Morgan Stanley & Bank of America Signal a New Bitcoin Era

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extrem ever assembled in the history of data. 1974, 1987, '92, 97, 2000, whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. >> I say when we sell. Hey, Muhammad. I say when we sell. >> All right, 2026. We are back. It's the last trade. We're actually recording on Thursday, January 8th and it is the first podcast of the new year and we're joined by Brian Cabllis and Michael Tanguma. Gentlemen, it's nice to see you. I mean, I've seen you throughout the course of the week and kind of get sick of seeing you guys sometimes, particularly Michael, but good to see you on the podcast today. How are you guys doing? >> Happy New Year. I heard people like this bod uh or hate it. I don't know. It depends. It depends how long you are at Treasury Companies. Uh but >> he couldn't help himself. He had to say >> it's going to it's going to be a a big year. It's going to be a big year for the last trade for on-ramp for Bitcoin. Um so excited to catch up. There's been videos of crazy stuff that's happened. >> Yeah, it's good to be back. Like we we go away for a couple weeks and uh a lot of things a lot of things happen in the world, Bitcoin related and not. Uh so yeah, lot lots to get into. >> Well, maybe to start us on some strong footing and to set the precedent for the rest of the year. What if we pulled up the terminal? So, we're trading at 91,000 as we record today. Um nothing too notable. There's a number of things that we'll get into as it relates to the price action and thoughts for 2026. But where I think the best place to start is if I actually get over to another tab here is Brian, you you had a really nice piece that dropped this morning on the on-ramp weekly roundup. And we were discussing or you were discussing there um a few different things, right? So, we were talking about the ETF flows and particularly one piece of news that caught your attention was the fact that Morgan Stanley has filed for a Bitcoin ETF. And you know, before I hand it over to you, I'm sure a lot of people saw this online, but what I think a lot of people see online is the slop breaking news post where all they see is, okay, Morgan Stanley did this, but beyond that, I don't think there's been a lot of great analysis or discourse about what the significance of this is and what are the details behind it. So, I'll hand it over to you first, Brian, since you um authored a piece today. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, my my thoughts are this is a huge deal and it reminded me uh it was similar in some sense to the Harvard allocation story from sort of the end of the summer in the sense that you know it obviously gets picked up uh that you see the headline but there isn't a lot of follow through on you know what the actual significance and importance of it is and so in the context of this one Morgan Stanley filing for their own Bitcoin ETF I think is a is a massive deal and and the main reason is that Morgan Stanley is not sort of a traditional or they're not known for historically being um sort of an ETF juggernaut or or factory of sorts. Um they they do have some ETFs uh that they issue. The majority of them uh I think 17 out of the 20 that they they manage um are basically through subbrands. So, Calvert, Parametric, and Eat Invance um have certain ETFs that uh Morgan Stanley is technically the issuer of, but in terms of of ETF funds where the actual Morgan Stanley brand name is on it, uh prior to this, uh there were only two other ones in the entire history of the firm. And so, I do think this is a massive deal. Um and and really what it signals is that there is real underlying client demand. they're seeing assets either flee their platform to get exposure to Bitcoin or digital assets or they're just seeing clients basically buy IBIT um and so they can monetize that on the margins but they're not getting sort of the core economics uh that the the actual issuer does um in terms of the you know momentous inflows that we've seen into IBIT over the past two years. Um so they saw the success uh and and it's not just success like it is remarkable success uh in terms of IBIT fastest growing ETF ever most profitable product that they've ever launched um so it's it's impossible to ignore this effectively and so you have Morgan Stanley you know storage institution obviously um and typically you know relatively conservative don't issue a lot of ETFs themselves like this is a massive signal that Bitcoin is not going away for one um but two they see the writing on the wall. They see the success of of IBID and that Black Rockck has had and they want they want some of those economics. So they're going to get into the issuer game. Um and so you know this is something we've talked about a lot uh sort of over the past year or so in terms of the slow nature of these institutions, these incumbents turning on access but not only access like actual solit solicitation. So the other headline from earlier this week um you know the original announcement came months ago but uh Bank of America actually turning on access happened this week uh to Bitcoin ETFs and along with turning on access they also have now sort of a standard recommendation of 1 to 4% in client portfolios. So BFA has now activated 15,000 wealth advisers with that recommendation playbook for these the Bitcoin ETFs. Um, and so the point of me saying that is that we see the headlines, we see the announcements, and that's why I think we've sort of become numb to them in some sense, and why maybe like this Morgan Stanley announcement from this week didn't get as much buzz as it probably deserves is we we've come kind of numb to uh a lot of these announcements, whether it's on the M&A side or people turning on access. But what what takes longer than the announcement is the actual plumbing being turned on and the access and the solicitation. And so I think both of these headlines from this week are are massive signposts in that evolution. Um and and kind of signals where we're headed for this year. >> Yeah, there's a lot there and I think it's um it's well said and important to highlight or call out the significance of Morgan Stanley announcing ETF. Um I think some things to underpin are important is like not only is this part of the process when you think about game theory and um businesses are competing at the highest levels. So whether it's banks competing with other banks, RAS competing with other RAAS and to Brian's point like these banks have very deep analytics to see asset flows and client interest. And so Balcunis uh had referenced I didn't know this was an actual acronym the B YOA uh bring your own assets you know so basically something to um you know a different trady firm launching an ETF and then ultimately using um their existing client assets to um start the flywheel for uh accumulation and so he expects others to be doing this which makes a lot of sense. Morgan Stanley is very sophisticated. They have taken a slower approach um to this asset class. And not to say that this is part of the um the uh strategy, but I wouldn't I would imagine it probably is, is that if there's only 21 million BTC and you want your client's assets to retain within the mortgage Stanley walls, whether it's via ETF, spot custody, and other solutions, whether it's lending against them, it's just better uh strategic advantage for you to have the in-house solution from custody to ETF to being able to margin loan against it to will take delivery and offer other products. Um and so fully expect to see others coming about uh in the in the light of Brian saying no um no breaking news. This came out earlier. I don't know if you guys saw but Morgan Stanley um I I can't read it because it's a Baron's article. This is Baron's Morgan Stanley's betting big on digital assets, workplace services, and private markets. The the thing that's behind this is that they're actually launching a wallet. Um but it's it's actually for real world assets to start. um which is something that we were talking about on final settlement that you will see the proliferation of real world assets for a number of reasons and that's a different story but point being is Morgan Stanley's betting very big on this asset class and the ETF coming live is uh just a huge kind of like function of that the other thing I would say that is interesting about th this file this ETF filing that's you know almost two years after the initial launch of of Bitcoin ETFs and IBIT like IBIT you know uh for all intents and purposes like they've kind of won uh in terms of what we've already seen for the past two years like the the vast majority of flows have gone through IBIT there's obviously other spot ETFs that exist so it's you know not only important from like their historical uh nature of not really being a major ETF issuer but it's also significant from the sense of like they do not you know they're not like super well positioned to go out compete IBIT right now because IBIT has such a strong uh early lead. And so you only do that if like you're super confident that the demand the TAM for these things is so much larger than we've even seen over the past 2 years that you think it doesn't matter that we don't we don't have a head start like we still need to be this we we still need to um launch this product and attempt to compete uh because it's not going away and it's only going to get bigger. So that was just another sort of signal from this as well. Yeah, I think people forget as well that uh last year that IBIT surpassed the uh Black Rockck's S&P 500 ETF in terms of revenue despite being like was it 17th of the size approximately? >> Yeah. >> And so to your point, Brian, I mean, >> yeah, we're two years into it. It's actually almost two years to the day when those ETFs went live in 2024, which is kind of remarkable. Time goes by quickly. yet um you know two years is a long time in the Bitcoin in in Bitcoin in particular but as we all know that's a very very short amount of time in markets and so to your point yeah despite some other players most mostly Black Rockck having a significant head start there is a lot of appetite for this asset class and it ultimately ties into another thing I wanted to to bring up because people are still uh convinced seemingly that Bitcoin has to have a bad year. It's it has been written that the price needs to go down in 2026. But I think people forget that everything is different than it was in 2021 and 2022, right? I mean, we we can go back to the fact that the monetary policy was entirely different. We were going from easy monetary policy, by the way, for like 15 years into some tightening for the first time in a while at a very, very fast rate historically. And then in 2022, of course, you have the blow up of all sorts of funds and exchanges and um yeah, really the the industry took a hit. Now, if you kind of take the the side in in 25 and 26, everything is different. We have an election year, you know, the economy, the incumbents want the economy to be strong. They want financial markets to be strong. the the Bitcoin and crypto voting block and donors affected um affected some of the results in 2024. They want to continue to get um people to participate and support the incumbents. And the other side of this as well is that monetary policy is easing and we all know the fact that the debt needs to be refinanced and stable coins play a large part in that. And those those um those