Let's go. Welcome back to Bitcoin Center.
Episode 26.
What's up, Cedric?
What's up, Paul?
Man, what are you doing over there?
I'm looking at what tweets I want to talk about this week.
I want to read this one.
This is from Shinaka, 86.
Shinaka, the way?
Breaking.
The silent kill switch inside your Bitcoin ETF.
They told you it was safe.
They told you it was secure.
they never told you about the clause that lets them unplug the protocol this is not a market
prediction this is a structural revelation the veto the se filings are clear blackrock fidelity
and other etf sponsors hold good faith discretion decide which bitcoin chain is the valid one
in the event of a fork your sovereign upgrade it can be orphaned stranded vetoed into irrelevance
by a compliance officer. The concentration? Right now, ETF custodians control 1.3 million Bitcoin.
That is 6.8% of the entire circulating supply. A single company, Coinbase, holds 81% of that.
Projections show this concentration reaching 15% to 20% by 2030. At that threshold, their veto power
becomes absolute. The precedent? History is not kind to the stranded. The Ethereum DAO fork in
2016 orphaned the original chain, ETC, leaving 16 to 20% of nodes behind. The Bitcoin cash forks in
2017 and 2018 did the same, isolating 17% of participants. These were voluntary splits. An
ETF veto is an involuntary excision. The future frozen. This is not about price. This is about
protocol ossification. Upgrades for privacy, scalability, or post-quantum security can be
blocked to satisfy regulatory compliance. The innovative heart of Bitcoin risks being frozen at
a 2017 level of technology. We are witnessing the great speciation, a compliant, sanitized,
black rock Bitcoin, and a sovereign, purist, original Bitcoin. Your fungible asset may soon
become two. The greatest paradox in financial history is unfolding. The decentralized asset is
being centrally captured through its own investment vehicles the ultimate trade is no longer long or
short it is self-custody versus controlled custodial capture the clock is ticking the
concentration is growing that is the red pill swallow it what to watch next custody concentration
breaching 10 percent well said yeah that's interesting i mean i like that uh she or he
or they or whatever they are did that so thoroughly i mean we all kind of said that right from the
beginning right that that was the risk of the etf yeah well do you think it's a big risk blackrock
does that to every security on wall street that they're uh on the board of right that then they
hold the most of the shares they they vote the proxies for all the shareholders they control
that they have not control but big sway over that company um why would they not want that over
bitcoin yeah well i mean someone like rockstar dev uh he was on my show and he was saying you
know you it's a giant honeypot you'd concentrate all this bitcoin one day it gets uh hacked taken
and it's all unleashed in a way when it gets rinsed and distributed again maybe and decentralized
um but i i think you know i i mean the only pushback i have against that
is that I do believe there's a general awakening of humanity to a decentralized lifestyle.
Moving away from you take care of me, daddy, to I'm going to take care of myself because nobody
else got my back. If anybody knows this better than anyone, it's the millennials, right? They
just got dumped a pile of shit. So if they're not going to wake up to the fact that they need
to be sovereign, they need to be decentralized, then this is the future that we have.
And we've given up.
But I think many people, starting with Gen X especially, and then going into millennials
and our kids, the Gen Zs that are coming up now, they want a decentralized future.
They don't trust centralized government control.
So I think even though she's accurate and it's well said and it's a relevant threat,
I'm hopeful that humanity is moving away from that mindset.
Yeah.
The hard forks and the soft forks,
that conversation will come up, I think, during the show.
I want to read another tweet from Rob Wallace.
Since Trump got elected last November
and Bitcoin ran from 60K to 100K,
Bitcoin has been shaking out the weak
and testing the patience of the strong.
For months, OGs holding thousands of Bitcoin have been selling.
Happy to have held until the 100K milestone
and convinced we were near the top of the four-year cycle over five and a half million bitcoin about
27.9 percent of the 19.9 million bitcoin in circulation wait how many how many over five
and a half million bitcoin about 27.5 percent that's of the 19.9 sold when have moved oh move
not at least once as prices at prices above 100k okay moved is different than sold but
but sure.
I think it's interpreted here.
Yeah, when I researched what was sold,
it's equivalent to what was being sold
in previous cycles, but go on.
These coins are moving out of the hands
of individual whales
and into the hands of convicted hodlers,
institutions, and the wealth they represent.
This rotation has helped Bitcoin
build one of the strongest bases in history,
sitting just a few percentage points
from all-time highs
while Twitter cries boredom.
The bears made one final stand on October 10th
that violent flash crash that wiped out more leverage in a single day than the first four
months of the year combined it was the bears last shot and they fired it yet here we stand at 115
000 right now bitcoin sits in a position that is statistically rare the largest positioning rinse
in crypto's history has collided with a macro goldilocks backdrop the trump z trade deal
framework is finally taking shape after six months of tension over the weekend in malaysia both sides
confirmed major progress the sense said the agreement would spare china from 100 tariffs
while china's rare earth export ban will be delayed for at least a year giving the west a
crucial window to rebuild supply chains at the same time the fed is preparing to end
quantitative tightening while signaling they will cut rates into a market already at all-time highs
trillions of dollars are still sitting in money money market funds waiting to move back into risk
all of it adds up to one thing the world's biggest markets are turning the corner
the cloud of uncertainty that has hung over bitcoin all year is finally lift finally lifting
and as asia opened last night we saw it unfold in real time gold is falling down over two and a
half percent overnight and eight percent since it peaked last tuesday bitcoin is up six percent
and october is officially in the green the rotation is on the torch is being passed when gold toppled
in 2020 bitcoin launched within two months rising more than 400 in the following half year we could
be setting up for a similar story now bitcoin is the next man up this could be the moment the world
realizes that the four-year cycle is a thing of the past the greatest opportunities in bitcoin do
not come when it is cheap they come when the last bear gives up and the last skeptic runs out of
excuses this is the setup that only comes around once every four years bitcoin's time to launch is
here i mean okay yeah i don't know if that was that convincing um especially with sort of the
the yeah i mean and and referring to 2020 that was a totally different setup i i don't you know i
a lot of well said stuff there but i don't necessarily agree yeah we'll see we'll see
do you think uh i mean do you think markets are or or m2 is is easing is getting more is there
more liquidity coming into the system uh what has been sort of it's still it's it seems to me like
It's still a battle, right?
I think there's obviously going to be more liquidity with lower interest rates.
I think if we lose the fear of massive tariffs on these crucial metals and minerals,
and I think that'll be a win also.
But at the same time, there's a macro backdrop.
If you look at just the overall business cycle that's getting more and more negative.
Yeah, the layoffs.
And AI's innovation reducing employment or reducing future hiring.
So there's a lot of cross-currents.
I still think there's more upside left in Bitcoin.
regard besides all of that um but i have a hard time seeing this thing go
to the 444k or a million or 800 or 750 but it could go to 70k in the next week too
yeah i think that's very possible and that could really blow everyone's minds and then
that could be that could be what we need to just flush out because it seems like there's still a
lot of speculation in the system well what i was going to say is that you might need some sort of
business cycle panic before you get massive liquidity injections by the United States.
