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In this episode, I had the pleasure of joining Robin Sayer on his show to dive deep into Bitcoin,
its current trajectory, and the bigger forces shaping our future.
Robin and I unpack everything from Bitcoin treasury companies and ETFs to price discovery,
passive investing, and what it really means for Bitcoin adoption.
We touch on how governments might try to co-opt Bitcoin, the role of stablecoins, and whether Bitcoin is ultimately a lifeboat away from fiat collapse.
If you're curious about where Bitcoin stands today, how it could evolve tomorrow, and what we could do as individuals to preserve its core ethos, this RIP is for you.
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And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with me, interviewed by Robin Sayre.
What is real? How do you define real?
You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do? You get out.
Maybe you can give us some brief overview of who you are and especially why you're excited about Bitcoin.
Sure. My name is Cedric Youngelman.
I'm the host of the Bitcoin Matrix podcast and Bitcoin Center.
I'm co-host of Bitcoin Center with Paul Tarantino.
That's live Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern.
And why am I excited about Bitcoin?
Well, I'm excited about separating money from state, state from money.
I think that's been a terrible combination for most citizens around the world.
And I think it's also the best way to have something that can't be debased.
And it's a great anchor for, I think, people to think about how to protect their wealth or life raft, if you will.
So quickly, that's some of the reasons I'm excited about Bitcoin.
I think it's the most important thing in the world.
So I think you just say, no, I'm sorry, because you said in the beginning, before we started
recording that you kind of annoyed on this like between treasury companies, because I
think that that's exactly the reason why I feel like it's a distraction because there's
all those things.
Why are we excited about Bitcoin and why we got into Bitcoin?
Maybe not like I, if I'm totally honest, I got into Bitcoin because of the gains, but
state and then got deep into Bitcoin because of exactly the reasons that you lined out.
So I feel like there's a big value to just like the number of go up technology.
But I hear you a lot with being like kind of annoyed at this distraction of the Bitcoin
Treasury companies. And when you said like you're excited about this and like I thought about
Bitcoin Treasury companies kind of a distraction to that. It's a major distraction. I'm excited
about them from a finance and economics perspective and how they're going to hopefully eat traditional
finance. But I think it's a distraction from all the things that make Bitcoin Bitcoin because
Bitcoin treasury companies, they centralize their Bitcoin. You're not holding the Bitcoin. You don't
have any real true claim on it other than it's a shareholder and you're last in line.
it's not about self custody it's not about using bitcoin as a currency or medium exchange
it's not about improving bitcoin's privacy or you know personal security or just even
you know layer one security so i think it's a big distraction from the bigger issues
in bitcoin i think it's also potentially a great way for the state to capture
Bitcoin, I guess in quotes,
you know, or literally seize Bitcoin,
confiscate Bitcoin in the future.
So while I think it's exciting
from the financialization of Bitcoin,
yeah, I just, I wish those other topics
wouldn't be so suffocated in this environment.
And I think it also brings a lot of people to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is great. Bitcoin is for everyone.
But it brings a lot of people, I think, to Bitcoin who really see it as a get rich quick scheme and something they could trade and flip.
You know, so in that regard, you know, it's not really it's any education.
There's like there's no bad publicity, but, you know, I don't think it's the best necessarily on ramp for Bitcoin education.
education. Yeah, there's this thing where everything is good for Bitcoin.
But also even Satoshi was very concerned about how we grow this thing.
And he was cautious about not making it too big too fast because it can be captured.
And I'm kind of wondering because I do see the positive and the negative side of
treasuring companies, and I think it's kind of coming anyway.
So like we can come in on it, but it will come like
they are coming faster and faster in there and it will happen anyways. But I do wonder if the value
they bring and the service they bring and they do bring a lot of service with unlocking capital that
wouldn't otherwise be impossible to get into Bitcoin and the financialization that you brought
in. If this makes up for the negative aspects of decentralizing coins, possibly being a target for
six one or two and all the things that you have mentioned like the the this this this balancing of
uh we we want bitcoin to go up and be financialized but also we wanna have this core ethos
uh in bitcoin maintained and i don't know like do do we succeed if bitcoin is just mainstream money
uh and and along the way we might lose some of the core ethos i don't know yeah we might um
I mean, I think Bitcoin treasury companies are an evolving financial mechanism.
And I think at some point you reach a nexus where more operating companies that have positive cash flow take on that strategy.
And it just eats the Bitcoin treasury companies.
Maybe only a few survive in that regard.
I do think it unlocks capital.
I personally understand that at a very personal level with whatever money I had trapped in 401ks and Roths here in the U.S.
And, you know, someone who works and saves and, you know, receives company matches.
I had a small pool of capital in my 401k and I think I had an IRA.
and there it was there were things like gbtc that i looked at as how can i you know get bitcoin price
exposure with this trapped capital it worked for me i can understand why metaplanet's having
success in japan smarter web's trying to do it uk i do question though how much capital in in this
um how much money coming into these bitcoin treasury companies is actually tracked cap
trapped capital versus retail excitement that's not necessarily trapped. And I would also encourage
people to think about, you know, if you, let's say you had some trapped capital, you have $10,000
in your IRA and you've done phenomenally well, you've done a 10, 20, 50, 100x with any of these
securities. It's okay, I think, to thank those securities and pull your money, maybe even pay
penalties to get your trapped capital out of the system entirely. Or there are new products that
have come along. The ETFs are here. And again, that's not Bitcoin ethos, but you can use ETFs.
And you could also do self-custody in a lot of these vehicles now, especially in the United States.
And Trump just did an executive order to increase the ability to buy Bitcoin in your 401k.
I think in the States, it's just your IRA.
So I really see that use case.
I just think right now, a lot of the fervor in this market is retail, FOMO, and not necessarily 100% trapped capital.