firms that you cite as well like uh Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, they've been sidelined for two years and now they're kind of like ripping the tape off. And and Vanguard was another one in December uh where historically they've just been like, "No, you can't buy it. It doesn't make any sense." Totally got rid of that um seemingly overnight. And now things are really starting to heat up. So, I think anyone who's still like um you know, the sentiment is still kind of bad online and if you're getting caught up in the fact that well, it has to be a bad year, I think you're totally wrong. And I think the most bullish thing that could happen for Bitcoin this year is a new all-time high. If we could like definitively move past the fact that fouryear cycles uh exist, if we could just blow past that and the price, even if it doesn't mean like it's an explosive year to the upside, that's going to be in my opinion the most bullish thing that could happen this year. I can think about like 10 other bullish things, but either way, uh the the the other just to tie into that is like the banks. Um Morgan Stanley is a bank. you think about the ramifications and the value added from a like that's the the core thing we've talked about since the very beginning how we think about building a business and the winners in the future will treat Bitcoin as money and money has to require uh financial services which requires relationships and that's generally localized meaning that mortgage clients that have been there forever are going to rather opt for their ETF because of the different benefits versus going to IBIT or somewhere else and there'll be other institutions that do that now take it a step further It came out yesterday. Trump uh whatever World Liberty just got the bank charter, right? And this kind of is going towards your point of there's a lot of things that the administration, we've been talking about this since last year, is laying the groundwork for where this is heading in digital assets and Bitcoin's price appreciation. So, um yeah, I I it's it's interesting like I get where you're coming from and that there's a lot of market sentiment in the the the market cycle um still existing. I fully just haven't even thought that a four-year market cycle exists because like we just live and breathe this stuff and talk to people all day long and I would be genuinely shocked if we didn't see an all-time high this year and maybe even the the first quarter because of all these things that are happening from a macro perspective and then in the actual asset class and then in the market that um yeah I just want to throw out like I don't I think like there's a version of this but it's a very unsophisticated uneducated person that would be doing it like Luke Gro is a great example because he's world class at a certain segment of the market and love him and love to have him back on. But I think when it comes to a lot of the market perception of like quantum and all the stuff we talked about before the end of the last year with the deal, it's like it's not like just because he understands that level of the world when you think about turning on the liquidity pipes, what the administration's doing, the need for it, and all the things that are happening in digital assets. I would be shocked on the other side if we didn't see an all-time high this year versus we need to see an all-time high to for it to be bullish. Basically, I would invert that. >> Yeah, I would say a few things. One, Bitcoin's very interesting because the price itself and number go up is certainly a component of the thesis um in terms of the reflexivity of the asset, how people get interested in it. Um, but there can be and there historically has been big disconnects between what the price is and what the actual fundamental thesis is doing. Um, and so I would say like 2025, you know, let's just say hypothetically like Bitcoin wasn't priced 24/7 365 and it was some sort of like private investment vehicle where it wasn't getting marked to market on a daily basis on a second to second basis. you would look at that investment and say the thesis has strengthened this year uh from a macro perspective like you talked about Jackson from an administration perspective and a regulatory perspective as we discussed and just like the general knowledge and value and the sort of merit and value prop of of Bitcoin being better and better understood by the day. All of those things are super constructive for the long-term thesis of the asset. And so if you just forgot about price, didn't look at it, you would you would, you know, most rational people would agree 2025 was like a massively bullish year for Bitcoin. The problem is people anchor to the price as part of their thesis. Um, and love Luke as well, but I think that's kind of what he was saying. He had a more short-term view on the asset, saying this price drop, the 25 to 35% price drop we saw in in October and November, he was like, "This changes my short-term outlook." It's like, well, one, that's a time horizon issue, and two, I would say you're putting too much credence in the value prop or or sorry, the actual asset price and how it informs your thesis on the asset. The other thing I'll say is that there's sort of a a a interesting paradox back to like the cycle thinking in the sense that, you know, you're not supposed to say in finance, this time is different, as you said, Jackson. Um, but another idiom in in traditional finance is past performance is not indicative of future results. And so those two things are kind of in congruent with each other, right? Like if you're saying past performance is not indicative of future results, well then you shouldn't be looking at three data points uh of the past three cycles to inform your view of what's going to happen in 2026. Um, and so while yes, uh, it's it's always an interesting or a dangerous endeavor to say this time is different, as you sort of line lined up, Jackson, like this time is fundamentally different from a market structure perspective, from a regulatory perspective, all of these things are uh, on a positive trajectory. So, one thing one thing just to add to that and I don't know if Jackson you had more or this might throw you a lot for transition or not is um >> something that I think also is really important to call out and what's is what makes this conversation um entertaining and valuable for us to have and then ideally for listeners is they're all like sometimes subjective like there's different coverts in the way they size this asset class, right? And we have this view, I think, at least us three, that this is the best savings account that's ever existed. And so, we hold a very large, if not all of our wealth in that asset. And it allows you to take a step back and breathe and focus on other things and then not be worried about this short-term price uh and look at the fundamentals when other allocators look at it as trade similar to Luke potentially and he sizes it accordingly and he's looking at it in relation to Nvidia or gold or something else and when it doesn't perform has how expected he's much faster to make that call and that's and and the reason why I'm bringing this up because I've been thinking deeply about this I ended up in a three hour conversation and going not even in circles is very productive around custody and it's like well it it's all like kind of subjective dependent on how much allocation somebody has cuz if you're all in well [ __ ] like you got to think about it fundamentally different than if you have 1 10% and where you go and so I do think that's an important thing is there's a lot of nuance in how people think about this asset class and the mo majority of the market and probably even like half the listeners look at this as a trade they're looking at it um we're all looking for more dollars because it's the unit of account so we need a measure for what we want to buy. So, I don't like to say like it's one Bitcoin, one Bitcoin because it's not nobody values the Bitcoin like or like you can't trade it for the car. You need to get to the dollars before the car. But the point being is that individuals have different partic perspectives on where they want this asset class to go. and if they're looking at it as compared to MSTR or other things versus the value of best savings account and then the appreciation in the meta of like oh what all that space that's saved from trading it selling it taxes timing it it can be dered or directed into generating more Bitcoin or value for the world like that's where we think it goes but we're still so early that it might be a lifetime before people get there and that's what kind of causes a lot of the disconnect and sentiment All right, it's 2026 and we have a new year ahead of us. It means it's a great time. It is an opportunity to take inventory. Think about your Bitcoin custody, your inheritance plan, your broader ownership structure, and your goals. If you're looking for more peace of mind this year, get in touch with us here at On-Ramp. We're working with individuals all over the world. People who've been in Bitcoin for a decade, people who got in for the first time last year. We're working with individuals who use self- custody and have done so for a number of years or even over a decade. And likewise, we're working with people who never felt comfortable with self-custody and who have Bitcoin on an exchange. Either way, get in touch with us here at On-Ramp. We have a private client type approach to our relationships. You have a dedicated account manager, always human support, multi-institution custody with inheritance included, an IRA account included as well at no additional cost. access to Bitcoin back loans, insurance is included, trading capabilities as well. And for a limited time, if you use the code TLT, you'll get 50% off your first month with On-Ramp. Now, I will say it may be worth having a conversation. So, when you speak with me or speak with someone and book that consultation on our homepage, you can just mention you heard of us through the last trade, mentioned TLT, and we'll still take care of that if you sign up. So, hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Thanks for being here. Yeah. Well, look, I I mean, I agree with a lot of what you guys both said and um it does tie into another item on the agenda today. In a sense, this this maybe even takes it to the to the next degree, right? So, this is a article that went uh extremely viral at some point over the past like one to two weeks um over the holidays, the prison of financial mediocrity. And um I think the whole idea, if you could summarize the article, if I could summarize the article, is younger generations feel like they've been priced out of the same um ability to own assets, whether it's stocks, homes, uh follow a conventional career path, you know, work at a big company, have benefits, get promotions, and be able to retire like that to uh people in their like teens, 20s, maybe even 30s feels out of reach for many. And so the whole idea of this article is like we kind of solved for a certain level of Maslo's hierarchy of needs as a society, right? Like most people have food security in the United States. Um most people have some sort of shelter. Now we could definitely make the case that home prices are incredibly unaffordable relative to the past hundred years in this country, but still most people have shelter one way or another. And so for a lot of people