Macro Noise, (Micro)Strategy, Fiscal Dominance, & Bitcoin Banks

Michael Tanguma (00:00.176) there. Brian Cubellis (00:01.342) somewhat. Jackson Mikalic (00:03.034) Hey Michael, you don't know about gold delivery? Welcome back to the last trade. It's good to see your smiling faces. It's been a long day. It's been a busy day. So I'm excited to wrap things up for the day here with Michael Tanguma, Tim Cotsman and Brian Cabellas. Gentlemen, nice to see you. How are we doing? Tim Kotzman (00:22.126) Great. Michael Tanguma (00:22.992) Jackson has an extra big smile on his face. He likes talking with clients and helping them secure their wealth. And he gets to jump into from heavy deals into a heavy conversation. So he's extra smirky today. Brian Cubellis (00:23.345) well. Jackson Mikalic (00:35.974) You know, everyone, everyone knows it follows us on video. can't keep a straight face, so I'm working on it. But anyways, what is, what is going on here? I don't like this chart right now. We got the on-ramp terminal pulled up and you have about $96,000 per Bitcoin. It's been chopping around a lot this week. I think when we recorded last week, so we're recording Thursday, February 6th, a week ago we were looking at $105,000 per Bitcoin. So got a nice like 10 % correction. I think, and part of that was due to the tariffs announced over the weekend, which were quickly reversed. Art of the deal, know, Trump had some tariffs he proposed for Mexico, Canada, and China. And what we saw on Monday was some negotiations, which ended up in a market reversal. So I think, Tim, you were tweeting about it over the weekend, how you thought, You thought a lot of those price, a lot of the price action to the downside would be wiped out and we would be back to even by close of market on Monday. And it looked like you were right. So gentlemen, what's going on here over the course of the week? We've been chopping around. What are some thoughts? Michael Tanguma (01:47.964) I think two things that come to mind is we're really in a bubble, Like just a silo in the information and ways we look at the space. Bitcoin's still a very small asset in the global macro landscape. Anecdotally, I've known a large party that's held Bitcoin for a while on behalf of others, like a fund product. And a lot of times when you're in a fund-based vehicle, you're helping provide conviction and confidence for the individuals. and had known that there was some natural, I don't know, disconnect maybe in the underlying value. It was a trade they had gotten in early and they had helped them see through this bear market, but watching them get out of a position recently. And I share that because those individuals have held, you watch it go up to 108, you see it start to retrace to 93. And if you're not following the space, you see that and you're like, wait, I just held for an additional three or four years. What happens if it goes back? to 17, 18, whatever that is, like, let me get out of my position. So I think that there's a lot of individuals that just do not necessarily follow and track the markets, know where we're heading. And people want to realize their gains in this asset class. And then the other side of that, goes back to it's just a very small asset as it relates to everything else. So when people need a source liquidity, it's going to be one of the first things people go for. And that's ties into the volatility with leverage. I was talking with an individual. today about a lending product that he was in and I was recognizing that rehypothecation and leverage is very risky, specifically in this asset class, because it can easily go to 120 and then back down to 70 because of where it sits in the market landscape. And if there's some crazy tariffs, Japan trade, whatever it is, the market can easily reverse. And maybe it's for a few days, but if you're off size there, you can lose a large part of your stack. And that's where the volatility comes in that we're heading to. And I think we'll end up seeing more of it. So I think there's a lot of factors and there's probably others at play, but those are the two that come to mind. Jackson Mikalic (03:47.855) So you're saying I shouldn't take out a Bitcoin backed loan. Brian Cubellis (03:48.06) Yeah, that's... Michael Tanguma (03:51.292) Sourcing liquidity is important to manage day to day expenses. I think the reality is that you want to be insanely conservative because the market is highly volatile. Brian Cubellis (04:01.395) Yeah, that was the biggest takeaway from the weekend and sort of the first few trading days of the week was effectively what we've seen before in various instances of geopolitical uncertainty or sort of macroeconomic shocks that occur where Bitcoin, this 24 seven digital asset is able to be traded on the weekends. And so you're going to see. short term spouts of hyper volatility effectively when these events occur. And that is, in my mind, completely separate from the longer term fundamental trajectory of Bitcoin. And in this instance, most recently, it's like this sort of mini tariff trade war that Trump sort of kicked off. It's like, well, if you think about it a little bit more medium to long term, like tariffs aren't necessarily bad for Bitcoin. There's an argument that it's actually pretty positive and bullish for Bitcoin. think Jeff Park of Bitwise had a good thread on Twitter about this the other day. there's a lot of fundamental merit around the idea that a more tariff heavy policy from the government would actually be good for risk assets like Bitcoin, ultimately. But you see that near term shock, that near term volatility. get absorbed by Bitcoin because again, it's like this thing that can be traded at all times, particularly on the weekend when these things tend to seem to tend to occur. And yeah, this is a great chart from BlackRock. Jackson Mikalic (05:33.188) Yeah, I'll... I like this one, Brian. Yeah, this chart from BlackRock. guess they put it out at some point in the fall, but it's the performance of the S &P 500 gold and Bitcoin following major geopolitical events. I don't think we'd necessarily categorize what happened over the weekend as a major geopolitical event, but it still kind of shuffles up the board and potentially could have longer term implications. think we've avoided that for now, but it doesn't mean that tariffs won't be on the table in the future. And so Bitcoin is resilient. At the end of the day, you can see here there's been a handful of major geopolitical events just in the past five years. And Bitcoin's price performance in the 60 days following that has been positive and in many cases quite attractive, 20 % in 60 day return to 130%. The lowest 60 day return is 15%. And so I think this just goes to demonstrate Bitcoin's uncorrelated nature. The fact that it is a global asset, it exists without exists outside of the existing US dollar centric monetary world order. So, yeah, I mean, I think over the long term, this it's all positive for Bitcoin. One other chart I wanted to pull up as well, going back to the terminal, just to demonstrate where we are historically in the cycle, because we like to look at what's going on on a week by week basis. But this is a great one just to demonstrate the price performance post-having. So anyone who is on video, you can see there's lines here that demonstrate when the halving occurred and then the price performance following that. And so we're this little purple line here where you can really see that we still have seen nice appreciation since the halving over 100 % appreciation, but we have far, we have much more room to grow here. We're still early in the cycle. If you look back historically, like 2021, 2017, the year following the halving is really where Bitcoin's price tends to be explosive. So why we're chopping around. Jackson Mikalic (07:33.124) you know, 90,000, a hundred thousand dollars. People are getting bored of that. But we have, this is another chart, I think that just to set the table is Bitcoin's price is nominated than gold. So we actually haven't even, we may have reached new all time highs or just about in line with where Bitcoin's price was denominated than gold in the 2021 cycle. So as Tim likes to say, we're going higher. That's the main takeaway from a couple of charts here. Tim Kotzman (08:03.054) Yeah, all of this just calls to mind that if you don't like the price action, just go on a short vacation or a regular vacation, right? Three, five, seven days, you'll probably be okay. I mean, literally, I've had people ask the gentleman that orange-pilled me, like, what do you do when the price is down? He's like, I wash my car, I go drive my car, I go skiing. Like, you just have to turn it off. And that obviously takes a level. conviction to start with. Michael Tanguma (08:34.684) Yeah, I've had a lot, you being in space for a while, you meet folks that come in from traditional finance or other markets and have wealth and capital and they invest and they, the funniest that the guy referenced was his distraction. He had to go start another business because... He just calls it his distraction to keep him away from looking at a stack of Bitcoin because he has this number that he's waiting for. And between now and there, you're just trying not to effectively get shaken out. do think this is an important part