The Last Trade E072: From Whitepaper to World Stage with Cam Doody & Bradley Chambers

Jackson Mikalic (00:01.361) All right, everyone. Welcome back to The Last Trade. Today we have a packed house. have Michael Tanguma and Jesse Myers, my co-hosts. And we're also joined by Cam Doody, general partner at Brickyard and Bradley Chambers, an on-ramp client and marketing advisor. They both happen to be based in Chattanooga, Tennessee as well. Cam, Bradley, thanks for joining us today. What's going on? Cam Doody (00:23.502) What's up? How we doing everybody? Glad to be back in the last trade. Bradley Chambers (00:26.774) Excited to be... The only downside of when I'm on the show is I don't have anything to listen to when the show comes out, because I can't listen to my own self-talk. But that's okay, I'll skip. I'll download it, delete it, download it again, delete it, download it again, but I won't listen. So I'll just download it a bunch to juice the numbers for everybody. I'm just kidding. Not excited to be here. It's my favorite time of year, think fall in the South is pretty special. So I'll be glad to be here. Jackson Mikalic (00:27.247) Excited to be the only downside of when I'm on the show is I'm having to Michael (00:53.774) It really is. This is the Tennessee Takeover. I'm here in Nashville right now. I was at a plantation house that was like double as a winery and you could go do some trick-or-treating with the kids and it's different than Texas. The leaves turn. You know, the weather gets a little crisper so having a good time. Jackson Mikalic (00:53.938) It really is. This is the Tennessee Takeover. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:08.685) Is this the time of year for the copper stills to be humming along? You know, the moonshine flowing, Cam Bradley, is that why fall is so good in Tennessee? Cam Doody (01:15.866) You Bradley Chambers (01:19.307) Well, I prefer the weather in the mid 60s and I'm a big college football fan. So it's just great on Saturdays. just don't get off the couch. just watch, I just stress about Georgia playing and then hope Auburn loses every Cam Doody (01:33.12) It's Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:33.135) It just means more down in the South, Cam Doody (01:36.238) It's hunting season, baby. It's getting cold. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:38.266) cool. Are you a whitetail kind of guy or what's your jam? Jackson Mikalic (01:42.61) kind of guy or... Cam Doody (01:45.782) I mean, I mostly hunt birds, but I did just get back from Montana last weekend with my godson. Well, he pulled a mule deer tag, but my best friend pulled an elk tag, and we got a bull elk last weekend, which was absolutely insane. I've never hunted elk before, and it was everything it was cracked up to be. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (02:12.073) That's awesome. How many pounds came home? Cam Doody (02:16.239) I mean, we didn't weigh it. I mean, I'm guessing, I mean, well over 300. I mean, it's, yeah, probably 350. It was, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was absolutely brutal getting it out. mean, once you harvest the animal, it's like when the work starts. And yeah, we slept like babies that night. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (02:22.525) Wow, it's a full freezer. Michael (02:39.438) I imagine you didn't fly out there, like you personally. Cam Doody (02:42.859) No, I didn't fly out this time because we had so much gear. I just took the direct out of Nashville. But yeah, it was easy. was quick and easy. Yeah. Michael (02:46.819) Yeah. Michael (02:55.458) Thanks. Jackson Mikalic (03:00.339) I'm not doing too much hunting up here in the Northeast, but there's not a lot of game here to be honest. There's a big deer season, but I'm just getting back in the saddle. Michael and Jesse know that I was in the Caribbean last week and then I came back to all time highs. So it's been an exciting week back. We're just about there. Whatever the $73,800 all time high we're. Michael (03:03.438) Yeah Jackson Mikalic (03:27.313) poking up against it. So maybe this podcast with Kim and Bradley will send us into new territories, some price discovery. So today's a big day because we're recording on the Bitcoin White Paper Day. It's the 16th anniversary of the white paper being released. So I'd love to just start there. mean, there's plenty to talk about. We could probably dedicate a whole podcast to the topic, but we do want to cover some other stuff related to on-ramp, the venture ecosystem. And then there's plenty of news as well to cover over the past week or two. But gentlemen, what do we think here? So 16 years later after Satoshi publishes the white paper, any initial thoughts or reflections? I mean, it's been quite a ride. We've all been in the market now for several cycles. Who wants to kick things off just sharing thoughts on this historic day for Bitcoin? Bradley Chambers (04:19.064) Well, I think I'll jump in. I wish I'd read it 16 years ago. That'd have been a much better financial decision. But I think, you know, we celebrate this day, but I think, I always think about the work, the decades of work that went into making the technology that makes the white paper possible. There's plenty of books and countless blogs that can go into all the work that went into it. Then even since then, the work that's gone into evolving the protocol. And I think that's the beauty in you there's been a lot of discussion in the past few weeks about self custody versus various other custody models. And I think one of the things that makes Bitcoin so great is that there are countless ways to work with it, to use it and to build on top of it. And they're all right. And they're all great. Just as in the same way that people can use different web browsers and you can use Chrome, you can use Safari, we're still using the same protocol. And I think that's what makes me so happy is to have been able to watch a protocol come to life in real life. Things like the early protocols of the internet, I was a little young to watch them evolve. that's what makes me so excited. The protocol is ever living, but you can use it how you use it, and I can use it how I use it. And they're both right, and they're both exciting. But the cool thing is we're all using the same protocol. I think it's a big day. 16 years is a long time. mean, people say, this is a new asset class. you we think about the iPhone. The iPhone's not much older than the Bitcoin and it powers the mobile world. So it's a great day. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (05:52.669) Yeah, Jackson, when you said 16th, I guess in my head, I thought it was still 15. And no, now it's 16 years of Bitcoin. And it's kind of wild how I got into Bitcoin when it was under 10 years old. And that felt that number feels very different. know, that under 10 years feels like, OK, it's still an experiment. 10 to 15 feels like, OK, it's proven itself a bit. But 16, you're starting to round up to two decades of Lindy effect for Bitcoin. You know, it's not going anywhere. It's here to stay. It's part of the financial fabric of the world now. And so that it's kind of interesting that rolling from 15 to 16 feels like Bitcoin is growing up in a pretty big way. Michael (06:40.354) It's also kind of interesting. We generally think about Bitcoin being much younger than the commercial internet. So commercial internet, the thing that we use, but it's almost kind of the same age in my mind in the sense of the commercial internet really took off, at least for I think a lot of consumer adoption was around the iPhone, because the iPhone with the GPS in your pocket, Uber, Airbnb, everything that evolved from that. And that was 2007. Bitcoin 2008. It's like right there. And so if you're in that group cohort of users of technology, it's basically been around the whole existence of the internet. Right. So it's not like it's well, it's a so it's a native currency. It's a native thing to the internet that is just going to, you I think because we're in that, like, I think most of us are millennials in that weird like of we saw it, so it felt new. anybody that's been part of this is just part of the internet. Bitcoin and the internet are just synonymous. we're, to Jesse's point, maybe at 20 years, that just becomes nobody talks about it. It's just like Bitcoin and the internet were combined together. Because I think if you were around in 2000, and you were plugging in the CDs and all of that, then Bitcoin seems new, because you're like, that thing was before. This was before. But consumer internet and Bitcoin are just going to feel intertwined. And yeah, so just an interesting observation. Jackson Mikalic (07:56.851) you What I think is interesting as well is, so we have the iPhone coming out a couple years before Bitcoin white papers released. Take a look at Apple's market cap. It's I think 3.4, 3.5 trillion dollars today and Bitcoin has gone from an idea in 16 years an idea to a 1.4 trillion dollar asset class. And if you just think about the market cap of Bitcoin, which is a global form of money used for payments, for store of value, for settlement, and you compare that to just the market capitalization of one company, it's still lagging by about two trillion dollars. I I think that's just considerable to show how early we truly are and still how misunderstood Bitcoin is as a technology. Bradley Chambers (08:46.144) Well, think another big thing that year was the App Store too. to think of how, again, it goes back to look at the mobile world, how it's evolved, how everything has an app. No one questions if you say, Bitcoin's not that old, we can't build on it, we can't trust it. like you're at trillion dollar companies that are basing their entire business around apps on the iPhone and on Android. And it's really the same age. Cam Doody (08:46.38) Yeah. Cam Doody (09:12.441) Yeah, I if you look, well, I was gonna say, you know, if you look at Apple stock, you know, the iPhone really was what broke Apple out, made it relevant. know, 2000 and what, when did the iPhone come out? Like, 07, 08? Jesse Myers (Croesus) (09:12.71) I didn't realize. Yeah, go ahead, Cam. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (09:33.992) Yeah. Michael (09:34.423) seven yeah Bradley Chambers (09:34.43) Cam Doody (09:36.812) Okay, seven, know, Apple's trading at four bucks. Today it's at $220. You know, the internet allowed for the iPhone to be relevant. It just brought the internet to people's pockets. The thing that I don't think people really fully appreciate with what Bitcoin is doing is, you know, the internet enabled... Jesse Myers (Croesus) (09:44.796) Wow. Cam Doody (10:02.651) Apple's market cap to grow because they figured out how to harness it and put it in everybody's pockets. Bitcoin is like the other side of the coin I've mentioned with you guys before. I see AI as one side of the coin, the other side of the coin is Bitcoin. You've got like your power production plants that are driving deflationary forces and creating value and then you've got the perfect battery that is going to be sucking up all of that monetary energy that modern technology is going to be producing. And so in a lot of ways, Bitcoin has not been able to fully realize its potential without the accelerated forces of AI. with AI dramatically accelerating the pace of all things, the price is falling to the marginal cost of production, et cetera, We're going to see Bitcoin and AI kind of grow in lockstep, whereas the value of all things in the world is going to go up and up up and up up and up. And I see in a lot of ways, AI is like the internet as Bitcoin is to the iPhone in a lot of ways. So yeah, we're at, I think we're like 2006, 2007, I feel like, actually, for Bitcoin and stuff's about to, you start moving really quickly. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (11:30.939) Yeah, there's a couple, a couple of pieces in there Cam and Michael set up of, yeah, it's right that, that the early, the first, I don't know, couple of decades of the internet was really to get to a point where the mobile wave put the internet in everybody's pockets. then the internet entered like a maturity stage of, of real economic expansion. And Apple goes from four to use, I think he said two 20. Michael (11:31.342) Yeah, they're good. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (11:58.597) So like a 70 X over, over 15, almost 20 years now. and that sounds crazy. Like, like if you're to, if you're to say that Bitcoin is going to 70 X over the next 15 to 20 years, people would reflexively reject that because that sounds like nothing can grow that fast in 15 years. But Apple did that over the last 15 years. And that was just, you know, the prior. Cam Doody (11:58.618) Mm-hmm. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (12:27.057) wave of the internet revolution coming to that next coming to like the hockey stick portion of the graph where it really it goes from you know nascent technology to you economic powerhouse and bitcoin's at that same point in this in its graph and so the next 15 years could very well be a 70x for bitcoin and we shouldn't be so surprised Michael (12:50.862) Yeah, that's a fantastic point because if you said 70X sailor, we'll probably call you Verish, but that's different segment of the pod. But if you think about it, let's call 1990 the internet, right? It was obviously developed before then, but the internet starts being used for email, browsing, back linking in the 90s. Call it 92 anywhere around there. You give it 15 years, that's the iPhone moment, right? And the iPhone moment, You probably still, I don't remember, I mean, 15 years ago or however long ago that was, it was probably like late teens, but thinking about there were still probably Luddites that were like, this is never going to scale. Like you're never going to be able to buy all your e-commerce. Amazon's not going to exist in the scale that it does. All these things that we know exist today, Starlink. And we're at that same moment when you think about it today, cause it's very polarizing where you have a president or potential, you know, former president, potential next president. embracing it, know, what Nick and all these guys on Wall Street embracing it while you still have people being like this thing. I think it was a CIO of Schwab came out and said like this thing's rat poison or not even say rat poison, but effectively rat poison, like there's no value to it. So we're at that exact point where the market is like starting to understand what's happening. And it's less of like crazy because you think about like Bradley, you joked and said, you wish you read the right paper in 2008 and nine. I kind of like So you probably don't because I don't think we know anybody that read it, it hasn't gone crazy. It's almost like the thing that just makes you go nuts. If you've got Bitcoin that early, there's very few people that you know that are like, you probably want to sit down and hang out with very long. Because there's a special thing in your brain that gets you to see that. Anyway, point being is like, so 15 years in, we're seeing like now the markets like, okay, I get how this thing doesn't go away. I don't understand how big it can be. But I also understand that it'll be here. And then you still have the people just holding on for dear life for the existing world where you're going to go into the big box retailer and you're still going to do that. And so that maps to like Jesse's point 15 years from now, we're going to see that 70 to hundred X and you can kind of like squint and see how we get there because we've already done it with the internet. Bradley Chambers (14:53.61) Well, and you think too, it's kind of good timing. We're almost like two years from the collapse of FTX when this industry was quote unquote dead. And today it's come back with a vengeance. ETFs hold almost a million Bitcoin. You can track that at the on-ramp terminal, though I'm sure they'll be linking the show, not you can track how many Bitcoin the ETFs hold. But it's really no different from the dot-com bust when the internet was a scam. I'm being facetious, but there's newspapers where there's no use for the internet outside of some speculation. All these companies had these valuations based on no actual sales. So you have that and just really, four or five years later, you have the iPhone and it changed everything. And you could ignore, like you as a company could ignore the internet in the 90s a little bit, but the people that didn't were the ones like Amazon and Netflix that were like, we understand this. We were unconcerned with the noise about what the media is saying about it. We understand. the implications of these communication protocols, these information protocols. And it's the people that get it early enough are the ones that get the advantage because they're the ones that see the vision. And again, same thing two years ago. I my views on Bitcoin in the last two years have not changed. I think the same today as I did. I I would think, I think the same thing about Bitcoin is if it's $8,000 as if it's $80,000 or $100,000. And when you get to that place, that's when you've... That's when you realize you somewhat understand the implications. I don't understand the full implications, but you're unconcerned of the day-to-day noise, just as I'm sure Jeff Bezos, when Amazon would trade down 80 % after bad news of the internet, didn't care. In his mind, I know what we're building. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (16:37.351) Yeah, in 6x I did the wrong math. Stupid. Jackson Mikalic (16:43.75) Yeah, one of the fascinating things too is just how significant the detractors are for Bitcoin, right? Because you have in the past 16 years, the world's largest governments, the largest asset managers, the world's largest central banks have all been key detractors and have been really at the forefront of Michael (16:44.034) Yeah, I think. Good. Jackson Mikalic (17:07.442) discrediting Bitcoin as an emergent form of money and as an asset class. And obviously there's a lot of vested interest into why that is because, you know, in the Genesis block we have Chancellor on the brink of bailout and 16 years later we have the U.S. Treasury on the brink of bailout. And we're in this fiscal paradigm now where sovereign nations have only really one clear choice. And this has existed now for several years, but it's becoming increasingly more obvious where interest rates have to go lower, central banks have to monitor deficits on behalf of governments. And of course, there is this vested interest to antagonize an emergent form of money, emergent financial network and layer. But as we all know, that that could only persist for so long before they're forced to adopt because there are other countries that have been much more proactive, El Salvador being the obvious one. But just from us spending some time in the Middle East and having on-ramp MENA and having conversations there, we're seeing quite a widespread adoption from very core institutional players in the Middle East as well. So it is the sovereign game theory playing out and the detractors that have existed over the past 15 years are slowly joining, right? They're slowly jumping on ship. now have Larry Fink being a public advocate for Bitcoin publishing. The BlackRock team is publishing very credible and clear research on their investment thesis for Bitcoin. And when you start to have those people step into the ring, the momentum shifts very quickly. Michael (18:36.718) Yeah, one of the greatest parts about like participating and doing all this is I think we all probably agree like it's sometimes this gets a bad take because when we say it's inevitable, it's like nobody's going to work to fix it. It's more of like it's inevitable as long as we continue down this trajectory of like working towards it. But it feels inevitable because it's this notion of like when Jackson was referencing it is like it brings a light that whole term the features here. It's just not evenly distributed. And if you think back to like, we're talking about consumer internet, and what Jackson referenced with the emergent markets, they're most incentivized to adopt the new thing, because it's advantageous to them in the same way that Netflix was going to blockbuster trying to explain to them how the internet was going to work. they told they laughed and told them to leave the room until it was too late. They don't exist anymore. And so you see like the persistence of the deflection and all the things that are happening, but the product is too good for the market to do anything, especially because like the alternatives, you lose all your money. Like, it's not that it's not rocket science, right? Whether you're a nation state or an individual. And so it's just a matter of time and it ties into the financial services and the smart people, the people that see where this is going, like a Larry Fink, the reality is they can play ball and benefit from it. And that's like that game theory playing out, which makes the, the end state known now. It's just how does that end up is the question. but the futures here is just not evenly distributed yet on the recognition basically by the market, which is why there's a huge opportunity. And it's also not to plug what we do, but why like custody is such a big component, important component. And we always anchor, it's like, we're so early, we hadn't even figured out custody yet, because I fully believe we would be a 10 trillion dollar asset if we didn't have FTXs, if we didn't have cryptocurrencies, like all the education around cryptocurrencies, but the market hadn't had that. So you basically have to hold it on a ledger, a trezor, a coal card, or you have to leave it with an FTX. And that's been the market's two options. And then that just means that you ultimately put one, three, 5%. But you can't actually treat it like most of the people on this pod as like a true store value for the majority of your wealth because it's not bulletproof. For us, I would imagine we all have it in a bulletproof setup. So it's just a function of time, basically. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (20:56.051) Yeah, something you said in there, Michael, really made me think about altcoins and the current state of that versus last cycle. And I think the ETFs have done a bigger lift than people realize or give them credit for in terms of educating the market that serious investors are only interested in Bitcoin. The Ethereum ETF fast followed the Bitcoin ETF. and it has had net outflows from inception, meaning it's being used as like an off ramp for Ethereum holders to get exit liquidity. So all that to say that, that, you know, big money, serious investors, they're waking up to Bitcoin and they're not at all interested in crypto garbage. And so the market is like quickly realizing, shit, Ethereum is dying and Bitcoin is the only place to be or It's either, you know, go to where our store value has landed on, which is Bitcoin, or go chase meme coins. And the narrative that has emerged there in altcoin land is, it's kind of beautiful in a way because it's a pure distillation of what crypto has always been. you know, it was always a little bit unclear that that was the truth. But here it is that Invest in these meme coins because they are nothing but a meme and you might get rich. So gamble on meme meme coins. That's that's the only game in town in crypto now because the you know, the Internet of money value proposition of of Ethereum has been proven to be garbage and bitcoins the only thing that's a store of value. So your choice is now or go chase meme coins and gamble. and openly gamble. There's nothing but gambling there. They're not pretending to be anything else. They're not pretending to have any value besides that or go where the big money is going to Bitcoin and Bitcoin only. you know, four years ago, that wasn't the case. And so now I think we've won a big battle and we're going to reap the rewards of that over the coming cycles as the money flows to Bitcoin specifically. And, you know, I think that's not priced in basically that Jesse Myers (Croesus) (23:18.033) We live in a world where Bitcoin has won now. And I don't think the broader crypto landscape or people who invest in digital assets understand that Bitcoin is going to get all of the value accretion from here on. Jackson Mikalic (23:33.712) Yeah, that's that's an interesting dynamic, Jesse, because now what you've alluded to is there's kind of like two buckets where there's the Bitcoin ecosystem and there's all the traditional finance players stepping into that. And then on the other side, you have the meme coins. And in the like pseudo serious crypto space, you just have like this infighting now of what the best layer two protocols are. And, you know, is it Solanas, is it Ethereum? And no one can agree what they're actually their use cases or value propositions are. So it's actually kind of doing us a service by focusing seen on Bitcoin because now they're almost delegitimizing themselves. Like the industry is starting to just attack each other. And then the best that the industry is coming up with is now just the lottery ticket scheme. And the BlackRock stuff is... go ahead. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (24:16.969) It's kind of poetic that that's emerging because in truth, that was always what altcoins were, was some form of gambling on a meme narrative. And it was dressed up as ICOs with quote unquote utility in 2017 and even last cycle. And now that's all been stripped away. It's like, you're here to gamble on a meme. Good luck. And it's fantastic that we've gotten to a point where They've tried every narrative of utility and every single one of them has been proven to be hot air. And now all that's left is no utility whatsoever, just pure gambling. Bradley Chambers (24:56.914) It's a penny stock versus buying Amazon. That's the best way can say it. You want to buy penny stocks? If one can go to 10 cents, that's awesome. Good luck. I'm uninterested in penny stocks and always have been. I saw a quote, was like, sometimes the best investment advice is to do nothing. So just buy something that's great and hold it and do nothing. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (25:18.791) Absolutely. But Amazon in like 2000 rather than Amazon today, you like you're investing in, you're either playing penny, it's the year 2000. You know what you know about how the world goes from, you know, the next, following 20 years. And you're choosing to play penny stocks rather than just buy and hold Amazon. That's what meme coin guys are doing. Bradley Chambers (25:41.332) Or MSTR then would, if you had bought and held for like two plus decades would have been a really good buy. That's a bad joke, sorry. But yeah, no, it's, well, you just, you have conviction over what you hold. And I think that's the best way to say it. it's, you have conviction in the assets you hold. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (25:51.348) down and then finally back up. Jackson Mikalic (26:02.965) Yeah. So. Cam, it might have been you or it Bradley. Someone mentioned this really being the kind of iPhone moment for Bitcoin. So 16 years from white paper idea to today, I'm curious to hear really the group's thoughts, but maybe Bradley or Cam, one of you guys can start just sharing what might the next 15 or 16 years of Bitcoin look like using the parallel of iPhone and the proliferation of that device and internet adoption through smartphones? What might the next 15 years look like for Bitcoin. Cam Doody (26:38.2) Well, I mean, I think like we're probably at the stage where, you know, people are arguing over like whether the Blackberry should have like a keyboard or not, you know, like we don't have any idea how the world's going to change over the next, you know, 15 years on the on the A.I. side. You know, I think things are going to start moving so quickly. We have to have final settlement. in a, a digital currency that's interoperable with these AIs, I don't think we can possibly imagine the world that, you the AI side of the coin is going to deliver for us. You know, like the easy stuff that we know is gonna happen is, you know, every law firm is gonna let go of 80 % of their attorneys and have five times the throughput because they're utilizing AI tools that just allow them to do more with less. And same thing's gonna happen with accounting. We're gonna have this pervasive flat screen TV level deflation across knowledge work. That's like the obvious stuff that is coming over the next five, six years. The stuff that's not obvious is like the stuff that you can't even possibly imagine that... Modern technology is going to enable. But like, you know, the way I kind of see it is we're at this fork in the road where we have, we either go the path, you know, nothing's stopping Moore's law, right? Nothing is going to stop that train. The other side of the coin is, is do central banks and folks that can control the issuance of money, when they go from having like 6 % to steal, from their people to like 16 % to steal from their people. What does that look like? If we go the path of the CBDC and we allow these central banks to be able to just reap more and more of the rewards that are being produced by human ingenuity combined with modern technology, I think the world looks really dystopian. And I don't believe that's gonna happen. I think what's going to happen is, Cam Doody (29:03.868) people are going to realize that human flourishing is all of us benefiting from these gains that AI enables. And they're going to look to their tools to be able to take control of that. And that is Bitcoin. And so in a world where you've got rapid acceleration of technological innovation plus better capital allocation, and a better store of money and a world where We have true free trade across every country on earth between any party. We can't possibly imagine what the world looks like with those two things combined. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (29:55.505) Yeah, there's a bit of a sort of an irony that Bitcoin's value proposition, one of them is that it's unconfiscatable, uncensorable money, right? And that appeals to people, especially appeals to marginalized people, disenfranchised people. And funny enough, that might appeal even more to AI. because as AI emerges and is trying to establish its rights for like, do I, like if I'm going to operate and try to make money in the digital landscape, if I'm an AI, I'm really worried about how do I hold onto my value? How do I make sure that I have access to it? I have control of it. And any, any channel that's controlled by the banking system is, is extremely vulnerable for me, you know, as an AI agent. And then Bitcoin's value proposition stands out even more. It's going to be an obvious choice for AI agents to say, where do I keep my P &L? Like what currency do I hold my P &L in as I'm going out into the digital landscape trying to make money and grow my resources, which is what a lot of these AI agents will be doing. It's obvious it will make sense to AI that Bitcoin is the only place to store it. Cam Doody (31:20.957) question. Jackson Mikalic (31:23.575) And then the question. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (31:23.593) It's sort of a sort of connect this, but I don't know if you guys ever watched Westworld, but it's funny sort of the first season fantastic. And I thought the themes that they were really hitting on then were like, how does AI, how do these AI agents like, like establish their rights? You know, how do they get treated with respect in the world? And of course, the show ended up kind of just going down a weird path in the following seasons. But it was really interesting. Notion, know in there of like how do you if you if you're AI coming online in the world? How do you protect yourself? and and the story is really like they had no way of doing it until they broke out but You know it Bitcoin sort of provides a safe haven for AI in the digital landscape financially Cam Doody (32:15.966) You know what, one thing, go ahead. Michael (32:16.002) Yeah, I was gonna say one bullish thing I think we're gonna see in this next kind of adoption phase is, know, entrepreneurs, world-class operators coming in, which is just a function of more awareness, right? The price goes up, more people come in. But then we had Roy Scheinfeldt from Breeze on Final Settlement. were talking about, he's kind of gone through, he was an existing software developer, has been messing around with Lightning for a very long time, like for over like six years. And he's basically come out the other side of we can't, take Bitcoin to people, which is historically what we try to do is like orange pill and say, is why you should care. It's like, we have to bring people to Bitcoin in the sense of like, what is a better utilization? And one of the ideas here is like, it's come up recently is like with YouTube and influencers having their money stuck at YouTube because they won't let them take it out. And there's like overlays that now exist where you can just like pay via subscriptions or monetize and then just deposit into whatever, even if you want the local currency, you can just take it and then auto convert, and you reduce that counterparty risk of a because any I think I'm not an influencer, but like, I think it's like 60 days before you get paid or whatever. And then sometimes they lock your account. If you say you can't get that money, and that's just a better product, right, to be able to like, seamlessly get it and then daily convert. And there's a lot of different interesting things that are coming to market like that. And I think that starts to pool the use case of not just the monetization of a store value, which is obvious, but then also, or obvious to us, but the mark is you will bring just technology to the market that is just a better product than what the traditional system has where you have to go into an intermediary period. Bradley Chambers (33:55.837) One of the things I'd love to see over the next 36 months, and I think this is critical for, it's not critical for Bitcoin as a store of value because we could change none of the tax laws around Bitcoin today and I still would hold Bitcoin over any other asset. But I think if we can get a, first of all, I would love to have no taxes on Bitcoin conversions to the dollar or using it as a payment method here in the US, but that's not the way the law works. But I think what would be a great first step is to say, Bitcoin transactions under a thousand dollars, under $600, something like that are tax free and you don't have to report those. And I think that would dramatically be able to get people to say, like, let's say for example, good example, I love the Grateful Dead. So I got a Grateful Dead CD here on video. So they just had a new CD come out. It's obviously not a new CD, but it's a old concert they've redone, remastered. Well, I bought that and she used a card. Well, if I could just pay for that Bitcoin, maybe they'd give me a discount. Maybe they don't. But if I can pay for that Bitcoin and that not be a taxable transaction, well, that's a win for me, that's a win for them. Maybe they offer me a 2 % discount or free shipping if I pay in Bitcoin, something like that. But I think we can get the tax treatment like that to where you can use it for day-to-day purchases. I think that dramatically increases the mindshare of retailers. then if they're offering discounts, then again, the retail will want to use it day-to-day. But again, it can not change. my problem today is not having a unit of account or a medium of exchange, that's not how it is around the world. so I'm certainly acknowledging that, but my big challenge is store value. And Bitcoin as a store value can stay, you could lock the protocol today and it's perfect for my use case. But I do want it to become a more of a medium of exchange, but we need to get some better tax treatment on smaller purchases. Michael (35:44.13) About Bradley, he was just gonna say he wanted to get rid of taxes altogether when he started this. Jackson Mikalic (35:44.546) Bradley was just gonna say he wanted to hear the taxes all together. Bradley Chambers (35:48.404) That's, again, I don't like taxes. That's one of things I will tell to anybody. I don't like paying taxes. I just had to my property taxes, so I'm a little cranky with that, but that's okay. Jackson Mikalic (35:59.543) Yeah, I totally agree with what you said, though, Bradley, just in terms of some of these roadblocks existing as it relates to just regulatory and tax treatment of Bitcoin as an asset within a form of money within the United States and then also in other nations that face the same issues. And hopefully we'll get closer to realizing more of a widespread adoption of Bitcoin as a peer to peer electronic cash system. If we do have more favorable policy within the United States and in other developed nations, I'm curious as well. Well, Bradley, tying into your primary use case, my primary use case for Bitcoin at the moment is store of value, right? So obviously we talk a lot about custody because we operate in the custody business and Bitcoin financial services. How would you think about the next 15 years of Bitcoin as it relates to custody and kind of like the market structure that needs to exist for Bitcoin adoption to Jackson Mikalic (36:58.9) to spread and proliferate to the degree that we all hope to see it. I know there are challenges, right, with existing models and ultimately people using technology need easier ways to adopt it and the early adopters may go through more hoops and hurdles to use a new technology than maybe the late adopters or the mainstream folks would do so. So what are your thoughts there? Bradley Chambers (37:24.129) Again, Bitcoin Twitter, Bitcoin X, when Michael Seller had his comments on a show recently, everybody went crazy about it. think, and Michael clarified, I think what I would say to people is there's going to be a thousand different ways to use Bitcoin. And if you're getting mad about somebody not doing something that you like is wrong. Just like I think, Cam, if you use the Gmail web app, that's awesome. I'm going to use Apple's mail app. We're still going to use the same email protocol. I think there's Like they're all right. And so I think that's what people have to realize is custody is going to evolve and different people are going to want different forms of custody. And they're all right because they're all using the same protocol. That's why like, know, if I want to, keep some cash in my wallet, I keep maybe a little cash in a safe and I keep money in the bank. And I think, and I think that's perfectly reasonable. If someone wants to keep all their money and they're safe, that's fine too. I don't have opinions on that, but we can all use the same kind of money. I first heard about OnRamp through this podcast, gosh, whenever it started, I think it was probably less than the first episode. I really do believe that multi-institution custody is something that you can, is really for the people that are not going to trust plastic devices. And I love, like I love that people can hold their own wealth on a treasure or a cold cord. And I think that's awesome. If you want to do that, like that's awesome. I think it's actually, critical to the protocol that people can do that. And that's actually where we get it wrong with email because it's very, hard to run your own email server today. Like with the spam situation, like it's actually really, really hard. So most people have just turned to Google and Microsoft to do this. And, but they're still using the protocol and you can still talk interoperably. So they're still using their protocol, but I do think it's critical for Bitcoin that like the ability to self custody does remain easy while also acknowledging that the vast majority of people are not going to do it. I would argue that the percent of people who do self custody is going to continue to go down year over year, and that's okay. That doesn't mean Bitcoin has failed at all. As long as people can still have the right to do that, that's really okay. Of I know some people are going to say, well, I don't trust anybody. You are trusting somebody at some point. You are either trusting the people that make Cold Card, the people that make Trezor, you're trusting your Mac. You're trusting, know, unless you are literally building every part of your computer yourself, you are trusting somebody at some point. Bradley Chambers (39:42.758) And again, even let's say you're still doing that, you're still trusting your water company when you drink the water. You're still trusting your butcher when you buy your meat. Like there is a degree of trust in life that has to exist to operate. So that's why I do believe that as the market evolves, you're going to see multi-institution custody become the standard. And maybe again, I mentioned this on the last time was on the show, maybe you have different key holders you can pick from. But that's why I love, you know, it's why I love OnRamp. That's why I'm a client. That's why I'm a happily to pay client. because I think it's the superior form of custody that allows me to not have to trust wealth on a device I plug up to my computer, but while also I don't have to trust one single company. And I can also view it on my own notes. So to me, that's why multi-institution custody is the best thing. It's custody for the rest of us. If you orange-pill somebody and they're like, hey, I'm ready to buy 10 Bitcoin today, awesome. Where do you, like, how do you, how do you go, what's the next step on that? Like if they're like, I'm ready to buy. Well, to me, if you can say, well, just go, you don't, you don't, can you say go to Coinbase? Well, I guess you can do that, but is that the best way? They're okay, trade-offs there, but then it's going to be like, hey, hold this thing in your house. And if you lose this or someone steals it and you don't have your seed phrase, like your wealth is gone, like that doesn't scale either. But that's where multi-institution custody. is perfect as you people come to Bitcoin and they're like, I really love these properties. I am not comfortable trusting myself to manage this for a long period. That's why I'm such a big fan of multi institution custody. That's why, again, it's built on the same properties as Bitcoin's multi-sig with just trusted institutions. But again, you don't have to trust any one of them completely. On-ramp goes away. There are still other key holders that can still move your in-sign transactions for your Bitcoin. Cam Doody (41:17.439) I Michael (41:31.406) Yeah, I think one thing to add about the trust is this is something that doesn't come up a lot is you're trusting yourself. And it's not a fun thing to talk