of people understand Bitcoin.
Now, if you are confusing the nature of what Bitcoin is and how Bitcoin adoption increases and that it is money and that 100% of the world needs money and money is this very unique economic good that is differentiated from all other goods.
and it's a basic necessity, not a luxury,
that then it becomes easy to say,
okay, well, if the end game is 100% of people
buying Bitcoin and no more than 1% of people understand it,
and you can look at the value of Bitcoin
relative to all the market of financial assets,
so first the market of money,
in its broadest sense, something like 100 to 120 trillion.
Bitcoin is roughly 1.2 to 1.3 trillion today.
That's asymmetric if you look at the fact that I think only two of the companies in the S&P 500 own Bitcoin, Square, Tesla.
There are other companies that have holdings, but I don't think on a primary basis.
Goldman might have some of the ETF for their customers, but from my understanding, if you think about holding on a direct basis,
again, I'm just looking for benchmarks that say that one out of a hundred number is conservative.
that you can look at a number of different points and say,
okay, well, if what's actually happening here
is that the world's adopting a new form of money
and they're adopting Bitcoin
because it has a credibly enforced fixed supply,
100% of people are going to need it
and very few people understand it
and they're about to have to print a lot more money,
then there's a lot of asymmetry left inherently there.
If you start to think about it as digital capital,
I don't even know, like if I was to ask you,
what does digital capital actually mean?
I don't know.
But I don't understand a lot of his analogies.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's what I've done.
Imagine trying to explain the narrative,
you know, like the fundamental demand for Bitcoin.
And if someone was like, well, what is digital capital?
And you're like, I don't think most of the shareholders.
They're like, oh, it's something you can borrow against.
It's collateral.
So everyone's borrowing against this thing.
but what is the thing?
Why are they able to borrow?
Well, because it's scarce,
but it's zeros and ones.
So everyone's just holding the zeros and ones,
but borrowing against it for other money.
How does this work?
And so it might become more difficult
to think about the asymmetry of it
if you're not thinking about it in the context of money.
And it's like when Michael Saylor came to understand Bitcoin,
he read the Bitcoin standard, right?
So it's like for one side of the shareholder base,
they're saying, oh, Bitcoin's not volatile enough.
You need more volatility.
And then the other side's like, oh, but for the 99% of you,
it's too volatile for you just by my digital preferred equity.
and um and so i think that like when you're stuck in that um financialized mentality that um that it
might be difficult to see asymmetry because you're missing something fundamental about bitcoin
and i do think and not to everyone because i know people who are you know really you know
long-time bitcoiners that have started to allocate money to these bitcoin treasury companies so they
they clearly get Bitcoin.
I think they might just be wanting to gamble.
They like gambling or something.
Yeah.
But,
but a lot of other people came to Bitcoin by way of these.
They caught enough signal to,
to understand that there is financial upside to Bitcoin.
And it's something that they want to own with it.
Never actually having rabbit hole,
but and do have a very limited surface level understanding.
And those people are going to rabbit hole Bitcoin when the,
you know,
When the premium flips to a discount, they realize that the narrative was wrong, but they were so close to being on the signal and that will be an unlock. So that's where I say, you know, everything's good for Bitcoin. You know, the treasury companies don't have to fail for people to, for their stock to go up in fiat, for people to have, you know, inevitably gotten less Bitcoin as a result versus the very, you know, early minority of people that were in it before.
it started to get heavily diluted and traded at material premium.
But, you know, it's like money is money.
There's fundamental truth that exists in the world
and people will figure it out
because you can only solve the problem of fiat money
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understand bitcoin i think that's probably a fair number in terms of understand i think maybe
more people would have some kind of x exposure to it um but i would say no more than one in a hundred
people actually understand what bitcoin is what do you think the milestone we need to reach is
to sort of move us from, I guess that's like the, when do we go from gradually to suddenly?
Like how many people need to understand Bitcoin for us to reach that sort of escape velocity?
