You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
You probably should be.
In a war in Iran, Yemen has stepped in.
They're embargoing Saudi Arabia.
We got AI taking over.
Models leaking into other models, destroying them.
Open AI and hugging face.
Regulatory capture coming to America.
But the most important thing out there right now is the fact that the power law
The power trend is broken.
Power curve.
The power curve.
Power curve is broken, sir.
Are we going to be able to do this moving forward?
What are we going to talk about?
You know, I'm always up for a challenge, my friend.
And when I hear the chirps and see the tweets of, you know,
those very astute mathematical trend followers on Twitter saying the good old power law doesn't
work anymore. I'm happy to rise to the occasion to show you as I've been showing you on this
show for how many years now? I think we're at eight. Yeah, for the monetary base. I don't think
we've done power law updates all those times, but I have actually first charted that back in 2018
as well. So I'm happy to put some minds at ease that know the good old power curve of Bitcoin's
network adoption is still growing fantastically well. And you should take comfort in that fact,
not try to get all upset and worried about it. And that's what I'm here today to help you with.
Just ease, ease minds and let Bitcoin let Bitcoin help you.
That's it.
Well, if I recall correctly, the last time we met here, we were probably around the same price level and it was generational buying times.
who looked at Bitcoin pricing silver, pricing gold,
and they were around the, I think, the lowest band.
It could be 90th percentile below the mean or the trend, excuse me.
It's even lower.
It's even lower now.
Yeah.
You want to take a look at it?
Yeah.
I think we did February.
so we are five months from our last recording generational buying opportunity five five months
ago obviously we've gone down we've gone up we putzed around and so what are we looking at now
so i'm gonna take off this for a second this is the old
bitcoin power law or the power curve if you like what i like to call it because the word
law seems to trigger people which we can uh we can also talk about but
you know i do these these updates a lot i do streams like this if people want to uh
see more i check check this stuff a lot but every day we get a new data point here
and uh i don't know you and i'm already probably started to do it
i feel like it was somewhere around 2020 maybe 2022 can't remember honestly uh when i started
to get these charts running full time but um in any event if you go log linear like most charts
like a stock or if you're looking at bond yields you're going to see straight lines
but bitcoin log linear we have that nice kind of rainbow parabola and it should immediately
should immediately make you think that something else is going on with bitcoin and if you go log
log you can see that straight line actually starts to emerge but i this chart i like and i've been
showing more because I'm actually, I'm showing how the bands of regression deviations have evolved
over time and that they're not always perfect. Of course, you want to draw those straight lines
in the past. You're basically actually extrapolating from present back to the past and into the future.
So you see that I'm doing it into the future here, but back to the past.
uh it's actually not you know we see those nice beautiful straight bands which i can show you as
well i have plenty of charts like that that's not how it looked at the time this is how the power
law looked at the time every day okay and uh what you should a couple things to take away from this
chart basically is you see early years 2011 even after 2013 you see there more spaces between the bands Bands aren as close together and they can be a bit lumpy I actually taking the Q100 off because it a wild one
It even all the way until 2016.
But this is good.
It's a good point, actually, because it shows you how wild it can be.
It was still projecting that it was at least theoretically, statistically possible that Bitcoin could get to.
66 million.
And that's based on the data at the time.
But as you see, there's a huge drop here
as we get through the so-called
crypto winter, which I guess is the name
that they were calling it at the time.
But basically the 2014, 15, 16,
and as we got into more shit coins
and ICOs, 2017.
But in mid-2016,
it sort of resets itself entirely.
And then we get more of a straight
straight lines if i zoom in to say from 2016 until today you see it looks pretty good right
looks pretty good the lines are closer together less jaggedy but one thing that also you should
see is that uh the pandemic start and also sbf's gift to all of us the 2022 uh crash on top of all
of the, what do we call them?
DeFi, Terra, Luna.
It's really like Bitcoin collateral mismanagement.
That's what I would.
Yeah, but I think there was a certain DeFi narrative
that was grounded in nothing as well,
which Terra showed.
I guess FTX had no Bitcoin anyway,
although they did have Anthropik shares, right?
Which was interesting.
But in any event,
we punched a new low there to take the lower bound down.
And when we talked, I don't think we had punched a new low,
or at least maybe we were starting to.
I'm looking.
No, we wouldn't have.
So it was only actually from about June, May, June,
where we had a big dip that if you start to see,
how that expands the realm of probabilities basically we go even lower so it's okay it's
happened plenty of times before you can see it that q100 looks wild but if you look at the bottom
end you know the q0 q10 q20 it's happened plenty of times where we expand the realm of probabilities
and i just want to remind people this is completely different than you know a trading view chart where
where you draw a channel with an exponential chart,
simply where things look like a straight line
in Expo space, log linear.
This is not, you know, Elliott Wave, ABC corrections,
all that.
These are just everyday expanding the set of probabilities
of where Bitcoin can be relative to
what's called a power regression or power law.
And we can talk more about, again, what it means
because it's all, I know we get all types of listeners
to your show and other shows I do.
So I'm happy to repeat some concepts.
But in any event, you can clearly see that we are at the low, low range.
For about the last couple of weeks, we've actually done a nice little Art Simpson, which we typically do.
We have a big rise.
I think it's totally possible, by the way, we could fall again.
I'm making no predictions of where we can be.
But statistically, long term, not financial advice, but statistically, we are in a very, very bullish phase.
of Bitcoin's growth relative to the power curve. I mean, you can't really get much cheaper.
Could we go down and paint another low in this zero-th percentile, as I call it, which is really,
it's 0.0001 percentile. It's like the worst data point you could paint. It will catch that,
basically. And so I still call it just the Q0. So it's basically as cheap as the
realm of probabilities would paint. That's roughly where we are. We're basically just off it a little
bit. And yeah, so I'd say it's a danger zone. You don't want to maybe go too crazy with buying here,
but slowly, steadily, it could be. In fact, it certainly is. If you look past this prologue here,
coming in at these levels for anybody is a very good decision.
I can hear them now. I can hear them now, Matthew. It all sounds well and good. You're
bullying us up, buying opportunity, cheap sats, looking at the regression, looking at the
probabilities. But it seems to me that you're just changing the chart to make it fit your narrative.
the next plan B
all these lines are moving
the curve and they're going down
the power law is just you can make it what you want at any point in time You can manipulate it to make sure it within the bounds of this trend that you been describing for years
It's pseudoscience.
Excellent.
Excellent steel man of, you know, all of these mathematicians on Twitter's points, Marty.
I just did a show yesterday with the great Giovanni.
Some might find him a little cantankerous on Twitter, but he's actually a nice guy.
When you get to know him, I've met him a few times in person now.
And he has this institute, which he has founded in Torino, Italy, actually.
It's called the Bitcoin Science Institute.
dude. And he's continuing to study this stuff, basically how the price could represent
adoption of Bitcoin, looking at hash rate, looking at addresses, looking at those things over time,
looking at those things as a relationship to each other, a price versus addresses over time.
How would that look? And it's very interesting with Bitcoin, because no matter how you slice it,
the power laws keep re-emerging. And basically, you know, again, crash course there. What does
it mean? Power law, the way you can see it, it's a straight line on log log. You can clearly see
that that is roughly happening here with Bitcoin. Yeah, there are some booms to the upside. Yeah,
there are some crashes to the downside, but that's to be expected in the market.
uh also if you look at some stats here and i'll just highlight one for you see this is a 96.1
percent r squared and if we looked at any other type of regression right so exponential regressions
would be if this was a straight line on log linear which it's not obviously a curved parabola
looking type you know decaying um chart here it would not fit an exponential trend certainly
wouldn't fit a stock flow trend i wouldn't fit a linear or logarithmic trend either and i can show
you actually uh i got a good one here for you we can we can go right through them so here's here's
the same chart good old power law all right which by the way again we're significantly discounted
just from the trend itself sometimes that helps to say it trends about 142 000 at the moment
right so if you go back here i'm actually showing exactly the model i think it's 0.4
uh 42 roughly is the zero bound we're a little bit higher than that
uh we're surprised yeah 446 we're at 0.46 so under 50 percent of the trend itself which again
uh it's been there before so if it's been there before there's no there's no reason it might not
be there again okay now let's just let's just let's shoe let's shoehorn in some good old models
here like you said like stock to flow others this is the wrong one i want to show this one
all right so let's try exponential exponential trend is going to be a straight line on log
linear i just asked you marty look at these two trends right there exponential is the dotted one
powers the solid which one do you think more accurately describes what bitcoin is doing
i mean just the eye test looking at the chart i would say the solid black line you know
it looks good it looks really really good um we go a log log here you can see what an exponential
starts to look like. Oops. Chart looking weird. But log linear, when it's a straight line,
you can see it is, Bitcoin's price hasn't hit it since mid 2022. All right. So it's not even close.