And trapped capital sometimes gets unleashed.
You know, Japan can change their rules around spot Bitcoin and how it's treated from a tax perspective.
And that reduces the moat of a company like MetaPlanet.
So, yeah, it's a great question.
Sorry for the ramble.
It's besides the narrative and besides maybe getting some retail folks excited about a treasury company and not Bitcoin itself.
Do Bitcoin Treasury companies and the institutions and companies in general that they're coming more and more into Bitcoin change something like maybe the cycles, maybe like the buying behavior or maybe whatever you want to take it?
Yeah, I think the ETFs combined with the Bitcoin Treasury companies have definitely altered or are altering the cycles.
ETFs are some of the people who are buying the ETF, the Bitcoin ETFs right now are some of the
smartest value investors in traditional finance. And those are strong hands, generally speaking.
And we've seen this over the last, I think, year plus, every dip is getting sort of bought up
rather quickly. We're not having large spikes up. We're going sideways for a long time,
minor dips bought up right away and moving up levels like a stepladder so it seems like
bitcoin's act it's maturing it seems like as an asset class that doesn't preclude me from thinking
that it can get much more volatile going forward still and volatility can come back but i do think
that um we'll see my my hypothesis will see probably smaller drawdowns than historically
speaking. You know, you have to really think about already 90% plus of Bitcoin has been issued.
So how much does the halvings really matter, you know, going forward? Are they going to have the
same sort of jolt on, you know, humanity when you're at 94.5% Bitcoin already emitted and more
Bitcoin is getting bought per day than is produced through mining through these treasury companies.
And that'll be interesting. I do also think, though, the ETFs bring probably like this.
I think we have less true price discovery. So, you know, the security markets are incredibly
centralized. You can note BlackRock and Vanguard. And yeah, they're acting on behalf of their
customers and they own those assets on behalf of those customers but they know all the deal flow on
probably 60 to 75 percent of the market because they manage the deal flow of their customers
and then the dtcc clears like 99.99 of all securities bonds and all financial instruments
derivatives in in almost the globe i think you know definitely in america i i feel like there's
a lot of um i don't think there's true price discovery in any of these markets anymore
for so many different reasons from passive investors who never turn off the you know the
the buying on a monthly weekly or by week by monthly basis so i do think there's potential
or that we just haven't seen true price discovery because but at the same time i do think it supports
you know the floor the price floor um so i don't know this is very it's it's it's interesting to
watch i mean do you think the the bitcoin treasury companies alter the cycles when it comes to
bitcoin the rules are simple run your own node hold your own keys and protect your seed phrase
that's where micro seed comes in unlike bulky backups micro seed is stamped onto a tiny steel
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i think price and uh supply and demand usually all the cycles and as the supplies there's the same
and the demand changes, the cyclical nature of Bitcoin might actually change.
But I'm really interested because you said like less price discovery. Do you mean because people
are just in those passive instruments and then they just invest in like a phone and then it just
gets passively invested in like a little bit Bitcoin, a little bit stocks, a little bit here
and there and basically people don't really pick themselves and they just let them management or
like an automatic thing uh do it uh or do you talk more about paper bitcoin and the ios uh things
i think more of the first and so i i think passive investors uh you know imagine going to the
supermarket and you you want to buy you bought tomatoes last week three for a dollar and you
and you want to buy them again today, this week,
you're gonna make a salad,
and now they're four bucks each.
And you might think to yourself,
hey, maybe I'm not gonna go buy three tomatoes for $12 now.
Things have changed, I'm gonna buy cucumbers,
I'll buy croutons, I'll buy red peppers, I'll change it up.
But if you're sort of a 401k investor,
you're buying on an algorithmic basis
whenever you stacking and you buying generally Like so you saying okay I want to buy Microsoft this week I don care what the price is I gonna buy I gonna rebalance it to Microsoft
I'm gonna buy Amazon, I'm gonna buy Google.
I'm gonna buy the mag seven regardless of price.
So passive investors are not looking at value investing
or trying to see, hey, you know,
this stock has gone up a lot since last week.
Maybe I should buy more of this other stock
that I have a lot of faith in that hasn't gone up.
And generally speaking, passive investors, you sort of, you cut your flowers and you water your weeds.
Generally speaking, you know, you rebalance out of the winners and into your losers.
And so I think that leads to higher floors, less price discovery on the downside.
You kind of see this with like the video or Amazon.
Anytime bad news comes out, there might be a small dip.
And then the stock recovers and goes to new highs.
there's there's no real price discovery on the downside right now there's not a lot of
short sellers in any of these markets who are challenging and pushing and you know um pushing
back on valuation models there's very little value investors are doing well right now um and i think
a lot of that's driven by passive investing and in essence a lot of that is really not doing like
true mark to market valuations.
So, you know, everyone thinks, you know, like, I mean, NVIDIA is trading at what, 50 P right now, right?
It's a $4 trillion as stock.
So everyone, there's a lot of people who think they're worth that much money.
And if those bubbles pop or burst or come back to any sort of mean or medium, historically, a lot of people are going to have less money than they thought they did.
I don't know. I kind of went on a tangent there.
And I think that having all the centralized forces in these markets leads to more, I wouldn't say price fixing or anything illegal, but more price coordination, more collusion, more aligned interests.
um just in terms of the etf you're not even you're not going from even cash to bitcoin
you're going from generally speaking in the system the authorized participants are trading in and out
of the etf with cash so it's not even in kind exchanges that just got approved so i think
there's there's that that leads to more fees more middlemen which which leads to think about if
If you're buying $100 of Bitcoin and there's 2% of fees,
so every $100 you want to put into Bitcoin, $2 goes into fees.
That's less money going into the asset.
I don't know.