I would expect that it's something like three to 5% of people.
As low as that?
Yeah. But I also don't believe that, you know, I anchor people to 1% because your question was,
you know, is there still asymmetry in Bitcoin? And if you understand,
If you come to understand the nature of Bitcoin as money and the importance of its fixed supply and that everybody needs Bitcoin and economic systems do converge on one form of money and it's not random that everyone in the US uses dollars.
It's not random that everyone in Europe uses euros and yen in Japan and it's also not random that the gold standard existed.
then you start to be, if you're at 1%,
then you start to conceptualize that it's,
you know, 1 to 100 asymmetric.
But from a practical perspective,
we're not, like, there are not 1%,
there are not 80 million people in the world
that really grok Bitcoin.
No.
um and so if it's something smaller than that you know which it which it is it's like if if 80
million people in the world really understood bitcoin the bitcoin price wouldn't be where it is
and uh because those 80 million people would be you know ceos of fortune 500 companies and you
They have access to more information, more ability to adopt.
It's probably less than 5 million people.
Yeah.
I would guess if it was 5 million people, the Bitcoin conference wouldn't have to appeal to altcoins and have 15,000 people out.
It's still early, very early.
And so when I think about three to 5%, I think about it from the perspective of who are those people, you know, like, because if it's more people like Michael Saylor, more people like, you know, Ross Stevens, the founder of Stone Ridge, if it's, you know, people who run companies, their spheres of influence in terms of just the people immediately around them that
catch on to their signal,
that if it's one in 20 people,
if one in 20 people really rocked Bitcoin,
that would be 400 million people, right?
If I'm doing my math right,
8 billion, 80 million times five, right?
That Bitcoin becomes very easy to see
in that world.
Like in terms of like,
you're still a little bit crazy
if you're the person in your circle
that has had enough vision
to see how Bitcoin goes
from where it is today
to a fully functioning money system
that's being used
to facilitate transactions
for day-to-day commerce.
And once enough people
have figured it out,
then it will be like a rush to the exit.
It will likely coincide with fiat.
hyperinflation um where where people won't be sitting around saying you know what's the benefit
of investing in a bitcoin treasury company or not and thinking in you know fiat kegers
they're going to be flooding to the only form of money that's holding its value um and so um you
know another way i would look at it though is similar to when a when a currency hyperinflates
like the Argentine peso or the Turkish lira
or Venezuelan Boulevard,
it wasn't because 50% of the people figured out
that the money is not working.
The smaller group of people figured it out,
headed for the exits,
and then the rest of the people figured out
what's going on as a function of it.
So that's what I viewed to be more likely.
but it's also part of the reason why you know on the treasury companies i do think there's
something about the treasury companies that just confuses a lot of people about bitcoin not just
about what they you know how they talk about bitcoin and that that confuses them but like
the idea of like but you buy you you know someone lends money to you and you buy bitcoin and
you know what's the risk that you blow up even if i don't think that they'll blow up
but I also think
that they're adversarial
and they're not all adversarial
and maybe adversarial is a strong word
but to talk about
Bitcoin payments
where it's not just like a meme
like don't spend your Bitcoin
like I understand those people
but it's a difference to say
like you know
don't spend your Bitcoin
to saying that
Bitcoin payments
is a misfortunate
unfortunate part of
you know
the historical narrative
and to be antagonistic
to the use of Bitcoin as payments
because that is a necessary part of the end game.
If you hear someone like Jack Dorsey talk about it,
where he says Bitcoin needs to be everyday money to work,
to be successful.
Now, that doesn't mean that everybody needs to be paying for things in Bitcoin today,
but as an end state or an end game,
that needs to be the end game
because otherwise, if Bitcoin was just locked up
in a relatively few large institutions,
it would be so centralized that it would not be resistant to censorship.
If it's not resistant to censorship, then the whole exercise is moot.
If it's not resistant to censorship, you've just recreated the fiat system.