And again, another eye test, very simple thing. If Bitcoin was an exponential asset,
like all other assets in the world, as far as I can tell, gold, stocks, bonds,
then if it was on the all-time exponential trend that you can clearly draw with statistical
analysis, simple math, basically, if you have a computer or AI these days,
it should be, price should be around $600,000 at the moment. It's not. So I would say I would put
to a lot of people, that's a good thing. That's a good thing that the power law is more conservative.
It shows you the scalability of how it grows. And another thing just to say is,
and you can see it here, if I go down to the statistics, let's go
here. You see power trend says 39.4% TTM. And then if you see exponential, you see two metrics,
108% CAGR and 108% TTM.
And notice how power does not have the same.
It says 136 CAGR 39 TTM or about 40 TTM The reason is exponential is just that It constant growth always right The world of 72 We talk about this a lot So just shut me off if I speaking
too much, but if it helps, it helps some of the newbies in the crowd. A 10% return is not going
to double every 10 years. It's going to double every 7.2 years. And that's constant. Every 7.2
years, if you go at a 10% CAGR, you're going to double in another 7.2 years. That's exponential
growth. Stocks through that, bonds, gold, silver. Bitcoin is not doing that right now,
which is very interesting. It's actually slowing down slightly, but there is a constant
proportionality, which is, and the numbers you have to sort of do the math, but it's
basically for every 13% increase in the life of Bitcoin, the price doubles.
That's what the power trend tells us. And that's a very stable metric at the moment.
So basically, if you figure out the math, Bitcoin's about over 6,000 days old. 13% of that,
you're getting close to 800 days, i.e. roughly over two years, the price doubles.
Two years is also known as about 40% CAGR at the moment, which is an enormous return
still. But the catch is it actually is declining a little bit. So that's how it works.
uh we can do the old plan b trends let's look at his uh 2020 trend that was it's the one that's
most laughable all right so plan b's trend would be uh it's showing 6.58 million bitcoin at the
moment i think we can uh we can discount that one i think we can get back to it i think we
we just say it's a nice nice little stair stepper there notice by the way how it's very
close to the exponential trend. And I'll explain that in a second, but let's just run through them
all. Let's go to plan B's 2019 trends, a little bit better, a little bit better, but still,
you got to look at the numbers to see how rough it is. $800,000 Bitcoin is projected at the moment.
You know, we got a way to go. I'm not saying we can't get up there. I'm not saying at all,
we can't get up there soon. Notice, by the way, that we did catch it in right when the ETFs were
approved in early 2024, but we haven't hit his 2019 projection since then. That is since 2024.
We could also look at, say, another thing that helps if we want to see if a model works is how
did it look at the time versus how does it look now? All right. So a good one I like to show is
2016 because that's about when Bitcoin's power trend really started to manifest itself. Giovanni
and I started to notice it about 2018, as have many others since then. Let's take off plan B.
Let's take off, let's leave exponential. Let's look at plan B's, yeah, not plan B's because he
was actually using even more crazy numbers, which I'll explain in a second. But let's just look at a
pure stock-to-flow power trend in 2016. These would be the numbers. I'll put back 2019, actually.
You see, it's very close to 2019.
It's actually slightly better than it is 2019.
$615,000 Bitcoin, okay?
And then notice that that means
that we have stopped producing data.
We just left it at 2016 and projected forward, all right?
So again, $600,000 versus $60,000 price
were an order of magnitude,
10 orders of magnitude actually off.
if we go to
this one
this would allow the model to keep calculating out
kind of an all time
still a little bit better now
260,000
still off
and well over the 140,000 power trend
okay
but the key would be more
look at the gap
between what 2016 projected, right?
With all the data in 2016,
up until the end of 2016 versus today, $400,000 off.
Now let's look at the power curve, okay?
And I'll take off exponential,
but the power curve is projected 143,000 at the moment.
Yes, we're well under it.
That's fine.
We've had plenty of periods
where we've been under it and above it.
All right, I've showed you before how it can evolve.
Let's look at the power trend
when it was calculated back in 2016 and then take no more new data and let's see how good it has
been so that's 10 years now the line i'm about to draw for you has not seen any data since 10 years
are you ready for it i'm ready look at that i didn't even notice it look at that
So when the divas yell at you and say the power trend is broken or whatever,
the calculation of looking at this power regression,
say today with all time 7,000 or six, six and a half thousand,
whatever it is,
days of data points versus 10 years less of data points,
the Delta onward,
that all right is something around 15 16 17k it's incredible it's really incredible as as far as like
statistics are concerned this is the same number it's literally the same number um
you're not like stock to flow will give you orders of magnitude wrong exponential trends
will give you orders of magnitude wrong. The power curve is consistently painting the same
numbers. It means it's stable. And it has the highest R squared, which is about 96%.
So again, anytime I see people tried to say like, it's not a valid model or whatever,
it's not even anything. First, I guess I should just say this. I don't take it personally. If,
people don't like the power law. I mean, maybe some people in the space kind of really want to
educate on this hardcore or something, but it might be possible in the future, which we can
talk about, that Bitcoin could move to an exponential model. You and I have talked about
this a lot. I'm not sure where your latest, say, remembrances are of this. It's possible that if
the financial system starts to co-op Bitcoin, monopolize Bitcoin, we get more and more fiat
units of interest piled on top of limited Bitcoin, it's possible it could go exponential.
But at the moment, it's not. And I would say that's actually a very, very good thing,
because that's how networks usually grow. It's growing stable and scalable. So not only is it
a scalable way to grow things in power, like the internet grows this way, networks, cities grow this
way in power, which we can talk about too, if you want. But it's also stable. It's basically not
changed. No matter if you look at now, with all of the data that we have in Bitcoin versus 10 years
ago. So it's actually an incredible way. It's an incredible way to look at how Bitcoin grows.
It's way more accurate than any other model, if you want to call it a model.
And most of all, I just think people should take comfort in it because, trust me, if Bitcoin breaks
the power law breaks the model,
which it's not even close to doing at the moment.
It's not going to break it to the downside.
It's going to break it to the upside.
It's going to go exponential.
I mean, if it goes exponential,
that means it's even going to grow faster,
not slower, faster.
So there's just many layers there,
many levels.
I'll stop there.
But there's many,
when people sort of say that it's broken
or like you said,
it's things are changing.
It's actually not changing.
It's quite stable.
And it's also a scalable model.
So people should actually take comfort in that.
Thank you for answering. I've been hearing the naysayers and they've been having me
doubting questioning. Should I even bring Matty back on to talk about that? I'm kidding.
And he also supports you, Craig. My God.
I think it's important to remind, I feel like despite the fact that we've gone over these core
concepts quarter in and quarter out for many years now, it is important to really drill in
the fundamentals because even i i i stray every once in a while i forget i get caught up in
super cycle narratives i think yeah what i love most about our quarterly catch-ups is
the grounding nature of the data that you bring to the table and on that note i mean you mentioned
it and i think people do like analogies and they do like to get heady when it comes to describing
bitcoin to other people trying trying to to paint the picture i mean cities following a power trend
growth too. How does that happen? How has that happened historically? How could you measure that?
Yeah. So it's actually very elegant. It fits in very well to, I think a lot of the reading that
you and I have done over the years, and I'm sure many people talk about free markets, talk about
exponential debt, talk about fiscal deficits exploding that can't be restored. Those are
actually noticed, by the way, in a big way. Of course, you can do fiscal, you have fiscal debt
problems on a local level and plenty of states in America have gone bankrupt and municipalities as
well. But on a national level, especially when you print money, whether you're in the United
States or Britain or Germany or some banana republic, when it blows up in a big way, it's on
a nation state level. And that's an exponential trend. So it maps very elegantly into reality.
is just look at this chart again. Let's not even introduce debt and more numbers and all that
stuff. But if you just look at these two trends here, our nation's debt grows on that straight
dotted line. The money supply, the base money supply, the broad money supply, they have a
little bit different rates, but they grow on that straight dotted line. The stock market actually
grows on that straight dotted line as well. So it does keep up. That's why it's important to stay
invested in something. Bitcoin is not. So that causes confusion. And we can talk about sort of
the grand thesis as well Like how does this what happens when these things are going to match Because Bitcoin is growing much faster at 40 per year than say the stock market which is ongoing you know 12 to 14 per year with dividends maybe 14 15 reinvested
I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it maps on quite elegantly just to say,
and this is something I've been studying for a long time is exponential trends are volatile.