And I think that it seems like most parties that are the biggest supporters of Bitcoin right now,
like let's say the U.S. government, is really embracing Bitcoin,
which is strange if you really boil it down.
But it seems like everyone's really excited about it because that means I think everyone thinks
when governments get involved, these treasury companies get involved, that's people who are going to buy their bags,
right, make them rich.
Oh, I forgot where I was going with that, but.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
Hey, it's fascinating because I never thought about
passive investment like ETFs and all those instruments.
Like if you think about on first principles, like Fiat
Fiat came around and Fiat pushed people to all sorts of financial instruments for savings
because Fiat is horrible in saving money, obviously.
And so a lot of my friends, they have ETFs, they have, they have some, they usually have
ETFs actually as savings.
Rarely people have something else outside of that.
They usually have like a bank consultant.
They're like, hey, like there's this X, Y, Z ETF.
You want to be more aggressive.
You want to be more economic friendly.
You want to like all those we did.
They all have kind of the same thing, but they have a different name, a different label
on them, and then they all invest in that just because the bank consultant told them
to and they trust the banks.
And literally today there's an Austrian study coming up.
came out how many people are trusting in the government institutions.
And it was a high number.
It was like in the 90s where people were saying, like, yeah, I trust the banks.
I trust the government.
I trust the police and execution, which is generally a good thing for a state to have.
It means like the state is working fine.
And I think like Austria still works okayish.
I am not a fan of the EU, but like also government does not complete.
complete BS, but there's another tangent.
But when we have that situation and you know, like before you told me,
I'll never thought about that.
We have a lot of people that just invest in this instruments and leave it there.
And there's rebalancing going on.
The there's nobody that really says like, oh, like this is a good thing.
And especially it's not your own money.
You invest other people's money and like with other people's money,
You don't care that much as with your own money.
This distorts the price and the price discovery.
I literally never thought about that.
And it's so obvious once you see it because like the fiat
fiat itself distorts the price signal, but fiat and the second implications
with financial instruments like ETFs distorting the price massively.
I'm like almost 600 episodes in and then it's the first time I thought
about ETFs kind of destroying the price discovery of, of a free market and kind of is a tool
against the free market just because people use it really weirdly and, and, and, and, uh,
as a savings vehicle and they just put the money in there and no matter what that that's,
that that's really interesting.
Speaker 2
column and and his uh his tweets and he's really speaking to sort of uh the value in the market
it just seems like it's 200 over value like stocks and and real estate seems incredibly overvalued
and and so you can talk about all the reasons why it's overvalued but at some point it returns to
the mean at some point you know stocks aren't going to be 50 p.e uh he he talked about how
Now, if you ask the average investor what they expect out of their portfolio, they're
expecting sort of like 10% to 12% returns above inflation.
If you're buying a stock at 50 PE, that's a 2% return.
And there's a major disconnect there.
And the other thing I'm tying into all this is, I think it's possible AI is completely
overvalued and not going to deliver the growth that they want to see in the economy.
And it's possible that it's actually going to be deflationary.
People will lose jobs.
There won't be as many new jobs maybe or a new whatever.
So let's say it's deflationary.
And if people want to like all this, they want to think kind of contain sort of that
whole narrative in NVIDIA and the MAG-7. And if this bubble pops, they're praying that people
only sell their MAG-7. But right now, through the things like ETFs and funds, you could just sell
the whole thing with one push of a button. And that will be interesting, you know, in a digital
error when we ever get into real price discovery on the downside.
So yeah, I
yeah, it's
I think the other thing right now, it's just interesting how not
how lack how much lack of exuberance there is at
for Bitcoin, this price point in US dollar terms.
I do think so.
I get I get messages and I just talked about it with Sean
in the morning where we talked about we are up 87%.
The last time I looked with the Bitcoin price in the last 12 months and people
and people act like we are down 50.
Like people act we are in a massive bear market since two years.
But we actually are in a bull market.
We are 87% up. Yes, we are not 200, 300, 400% up
in the last two weeks, but Bitcoin kind of changed.
And as we said before, we went from like, I don't know, a jet ski to like a small speedboat
to now maybe we are slowly coming to being an aircraft carrier.
And at some point we will be a freaking island.
So like we are growing and then Bitcoin, it needs a lot of people have this price targets
of, I don't know if you have price targets, but like they have this price, I guess, of
like half a million, a million, two million.
And I'm like, you know how much money has to go in there to reach those price
targets and what has to happen in order to go there.
And I'm not saying it's impossible this year and this cycle.
I will definitely hit it at some point.
But people say, oh, like a million this year, a million next year.
I don't wish that for anyone, because I think this shows that the field system is
kind of completely bust and there's friends and families that you still
have to save you. Well, that's what Michael Novogratz mentioned the other day. And maybe
you agree with him is like, if Bitcoin went to a million this year, which I think is still possible,
not maybe likely or probable, you know, how bad would that be for, you know, let's say the economy?
And what does that mean for the price of different things? But maybe, you know, the price of bread
doesn't skyrocket in that example.
And maybe that's a way to export
all the inflation into Bitcoin.
And I do
also think at some point
we kind of have to rip
the Band-Aid off. Even if we don't
want it to go quick, we don't want it
to be ugly,
I don't think we have a choice.
I think
idealistically, the longer this
takes, the slower the grind up, the better
for everybody.
But
But I don't think we're assured that by any means.
And I think at some point we have to deal with this, the pain in the system or how broken
it is.
There's two interesting theories and I'm really curious on what you think, because I'm not
100% sure on like what what I really am fixed on the first theory.
And this is what I always kind of pushed on, but I'm not sure if it's the right one is
that we are on the Titanic with feared and we should take we should sink the Titanic as
slow as possible to get everyone safe to the Bitcoin land.