particularly in white collar work like these basic needs have been met and now you kind of start to pursue or think about um purpose meaning uh wealth accumulation building a family things that you see your parents or grandparents have achieved but then you kind of go out into the world into the marketplace uh look for jobs and opportunities and you recognize well this is how much money I'm making. this is how much everything that I want to buy or need to buy is increasing by and perhaps the only way that I get there is by being long degeneracy is kind of like the the thesis of this article and so what that means is we've seen an explosion of essentially gambling like we like to call them prediction markets apparently and uh Robin Hood CEO said that we're in the super cycle for prediction markets so all that means is that we're in a super cycle for gambling and so the whole idea at least my takeaway from this is that in terms of being an investor investor, which is where this guy is coming from, I take it, is you want to invest in things that are going to benefit from the long degeneracy trade. Um, and I think it ties directly into like not directly into what you said, Michael, but people are a lot of people are viewing Bitcoin, but more broadly crypto as something you trade for more dollars in the future. Now we know that 99% of people are bad traders and we know that most people get wreck wrecked uh trying to trade crypto assets but still that's where most people find themselves and I think there are very very very few amount of people um who listen not a few people who listen to the show but people who exist in the world in this country who actually think about Bitcoin as a savings vehicle. So there's the gap where it's like most people think about crypto as prediction markets or as gambling. We're thinking about Bitcoin as a savings vehicle and those two are not the same, of course. Yeah, I think it's a great recap on it. Um I think not to get philosophical, but like you can really tie back um you know, we talked about this a little bit with Mel Matson and like the notion that the world's in a bad place or we're in a bad place. like it's we're pretty good as as it relates to the abilities of an individual um the tools at our disposal but when you come down to like if I try to boil down look life uh is a notion of there's no such thing as staying still right you're either moving forwards or backwards and a version of a good or spiritually fulfilled life is you're progressing and if you're not progressing you're regressing which is causing this malaise that exists and the the version of that malaise is that you're not able to to retain or your purchasing power or time and so the things that you want are becoming further and further out of reach. And so what is interesting about this article is it's less about crypto like crypto is the angle or one angle but the vibe coding aspect is another one because now you can see the degeneracy of what this guy's describing is across venture across investors across uh Gen Z of like trying to hit it rich sell the thing try to like make a bunch of apps vibe code it there because you're trying to like pick up that mimemetic theme to get out of the ability to um work hard, preserve your capital, progress slowly, which are just timeless notions. They're not you can't there's no such thing as a free lunch. It's just how the world works. And so that article is interesting because you can see this permeating. We've been talking about it, but this is like permeating into like, you know, all other asset classes, all other thesises of being long degeneracy is a pretty [ __ ] crazy thing to think about when it's not only like the individual, but now investors and they will make money on it. is the crazy part. But um anyway, so I just think that's like the worth the call out because it's not even enough to have the agency because like the agency starts with okay, I'm going to develop build uh that guy you like and I think he's a great follow Greg Eisenberg. He's really looking at he had a tweet the other day about you know he hung out with a bunch of 22 year olds that are just like killing it. Uh he had a quote a couple days ago was like I would take 200k in claude credits versus a four-year education. But the idea is like that's just not enough because even if you do that like if you don't actually a be able to preserve the wealth but then also if you don't have a basis of like value cuz that's what this all comes down to is money doesn't grow on trees. So you need a fundamental anchor point to the world. If you're just that's always a loop everything you do of it is going to be downstream of it and then you wake up one day and you're like what the hell was I doing? Like why was I chasing this thing? Um, and so anyway, this is a little like philosophical, but it's just important because like unless your ba your basis of reality is is based on that, like money doesn't grow on trees, not everything's swashing around and I'm trying to like dump on somebody to make my to get my nut. It's like, well then you start to actually live in and create a world that you want to see and then deliver value. And I think that's the natural kind of like dichotomy where there's going to be a lot of AI value, but then a lot of people are just building these slop apps because the next venture capitalist is like the joke. It's like you put like I went to Stanford, worked at Claude, and then you can go and like cold call a cold cold email a bunch of people from your LinkedIn and get like a $10 million, you know, scene round completed because that's the status of the world and that's the incentive model. Yeah, I would say there's there's some nuance there because I you know I I read that article that went super viral and like to me it was a little too of a like a doomer take in the sense that like if you do have agency and you are able to to leverage these tools to produce value whether that's a good or a service that the market demands like there's never been a better time in history for one person to produce value is kind of how I would think about it and while that does require our agency and uh more of a tactful path than just like creating a slop app trying to sell it. Um if you're actually going about it in the right way and and leveraging the tools to to create something valuable um there's never been a better time to do that. So I I would say that like that was missing from the article in the sense that like yes, you know, because what he talks about in there is like part of the nihilism is sparked by AI itself and the the notion that there's not going to be as many jobs in the future. So not only are things more expensive than I can afford, but I actually don't have a a great path to that traditional uh career arc uh that you were sort of alluding to, Jackson. So like the the element that I think is is less discussed in that article is like well you know you can just leverage the tools to be productive. Um and Michael to your point like that's kind of moot as well if you're not saving in a better store value right so like you could be producing value but if you're still just holding it in dollars or then taking those dollars and gambling them then it sort of defeats the purpose. So like I would agree that like it's not it's not one or the other. It's kind of you need to be doing both in tandem. Leveraging the tools that are naturally deflationary to produce value in the world uh while also storing your value in something that can't be debased. And here's a bullish take. Like I don't think we're that far off. It's maybe this is my uh hopeful optimism that it gets meaned that um Bitcoin is a quantum of uh money in the sense that like quantum is this [ __ ] crazy theoretical deal that just like beams through walls and like solves every problem and cracks everything is but and if you get it you basically have the superpowers is that it is the supreme LLM. It's the supreme asset to preserve your capital in a in an abundant world. You need the finite asset. When that crosses, that's when the [ __ ] gets crazy because that's when all these people are building these things. They're wanting to get paid in it. The market starts to absorb it. And I've always thought about this that you're going to get this intersection and confluence of the asset from the Morgan Stanley's and the Treadfi world and sovereigns and then you're going to get it from the tech and it's just a better form of like uh rails for anything online. forget about just AI. And when that like intersects together, it just starts to create like a picture of, oh god, like I can see how this is the new money of the internet and the world. And when that happens, then all the things you're referencing start to become real because then all that sloth that's created like just goes to go away goes away because nobody's going to power it with any proof of work. Satoshi's. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I I would say the droids the droids will actually be the ones that make uh Bitcoin adoption ramp up. They are the ones in charge of hyper bitcoinization because the droids may demand to be paid in bitcoin. And if we go into a future where all the soft you know people are mostly interacting with software through vibe coding and whatever other platforms you know come in the future um the droids are going to demand a harder form of money. And so that may actually be how kind of ties into what you said, Michael, like that is I think certainly the future like in terms of how you'd interact with these types of platforms in terms of micro payments and allowing to um you know pay per like token on applications, but then also how do you transfer money over the internet instantly? I mean there's only one way to do it in a way that's actually scarce and verifiable. So maybe that's how that all happens. >> Yeah. I mean it's it's interesting. um you know with the weeks off and a little bit quieter. I'm sure everyone had too much time on their hands especially on Twitter and hadn't really seen as much um because I know it's there. It's just, you know, we're busy. But um the proliferation I think Claude launching around that time, but realizing like we're not that far and probably, it sounds crazy, but 3 years from now where we don't potentially do this podcast and there's like a representation of us or there's other pods that people listen to because there's just enough information. And um but it's this notion of like authenticity coming back and things that you can't recreate in that format. And it reminds me a lot of like what we're doing on the early writer side because there's an angle of like where we head is so far from where we have been that only a few will I don't it sounds like um pessimistic but like it's not to say that only a few will survive. that like it'll take time for people to recalibrate because if everyone was playing a world of wrong unit economics and we saw this already like this isn't even theoretical it's practical as interest rates rose in 20 from 21 you saw how many zombie VC companies and VCs that went around because they didn't know how to deliver value and so as you get back to a world where you have to deliver some value to get the underlying value the thing that's most valuable it changes the dynamic of who can operate especially when a competitor is out there that has more agency gency that is um more competitive, has better market forces, whatever it might be. Lowering that cost, that's