They are just by nature, mathematically by nature, they're volatile. They can explode.
They can cause financial ruin and you have to have a currency completely reset.
That's the nature of exponential debt. Compound interest, it's an exponential function. It's
all exponential at the end of the day on broad levels and that is volatile. You can have great
growth. You can have some winners, a lot of losers. You can have all that other stuff
politically, but it's a volatile function. So power curves, what are interesting about them,
they tend to actually be visible in things that are less volatile. So like I said,
nation's GDPs, debt, stock markets, all those things, they grow exponentially.
But something like, and actually even nationwide populations grow exponentially as well.
which is kind of interesting. But on a city level, on a more local level,
you actually notice that they grow in power. And so what would that mean? It would basically mean
that instead of having the population of a city just flip into the sun, like sci-fi skyscrapers
and all the rest, it doesn't actually look like that. And in fact, every year, even though there
might be a growing growth rate, like a positive growth rate, I should say, of people coming into
New York or Philadelphia or wherever, the rate of growth now in, say, New York is way less,
way less than it was 100 years ago or 200 years. So that's the way to think about a power law is
basically it's a scalable growth. And what that does mean in practice is over time, it's a declining
growth rate. And when I say declining, don't think that means anemic or bad. It just means
It's scalable. It grows at a slower and slower rate, but it still grows. I can stop there.
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I think it's important because people will look at this chart
for those watching and looking at this chart.
And hearing that explanation,
I think Matty was just using this
as an example to point at.
As he mentioned,
at the current point in Bitcoin's history,
its power trend is growing faster
than the exponential trend of the stock market
or M2 money right now.
So comparatively, based on the historical trend,
And what we can gleam is that Bitcoin's outperformance compared to those assets should continue until they intersect, which is a very interesting point that Maddie and I have been discussing for a couple of years now.
And we can talk about it again.
Yeah, I feel like it has to be a recurring theme.
Like, have you thought?
But at some point in the future,
Bitcoin's power trend is going to intersect
with the exponential growth of M2 and in the stock market,
and all these other assets that are growing exponentially.
And that posits the interesting thought experiment of what happens then what co what does Bitcoin co the exponential trends and force all these other assets to grow at a more stable and scalable rate
or do those exponential trends pull Bitcoin onto the exponential curve and send it on that
trajectory moving forward. And this is really a conversation of how do you think society should
grow? What is sustainable, I think, is the best question. Is this exponential boom bust economy
driven by money supply expansion, equities expansion, is it the right way to do things?
I mean, if we're looking now, I'm sitting here halfway across the world from where Maddie is
right now. We're having a conversation. We've got very strong internet. There's no latency
in the talk. It seems like this exponential growth trend has gotten us pretty far from a societal
and technological perspective. But what is the case for convincing people that maybe
power trend growth is more advantageous? Right. And if it will, if there even is the possibility
to convince, or if we would be again, which I do fear, honestly, is you might be co-opted into a
system where by the way bitcoin number go up could even be stronger exponential growth is stronger
by definition it's it's more constant it's more forceful but then you can add a lot of volatility
there um i had a similar discussion with danny recently and he mentioned an interview he did
with thomas pacquiao who said basically kind of what i was trying to explain mathematically is like
might be where we're all rich or something but the project has failed i actually remember that
interview that thomas did with him but um that would be something that i would i say
again it might be okay in that world but what i think that means is if bitcoin say goes exponential
which by the way is a different topic than a lot of people on twitter saying if the power
law is broken or something again if if if the bitcoin power law breaks it's gonna break to the
upside, not to the downside. But if it goes exponential, then that just means that Bitcoin
is going to start to mirror an already volatile financial system. And rather than show charts,
I'll just try to talk through this a little bit more. I can show the charts. But even though the
stock market grows at that constant exponential rate, it's actually what Jeffrey West calls
super exponential. So if you look back far enough, and this should be intuitive to people as well,
is when we had less technology, less growth, I can show you charts of the stock market in the
1800s is only growing like 2%. Then after the Fed was formed, it's 5%. Then when I was growing up,
even in the 90s, whatever, starting university, we'd talk about 9% being a good stock market
return. That's about what the S&P 500 was doing. Now it's doing 12% plus 2% with dividends. You're
almost to 15%. But to find those trends, you got to kind of separate out the noise. And I can show
you that chart in a second. But the bottom line is, there's a directionality right there. So you
have, firstly, it's exponential, which is constant. But actually, if you look at it in the big picture,
it's super exponential, as Jeffrey West uses. It's not a mathematical term, but it's what we're
noticing in certain markets. And you see this with the money supply as well, by the way.
well, I should be cautious on that. You see that in some money supplies, not all,
but certainly with the stock market, the big one is the stock market. You see that the returns get
more and more. People need more and more to catch up with inflation, monetary price inflation.
And that gets the rat race going a lot more. No matter what the Fed says or whatever,
the central bank says, I try to measure the actual markets and the returns and try to make
my decisions there and things are getting crazier, not less crazy as probably most people can sense.
Map that on Bitcoin's growth rate. Well, let's even stop there before we say map that on Bitcoin's
growth rate. Let's say that Bitcoin would just go exponential and start to map onto
the stock market's growth rate. So even though it's faster now, let's just say
it starts to go even faster in the future.
I think what that shows is really not,
I mean, you would for Bitcoiners, for sure,
they could do well in either scenario.
Bitcoin turns the world into a power curve
or Bitcoin gets pulled into a TradFi exponential curve.
This is basically my grand thesis.
If we say that Bitcoin goes exponential,
I think you're going to see more volatility.
And yeah, Bitcoiners might be fine in certain ways, but society might not be.
And we're on this path.
We're on this collision course right now.
And it basically the verdict is I think out or the jury still out on how that verdict will be decided And I tend to lean towards the fact that I would not want to see a Bitcoin world where it matches the stock market I would like to see a world as I sure you would many others would
It's like the cypherpunk world, the distributed networked world, a lot more freedom.
No one can tell us if we can't withdraw our coins from exchanges.
The only way we can hold Bitcoin is not only through ETFs.
I think if you start to see the opposite of those things that I just mentioned, Bitcoin could start to look like the stock market.
It could start to just sort of mirror it or it looks like, I don't know, the GLD or something like that.
We might go through long periods of just nothing and then some big booms and corrections.
That would be an exponential world.
And I think it's more volatile, not less.
I think you have more and more debt, just like in the real estate world, you get more and more debt.
that's behind the same asset that's really not that much more productive. Again, Bitcoin doesn't
produce revenue anyway for holders. It does for miners, but not for holders. And you get more and
more fiat interests piling up, like trillions and trillions of fiat currency interest units piling
up on the same amount of Bitcoin. It's like a hot potato, right? It's like musical chairs.
you get more and more volatility. So I actually think the whole thing, again, just to sort of be
clear, and maybe I haven't fully described the Bitcoin turns the world power yet. We can talk
about that. But I think it's quite elegant. I think the idea that exponential curves are volatile,
the markets, money supply, debt, fiscal deficits, all that stuff is exponential and volatile.
It's pretty interesting how Bitcoin, which is this totally unique and different financial asset
than we've ever had for all the reasons you talk about on your show is not growing that way.
It's clearly not growing that way. Like the R square doesn't show it. The eye test doesn't
show it. The numbers don't show it. So I hope that it continues to grow that way. I will say,
am I going to be like disappointed if it goes exponential? Maybe a little bit. I mean, but
Bitcoin is going to do well either way, I think. But I do actually think there's something here
and we're going to see it in the next, you know, you and I will be here for it for sure.
in the next 10 to 15 years is where I think there's going to be some sort of a crossing
where basically this 40% Bitcoin that 40% rate of return that Bitcoin does now
is probably going to cross with this super exponential treadmill stair-step growth that
the stock market is doing, where maybe in 10, 15 years, the stock market is also doing that.
And then people are just going to have to ask themselves a question like,
okay, do I just want to keep chasing all these fiat interest units?
Or would I want to just go back to the castle, so to speak, have some Bitcoin to do my transactions completely different than the way the financial world has always done them before?
That's going to be a big question, I think, for the TradFi system.
And I certainly don't see the TradFi system giving up their power easily.
Neither do I.
And I wouldn't be shocked if that intersection point is pulled forward.
I mean, if you just look at the stock market gains the last year, the AI boom, you could see things getting rather crazy.