This makes sense because like a Titanic, if it sinks slowly, we have enough chance to
actually get the people out and get them safe and they're not wet and they're not
sinking in the water. But then there's also the other theory and the data kind of like
for the experiment. What if feared is an addiction, a drug addiction, and we are now saying,
Oh, let's, let's take field still. But let's take it a little less. So it's like, Oh, let's,
let's still take heroin. But let's take a little less, little less. And as you said,
maybe we have to rip off the bandaid. Maybe we have to just stop taking the drugs. Maybe
We have to just stop taking the addiction that we are in and just get clean and get the Bitcoin system.
And also with drug addicts, like if you completely cut them, like there's usually a crash happening.
Like I'm not super into this topic, but I can imagine things like that happening.
So anyways, Bitcoin will do what Bitcoin will do and we will see how it progresses.
I just think if Bitcoin goes up too quickly and then in the same time,
Fiat goes down too, too fast.
There might be bad things happening along the way,
but either way we will come to a nice Bitcoin, a nice Bitcoin land.
I just don't think like the slower it goes, like for me, it's, it's, it's the better,
but I'm not, I'm not certain about that.
If we see fear, there's the poison.
Maybe we have to get the poison out of the system faster.
I am not fully sure on that.
I so I look at the United States government.
Maybe this is where I was going with it.
The United States government is embracing Bitcoin
and a lot of governments are looking at Bitcoin and
Bitcoin, from my perspective, is is discovered
and utilized to separate money from state.
But what if the state and my good friend
Paul Tarantino talks about this. What if the state kind of mapped out and gamed out
their debt problem with fiat and
came up with the answer? And the answer is you need a heat
sink like Bitcoin, like gold, like oil.
So I'm also reading Mark Goodwin's book, The Bitcoin Dollar, and I'm trying to understand this.
If you can yoke the dollar
to one of these asset classes, like gold originally
and then oil.
And you always keep,
you keep medium exchange out of it
and you keep unit of account out of it.
So you don't care if the dollar is store value.
You just need it to be a medium exchange.
Means you need to buy,
if you want to buy that thing,
you have to use dollars.
And you want to keep unit of account.
So if you want to measure that thing,
you measure it in dollars.
And therefore then the wealth in the world
stays in dollars.
Everything is measured in dollars.
And I think this is what Jeff Booth talks about. So Bitcoin fails as a medium exchange. It fails like gold failed. So I think that's why, and again, I look at, you know, Bitcoin is built utilizing SHA-256 technology, which is CIA government technology.
and they're embracing it now.
And if the way they're embracing it, though,
is by hurting it all together and ghettoizing it.
So making it a stagnant asset,
sort of like a pet rock.
And if that thing grows in value,
they can sell dollars
and have everything measured in dollars.
So they can sell treasuries to the stable coins.
If you want to buy the thing you got to buy the stable coin And then so you want to buy this stable coin you got they got to buy us treasuries and you have this beautiful mechanism you actually build a floor into the dollar because anytime the stable coin breaks peg and goes below there be large
institutions and pools of capital that want to buy dollars for less than the price of a dollar
and then you have a valuable dollar if it breaks the peg above you know now you could buy more than
a dollar for a dollar so um it's i i i think that that's sort of the the end game or the way to
extend the life of the dollar is is the government's going to look to use bitcoin as a heat sink the
way they used and so you had the petrodollar right after we broke the peg with gold we had
the petrodollar if you wanted to buy the oil and use energy in the world you had to go with dollars
Even if both parties didn't trade in dollars in their home currency, you know, they have
native currencies, they had to use dollars as an intermediary to buy oil.
And oil is priced in dollars.
And, you know, yeah, so I think a lot about that convergence.
And alongside the Bitcoin treasuries companies, which is a centralizing force and sort of
the lack of interest in sort of the other qualities of Bitcoin.
It's super interesting. And I like I'm big on that. There's like the Bitcoin system and
the fiat system and you can hold Bitcoin in the fiat system. And if, if I do not hope
that for anyone, but it's a possibility that if you hold Bitcoin in the fiat system, which
an ETF is, or like in the treasury company or like on exchange, even, uh, you might end
with zero Bitcoin. Like I do not hope that for anyone. Like I do hope that your IOU is actually
holding up and you get your Bitcoin at some point in kind. But it's just a reality that
those are not really your Bitcoin and they're in the fiat system. And you might end up with
zero Bitcoin because it's just a piece of paper that you in the end have. That's why as long as
as we can push self custody and maybe like spending a Bitcoin and kind of trying to have
more and more Bitcoin ecosystems and full node operators and all those things out there.
I think as long as we have that, we are good. And only individuals that hold it in the field
system will suffer from that.
Yeah, I think about this a lot too. And I've sort of mixed feelings. On one hand,
you have to have your Bitcoin in self-custody to get the qualities and the good stuff from Bitcoin.
But you become your own counterparty risk to yourself and to anyone else in your life that
you want to inherit your Bitcoin or get access to Bitcoin in case anything happened to you.
But for thousands of years or hundreds of years, people have trusted institutions with their wealth.
you've never been able to take full
self-custody of this kind of wealth
before. And you think about
why necklaces were created so that you
didn't hide your money under a mattress.
You put your shelves on your neck.
So if someone wants to steal your money in the middle of the neck,
in the middle of the night, they had to wake you up to take it
off your neck.
It wasn't to show off the money. It was to protect
the money, to keep it on you, to have
self-custody of your shelves.
But at some point,
you look at Rye Stones
and the biggest Rye Stones
and then the village were kept in the middle of the village because it was an honest transparent
ledger people knew who worked or owned that particular stone and even if you stole it
the idea of the value behind the stone and who and who should accrue to was still in everyone's
ledger because it was small enough uh economy where they could kind of keep track of those things
but trust is in the system and i i my my guess is if bitcoin overtakes the entire economy
and becomes all three things,
store of value, medium exchange,
and unit of account,
I do think a lot of people
and institutions and entities
would probably have,
not take self-custody of their Bitcoin.