If you can censor Bitcoin, it's too centralized to not be resistant to it.
You can alter one rule, you can functionally alter other rules like the fixed supply.
and so
but where I'm going
is that
my view of it is
and again
I'm working on
Bitcoin payments
but I'm also doing that
for logical reasons
it's part of the reason
why you know
I see this as problematic
but
the vast majority
of people
are going to start
to understand
Bitcoin as money
as they see it
being used as money
and so
if you are
if your position
as a company
is antagonistic
to that
I view it as problematic
to
the future adoption of Bitcoin to working. And because for some people, only a certain number
of people in the world will be able to sit down, read a book, listen to a podcast,
see this very esoteric thing and be like, ah, yep, this is where the world's going. I'm going
to buy Bitcoin today with the idea that everyone else is going to come to a similar conclusion that
this is the best form of money. But when you can go down the street in Austin, Texas on a square
terminal by beef for Bitcoin and eggs for Bitcoin and sourdough bread for Bitcoin, that for the
person that doesn't have enough vision and not in a critical way, but just in a very logical way,
be like, hey, it's hard for somebody to understand Bitcoin as money when it's not using money. Well,
when they see it capable of being used as money, that is an unlock. It closes the mental loop.
It's like, okay, I'm not using Bitcoin as money, but you can. And I'm now going to evaluate this in the context of all this other intellectual kind of thought process or logic about why somebody created Bitcoin to be this form of money that has this fixed supply and that it was expressly created because of all the trust that you had to put in banks and that trust had been broken.
central banks creating money, quantitative easing, banks creating credit bubbles, everything.
But if you don't have that being used, or if you're actively working to constrain that,
that that is something that is in opposition to a wave of people that would start to turn on to it,
turning on. You know, now Square do Bitcoin payments. What percentage of your payments
that you're making, things you're buying is in Bitcoin? Because for me, like basically the only
time i ever actually use bitcoin as money is around bitcoin events and bitcoin conferences
because otherwise i just don't really have an opportunity to um i mean it's still low right
but uh in terms of uh percent it's greater in number of payments smaller in um absolute value
i'd say but like um my local grocer accepts bitcoin the uh the woman who cuts my hair
she was already on Square
so she now accepts Bitcoin
it was her first Bitcoin
you know
so
again when you think about it
again
it's a microcosm but
a woman who had never bought Bitcoin
I've been going to the same woman for 8 years
okay
since I moved back to Austin
great lady
super based
and
she the first bitcoin that she ever got was after square turned on bitcoin payments and i paid her
in bitcoin that's cool that she had every opportunity i've been talking to her about
bitcoin for eight years right but it was square turning the ability to accept bitcoin on and she
was like yeah sure like that for whatever reason super easy for her you know going to an exchange
wasn't.
And so I do think it's a critical part.
And one of the other things that occurred in my
flippening on the Bitcoin treasury companies was like,
we turned Bitcoin into money.
Digital credit is the most important inflection
in the history of Bitcoin.
Credit on Bitcoin is bigger than lightning
or multi-sig.
That is implicitly the comment.
But then Saylor also made a comment
about how what was happening
with the preferred stock of Strive
was the most interesting thing
happening in Bitcoin at the time.
It was happening at a time
where Square was rolling out
Bitcoin payments to 4 million merchants.
Yeah, crazy.
What are we talking about?
And so I don't think like Sailor's bad.
You know, it's like, I wish that like 2020 Sailor would come back.
Yeah.
You know?
That's exactly where I'm at.
He's in there.
Like there was a podcast.
I don't know if you were a part of it, but there was a podcast that he did with Eric
Kaysen and John Ballas.
Oh, Mr. Yeah.
And HODL.