I think Google just put out their earnings report yesterday.
I think they did like 24% growth.
Yep.
Last year is a $70 billion company, which is insane at those levels.
Yep.
I don't have it handy, but if you look at the top, those top tech stocks in the US, they are absolutely at, let's say, 25% CAGR.
Even before AI, after AI, even higher.
but 22% to 25% CAGR, that's what they're doing.
So if you think, okay, they're already leaving the stock market behind.
AI is a part of the story.
This crazy fiat growth is part of the story.
It's going to be pulled in, I think, even faster.
Yeah, and then you think it looks like AI is being deemed an existential industry,
at least here in the United States and other parts of the world for that matter.
And it's going to be backstopped by the full force of the federal government.
and the Fed, essentially,
even though the Fed probably won't explicitly admit
that the Treasury is there to backstop them.
We've seen this with the quasi-nationalization
of some of these publicly traded companies,
the government getting stakes in them.
And as we all know, the Fed exists to monetize the debt
that the Treasury prints.
And so it's hard to believe that the Fed would have backstopped this
if pressure was put on from the federal government
which it seems like the intent of this administration has been when it comes to the Fed is to tie more closely to the Treasury.
But bringing this back to the power trend and the effect it has on Bitcoin, it stays on the power trend and the effect it will have on markets.
Not only we've expressed it this way in the past, it may be interesting to wander down this thought experiment.
But this concept has been popular in Bitcoin for quite a while, but maybe when they intersect,
the market just comes to a sort of come to Jesus moment or just a question.
It's like, okay, what do we want the risk-free rate of return to look like?
And how do we want to calculate opportunity costs moving forward?
Do we want to do it on this exponential curve that is very much affected by Fed policy and
M2, monetary expansion, M0 monetary expansion, M1 monetary expansion?
Or would we like to coalesce around this sort of neutral distributed protocol with rules
that are very cut and dry and begin to weigh opportunity cost of return versus the returns
of this asset here?
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
It does.
Makes perfect sense.
I have charts actually to show all of it, but I'll still try to go back to the charts.
The power curve won't, by definition, a power curve, a power regression, a power law is
different than an exponential curve.
More, you know, exponential curves in the markets are exponential because of compounding
interest.
That is what makes them exponential.
So more and more, as I've been saying, more and more fiat units of interest.
begets higher and higher principal balance,
debt balance, all the things system-wide.
That's just, that's how it looks.
Every once in a while, you get an explosion of that.
You know, we had that actually in World War I,
and we had it in World War II.
We had nations that basically
couldn't pay their debts anymore.
Some of them started wars.
Some of them were defending in wars like Britain.
But they, you know, Britain...
Britain was basically bankrupt in both wars, both World War I and World War II.
So it certainly feels, again, this is where I always try to be careful,
saying when is the point, it comes a moment, so on and so forth.
I've told you that on the show for many years, right?
Because I think gold bugs in the 1980s probably thought this was it, right?
Gold was going to $850 an ounce, and then it went into a 20-year bear.
So I'm not sure exactly when this point will come. Maybe AI gives us like another three decades with its productivity somehow. I don't know. I honestly do not have a crystal ball there.
But I would say if so, the other idea basically of this, my grand theory is that if Bitcoin kind of does, it's a little bit, I'll come back to your point about having a risk free rate of return.
But a power law can't actually have a risk free rate of return because a power law over time has this declining growth rate.
So it just won't work.
You know, exponential interest won't work.
So again, then you would go back to maybe other theories that other Bitcoiners have espoused or other people, you know, people have talked about like equity only, equity only type world, where basically everyone's kind of a VC.
People are just investing, you invest in someone's future.
It might be on sort of a socialist like family level, or it might be on an actual like here, I expect you to give me this return.
And if you don't, maybe, you know, I'm just throwing it out there.
But like, you know, I'll have collateral on your car or something.
I don't know.
It could be all sorts of things.
But the required rate of return or the constant rate of return doesn't work.
It just does not work in power, law, mathematics.
And I haven't seen this, by the way, explained by anyone, by anybody even, say, smarter than me in the power of law world, like Giovanni or other people that have, you know, physics PhDs.
it will not work. So that's why I keep saying the only way I can see it working is if literally
Bitcoin, like a black hole, pulls the whole TradFi market into its really interesting,
more stable growth rate, but not something that can rely on exponential fiat units of interest
versus Bitcoin itself being pulled back into this monopolized TradFi world where you have
ever expanding amounts of debt contracts with ever expanding amounts of fiat interest behind
that. And I think that would still happen under your model of Bitcoin is the risk-free rate.
I think that would happen. I mean, even if Bitcoin's a risk-free rate, it's still a rate
and it's still going to be a compound interest rate. So it's kind of a wild thought to think
that we wouldn't have like proper old school interest rates at all, but that would be if
the power law we're going to hold. And I'm not saying that it has to. It could absolutely turn
back into a traditional good old TradFi exponential curve. But if it holds, then compound interest
actually won work So that the theory
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At the point that they intersect and then the power trend stays lower than exponential when it's past the point of intersection.
Start experiment as a capital allocator.
I mean, you can look at the return of the exponential.
But if you're thinking about it from like a risk perspective, like what do I need to do to outperform the hurdle rate of Bitcoin's CAGR at this point?
Would that be seen as more risk averse?
It's like, OK, I need a lower rate.
I need to raise capital, deploy it into this productive endeavor.
We'll just use farming.
I'm going to start a farm.
I think I can raise capital now, get seats in the ground, get a yield.
um harvest that yield sell to the market and have a return uh on that initial capital outlay that is
that is higher than what bitcoin's category is that year and compare that to the exponential
curve could i could i get a rate of return that's higher than the exponential rate of return which
is a bit higher than in the power trend right now like i'm just trying to think through the thought
of experiment like what conditions would pull which trend um towards the other
Yep. And it also changes the picture when you think of what your North Star becomes.
Right. So if your North Star is still like dollars, you know, this transactional currency of dollars and they still have the strongest military and they can force you to, you know, use their dollars and pay taxes and dollars, even if they have like a large portion of the treasury having some Bitcoin, which, again, may happen sooner than we think.
if it's still in dollars,
you're going to move towards
something that represents
the rest of the TradFi world.
Your thought experiment, I would say,
is harder because it could also be
that we're in a sats world, right?
And if we're in a sats world,
then it could be like,
well, we know that Bitcoin
is always going to...
It's like everyone's going to continue
to chase Bitcoin, okay?
And I'm not saying that this is the goofy
like central bank,
like deflationary situation.
This is the central bank propaganda, by the way, is that, you know, productive good deflation is a bad thing.
Of course, it's not. Right. Because we know, you know, because they say, oh, if you have deflation in assets, then you're never going to buy them and the economy slows.
But that's obviously patently false. I'm sure you talked about this many times in the show, right?
I mean, we know that technology in particular, like your laptop is going to be faster and better next year, even with Moore's law.
Like it's still faster and better next year.
Like the rate of return is declining That true but we getting there So yeah the question is if we are in a Bitcoin world
we have sats,
we know that sats are like the gold standard,
so to speak.
What is going to be a project
that's going to make you want to risk those sats?
And the thing is,
I think people always think about
getting that defined CAGR and everything,
but it's...
I don't know.
Theoretically, in a power world, it's not constant.
It's not a constant rate of return.
If you get a constant rate of return, then you're back to exponential.
You're back to square one anyway.
So it's a weird thought experiment.
The only way I could simply say it is,
okay, I have Bitcoin.
I'll hold it.
I'll save in it.
And if I want to take some risk to get access
of what that purchasing power is expected to gain me in Bitcoin next year,
I'll take the risk.
And of course, people can put numbers on those investments and everything,
but the rate is not constant.
The rate actually will decline.
It will slowly and slowly come down, basically.
So that's just how a power curve works.
Different.
So it's hard to even think about mathematically.
This is why it's a wild thought because we like never in recorded history has anything even worked like this at all.
I do think you could come back to a situation where and Bitcoin helps with this, too, by the way, is where the collateral, which, by the way, is what the ancient Greeks is called.
like in probably if you have European, many European, different European speakers listening
right now, like the word for collateral in many languages is hypotech or hypoteca. It's like the
hypothetical. And it's possible, first of all, collateral is way more hypothetical than it's
ever been today in this financial world. Like it's, it's actually, so the word rehypothecation,
it means rehypothes, it doesn't mean like fractional reserve banking or anything. It just
means rehypothecating a single piece of collateral that everybody clearly understands, like a house.