All I know is that the path we're going is much higher Bitcoin and much higher gold,
but Bitcoin is going to be far greater performance than gold just out of the scarcity factor and the
adoption factor so if you focus on where we're going and not the path we take to get there
you're going to be fine and you're going to just take any downturn any major catastrophes as
opportunities to accumulate more all right that's that's the uh stay humble and stack sats yeah
let's fucking go all right this is bitcoin center number 26 brought to you by bite federal go bank
yourself point of sale crypto wallet and the bitcoin atms make sure you buy spot bitcoin at
that bitcoin atm and put in self-custody and stamp your seed phrase you could use micro seed
uh go to microstreet.io you could use the code matrix let's get into it let's do it
let's be real right praising telegram for launching a bitcoin wallet i've always felt
like lukehaley bitcoin this digital currency that's out there that people say oh it might be
the next big thing what do you think i think it's rat poison bitcoin she never heard him a few weeks
ago now everybody's talking about him but is it is it a currency i don't know or is it more like a
stock or is it a tulip bowl or is it just stupid to me it smells like ponzi scheme and the greater
fool theory right do like five minutes of freaking research well thanks for coming to my set talk
Yes.
Don't buy shit.
Oh, man, I was getting that wrong.
All right.
Bitcoin's recent rally.
Do you agree?
Is crypto finally dead?
Go to the next one.
Matter of fact, they're kind of in the Ethernet.
What are they?
Some rumors that it's a Japanese guy,
but they say no, that he's a fake name.
It was a pseudonym.
I mean, you're literally putting real money
onto a system that we don't even know who created it.
It will come to a bad ending.
Is this the most exciting bull run ever?
Not for me.
No, it's not.
welcome to bitcoin center the fast-paced show where the debate is the story
i had no idea this was the first topic are bitcoin's biggest hodlers trading self-sovereignty
for wall street convenience as over three billion of bitcoin moves into black rocks
ETF tax-free.
So when I looked at this,
you have to understand that these
in-kind conversions
where you've got
Bitcoiners coin in exchange
for ETF shares,
it can go the other way as well.
So
it's still up to the Bitcoin community
to preach
about self-custody
and the value of self-custody.
I don't think there's going to be
anything greater
than a wall street meltdown to convince people of self-custody just like we've experienced
all the crypto meltdowns yeah and we've yanked our coins into self-custody i think wall street's
gonna have to learn that lesson um and i think do you mean main street investing in wall street
no no no these are institutions that are able to do this individuals are just screwed if you're
in the ETF, you're just, you can't take self-custody of Bitcoin in the ETF. These are for institutional
buyers only. The reason why they want to do it, right, is that it's cheaper and easier to get
margin on your Bitcoin than it is to get a collateralized loan against Bitcoin, right?
You're going to get a collateralized loan at 8%, 10% maybe if you're an institution where you're
get margin at like what three four percent things silly like that right so um i think for them it
makes sense hopefully they believe in self-custody and when the stuff hits the fan hopefully they're
yanking their coins are going into self-custody as well so i mean it is that is the beauty of
bitcoin the fact that you can hold it sovereignly and that that is unlike any other asset we have
so uh that and other than gold in your backyard right so uh yeah that's my take on it it's uh
you know three thirty thousand coins they say roughly um and i bet holds i bet not the entire
etf initiative but holds about 3.8 percent of the coins of the 21 million damn well these ogs a lot
of them were some of the most radical thinkers around separate money from state yeah you know
Well, why do we...
We don't know they're OGs.
Sure, we don't know that.
We don't know that.
I think they're institutional holders
that have been accumulating Bitcoin.
And this is a way for them to get more leverage.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's move on to the next one here.
All right.
Trump pardons CZ.
A sitting U.S. president just pardoned the Binance co-founder.
Does Trump freeing Binance's CZ raise a red flag?
I mean, was CZ still in jail?
No, he was out of jail, but he sort of, I think, had a record.
And so he couldn't.
This kind of opens the gate for him to more officially resume business with finance here in the U.S.
Got it.
Well, when he went to jail, he had to appoint, you know, sort of a representative to take his rollover.
And so, I mean, in May, before he got the pardon, they accepted about, I think, $2 billion in Trump's stablecoin.
as payment uh you know as an equity investment so they were already sort of paving the way and
doing pre-negotiations the company was without cz officially being there and being a part of it
what i find interesting about this one i didn't realize that cz subjected himself to u.s authority
and went to prison here i didn't realize he was i thought he would never land on america american
soil to being taken it was like an agreement though for like a short period of time sentence
or something like sure uh it was short i think it was like more a little longer than two months i
think it was several months maybe four months or something like that they also paid a 4.3 billion
dollar penalty uh and uh that was i mean so just think about how profitable they are but on the
other side of this you know um the biden administration came at them for you know not
Not maintaining an effective anti-money laundering program,
which, you know, that's really vague in the sense that,
so they're running a program that's just not effective.
Define effective.
Who gets to judge that?
Who gets to judge?
The president or the CEO of HSBC never went to prison
for not running a fucking...
An effective anti-money laundering.
Yeah, or JP Morgan when made off.
They always throw some underling in jail.
Yeah, with made off and all these sort of crimes.
So it does seem maybe that it wasn't fair.
I don't know.
I'm not a CZ, like, I'm not a crypto fan,
but I think CZ's a really interesting character.
But he also, he pledged to make America the capital of crypto.
Which is, I think this is interesting,
because there was always rumors that, you know,
Binance is sort of a Chinese front Now he was born in I think Canada sort of like Vitalik But Vitalik being Russian Canada is an easy way to
Sort of place to embed someone?
No, from what I understand, it's an easy place to land if you're coming from China.
Sure.
Or was he planted there by China?
Who knows?
But it's interesting.
They're going to let Binance go crazy here in the States.
He couldn't build what he's building in China.
So he had to leave, right?
Yeah.
So Trump, though, before we move on, he pardoned the three co-founders of BitMEX.
And he pardoned Ross and the 1,500 people.
He used the pardon power in his second term early as opposed to most presidents usually.
Let's move on.
The next one here is JP Morgan embraces Bitcoin collateral.
Bossman, Mafia Don, Jamie Dimon once called Bitcoin a fraud.
So why is JP Morgan now willing to lend against it?
Is this a pragmatic turnabout?
Because the rates are higher than traditional collateral lending,
and I can make more money.
Sure.
Well, it also brings more assets under management.
Yeah.
They're rolling out the deal with what Coinbase, crypto, wallets.
Coinbase is going to cuss you.
They're going to lend against it.
Everybody's doing it.
He's got to make more money.
Yeah.
They have about 2% more than what they normally lend.
Do you believe that Jamie's sort of slowly coming around to this for the money?
Or this has been sort of deliberately slow rolled as more of a plan to just delay, delay, delay?