And I don't think that would be
the worst thing in the world.
You know, I think a lot of people
would look at it and say,
hey, how much of my stack
do I have to have in self-custody
for various reasons?
And what rights and access
do I have to have
to the other part of the stack
to move it into my getaway stack
if I needed to change my threat vector.
Right?
I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't keep all his wealth at his crib.
He's a very wealthy person.
People know he's wealthy.
And even though he doesn't keep it there,
he still hires bodyguards probably in security.
I mean, everyone has to look at their own threat vector.
I was talking to David Callum last night,
and he would be scared of a wrench attack.
And he doesn't understand maybe multi-sig
and different ways to secure your Bitcoin.
But I think if he owned a Bitcoin,
I don't think he'd have a problem
if he kept it at fidelity
and for him avoided his biggest nightmare,
someone coming to his home
and trying to take his Bitcoin,
you know, or any of his wealth.
So I think that will evolve too.
And I think the way you self-custody
will probably evolve over time.
I mean, we're very,
it's a very nascent technology
in that respect, all of this.
So in how we look at it,
how we interact with it,
I mean, like corporations, I mean, they're going to have to really look at how they hold it.
Do you have three people who, you know, five people who have keys and three of them can move the coins?
Do you have nine people?
Do you have 17?
Like, how do you figure this out?
Do you keep it at three different custodians and have only certain people who can call the custodian?
I mean, how do countries then, you know, buy and store Bitcoin?
And that's another thing.
I think, you know, a lot of people think the U.S. is going to buy Bitcoin.
And I really don't.
I don't think the United States government is interested in buying something and never selling it.
I don't think they have, like, you'd have to buy Bitcoin and sell it to actually capture gains for, like, I just don't see the United States government or really a lot of governments looking to do that in the near term.
especially killing the notion of their own golden goose.
The United States government gets to issue $100 bills that cost them 7 cents to produce.
Think about a supermarket that's operating at 1% to 2% profit margins.
They're operating at over 99% operating margin or profit margin on their goods.
They're not going to let anyone mess with that business.
But maybe they need Bitcoin to prolong this business.
They totally do.
They need, if Bitcoin goes up in value, stable coins have to buy more U.S. treasuries.
And when, when a stable coin is issued, the United States government gets a two for one.
So they issue the stable coin.
That's a dollar.
And the stable coin has to go buy a U.S.
Treasury, which is a second dollar to back the first dollar.
So $1 bought, $2 sold.
So it's a great business.
And I think that's part of the reason the price of Bitcoin is through any,
whether it's nefarious or just again, I think there's a lot of parties involved
that are moving a lot of Bitcoin through regulated markets.
And I think those parties have an opportunity to work together
to push price in different directions,
whether it's to burn short sellers or to liquidate longs or whatever it might be.
I mean, we've seen a lot of manipulation in gold markets.
So I think the United States government is trying to roll out the Genius Act
and the big, beautiful bill and all the regulatory clarity on stable coins
and onshore as much stable coins as possible to sell U.S. treasuries
and then let the price of Bitcoin potentially rip
or at least step ladder up a lot more and issue more treasuries behind all those stable coins i
see like uh the same was gold and paper bills were now bitcoin and stable coins it's like almost a
brett and woods 2.0 where uh the the the us is already saying like um we want bitcoin to flourish
in in america and we will give the rest of the world stable coins like that's a genius thing to
do it's monetary colonialism i mean those u.s dollar stable coins whatever you want to call them
i think we should call them digital political currency units um but those things will get into
markets that the dollar has never been able to get into like iran and china and russia and it'll
help uh bring down and that will be a stepladder improvement for all the economies around the world
who are on a crappier coin than the dollar and i think that's where you know you see stable coins
is a bridge to Bitcoin or an on-ramp, but I think it extends the life of the dollar because
it brings it, that's a much better unit of account for a lot of economies.
It's a slower death for a lot of people around the world to be on the dollar than it is to
be on their local currency.
I mean, if you look at Turkey and all those, like if you have like a inflation rate of
like 100 or over 100% a year like that, like it's not, the US dollar is almost like a Bitcoin
at that point right and if you look at bitcoin treasury companies i mean these are right now the
companies coming to this uh strategy are failing companies uh you know meta planet they can't get
people you know covert destroyed their hotel business so how do we change it up what can we
do we could become a bitcoin treasury company right and then that was a lot of um exterior
external qualities too beyond just being getting you're tethering yourself to the bitcoin price
You get great marketing, you get sort of community support, all these different things.
But it's been struggling and failing companies that have come to this game plan first.
And the companies that will come last are your most successful companies.
They have the least incentive to change what they're doing.
um but uh and so it's going to be countries that have you know that the dollar has uh
taken over their local currency and they don't have a local currency and or they have a failing
currency and these will be the countries that turn to bitcoin first like a la el salvador right
they didn't have their own currency they were already dollarized so um they have the least skin
the game and keeping their own currency so they can move to the you know sort of try to experiment
with bitcoin and so i think you'll see tiny failing countries try bitcoin first and that
will be exciting i would love to see some countries that you know really turn everything around for
their citizens by jumping on the bitcoin uh bandwagon right and and moving to a bitcoin standard
uh i'd love to see a con a company continue to thrive like what we've seen with el salvador in
a short period of time and that sort of remains to be written but it'll be amazing to see a country
rise to the cream of the crop uh through a bitcoin standard um but it'll be countries without their
own currency i think first or failing currencies yeah and i've 100 agree that's why i was so
surprised to see uh president of the united states talking about bitcoin being at bitcoin conferences
investors being openly about, oh, maybe we do, we buy some, maybe we do this and that.
