The Last Trade E052: Bitcoin is Winning with NVK

Brian Cubellis (00:00.27) Mitch I'm glad you left big alright. We'll cut that out We're live with MVK Hey, I Got product placement front and center for this episode clock clock mini here What is that? I'm at my desk when everyone's got backgrounds? 1781 blocks to the next retarget. This is the stat we have this is a product developed by MBK. I got a queue. I got a queue getting delivered to a random location because I got actually pressured from, you know, the stuff matters when people keep posting about it. You're like, well, I guess I have to own one or I'm outside of the club. So absolutely. You're not really good unless you have a queue. I'm just joking. Everyone keeps in his background. I like looking at it through the day and like it's nice on the desk. Well, I'm on camera most of the day, so like I actually see it just looking at myself like, I can tell. You know, I have like 50 of them in my office. There's no place you look and you don't see them. Marty's on camera during the day. He is a professional influencer. And I heard something you said the other day, Rudolph, about everybody becomes a podcaster, everybody in Bitcoin becomes a podcaster before it's all said and done. So, we'll all be in the same place. I think it's because like it's a very efficient way. of getting your thoughts out. Like Twitter is too noisy, right? And, you know, in long form writing, realistically, nobody reads. So like, you know, the podcasting really is like a very, very good way of getting the word out. And I mean, you could say I'm an influencer or a first mover. We live in the digital age. You have to own your message. Content marketing is key in this world. And yeah, I was just the first one to step out and say, one of the first to step out in the Bitcoin space. I'm going to own the message. That's right. I mean, influencer, thought leader, it's the same picture. We're doing bum bum checks today. Is that not? No, moving on. I don't even engage that. Neither do I. I'm embarrassed I brought it up. But we have a list of topics to talk about. I mean, mentioning the queue, Michael, I'm excited for you to get the queue. Brian Cubellis (02:21.774) In your hands and for anybody listening who doesn't have context and VK is The founder of coin kite which has been around for over a decade now building Hardware for Bitcoiners to secure their Bitcoin hardware devices hardware wallets now NFC card sats card tap signer and the latest iteration of their Bitcoin security hardware is the cold card queue, which is a form factor looks somewhat like a a BlackBerry calculator, whatever you want to refer to it. And I've been using it for months now. And just want to say, like in terms of like hardware, I want to disclaimer 1031 is an investor in CoinKite. CoinKite is a sponsor of Rabbit Hole Recap, another podcast that I host. But honestly, the battery pack and being able to pass around transactions and sign transactions using NFC and QR scanner is one of the best UX upgrades I've had. in terms of like Bitcoin hardware, just literally not having to plug it in anything, having a battery pack, being able to scan a QR code with Sparrow wallet to pass back, PSPTs to sign and then broadcast. It's an incredible experience. It's like, you know, I mean, we do this because we want to not because we need to, you know, like we make the devices for ourselves. So, you know, it's a product. From the quitters to Bitcoiners like, you know, it's not like focus groups on shit quitters and let's like open the funnel as big as possible. It's a, it's very concerted effort into making a product that works for us. If it works for us, it's going to work for other Bitcoiners. So it's very focused that way. Yeah. It works for me. I want to. throw a spicy takeout, I hesitated, I'm just gonna do it. I'm curious, MBK, how much the Q was influenced or accelerated because of Foundations Harbor device. And why I bring it up is because I haven't played with the Q, but I got it because I was nicely sent a Foundation device and I liked the form factor and this idea of like, not V1, but the. Brian Cubellis (04:35.246) hardware device that had dongles and all the things associated is just like clunky and messy building on chain. You're getting old people on a call. You got to like plug in, you know, the USB -C. It doesn't match to the drivers and all that. So that form factor of like QRs, tap signing or NFC was really awesome. And then to see you guys do it, like how much was the market? I guess where I'm going at is was it a part of that that helped drive it? And because I... personally think it was, but I'd be curious. And I think it's a good thing from the industry perspective because we're all like working towards a certain goal and that angle of like sharpening. Yeah. So, so like, I, I don't think it was done. I think it was Spectre DIY, mostly that like, that had the biggest effect on that. We we've been building the device for many years. We just sort of like never felt the market was ready for it. I think the, the, Because realistically speaking, that company doesn't have any market share, right? It's like there's a few devices only out there. So there wasn't enough user demand that came from that with the experience using that device to influence the market demand for it. I think the biggest demand from users came once Jade from Blockstream and seed signer Both had a lot more market share and probably like, you know, tens hundreds more market share than than the device so those those two devices are sort of like cheaper less secure kind of thing and and and But he had very very interesting UX paths they took that that helped create some demand or at least rhetoric around having QRs. And I think that the main thing that made the QR come to fruition was the fact that on that year that we decided to launch the Q, the supplier for the QR scanner found some economies of scale that were further advanced and lowered the price a lot of the scanner. Brian Cubellis (06:56.974) So we could economically create a product like that. The idea of the queue has been something on our bench for many years. The QR per se, I don't like it. I feel like most people don't use it. It is a nice thing to have for you to check addresses, but realistically speaking, most people want NFC or USB. The problem is Unchain never created an app with NFC. And, but, you know, like, and chain and chain is a small market in terms of like user count. It's, it's a, it's a much more higher net worth folks that are interested in that sort of set of trade offs. So, you know, that did, it's a shape of the data for added NFC