Right. So it's like instead of having one loan on a house, you have four or five. That's like the
very simple example of rehypothecation in the worldwide financial system. And that's bad.
That's bad. Like it would be great if everybody knew asset values and they knew the collateral
and everything. And so Bitcoin can actually do that. You have to look at what people in
Dubify are doing or other projects. If you have the collateral, you take a loan out against it,
even in a fiat world. So it's a still exponential world at the moment, but the idea is clear.
And you can't pay back that loan, then the collateral goes back to the lender.
That might be something that is clear in everybody's mind and could be something.
It's like, you know, it sucks, but it's like if you're a borrower and you lose your collateral.
But if you're a lender and you really want to worry about your risk, right?
Like collateral might be something that's like way more important in the future and actually like very clearly understood.
There's another thing I'm thinking about.
And that's an ancient concept, right?
So it's the hypothetical, the thing that is pledged.
It's literally the word the Greeks use as hypothec.
So it's the hypothetical thing that is pledged when someone draws a loan.
And I think that a Bitcoin world will allow for extreme clarity on what is collateralized and what is not collateralized.
Extreme transparency, right?
Yeah, primarily because of the blockchain and primarily just even because of the Bitcoin itself.
But that would be like Debify, for example, at level one right now.
You can pledge Bitcoin in multi-sig where everybody sees it, borrow, lender, platform, a bank, you can have a lawyer, whatever, doing a multi-sig.
You know that the collateral is right there and it's not going to be re-hypothecated further.
It literally kills re-hypothecation.
It's a great concept, what they're doing, for example.
And other people are doing it, but Debify, in my opinion, is the one that's...
And I have a relationship with those guys.
I don't personally, but just I've, you know, work with those guys.
They put the honey badger on.
So be clear about that.
But not anymore, unfortunately.
Not going to do that this year.
But anyway.
It's hiatus this year.
Hiatus this year.
Yeah, hopefully.
Hopefully.
The point is, it's a great product that utilizes Bitcoin's multi-sig.
Doesn't do anything too fancy.
And it actually kills rehypothecation.
Because everybody knows, bar a lender, you know where the collateral is.
and you know that's not pledged again to some other loan,
or if it's going to be pledged again,
you could clearly see, okay, that this is already pledged once, right?
You can actually see that in the platform and the code and everything.
So it's really interesting, really interesting.
Now, that is still an exponential world.
You using fiat interest fiat currencies to borrow against that Everything is still exponential world But I could see in the future where we get to some sort of a power arrangement or an equity
like arrangement, where the collateral is really what people start to think about.
They're like, okay, me as a borrower, do I want to pledge my car to take a loan to try
to do this project?
If I have the real risk of losing my car, maybe I do if I believe in it, or maybe I don't.
And so that is something as well that I'm thinking about a lot is because Bitcoin can make all of that like perfectly transparent, which would be another way to think about it.
But again, are you using interest rates there? Are you using like, I don't know, haircut somehow technology or terminology where I don't know, maybe you force the borrower to sell the collateral like.
I mean, the collateral itself could be Bitcoin, actually, simply. And so you just force the
borrower to sell the Bitcoin if they can't repay, which is how it works now. But I'm just thinking,
again, if you think out long and longer term in an exponential world, it still won't work
with the compounding rates. So you'd have to think about someone who was comfortable
really taking a risk, both on the borrower and the lender side. But that's far in the future.
What I'm talking about right now is 10, 15 years at least, if it works out this way.
The much clearer, easier thing to understand is, say, what Debitify is doing right now.
You just have a fiat loan.
You have an interest rate.
It's compounding.
It's exponential.
If you can't pay it back, you either post more Bitcoin or they liquidate the Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I think a better way, or maybe not a better way, but another way to reframe this is,
Do we think the landscape of financial arrangements, financial contracts between individuals has explored the whole design space?
And will we innovate in the world of finance in the pursuit of economic expansion and productivity gains in a Bitcoin world?
You know, I'm trying to get like, we can't, we can't right now.
We've been talking about this for years.
So we always come back to the same part, same answer, which is the same conclusion, which
is we don't know what's going to happen.
And so I think a reframe is like, do you think the extent of the, the extent of financial
engineering, for lack of a better term, has, we've explored the whole design space.
and we won't innovate again and i think that's that's what we've been getting at right for two
years as we we don't know what it will be and if we are going to pull trad fi onto the power trend
i think it would preclude that we need to figure out a new sort of financial arrangement for
for an investment in the economy um and i'm optimistic right i'm sure you are as well we're
human beings are uh you know if nothing but creative i mean when when it worst comes to
worst you can creativity technology is definitely room for optimism even amidst the crazy uh volatile
exponential world so i'm super optimistic about all of it uh and yeah we'll probably be probably
surprised well this is a good segue into i'm actually writing was writing the newsletter i
didn't get out before we started hit record but i'm really uh excited to get this one out in
particular because i've um i've been tweeting about it this week and i think it's particularly
here in the u.s it's it's a big problem which is the fact that gen z many younger millennials
they are turning towards the democratic socialist of america mermundani and others of that ilk
because they believe that the united states the united states as a capitalist system has failed
them terribly. And I'm going to posit and put forth in the newsletter, and I've already done
that in a couple of tweets, but I'm expanding on it today, that we live in a capitalist society.
And it brings back to, I think, why we're into Bitcoin is because we live in a quasi-socialist
experiment here in the United States and globally, for that matter, because the fiat currency can't
have a truly capitalist system if the most important tool used to coordinate economic
activity essentially controlled. And I think it's a big social problem that needs a lot of narrative
work here in the United States as many people thinking that the K-shaped economy, the income
inequality that exists here in the United States is a product of a capitalist system. And obviously
to a degree, there are private free markets in the United States, but they're sitting above a
that is completely centralized and I would argue very socialist,
particularly when you consider bailouts and the ability to issue debt
that will be monetized by the central bank,
and you can use the proceeds of that debt to throw at things
that otherwise would not exist.
Yeah.
completely agree with you completely agree with you and that's that's uh you know it could be a
in fact a perfect time i mean i say often you have to have gratitude in life and i'm very grateful for
bitcoin uh and all of that i think layers on very well to what you've been saying you've just been
saying and i think you know again i think it's just as surely you've talked about plenty of times
on your own show. It's just, it's an elegant solution for so many problems in the world.
It's hard to see, you know, why it won't keep pushing the boundaries of things that we wouldn't
expect. And one more thing, by the way, to try to stay away from the numbers and the compound
interest, because I know that can cause people's eyes to roll in the back of their head. But I
would still say, if we get into a system like you're saying with Bitcoin, where just forget
the numbers. But if it's a, if it's sort of this Bitcoin treasury or the United States treasury or
governments hold some Bitcoin and that's it, and exchanges are really, you know, the KYC is just
even more overbearing than the law itself, whatever it might be. At some point withdrawals,
shut down, you know, the system becomes completely centralized and controlled.
everybody already intuitively knows that's not a good thing but i would i think that that actually
pretty cleanly layers onto a you know volatile exponential system whereas if you have the other
we have you know whatever it is more community-based distributed people can actually
withdraw or people don't even have to worry about withdrawals because you're anyway trading on you
know layered networks above the main chain if you want to withdraw back to the main chain that's fine
all those things, you have multi-sig on a main chain level.
I think that actually pretty cleanly aligns with a new technological era that grows in
a scalable, sustainable power law fashion.
So that's another way I would try to just tie up the things that we've been saying.
Yeah.
I mean, on that note, I have my thoughts on this, which are very bullish, but I recorded
with Francis.
from bull bitcoin a few weeks ago and it was really jacked up over that because he confirmed
something that i believe particularly during this bear market is that the the the um the rumors of
bitcoin's cypherpunk roots being completely ripped out of the ground and dead are are greatly
exaggerated the freedom tech movement uh particularly within bitcoin as it pertains to
the usability around payments, the ability to achieve privacy in a much easier fashion,
and just optionality in terms of how you actually use Bitcoin as payments.
Or now with these ARCs launching, I know the Arcade team and ARC Labs,
they're thinking about interesting covenant solutions on top of their protocol.
I'm very bullish on the ability to use Bitcoin as everyday money and obviously Square launching
the ability to receive payments for Square merchants this year.
I think the calls for the demise of the cypherpunk movement within Bitcoin are greatly exaggerated.
And yes, they've been drowned out by the suit coiners and TradFi making its way in.
The suit coiners.
Yeah.
I'm living over here in Europe, so I don't hear all the parlance.
The ties and the suit quarters.
Yeah, that's funny.
Dude, you're totally right.