It was a HODL.
but like when you when you listen to it it's like man this guy gets like the fundamental
importance of bitcoin and i'm like where's that guy he's in 100 he's in there i want to see him
come back too yeah um i think he might be gone though um i think you know when you talk you do
i hope so um you know when you talk about this like any state of bitcoin this bitcoin is hope
um we hope he comes back yeah you know when you talk about like this end state of bitcoin this
type of Bitcoinized world, however you want to call it. Do you think that Bitcoin is the global
reserve currency? It's used in every single payment by every single person? Because there's
this like growing idea that Bitcoin won't step into that role and instead will be the global
reserve asset and will still have some like USDT stable coin type payment rails.
No, Bitcoin will be the reserve currency. I think like there's two things that I think confuse
people. They refer to
a reserve asset versus a reserve
currency, and when they're doing that,
they're kind of like...
The real
Realistically, maybe conflating is the wrong term, but they look at the treasury as a treasury bill as a reserve asset and the dollar as a reserve currency.
But the dollar is money and a treasury is a claim on future dollars at some future point in time.
and if the dollar held its value rather than degraded in value then why would they need to
buy the treasury right um so it's like hey they know the dollar is losing value the treasury
is functionally speaking guaranteed by the u.s government so i'll i'll own the treasury because
it's going to give me some nominal yield which is better than just holding the dollar
but a large function of it is
created by the decline in the dollar.
And so it's like money is both an asset
and a currency. Not all assets are money
but money is an asset. It's not semantics.
It's like the thing that makes money money is unique to it
and the other assets don't have the
properties that could allow it to be that thing.
And so I do think that there's going to be an inclination to try to force Bitcoin into a box that says, oh, you have to use this fiat stablecoin and there's going to be Bitcoin and the institutions.
That's part of what I see being problematic.
Now, the economic gravity of Bitcoin will dictate that it will break through those barriers as well.
But that doesn't mean that everybody, first people through the door aren't caught up in the crossfire.
But the reason why, so one, it's just like a currency is an asset.
Now, Bitcoin is unique in the history of money because it is a form of money that is both functional as money and as a currency.
And, you know, for the longest time, I didn't really appreciate the distinction of when people were differentiated between money as currency.
If you ask somebody about the dollar, they'd be like, is the dollar money or currency?
They would probably look at you sideways like, what are you talking about?
Because they sound like the same thing.
Right, because they think of them the same thing.
It's like money's currency, currency's money.
Well, if gold was money, gold needed to be refined into a currency to have the utility in trade.
You had to set a standard.
You need to turn into coins.
You had to turn into coins into a standard unit.
The idea of one ounce needed to be standardized.
Gold, the element on its own is just an element.
putting it into a standard unit putting the stamp of a crown you know having a currency issuer that
is turning into the coin ensuring that there isn't counterfeit out there was a functional part of the
the role of the currency issuer relative to the money that there actually was a distinction and
in the entire history of commodity metals that has that has functionally been the case and like a
a gold bar that doesn't have the mark of a crown on it to this day
is considered different, is not considered to be currency.
That's why they call it bullion.
Now, Bitcoin is unique because not only does it have this fixed supply
and it has these monetary properties,
but the Bitcoin network does,
and I'm not distinguishing between Bitcoin, the asset, and Bitcoin,
the network, I put those two things as one.
The network is not valuable without the currency. The currency is dependent on having these nodes to be able to transmit money in the system to have final settlement. But Bitcoin in its totality issues the money, verifies all transactions, and has a standard unit baked in. You don't need someone to create one ounce of gold. You have one Satoshi.
and so for the first time a form of money can be a currency as well bitcoin because the bitcoin
network is capable of doing all of the things that a currency issuer was previously necessary for
to refine money into something that was a utility in trade um so it doesn't need the issuer
that's like the fundamental aspect of Bitcoin
then when it comes to well
yeah there are going to be people who want to put Bitcoin
sitting in a stablecoin wrapper
and say that you have to use this or they might even just think it's a good idea
that it's a good way to scale
that there will be that inclination
Tether's already started to buy Bitcoin
they'll probably allocate more to Bitcoin over time
but to a holder
However, the economic incentives dictate, even if you are going to use a custodian, this isn't about purity. It's about pragmatism. That if you were going to use a custodian or not, that if you were going to use a custodian and somebody was like, hey, you're going to deposit your Bitcoin to my bank or my bank-like entity.
and I'm going to give you a note back
that's denominated in some other money, not Bitcoin.