how you end up in this deflationary environment. And so the same concept goes on the other side of it when it comes to content and production and how that works. When you mentioned powering uh proof of work to surface, not the slop, right, but the real content that people are attributing some form of units to be seen. Well, you actually got to be a real producer and deliver real value. And so we go back to this world of like meritocracy and value production. Um but you know TV how long it takes. >> Just two things to to jump in real quick because um it it's funny that we're talking about this because I published something. It was something I would like I only read that viral article this morning and Brian I I agreed with you that it was kind of like a doo or take of the future because if that's how we all perceive the future to be then we probably wouldn't be here, right? we would just be like gambling on prediction markets or doing whatever else. But we see a future that's different. And I wrote a piece on my personal newsletter this week. Like I said, I had not read this thing until this morning. And mine is pretty much like the the flip side is the optimistic take because I was thinking about this. Is it the best or worst time to be alive in the context of like where we are um at the workforce and specifically white collar work because that's the type of work that I'm familiar with and I come to the conclusion that it is the best time to be alive because to your point Brian if you have agency and then now if you pair it with Bitcoin of course a better form of money a savings technology you're pretty much you pretty much cannot lose right like the only other thing I'd throw in there is like you believe in God then then you're definitely not going to lose right Like if you have agency, the gap between a high agency person and a low agency person is only going to widen. Most people are kind of stuck in that that doomer view uh version of the future where they can't see that there's actually a very optimistic future ahead of them if they actually take the time to invest in themselves and to learn new skills. They can only see like right ahead of them. They can only see that in October of this year it was the worst year of layoffs in over 20 years. and they can only hear the chatter about how AI is going to destroy the workforce. But if you take the opposite of that there, that means there's a vast opportunity out there. And then if you save in a better form, well, first of all, you need to have just like generally good financial practices as an individual. And if you're able to save money and you have the financial means to do so, and you do it in a better form of money, then I think it's the best time to be alive. I mean, every generation is going to have challenges. I would rather face the challenges that we have today than have to fight in the trenches in World War II like my grandfather. like I would rather like that that's a no-brainer for me. Um so I think it's the best time to be alive. I think all the doomer stuff should be faded in 2026. And um yeah, man. I I think it's I think it's going to be a bullish year for Bitcoin for all the reasons we've discussed already. And I would encourage people like don't don't be discouraged by the slop online. Um and the other thing I want to mention too is I totally think the slop online's going to get worse. And so that's why I'm excited about things that can be done in person. That's why I'm excited about the guild. Um, and if people want to get in touch about that, they should reach out for on-ramp uh, clients and early riders investors. But things are going to move back into the analog world. Things are going to get way worse online. Dead internet theory will become a thing if it's not already. And people are going to crave actual human connection. and people are going to want to get off the screens and spend time in person and engage in um critical thinking and be challenged on their opinions and meet people that think like them. So, I'm actually really bullish on going back into analog experiences back into the real world. And um I think like there's just such an opportunity in this industry to do it, but also in every industry. >> Well said. Am I too am I too bold up here? No, I appreciate I appreciate your optimism. I'm I'm generally pretty optimistic myself. I do think this is like it's a it's a weird interim period where the slop is proliferating and to your point, it's only going to get worse. And so there does need to be some basically uh value ranking system that allows you to determine whether something is organic human created versus slot. And it'll be hard to distinguish at some point what's uh like just by reading it, it'll be hard to distinguish. So you do need some value acrruel system or ranking system uh to be able to discern what's what's real and what's not. >> Yeah. I mean the thing to call out, we should transition from this is like the slop only exists if you want it to exist. Like all the [ __ ] we're talking about, it's like if you just save your money and go about your life, like you don't have to pay attention to any of this slop. >> You listen to this podcast. And if you picked this podcast because it's the signal for you to understand Bitcoin weekly and then you go back to it, half of what we said, if not all of it doesn't make any sense because nobody's surfing on Twitter and they don't care about what's coming in their newsletter. So it's not relevant like to everyone in a slob. It's just it's a thing that exists. So where do you want to go from there then? Let's um Well, we talked enough about slop. Um I think uh let's we could do the running it hot. I mean, it kind of t it ties into it ties into um two of the the themes we we touched on um early, which is bullish for Bitcoin and probably all assets in general. Um, and it was an article that came out and it touches on the AI stuff. The again, this is like the reality of having too much time. A lot of these articles were from from Twitter. Um, you know, talking business on the air. I hope we're going to be posting more of our um content on Twitter because it it sounds like that's what they're promoting. So, a lot of these things are doing, you know, very well. Um, but the thing like that we didn't get to catch up on was silver running over the two weeks u that we were out and just an insane number. I think it hit like $81 a troy ounce. Um, and I think that we know that there's too much debt, there's not enough dollars and at the end of the day assets have to continue to appreciate to sustain any kind of equilibrium that we exist in without the market completely falling apart. And there's a number of market forces that have to occur for that. But one of them is just the narrative driven around GDP and production. And I think that's a big component of AI and where AI is driven from, you know, the the people much smarter talk about Nvidia, but you just think about from 21 after interest rates rose and then the amount of like what's the narrative that a lot of capital consumed which was AI. And so part of this article um was just really talking about the market forces around the digitization whether I don't even know if it actually included crypto but it was a lot of u robotics um compute data centers energy and that we're kind of in a very um bullish time for like markets and growth. I think it goes both sides. It ties to what we talked about where yes there's a lot of value that will be created but there's also because of just the proxy where there's too much debt they're not aligned onetoone with value so you get a bunch of noise through that system and that's why you see venture capital isn't a bad industry it's just that the amount of capital throw in that industry distorts the uh misaligned investment or misallocation and so very similar with this it's like we need the economy to run we need the narrative around robotics AI deflation growth, new businesses and new industries to grow. And so that further underpins where that will grow along with gold, along with silver, along with real estate, along with Bitcoin. Um, and so I think that's the narrative for at least the next call it 18 to 36 months. The sad part, if you play the other side of it, is what goes up must come down. And we saw this happen in 21. There's vintages if anybody's familiar with venture and just other asset classes that completely um you know decompressed and um will never come back and nobody will ever there's a lot of money destroyed and people like to think well that was just an isolated incident or whatever it's like no it's just the amount of proxy for the amount of units injected in the system is how crazy the capital allocation will be so um I thought that article really further underpinn like where we're heading this year from every other sector administration is uh it's in their best interest for this to occur, but to also be very vigilant and careful with what you're doing with your capital because I think to start a business there's a lot of misallocation of capital. There's no shortage of people that will fund it, that will acquire it. But to have that basis of the sound unit to try to sweep your funds into, hold your treasury, or ultimately if you do get an exit that probably wouldn't happen in a Bitcoin world or in a uh low interest rate world, you sweep that into a harder asset because that's what's going to keep you alive in the future, not playing into, and I saw this firsthand pre- Bitcoin. It was like a rework, and everyone was smelling their own farts, thinking that we were going to be a $50 billion business. And I sat in the middle of that and was like, "This makes zero sense." Um, it's very hard when the market's telling you you're a genius to take a step back and realize maybe it's not me being a genius, it's the market and the dislocation. And so I think that's a part of that article and how to play and navigate that world we're heading into. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned like on the AI side in terms of, you know, how it relates to GDP. they really need it to to support GDP in the sense that if you think about um and if we want to go down this this tangent, we can, but like all of the fraud being exposed in Minnesota and the the likely fraud in California, like all of that is also distorting GDP. So like if we actually unearth a ton of fraud and actually do something about it, like that's going to be a massive hit uh in terms of GDP downwards. Like if you remember probably like 12 months ago or so, maybe even longer than that, there was some data that came out that you know some massive wild percentage of uh new job growth was just like all government jobs, right? And so it's the same idea where it's like this is subsidized growth to a certain extent. And if some of that is some of those subsidies or most of those subsidies are actually just being wasted immediately um and being misallocated and destroyed like that has real real uh implications for like what GDP is and and GDP is a flawed metric for a lot of reasons but like I think that's part of the administration's push around AI around uh energy security is because they they know they need to win in that area to basically counterbalance uh any declines in GDP as a result of rooting out fraud potentially. >> I mean, that's hilarious though, right? Like GDP goes up because fraud goes up. >> Well, yeah, but like that's why that's why all this fraud stuff is like super fascinating because I do think it is it's this nice educational journey for people to finally start understanding like why the government's ability to print money out of thin air is bad. Like because it can be immediately wasted. It can be fraudulent. It can be misallocated. And the only reason that that is allowed to happen is because it's created for free, right? Like if there were constraints on money creation, you wouldn't be able to as easily waste it basically. And that's like rooted in like just core Austrian thinking like if the money's free, it's it naturally gets misallocated. And that's that's what we've seen over the past 100 years. And I I think um there's a more meta like outside narrative of like this isn't actually organic on this stuff coming about uh the same way Doge, but that's a different conversation for a different podcast. Maybe the the Honor Tapes or whatever. Um but like if we just take the 2D, you know, what's happening right now, the the the book Anatomy of the State is wonderful for anybody to read. Um it's like [ __ ] I don't know, 12 pages or I 36 pages. But the point being is the thing that we didn't discuss about the fraud is that it's all uh basically sanctioned and endorsed by politicians because you don't like move the money through the capital system, financial system unless they're getting their cut. And so to to Brian's point, no state is immune from this. uh Minnesota might be one of the smaller states when you think about California and Texas because the amount of capital that's being uh distributed whether it's via SBA loans um uh Medicare and all the other things that were uh involved with the um child care stuff and um and so that like is one order around business and fraud and that's just super depressing when you think about somebody struggling to make ends meet and then they just see people taking millions of dollars uh from the government. But then the other side of that which is probably even more darker is like thinking about the politicians and their actions because of the capital that's come into their pockets uh and for what they do. And so the whole thing is just like a mess, but it does tie directly into um I don't know if it's in this concept or was another one or segment, but I did I'm glad we brought up the Somali stuff because that's just a wild kind of like turn of event scene that and then how blatant it is. Uh, >> do you guys think do you guys think it's like significant enough to create a flywheel of people going deeper or is it just going to be the um, you know, the news dour and we forget about it with the 24-hour news cycle. >> I think it has something to do with um, we've already seen this like there's nothing that really gets somebody to the bone of what we're talking about. It's just time because there's a lot of research and it's like really multi-threaded and how do you come to the point of like wait there's something wrong with the money. Um, but the thing that you brought up is um it's very similar with Doge and um I think like this is a narrative that's being orch orchestrated cuz there's going to be something around taxes and like putting capital back in individuals pockets. I I my perception I know it sounds a little conspiratorial but I think like this coming out because there's a lot of people that are unhappy and there's all this stuff talking about like tax whatever uh revolt or like boycotting and I think that you're seeing more and more of this because there's a reality that people need dollars. It's like another precursor for like a UBI or people getting dollars in their pocket. I think that's what more is about because like you can look back at like this guy that did it and like the stuff existed forever. People know there's fraud. It's like the way that you see the memes and how fast it like burns like wildfire over social that I think there's a bigger story here when it comes to like fraud and what the perceived action or interpretation basically is is not to go deep down the rabbit hole and the money's broken. It's something else. I don't know. I do think there is a logical path there for someone again with some agent some amount of agency um and you know head on their shoulders to say you know why are we paying taxes if if most of our tax dollars are being wasted or sent abroad why are we paying why are we paying taxes if they can just print the money and so that that is a natural path to then question well what is money what is fiat um how are they able to just print money out of thin air so I do think there is a a natural sort of educational additional progression there. Whether people actually pursue that is totally another question. And whether to your question, Jackson, this stuff just gets memory hold. I think that ultimately comes down to is like do you see any like, you know, actual ramifications consequences for these people? Um, you know, they're saying they're going to do investigations, but we've kind of heard this song and dance for the first year of this administration if we're being honest. Yes, they've gotten some some some stuff done, but it's been a lot of grandstanding and a lot of announcements uh not not necessarily followed through on. Um, so I think that'll that'll also be dependent. Um, you know, if this story persists, it'll be because they're actually doing something about it, holding people accountable. If they don't, then the likelihood that it gets memory hold goes up in my mind. >> Yeah. I mean, this is like a tangent, but it's important for the basis of Yes, you're right. Like any aspect of almost anything in society can tie back to the money being broken. It's just like how many people pick that up. >> Yeah. >> There's the notion that comes from um and it's relevant because it just came out. This isn't a pot about it, but it came out about the vaccine schedule and Trump. And the reality is the reason why most of these things get memory hold and if you try to bring them up as problems is because structurally we are just fully not conditioned to get it. It's the same reason why people are structurally not fully or conditioned to get Bitcoin. And it's because you went to school for X number of years and you sat in the room and you have to go and this is not good bad. This just is reality. and you're told certain things and you've you have a level of authority and hierarchy that has always existed and then you go to college to do that. And so the mental bandwidth and the malleability of an individual to just be like the money's broken, there's a new money or taking a step further and the government is doing X Y and Z and this is pervasive versus this is one thing and all this needs to be reconstructed is just so far of a leap that we forget um that a where we came from but b that is just structurally how individuals are meant to uh have like grown like that you know you again depending on where you are in the cycle um and because I experienced this a lot when you talk to people and the reason I brought up the vaccine schedule is because a lot of people understand and have done the data it's all empirical around vaccines especially for like early childhood and then you tell people this cuz we have this happen firsthand where you tell family members or whatever and they laugh you out it's like you're not a doctor and it's like because you're conditioned to not look at anybody except for what is being told but then it's come out again objectively they just they the thing that's really weird but they have the whole uh image where it shows the baby and then it shows all the little like uh syringes and then this and then they they updated it and I think yesterday they just updated the food pyramid like to tie this back to Bitcoin it's like safe was telling you about the food pyramid like a 10 a decade ago and he was laughed out of the room. So again, it like all these things that are like looked at as conspiracies or all this stuff, it just comes back to people being structurally conditioned to follow a hierarchy. And if you veer outside of that, people just think you're crazy because that's the way the the mental model of the world works. And that's all moving and transitioning, but it's just going to be very hard for people to pick up a singular thing and then be like, "Oh, I get it." They're more apt to just like, you know, and that's kind of like humans, right? Because if we thought everything is like flawed, then we would just not our brains wouldn't work. So we need like a mental model of the world. Uh it just happens to be the mental model of the world may not be actually the right one. >> I I I agree with all that. I think you're right. The the only thing I would say is that again going back to like this time is is perhaps different in the sense that I I do think we are seeing a level of uh trust erosion in these traditional institutions in the you know even just like the quote unquote experts as you're sort of referring to like people have this uh difference to a hierarchy of institutions. I do think that that is that is waning like that's really the story of the past five or so years postco is like uh more and more distrust of of institutions which had been trusted for decades. Um and so I do think that that does generally start to shift people in a direction of of being more uh first principlesoriented thinking for themselves um questioning things and eventually that gets to money. full fully agree and it goes back to earlier like the real barometer if you had to pick one thing is it's just Bitcoin's price because Bitcoin's price is the symptom of like everything's healing. Um, but independent of that, I do want to call out in the comments if this is not valuable and get us getting too philosophical, not tying into financial markets, like we will course correct because uh it's kind of fun to talk about and we get to catch up here. But if this is therapeutic, we needed this. >> But if people are listening and they're like, "These guys are nuts and I have.1% allocation and I'm thinking about increasing it to 2%." Um, you know, we can go back to the ETFs and, you know, market structure and the um, bill that is coming or not coming in 2027, but leave a comment if you don't like it. Or if you do like it, that'll also help uh, us understand better where we should take this show. >> Yeah. I mean, they may just not like Michael. >> That could be the case, too. If you just don't like Michael, I I would love my time back. So, if you want us to replace uh, me on the show, you can also leave a comment. And and you know to be honest you guys can steer the direction of the show. If enough people >> still taking applications for a new co-host >> enough I can promise you if enough people weekly commented that I should not be on the show. I will gladly gladly uh hand this off and I would have I would have a great um use case. >> I'd be like guys the listener the listeners do not like me on the show so I should not be doing the show. >> I mean you're the one who always wants to do more podcasts. though. >> I mean, I think they're good for business. >> Yeah. >> How else are we supposed to ed educate the market on multi institution becoming the standard for for custody move on and we can wrap soon, but uh >> we're not wrapping. We got 40 We got 38 minutes. We're going to full an hour and 30 minutes. We haven't even talked about we got like six other subjects. >> Wow. Um, well, I was just going to say on before we wrap up on this topic then that uh >> yeah, if anyone is asking about the