I'm 100% on board with that.
I've never not believed that myself.
And the more and more you explore Bitcoin, the more layers you find just in general and how the thing works.
And surely it just can't be who's the best regulator of Bitcoin policy.
That's the future of Bitcoin.
surely not
no
I'm bullish
let's get back to the charts
what
what's
Q1 monetary base
looking like
okay
let's look at
the Federal Reserve's
balance sheet here
really quickly
back to
a little bit more
concrete
price stuff
you see the craziness
of 2008 right
Q1, 2, 3
this is the asset side
of the balance sheet
by the way
monetary base
on the liability side
but I just want to show
your asset side
currently this is not uh this week's because that's not going to be released for me at least
until tomorrow but uh you see uh we topped out at the pandemic almost at nine trillion dollars and
now we're at 6.74 last week um last wednesday and what i wanted to i want to show a couple
things here so first of all you can obviously see it's been growing so my monetary based stuff
and it's going to continue to be this way
because I'm really...
AI is taking me to other levels like many people with this but it still I trying to make it more encompassing Anyway they release stuff very slowly the central banks So on a worldwide level we actually still going to do Q1 And it mostly flat still even down actually
but you can see the Federal Reserve through Q1 itself is rising a little bit. It's balance sheet
in total and even throughout the year. So we can continue to expect that a little bit more.
obviously people are wondering how
Orsh is going to be here
in the next few meetings
is he a dove in hawk's clothing
or is he a hawk in dove's clothing
he's kind of
he's being very cagey about things
but most people expect a hold
and maybe even a hike in September
so we'll see
but
again backing out again
and we talk about hard money
this is kind of an interesting chart
I just want to show you
let's look at this on
percentage
this is
This is the Fed's balance sheet over 100 years, percentage-wise.
Now, this light red shade area is the MBS, right?
So basically real estate, bad real estate that the Fed has held on its books since 2008.
But notice here, the blue, all right?
The blue is basically corporate debt.
so when they were started they basically just held uh gold and loans to corporates
which is quite interesting throughout their first part of the history and then world war ii came a
lot of gold came into the u.s and the u.s itself had more gold this is just the u.s's gold here
which gold actually became 86 percent 87 percent of the fed's balance sheet at the start of world
war ii and then brenton woods started dollarization started treasury purchase buying
you know continuous treasury purchase buying started after brenton woods fully ended
only even here gold standard ended here um and by the way this is uh fed valuation of gold at
that same value 42 dollars an ounce that's another thing to keep in mind here but it left room for
are lots and lots of treasury buying and it is kind of interesting if you look at this chart
again bitcoin is our gold analog at least that's how i look at it in many ways uh does this gold
remind you of any other chart that you've seen like the way that it looks shit coin chart uh
it's a good guess there's this famous kind of famous i don't know i have like a shirt of it
like where it shows the purchasing power of the dollar over the last hundred years that actually
The Fed doesn't publish it.
The BLS publishes it in U.S. cities.
So if I put that on it, kind of interesting.
Yeah, that's pretty.
Tracks it pretty nicely.
A little bit different here.
My tooltip is too much in the way,
but you can see that a little bit different
during the Great Depression.
But generally, let's track that pretty well.
And again, I look at all this as...
an analog of what's going to come to Bitcoin, I think.
No doubt about it.
Whether it's the treasury, whether it's the central bank
that's going to hold Bitcoin, and they will
before we get to any of the things
that you and I were just theorizing about.
Bitcoin is the only way that they're going to be
truly be able to hold the value of currency.
And I think this chart actually shows it pretty well.
Back to the way that the money base is growing again.
Here's the ECB.
ECB, again, just keeping in mind, so these are weekly charts, so they're a little bit more
current than what I'm going to show you next. You can see that ECB, same deal. They got to,
you know, it's almost like the Fed. They didn't get to 9 trillion euros. They were
flirting with it, but never got to it. And here, you know, I have, again, this is exponential
charts, a straight line on log linear. You can see that they're in very, very low, historically low
quantiles, you know, between the worst and the 10th percentile of their, of their monetary base.
And they're about, uh, uh, the monetary base is on the liability side. I'm just showing you the
total assets just here, just to kind of see the trend, but it's $6 trillion, which obviously,
you know, they've worldwide central banks have cut a lot in the last six years and we're still
there. I'm not hoping for runaway crazy inflation, but if you did want to worry about that, here are
the global numbers. Again, so you can see here, this is a new dashboard, by the way. We can look
at other currencies if you want. And all this stuff is going to be released shortly, soon,
very soon for people in the fall. So that's another good update I have for people where
where people will be able to subscribe to get some of this data.
2021, we topped out again over 30 trillion in the money base.
And now through the first quarter, which as I said,
is a little bit less current than the figures I shown you we at 26 trillion a little over 26 trillion at the end of fourth quarter 2025 So even still slightly down But at the end of the day
your CAGR is about 11.3% in native terms or about 1% per month compounded. And
it's
quite low, interestingly.
I mean, they have not done much
money printing at all since
the pandemic
worldwide.
The TDA chart is to me. You'll see
it's a coiling band here.
Getting ready to explode.
Right here.
It looks like suppressed volatility.
Yeah. And here's
actually the
money-based chart
across time.
Really, I need to go to here
for you in the modern era.
Same chart, but the total here,
you can see 26.2 trillion.
That works like still working on my rounding there,
but 26.2 trillion here
in first quarter.
Again, that slight difference from the other chart is
is Claude gotta work on some of those things but anyway 26 trillion basically but notice it is again
where this is the worldwide figure so we went from the top of the band during COVID to now
we're at the bottom of the band so like yeah again I don't know I mean like this is not this is where
this is clearly an exponential curve we could go on for maybe another year they try to fight
inflation. They tried to, you know, keep the money presses down a little bit, but yeah.
And I'm not even hoping for crazy central bank inflation, but they have really taken it down to,
let's say, trend historically low levels. And, you know, if bad things happen, we know that they
usually solve things with the printed press. So I certainly would say all of this shows signs of
Bitcoin as usual being a good place to run if the printing presses do really start up globally.
But they're not actually that crazy.
$26 trillion is where we are basically, which is $4 trillion less than four or five years ago.
They're still keeping it low.
It's fascinating how it aligns with Bitcoin hitting the nadir.
Is that the right term?
Nadir being the low, yeah.
It's power trend.
um although notice notice i have another chart to show this but bitcoin actually went up here too
so this is where bitcoin i think is still so small but i think the power curve is more
actually important for bitcoin's movement than the money base because as money base was coming
down from 30 to 26 trillion over the last four years bitcoin did go through a bull it didn't go
through as strong a bull actually interestingly as it had in prior trends right so you know i'll
show you this in a second, but we barely got to the trend line basically in the last three years.
And we kind of front ran it with the ETF approval in January, February, March of 2024.
So all those things are true. But what's also true is the money base actually went down
when Bitcoin had a bull. But that's also something to keep in mind.
Bitcoin is still small enough that it can do different things, right? I mean,
the money base can go down and bitcoin can still go up so we'll see but yeah i think bitcoin's still
the the main story for me as far as like directionally and where bitcoin goes
is actually the power curve again you get more comfort there than you can have in the value of
the money base all right can i share a chart and this is like completely not aligned with what we're
talking about global monetary base but i'm thinking again about exponentials power trend
which pulls which switch and how do you make the argument um do i need to stop sharing yeah stop
sharing i'm gonna share but like this is a a chart i've been talking about this week as well because
again it's been like all made this problem i'm sure you've seen this the henry adams curve yeah
and so 1971 you just showed the charts when we clearly went off the gold standard um made a
clean cut. And I say again, like just from a narrative perspective, thinking about despite
the fact that we can talk from across the world at very high latency, do things that are incredible,
there's like, how do you articulate the lack of necessary investment in the economy? And this
chart highlights the lack of investment in energy infrastructure that would keep energy consumption
per capita on that red line, which is the Henry Adams curve, which was true for many,
many centuries. And so like, yes, the stock market may be going up exponentially, monetary base,
similarly so but the products of that have led to a ton of fiat gains that make people feel rich on paper And many people feel rich in real life because they able to buy a bunch of financial assets and real estate assets and things of the such
But there is this neglect to the base layer of our economy, which is the energy system that I don't think is sustainable.
If we were trying to continue to grow exponentially and the fiat system were to allow the misallocation of capital to the base of the economy around our energy systems, it feels like it would collapse on itself.
So that's another, I guess, thought experiment framework is like everything's exponential until it isn't.