for like what, Tim, you do on the Treasury's pod. And as you grow your brand in education and what we're doing here is this is why Bitcoin first and education matters so much because historically in this space, it's been so early. You have the hardcore Bitcoin firms that go deep in Bitcoin. Bitcoin only education, but historically financial service, TradFi, Wall Street, everything related to professional services haven't really interacted on that side. So they end up as exit liquidity because they come in, they chase the price, but then when the volatility happens, they have no idea what they're holding. And so it's almost like accelerated business cycles. So it's just like happening in fast time back and forth. And I've never traded, you know, in any professional. circumstance, but I've talked to like Ralph from on rent Mina and he referenced being on the trading floor in Glen as well. And they reference like trading is, it's like the market knows what you're thinking, right? So like when you're ready to go long and it goes short, when you go short, it goes long. Like it's kind of like a sentiment in the market. And so it's similar in Bitcoin in the sense of like, it's always going to take the path. of most resistance. So when you're like thinking it's over, it's when it's going to rip and when you're thinking it can't go any higher or it can't go any lower, it's just going to like take off. And so you see a lot of that. So I think it's always going to follow that path because it's just a market. It's just the free market at play in real time. And that's always going to play off of people's sentiment and what they're thinking because it's always going to take money from both sides at the most like optimal time. Brian Cubellis (10:36.756) I mean, that was definitely true for me in the sense of like, I was definitely in the camp of, we breached 100K, that it would be, maybe we're there for a little bit, but that was such an important psychological barrier that then the sort of floodgates would be opened in terms of demand and people realizing they needed exposure and we would sort of gap to 125. And obviously that hasn't happened. We've sort of from, you a little under 110 back to 90 basically. And so yeah, exactly to your point, Michael, I think most people were in that camp and obviously the opposite happens. Michael Tanguma (11:13.716) And I don't think people have really gotten their exposure yet. It really feels like Sailor has been a large percentage of this uptick. And then obviously there has been sovereign stacking and there's been steady bid, but it's not like net new insurance. We don't see and hear a lot of it outside of kind of like, there's some themes coming with the new administration, but there's not like, and then a little bit of the speculative mania with some of the meme coins, but there's nothing like crazy happening yet. So I think we're still very early, like as Jackson pointed up in that cycle, looks like we're only, you know, we still have a ways to go. Jackson Mikalic (11:51.962) Yeah. One thing that I wanted to cover was just get the group's thoughts here on the press earlier this week with David Sachs. I had mentioned that unfortunately I've just been too busy and I haven't been able to keep up with just everything that's going on because it's actually remarkable just how much news there is in the Bitcoin digital asset space now that we have a you know, political and regulatory support for the asset class. So why don't you catch me up and catch the audience up on what happened earlier this week? Brian Cubellis (12:26.419) Well, yeah, I I would say it goes beyond just like crypto and digital assets on the sort of flurry of news that's occurring every day. You know, I was reminded of, you know, a famous quote, think, you know, something to the effect of there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen. Like that sort of in my mind perfectly encapsulates the past few weeks. It's like very hard to keep track of everything that's occurring from executive orders to everything that Doge and Elon are doing. And it feels like we're really, least in my mind, on the precipice and in the midst of some real government led change and actual rooting out of corruption that I never even really believed I would see in my lifetime and not this fast, right? in a span of a few weeks and every day sort of a new layer of corruption being exposed. And then, yeah, what you mentioned around Sachs and just on the crypto digital asset front, a wild press conference that he gave earlier this week, I think the biggest takeaway from that for me wasn't even necessarily directly related to Bitcoin. mean, he did he did reference that a Bitcoin reserve is top of mind for the working group and they're evaluating what that looks like. But the more important, I think, signal from what he was saying was effectively, you know, the U.S. government realizes the opportunity that they have with stable coins effectively. really, I think the goal of Sachs and his working group is going to be to lean into that and realize stable coins and crypto are not a threat. They're quite the opposite for US dominance, fiscal dominance in the sense that they are now viewing stable coins effectively as a way to plug the hole of demand for treasuries. this is going to allow them to effectively how I view it is like this is just a new way for them to kick the can down the road effectively and hang on to or maintain Brian Cubellis (14:50.108) the dollar's global reserve status by finding this new source of demand for our debt effectively. And that's going to be through basically allowing US-denominated stablecoins to flourish throughout the world. And so that was the biggest takeaway for me. And I think what Luke Grohmann has recently been on a ton of pods talking about similar dynamics and how this this stable coin effort and this realization on behalf of the US government could also just coincide with their recognition that effectively they're going to continue to debase the currency but spread dollar hegemony across the world through stable coins while at the same time effectively monetizing Bitcoin and allowing US citizens to store value in Bitcoin and transact in stable coins effectively. And so that was That was sort of the biggest signal of everything David Sachs walked through in that presser. He also had a line in there that I thought was worth calling out that he just said point blank, Bitcoin is an excellent store of value. So it's just, that doesn't seem big on the surface, but again, someone who has a government position saying that about Bitcoin, I do think is pretty important, but we're so wrapped up in everything else that's been happening over the past several months that it's hard to contextualize how actually kind of wild that is. Michael Tanguma (16:13.53) Yeah, I think one thing to add to that is encapsulates what Grumman said is we can have a, they're not mutually exclusive. We can have a weaker dollar, but stronger dollar dominance globally. And what's never reconciled in my mind is that from a retail or just Bitcoin demand, like for stables, you can get to larger amounts of treasury purchases from that. But what I think also coincides with it and it's still early but it feels right is that there will be requirements from banking level to hold certain amount of treasury reserves if you're going to hold bitcoin from a and we saw this what they try to do with the sab rule is like you have to have a one-to-one and i think like the rumor i've seen the number float out is 20 so if you have a billion dollars in bitcoin you need you know 20 200 million dollars and some kind of reserve from a treasury perspective or stables, which would effectively be the same thing. You could start to see how you can push out or increase the demand for charges where they're non-existent. And then the other thing, just to contextualize how much things have changed is, I don't know who this Twitter account is, it's a AP underscore abacus. He just always is talking about recent updates, but he has this tweet from, think today was says a year ago, every crypto exchange was receiving Wells notice. and fast tracking overseas operations. I don't know if you guys remember A16Z had set up shop in the UK, which they recently closed and brought it back here. But then he says, now, Gemini will go public, expect Kraken to do the same among others. And it's like impossible to communicate the shift that's happened in a mere three weeks. And this goes back to asymmetric information because if folks really knew what was happening here, there's only one direction at a certain point. It's just at what time it happens that... Yeah, most of this is just people aren't following this industry. They're busy with their daily lives. They don't have time to hear about sex and what's going on with kind of, know, cracking. Tim Kotzman (18:14.958) Yeah, that AP abacus site or X profile Andrew I had on the pod with the Bitcoin Treasuries pod a few weeks ago and yeah, he it's probably one of the highest alpha accounts you could possibly follow these just like Does three to six or seven bull points of like all right? Here's the text messages I'm getting today, and it's like wow that's pretty cool or at least interesting Michael Tanguma (18:29.681) Yeah. Michael Tanguma (18:41.304) Who is he like is he did he come on as an a non or is he came? It's like his persona his he came on physically. Like does he work in Trad Fire? What's the background with his with his knowledge? Tim Kotzman (18:51.298) He came from Tradfine, has all of those relationships. yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great to be able to follow along. And it's like, even if you don't know him, it's, you know, he's just kind of putting it out there every day or a couple of days a week as to what's going on on the inside track. Michael Tanguma (18:55.334) Very cool. Jackson Mikalic (19:11.683) Yeah, one thing I've been paying attention to is the state adoption or the race for the first Bitcoin strategic reserve at the state level. This kind of ties into an underlying theme that I've been thinking about for a little bit, where if you look at the most, if you look at the wealthiest counties in the United States over the past 20 years, I just pulled it up here on screen, but you can see that five of them. in the top 10 are in the DC metro area. And so what's happened here over the past, so from 2005 to 2025, what happened was there's less counties in the New York metro area. There's more counties now in the DC metro area and in Silicon Valley. So what I think is interesting here is that over the course of those 20 years, there's still of course wealth you can see here, like NASA County. in New York, in the New York metro area, but you have, can't even keep them straight, I think three in the Silicon Valley and then five in the DC metro area. What this tells me is that the wealth is concentrating around how massive the state has gotten since from 2005 to 2025. And this ties into the Doge conversation where I think we're going to start to see the reversal of that over the very long term. And I also think this ties into the Bitcoin treasury conversation at the state level, because I would wager it's going to be a long-term wager. But if you look at this chart in 20 years from now, the wealthiest counties in the United States will be cities and states that have led in Bitcoin adoption. Similarly, from 2005 to 2025, you've seen the growth of Silicon Valley and technology dominating and that becoming the one of the main industries of the United States, that's going to play out now in Bitcoin. And it's going to happen very quickly, but it will take time for these demographics to skew as talent and capital flee for better opportunities. But what is really exciting is that almost half of the states have some sort of Bitcoin legislation now introduced. So have 24 states that have some sort of legislation introduced. 16 states have strategic Bitcoin reserve bills that have been introduced. Brian Cubellis (21:27.635) Didn't two of them get killed like today? Not to be the bear, like I think that's worth pointing out. Jackson Mikalic (21:30.79) Yeah, two of them got killed in Wyoming. Yep. Yeah. Wyoming and North Dakota. So two of them got killed. think what's closest right now is Arizona, which would, which proposes allowing to invest up to 10 % of Arizona's public funds into Bitcoin. And then there's ones that aren't, I think, as exciting. I think it's Illinois, maybe right now they're proposing you could only fund the Bitcoin strategic reserve through gifts or grants or donations. So wouldn't actually allow. the state to use its own capital or taxes to fund the Bitcoin treasury for the state. But then one that was introduced today was particularly interesting with Iowa. They specifically called out that they could invest 5 % of money into digital assets, but it has to be digital assets that have a market cap greater than $750 billion. So right now that's only Bitcoin. So I don't know how they derive that number or what the relevance of it, of that number is, but I'm excited to see this longer term shift. It's going to play out pretty rapidly here in the United States, where the states that will dominate the next decade are going to be those that are Bitcoin forward. And the concentration of wealth that we've seen around the just massive, the massive entity that the United States government has become seven, $37 trillion of debt. massive spending in military health care, et cetera. And then of course lobbyists like that's going to dwindle over time if we, if we stay on this course, what are your guys thoughts on that? Brian Cubellis (23:07.699) I think it's all really good points. guess the questions in my mind would be is everything we're seeing with those sustainable or can it be persistent into the future? I.E. if we're looking at those numbers 20 years from now, does it it revert back? Like is it is what we're about to see over the next five to 10 years a blip on that broader trajectory or do we you know are the you know what are the counties 20 years from now? that are the concentration of wealth. Is it Texas, Michael? Is it, what are they calling the new Wall Street out in Dallas? Y'all Street. Yeah, maybe it's Y'all Street. Michael Tanguma (23:45.508) Y'all straight. Michael Tanguma (23:50.64) Yeah, I think like going back, it's kind of sad, as humans, how, how we follow whatever the, the okay thing is to write. Like it's kind of, I mean, it is what it is, but what Jackson's referring to, it doesn't, isn't it kind of funny you go on Twitter and you see these individuals now speak up. Like, what's the dude, that runs a 16 Z, Mark Andreessen was on Joe Rogan's pod, like in between, you know, Trump, the inauguration, it was out there. you know, explaining how everything was messed up. It's like finally found it. And that's just like a proxy for like all the different narratives that have switched when reality is this shouldn't be controversial. Like taxes, increase in taxes, increase in bureaucracy kill productivity because if you make money and deliver goods and then you have to give it to the state that's thousands of miles away to allocate it, like it's naturally not going to end up in the most productive way. And it turns out via these Doge initiatives that we're finding out we were paying Orlando Bloom 20 million dollars to take pictures of. Zelensky and that's not even the most like insane thing that they're finding it's too much to keep up with right and you can't really believe everything you see on Twitter too but you can see enough that it's just it's all coming to light how insane all of this has been so it ties back to well to your point Brian it like it has to go this way or we just like ultimately fail because you have to go back to meritocracy and letting like letting the capital flow, the capital flight flow, the innovation grow and that's what like we talk about the UAE and this notion of running it like a startup. Jackson and I were on a call, know, poor soul, like if you guys are listening to this and you're a Bitcoin writer firm that won't see it, us and we'll figure out a way to get you involved in the space, especially if you're talented because this guy was at an RIA and they're like gonna go down with the ship. This guy's running, the principle there is just like the, remind me of Vanguard stance where like that CEO is gone now but. He's just like, I'll just go down to the grave. The principal there is like, they're not gonna adopt it. And he's like, what do we do? And that just reminds me of the states and all these different places. And it's starting to feel more and more like the internet, right? Like how insane it would be to be like, well, we're just not gonna use the internet. You're like, well, good luck with that. It's like, so we're not gonna adopt the thing that stores wealth and lets us thrive. Well, yeah, good luck with that. And I've always had this, independent of being from Texas, it's like, when I was leaving New York, Michael Tanguma (26:10.044) in 19 right before COVID, I just looked around and there was all these things that just didn't make sense from growing up here and you just didn't you just felt it and it feel right. But what I knew was you had this like movement already pre-COVID and then accelerated post-COVID with Silicon Valley coming to Texas and it was really like Austin. And then you had more people coming from the coast and the beauty of Bitcoin, it has this nature of tech and finance. And so whoever wins that, whoever has a friendly climate because Austin has the tech climate that's that's friendly and people come and then Dallas has more of the finance. Whatever can create the right environment for that are going to be these future capitals of the world where Wall Street was from that because it had the access, you know, to the Fed and all the things associated Silicon Valley where that's come. I think we're to start to see that. And so Singapore is like looking, you know, UAE. But yes, to your point, I think it has to do with the friendly environment and then the people will go. And it has to do with regulators and administrators knowing that you want to bring the capital in. create environments that are conducive to creating productivity or you're just going to lose those people because the money can move now and people can move and work remote and you're starting to see certain people pick up on that and there's just laggards that are going to they think the world still exists how they grew up and it's fundamentally changed. Jackson Mikalic (27:29.059) Yeah, I think it's just similar to what you described there, Michael. I anchor back to the COVID times and I was living in New York at that time and ultimately ended up leaving because of just how insane the policies were there. There's a lot that I could go into and we'll save that for another conversation. But the same thing will play out over time here just because of the nature of technology. remote working Bitcoin as a distributed asset and now states having more sovereignty and kind of leading the charge. think that will be the same thing where people fled California. People fled New York over the past couple of years, but they're starting to migrate back. I saw an interesting chart. was last week. I'm not going to pull it up, but it was just comparing housing inventory in the Northeast part of the United States compared to Florida and Texas. And housing got, the housing market got very tight in Florida and Texas in probably 2021, 2022, because people were unsure about what would happen in kind of the aftermath of COVID. But now it's flipped where there's way more vacancies and there's other things there too. In Florida, there's natural disasters, there's insurance that's absurdly expensive for your homes. But Texas and Florida, two kind of safe havens during the madness of COVID. have way more housing inventory now. And there's of course other things that go into that, like new builds, et cetera. But I do think it's just kind of an interesting way to track shifting sentiment and demographics in real time by just looking at the housing market. So now in the Northeast, people feel comfortable to come back because they don't feel like they're going to be put in another risky position. But who knows what happens over the long term. But I just think those are... Those are things that play out and it ties into the state adoption of Bitcoin. Ultimately, whatever state, whatever couple of states get first to put the Bitcoin strategic reserve bill in place, I feel confident that there will be a number of them this year, especially with the smirks that you guys mentioned that happened during the press conference when they were talking about the national or the, yeah, the United States strategic Bitcoin reserve. So I feel confident that will happen sometime this year at the state level. Jackson Mikalic (29:53.286) and at the federal level. And we're just going to see competition play out in real time. So it's it'll be fascinating to watch. I'm in Pennsylvania. PA has a bill that's been introduced. So I would love to see something happen there. I would love for Philadelphia to have more of a Bitcoin presence, have a lead in Bitcoin and technology, as you mentioned, Michael, but we'll have to see what plays out over the over the next months and years. Michael Tanguma (30:18.15) Tim, how do you, we're good. Brian Cubellis (30:18.195) It's it's I was just gonna say it's worth calling out everything you just discussed is also playing out X us right? So I don't know who put together that state by state comparison of all the different processes but whoever created that also created one for nation states doing the same thing which is equally interesting if not more in the sense that you know, I think the other thing that you're gonna see from Nation states is so the Czech Republic, they have a bill in process, but then it was also announced, I think today or yesterday, that they are removing capital gains tax on Bitcoin and crypto. So you're going to have these other levers that are probably easier to pull on the nation state level than the state level in the United States for just broader sort of Bitcoin adoption and Bitcoin friendliness. So I think you're gonna see you're gonna see this play out maybe even on an expedited fashion sort of X us Michael Tanguma (31:23.868) Yeah, maybe Jackson, if you remember, I want to pull up one other one that we've talked about here and somebody had an interesting tweet about it was if you want to know what nation state Bitcoin adoption looks like, just look at this chart, which is the hashrate growth. I think there's been something inorganic you can kind of see around that like 2020 mid 2022 mark, like right around here that we've heard, you know, rumored that there's countries that are, you know, mining Bitcoin using nuclear energy. And I think That's what you kind of see as a precursor before the adoption. We saw this in Texas with the amount of hashrate that came here and then that naturally there derives from a, from a like sovereign level, more interest because now there's more capital coming. There's more jobs. There's more just like ability to lobby that I think this notion of the, where a lot of these countries, it'd be interesting to look and see their natural resources and then who's already mining. Tim this is like right in your backyard when it comes to you know oil and gas and you spent time in Texas I'm curious how you think about because now you're living in New York and you're in the middle of it all like how do you think about just? Business building what would it take? To move back to Texas like how do you see the the friendliness to to business and innovation going in a world where Bitcoin starts to become a bigger theme? Tim Kotzman (32:44.61) I think to your point, Texas has a huge advantage. Just the spirit of Texas is freedom and individual responsibility and free enterprise and all of those things. Interestingly, when I was down there buying minerals, one of the managers on our team... sent my business partner at the time and I had a text message with like the price of Bitcoin and this was maybe 2017 or 2018 and I had no idea what it was and I'm like should I buy some and he's like I mean it's like the equivalent of gambling and that's literally all I knew about or heard about as far as Bitcoin until 2021. Yeah, and being on the mineral side, at that point, yeah, you just didn't hear anything about it. But to your point, the spirit of Texas, I think, has a lot. going for it and like New York's gonna have to do quite a bit to be something other than a tourist destination and somewhere that people come, yes, to meet people for business and go to conferences but yeah, I'll be intrigued to see how each individual state kind of ends up going about this as we get through the next six, 12, 18 months. Michael Tanguma (34:05.508) My favorite part about that is all of these states, countries don't even have to understand Bitcoin. They all have to just have like Texas obviously has the wildcatter spirit of like if we can make money from it, go and look, you'll go that way. And a lot of individuals that came into mining here, and this is in other places like where you understand commodities is well, know what it costs to produce, to bring it out of the ground. know. where the cost to produce it, what I can sell it for, and if there's a profit to be made, well then I'll exit the position when it comes to production, I'll take the dollars, and that's how it starts here. They don't even care about Bitcoin, it's the fact that they're pulling, might as well be pulling digital oil out of the ground, but you can't, it's almost impossible once you do that, and then the price appreciates you, like wait, why didn't I hold it, or what did I just do, or just tripled, and then you just go down the natural rabbit hole. So that's the kicker, that's where this is all going, it's just again, whenever somebody wakes up, like, well, if I can just produce it, there obviously needs to be some education because there's a lot of capex that goes into mining. So you're not just going to like start mining without having some knowledge of it. But they first even will go in the direction of let me just produce some sell it I can get the local currency. But then over time, there's only one direction that kind of naturally goes from an education perspective. Brian Cubellis (35:19.635) Yeah, it's a natural incentive, right? Like if you have otherwise wasted energy sources as a nation state, you effectively have an input cost of zero for your Bitcoin mining efforts. And so you're entirely incentivized to lean into it. To your point, even if you don't care about Bitcoin, there's a profit opportunity there for any nation state with unused resources effectively. Jackson Mikalic (35:19.653) Yeah, well, how about speaking? Jackson Mikalic (35:44.804) And so speaking of profit opportunity, what is the Trump media and technology group doing with the Bitcoin plus ETF? Sounds like that's going to where the money is. I, this, this news, guess just came out a little bit earlier today. I haven't even gotten to dig into it yet. Have you guys seen this? Brian Cubellis (36:04.945) I've seen it. I've heard about it. I don't know exactly what it means. It sounds like Trump's media company is planning to launch several different ETFs, one of them they're referring to as the Bitcoin plus ETF. No idea what that means. I don't know, Tim, have you you heard any other scuttlebutt or looked into this any further? Tim Kotzman (36:27.63) No, I read the post that you have up on the screen right now and like it reminds me of all of the controversy around When Trump first took office and people were saying you have to divest you can't be right there There can't be a conflict and I think that ended up with You know, you could