I mean, you know.
Did he always know he was going to come around?
I don't think so.
You know, Jamie Dimon, they became the custodian for the gold ETF.
Right.
Okay.
GLD, which is giant, right?
Yeah.
And they did that a few years back.
So they understood the debasement trade before they publicized the debasement trade.
And they wanted to custody the largest sovereign asset in the world.
I think they will eventually get there with Bitcoin.
But he's not going to walk back his comments and say I was wrong.
I don't see him being humble enough to say he's wrong about anything.
But at the same time, I don't think he's going to miss an opportunity to make money.
yeah and he's not going to let a division of his true opportunity yeah so yeah they can make more
money lending against bitcoin than they can lending against apple stock let's lend against
right they're going to buy coinbase probably at some point and turn to turn the strategy and be
like that's a nice business you got there be a shame something happened to your your coins there
yeah exactly all right let's move on to the next one uh bitcoin's intrinsic so much better has
actually i think a lot of people including recently recently was saying like bitcoin has
no intrinsic value. The general tale that people tell about the gold intrinsic values that you can
wear as jewelry. I mean, come on, seriously. The underlying scarcity of Bitcoin secured by code
is the intrinsic value. This is the only thing that's deflationary by nature. And so I think
it's a better version than gold. It's digital. You can move it around. It's way more fungible
than gold that you wear as jewelry. And so I think it'll be worth more than gold, for sure.
You can wear your Bitcoin. Don't worry.
All right. So I guess the question here is that David said each Bitcoin encodes one gigawatt hour of energy into unforgeable digital scarcity.
Could this energy as value framing flip the script on critics like Lagarde or is it just a remix of the old?
No, I don't think it flips the script on Lagarde. I don't think she really is going to draw much from that comment.
I don't think she cares what he says.
I think generally he's a really smart dude.
You know, he'll come up a little bit later when we get into Spark.
But, like, you know, I don't really get this comparison here.
I don't think that, you know, Bitcoin is like a real literal battery of storing energy.
The miners can just turn off the hash rate at any time.
And, like, it's not sort of a forward-looking commitment.
I just don't get the exact analogy.
I don't think Lagarde's going to care.
I don't think it has intrinsic value because of the electricity already spent.
Well, I slightly disagree with that.
I totally agree that Lagarde doesn't give a shit.
But I disagree.
I do think that the energy consumption used to secure the network adds intrinsic value.
Because you can't just create this stuff out of thin air.
It's forcing so much work.
I think it kind of represents a cost of production.
Yes, it's a cost of production.
but like you're you know you can spend a lot of money uh producing something that has no value
to it sure and so i don't think it gives it intrinsic value this cost of production is a part
of the security model right because of the cost yeah i think it's the network yeah so in that
regard i think it adds a lot of value i i think i see what you're saying it definitely uh you know
know represents the security level and the you know how secure your coins are or your sats yeah
yeah that's the way i look at it yeah we could explore that for hours so let's move on to the
next one here so people are rushing to other stores of value that don't rely on a central government
the shiny metal gold is one of them but there's another currency that people are opting for that
kind of looks a little bit like gold at least mentally bitcoin is essentially the new gold
It's becoming really the true digital gold.
I think a lot of young people are comfortable with digital assets and digital currencies
and would switch over to Bitcoin or something different.
Either one of those things would provide a check on the Federal Reserve because people
would have an alternative and the Fed would know that if they created too much inflation,
people would switch over.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may represent a future path for this psychological journey
of money that we've seen here, but it seems to be too early.
that was cool yeah i had no idea who this guy was my little bitcoin bubble but uh his bubble's
bigger than ours yeah way bigger bigger than bitcoins and it's i you know it's just more
proof that this discussion around fiat this discussion around debasement around inflation
is becoming mainstream people i mean gosh bitcoin has unlocked financial education
i don't think it's bitcoin that i'm i think this is inflation yeah and i think this is the norm
this is the the normalization of the debasement trade which is a nice way of putting like your
money's going to they've literally gotten whole society to buy into like we can make money
disagree on inflation no i totally disagree you can look at it as a trade bitcoin is the seed this
is the seed that was planted solution i yeah but it's what i'm saying is it's unlocked as
he's coming to this through gold gold explained finally i mean maybe that's an allusion to gold
gold bugs have been saying this shit for how many years what i thought was cool is that was
now all of a sudden bitcoin comes on the scene and bitcoin community just you know memes it into
existence and like gets it in cnbc gets like joe kernan talking about safedean's book get like we
embedded that conversation
at the level where
it's reaching a YouTube influencer.
Like, that's telling
this story. I mean,
I've heard it on
so many podcasts now.
I think in a very modern YouTube
sort of temporal way that people will
grok and relate to on YouTube
in the format that YouTube is short video.
Kind of comes across very clear,
level-headed. Even if it's
as simple as we just needed
the new technology spin
in order to get the younger generation on the hard money program.
Maybe that's all this is.
If it's even that simple, it's good that this message is out there.
Yeah, I don't think people are going to come through it for the hard money.
I think it's going to be the debasement trade.
I don't think people are going to realize that it's about hard money.
They're just going to...
It's sort of going to be like the dot-com trade.
It starts somewhere.
It has to start somewhere.
But in the dot-com trade, maybe 10% of 15 people understood the internet.
The rest of the people were just chasing alpha.
They didn't understand sort of.
So I think a lot of people are going to come to Bitcoin and gold right now just to survive.
It's totally different.
It's totally different because the dot-com trade was a technology innovation for companies.
The Bitcoin is a technology revolution that fixes money that we all use.
Yeah.
Right?
Like this is immediate, an immediate shift in.
They're going to be told the same thing about ETH too.
I haven't seen that.
I haven't seen.
If I'm going to give Wall Street any credit about this,
they're not describing ETH as gold 2.0.
Yeah, but they're pushing out the stable coins.
I think Main Street still likes ETH.
They're thinking of ETH as a blockchain technology company.
You know, we talk about Bitcoin.
Wall Street 2.0.
We talk about Bitcoin maybe being NSA creation, right?
yeah do you think i mean how is eth not maybe a state creation that is is they knew they were
going to support the whole time eth is wall street in a similar way wall street 2.0 that's
what jimmy is behind it i mean defy is wall street 2.0 that's what's so weird about jamie playing
dumb is like they invested and seeded and started it's like how did that get uh green lit like that
yeah it's crazy all right let's move on they sold they sold all their tech if you enjoy the show
please hit like and subscribe tune into bitcoin center every tuesday at 8 pm eastern
to paul myself uh brought to you by bite federal go bank yourself let's move on to the lightning round
all right the feds waller embraced the disruption fed governor is not only praising crypto
innovations but floating a skinny fed account for stablecoin firms is the u.s central bank
turning crypto friendly at last or is this just rhetoric as waller eyes the fed chair role oh i
don't think this is just rhetoric i think this is serious i think this is happening um this is
bringing liquidity to the the newest companies actually turns stable coins into an even better
cbdc yeah 100 puts it on their rails gives them a lot more control yeah and then it's exchangeable
with all the other CVBCs in the world.