Like just the presence of him at a Bitcoin conference that honestly surprised me that
it felt so out of place.
Like it felt like this should happen in 2035 or 2030 or something like that.
For me also El Salvador felt out of place.
Like El Salvador happened way earlier than I thought it will happen.
I came into Bitcoin in 2020 and had my theories of if Bitcoin is successful, how it will go.
And I completely underestimated developments on a nation's side of things. I overestimated
how quick it will go with companies. Like I thought we have like 100, 200 companies within
like 2022, but we are not even at 200 publicly traded companies yet. So it's interesting how
countries are already doing that like yeah unreal for me i put on my tinfoil hat and i wonder if
you know salvador is like a cia project to test out in a small economy what putting it on bitcoin
standard would look like um and also sort of um aligning bitcoin with sort of uh a more you know
people look at things with broad strokes and it's not that you know you could say el salvador is not
a democratic country anymore and i don't think democracy is necessarily the best thing humanity
will ever come up with but you know that's used that's a double-edged sword right and i i think
that um you know i i i don't i don't think trump is an outsider um i do think his family got debanked
maybe but i don't think that they're outside the establishment he was a prior president already um
And I think he was installed to roll out the digital surveillance network.
And I think that starts with, you know, paving the way for stable coins.
And notice how they put a really broad net on crypto.
And sort of, and they've sort of sanctioned all, like Ripple and ETH are now like sort of legal securities
or just kind of gotten backdoored around the Howey test.
And all these things should, you know, I hate government intervention,
but I do think, you know, we're going to have a government,
they should be intervening in predatory behavior.
And I think a lot of these things have been predatory
and not in good faith and are kind of registered security.
So, or not on registered securities.
So I still, why is Trump bear hugging Bitcoin?
Why were, you know, I think it was great that we had politicians come speak to us,
but it felt more like we were at a certain politician's rally rather than they were asked
to come and present their ideas to us for us to think through their ideas.
And I think we, you know, we might have got a lot of short-term gains,
and I use we very loosely here.
There is no real Bitcoin community.
but if there is a movement, you know, we've really tethered our movement to one political party.
And, you know, political, I think both political parties are used to divide and conquer us.
So you could see, you know, what if the Republican Party loses the midterm elections?
Then, you know, the other party wants to do a whole bunch of,
they want to repeal a lot of EOs and laws and new regulation.
I mean, what if we get a different president from a different party in three years?
A lot can change.
A lot of the things that Trump has done that have been positive for Bitcoin have been done through EO not through sort of the voting process and you know through more mainstream legislation
So those things can change in the headwinds.
And you could see how Bitcoin could be a political football, you know, years from now in the
United States government.
And that this could, you know, humans have been FOMOing in and out of Bitcoin for 16
years now.
So you could see how, what if we did go up to like, you know, a million dollars by April of next year.
And then, you know, things change in the political environment.
And there's, you know, recession and Bitcoin goes down to back down to 42K or 47K or, you know.
And if Bitcoin were to go below 69K, I think that would really put a wrinkle in the narrative of, you know, always having higher lows.
So, you know, it's interesting how, you know, how the hand has been played.
You know, I would have liked to have seen the Bitcoin community just continue to be sort of like the orange party.
And, you know, you can come and bend the knee, tell us what you'll do for us.
but like we're not necessarily going to long term put ourselves blindly behind a candidate or a party.
You know, or just appeal to one side and not the other.
And it's made it a very, you know, with Trump and the meme coins that he launched and some of that bullshit.
And, you know, it really hasn't.
In 2025, outside the Bitcoin bubble, you still go to like something like family barbecues or Thanksgiving.
And there's a lot of people on the left or from the Democratic, whatever you want to call it, like who hear about Bitcoin and are just annoyed right away or have bias against Bitcoiners because of their association with some of these things.
So, you know, yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that goes and whether, you know, short term games lead to long term pain there.
Yeah, the association is interesting because people and I see it in the mainstream media
all the time.
Bitcoin rise partly because of Trump.
And that's the only reason they always mention, like, I don't know how it is in America, but
in the Austrian mainstream news cycle, that's when they represent Bitcoin and they show
how Bitcoin was rising.
This always say, yeah, because Trump is in office and he is a Bitcoin and that's why
Bitcoin is now on the rise. Ah, I don't know. Like that. There's some truth in that, but
you let a lot of truth out.
Yeah. That doesn't discuss fiat and inflation and any of these things that are truly driving
the network effects of Bitcoin and it turns people off and it helps them sort of, um,
yeah, just, just, um, I forget that, you know, just push it aside and, and the past based
on, you know, kill the messenger type stuff.
I also find it interesting how in the EU, they are very open
and pushing forward the CBDC.
And in America, it's a topic where like there's no CBDC.
But at the same time, we have stable coins.
And I'm like, maybe the stable coins are just the CBDCs of America
with a different label on them.
Like they can be controlled.
They're digital.
Like what's the difference to a CBDC?
Yeah.
I mean, this is where I think you really get into debate over definitions around, you know, how involved the central bank is with the coin.
But I think of things like PayPal already as like a CBDC, right?
They can turn me on.
They can turn me off.
They can, you know, go fund me.
They could take all the money away from the Canadian truckers.
They could turn your bank account on and off.
And they can do this at the individual level.
And they could do this at the zip code level.
and it's just in the United States
it's just masked behind a private
public partnership
so the government doesn't track every word you say
Palantir does
you know we didn't turn the government
turn off your money Bank of America
did
but under whose orders and direction
and
I think that's
you know it's just crazy to me how much
you know people want to think
that Trump and Musk were outsiders
and they were just able to buy Twitter and become president of the United States.
And then, like, Musk is not even a United States citizen.
And he's, like, heading up Doge and access to every computer system in the government.