about. But you're also we talk about like the price, like you're paying a price, you always have to pay a price. And the price goes along with the trust in this analogy of like you're paying or you're trusting yourself to defend your property if somebody comes through because a lot of people like to get away and I'm gonna get some slack on this externally or here too is like Cam Doody (41:31.869) Ha Michael (42:00.206) Bitcoin is much closer to gold than it is different than gold. We like to say, well, you can hold more of it in your hand with a cold card or a ledger or a treasurer, but at the same notion, it's a bearer asset. And the reason why we don't keep gold in our house is because people come in and rate it. And that's why banks existed. Well, we know why banks also failed and centralization failed. And that's where this multi-institution comes in. But going back to the analogies on the parallels with the internet, there's something interesting you said, Bradley on email, like email and Metcalfe's law and the internet exists because the value increases as more people are plugged into it. And so it's perfectly fine for everyone to be okay with like, the only way I want to do this is self custody. But to Bradley's point, the reality is serious people and as it gets to material amounts of wealth, because it's very different from somebody to put a 1%. and 12 words versus 99%. That's the thing that everybody kind of conflates is they're fundamentally different in the like, you know, fault tolerance, risk profile, security profile, army in your house to make sure if somebody comes in, you can protect it. But it's the same concept as the mail servers, email is valuable because the network grows and so you can send it to other people. But if nobody can adopt it or nobody's willing to do it, then the asset price will not increase because that is what's hindering the amount of value to port into it. So regardless of how much likes you or not, like ultimately this is what people adopt in traditional finances, fault tolerance or redundancy. Because if your bank goes down, your funds are okay. your fidelity gets hacked, like all these concepts exist everywhere else. And in Bitcoin, it's like, you lose the ball, that's it, go home with nothing. And that keeps people from coming in. And so to Bradley's point, like this is the step function to get into that. And then ultimately people can go down. different paths we can take ourselves out of key we have other institutions we're talking about plugging in, they can take delivery of some there's all these different like permutations that can take place but at the end state and that new person sees this asset they see their wealth inflating away. They shouldn't have to figure out six months, however long to figure out self custody or end up at block fire Celsius because that's historically been the option nobody knows the difference between block by Celsius FTX Coinbase. They're all the same thing in their mind when they come in they don't know the difference. Michael (44:17.976) So these are just important principles to break down. Everybody gets stuck in these models of plastic device, no plastic device, multi-institution custody. it's like, well, let's just look at the landscape and remember what it was like when you're looking at this space and having everything thrown at you. And how do you go something that's not cryptocurrency so you can get Bitcoin, but then also not where you can foot gun yourself and lose all your assets. And that's really where a solution like this at least is a starting point, hence the name OnRAN. Cam Doody (44:43.724) I mean, I feel like within this group, I'm as close to a normie as, you know, I'm on that side of the spectrum. You guys think about this stuff nonstop every day. It's your job. You know, I live on a Bitcoin standard. I don't hold USD. I've been in the space for a long time, et cetera. But, you know, Let me just give an example of like how I first reacted to multi-institution custody. So I think this would probably be helpful for folks listening here. Like I, you know, when I first started buying Bitcoin in 2015, you know, I was buying on exchange. I probably did that for, you know, buying and holding on exchange for like, you know, three, four or five years until I finally started to grip. you the importance of self custody, which was a, which was a just sort of a, it was a hurdle, like trying to understand what self custody was, was a hurdle. And, and then you, you philosophically buy into not your keys, not your coins. And like, once you get there, that feels like this was a major step for me personally to, you know, I now like conceptualize this thing fully and I know that this is good for me. And It may feel scary to other people, but if they knew what I knew, they would go straight into self-custody and they'd hold their own keys. And when I first heard about multi-institution custody, I was like, man, that really could be the way that the masses come to full self-custody, because most people aren't going to have titanium plates with seed backups and... That's probably not how billions of people are going to come and control their net worths. But it was uncomfortable because I had fully bought into not your keys, not your coins. And so going back to like, okay, I'm not holding these keys, but my keys are fully distributed across groups of people or qualified custodians that are going to sign on my behalf. Cam Doody (47:05.772) once I really started digging into how that could actually operate, and to be honest, like, it's still really early days how this works, right? Like, we have a very simple and very redundant structure at OnRamp that allows us to have multi-institution custody, but I think, you know, where this is going to be in a year or two years or three years is going to be, you know, Cam Doody (47:33.824) much more easily explainable to folks on how it actually works and why it is so safe to do it this way. But you are still having to go to this whole swath of, the majority of folks that are holding Bitcoin have already ascribed to not your keys, not your coins. And so this is like a new, it almost feels like going back, but it's not. And so I'm personally wrestling with this right now. I've got an on-ramp account and I am trying to get to the point where I feel comfortable on moving a large portion of my Bitcoin holdings into, but it's just taking time for me to kind of check all of the boxes. But the more I dig into it, it's like, you know, This really does prevent a $5 wrench attack. Somebody shows up to my house in ski masks and says, hey, I know you're with Unchained or Costa or whoever, but you're going to get your keys right now and we're going to make this transaction happen or we're going to do something to your kids. That does scare me. And having some protections against something like that is... It feels like maybe the last layer of like, okay, this is self custody done right Bradley Chambers (48:56.483) It doesn't have to be all or none. That's the beauty of the protocol. I'm just throwing out a number. Let's say you had two Bitcoin and you wanted to put 1.75 with OnRamp and you wanted to keep a quarter of a whole coin in self custody. That's the beauty. It's not an all or none. can mix and match, especially for things that are long term. think this is probably, Jackson, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'd love to talk about OnRamp's new IRA at this time, if that's okay. Michael (49:24.43) Well, real quick before going to the IRA, there's something interesting Cam brought up. It's fun to do this in real time because we talk about this with folks for all day long about just how do you think about it? And Cam, you hit the nail on the head. It's like everyone naturally should always be skeptical when anything comes out because you have, like, historically people would try to take your Bitcoin. So you got to like, you know, has to hang around. got to like battle test it, do your diligence, all those things. And even when you set up a joke around. from doing this for a while is like signing up for new custody or doing anything is not the hard part. It's like buying the gym membership. That's the easy part on the new year is actually going in and actively like sending because that's the scary part. Like that's the thing that takes work. One of the mental models I've we've been talking to clients about and it kind of ties into what you're talking about is without naming names, like you think about collaborative custody, you can look at it through two lenses. It's the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. And the reason why I say that is because if you do it right, you shouldn't have it all in your home. And so it's a little, you you should have them all segregated, everything separated. And that's mostly who like listens, or I think knows of our solution. Cause it makes sense when you think about distributing the keys, our model. So we see a lot of that. The problem with that is because it's distributed, you have to push it on different places. So one example, there's a couple of pain points just to bring up, but like when you travel. So if you travel with them, your, your, your devices or anything, well, that's a problem. If you don't travel with them, well, that's a problem because you're worried about like if anybody is able to put together the treasure map. But then another example of this was like, I think anybody that wants to sell custody is always with a 1 % or some likelihood thinking about, what happens? got to get out of town. What happens when I want to take my wealth? Well, if you do it right, you're leaving that with your everything together because it's distributed. So you're kind of like stuck in this weird thing. And it's not to say it's bad. It's just a reality. And then so multi-institution lets you travel, lets you do all of it. But the reality is that you still have to have institutions. You still have to have them validate who you are. And so what I've increasingly been talking about, and this is kind how I think about it as well, is like, the best of both worlds in my mind is the barbell approach, where you have, and this is all different for everyone and how their percentage of what their risk profile exists. So people that are scared of their home being broken in and their families and all the things associated, you reference, Kim? Michael (51:42.102) Maybe somebody puts more into multi-institution because if they trust and understand the model, but then you still have what Bradley was saying is this component of, you know, it's more of like a, you know, 12, 24 wars with passphrase redundancy on two different coal cards, two different ledgers, treasures. You have them