Yeah.
And this Federal Reserve Governor, Christopher Walker,
I mean, he kicked off this conference.
Waller, right?
Waller, my bad.
He's Walker from now on.
Christopher Walker.
Cowbell.
We need more cowbell.
So, yeah, Christopher Walken is now on the Federal Reserve Board.
And, you know, he said,
my view from the Fed from now on is embrace the disruption.
Don't avoid it.
The Fed intends to be an active part of that revolution.
I think the revolution is not happening with the Fed as far as they're concerned, but this is them co-opting the revolution.
And he's, you know, one of Trump's potential top candidates to replace Powell.
So it could be just talk to kind of, you know, whatever.
But he said, I believe we can and should do more to support those actively transforming the payment system.
To that end, I have asked Federal Reserve staff to explore the idea of what I'm calling a payment account.
this whole conference was to just really get together people from the fed and these payment
companies in the crypto space this goes hand in hand with luke groman's comment a month or so ago
when he said uh when somebody asked him about like a getting stable coin adoption and he said
and he said we'll just wait to the next major crisis when a foreign government needs a swap
line for us dollars and we say you're not getting it unless you take it as stable coins
Right, no, 100%.
You got to spend it this way or that way.
Yeah, and the last thing I'll say is...
Don't be kidding yourself.
Stable coins are CBDCs.
And my man Christopher Walken said,
I wanted to send a message that this is a new error
for the Federal Reserve in payments.
The DeFi industry is not viewed with suspicion or scorn.
He called the new Fed conference an acknowledgement
that distributed ledgers and crypto assets
are no longer on the fringes,
but are increasingly woven into the fabric
of the payment and financial system.
And this has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
in my opinion and uh i i hope bitcoin is very little or nothing to do with d5 for a long time
uh we could talk about that maybe but yeah let's move on to the next one but this is going fast
all right so uh gbdc discount vanishes i have no idea they're still around
no gray scales gbdc trust once at a 50 discount is now trading essentially a parody
and zero is a zero percent discount so our trade oh i guess that's a one m nap are traders that
confident spot etf approval is imminent or is there arbitrage risk if the sc i mean it was it
was gbtc traded like a closed-end mutual fund right so um you know traders are going to arbitrage
the uh uh the premiums or the uh what do you call it the uh discount away and that's what we've seen
with GBTC. I guess there is rumors or there's potential the SEC is going to give them the
ability to convert GBTC into an ETF. I don't see why it's taken so long, but I guess Gensler
wanted to punish them since they decided to sue the SEC. And so now maybe when the SEC wakes up
from their government shutdown,
maybe they will give GBTC ETF
and then this won't be an issue anymore.
But I still don't think the premiums or discounts
are going to get that big
because traders will just get rid of it.
Right.
So it's kind of a nothing burger,
but good to see that the 50% discount is gone.
Yeah, I wonder how Barry Schilbert's doing.
All right.
I think certainly, yeah,
it's fair to say that right now
gold is winning the debasement trade.
But I think there's the NFK
and there are lots of market market people out there have talked about how bitcoin trails gold
and whatever and yeah then it's probably true um but i think it's important that that when we say
the debasin trade it's really there's there's an important geopolitical angle to it right like the
chinese and around the mid-2000 teens decided they were going to start stockpiling gold um china has
a gp to all you know public private debt ratio of like 390 something like that huge um they've
they've injected $1 trillion worth of yuan into their economy this year.
They are debasing yuan against gold with the objective of creating a sort of gold-based,
not gold-backed, but gold-based financial system.
And when you have central banks buying gold,
the express purpose of retooling the global financial system and creating new rails,
this is what's going to happen.
And I think Bitcoin's going to catch up.
There's lots of money in.
Bitcoin is trade 24-7. Gold is not trade 24-7.
There's lots of reasons why Bitcoin is a lot more volatile,
and there's been a lot of talk in D.C. lately about, you know,
does Bitcoin's volatility prevent it from achieving its, you know,
achieving the objective of becoming global collateral?
Maybe again, I'll leave that in the exact receiving address.
I have my own opinions about that.
But I think it's important to remember what's actually going on here.
I mean, yes, gold right now is winning the debasement trade,
but, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
There's a very disciplined effort in aging to make this happen.
for reasons that make perfect sense
if you're a Chinese policymaker.
But again, I don't really fret too much
the price action of Bitcoin over the past week
for all kinds of reasons.
And again, I also don't think the price of gold is infinite
because again, gold, like a lot of other assets,
is manipulated.
It can be repressed.
It can be inflated.
Right now it's being inflated,
but there's a limit to even an economy
besides China and all their stimulus,
how much they can inflate the price.
so is he suggesting that china is helping suppress the bitcoin market while pumping the gold market
to compete on different monetary outcomes i'm not sure what he was suggesting in terms of that
i mean what do you think china is doing here do you think china is just trying to acquire gold
it's been very clear right china needs to build a middle class to uh offset uh a future uh multipolar
world where the us becomes less of a customer right so they started saying in 2014 uh we're
going to buy less treasuries we're going to let them roll off our balance sheet we're going to
tell our citizens to start buying gold they were very public about getting their citizens to invest
in gold and then they uh been instead of buying treasuries buying gold for their balance sheet so
they're they are driving the value of gold up to uh to create wealth with inside their own country
at the same time right there see there now an opportunity when we sanctioned russia there now this opportunity to go to the rest of the belt and road uh players and say hey the u could
take your treasuries at any time why don't we start settling trade in gold we'll trade our
currencies any surpluses can be settled in gold we'll set up a gold exchange in hong kong we'll
set up a gold exchange in saudi arabia we'll set up a gold exchange in your country we'll have the
vaults in your country so you don't have to worry about us confiscating your gold like the u.s did
right so they're they're using this very smartly against us to set up a multipolar world that can
settle in gold gold this is what we say yeah not not gold backed yeah i get it settled gold based
yeah okay gold i call it but are they just missing the whole bitcoin bitcoin thing no no no no bitcoin
Bitcoin is $2 trillion.
Gold's over $20 trillion.
$30 trillion.
$30 trillion, yeah.
So there's...
More liquidity is not big enough.
It's not big enough to settle global trade yet.
Are they just going to ignore it?
I doubt it.
So the mining going on in Bitcoin,
the mining going on in China,
do you think that is rogue miners?
And or is that the state acquiring some Bitcoin?
I have no proof of any of it.
I mean, I would suspect that the state is involved.
And what happens if gold, if the United States government dumps a bunch of gold tomorrow?
What if the United States government sold all the gold tomorrow, crashing the price?
That's not going to happen.
I mean, what is the threat to then China long term?
Maybe the way...
The threat to China?
Well, in terms of like some societies didn't adopt gold fast enough.
Okay.
And it set them back, let's say.
Maybe they went with silver.
Okay.
Right?