Are we barreling towards a complete collapse of the system?
because systems are complex.
And if you don't tend to them,
they will collapse in their own themselves.
And everybody may be rah-rah.
Google's growing at 25% a year right now.
Pile in.
But I do fear that there's extreme neglect
to critical parts of the economy
that actually make it function.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a great chart.
I do need to get this up
as part of my data as well
because I think that last dip there
should be right about, I would assume that last dip is Fukushima and the Germans, many other
countries as well, completely, completely are a part of this collapse by taking out their nuclear
energy, their cheap, efficient, amazing nuclear energy away from the markets. And I mean, Merkel
did a lot of stupid things, including making Europe reliant on barbarous Russian energy. But
But in any event, they had nuclear, they had more energy security.
Energy independence isn't the right word for people, by the way.
It's energy security, if you have security.
And yeah, the world is way behind there right now.
And I think that's going to be a huge...
I hope that there's like sort of a renaissance here.
I don't know.
I'm not as much of an expert in this industry as you are,
but I think Bitcoin can certainly be a part of this.
I absolutely think Bitcoin can be a part of that as well, turning that around.
I agree.
I'm sorry for derailing our
no no no it's a that's a great chart
and by the way actually speaking of
going off the trend
let me
let me go back to this one
not this one actually
but shoot sorry
before you go forward Logan is
Maddie's video frozen
for you too
should be fine you're recording
luckily but you've been frozen for the last couple
minutes for me yeah for me i we're both moving at least okay look it must be uh taking a bathroom
break so proceed your your according locally i did not um i did not hit my local recording but
anyway hopefully it'll work they're going back to this chart which is again the trend of the globe
on money and as you go back into history the data gets a little bit thinner but if we go from here
which is Brenton Woods ending. And it does actually relate to your chart. So I'm showing
actually the inverse of what you just showed is money as well. Interestingly, so we started this
conversation talking about the faster and faster treadmills of super exponential growth in the
stock market, which is undoubtedly happening. But it's almost like they're kind of worried in the
funny world too. And like they, they actually understood that they were, um,
at least I'm giving a different explanation than what you are, but they were 10, like,
notice how this is, I'm just showing this from 2008, basically the start of Bitcoin,
all these trend lines start from the 2008 crisis, which also happened to be the start of Bitcoin.
That is a slower rate of growth in dollar terms, right? It's only 7.6%, 7.6% CAGR
on basically the OLS here. If you went back to 1971, you can just see, obviously, the gaps here.
The data is all real. You can clearly see that it's growing faster from 1971.
So I'm showing kind of the inverse of what you just showed me.
The money base was growing at 10%, 11%, even 12% at times, CAGR. So it was actually growing faster
until 2008. And then even if it did seem like crazy amounts of money printing at the beginning
of the financial crisis, and it was, they tapered off a lot from about 2017 until that repo crisis
in 20... The US in particular stopped even in 2014 until the repo crisis of 2019. And then,
of course, the world went nuts in the pandemic. But in the last four years as well, they've
safer it off massively. So the net net of all this is actually slower money growth rate in the last
16 years, 18 years, say, compared to the last 60 years. And that's also another, it's kind of a,
I don't know what you want to call it. It's a wrench in the calculations. It's kind of weird.
You might expect it to be going the other way.
But it's actually the money supply is growing slower.
I'm basically showing the same chart that you had, but the trend lines are drawn differently.
Yeah.
And do you think that was an explicit recognition by the powers that be to slow the growth or just sort of?
Yeah, I do.
I do in some ways.
I mean, this Basel, Basel initiatives, Basel 1, 2, 3, 3 in particular, which, you know, came in light of all this stuff talking about, you know, different levels of capital, tier one capital.
you know, gold had a more higher place and holding treasuries and holding treasuries.
You know, I actually forget now that full tier one, I think at 90 days is a special place
in bonds that hold treasuries, but it's not just 90 day bonds. It's, or even year bonds
have a special place in Basel III Capital. It is any expiration date that expires within 90 days.
So it could be a 30 year bond expiring within 90 days or a year that would count as two,
your two one capital. So I think that they have tried to, um, they've tried to add to
the appeal of buying, uh, central bank treasuries, but treasuries to, uh, you know,
to protect balance sheets, let's say. And they've also tried to stop some of the rehypothecation
that we were just talking about earlier. So I do think that there is a, an effort there.
but that you know these are centralized monopolized slow-moving institutions and i don't think that
we should read into it as anything like some really genius moves here's another example
i just show you this chart this is one of my favorites is basically notice how i told you
before the fed was holding basically when they so this is u.s federal reserve ownership of u.s
federal debt. So back in the roaring 20s, before the Great Depression, they owned basically zero
government bonds as part of the balance sheet. It was corporate bonds and it was gold.
And you get all the way to the end of the Vietnam War. And actually, this percentage starts to go
down, not because the Fed holds less treasuries, because the United States has more debt
growing. And so all of that continued basically until here. They thought all this was like kind
a fine. The Federal Reserve can just buy proportionately less debt, but the United
States can issue more debt. And then you get this ratio of something like 10% or something.
And then this goes down because of corporate bailouts. But bottom line, if you look at the
crazy days, they got up to 20% ownership of the Federal Reserve, as you rightly said,
monetized 20% of the US federal debt in 2021 at the height of the pandemic. And now it's down to
like 12, 11, actually 11.38% to be precise as of June 30th. So Warsh, actually Powell gave Warsh
plenty of runway to work with should they need to monetize again. And again, I'm not cheerleading
for them to do this. Maybe they know more than they let on how dangerous some of this can be.
And you can kind of see it with the shallower money supply. But if they need it, they could
certainly bring out the monetary bazooka and buy more treasuries. That was basically what Powell
left Warsh with, which by the way, is actually better than what Greenspan left Bernanke with,
for sure.
Well, I mean, you mentioned Basel 1, Basel 3.
But now with the second Trump administration,
Warsh and Bessent,
many believe in working somewhat in tandem.
We have this new SLR ratio rule kicking in.
The thesis there is that the Fed doesn't want to
be looked at as the reason
for monetary and credit expansion.
So they're pushing that to the commercial banks
by messing with the reserve ratio requirements,
the short-term liquid reserve ratio requirements.
And so have you thought about it?
I need to get that up there.
That's very important.
Let's say it'll come back on our September call
or October call because both the banks holding treasuries
and foreign banks, both central banks and non-central banks, are something that I want
to get a better handle on. And I think that's a big shakeup that's coming here too.
It'll probably play a part. But yeah, theoretically, at least, better reserve is not,
it's monetizing still a lot. Let's look at the number, by the way, and say what it is.
All right. So the Fed owns four and a half trillion, which means basically they money
print on the other side, money bases on the other side of this.
But as far as what they own, $4.5 trillion out of $39.46 trillion, it's not as high as
it ever been It been closer to the uh worst of the pandemic but still uh they have i think they have room to buy more and they probably will yeah and it weird too
like i'm looking at the chart and it doesn't look like btfp had any effect on this but it gets into
like the weird accounting tricks that they so like there was a period there like post 23 banking
spasm banking crisis where they did at least temporarily bring on treasuries held by the
banks onto their balance sheet um it doesn't look like it's showing up on this chart though
because it was considered like a loan right they they actually brought on corporate debt to their
balance sheet and they uh the banks took the treasuries onto there they swapped basically so
So that gave the banks more liquidity.
Yeah.
I mean, Fed.
Didn't the Fed take on the risk, though?
Because they were essentially just giving them.
Absolutely.
100%.
The thing that you don't see is all the guarantees, the assurances, which was basically there anyway.
This is what the monopoly does, right?
It's a moral hazard.
So that was already there anyway when all the crazy bets were happening, you know, after the dotcom and 9-11.
and before the global financial crisis,
all that was there anyway that they had the guarantee,
but yeah, they fully enacted that with the TARP
and the TALF and all that stuff.
So that's what that dip is,
is basically the Fed holding more corporate debt
than the treasuries.
And you can actually see it as a percentage right here.
But look at that.
They went to 75% of their balance sheet
as basically corporate debt
in the global financial crisis.
it's crazy how volatile these charts can look.
I mean, just looking at the charts,
it's like this is very unnatural to me.
And we've talked about this.
If you go back to like a couple charts ago
that you're looking at,
I think that was the,
I think it's Treasury's owned.
Yeah, this one, like this one, right?
We've talked about this before.
That was like very volatile leading up to 2008.