either put everything in a trust or just basically make some reasonable effort to not be involved in the day-to-day operations of it. And that's kind of how I'm reading all of this. But I'm not an expert. Brian Cubellis (37:02.557) So is the thinking that he has enough of an arm's length distance from the operations of this Trump media company? Is that the general line of thinking? Tim Kotzman (37:11.714) Yeah, mean, just really either of his sons or anyone else could really just be taking this by the reins and doing all the obvious money making opportunities. It's not that complicated. Michael Tanguma (37:22.684) Okay. Every day we get examples of why efficient market hypothesis is complete BS and people will continue to tell you that it exists. like, I mean, it's pretty straightforward what's happening here and people will tell you, well, it's all priced in. you can, it's just, none of this stuff is priced in. There's so many variables and things, but to Tim's point, like every, everything that has happened the past six months post kind of let's call it Nashville conference has shown a directional. Double down, triple down from anywhere near him getting into this space. You go to, know, strive getting involved in putting Bitcoin, you know, as a staple of their registered investment advice and the advisement firm. Everything related to Liberty and the family around them doing it. People related to the industry, the new administration like. We're very close, you can see to. I think like we forget that it's only been what 15 days since he's been in office, whatever the number is, it feels like years, but it's like, think it's been 15 days and we were like, well, why hasn't it happened faster? Why is the price still here? It's like, we're still so much time and it's going to be a long year basically. Jackson Mikalic (38:35.206) I think it was the Michigan state pension system as well that just came up on the 13 F filings for this past quarter of Q4 of 2024 with a very small and insignificant allocation to the Bitcoin ETFs compared to their total asset base. But when you start just piecing all this data together, it does kind of become quite obvious that there's so much momentum behind this asset now. And virtually it's not priced in at all. Right. Like you have pension funds that are starting to just throw a couple basis points at Bitcoin via ETFs. You have the president and his media company wanting to launch a Bitcoin plus ETF. We'll have to wait and see what exactly that means. But I mean, these are these are incredible signs just to think of like six or 12 months ago how adversarial. everything was in the United States to this industry. And now you have pretty much all the tailwinds. It's a coiled spring for Bitcoin in 2025. And it's just a matter of being patient now. And Michael, to your point earlier, just not rugged yourself, right? Like don't as an investor, be prudent, be conservative, have an allocation to Bitcoin that you're comfortable with. lend it out to someone who's going to rehypothecate it, don't leave it on an exchange that you can't get it out of, and you'll be very pleased with that decision over the long term. Michael Tanguma (40:00.092) Yeah, it's actually a great point. I haven't had a chance to talk with you guys, catch up on just calls I've had today. what's going to be fascinating is everyone's going to be caught off sides on both directions, meaning the price appreciation from like individuals, because I think we end up going a lot higher than we expect, but also the banks and institutional allocators. Because if you think about what happened six to 12 months ago, this was still rat poison. It was still speculative Ponzi. So that inertia still exists. That's why we haven't seen a lot of institutional capital come in. We anecdotally talk to institutions all day long and they're still trying to wrap their heads around what the hell is happening, what the difference between Bitcoin and crypto broadly is. But then talking with banks and other financial service partners, they went from being villainized and FDIC and all the choke point and all these things happening to now needing to figure out their solutions and they're still... Some are still concerned of like, you know, the, stain is still there from all of the craziness from the past two years of not wanting to get close to this asset because of fear of, um, you know, kind of retaliation from the bureaucracy that exists, but then also, um, just doing the work when it comes to, you build or do you buy? They're not going to be able to build. now they have to go figure out their partnerships. And then I talked to somebody today that was explaining how there's one ETF provider still sourcing liquidity via like Telegram. I don't even know what true this is, but this guy had no reason to lie to me that they're still leveraging like Telegram to find like the plumbing is still so archaic for this industry and the native firms get it. But the problem with the native firms is they're also doing Trump coin. And so I think like That's why I personally feel this cycle goes a lot longer than this year because it's just like the inertia is moving in our direction but we still are in the very early innings and the plumbing isn't even right to turn on like they can't turn it on because the infrastructure is not ready yet a lot of these banks are in a lot of these other institutions to start to tap in from a consensus perspective or Like our A's and getting the approvals from their internal teams are going to the SEC And that's why I think like it's kind of a funny joke. I thought about this the other day Michael Tanguma (42:10.096) You'll hear people tell you protect your Bitcoin like it's 10x the price that it is today. And that's the most sound advice you can ever have. But those same people expect you to hold it on like a plastic device. And so it's like, imagine Bitcoin 10x today, a million dollars on a ledger. Like you would just lose your mind. You would just be scary. You'd wake up every day wondering like, okay, am I a target? that my data leak? You know, if I have, because 10 Bitcoin there is $10 million. And that's some serious money. People rob people's houses for $50,000. Let alone 10 million you become a little bank in your house So I think we're gonna caught off sides on both sides of the spectrum of the banks aren't ready for it And then the people holding it we've been in the steady grind from you know 5,000 to 100 K our minds have like been ready for it slowly We got in slow and slower comfortable with our custody, but imagine it going 300,000 500,000 700. It's just gonna be somewhat messy Brian Cubellis (43:05.395) Is that an official top call from Michael right there? 700k? Jackson Mikalic (43:05.455) Well now I'm fired up because... Tim Kotzman (43:10.734) Thanks Michael Tanguma (43:11.398) Dude, being in this space for this long, always just, you know, you're always wrong with the price. I'm just hoping I'm wrong to the upside this time and it's just gonna... Tim Kotzman (43:20.782) I that's what Larry Fink said he could get up to. I mean, Uncle Larry, is Uncle Larry wrong? Brian Cubellis (43:24.275) It is what Larry thinks. That's a good point, Tim. Jackson Mikalic (43:24.943) Larry, Larry, are you listening? Michael Tanguma (43:26.524) Uncle Larry. Brian Cubellis (43:29.149) There was one thing you said in there, Michael, I think was spot on around like there's effectively an order of operations to this, which I don't think is well understood around more of the institutional adoption. Because to your point, there was a lot of built up hesitancy post FTX, post all the sort of calamitous failures of broader crypto. And so now that that veil is being removed, right? There's a friendly administration. There's people in very powerful positions who want the asset to go up effectively, are launching their own crypto products. And so now that that veil is removed, the second order effect of that is like, now these people can actually go do the work to understand it, because I don't think they actually ever started doing the work on the asset and why they need to own it because of that. shroud around it, right? And so now that that is being removed, I think the air cover to lean into it, understand it more deeply and actually get exposure like we're extremely early innings in that respect, just because I think it needed to play out in sort of that orally fashion of you needed that veil lifted first. Tim Kotzman (44:48.182) Hey, Michael, quick question. How much time, maybe even a range, do you think it'll take for the banks to get up to speed? And how much of that is education? How much of that is like operational? Michael Tanguma (45:02.35) It's kind of a chicken or egg question. Like if they're educated, then you can get more operational because you can have like a singular focus. This is kind of ties back to the conversation. I think we had last week around Bitcoin's dominance because if you think about the cycles we've gone through, it's only a small percentage of people that have gone through it. And you don't just leapfrog that because now more people come in, you almost, it intensifies and accelerates like So banks are, you think about it, like how crazy would it be for a bank just to be like, I'm gonna be Bitcoin only. Like I'm not