You'd be like, well, why do you need to do that?
Why don't you just denominate it in Bitcoin?
Denominate your liability to me, your obligation to me.
Or more likely the incentives will dictate,
hey, this is not a deposit.
This is a bailment arrangement.
Like you can't, legally, you can't take my money
and give it to somebody else.
But in either of those two scenarios, the bailment arrangement or the deposit arrangement, the economic incentive would dictate, like, just make it denominated in the currency that I'm giving you, not some other currency for which you're the issuer of that has a different denomination.
right and if and if one bank wants to do that another bank is going to follow the economic
incentive and say well i'll let's all you know whether it's a different bank or a different
jurisdiction they would say like i'll let you you know i'll denominate my liability to you in bitcoin
rather than some currency i just made up and said that you know my currency is convertible to you at you know 10 to one you like 20 to one which was like dollars to gold
at least around, you know, 1920 or 1930.
So you basically would have to make up some new currency supply,
or even if you were issuing it one-to-one,
like imagine like a tether to dollar,
if you were to do that with Bitcoin,
if it wasn't actually in Bitcoin, but was in, you know, BTC tether,
It's not Bitcoin.
You know, like your liability to me would be the currency and the gravitational force of the economic incentive would just be like, well, it's all the same to you.
Like just denominate your liability in Bitcoin, you know, and if you won't, I'll go find someone that does.
And so for that reason, Bitcoin will just be the reserve currency.
There's no – the network's capable of doing all the functions of a currency issuer.
It's technically not needed.
All it's introducing would be introducing greater economic friction.
And that also aligns with the incentive of the individual on the other side.
And so people will try to do dumb things.
Don't get me wrong.
um but at the end of the day all of the incentives are like squarely real behind you know you central
bank hold bitcoin or you you government of country xyz hold bitcoin you individual in america just
hold bitcoin or hold it with a bank that denominates in bitcoin um and so i've got like one
bit of keynesian brain rot that i can't get rid of which is what credit looks like in a fully
Bitcoinized world. Because I understand the positives of it are that if we live in Bitcoin,
I'm denominating, any credit that I give is denominated in Bitcoin. That gets rid of so
much malinvestment. But does it also slow investment to the point where it's much harder
to build new things? No, not in my view. I think that deflation,
if you think about it as a concept,
because, and I'm not suggesting you're a Keynesian,
but a lot of Keynesian struggle with this,
is that if there is realized deflation,
that is evidence of the fact
that people are willing to sell their goods and service
for less and less money.
That they wouldn't do that
if they didn't have an incentive to do that, right?
And that there is nothing that precludes
a fixed supply currency that is neutral with the creation of credit.
All it eliminates, or the viability of credit for that matter,
all it eliminates is the ability to bail out banks
if banks lend money and can't return it to the depositors
or then the shareholders after the depositors.
and so the way that I think about it is
and to compare with the fiat system
because it is really difficult
in the fiat brain world
because the fiat world exists so far detached
from any semblance of reality
that like if the Fed system has
six to seven trillion of base money
in it right now
there are like 105 trillion
of dollar-denominated debt that exists.