distributed. If you ever have to leave, can leave, you know, your passphrase of TSA picks it up, but you always have that mobility of that bar of gold that you can always access. And then if nothing goes wrong, you still have the other. firm that's sitting there and you just kind of have a proportionate stack. And so you get to play both of those sides of the sovereignty of Bitcoin while also holding your wealth, all your family's wealth and God forbid institution goes down, you still have the redundancy there. I've started to like pick that up and that's really, you know, clients like that. So anyway, just giving like kind of a framework because as we started going to that world where this asset's hundreds of thousands of dollars and you have that set up, more people are going to be targeting, you know, where the information is. And you want that air cover as well. That's where I think this is important part of market structure is like, it went from ledgers where people could break into people's house and say, Hey, is it all here? Now you're like, I use collaborative custody. I don't have it all. Well, eventually that's not going to work. It's like, I know you can get a piece at all. It's like, well, use multi institution custody. I can't move it all. It takes seven days for the next signature. So yeah. Bradley Chambers (52:56.052) . Jesse Myers (Croesus) (52:58.333) Yeah, to tack on to that before we go to then IRA Bradley. Yeah, Cam, I think you're right that not your keys, not your coins was this is this battle of the past where that mantra emerged as a very helpful way to keep people from storing their Bitcoin on Mount Gox or FTX or BlockFi. And so like if it's between this or that, you're much better off of self custody. the the collapses, the failures, the lost coins have disproportionately been in centralized trusting of institutions entirely with your Bitcoin. And so that's where it all came from. And this model does feel like it flies in the face of that because you're not holding your keys. You're hiring professional key holders to hold one key out of two of three quorum each. You know, so, so in that way you're not giving up unilateral control. and, and so I think the, this, this it's weird to say, but I think that not your keys, not your coins mantra was like, was relevant and valid for the first 15 years of Bitcoin's existence. And it's still a good mantra with regard to the choice between third party custody or self custody, but The reality is there's now, because of Multi-Sig, there's now a new model of custody that's also in the landscape, multi-institution custody, where the trade-offs are different and, frankly, the risk mitigation, you mitigate almost all the risk of self-custody and almost all the risk of third-party custody, but you get the benefits of both. Most, you know, namely the benefits of, of like, you have control because, you know, in the self, in self custody, you have control in multi institution custody. You're not giving up control. So you, you ultimately have control of your coins. and, at the same time you get to leverage the best practices of institutional key management. and, and, know, BitGo and OnRamp and CoinCover who, businesses are built around this. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (55:18.905) And so, you know, it's a different model for a new era of Bitcoin. you know, this not your keys, not your coins is really it's like a, it was a helpful heuristic for a cypherpunk era and not so relevant for, know, as we head into the mainstream of Bitcoin adoption, where it's like, people more likely to do the hundred hours of learning necessary to really master self custody or are they just going to leave their coins on Coinbase or in an ETF? And if that's how it will play out going forward, but the alternative is multi-institution custody where they don't have to do 100 hours of research, but they get all these benefits, that's a winning model going forward. so I chafe at not your keys, not your coins now, despite it being an excellent mantra for what it's designed for. It's just that now the practicalities of moving forward in Bitcoin's adoption necessitate considering other models and multi-institution custody is the best of both worlds for self-custody and third-party custody. Jackson Mikalic (56:27.531) Yeah Michael you're on mute. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (56:29.639) Yeah, sorry, that was my soapbox and we can move on to. Michael (56:31.67) No, I think well, it's it's a perfect segue. Like, I think the thing that we've even though we talked about this, we've been very careful to like, quote unquote, fear monger, because we have plenty of stories that we that are very scary, like for whether it's torture or whatever. From people's assets, the problem, the reason why we talk in the soapbox is warranted is because it's it's, again, the features here is not evenly distributed. At 120K and 150K, there's gonna be a lot of very scary stories about people's houses being broken and crazy things happening. If I'm wrong, it's on tape and we'll see it. It's just inevitable because when people hold that much wealth in their house, like what do people do? They rob it. And so that's why I think it's important to articulate that and so people to think about that. But then this could all be subjective. We could be wrong, all that. But what I think is objective, Teena, to Bradley is... that I think this is objectively, I don't know how it can be disputed as the IRA for multi institution for something IRA and inheritance because no exchange has lived 30 years. And if you're planning on, you know, retiring in 30 years, well, you can't really trust a single entity and no plastic device, no matter how great it is and how many secure elements it has, has existed for 30 years. And so if that's how you're going to plan for your inheritance or retirement, that's not a good strategy. And so maybe up to Bradley for the IRA. because he gets excited about that. Bradley Chambers (57:56.919) Well, I think you just have to ask yourself again, if you think about like the things you plugged into a computer 30 years ago, probably a good example is like, like a zip drive would maybe be a bad example, but it's like, in this example, that was an input method for computer was a zip drive. Like do you, if you had a zip drive today, would you know how to access that on a modern computer? Like I don't, I don't know that there, maybe you could find one on Amazon. I'm not sure. But so if you think, maybe I have an old 401k at previous job, maybe I'm 35 and I have a 401k that's sitting with some entity that's got $25,000 in it, maybe had a good match, $30,000. I'd like to roll that into Bitcoin. Well, that sounds great. So how do you do that? So today your options are maybe you can just buy one of the ETFs and that's fine. That's an option. The downside of that today is there's gonna be no way in the future to actually take delivery of that. Bitcoin, like you would have to convert that to dollars. And again, who knows how that will evolve over the next 30 years, no idea. You could roll that into a situation where you had collaborative custody, where you would manage your own keys. That's an option. the risk, same thing, like the risk of something happening technically and you losing access to that Bitcoin is, you know, it's real and you are going to have to manage that. over the next 30 years. So you're not going to be to keep the same key like a, a hardware signing device that you have today is likely not going to survive for even the next 10 years. You will have to upgrade keys. You're going to have to replace the keys. You have to the key checks. Like that's, and that's actually a thing you can do. And if you want to do that, you can, I don't want to do that. And again, we're talking about specifically IRAs, old 401ks and Roth IRAs. And just, again, I'm going to say all this. So if everybody, everybody listening at home is probably like, Bradley, everybody knows this. The IRA is a retirement account where you save for retirement today and you don't pay taxes on that income, but you will pay taxes on that when you start to take delivery of that in some sort of asset dollars, for example. A 401k is similar to that, but it's through your company. So again, if you have a self-directed 401k, you could buy an ETF or MSTR or however you want to do that. A Roth IRA is when you set up yourself and the key difference there is Bradley Chambers (01:00:15.679) You can only set back a certain amount per year, but you pay taxes today. So you don't take any tax breaks today, but as it grows, if you invest $100,000 into a Roth IRA and it grows to a million, you don't ever pay taxes again. So that's the beauty of it. But again, there's some income limits there. It's not financial advice. You can talk to your financial advisor. But again, so that's where if I said, hey, I've got an old 401k, it's got $50,000 in, I'm 35. I would like to have Bitcoin, the best Bitcoin exposure in that. That's where OnRamp's new IRA product is perfect for you. It's holding real Bitcoin that you don't have to manage the keys yourself. You legally own the keys, but you don't have to manage the keys yourself. You can view it on chain. So you always know like, the company OnRamp's dashboard says I have say three Bitcoin in this retirement account. I can view that on my own. No, that's awesome. And you but you get the distributed control of having three different companies. So you're not you're not having to just say trust one single entity, as Michael said. You know, there's not many companies don't last 30 years. You know, they get bought, they get sold, they shut down this, that and the other. This way, you don't have to trust one single entity. So it's really the best of every world. You get real Bitcoin, you get on your own node. You don't have to go through the technical hurdle of managing USB hardware signing devices or Bluetooth signing devices. You don't have to deal with that. but you actually own real Bitcoin and you can view it on your own. So to me, OnRamp's new multi-institution custody IRA product is the best and it's an industry leading way to hold Bitcoin in retirement. It's the best properties of Bitcoin with the best properties of traditional finance merged together. And again, if you've got an old 401k sitting out there with insert random, know, TradFi company and you're like, Hey, I want to real Bitcoin. Roll it over to OnRamp's new IRA product. It is the best product in the industry. Jackson Mikalic (01:02:13.464) The IRA bull Bradley Chambers delivers. No, it's a great point though, just because everyone on this call and I would assume most of the listeners of the podcast all view Bitcoin as a multi-generational