saying it won't happen because if they get the right education and they have the right team, but most people haven't had the time to do the diligence because they haven't needed to, because it hasn't been friendly. So when you do that, individuals that have listened to this and have done the research, they know there's inferior like technology from a custody perspective, it's called multi-party computation. And it's generally leveraged because, You have to support the long tail of crypto assets. So it's a proprietary cryptography spun up for each like instance of fireblocks has its own copper has its own. And the only reason people use this is because you have to support the thousand and one cryptocurrencies are a hundred and thousand and one. So you always find these like weird zero days and hacks and all this stuff. But I think that's what a lot of banks will end up ultimately having to use because they can't build it. They have to go partner or buy. And so long way of saying like it's again gonna be messy because if you can get ahead of it and somebody can articulate how Jackson well he puts very nicely that Bitcoin from a market cap weighted perspective digital assets is 60 to 70 percent at any given moment recently maybe dipped a little bit below that it is the market right the next cryptocurrency was a theory I mean that's kind of a pile of shit on fire it was always Paul shit now it's just on fire And so, and to contextualize that from the S &P 500, the Magnificent 7 make up only 35%. Right? So like Bitcoin is the market and if somebody can go in a room and explain that to them and then explain the gaps in the market and why individuals have held the majority of it and why they need to be banking services. A lot of these stories we're going to tell banks and they're working very nicely and we have a lot of conversations picking up there. But I mean, we're not a big firm, right? And I think like Mitch Kotchman who joined our CRO from BitGo, Michael Tanguma (47:20.496) He really believes in multi-institution where it heads and he likens that we're going to go through these reps in this cycle of getting out to the market, showing what this can do. We'll see a lot of the kind of natural blowups and things that happen when the irrational exuberance comes. And then it'll be that next cycle when everyone's like, shit, this is actually the only way you're supposed to do this because everything else has risk built into it. So I think we were just in this for the long game. It's a fun game because we're getting to monetize an asset in real time and then, you know, when market share. but I think it's just gonna be long. Jackson Mikalic (47:54.266) Yeah, back to your price target, Michael of 700,000. Was it 700 or 750? Doesn't matter. Higher. But yeah, back to that, back to that point though, because I'm, I'm fired up now because yes, exactly. Those are my words, by the way. You know, I don't want to be poor anymore, but here's the thing. This is, this is my, my big beef. Michael Tanguma (48:00.71) higher. Michael Tanguma (48:10.406) Cause you're not going to be poor anymore. Brian Cubellis (48:13.331) Hahaha Jackson Mikalic (48:23.173) right now with the industry. My beef with the industry is that there's a bunch of unserious people that just bullposts the entire day about why the price of Bitcoin is going to be a million or $10 million in 2025 or how you're going to retire on 0.01 Bitcoin. And they get all these people bought into this idea, which is fine. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. What's inherently wrong with that is that they're then telling people, you put all of your Bitcoin on this device. And then you write down words and it's that easy. But like it's it's really not that easy. I spoke to someone recently who doesn't work in the industry. They're more of a traditional finance type of background. But this person knows that I work in the Bitcoin industry. And so he called me and he said, hey, my friend passed away and his wife knew that he owned Bitcoin and I think other crypto as well. But she has literally no idea how to get it. Like it was just, guess it was probably discussed, but maybe not thoroughly. So, and I don't know to the extent of how much this, this, couple or in this family owned, but this, his wife, who's now mourning the loss of her husband also has no idea how to get access to any of this Bitcoin that was held in self custody. And so this is my big issue. with the industry currently is be a proponent of self custody. That's fine, but don't tell people that that is the only way to do it because what ends up happening is you're sitting on 100k Bitcoin now. Maybe you're sitting on Michael's price target of 750k Bitcoin by the end of the year, which isn't going to happen, by the way. I don't think it's going to go that high. But even if the price doubles or triples in the matter of the year, people are just in this situation now where they actually don't have a serious or well thought out solution. So that is that's a big issue. that I think that just generally the industry could do a better job at having more room for nuance. And probably there won't this won't happen because Twitter or X is not a great place for nuanced conversation. But I hope at least through this podcast we can help people to start thinking more critically about this. Michael, it ties into your point. Think about your Bitcoin like it's worth 10x what it is currently worth. And so do you really want to be in a situation where, you know, you're you could screw this all up like you got it right, but don't mess it up. Michael Tanguma (50:48.1) Yeah, this is why I gravitated towards Tim and excited for him to join this pod and other things we're working on is, you know, a serious individual in the space. Like you can have fun, but you also need professional experience and pragmatism and understanding what's commercially acceptable. And we'll look back in this, you know, we have to execute, but the individuals that are just serious, we're going to look back and be like, that's all you had to do is literally take a stance. that wasn't rooted in dogmatism and also just think from first principles, okay, let's play this out. This thing becomes money. Well, how does this all gonna end up? And that mortality thing I've experienced for years being in a space that individuals were in that position of like, you know, I gotta hold it all and bury it underneath my backyard or whatever. And then somebody passes away and it's sad, but then that brings to light, oh shit, like now. what happens if I go and then how does my family figure all this stuff out? So, yeah, it's gonna be interesting. mean, Leishman had a really good pod with Danny and he broke down a really good heuristic or way to describe. It's like, if somebody has to tell you to do something, you probably shouldn't do it. You should go figure it out for yourself and then if you can understand it deeply and then he referenced that to self-custody. like, you have to go do self-custody because... somebody tells you you should, you're probably not ready. Because you should do it because you fully understand why. And then you go and do the like months and months of work. Because most people do it they have no idea what they're doing. And the easiest analogy is like a firearm. Like if you use a firearm daily, weekly, it's no problem picking it up, reloading, cleaning and doing all those things. But if you don't pick it up for six months, every time you pick it up, you're like, shit, you're second guessing yourself. And then the crazy part is if you pick it up when you really need it, that's when accidents happen. And that's similarly with custody is people don't pick it up until it's too late and then that's when all the like mistakes ultimately happen Jackson Mikalic (52:44.793) Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's worth talking about, but I think to your point, Michael, just the call to action is just like actually think critically about it and maybe take a step step back and challenge current beliefs. I mean, that's kind of what we've all done here. Yeah. Brian Cubellis (53:01.715) Or just don't be dogmatic would be the biggest takeaway of it's not all or nothing. Bitcoin custody is not all or nothing. You don't need to have all your eggs in one basket. It's not true that you're only a real Bitcoiner if you have your seed phrase stamped on steel buried in your backyard. It's just not the case. There are other methods and it behooves the individual or the institution to think about these different methods. And based on your risk tolerance, based on your technical capability, based on your family's technical capability, it makes sense to diversify across different custody solutions. Michael Tanguma (53:38.906) My favorite part of this is, what's the whole notion like when the facts change, I change, what do you do? It's like everyone, the beauty of all this is this is great from a business perspective. Brian Cubellis (53:45.03) Right. Michael Tanguma (53:51.288) Is everyone talks about it as self custody or ETF or Coinbase? It's like no, doesn't exist anymore multi-institution exists You don't have to actually trust one institution But you also don't have to put it underneath your bed and have to worry about your fingers getting sent to your