Like excluding, we're not talking about
unfunded pension liabilities or derivatives,
just government debt, state, local, federal,
credit card debt, auto loans, student loans,
mortgages, vanilla debt,
things that are not preferred equity,
things that have a fixed maturity
and a fixed liability.
well how in the world
could the credit system
the amount of debt be 105
but all the money that exists is only 6 or 7
that functionally means that the same dollar
has been lent out
16, 17 times
that
But because that is the system that exists today, where the credit system is actually larger than the amount of money that exists, which only exists because the Fed introduced dollars and prevented the entire credit system from restructuring and shrinking for 50 years.
like it was turbocharged at the time of the financial crisis and the credit creation has
accelerated as a function of all the dollars that they put into the system in the great financial
crisis and then again in 2020 but but they were doing the same thing functionally in the 80s 90s
early 2000s before the financial crisis that the only way that that could get to that extreme of
there being 15 times to 17 times the amount of debt than the money in a world where you can create
money and bail bad debt out. So the way that I see the Bitcoin world working is there's 21 million
Bitcoin. All Bitcoin are always being saved by everybody. And some of those people are going to
be 70 years old, 80 years old, 90 years old. Some of them are going to be 20 years old coming into
the economy and they don't have any money and they're working. Well, in that world where everyone's
on a Bitcoin standard, the opportunity for Bitcoin to increase by a factor of 10 when everybody's
in this world, Bitcoin's the pricing mechanism. You're not just paying for things in Bitcoin.
The ribeye is priced in Bitcoin or sats. The gas at the gas station is priced in sats.
You're not thinking about a fiat price of Bitcoin. Well, in that world, Bitcoin's going to be,
you know in a year it might lose a percentage or two if there's some contraction in the economy
but more likely as it's going to be increasing in purchasing power as um as productivity
increases as people are willing to sell the same good for less money because they're able to
produce it more efficiently at less cost you know that's like saying like you know back when i was a
child or a young adult when a beer was a dollar, say, rather than $8 today or whatever it is.
It like a beer going from a dollar to 99 cents the next year Well in that world where money is appreciating and say that if there 21 million Bitcoin
the amount of Bitcoin that's lent out
is likely going to be a fraction of the 21 million.
So let's say that 10% of the Bitcoin are lent out,
but not like lent out to do some trading scheme.
It's like, hey, I'm going to lend you this money
and you go build a building,
start a business,
a business, whatever.
Well, if 10% of Bitcoin are lent out,
say 2.1 million,
and I know there are lost coins,
but let's just use the example.
Well, the 21 million minus 2.1,
the 18.9 million,
that's the market of growth
of who you're serving with that business.
And so, yeah, Bitcoin's,
you know, would be appreciating by productivity gains, but, and some businesses would fail and
not be able to, you know, repay loans similar to how it existed on a gold standard, right?
Not all loans were repaid, um, but economic activity flourished. So, um, now would there
be a world where like you had 21 million Bitcoin and the amount of debt in the system was 200
million Bitcoin? No, because the businesses that have those loans would fail and there couldn't
be any bailouts. But it's not hard to imagine if you're thinking in that Bitcoin-denominated world
and seeing the credit system as going back to its utility of productive capital formation,
like actual capital, building a plant, building a manufacturing facility,
building telecom infrastructure, or building satellites, whatever people are building,
that if the amount of debt that exists is a fraction of the total supply,
that your growth of that money base that's lent is all the other Bitcoin.
because you're doing it, you know, you're speculating in some business to drive growth.
And the rate of interest would likely be, you know, the way it used to work was that,
you know, if the economy was growing at 8%, say if productivity gains were 8%,
then like the most secure loan would be, you know, something underneath the rate of growth of the economic system.
and that it all would be in harmony in that world.
So I don't know if that helps from a context
to see how, you know.
No, it definitely helps.
This is an impossible question to answer
and I always ask it to you,
but when do you think we do go from the gradually
to the suddenly and end up in this world you're talking about?
Do you think it'll be in our lifetime?
Yeah, I hope it.
I mean, like, hope, you know,
we could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
hopefully that doesn't happen but we if we live to the average lifespan of you know people in our
countries it will be in our lifetime i don't know exactly you know there might be a lot of pain that
happens along the way as fiat hyper inflates i don't view it as we're just gonna seamlessly
transition from a world of excess and a bunch of zombie companies and a bunch of bad debts
to a Bitcoin standard
without economic volatility and dislocations.