And that set them back maybe 100 or 200 years.
Sure.
could that happen with bitcoin i think that's the play right i think the china not aware of that
no i think they are aware of it but they have this other right now other risk right that they
have they have a closed capital structure and capital flight is very dangerous for them and
bitcoin just is like the best capital flight instrument ever created right so they're going
going to sit there and say uh they're going to promote gold ownership they're going to promote
gold investment because and they've done everything to outlaw bitcoin mining bitcoin trading bitcoin
custody over the years because they want this closed capital structure that's a then that's
why we as bitcoiners keep saying the best thing we can do is embrace this new freedom tech this
sovereign money and give it to the world and have most of it here in the united states so i think
we're going to let them drive the value gold up we're going to mark to market our gold fill up the
tga and then we're going to slam bitcoin and then we're going to regain our dominance on a bitcoin
standard we'll have a multi-polar world some of the world working on gold some of the world working
on digital gold and that's how trade is going to be settled in the future but there's no reason for
us to like blow that that out of the bag right now let's let them monetize the gold with their
liquidity and then we'll mark to market when it's ten thousand dollars an ounce and then and in the
meantime we're confiscating bitcoin and doing all this and then we'll just we'll elevate the price
of bitcoin and who holds most bitcoin in the world the united states right the united states has what
like four percent of the gold i wonder how much china has at this point like is it two percent
I have no idea.
But I would hope that that's the game plan.
What is that?
Like $2 to $3 trillion on the balance?
You know, sort of what the markup would be.
I think we were trying to figure that out.
We were trying to figure that out.
And the quote we heard was around $1 trillion at today's prices.
I think, yeah, today's price is about $1 trillion.
So now you're talking about $250X or something like that.
$2.5 trillion, yeah.
Something like that.
All right, let's move on to the next one here.
Hodler profit-taking hits record levels.
Long-term hodlers unloaded 337,000 Bitcoin in the past 30 days.
Wow.
The biggest monthly sell-off by diamond hands in recent memory.
Is this merely prudent profit-taking after new highs
or a harbinger that even believers see trouble ahead?
I don't think it's about trouble ahead.
So here's the deal.
I did a little bit of research on this.
In 2017...
Thank God, someone did.
In 2017, during that cycle,
there was 3.93 million long-term bitcoin sold and they're defining long-term by six months to
one year old in 2013 three million long-term bitcoin was sold that's that long-term hodlers
six months to one year so take that with a grain of salt but 3.93 million supposedly sold in 2017
3 million supposedly sold in 2021 peak and currently we're sitting at 3.27 million
so very very comparable numbers all coinciding with the four-year cycle yep and and people sort
of leveling up in their lives i would say like just looking at this most recent recent flush
of uh uh this down flush in the market and how little bitcoin responded to that
i don't think that was a big drop like you mean in four year past four-year cycle tops
the first big move down was they were always like close to 50 i mean they were violent down drafts
50 down at 50 or more recoveries right so so for bitcoin to be down 10 15 percent on that big of a
flush was not like a big deal right and it's not coming on on like massive bullish speculation it's
coming in the midst of a one-year consolidation a lot of speculation in the system i think
there's a lot of speculative rhetoric there's not a lot of speculation there's not a lot of uh
um i think every time we go through the price chart right there's not sure there's not you
don't hear people saying like oh my god bitcoin's going up forever right but i have a feeling a lot
of people are going levered long when they feel like the tide is you know when the top will be in
the top in this market's going to be in when we hear everybody saying oh the four-year cycle's
dead. It's going to a million. It's going to go wherever it's going. We're just going straight to
the next bull market. There's no more four-year cycle. As soon as everybody believes there's no
more four-year cycle, then this bull run will be dead. But right now, we've got this drag of
everybody still thinks the four-year cycle is real. We're going to sell just in case.
Long-term hodlers are selling, taking profit. If you've made billions of dollars,
I'd probably sell some too, right? Yeah, I hear you. All right, let's move on here.
all right uh the real world test 8.9 yield on lightning so a recent uh public lightning network
node experiment earned 8.9 annualized yield over 60 days is this evidence that bitcoin's layer two
can generate substantial yield and maybe not for me yield curve no this still seems very
experimental to me in terms of like you know this is done over 60 days they're still trying to like
widen the network um 8.9 i just i don't i'm not sold that that's going to be around the rate
they'll generate i think they have to come in around 9 10 11 or this is just not going to be
that appetizing to you know sort of people who want to you know hold liquidity or capital somewhere
so i i'm just i'm not uh sold yet i love that they're doing this and that their public company
and it seems like they're trying to do it the right way and they have like a real bitcoin business
uh i just don't know if it's scalable yet that i you know i i don't know the details about this
they did this with about 500 bitcoin that's how they scaled it they scaled it up to about 497
bitcoin i believe which is on their balance sheet that's what i was gonna say in order to do this
kind of stuff you have to be a giant node yeah so they're trying to be one of these giant nodes
there they got up to 500 bitcoin there it's from their own balance sheet which to me so then they
They generate a little yield on their holdings.
It's all there, the flywheel.
But to me, that sort of breaks the purpose of Lightning.
Right?
We wanted massive decentralization.
Yeah, I don't think that's the way Lightning's going.
We wanted everybody running the nodes.
Lightning's going the way of sort of custodial and...
Giant nodes, right?
Yeah.
And those giant nodes are going to be controlled by large institutions.
Sort of, you know, whatever back office for Visa, right?
Right.
I think we're going to need a level three, a level four.
Layer four, layer five.
No, I think you're right.
Like maybe Visa adopts Lightning and runs giant nodes
and makes transactions for us free.
And I think it's even going to be a layer on top of Lightning.
Near free because they're earning this 4% or 5% yield.
Yeah, we'll see.
I think it's going to be even a layer on top of Lightning
that Visa would adopt.
It's still evolving.
Yeah, I think, yeah.
Let's move on to the next one here.
Bitcoin, 30% undervalued versus tech stocks.
One analysis claims Bitcoin is trading at 30% discount relative to its fair value versus the NASDAQ.
Does this imply Bitcoin's rally still has headroom if viewed as a tech asset?
Or is comparing apples to oranges completely misleading?
I just thought this whole question was kind of silly because it's like half the time you hear people say the problem with Bitcoin is it's correlated to tech assets.
Then the other half of the time they're saying if Bitcoin uncorrelates with tech assets, then it would really prove itself as a store of value.
and an asset that deserves to be in a portfolio.
So the only reason people are bitching
or saying it's undervalued
is because all of a sudden
it's not correlating with tech stocks, right?
And it's not correlating with the S&P.
But there should be a whole nother half of the population
that think that's an amazing thing.
And now this asset deserves to be in every portfolio.
So I think it misses the whole point.