family Now, what do you do? What do you talk about it? And it doesn't get talked about yet and it will because at the end of the day like the The product is the product. Bitcoin's a product and we know that it's just gonna permeate and go to wherever it needs to go because people adopt it in the same way people come to OnRamp every day because they ultimately have a problem and it's what Jackson just described, like I pass away and then not only do you have to figure out how to bury somebody and all the other things, but then now you have to find the asset. So it's just a function of time, basically. Jackson Mikalic (54:31.129) Yeah, here's a good one though, real quick. Real quick and then I want to hear MSTR. I want to talk about MSTR with Big Tim, with strategy. Brian Cubellis (54:31.514) and set it. Brian Cubellis (54:40.115) You mean strategy? Michael Tanguma (54:42.286) I heard Tim only holds MSTR. I heard Tim only holds MSTR. Brian Cubellis (54:43.057) The strategy. Jackson Mikalic (54:46.105) Hang on, one thing I want to call out just on the topic real quick is I had another conversation with someone yesterday who in real time was kind of thinking this through with Cam and I on the call. And the big unlock from his perspective around inheritance was there's three things about inheritance that most people haven't actually figured out. If you have a treasure map, you've done none of these things, unfortunately. And so the first is you want to make sure that your family has access. The second is you want to make sure that the legal title of the asset is being properly addressed. So your family is actually legally titled to those assets. The third is if you do things the right way and you have beneficiaries to your Bitcoin, you get a step up in basis like you would with any investment. So if your cost basis on Bitcoin is $10,000 and you pass away a year from now, five, 10 years from now, assuming the laws don't change, the cost basis for your heirs is whatever the price of the Bitcoin was at the time of death. That's an absolutely massive unlock. And that doesn't require you to go through like all this trust in the state stuff that you, that some people want to get set up. You can do that if you want, but you can just You can do all that. can solve for three things in a matter of minutes. So that's like, that was a big unlock from the conversation yesterday. Brian Cubellis (56:07.443) It's quite literally negligent to not think about that in terms of how you're going to pass along your Bitcoin because those tax implications would be so massive in the event that Bitcoin is a million, 10 million, 10 years from now. Those could be massive, massive implications if people aren't thinking about that properly. Jackson Mikalic (56:30.019) Alright Tim, let's talk strategy. What happened? Michael Tanguma (56:33.34) strategy, strategy. Is it, is this strategy bank or is it just strategy B? What's going on over there? Brian Cubellis (56:34.395) What happened? What happened yesterday, Tim? Tim Kotzman (56:41.39) So when the news first came out, I thought the new name was strategy B I literally saw it and I'm just a literal person. Right? I'm a guy. You just tell me something I'm like, okay, it's strategy B and then I learned it was strategy when the press release came out not just you know pictures from Ed of like strategy be up on the building and like the sign with sailor in his black Bitcoin t-shirt standing there So I Michael Tanguma (57:12.082) well I learned something new every day. I thought it was strategy B too. I just found out it's just strategy. Tim Kotzman (57:18.062) Yeah, it's just strategy and the, you know, what's swirling around X is that maybe this is a. I forget the technical kind of marketing term of like a mid brand between MicroStrategy, Strategy B, Strategy Bank, to your point, Michael. So the earnings call was all about Orange and Black and Bitcoin and the new website strategy.com, literally makes MicroStrategy, I'm sorry, makes the company Strategy. Brian Cubellis (57:32.829) Transitory. Tim Kotzman (57:55.148) look like it looks like you're logging into a hedge fund in the best way like a bitcoin hedge fund you go there it has all of this information that was it was also kind of a nod to the retail investors because a lot of these retail investors including one of my friends max like put together mstrmoon.com and had jeff and ben you know funneling in all of this data and then trying to keep it all updated. that's actually kind of a cool site to just check out anyways, strategy.com. And then the takeaways from the earnings call. If they deploy all the remaining ATM convertible debt and 500 million or so in preferreds, the new strike product at $120,000 Bitcoin. they would be at 30.02 % leverage ratio, which they said yesterday in the presentation, they're comfortable being at 20 to 30 % leverage. So I mean, they at will opportunistically, depending on market conditions and all that corporate speak, they could unload, you know, 20 some billion dollars worth of Bitcoin buying over some amount of timeframe coming up here. Michael Tanguma (59:10.458) What's the sentiment like? Like you're in the thick of it. Last night you're sending me, know, tweets of Michael Saylor retweeting your guys's podcast stream. you know, there's this just huge following that I think personally I'm not fully immersed in. And it reminds me of a little bit of, and this isn't a pejorative, but like the Robin Hood like excitement around, you know, it's less around Bitcoin, at least in my mind. I mean, there's Bitcoin aspect, but the way I perceive it and tell me if I'm wrong, like a lot of the followers or proponents of MicroStrategy probably have majority or larger percentage of their assets in MicroStrategy versus Bitcoin. Like how is that sentiment trader professional like think about Bitcoin? Like what is what's going on? Tim Kotzman (59:53.902) I think you know not to state the obvious but that everyone's on a journey like some of the more popular social media darlings You know that a few months ago were saying they were in the 2x levered long ETFs now They're on my podcast saying they're just they just have Microstrategy shares, they're not using leverage. They're not you know, they're not buying long call options so I think Some of that's not just entertaining, you would hope that people are sincerely on a journey of, and then just anecdotally, I've had coffee and breakfast with some guys here in New York when they're visiting and they're like, yeah, I just own MicroStrategy shares, right? There's like very little talk, at least with people I've met in person of like options strategies and like trying to just like hit one, like get to a hundred X in three minutes. But to your point, like, Saylor at this point, I think it's pretty apparent, is like a larger than life figure. And you did see Fong Li, the president's CEO, talking on the earnings call yesterday about Bitcoin. Whereas before he was really just talking about their operating business, their BI business. So I think... That's obviously great because, God forbid, something happens to Sailor or he steps aside at some point, you have someone else to take on more of that role. They were extremely kind of like buttoned up and professional, and it was pretty apparent that they were talking to the TradFi crowd. know, Sailor mentioned that like... MicroStrategy is a global brand and when they go and he has meetings, people are calling it MicroStrategy and all these different things. And so this is just a lot easier, but it really kind of leans in my take and a lot of the True North take from last night was it leans into the Bitcoin strategy because when the statement came out from Fong Li and someone like... Tim Kotzman (01:02:08.622) cut it and pasted it and it said something about Bitcoin and AI. was like, man, my first thought was they're gonna really lean into AI here. And on the call, it was like all Bitcoin all the time, which makes perfect sense to me because why would you wanna lean into your BI operating business that's not really anything compared to your Bitcoin strategy and why with DeepSeek and all this other nonsense? that's, you know, like, who knows how that's going to end up all of that confusion and bewilderment. Like, you don't really want to be talking about AI right now either if you can put Bitcoin at the center. So I think the rebrand, I mean, literally their merch shop as of last night was like mostly sold out unless you want like. Brian Cubellis (01:02:55.293) Did you get a vest? Tim Kotzman (01:02:56.558) Not yet, but I have, know, why should you buy MicroStrategy stock? have that book, so that's now a collector's item. Yeah, like as of last night, most of these merch shop products, unless you're a size small, like it's all sold out already. Michael Tanguma (01:02:57.884) you Brian Cubellis (01:03:01.011) There it is. Michael Tanguma (01:03:15.888) Well, they got one for Jackson then. Tim, idea for some media content is MSTR strategy diaries. A little quick 10, 15 minute cap of, there's no shortage of funny stories I've heard for the past two years of people just making an insane amount of wealth from like, the one that would come up a lot was Bitcoiners aping their wives, 401ks in a micro strategy because they like, you know, wife was stay at