And, you know, him and Teal go back to PayPal.
and if you look at the PayPal mafia
I mean
every product they've come out with since PayPal
which was built on
which was trying to basically be a private Bitcoin
was trying to be a private money PayPal
originally was trying to be a currency
and then they just became Rails
to tell me
Musk doesn't understand currency
is crazy
considering how far back he goes with this thing
and I think his goal with X is to turn it into like WeChat
where you do everything from book your dentist appointment
to pay for the dentist bill, which is just a CBDC right there,
you know, when he partners with the government.
And every business Musk is in is subsidized by a United States government,
from satellites to, oh, man, I'm blanking here, but, like, to Tesla.
And, like, people want to say, you know, Musk is a smart guy,
and, like, Tesla is, like, the stupidest idea ever.
electric cars.
I mean,
but anyway, I digress,
but I
think Trump's been installed to sort of
roll out all these things and
get people to digest it.
I think Biden was put in to like
go crazy with the inflation
because the right would never
accept that at first and then
they would never accept sort of
the infringement on digital rights
under a Biden administration.
It was the same way like Trump.
it was great to roll out COVID and the pandemic during Trump.
Because no, the right would have revolted if, if the left did that.
But if it came from the right, it kind of got through a lot easier.
So I don't know.
I think, I think that's, that's the thing.
Like, I think that Bitcoiners are not really thinking about
like any threats anymore.
Like it's, it almost seems like Bitcoin is like, Hey, we won.
The state's going to pump our bags.
Bitcoin companies are going to pump the price.
And we're here.
We're in Valhalla.
And Bitcoin was built to be anti-fragile, which means that it's going to get tested over and over.
And the tests are going to get bigger and bigger.
So I would only imagine something's coming we just can't even imagine or envision that's going to test Bitcoin in a very different way than ever before.
and and i would imagine the state's behind it that's a super interesting thing do you like how
do you like what if if someone is listening to this like what can we do to make sure like we
have bitcoin and we have as many freedom rights as possible with bitcoin do you remember proof
of keys where every like january 3rd trace mayor you know it's proof of keys and won't take their
key you know their coins off i mean i think self-custody is is the most important thing to
the movement right now again i already said earlier like i don't think all coins will be
in self-custody in the future but i think if we want true price discovery and if humanity wants
the qualities of bitcoin i think we need to take self-custody of coins which means people need to
just like be educated i don't think just because you want to take self-custody doesn't mean you
You should take 100% self-custody of all your coins right away or all your sats right away.
Or, you know, maybe there's, maybe you go to single SIG first, maybe then you go to multi-SIG.
Maybe you learn when you're a multi-SIG that you think single SIG is better.
I mean, there's so much learning here.
And then I think circular economies, people actually using Bitcoin as a medium exchange.
And obviously the biggest obstacle there is the taxation of capital gains on Bitcoin transactions,
which is if the United States government truly liked Bitcoin and loved Bitcoin,
they would treat it as nice as the dollar. They would treat it like money.
But you notice they haven't repealed any or your tax on any time you spend your Bitcoin in America
if there's capital gains. That would be the best thing the United States government could do for
Bitcoin. And the, I think the idea of removing capital gains tax, uh, for Bitcoin transactions,
if they're used to buy something like a product or service, that would be amazing. Like I already
spent my Bitcoin. I earn most of my money in directly in Bitcoin and I spend whatever I can.
I have a freelancer that works fully on Bitcoin. I work on the second one. Uh, we're doing more and
more there. So it's I love having a cash flow directly in Bitcoin that doesn't even touch
fiat. Like the more I can get there, the happier, the more the more freaked I am like that. That's
really cool. I do this like banks a lot and what they're charging and what they're doing and all
of those things. So I do like that we have that Bitcoin option and Bitcoin as a media exchange.
I thought they talked about like some 600 US dollar lift on transaction in the US.
I have no clue what the statement is.
None of that passed.
I don't think any of that passed.
That was a lot of talk.
I think there's been, I think a lot of the political rhetoric around Bitcoin the last
year or two has been a grift, a fundraising grift.
Nothing other than Ross getting released.
released. I mean, not a lot is and repeal, you know, I look a lot has happened. I don't want to
gloss over things. But I think, you know, in terms of campaigning on the United States government,
buying Bitcoin and strategic Bitcoin reserve. I think a lot of that has been a great way to raise
money from Bitcoiners and the greater community of crypto and deliver on the crypto side and not a lot
on the Bitcoin side.
And I think that, you know,
price going up is great,
but Bitcoin is like, you know,
buying Bitcoin because treasury companies
are buying Bitcoin or buying Bitcoin
because governments might buy Bitcoin
is, it should be cherries on top.
Like Bitcoin should be enough.
Like you don't need yield on your Bitcoin.
You shouldn't be, you don't need governments
to buy your bags.
Like if you're thinking long term that this is truly savings, you're not even planning on selling.
Just continue to accumulate whatever you can and stack.
Yeah, I just I don't think we're going to I mean, even Bo Hines, he just left after seven months with the government.
And like what was a kind he went to Tether again, which indicates where this is going.
I mean, he didn't even go to like a river or a Swan.
I mean, he went to a stable coin company.
And he was one of the people who were most excited about being in the government.
There's a lot of stable coin talk.
Yeah.
I mean, there's even like at the last Bitcoin conference.
It was all stable coins.
This remakes of stable coins was really fun.
That's like never heard so many times the talks about stable coins, which is kind of interesting
because we, I think as Bitcoiners, we have to stay vigilant.
We have to stay active and be aware of things.
And people got something from this podcast.
I do enjoy it a lot.
I learned about the necklace thing that was new for me.
It was a small nugget in there.
I wasn't aware how necklace came to be,
but the theory makes a lot of sense.
I have to go deep on that.
That's really cool.
I have one question for each and every one of my returning guests.