fraud in Minnesota, just say wait until you find out about the Federal Reserve and just just leave it at that. Don't explain don't explain any further >> and maybe some people will get to the conclusion that Brian Brian has uh spoken to. >> Reach out to Cam Stro. Um he's up in Minnesota and he is >> he's boots on the ground. >> He's boots on the ground. Um, it was in a it was in a a group chat um that one of uh our friends asked Cam or maybe it was me, maybe I was the friend that said it to somebody else with him and the chat was, "Did you move back to Minnesota because you got an offer you couldn't refuse. Maybe he's like a front." Um, you know, they got they caught on to like the names and the uh the demographics that were running these scams. So, Cam may be in Minnesota doing other things outside of just working with OnRAM. In case you missed it earlier, we are offering a limited time opportunity to sign up. Use code TLT for 50% off your first month with On-Ramp. I just want to reiterate stakes are high and this is an important decision to think through. So, I would fully expect that you'd want to have a conversation with someone on our team. Could speak with Cam, myself, Michael. Go to our homepage, book a consultation. You can speak with us for 15 minutes, 30 minutes. no obligation beyond that. Uh you can just ask us questions, learn about the solution, and I just want to make sure that as you as a listener, whether it's for you, your friends or family, I just want to make sure you have peace of mind and you feel good about this year ahead of us as it relates to Bitcoin ownership custody and inheritance. So again, limited time offer, 50% off your first month. Use code TLT. you can just mention that during the consultation or if you do end up just going direct to sign up, mention that code uh on the website and you'll be all set. So, thanks for being here and hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. One thing that's interesting if we can get back to markets for just a second is there's a this is all hypothetical by the way, but some sometimes people like hypothetical situations and likeopium. So, I'm going to pull it up just for a second anyway. I think we learned a lot of we learned a lot of lessons in 2025. Um, as it relates to Bitcoin, this is an interesting chart because it shows a hypothetical scenario of what percent of gold market being reallocated to Bitcoin. Now, I think this is a flawed uh hypothetical to begin with, but I think it's interesting just to show the discrepancy between the sound money assets because now you have gold that's over a $30 trillion market. Silver is roughly about four trillion and Bitcoin I believe is now less than two trillion. And for a long time people talked about the diminishing return theory of Bitcoin. Right? There was a camp in this industry that perceived that at some point Bitcoin re reaches a scale as an asset class. There's no way can continue to ker at 50 or 100%. It's going to be like tw uh 20 30%. It's going to have to go down as the size of the asset class grows. What I think we learned in 2025 is that's just blatantly wrong. I mean, gold moved over 10 trillion in terms of its market cap. And so, I think if people are right about ultimately the US government getting more involved with Bitcoin, sovereigns getting more involved with Bitcoin, I I think that that ultimately blows the socks off of anyone who participates in this market. It completely blows out of the water any idea that Bitcoin has to keer at a certain percentage or it needs to behave like it has in the past because what we saw was when there's a sovereign bid for an asset and I don't think Bitcoin gets anywhere close to where it would be with gold in terms of sovereign interest but even if there is a bit of a sovereign bid and we see this with mining of course already where it's not actually being taken off the market but there's there's countries that have been mining for a while now and have been stockpiling Bitcoin. If we get into a spot where there's actually some sort of sovereign competition for taking Bitcoin off the market, it's going to be a totally totally different market um that we'll be participating in. And so this chart, if anything, was just like fodder for another point of conversation. I think the idea of like rotating gold into Bitcoin really doesn't hold any um significance or weight. It doesn't make sense to me, but um if you guys have differing opinions, would be happy to hear them. Yeah, I think um I think you're right in that it's not it's probably not the right frame to say, you know, what if hypothetically 1 to 5% of gold specifically flows into Bitcoin. Like to me the broader story is going back to the access um that is still opening up in terms of uh wealth advisers around the country around the world actually soliciting uh you know 1 to 4% allocations like the rotation is going to come from every asset on earth like not just gold and and probably in my mind like it's more likely to come from bonds uh let's start there then real estate maybe equities and probably gold last because it's like well it's very similar these to Bitcoin. If you're worried about fiat debasement, um you probably want some gold in your portfolio and you probably want gold and Bitcoin as sort of a a sound money sleeve of your portfolio. And so I think the while that that chart is uh directionally helpful, I I would say a better chart would be showing the total amount of assets globally and then those percentages those hypothetical percentages of rotation from every other asset class on Earth that could flow into these things because again that the the cohorts that these banks wirehouses are now just beginning to solicit about a 1 to 5% allocation like those portfolios are in the 60/40 for the most part. So, they're in bonds and equities. Uh maybe they have some gold, but like the the bulk of where this rotation is going to come over the next several years is from bonds and equities and real estate in my mind. >> And Michael, before you jump in, Brian, you should definitely make that chart. That's >> I will. I will. So, I'm glad you brought this up, Jackson, because um you know, we have a lot of um tempered uh takes that sometimes maybe look pessimistic and myself in particular. Um but this one which you're describing it's not a matter of if it's when the mother of all you know blowoff tops will occur when this cycle there will be a cycle and there will be a deleveraging moment but it's that confluence that you're describing of a when people wake up to some level of appreciation for Bitcoin is finite scarcity the reality of debasement the reality of scarce assets and how it sits Bitcoin versus others. And then really it all comes down to the market forces which we haven't seen. And I I I could say inorganic or organic like the price has been dampened. But when that thing runs, the Robin Hood, the MSTR, the Nvidas, all of those things are mimetic momentum that this will see the numbers that I think we all, you know, everyone feels that should be there, but aren't aren't there from somebody that deeply understands this asset. And to be fair, I don't think a lot of people will be buying the thing that we're holding. they will be buying a trade and they will be buying something that's running and it'll be the the topic globally. But we've seen this play out. We saw this in Q4 of 17. We kind of saw this in the summer of 21. Um but the narrative and the structure has fundamentally shifted from everything we talked about with banks to the current market sentiment and all the things around it. And so, um, yeah, like that will happen and that's when you know when a cycle's really started, especially and I don't know, I would even I would I would even call out we probably get to an all-time high gold versus that now TBD because gold will be running and but I think um it's just a hard thing when we talk about this time is different when gold goes to $30 trillion and people recognize that's the money, right? That's the sign. That's the signal is like gold's money now. What am I selling it for? Sovereigns, what are you going to sell it? Like it gets 30 trillion, they sell it. No, it's probably going to go to 60 trillion. And when people get to that phase in Bitcoin, that's when you get into this like short squeeze where all the crazy stuff, whether it's true or not with silver, happened. I fully expect that to happen. Um, so yeah, I'm glad you brought it out because that's a little bit of like that's what we're hanging around for. And um I don't know if you want to go deeper there, but then that's really where it gets into this interesting part when we talk with financial service providers and what we do and how we can work with them and clients. It's like in that world it will happen. I think everyone's expecting it at some point. Why would you be in this trade or in this asset? But then fundamentally a bunch of other problems uh are created because now you're sitting on this wealth and you know there's a bunch of risk associated and we had a bunch of stuff that happened um over the past you know couple weeks with Ledger that I don't know if you want to talk about or if we want to talk about some more bullish price ripping >> no tell us about what happened with Ledger Michael >> maybe so this is not sequential but I do want to throw this out because I it made me think of it and this is another Marty website we got to we got to get him on. He was supposed to come on with Matt, by the way, but he he rugged the last minute. So, if anybody's listening and and also listens to his pod or knows him, let him know that we're talking about him and uh I'm going to text him later and we're going to get him out maybe next week. >> But independent of that, I thought this was just an absolutely fascinating number. Um >> can we click on it? >> Yeah. >> All right, cool. >> Oh [ __ ] >> So, it was basically in 20 um 25 trillion. I had to go like fact check this because it's just insane. Like a trillion dollars is something unfathomable. $25 trillion was settled on the protocol and it's pretty straightforward to actually uh the methodology. You're just looking at UTXO movement and then the price at that time $25 trillion on uh a network that's only 17 years old that is still $80,000 is crazy. And I didn't even realize when you contextualize that with 21 22 it's like basically as far as 21 close to 50% of that because 21 had 47.7 trillion settle and like this is another version of that signal like $25 trillion in capital settling in a digital bearer asset final settlement no intermediary is just like an insane uh thing that I don't think I fully appreciate had any idea if somebody told me finger in the air how many trillions were settled on Bitcoin maybe two like you know it just seems like a very large number. I don't know you guys have thoughts or does that surprise you at all? >> I would take the um I I would take this as a bare market signal actually. I mean that's a hu that's a huge number. I would have guessed way lower as well. It would have been like Dr. Evil. I would have been like I would have had a very low ball answer at first. But uh anyways, yeah, I think this is a bare market signal. We haven't even recovered to where we were in 2021 or 2022. And we're actually to your point Michael 50% of the way there for 21. So yeah, we're still in a bare market. Um, for everyone who's waiting for what Michael described, you might have to wait a little bit longer to get there. But