But yeah, I mean,
I continue to believe that this is like a,
you know, if we had this conversation two years ago,
I would have said 10 years.
If I'm, you know, keeping myself honest,
I'll now say eight years
because I would have said 10 years,
but nothing's changed about that.
And, you know, I added up to the amount of money
that they're going to have to print the unsustainability of inflation as it exists today.
Artificially manipulating interest rates higher doesn't make it cheaper to get oil out of
the ground or to produce food.
And so what people have found in the Keynesian view of economics, the raising of interest
rates should have brought inflation down.
And it might be bringing the price of houses down, but it doesn't make the production of any good cheaper. And the lion's share of people in the economic systems in the developed world are struggling to get by as it is.
And so I don't know how with all the money that they're going to have to print to sustain the credit system, the fundamentals of Bitcoin being as strong as they've ever been in terms of like the amount of development that's happening at the wallet level, the multi-sig custody level, the payments level, the mining side.
that, you know, now on the mining side,
there is a big secular shift happening
where a bunch of large miners that are unprofitable
are pivoting to AI.
But there's continuing to be innovation
to drive the price of a hash down,
which will, you know, ultimately drive the price
of Bitcoin-denominated energy down.
All of that, the fundamentals,
it is, we might, I don't know if this was on,
you know, we might have been talking about this
off-screen before we came on,
But it's like the sentiment has never been worse for my 10 years around Bitcoin.
The fundamentals of Bitcoin have never been better.
And those two things are true at the same time.
And I think that there's also, in my view, there also never was an adoption wave since 2021.
And the next one will be particularly large because of that.
but that if Bitcoin increases,
if adoption increases by 10 times,
then Bitcoin is, you know,
10 trillion to the,
or 12 trillion to the broadest definition of dollars
is like 25 trillion-ish today.
If Bitcoin demand in the next eight years
increases by 20 times,
and I think about that in terms of like,
If the number of people that actually understand Bitcoin is 0.1%,
if that grows to 2% in the next year,
what's more likely, that we get to 2% in the next eight years or not?
And that they're going to have to print trillions upon trillions of dollars?
That Bitcoin becomes in that time period,
with two more halving events of the Bitcoin network continuing to enforce its fixed supply knowledge distributing at an accelerating pace the Bitcoin becomes as large or the clear second
in terms of size of the currency system.
And I don't mean by like a little spike up.
I mean like at an equilibrium where I can hold a price like it's holding this price of
you know 64k for a long period of time that um that wouldn't be when when it's clear that bitcoin
is either the largest currency system in the world or the second largest that's where i think you see
the um the wheels come off the fiat bus truly and and people instinctually move into bitcoin without
having to have a intellectual conversation but um move into bitcoin to use bitcoin because it's the
only form of money that's working, much like people pick up the telephone without thinking
about it.
I'm here for it, man.
I hope we do see it in our lifetime.
I'd be very disappointed if not.
I hope this isn't like the quantum thing where it's always 10 years away.
No, I mean, well, you know, quantum needs to achieve things that are theoretically possible
and Bitcoin only has to do the exact same thing.
I mean, realistically, more infrastructure needs to be built out.
but from a fundamental of the validation
of the base money
and the enforcement of the fixed supply
it doesn't have to do anything different.
Yeah.
To close out Parker
you should tell everyone who's listening
who wants to start taking Bitcoin as payments
how they can find out about ZapRite.
I use it every single month
and it's fucking awesome.
I was just going to ask for a testimonial.
No, it makes my life so easy.
I invoice everyone through ZapRite.
I still don't do the discount in Bitcoin,
but I need to do that.
But everyone has the option to pay in Bitcoin.
But what about for cheat code?
Well, that actually worked really well
because we had such a janky ticket setup
the years before, before we used ZapRite,
where people would have to pay with Bitcoin.
We'd have to verify the transaction
and go in and issue them a ticket.
Using ZapRite was super straightforward.
Awesome.