And then it's like, boom, boom, more streamlined.
streamlined ones yep so yeah it would be good absolutely like you said to show here now okay
what does the fed own what are the banks own what are the foreign banks own both central bank and
non-central bank so and then what are the american people actually own at the end of the day
so because they're american people that own some of that but uh yeah it's it's
It's the key takeaway you should get from this is that Powell gave Worsh a lot of breathing room after all the stimulus that they had.
But also, you know, the economy wasn't it was already there was these big hiccups during the repo spike in September 2019.
And then, of course, we had the pandemic, which is papered over everything there.
And you can just see it now like the even back in the 80s, at least it was kind of up and down.
there was still some trend but at least you can see the markets like kind of interacting on the
edges and here it's just smooth lines with big mountains and it's just showing that the fed will
just do anything that they want to try to paper over any fears or if any wall street bank's going
to lose some money um and that's how it looks yeah um i'll probably have to call it here soon
marty uh gotta pick the daughter up but this is your favorite chart yes all right great chart one
of the best charts yeah so this is the old uh i've gone just take out any adjusted like if there's
change whatever i'm counting everything just to show you what bitcoin's technically been able to
transfer in value uh so the record's still 60 trillion by the way on a trailing 12 months basis
in 2022. That was a huge, huge number. But still to this day, Fedwire, which is the Federal Reserves,
that is all those reserves that we're talking about, basically this five, six trillion dollars
reserves are even less than that, actually, because hard currencies included there, two and a half,
but in any event, three, two to three to four, if you count reverse repurchase agreement,
$4 trillion of reserves that the Federal Reserve transfers every year through the financial system through FedWare.
Yeah, but what's the word here?
What's the velocity of that?
How much does that actually transfer in value every year?
$1.2 quadrillion.
dollars worth. So it is an incredible number. And it shows you, by the way, that this is not Visa,
this is not MasterCard, this is the base layer. And so Bitcoin absolutely can compete with this
because the TPS is about the same 6 7 I think Bitcoin TPS is even a little bit bigger transactions per second And I not showing that here But all the Bitcoin needs to do to compete here is just rise in price
It can totally handle anything.
So as far as value goes,
so there's an incredible amount of money
that goes through the traditional financial system.
This is the core of it.
This is Fedwire.
There's only $2 or $3 trillion of value,
of balance sheet value for all the banks in the United States.
$2 to $3 trillion in reserves at any one time.
That goes to the tune of a quadrillion dollars a year.
It's an incredible amount of money.
And so Bitcoin is certainly smaller than that.
Right now, Bitcoin's on a $24 trillion a year clip.
But you can see my little Fedwire supremacy on log scale.
Actually, in 2022, we got to only 16, 17 times smaller than Fedwire.
which is pretty nice.
But now we're about 50 times smaller than Fedwire,
47.6 times smaller than Fedwire to be exact.
When did we hit 200 there?
What was that?
What year was that?
200?
The last big, I guess, contraction in Bitcoin.
You mean the ratio?
So the ratio is on the right side.
Yeah.
Say that one right there.
This one?
Yeah.
uh 2023 november the the number is 133 134 134 okay that was 134 times larger than bitcoin in
2023 november um but notice that actually in the depths of bitcoin's crisis which was the end of
2022 it was trading a lot a lot of bitcoin was moving etfs had already uh no etfs had not started
actually started in 2024 but a lot of bitcoin was moving here 60 trillion dollars worth and uh
you know that was not that was not huge dollar bitcoin that was 16 17 000 bitcoin yeah and so i
think it's another like so if you go back to 20 november 2023 what was it 130 134 times yeah and
what is it today 50 40 48 47.6 better by three and so i'm just like eyeballing the
The price chart right now, November, we were at November 23, we're at between 33 and 39,000.
So the price is, depending on where you're looking, doubled.
But I guess the ratio is way less than half.
Ratio is better.
Price is even down, right, from, say, 2025.
And the ratio is still getting better.
Yeah, that's a pretty high signal right there.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is a great chart, I think, to show.
You could call it the money chart.
It's literally how much money is going through Bitcoin versus how much money is going through Fedwire.
And it's certainly the trend on log scale is good.
If you take log scale off, it's actually got in the realm of something looking normal already back in 2014, which is still 5,000 times smaller than Fedwire.
But if you look at it in a log scale, you can start to really put these sort of orders of magnitude in perspective.
And Bitcoin operates in log space anyway.
So it's going to take time.
Power law.
But this is where we are.
One more before we go.
I'm going to show you.
This is log periodic.
I got to credit Giovanni on this.
Giovanni actually made a great call in.
I can't go over this too much.
But in 2025, he was doing something like this.
and he published a paper on it and started this year but basically he's trying to measure
again through math can we measure sort of the wiggle within the wiggle or the cycles
right can we measure so the power law is the main trend go log log you see it again that
nice straight line appears in log log so we can tell it's a power curve
can we measure the wiggle within the wiggle and this is again i usually like to calculate this
stuff myself but thanks to the power of ai i just let this one go because this is this is not
This is more directionally than I've ever been when you actually look at these cycles.
And I'll just run through this very quickly.
You see here, I got a few different...
I've actually...
I just told the computer, give me the best cycles that you can possibly get with the log periodic formula.
Don't put a limit on or whatever.
So it found five.
I would say maybe only the first three are...
Well, they're ranked by amplitude, basically.
So 26, 23, 11.
and then it goes down to 10. So maybe four. The fifth one is eight. Anyway, they all have decent
amplitudes. But the point is, look what it finds. And Giovanni worked on this a lot and published
a paper. So I'll credit him for thinking to do this. But basically, it finds a two-year cycle,
2 It finds a 3 And it finds a 7 Now these are just not doing anything but looking at the changes of Bitcoin price in log space That it We don have to go into the math more than that
So you're trying to track the wiggle.
And then when you sort of squish it all together into one formula, it's still a power law.
But you can get these, what basically starts to look at these curves.
And you see how it goes out in the future.
And this is why I'm fine talking about cycles.
again i was always thought the four year was a shelling point because of the having obviously but
um so far they're still there i'm less let's say i'm less bullish on this idea because of just
being directionally right is quite difficult and just letting the math go on this i would say is
this can be volatile if i calculated this like a year ago it'd be more volatile than
than the good old power law which i showed you was just like fifteen thousand dollars off over
10 years difference of data so this is a different story completely different story i want to make
that caveat but having said all of that um again you can see that we're way outside the bands
of probability here to the downside uh and this actually shows slightly a little bit of a faster
next top but again it's showing end of 2028 so the pure four year would assume 2029 and this is
showing end of 2028 but it is showing like a bottoming give the people what they want give
them the bull juice what is what is that the bull the bull juice is by the end of 2028
the log periodic so the power curve itself by the way which we've been talking about the whole
episode is 300 000 that's the power curve that's the that's that more flat looking black line
straight the straight line the nice beautiful straight line 300 on trend at the end of 2028
if we're on trend 300,000 now this thing tries to track the cycles and its log periodic is 520,000
and the q90 let's just put the q100 in for fun the q90 uh which was b again 90 of observations
would be below that based on all prior that assuming this cycle holds 778,000 by the end
of 2028. You heard it here first. There you go. And the Q100, which would mean it would hit the
max all time log periodic sort of oscillation amplitude 2.2 million, which is the Super Bowl
juice. And we haven't been to that sort of a level since 2013, in fact. So I would be very,
very cautious of that number never financial advice as always but it is kind of fun to look
at these uh cycles and i'd say yeah this is the most directionally i've ever tried to look at price
um but yeah so far there is something to the cycles uh and i'm i'm also on board with that
idea 2.2 million by the end of 2028 get your as an extreme upside as an extreme upside
you heard it here first people want to hear they don't want to hear leveled uh they don't want to
statistical analysis based based probabilities uh with sound statistical backing yeah
no but look i love exploring all this stuff marty i love exploring with you i got uh lots more
economic data here and i just want to tell people thanks for following me over the years i've been
saying it for a long time but i finally in the fall will get something where people can play
around with these numbers i'm gonna hold you to that you've been saying this for years i'm gonna
I hope you do it this time.
This one's actually, it's going to be real.
Okay.
Yeah.
You go enjoy your weekend, grab your daughter, and we'll do this again.
End of summer?
End of summer, probably even into September, October.
Okay.
It's a long way to go with the old central bank publications.
But, yeah.
It seems like Warsh is looking to change that.
We need immediate data.
We'll see if that happens.
Well, we got that. We got weekly fed data anytime. That's we can look at that old as we did here.
Awesome. But thank you, buddy. This has been great. Thank you. Enjoy your weekend. Enjoy
your night. And we'll do this again. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this
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