And the question is, what have you learned outside of Bitcoin since your last appearance?
How to take care of an RV.
I'm in an RV now.
And so I'm learning a whole new set of skills.
It's kind of like taking care of a house.
But there's just a few other things that you got to do around this thing.
And that's what I've been putting my brainpower into.
Yeah, this RV.
What have I learned?
Oh, man. I've learned my kids are smarter than me.
And I can't learn.
Yeah, it's wild.
But they're intimidating now.
So they're turning 13 and nine.
So each birthday is coming up.
So, yeah, my son, he's like a young man.
And if I need to know anything, I just either Google it or ask him.
He'll tell me the answers.
And it'll interpret it better and explains to me better than Google will.
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Really cool.
We have an entertainer in the podcast where the previous guest is asking a question for the next guest, as you know.
And the last guest asks you, without knowing what the next guest is, and the last guest asked you, what changed Bitcoin for you?
What changed Bitcoin for me?
Like, you mean, like, what made me get it?
Uh, no, like, uh, maybe poorly formulated, but like what, uh, what did change for you
because of Bitcoin?
It's lack of nihilism, having no faith in the future.
I got a lot more faith in my ability to steer and create my own future, uh, and take it
back.
Uh, as a kid, I always felt like I could create my own future.
And then in adulthood is sort of that, that, that, uh, that feeling started to wane.
And I didn't realize that it was inflation that was just taking so much from me and making it so hard for me to keep up and get ahead and do all the things I wanted to do for my family.
So it gave me the ability to almost like stop and smell the roses, you know.
So, you know, so much of, you know, we talk about Bitcoin being time, but when you don't
have a lot of time or you're, you know, you're, let's say you're working a lot of hours or
something, you start to outsource certain things to get by.
And I found a lot of things I was outsourcing to kind of focus on my fiat job.
wanted to, I wanted to do myself like parenting, you know, I wanted more time to be there with
my kids and parent. Um, and so, um, and, and that's, yeah, I don't know. It's a hard thing
to explain, but, um,
It's an interesting thing of like outsourcing parenting while you want to do parenting and
then you go to the future. But, and, and most people do that, you know, like that's, uh,
How homeschooling is very popular in the Bitcoin ecosystem,
but not that popular in the general population.
Yeah.
And or even just taking care of this trailer.
Like I want to do these things myself.
And before Bitcoin, I never felt like I had the time and that I always had to like
go fiat mine and that I just if, you know,
just pay someone else to do that.
If it cost me less than what I make per hour or something, you know, my fiat job.
And I lost a lot of skills doing that.
And I think it's a pleasure of doing things yourself.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's just kind of made me more in control of my time,
understand the value of my time,
or not storing it in something that can be taken from me like the dollar,
what I'm trying to store in there.
So, yeah, just a lot of trying to understand time
and how to choose how to spend your time.
You know, what is it?
What does it mean to have free time?
You know so many people are just like I don have free time I don have time to do anything you know and and what if you do have time What do you want to do And then sometimes you have to do even if you have
as that's interesting, it's like, I do chores,
you do chores and I do that in my free time.
Is that free time?
Yeah, you know, if you choose to do the chore
during your free time or is that a,
and so that's perspective, right, too.
Why do I have to look at this as not my free time?
is all this is my free time you know um and and then just also like attitude yeah yeah and then
you think about something like just the notion of cost of living like oh you're gonna have another
kid like wow can you afford that you know and it's like you're putting a price tag on life you know
like um it's a weird thing like um you know i was coming home from work the other day and there was
I was a DJ on the radio.
I like her, but I don't like everything she says.
Seems like a lot of propaganda.
And she was talking about Mother's Day.
And she was like, you know, there's a survey that came out or a study that mothers make $160,000 a year if they got paid for what they do.
So make sure your family appreciates you.
And now you're putting a price tag on motherhood, right?
And you're also like pitting the mother versus the father in this weird way.
Because maybe the father doesn make I don know where they get this number where motherhood worth Because now that assuming that you get if you get paid to be a mother that you get paid 365 days 24 hours a day or is it nine hours a day Like how does this work
And, and now you're saying like, Oh, like honey, you should give me, like, it's just really like
puts all this price tag and this notion that life costs money. Like, you know, uh, I have deer
sometimes in my woods they're behind my house like i'm sure they're not sitting there like should we
have another baby like will that cost us money like you know they just figure out like what we
need to do to live and eat and sleep and um so you see how it disconnects us from just like being
alive this whole notion of how much things cost um i'm not saying money's not useful but just around
like the way they've financialized every aspect of living.
It's, uh, and putting a price tag on motherhood. That's, that's an impossible job to do. Like
that seems like, oh yeah. Like it seems anti-family it's anti-fam. Yeah. Like what, what is,
was it worth that my mother raised me? Like, like everything or how much should she have paid if
that, you know, if that was a job that paid, you know, and then making that part of the
the economic conversation in a household. And yeah, I don't know.
Um, I agree with you, man. That, uh, makes a whole lot of sense. And, uh, it sounds like
a very healthy attitude and it a very Bitcoin attitude Uh I I hear uh that that really cool Um before I let you go where uh where can people find you and and ask your questions They can find me on X or Twitter at said Youngman C
I host the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.
We drop a show weekly, a philosophical podcast about Bitcoin's effects on society, culture and economics.
That's at X underscore Bitcoin Matrix and now Bitcoin Center, Bitcoin underscore center.
live Tuesdays at 8 p.m. That sounds very well trained. Oh man, I never get that right. Trying.
You got to promote yourself in this space. I'm not good at that. I'm working on that.
Yeah, check it out and hit me up on X. My DMs are open. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cedric,
for being on. And also thank you so much for everyone that is watching and listening for
joining us today as always. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Bitcoin Matrix.
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