yeah, we're still in a damp sent or dampened sentiment. And you can even see it just like looking at the Bitcoin gold ratio. But now you can look at just how much transaction volume has been settled. And there's another data point that we haven't even gotten past to where we were a few years ago. >> It's a big number. I guess where my mind goes is like the context of like okay well how many like what's the number for US dollar settlement like is it hundreds of trillions that's what I that that's what I think would be helpful context for this chart yeah I would imagine um and and maybe to the to pull on that thread it's like how much trillions in financial um transactions settle via derivatives >> because to that point trillion quadrillions. >> Okay. >> Allegedly, >> that's what the droid just told me real quick. >> But but the the caveat is um you got to be careful because I don't necessarily know how much I believe this, but I think it's directionally true. It's like Bitcoin is a much less financialized asset. Meaning there are levels of derivatives, perpetual futures, uh options, but the traditional fiat system, the dollar system, I mean you can make the case that like it serves as a financial mechanism, a large part of the GDP and like movement is in the financial sector. Point being is like those level of quadrillions and in tens of hundreds of trillions of dollars net settle that and that's what that's considering versus the assets that are moving on the blockchain um are closer to like real world value that's being moved. >> Yeah, I hear what you're saying. That makes sense. >> Now, do we want to talk about Ledger? >> So, yeah. I mean, this is um this is interesting to call out. We got to be careful because we don't want to be doomers. We don't want to fear monger, but it's just the the reality. It's it's really been like a snowball because I think the first place it started was um Bloomberg had an article that really went deep and I actually didn't read it. So, maybe I'll pause after just starting with the first one because there's there's a slew of things that have been coming out that are really important to just call out and then we can discuss why they exist and our interpretation of how to solve for them. But it was small-time crypto investors are facing violent attacks. Rising prices and irreversible nature of crypto transactions have led to a surge of brutal home invasions and kidnappings. Um I know Brian looked through it because he had like the payw wall access. Um I don't know if you want to share some highlights before kind of going into some of the other other themes. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean just to sort of summarize what this particular article speaks to is um you know nothing necessarily new but just kind of um summarizing effectively what you know the trends have been over the past few years in terms of a rise of both physical and digital attacks on crypto holders. Um so uh Bitcoin and other digital assets um are bearer assets and so you know most people a lot of people historically have used some form of self-custody meaning holding private keys securing private keys themselves um and that puts a target on your head and um it's not only self- custody too because a lot of what this article talks about is uh people holding coins on exchange. So, what we've talked about in terms of social engineering attacks where someone impersonates someone from Coinbase uh on their support team or even Google uh to get access to your Gmail, which then can get them access to your Coinbase account. Um, what this article in particular focuses on is like sort of um you know, I think it was over a year ago now when um I forget who it was, but somebody like got one of the scammers on the phone and like did a basically an interview with them. Um it's really talking about like that segment of of these attacks where um it's basically criminal groups that are target specifically targeting um non-sophisticated uh holders typically uh on the older side, boomers, elderly folks who really don't understand what's going on from a technology perspective and are very easy. They're they're the easiest marks for these social engineering attacks. And so um it goes through in detail uh various examples of that um that have occurred um and and even beyond that like the the more physical uh attacks which you know the proverbial wrench attack where someone actually comes to your home uh to try to steal assets. >> Yeah. Well said. And so this piggybacks off of this is the one that shocked me the most because um for all these attacks and things that happen, I would estimate that it's at least onetenth to 1/100th of the amount of people that come forward for a number of reasons. But this person individually on Twitter um came forward and said, I won't read the whole tweet, but it says, 'You'll never think uh you never think it will happen until it does. I was target targeting a violent home invasion. Walk waking up in the middle of the night to masked intruders in our home is a violent ordeal I wouldn't wish on anyone. Yet I feel lucky my family is safe, wounds are healing uh or my family safe, wounds are healing well. And so to to finalize that and I think this was just like a confluence and coincidence um that while this is happening this has been on people's radar uh Caresh I believe is his last name from Dragonfly I think Jameson had uh discontinued his kind of like following of all these attacks because of just like how pervasive they were. And so Hib on his website and on Twitter basically like took that data and I think threw it into like a clawed application and I I think it's going to be pulling from wherever the source was. um and ultimately created charts showing the amount of deaths and the severity of these uh incidents. And mainly why we're bringing them up and calling them out is because it's sadly like it's not it is it's why this business exists. So I want to caveat like for it doesn't sound like talk in our book but it's the reality that this was always going in this way when you have meaningful and material amounts of wealth in your person on your person or in your direct control because for whatever reason we we bypass digital bearer asset as this panacea to like um solving all counterparty risk when we just forgot that people could hold all their gold on their person and that didn't work for a number of reasons. One of them is just literally physical risk, but there's also like financial u and economic reasons where you need like counterparties including financial institutions to offer services uh to yourself. And so um the thing that I really want to anchor to is it's just broken market structure. Like full stop self custody is insanely valuable. It's what the whole makes the whole thing work. um and and it will always be a part of my kind of like um model and how I think about security and risk. But the reality is that to hold all my wealth and and people know that uh that's what I do puts me, my family and others uh at risk. And I think as the market appreciates that and as the price appreciates, more and more people will come to this conclusion that I can't look at my wife in the eye and because something bad happens and it's always because I made this decision and early adopters are maybe perfectly fine with that and having to deal with it. But if we expect to cross a chasm and go to mainstream adoption, we can't just say go to an ETF because that's what a lot of whales are doing and a lot of high net worth family offices that got in early have sold. I've heard firsthand and gone into the ETF because they don't want to deal with this. Like why would you want to deal with your family getting ram sack, loss of life over a trade or way to store value? Jackson had a good point of like I'd rather lose all my money than have my family get kidnapped or killed because like of this notion. And so I think that this is just something that will continue to occur and it's really a sign of broken market structure because nobody kidnaps um a large equity holder or a large bond holder for their position because they will just be caught. It'll take too much time. Um, so while I'm doing that, I want to respond or hear some responses, but I will share that we're going to be doing more this year for individuals. One of them for listeners of this podcast that like it, if anybody's ever been interested in signing up for on-ramp, we want to make it as simple for you. So, we're getting flatter cost, lower cost structures that are going to come be announced next week. But for specifically for listeners here, they can we're making it as easy as possible. They can sign up and get 50% off of on-ramp uh for the first month if they use TLT as the code. So with that, Jackson, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this and it's something that you think about and are passionate about given uh you find it crazy that like nobody talks about this and acts like self-custody is the only thing that should exist in Bitcoin. >> I mean it's yeah it's frustrating and look I know if this if this gets out there they're going to be people who um disagree with me and I think that's fine and think that's part of having a discourse is there needs to be differing opinions. So my opinion is that and Michael you you directionally got it right but we were talking about 6102 and so a lot of people that sit in self custody one of the big things one of the big reasons they continue to do it outside of liking the sovereignty of it is that they're concerned about the government all the all of a sudden issuing an edict and make and outlawing ownership of Bitcoin or something to that degree. and confiscating Bitcoin that sits on centralized custodians. For people who don't know what 6102 means, it's just a reference to in the 1930s when the US government did something similar with private gold ownership. So my comment the other day was the fact that I would much rather have my Bitcoin confiscated by the government than have to have my family experience violent armed people coming into our house in the middle of the night hurting my family and having to deal with that traumatic experience and then also losing money. I mean like unless you're incredibly sophisticated, you're going to end up losing money in addition to being harmed and not just you but your family. So, like for me, it's a no-brainer. I if I had to choose between the two, I'd rather the government take my Bitcoin than have my family subjected to that type of uh violence and traumatic experience. The other thing I would say as well, it doesn't need to be one or the other. I mean, that's like kind of tying in what we do. The whole model is predicated on the fact that no institution controls the Bitcoin. So, no institution can hand over the keys to your Bitcoin to the government. And this model only evolves over time as you have various jurisdictions that participate in the key quorum. So, you're solving for 6102 and you're solving for physical attacks. I mean, for me, that's a no-brainer. Um, and I know I get kind of animated about it, but it's just frustrating that people think for some reason that we have to live in a world where you have to put yourself and your family at risk just because you want to be a sovereign individual. >> You get animated. What about me? Um, no. So, you're you're exactly right. And I do think to to call out the one thing that we probably I personally made a mistake and we're going to be a lot