home mom now they had this dormant at things sitting there they're managing it and they just like bought it without telling them and now they're sitting on these like 10 to 20 X gains. And the other day I was talking to an individual that had kind of persuaded him not to do a risky investment. And he told me that he aped it all into to MSTR and he's like sitting on like some crazy amount of capital in like 12 months. And I think there's just no shortage of interesting like anecdotes that could come about from people that are just like sitting on massive gains right now. Tim Kotzman (01:04:16.706) Yeah, no, absolutely. And the other quick takeaway is, you know, they have the at the market where they can sell shares, they have the convertible debt, they have the preferreds, but they still could issue a new fixed coupon product. and had that one-to-one slide, which obviously has the lowest vol. mean, literally, they had a section under this fixed coupon product for strategies, and it's like preferred stocks, high yield, private credit, real estate, hedge funds, alternatives. It's like... Yeah, what's the market cap of all of those? What's the addressable market? I mean, it's just huge. then just in general, hearing sailors say the obvious, sometimes when you hear something for the second or third time or from a different person, it hits you finally. And he's like other untapped pools of capital. And it's like, they're just not going to stop with at least brainstorming and... coming to market with with products and then the asymmetry of it which is why I think everyone's losing their minds all the time regardless of you know whether the stock's up or down is like are they selling shares and they actually had a really nice slide on that of like percentage of the daily traded volume they actually sold per day or week or month whatever it was of ATM you know like how much of that are they doing versus the convertible debt now versus the preferreds and it's like which pedal are they on so I don't know pretty good Michael Tanguma (01:05:53.832) Yeah, there's an interesting aspect about the bank side. think people, I mean, you hear they have a lot of Bitcoin, right? Or they have a lot of Bitcoin. So it's like, well, they can do something in the future. But I don't think anybody ties like an actual way how they can accrete more Bitcoin that's like not rooted in insane risk. And one of the, at least directionally, because like we don't know, it's like the internet, right? It's like, how could you say like what you're gonna use the internet for in 1990? But in 2000, it was very obvious. In 2008, it was more obvious. One of the angles, and we've talked about this before, and Brian and Jackson, I don't know if I brought it up this week, but it was this notion of like, we go back to more of a free banking style setup where we talk about like crypto exchanges actually kind of operate like free banking based on free banking, based on like, not only relationships, but really reputation, right? Like the fact that you have a good reputation, you fulfill the obligations. We've seen a lot that haven't, they've gone away in the same way free banks, you know, we had bank runs. or banks had bank runs. But then if we think about in a world where everyone's issuing like a stable coin, a regulated stable coin, and you're trying to differentiate, what does it look like if A, you pass some of the yield back from the stable coins that are sitting in the treasury market back to the holder of the stable coin? So let's say like you're tethering, have You know, your treasury holdings and you're creating 5%. Well, rather than sweeping that 5 % into straight BTC, what if you give 3 % back to the holder? But then, well, naturally you start to like, you're building more confidence in your product, right? Your stable coin to hold that. So what if you put you back the stable coin with dollars plus BTC? Because that feels a lot more like if you're using. dollars, well, you want that to be reserved with a one to one ratio. But then also if anything goes away, you have like Bitcoin sitting there. Where I'm going with this is well, what happens if that is a strategy that somebody ends up employing when they want to go and you know, launch a stable coin, because that's interesting, right? Like I would want to stable coin that's backed, but also accretes some additional dollars and then also is backed by BTC that appreciates. Well, if you need to source that BTC, you go to MicroStrategy like, hey, I want to park, you know, Michael Tanguma (01:08:10.352) this amount of Bitcoin and it's actually not that risky when you think about it. You have the reserves from the dollars. So you'll start to see these interesting dynamics play out where I think that they will come up with creative ways as long as they manage risk to do things with the Bitcoin to create more value for everyone else. And I think this goes for anybody holding Bitcoin. Brian Cubellis (01:08:28.243) Yeah, that definitely seems like a logical path forward for both stablecoins and then like what a quote unquote Bitcoin bank looks like in the future and the types of opportunities that they would have. Complete aside, one of my favorite things about Michael Saylor has nothing really to do with Bitcoin. It's that he bought, I guess, a ton of domains back in the day and he's just been sitting on them. So we know he has hope.com. guess he has strategy.com. Michael.com. Does he have bank.com is the next question that we need to be asking. Michael Tanguma (01:09:04.036) Michael.com. Michael Tanguma (01:09:11.504) It's a funny thing with the precursor like digital scarcity that a lot of Bitcoiners love. Brian Cubellis (01:09:14.533) Right. mean, the guy knew about scarcity before Bitcoin existed. It's fascinating. Michael Tanguma (01:09:19.323) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (01:09:22.479) Boom. Let's leave it there. And Tim, unless Tim has some closing thoughts. Tim Kotzman (01:09:28.494) Oh, we were discussing this a little bit last night and I don't want to, I'm going to get this wrong, but before a certain year, I think it's before 1995, you could actually just like buy a domain or claim a domain. Like it didn't cost anything. I'm like, Holy moly. Wow. I mean, Brian Cubellis (01:09:45.171) Mm-hmm. Michael Tanguma (01:09:48.006) That sounds a lot like the Bitcoin faucet where you see. Brian Cubellis (01:09:50.675) Yeah, exactly. Tim Kotzman (01:09:53.282) before Bitcoin was even worth a penny. Yeah, interesting. Jackson Mikalic (01:09:59.014) Well, great rip guys. I think I'm tapped out. I don't know if there's anything else you guys want to cover before we wrap up. if not, it's a pleasure as always. If anyone... is interested in what we're doing with the terminal. Check that out. We pulled up a couple of charts to start the episode. It's free to use. There's hundreds of charts in there. And so we've gotten a lot of good feedback from individual investors to RIAs, to institutional investors. So check that out. Michael Tanguma (01:10:30.716) Let's tease a little bit before we wrap the Bitcoin investor week because I think we should talk about it leading up to it because I think we'll end up doing some kind of event for listeners and clients of OnRamp or prospective clients and I know Tim is in the thick of it so it's going to be a busy week. Are you prepared Tim? Tim Kotzman (01:10:52.246) ready. I actually want to go back to Jackson. Where can people, how do they access or go to the terminal? Jackson Mikalic (01:11:00.527) They can go to, I believe it's what terminal dot on ramp icon terminal dot on ramp bitcoin dot com or just go to our website on ramp bitcoin if you want to check it out. Yeah. Bitcoin investor week. Yeah Tim what do you think? Michael Tanguma (01:11:03.74) To go to the web. Yeah, or the website. Tim Kotzman (01:11:15.458) New York City coming up February 24th through the 28th. I'll be on a panel on that Wednesday. yeah, really looking forward to spending some time with everyone. And the chatter has been that there's gonna be quite a few people there and quite a few cocktail hours and networking opportunities. So yeah, I think it'll be a lot of fun. Michael Tanguma (01:11:41.2) Yeah, the list of individuals in this industry, I mean, it's everyone going to be there that's engaged. But then I think a lot of individuals like we talked about that are doing education or in the process of education and trying to figure out what the hell is happening, what's their strategy are going to descend on New York to kind of mingle and figure out what the playbook is for the rest of the year. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:03.299) Maybe we kick off the first official last trade dinner series. Maybe more to come with that. Michael Tanguma (01:12:10.108) It's not a bad call. It's gonna be a packed week, so we gotta do it earlier. yeah, if you're ever interested in getting involved, we will do something that week. reach out and Tim will probably have to do a happy hour or something for listeners of your pod and ours. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:12.197) All right. Tim Kotzman (01:12:27.214) Awesome, looking forward to it. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:29.197) All right, see you guys. Brian Cubellis (01:12:31.518) boss.