The very fact that Bitcoin can uncorrelate with tech stocks,
i think adds value to the adoption of this asset over the long run right so um to me it's not it's
not a disappointing thing it's not uh you know i well i do think it's undervalued if tech stocks
fall apart and it correlates on the downside then you know we'll be i mean this is uh you know an
analyst is just trying to figure out where the correlations and trends and patterns are and what
conclusions they could draw from a limited sample size and that's been a very con that's been a very
prominent thing trying to figure out how to look at this thing how to value it how to evaluate at
a moment in time how to place a bet but for my perspective right you are seeing a lot of selling
with not a lot of downside yet we just don't know well you know no matter what anyone's plans are
the government's included we don't know what kind of black swan events could just come out of nowhere
at any time, short-term or long-term.
But there's nothing I've seen that would...
I mean, if Bitcoin dropped...
That's when they usually come out, though.
If Bitcoin dropped to $70,000, $50,000, $40,000 a coin,
I'd be like, what can I sell?
Right.
You would feel richer in purchasing power in a lot of ways
if you have any sort of fiat that you make in the real world.
It's worth more now.
You could get two Bitcoin for the price of one.
That'd be amazing.
I agree.
All right, let's move on.
And what I just did through that,
And by the way, what I would ask you to do is keep coming back to that statement.
The natural state of the free market is deflation.
Don't just say it.
Internalize it.
Internalize it so it's true for you because it is true.
In that world, prices fall to the marginal cost of production.
And it keeps happening.
And that happens forever.
So what does that set up in our brains?
It sets up a cognitive dissonance.
And the first part is a mental discomfort in our brains
by holding two true statements that we can't align.
They're opposites.
And the second thing, and what most Bitcoiners will tell you in this,
is as they spend more time in Bitcoin,
the other thing that happens,
and I'm going to share with you how it happened to me too,
is the discomfort you feel
when your actions don't align to your values.
That's the second thing that happens.
And so worse than this, we've never lived in a system, a natural state, a free market,
we've never lived in that.
Worse than our own brains trying to understand that complication is this.
It's happening at a faster and faster rate because exponential productivity gains,
artificial intelligence, is exponential productivity gains.
Exponential productivity gains means everything should be cheaper at a faster and faster rate, forever.
And that should be the natural course as we compete to provide more value.
And we should all be living in that abundant system.
And it should be getting easier and easier for 8 billion people on the planet every day.
Because that's how we compete.
and it's wild that we use the technology that produces artificial intelligence and we ourselves
will use it and then wonder why prices are falling and their system looks so bad because we live in a
system because it's a credit-based system that can't allow that to happen that must extract all
of those gains and centralize them and make them stronger and stronger and stronger with
very few people controlling all of the technology, all of the broad-based abundance that should
flow to you.
It's wild.
It's wild that smart people can say, AI and robotics is going to replace all jobs.
By the way, AI and robotics is the worst it'll ever be right now.
It's moving so fast.
And smart people can say AI and robotics place all jobs.
But we should keep printing money so people, when they lose their jobs, prices should rise and they won't know what to do.
It's ludicrous.
that the the the idea of productivity is to save our save our time if we would allow
so jeff's been preaching this for years now um is this just is this message not sinking in is it
flying under the radar for most people or are they yeah i think it's totally why why why are
people not rocking this i think because they're uncomfortable uh to what he was saying i mean like
it's really like painful to have these two ideas in your head and live in a paradox i i think it's
it's just draining um i don't think i don't think people have a hard time realizing that there's
what's good for humanity and then there's what's good for government well i think a lot of people
think government is humanity yeah you know and i have a it's the creator of money it's the creator
of money it's your problem god sort of like property right so uh a god-like ability to
create money yes and um which steals humanity's which gives wealth and productivity anybody who
has the the money printer becomes the they have the moral imperative to solve all problems now
because they have the ring that's all the people like hey you don't believe that you don't believe
that you just say no but i did believe that for a long time it's like you're in a government world
you're right and they control everything you don't think about it that way but you're like
yeah i guess anything outside of my purview i got we gotta go to them to figure this out it's like
entering the matrix and going like whoa right so it's it is the bitcoin matrix and this is um i
I think once people grok this, they do have a hard time understanding.
But I don't what I don't get is why they don't all of a sudden realize that the government and the Federal Reserve is the problem.
Because if you removed them from the situation, well, if you removed, if you removed, if you removed money from the state.
We just had an interesting conversation with Dan White.
And, you know, I think the history of money is still not fully understood.
For sure.
And to say that the Federal Reserve is the problem doesn't acknowledge that the Federal Reserve was solving some problems of sort of private money and all the banking issues prior to 1913.
Okay, so.
And I wasn't around then, but it wasn't like things were just all copacetic and they weren't booms and busts.
They were.
All this like different money
Flowing around
But the booms and bust
Didn't impoverish the entire world
No I get it
I think it's been a bad bad thing
But I think it came about
Participating with those bad banks Right But I think a lot of people Might correctly assume It would be worse without this thing No this is Especially pre But this is the nature of humanity that creates so many long problems
This idea of, I am hurt, somebody needs to help me.
That has created so many chronic problems in civilization forever.
As opposed to, I screwed up, I needed to bail myself out.
Yeah, well, there's no personal responsibility taught.
in America and the culture and any of it.
Exactly. So
this is what the Federal Reserve
played on or prayed on.
Sure. This like somebody help
me attitude that so
many people in our world want to embrace.
Yeah. And this
creates longer term.
Yeah, but they don't have a
people go to them like mommy and daddy.
That's a bad thing. They don't have a money printer.
We gave them the authority.
They literally separated family and said, hey, look,
we'll give Social Security so the family
doesn't have to care you know we're we're the family now we're we're the source of love
creation and all things godlike so come to us with your problems that we come to us with your
injustice there's lots of control structures that have been set up a society to fill that role
and that is a big problem because people do not take their own sovereignty in their their own
hands people don't want to be sovereign feed yourself make your own money store your own money
Be your own bank.
Dude, Jeff is a godsend.
Yes.
What is that?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he moved to Florida.
He had to, you know, vote with his feet a little bit.
Yeah, buddy.
Welcome to Florida, Jeff.
Welcome to Florida.
Yeah, I hope I didn't talk to you.
All right, let's move on.
All right.
Spark and ARK.
Redefine Bitcoin's Layer 2 landscape.
As Spark and ARK emerge with radically different trust and privacy tradeoffs
to extend lightning's reach are we witnessing the birth of a new pragmatic era in bitcoin scalability
or the quiet normalization of semi-custodial networks under the banner of layer two
no i think this is incremental uh pragmatic experimentation trying to find small benefits
and risks and trade-offs just trying to figure out the trade-offs that lightning hasn't solved
I don't think Lightning is the end-all be-all for the end user or the retail user or the common person to interact with the on-chain final settlement.
So I think these things are going to be built on top of Lightning.
But the way these things are, I don't think that they're anywhere near end state themselves or guaranteed.
I think they're moving in a good direction because from working in the space and working with Lightning, watching what happened to Samurai, I started to understand Lightning as a risk from a regulatory perspective because you're custodying people's coins.
You're running a node on their behalf.