better at is how do we bridge the gap because for some people we think on a long enough time horizon doesn't matter your exposure some exposure to multi-institution makes sense but the reality is that's perfectly fine if it doesn't make sense for you but for your friends and family it can make perfect sense because what's the alternative never getting any exposure or going into a centralized custodian or ETF I think most people would recognize that and so we're going to have some awesome referral stuff that's going to be coming Um but independent of that that it's really all probability and size waiting because I think that's the real hard part where we had 17 years. It kind of ties back into the uh socioeconomic hierarchy of like okay we were told to do this so it's hard to like reposition and just be truthful about like where do we sit but the reality is like the notion of a 6102 in most practical and pragmatic people's minds is like less than 10%. It's probably less than 5% and for a lot of people it's probably 1 to 3%. So, it's not to say that like you don't account for it. It's just that you size it appropriately and then you also look at what's the probability of if somebody finds out you hold all this money on your person which I'm sad to say like they are going to find out. I I've been talking about this for a while and I saw somebody else posted I don't know if it was uh or somebody else that with all these like different AI models you can put all this data in and triangulate pretty much anybody because everything's been hacked. Part of what caused all this or the conversation was Ledger again leaked somebody's information or the the third party vendor which is crazy because just in Bitcoin they secure a trillion dollars in total crypto. I think they secure a 1.5 to2 trillion that's just out there now into the ether for people to have updated uh PII on like where their locations are. And so um that is the the reality. And so the the angle that I've been playing around with and I don't know if Brian you've heard it but I Liam's kind of liking it. I'm starting to like it is what onramp and what multi- institution is to me um and because I think other businesses will do it. It's like the MacBook and it's the sense of like sure early adopters were com were competing and hobbyists and people that were early will never would have never like transition from how they set up their motherboard and their PC and the RAM and the hard drive. And even when the MacBook came out, they decided and even today, people want um very like robust setups and secure and all these other things, but the reality for the mass majority of people, they want a PC. They want the thing shipped to them and they get all the value from it. And a MacBook I use because you just know you're not going to get viruses and there's just a bunch of things that just come directly out of it. And that's ultimately how you cross a chasm in an industry to make this asset palatable and universal for everyone with a click of a button versus well ETFs and centralized custody we know long term can't work because we saw what happened with gold. But the alternative we're going to live in a pre PC in a box world everyone has to duct tape their PC solution. You can't expect the world to do that. We'll just sit in the dark ages of certain people doing it and then other people are just never going to get there. And if we're going to actually grow as an industry and asset class and financialization and so while this doesn't have to be for everyone, it really is for a large percentage of the market, our beliefs are because rather than have to learn all this stuff, they'll just be able to know that best-in-class exists. They click the button, they get their MacBook, they get the value, and they go back to their life. >> Yeah. No, that's all very well said. The only other thing I would add is like, you know, even if even if what we do and and multi-institution is not right for you and you're super comfortable with your self-custody, super sovereign setup, um, in all likelihood, you know, people, um, that it is perfect for, um, and, you know, uh, we're talking about things, you know, in terms of these types of attacks that probably go under discussed. The other thing that goes under discussed um in a similar vein is the concentration at at single counterparties. So you know everyone's excited about the inflows to the ETFs very constructive access point for new capital coming in. Agree with all of that. I think it's a net positive. Uh but most of the ETFs have outsourced their custody to one provider uh in in Coinbase. And so Coinbase's um total Bitcoin that they hold is is growing up is going up dramatically. And so if you even if mic is not right for you, but you care about the longevity and the future trajectory of Bitcoin generally and its adoption, you should care about MIC because it prevents uh a lot of the risk associated with concentrated uh custody at a at a single provider because we know single providers are not infallible. It's not impossible that something can go wrong. Um, and if you have that single entity risk, then you're fully exposed to uh that. And particularly in these uh ETF rappers that have just decided to use Coinbase as a subcustodian, that's a real risk that people avoid talking about. Um, and you know, there is a solution out there. There's a solution to mitigate the risks associated with that. Distribute private keys so that no one has unilateral control. Um, and again, even if it's not right for you, there's probably people in your life that, you know, you've been talking to them about Bitcoin for a while. Maybe they're not comfortable with uh setting up a hardware device, but you also don't want to send them to to Black Rockck or Coinbase. Um, this is the perfect solution for them. >> Yeah. And the other thing to add to that is like this that I just pulled up is not a solution for the vast majority of people because we have to be honest with ourselves and realize that 0.1 to 1% of the total population has any material exposure to Bitcoin and it's actually getting harder as the price appreciates because to tell an individual to park a h 100,000 a million $10 million in a hardware device just becomes very crazy and especially if it's all of their exposure and then if we think again it goes back to that early part of the conversation which is it starts to get a little nuanced based on how much somebody's exposure is and if it's 0.1% who cares how you custody right but this is posited by Jameson Lop who who again this is how early we are somebody that's been in this industry for 10 plus years develops custody solutions ultimately saying the best method for purchasing a hardware wallet is with a cash in person from a retail store directly from the vendor at a conference if you need to have it shipped use a disposable contact info and have it shipped somewhere other than your residence like just think about that proposition outside of like on top of just getting the thesis. How do you buy it? How do you not do it? It's like this is not it's just not realistic. If you want Bitcoin to preserve wealth for everyone in humanity. So that's what we're our goal is. The goal is not to um that's the goal. And so until other solutions and other people are doing things that help mitigate it and again it's not a panacea for people to still know that somebody holds Bitcoin and go. But our belief is that on a long enough time horizon as people understand the robustness of multi-institution as they understand the ability to set legal time locks, video verifications, the ability to set it for a year that can't move the market and bad actors will also understand this. And we do things already to let you know people know in case somebody gets in an email they can see. The point being is it just doesn't make logical sense for somebody to try to like ram sack your house because you can't get access to your money in the same way you can't get access to your Amazon stock. But until that gets widespread, this will continue. Um and so it's just important to know and again like Brian said said it great independent of yourself. Your um family that may not be as evangelical as uh convicted are going to be thinking about this and they're either going to be thinking well this is why I don't get exposure. usually going to be think this is why I sell this be thinking about why I just go into the ETF when I really want to get my real allocation and that also sucks because I don't believe that in the same way single party or custody in the home is a risk factor. I don't necessarily buy the long-term viability of ETFs in single party custody because as the honeypot grows um the the ROI on targeting that grows and it's just a matter of time before something bad happens. So that's in its in a nutshell in an essence why we're at $90,000. It's not the value prop is only 21 million. It's not rocket science to figure out the Bitcoin thing. It's how the hell do you custody an ephemeral asset in size that guarantees tomorrow it'll be there. >> Michael, I know if it I know if it was up to you, we would just continue recording the rest of the day. No, we got we got we got a we got a we're doing a we got a broadcast with Braun right after this. So, we're getting all >> [ __ ] >> All right. Well, I'm I'm done. And unless you guys have anything else, I'm I'm done. >> Only other thing I was going to say is uh be on the lookout. We're going to uh refresh our our referral program. So, going back to like even if it's not right for you, but you have people in your life that it is right for, you can actually earn Bitcoin by referring them to to On-Ramp. So, more to come on that front. But uh real hundreds of of dollars. Uh >> Jackson, I feel like people want to talk to you about this stuff. Like they want to get a consult. They're interested. It was price. It was how do I on board? How does it all work? How do we get them to talk to you? Because I feel like they're not interested. You have an email. >> I thought they would want to work. I thought they would want to talk to Cam, but I guess after what we uncovered today, he's too busy running his daycare. Um but yeah, if they want to speak with me directly, you can just email me, jsononrampbitcoin.com. And if for whatever reason you don't want to do that, you can just head to our website and you can book a consultation directly on the homepage. I know this is um a sensitive topic. It is a topic that you need to ask questions about and think through before making a decision. So, let's have a conversation and we'll answer all the questions that you have and it may be the right fit for you. It may not be and that's okay. But yeah, feel free to reach out and we're happy to help. Yeah, it's going to be a big year for uh TLT, BTC, On-Ramp, Bitcoin's price. So, um looking forward to it with you guys. >> Well, you're not going to be on the podcast next week. If we get enough comments, so don't look too don't look forward to it too much. >> How many comments do we say 10? If there's if there's 10 comments that say Michael, I won't show up. I won't go. >> Yeah. Okay, perfect. >> So, that's fair. That's a fair >> Well, Brian, I guess I'll see you next week for sure, Michael. Maybe next week. >> TBD. All right. Later, gents. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onra Media is forformational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/cont to schedule a consultation with one of our private client adviserss.