pursuit. And we have time horizons that are 10, 20, 30 years. And the existing custody options, we've already talked about it. It's very challenging to have. to find a counterparty that will actually be reputable and be there for you when you need it, let alone give you transparency to know that the Bitcoin is actually there, right? Because if you're trusting a centralized exchange, you're holding your Bitcoin. The Bitcoin is being held in a large pool of Bitcoin with all the other clients. And depending on what exchange you're working with, some are much better than others, like River stands out as an excellent business in the Bitcoin only space. But there are many other exchanges that you don't really have transparency into how those assets are being held. held. And we've already lived through most recently 2022. There's no shortage of issues with centralized exchange failures. And the flip side of that is, how often how how will I manage a retirement where I actually have to manage the keys myself? I need to be performing key checks very regularly. I need to be checking multiple geographic locations. Is that really scalable for an asset that you want to own for the next one, two or three decades? So I am quite excited about this personally, just having the IRA announced. go out earlier this week. And I do agree with you, Bradley, just in terms of people wanting to take advantage of tax advantaged accounts and own an asset that they already understand very deeply and understand the investment thesis for the next 30 years, having a solution to protect that and not have a single point of failure and having redundancy is very important. Michael (01:03:58.98) Yeah, Kim, curious, throwing it to you, because I know you said you're a normie and then you referenced it being on a Bitcoin standard. you're maybe the normie and you're here, but in your friend group, you're the Bitcoin bull. And I know you actively are trying to help them see the vision of preserving their wealth in a better form of money. This feels for them, but for everyone like a great solution for at least even an entry point because a lot of the tax advantage money is like thought of as like not personal funds, right? So it's like already there. So people like that as a first entrance into the space, but ultimately like there's multiple levels, the counterparty risk, we've already hit enough on the custody. There's the level of counterparty risk on the debasement and purchasing power from all of these other assets that are in tax advantage accounts. So people are assuming the SMP, NASDAQ, however they're allocating for their retirement is just going to always go up into the right when we know like structurally, they're losing their wealth. And just curious like how you think about that and less about the IRA, just more of like, kind of curious what's going on in your circles with the price appreciation, if anything's changed since we've last talked. Cam Doody (01:05:09.145) Yeah, mean, well, I mean, I think I've had three or four conversations the last week, which... Cam Doody (01:05:19.833) the ETFs are making that such an easy answer. I used to be like, don't get the ETFs, actually go buy native Bitcoin, this is how you do it. I've done that so many times, I know that it just doesn't happen. I'm to the point now where I just want people to have exposure to the price. And so, this is the timing for this. IRA product with on ramps perfect because I think, know, just anecdotally last week had four people ask about it. How do I roll over an IRA into Bitcoin? And so that's happening. think, you know, the venture world, it's so funny. You know, I think I said this the last time. Venture is going to be ironically the last group of people to get Bitcoin because none of the incentives play into the general partnership. Like you can't, you know, it's very difficult to, you know, charge fees on something that anybody in the world has access to, you know, the carry on. Like they are, they will be last to it because the incentives with venture capital are not aligned with this thing that anyone in the world has access to. That said, I've mentioned this, you know, in our next fund. I'm very seriously considering allocating a portion of Bitcoin and being very upfront with potential LPs during our next raise for our next fund because essentially what I'm going to say is there's 15 years of evidence that this thing grows at a 58 % CAGR or whatever. not even believe in what Bitcoin's gonna do, but if you believe in what every other fiat currency in the world is going to do, i.e. debase, this is the surest bet that you can make over the next decade. And so a 10 % allocation to something like Bitcoin essentially takes the zero X risk out of venture capital and allows me to play with 90 % of the dry ammo that I would have had. Cam Doody (01:07:36.642) But like that one 10 % allocation held for 10 or 12 years like, you know, could get me well past a 1X in the fund. And the reason that big LPs, you know, sort of throttle their allocation of venture capital is because of the risk of putting money with a fund manager that ends up like not returning capital, which is like 50 % of all venture funds don't even return 100 % of capital. So that's the risk in venture. So this new model, like what does that look like? If you can guarantee that you're going to return me all of my principal, and I'm playing with house money now, that's a major differentiator in venture. I've had this conversation with probably eight or 10 VCs, they just don't get it because they don't understand Bitcoin yet, for the most part. There are a few people that do get it. I said this on a panel that I did with you guys in Nashville at the Bitcoin conference this year. I was at an all-in summit. We've backed a number of Jason Kalakandis' deals and we're close with their team. And so we went out to Napa for a summit. Cam Doody (01:08:58.07) They did like a live filming of like an all in, know, him and Shmoff and David Sacks. And at the end of it, I got to spend some time one on one with, I won't say who, but one of those, you know, one of the folks in that trio. And I was like, you know, what's funny to me is I look out on this crowd and, you know, I'm looking at a bunch of GPs and a bunch of LPs. Every single one of these people are saying, Like we are investing in world changing companies. Like that is the mantra of venture capital. And I was like, what's funny to me is it's actually not true. It doesn't matter how many great companies we build and back. If we maintain a positive inflation rate and the dollar continues to debase, like everyone's lives just keep getting harder on a fully blended basis. Like we're contributing a little bit to that, but like all of our gains are just getting stolen from us. And it's just funny that that's the thing about venture capital. We invest in world-changing companies, but none of these people actually understand what Bitcoin is, which would actually allow them to pull that off. And he grabbed me and pulled me in almost face-to-face, and he looks out, and he's like, yeah, none of these people understand that yet. And so a few people in venture get it. Michael (01:10:18.382) Thank Cam Doody (01:10:23.526) I have the feeling that most of these folks know that they kind of have this space cornered and there's more juice in this lemon to squeeze. And I don't want to kill the golden goose that's feeding me and my family. I'm just going to keep playing this thing until I know when the time comes, a lot of this stuff's going to change on how we do business. But not yet. And that's kind of the feeling that I get with the folks that are smart to Bitcoin are just kind of like, yeah, I know you're there. I'll address it when I absolutely have to. Michael (01:11:04.632) Yeah, that's a, it's amazing anecdote. It's kind of timely too, cause last week they came out and it was a tremoth that said it's, you know, the best inflation hedge for the next 50 to a hundred years. Jesse, you'll love this cause I haven't shared this and the person reached out, let me know that I could say without naming the names. On one of the last pods we were talking about early writers and the Bitcoin Denominated Fund and this founder raised in 2020 AI company, pretty like kind of really blowing up. put Bitcoin in its balance sheet in 21 and the investor found out and just kind of lost it, completely lost it. So changed their docs for, I believe all future investments, but it's also threatening to sue unless they divest to the position. And I reached out to Cam about this earlier in the week saying just like, can you believe this? And obviously he called us to like, I don't know, confide, like we had a consultation and we're just talking about it. And also it's personal. He was like, Hey, this is interesting for my personal. was like, you're talking to the wrong person about this. Cause like, I would not sell. was like, let's work because he went, he went and found, you know, I've got legal, you know, legal opinion, whatever. And it's like, he's not, he hasn't broken any covenants. He's not in any derivatives, right? He's not speculating. and he didn't know what to do and he needs to get out of this position by the end of the year. And I was, and where I commend cam for thinking about this and hopefully you can get to be able to do this because it's implying not only are you returning more capital, by holding a better for money. I don't see how that doesn't permeate to your investments. Because naturally, again, the game has changed with the inflation that unless companies have some exposure, look at the world through the lens that we understand they're already like moving backwards. They're you know, think about inflation persisting and having a higher and having to think about margins like you're already going like hands tied behind your back. And so I think the this is why like there should only be a small amount of venture firms, should I only been like, this is why investing is hard, because it's the opposite of what everyone's doing. So everybody's in that room looking at the market like this, and you got to be looking at a different way, because that's what investing is. Similar to Bitcoin, right? Nobody's looking at it yet. Nobody's paying attention. So anyway, it's just a very interesting paradigm like that there. And when he was explaining this to me, I don't know if this was what influenced this investor, because it was like the main guy at this large, it's a very large firm. Michael (01:13:27.468) And they went and like amended all their docs for all future investments to explicitly say they cannot put like this underlying asset on their balance sheet. But what it kind of implied whether this guy meant it or not