And when we use it next year for cheat code,
I mean, we did a discount for Bitcoin this time.
And I think we're going to do something a little bit more interesting this year if we do cheat code.
We've not quite announced it yet.
Okay.
Well, I hope it happens.
I hope I can make it this year.
Honestly, from my view in the States, it looks like a phenomenal event.
But yeah, for anybody, whether it's a podcast, for people hosting Bitcoin events, we have a full ticket suite.
I appreciate you plugging that.
We love supporting you on that.
But at ZapRite, we're bringing Bitcoin fiat into one platform.
It's Bitcoin native.
We meet everybody where they are.
We support non-custodial solutions on both on-chain as well as Lightning, but we also have custodial solutions.
And we're really just helping anybody.
We really focus on people who already understand Bitcoin.
and so I just encourage people that
if they are running a business
and they grok Bitcoin
they understand why Bitcoin stores value
that whether it's with ZapRite
or somebody else
it's like if people come through ZapRite
and they're better off with Square
given the nature of Square Suite
and their type of business
we send them straight to Square
but my message to people is that
if you understand Bitcoin
and you're a key person
in the operations of a business
or if you own a business
I would very much encourage you to evaluate your options in Bitcoin payments.
We'd love to support you at ZapRite.
If you go into zaprite.com, which is Z-A-P-R-I-T-E.com,
and submit a contact form, I'd be the person that helps figure out
if we're the right solution or help create a solution for you with us.
We'd love to support you.
We've got an API for custom-built websites.
Our ticket solution is great that Danny uses.
Invoices are a really popular tool.
So, yeah, just chopping wood. And, you know, in my view, it's get back to basics that stacks, you know, stay humble and stack sats. I think Bitcoin is better than, you know, buying stock in a treasury company. And, you know, not everybody has to accept Bitcoin as payment today. Not everyone has to pay for their Bitcoin. If people only have 1% of their savings in Bitcoin, you got too much fiat, you need to keep rabbit holing Bitcoin.
But that is also the light at the end of the tunnel.
It's the end game.
And so I encourage people that are further down their journey to put in the effort to make that investment and will pay off for people.
The best thing about ZapRite is we had a little quirk when we were trying to launch the tickets and I emailed you and the fix was done overnight.
So that's pretty good as well.
That's the power of, you know, working with a Bitcoin company and we treat everybody with that same.
It's like if there is an issue, we solve it, but it's also the beauty of AI.
It's like everyone talks about AI and about how AI sucked the air out of the Bitcoin balloon.
It's like, well, they solve two different problems.
Bitcoin's money and AI needs money too.
But it also accelerates the development of Bitcoin applications.
And our team on the engineering side, Nate, our CTO, and all of our engineers have really leaned into that side.
So we're able to really lock in and deliver high value features in a fast, efficient way.
So our customers like you, Danny, are the best sources of feedback of what they need.
Because if someone needs them like you, then 10 other customers do or 100 other customers do.
So we appreciate getting that feedback.
Yeah, it's awesome.
If you run a business, check out Zapri.
Thank you, Parker.
Appreciate your time.
we've got to do it again
I'm going to come to Austin soon
we're not the one in person
in a long time
yeah
you come to Austin
I'll get over to
wherever you are
whether it's at Cheat Code
or you know
further away
across the world
yeah Cheat Code
next year
I think we're going to do it
but there'll probably be
an announcement very soon
well
good luck to England tomorrow
I think we're going to do it man
did you see Spain
just beat France
I actually didn't
I watched the first half
so Spain beat France
I think
the only way
we were ever going to win
this World Cup
is if Spain beat France.
I don't think we could have beaten France,
but I think we got a shot.
Was it 1-0 or did they each end up getting-
2-0.
Oh, well, okay.
Yeah.
So just Argentina's get through,
but I think we're going to do it.
All right.
Fingers crossed.
This might age like milk,
but thank you, Parker.
Keep my fingers crossed for you.
See you, man.
All right, see you.
Thank you.