And when you have custody, you're taking on a responsibility that requires licensing and regulation.
It's a whole other ballgame.
So to the extent that they can build layer twos that work like Lightning but are peer-to-peer without people having to rely on somebody running their node, I'm all for it.
And I think it's great innovation because at the end of the day, that merchant, that retailer wants to just get the Bitcoin.
They just want to get paid.
They want to get paid cheaper, faster, with no settlement risk.
and lightning can deliver that but it can't deliver that in a fashion that the regulators
will allow yeah we got to run through this i'll just you know set for privacy just put out a piece
in bitcoin magazine uh taking a look at these two systems uh we definitely need you know more layer
twos or new layer twos or maybe this is three and four you know uh arc kind of came out of um
uh concept of arc was created in may of 2023 and uh but you know there's still trust trade-offs
there's lack of you know sort of finality or sort of like figuring out there's vtxos that expire
um it's complex sort of user experience still uh there's privacy trade-offs transaction visibility
issues uh but you know there's progress here and then you know looking at spark uh spark uh was
launched by the folks at light spark you know who um you know they have an interesting history
they came out of the failed libra sort of currency or they're affiliated with that they have
connections to that they've uh done something like uva which is a username system with natively
integrated compliance features for their banking partners so it doesn't sound so great but this
seems to kind of be uh more aligned with bitcoin ethos and they're kind of taking some of the like
state chains and they're trying to move that forward and build on that uh but again this sort
of like has you know maybe some trust trade-offs lack of true finality uh potentially centralized
token control uh and some privacy trade-offs uh but you know we'll see where this goes it's exciting
yeah no i i think there's going to be some good things that emerge from this all right let's let's
Let's move on to the next one here.
Shinobi warns, save our wallets before it's too late.
As U.S. prosecutors target developers of open source, non-custodial wallets,
Bitcoiners are rallying behind the Satoshi Niju campaign
to secure explicit legal protections.
Does this mark the beginning of a new civil rights battle
for digital self-sovereignty or the last stand
before code itself becomes criminalized?
Well, hopefully we don't have to get,
this doesn't become uh an end-all be-all uh they're trying to get this uh into the what do
they call it the uh what's that new crypto law they're working the crypto clarity act the anti
clarity act to go through um which you know because if they're going after self-custody
like they did with with samurai and and these lightning nodes and what they did with tornado
cash, if they go in after these developers to squash privacy and self-custody, that really
is like the first nail in the coffin.
That, to me, is more dangerous than what's happening with IBIT.
So I'm hopeful.
I have sent my letters to our senators here in Florida, both Republican and Democrat,
to let them know what I think.
I think this is very important for everybody in our space to support.
They make it super easy.
Go to the website, download the letter, email it.
They give you the phone numbers, call your senators,
let them know that you care about this stuff.
And self-custody is super important.
If we lose that, we have lost Bitcoin.
That's the bottom line.
This is the first digital bearer asset ever in humanity,
and they will take it away if we don't fight for it.
And so you have to fight for your ability to hold it yourself.
Yeah, I agree.
Word.
All right, man, let's go to the last one here.
I mean, let's say that Peter and I are bad actors.
Sure.
Let's say that we are.
What are you going to do about it?
That's why we are here.
How are you going to stop us?
uh i thought this also had to do with um bonance founder cz agreeing to debate uh peter schiff with
bitcoin versus gold i think all these guys i don't know that didn't sound i don't know i don't like
them really kind of what do you think of that quote from jameson um i don't really i i don't
understand the clip i don't understand what the hell they were talking about there so they're
saying like uh that that clip is related to knots versus core and they're saying like hey
we're bad actors not like literally like jameson saying me okay like himself but like uh hypothetically
bad actors like if they're gonna do this and you can't stop them 100 like that that's it like what
are you gonna do what are you gonna do about it like we could just do it but it seemed like i mean
it he's it seemed like that clip makes it seem like he's intimating like he's trying to think
through how to be a bad actor you know and and that that yeah so i and that we're guessing i'm
guessing what he was trying to say is there are always bad actors we've had many bad actors in
the bitcoin space in the past and even if he he's not saying he what he is but even if he was or
somebody else was you can't stop it it's the protocol itself that's this trust model that
as long as we maintain the protocol and we maintain the consensus that bad actors can come
and go they can do a little bit of damage but they're going to get flushed out right they always
have so i'm hopeful that's what he was getting at um if this is related to the core and knots debate
um i'm still like i mean first of all thank you tone vase and jimmy song for your lecture series
or interview series yeah i mean jimmy had i think uh tone vase had jimmy and bob burnett on today
i watched that today uh and the other two episodes i think that they've done and more coming i mean
uh we need guys like that to come in to this this discussion because i think they're educating a lot
of people if you haven't watched it go watch it these guys were around for uh in the bitcoin
community for the first
user-activated
software, the block wars.
They're taking this on again
to try and make sure people really understand what's going
on. I think it's super important.
I'm not
sold
on either. The more I learn
about the discussion, the more
I see both sides
and the more I think that
maybe the whole
discussion about
the CSAM debate
is like an emotional wrapper
on a core technical issue
that most of us probably aren't capable
of really comprehending.
So at the end of the day,
if there's a way for this whole community
to come together and solve this
or come to a settlement on an agreement
or simply we have multiple clients running,
then that is better than us trying to experiment
with a fight that leads to a hard fork.
That is going to be a horrible experience
for anybody who's new to this system.
And I don't think anybody benefits from it.
So I don't know that his comment
was directly associated with calling himself a bad actor
because he supports core.
And what are you going to do about it?
I don't think he was calling.
I don't know if he's trying to call people out like that or not,
but maybe he was.
I mean, Bitcoin's a decentralized protocol that's uncensorable.
You can do what the hell you want.
Yeah, but I think we know what monetary transactions are.
Yeah, we do.
And I think that we shouldn't have faith that bad actors are going to not act badly when we try to steer them in the place we want them to misbehave.
I'm just, I'm not sure.
And I just don't know why we had to go from Op Return at 83 kilobytes to 10,000.
We didn't have to do that.
And some people have argued that this has been something Core has been thinking about for a decade.
It's not a rush.
But the community flipped out, and they were just like, we don't hear you.
If there's a good technical argument, Core is not doing a good job of explaining it.
Yeah, I agree with that.
But also, the CSAM, that really triggered me initially.
But now I'm starting to understand that that's probably not as big of a threat as I once thought it was to node operators.
Miners are certainly not incentivized.
big publicly traded miners are certainly non-incentivized to mine that stuff.
So they're leery about it as well.
So, you know, there's a lot, this is a lot more nuanced and complicated than I think
the surface level argument that's happening on X reflects.
Yeah.
Just to maybe clarify on the clip.