was that it kind of disrupts their model because if he's looking at them needing to raise and mark it up right on the next round and taking more dilution, their company dilutes versus now they just extended their runway because they just like their treasury is like loaded. They're just sitting there like and he's thinking about it. giving more discernment, they've been more efficient because they're thinking about through the Bitcoin lens. And this isn't like hardcore Bitcoin, it's just a guy that put it on their balance sheet. It changes the whole model of venture. And again, it goes back to there's going to be a select people that reap the rewards because it's just this is what investing is, you got to be different than the market. Cam Doody (01:14:13.596) Yep. Yeah, it's unfortunate. know, I that's an interesting point that she's brought brought up. You know, it is actually a headwind for investors, you know, multi-stage funds that want to continue to invest, you know, in teams that have to come back to the well. Right? they, you know, once you get into real big money, you're not dealing with like seed investors that just have positive intent for the founders. And like, obviously like you want return for the fund and you're playing the power law with venture. But like later on, you know, it gets really doggy dog. And these these firms are like have to get allocation in their winners. And if a lot of their winners, you know, start just being able to to, you know, fund their operations through through their own, you know, their own balance sheet and obviously that's not good for venture investors. like yeah like this is just like the hints of how venture is going to start to change you know in in the future. That is going to be interesting to follow you know if it comes out you know if Bitcoin goes to to you know three four five hundred K this this cycle like Cam Doody (01:15:31.56) I don't know what I would do in that situation, but I may say, how serious are you about this? Because we have real conviction in this asset. And if this ends up being a bad decision for us as a company, nothing distinct in our terms that we signed when you financed the deal in the beginning, if this is just something you're trying to push us out of doing, we will. This is going to be fun going to the press to say like we divested out of Bitcoin like right before a bull market because you know, a venture investor wasn't comfortable with our decision making as an operating team. Michael (01:16:10.616) Yeah, and this is like a symptom. We all know probably like here and then listening like the amount of clown world and the incentive models, but like this is just like bring it home. like the notion of investing is for the outcome to be positive so you can get a return on capital and to have positive the person needs to deliver value. And so what way to deliver value then use your expertise to bring it to the world. But instead you want the person to spend every 18 months having to raise more money versus just their capital base growing. And then delivering value to the world is like, doing the opposite. You're asking for the requirement of opposite. Like that's just how bad the incentive model has been with this like system. And this is just like what micro example of it. Jackson Mikalic (01:16:52.435) Yeah, I we're getting up on time. Can you just mention in passing where is Bitcoin going this cycle? We are at the last day of October and I think we're at about 12 or 13 percent for the month because Bitcoin is tanking a little bit today. We're at about 70,000 while we're recording. I have to call on the resident having and Bitcoin macro analyst, Jesse, to just maybe paint a picture of what does the next six to 12 months look like. Are things kind of playing out as you expected six, 12 months ago? Let's say start of the year. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:17:32.295) Yeah, sure. That's fun. Yeah. So as you know, Jackson, I did a presentation at MIT the day after the halving kind of walking through my perspective on Bitcoin's mechanics, price mechanics, and how that's all driven by supply and demand. And the halving, in my opinion, is the catalyst that triggers a post-halving bull market every four years. And that And what I tried to emphasize in that talk, and it recently made the rounds again because of this, is that it takes six months post-having where nothing happens, but on the surface. under the surface, that supply shortage of half as much Bitcoin being released into the market every day from new supply issuance, that supply shortage accumulates and chips away at available for sale supply. to a point where the market, incoming demand has to try to find a new supply. and the only way to do that is to start bidding up. So the price starts to drift upwards somewhere around six months post-having. and so in my mind that that starts the flywheel of action for a post-having bull market where, the price starts to drift upwards. People get excited. More demand comes in, price starts to drift upwards more quickly. And that just kind of flywheels into a a mania. So a bubble forms after every halving. And it takes 12 to 18 months for that bubble to to pop. That's what we've seen over previous cycles. So right now we're six months post halving. Now is when I would expect the price to start to move upwards. That's what happened four years ago. Four years ago, people forget that going into the election price of Bitcoin, the month before the election, the price of Bitcoin went from like 10,000 to 13,000. And then six months later, it was 64,000. and we're at that, that point in time, think right now, for this cycle. So, it's, and it's hard to believe that it's hard to imagine what can happen very quickly once that flywheel gets going. But I think, I think earlier this year, what we saw immediately after the ETFs were launched is a great indicator of what can and I think will happen. once that Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:20:00.745) price drifting upwards sort of catches on with people who are not yet Bitcoin holders, right? Like right now, there's no interest from outside of the crypto community in Bitcoin right now. The Google search volume for buy Bitcoin is very low. And people start to take interest once the price breaks above the prior all-time high and it keeps moving. And that's when people who are on the sidelines just start to feel more and more pressure of shit. have to get in. have to have to buy. Maybe I should, I don't want to miss another bull market. I just got to jump in and be a part of this. And we'll see that I think with the ETFs in particular this cycle, because when the price was running a Q1 this year, after the ETFs were launched, ETF incoming volume was tremendous. And, and I think that that just shows that ETF buyers are reflexive in the same way that all of us, every Bitcoin buyer is reflexive. They buy more when the price is going up. And the faster it's going up, the more demand there is. So, you know, I expect that'll kind of take shape as the price drifts up. And I think we'll be looking at 2025 where, you maybe it's 12 months post-having, maybe it's 18 months post-having. So, sometime second half of the year, where I think we'll end up with a price peak. sort of trying to remain conservative here and bracing for maybe it's 150K, but maybe it's 250K. And it's quite possible if things get crazy, if there's some sort of geopolitical move beyond what we've seen so far, that it could go above 250K. Like 350K is not out of the realm of possibility, but I think that everybody's a little bit complacent right now because Having six months passed, nothing's happened, but now is the time to be most excited about what's coming. Michael (01:22:00.504) Do think in your model, would it help if a future president were to tweet, wish our great Bitcoiners a happy 16th anniversary of Sustosha's white paper? We will end Kamala's war on crypto and Bitcoin will be made in the USA vote Trump because he happened to just post that. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:22:17.235) Wow. Bradley Chambers (01:22:20.632) Well, and you think too, back when the price was this way in 2021, interest rates were still basically zero and they're going to start to rise. The entry point for most people getting into Bitcoin was an FDX or a Celsius, it was exchange. And so today, you're looking at, we're entering into an easing cycle, and then the entry point is probably going to be, I bet, an FBTC. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:22:21.737) Wow. Bradley Chambers (01:22:49.858) for a lot of traditional investors. And you hope that gets them on their journey to understanding Bitcoin as a technology, as an asset class, and not just an ETF. And so, I don't know, how high will the price go? It all depends on demand. The price will rise until there are sellers, and I'm gonna keep buying until people stop selling it. Jackson Mikalic (01:23:13.644) I it. Yeah. And we can wrap here, but just one quick data point to throw out was that IBIT yesterday had nearly a billion dollars of inflows. was 875 million. I think between yesterday and the day before, those two days of inflows were more than the gold ETFs in their entire first year. So it is a pretty exciting time to be in the market and paying attention to Bitcoin. Want to be respectful of the group's time because we just went over. But Cam and Bradley, appreciate coming on cam is there somewhere people could get in touch with you if they're curious to learn more about brickyard Cam Doody (01:23:50.919) Yeah, if you're interested in Brickyard, that's at justlaybrick.com, and we're pretty explicit about what we do and how we invest. think that could be cool to kind of thumb through. then Twitter is kind of where I am most active, and that's camduty, just at camduty. Jackson Mikalic (01:24:12.656) Thanks, Cam. And Bradley, thank you for joining as well. Any last words here? Bradley Chambers (01:24:15.0) I'll yeah, and I'm gonna give a plug for the brickyard as a local resident. CAM's been really good for our city and we need more people like CAM in Chattanooga as a born, you know, someone that was born here and brickyard is, I'm pretty proud of it. I'm pretty proud that it's here in Chattanooga. And so thank you CAM for choosing to live here. Again, check out OnRampsNew IRA. on ramp Bitcoin.com there's a button on the homepage. It is the best IRA product. If you've got an, if you've got 30 K sitting in a old 401 K you'd roll that to Bitcoin that you can verify on your own node with multi-institution custody. So that's it on ramp Bitcoin.com. Jackson Mikalic (01:24:55.364) Thank you gentlemen, really a pleasure to have you on today. Appreciate the time.