So Michael Dunworth, Rokasa, come get your boy.
but then kyle torpe was like this was in response to luke calling him and peter bad actors or
something like that by the way he didn't just say it out of nowhere it makes more sense in that
context then michael's like thanks for clarifying that makes help that makes heaps more sense
everything is starting to feel clickbaity paparazzi on the timeline do you get the same sort of stuff
yeah it's getting a little wild out there but i think this speaks to that we need a new governance
model i don't think we have one in place that's going to work for an asset this size
and i think that i don't think i think we're moving past the ability of humans
to augment tinker adjust i think like bob said it really good today on on uh with tone and jimmy
when he said you know when he started it i think at gateway it was kind of like they they were
they were developers they're doing whatever hell they wanted and they were doing stuff they thought
was great and then as they got bigger and they became publicly traded and they became this giant
company and they had users that were like well don't take that away no don't don't change this
and then you begin to it becomes very much more complicated and there's a lot more social and
corporate implications to making technical changes and so uh you know well jim it sounds like on
bitcoin audible chat jimmy song and guy swan would talk about it and jimmy sounds like he's really for
ossification that a lot of these developers want to you know have new tools new things to play with
more d5 more of this bullshit and like we kind of know that this is really good money it's a
fantastic store of value it's people's life force and i think we're moving past the ability of one
human yeah to i mean look at justice gold gold has been ossified for how long forever right and
gold is the best money we've had for and and ossification could mean for like for a few years
until people come up with something that is really thought out well yeah i need it let's
let's make what we have better let's bring privacy and security to what we already have awesome it's
not it's not ossification to demise it's ossification unless there's a critical issue
that needs to be solved and then what is the governance model look like to make those decisions
and i think i think bob is kind of thinking about that and others need and if if anything good comes
out of this debate yeah it's that we will figure out a better way to coordinate what needs to be
changed and why yeah as opposed to just changing something that doesn't need to be fixed last one
We got on top right here, Schiffer, Zao, two guys who know very little about Bitcoin or are not real supporters.
CZ, I think, actually knows what he's talking about.
They should invite Brian Armstrong to this.
They could be a bunch of three clowns kind of selling shit coins and arguing against Bitcoin.
You know, I want to read one more thing that's really interesting.
So Zelle, the bank-owned money transfer app used by more than 100 million U.S. customers for instant domestic payments,
says it plans to enable international transfers using stable coins.
the service will be available to any bank in the zell network so then the site bringer i don't know
this is a or not but this is a monumental development but it's being quietly presented
almost too quietly which is exactly why it matters here's the unfiltered truth this marks the covert
merger of the u.s banking system and crypto rails zell is not just another fintech app it's the
clearing interface for over 1800 u.s banks collectively managing trillions in retail flow
When that network integrates stablecoins for international transfers, what's really happening is the digitization of the U.S. dollar settlement layer, the plumbing beneath the financial system.
Stablecoins are no longer the crypto toy of the retail class.
They're becoming the rails for the next swift but bank-controlled KYC and fully reflexive to U.S. policy.
Number two, this is the soft launch of CBDC without the C.
No official central bank digital currency.
No problem.
What we're seeing is a proxy CBDC system emerging from the private sector under regulatory blessing.
The US avoided launching a CBDC directly because that would have triggered political backlash,
privacy outrage and state level resistance.
Instead, they're federalizing stable coins through commercial banking conduits like Zelle,
using existing consumer trust infrastructure.
The result, full programmability and traceability of transactions.
dollar hegemony extended into digital form plausible deniability it's not a CBDC it's
innovation this is the reverse Trojan horse of monetary control a private sector rollout masking
as convenience number three reflexive implications for Bitcoin here's the paradox the Excel this
accelerates Bitcoin adoption not hinders it because it because as fiat transitions into
digital form the belief structure of money itself becomes transparent when your Zelle balance is a
programmable token, the difference between stablecoin and crypto collapses. The mental
firewall separating traditional finance from the digital asset realm disintegrates. Reflexively,
that triggers a belief migration. The realization that money is now code, and if all money is code,
the purest form of code money wins. That's Bitcoin. Every user sends a cross-border Zelle
transfer using a regulated stablecoin is now functionally interacting with a blockchain.
chain. And every interaction is a micro dose of awareness, a subconscious onboarding into
the post fiat paradigm for global liquidity implication, stable coin rails, compressed
friction and bypass traditional correspondent banking bottlenecks. That means velocity of
dollar liquidity increases more flow less drag Ironically this inflates global USD liquidity even as the Fed maintains its tightening stance on paper It stealth monetary expansion through technological
rails, what you should call shadow QE via blockchain infrastructure. And every liquidity
expansion, however disguised, reflexively fuels hard collateral assets. That's the bridge. Zelle
stablecoins to U.S. dollar digitization to hidden liquidity expansion to Bitcoin ignition.
The real meta play. Don't miss this. This rollout isn't just about payments. It's geopolitical
containment. The U.S. is watching China's digital yuan encroach on emerging market corridors.
And rather than fight it head on, it's co-opting the terrain. By turning Zelle into a regulated
global stablecoin network, the U.S. quietly reasserts dollar dominance in digital form.
It's the same strategy the British Empire used with telegraphy and naval routes.
Control the rails and you control the narratives of value transmission.
Zelle's expansion marks the monetary mirror moment where old world banking and digital finance finally fuse.
It's the birth of the hybrid layer, the point where sovereignty, liquidity and code converge into one reflexive field.
The Zelle news is the quiet trigger point the invisible ignition the day the banks began to run on chain and pretend they didn that was awesome i and i think it goes beyond zelle it paypal yep it venmo it visa it mastercard it american
express right they're all going to do it and i think totally accurate and just expand it um
And then I got bad news for everybody who's holding a bag of Ripple.
It ain't Ripple.
It's all of those guys running stablecoins.
So and then at the end of the day, right, what does that mean?
It's exactly it's I mean, Russia pointed this out as the threat, right?
Russia called us out on this stablecoin game because they know it is the threat by which we're going to offshore inflation and liquidity into all of their citizens all over the world.
So this is the game.
Bitcoin is going to be the pristine collateral in that new infrastructure, in that new dollar liquidity rail system.
So it's no longer going to be treasuries.
Treasuries are going to die a slow death.
It's going to be Bitcoin and stablecoins.
Prepare accordingly.
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Francis, I don't know if we have any questions or Q&A or comments, but this is Bitcoin by
Federal.
Go bank yourself.
Seth for Privacy is a Monero advocate.
Good for him.
Yes.
He's trying to figure things out.
No, I mean, Monero was awesome.
Monero was a great privacy coin.
It's just too small of a network now,
and it can be broken.
He's breaking down the pros and cons
of layer twos on Bitcoin.
Love the privacy,
and hopefully we can get more privacy into Bitcoin
in the future.
Yeah, hopefully Bitcoin can learn from Monero on that front.
I don't think Monero's going to work out,
but I'd love to chat with Seth for privacy
about specifically these kinds of things.
What he likes about Monero, maybe even.
We could learn from that.
I don't know.
I don't think we should be so closed-minded
but thanks for commenting.
That's it.
All right.
Thanks, Seth.
Let's roll out.
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