because you'd have made the device a lot cheaper. But, but anyways, the point is, I think. the market has evolved with more options. Another device that actually had very good UX and F -C -N -A and QR, but again, lower security threshold is Kobo, Kobo Vault. I think now it's called Keystone. They also had like good UX and camera, but it was sort of like all over the place. You know, not enough people using. You know 90 % 80 % of the market still is treasure ledger, which neither have QR code scanners And and you know, they're still USB use By Trezor with Unchain as well, so we're trying to find ways to move people out of USB If that be via QR, if that be via NFC or SD card, as long as people get out of USB, I think we're in a better place. Yeah. I'm going to stand up for QR here. I like the QR experience. Well, and because you can interact with your laptop where most laptops aren't NFC enabled yet. Yeah. And part of bringing that up is just internally, like we have a lot of individuals that, you know, want to mix between thinking through. Brian Cubellis (09:09.454) what does it look like from our product and multi -institution to be able to participate, whether it's holding two keys or one keys. But there's this also dynamic of like, when you send, we joke around plastic device of a little treasure one in somebody who's holding $10 million. And as that appreciates you just naturally like holding this device and wondering like, is this thing gonna last very long? And so that was part of looking at foundation and the queue is like, what does it look like from our product mix as we grow? But then the other side of it, and I've shared with Marty and I'm sure you guys have, chatted about, Rodolfo about just, and this is an interesting topic to get your take on it. You've been probably the loudest about video, verification being doomed from just like authentication and dependent. Yeah. And so I'd love to hear those thoughts, but the thing I keep anchoring back to is like the idea of like, obviously having a private key on one of these devices and being able to authenticate in some way, whether it's, you know, leveraging movement of Bitcoin across the protocol or other things that I see these devices playing different, roles in authentication outside of just participating in a quorum for your asset. But curious on the video verification, because I don't think a lot of people have heard of this take and it's very valid and something we're thinking about deeply. We'd rather get into it early versus a lot of existing companies. This is all they rely on. And now they're just like almost going to be trapped for the next decade or at least next couple of years. You know, there is a service provider I use for some legacy interfacing that I have to do on the institutional side that you know, they said at some thresholds, they require video, which I simply not willing to do because there's going to be fake videos of me because AI can do that now. And also, I don't want an image of me on video talking about a specific Bitcoin number because that just sounds completely retarded. Because in reality is all companies will get hacked is a when not an if, right? So Unchain will get hacked and we'll leak those videos eventually. So it's better not to have those videos. So then the answer is like, how do we authenticate people? And voice is gone, video is gone. So the way to do it is with private key pairs. Why don't we use a tap signer? Maybe it's not for signing a transaction, but it's still a Bitcoin curve. Brian Cubellis (11:36.622) and you can preset the device, send to your customer, or the customer has to come pick up in person when they set up the account, right? So you have a nice solid chain of custody, and they use that to authenticate into the app. On top of the signature they provided with their hardware device, right? I think that puts people in a much better place. I don't think, see like biometrics, which is video or voice, is not something you know, it's something you have. and something you have can be taken from you. Yeah. If you've seen, and just like talking about it all on air, cause they rather, it's better to have it out and then everybody do it or compete to do it as, we have on -ramp branches and we have team all over the U S and the ideas as we grow, you have a certain balance. You come meet a representative, the local branch, and you can authenticate this as me before starting. No, that's nothing beats in person. Right? So for example, it's funny, but, I, there's a few business service providers of legacy services that I deal with, right? Like that are like either Bitcoin bridges or they are banking partners, right? And one of our corporate requirement is that all the KYC be done on paper, right? Like I understand they have no choice. They have to do KYC. They need a picture of my penis. But let's do that over paper, right? So what we do is, we FedEx a photocopy of any document that they need. And if they need to see it in person, we either fly them in or we fly out, right? They check the photocopy versus the original and they're good to go. Like legally we've checked and like most jurisdictions are perfectly fine with that, right? How that scale for like a, you know, like a smaller, more retail kind of customer, I don't know, but. Brian Cubellis (13:36.078) For institutional investors or institutional clients, it definitely scales, right? So, I know that you have a safe somewhere in your office that has my identity in a photocopy, which is fine. And remote attackers can't get that, right? Worst case that happens is that burns or whatever, and we do it again. But I think that's a much more sane path forward. I think how that scales is you've got companies that, if that... becomes the standard. You've got companies that focus on that and only that. And you outsource identity verification and KYC, just like many, many firms do already today to programs, to companies that might do that best. And I think a lot of people think it's overkill. They think it's overkill, but anybody that's listened to the Junseth deal or should go listen, or Marty had a great post right after that. It's like, This stuff's happening. You have never seen a digital bearer asset live natively on the internet. Like they are coming for everything you have. Well, I mean, even, even like shopping carts and like the treasure lost all customer information ones. ledger lost it more than once. I don't know. I think three times. a coin square, an exchange in Canada lost all their customer data as well. you know, finance, there was pictures of people doing this. to a third party that's gonna lose their identity, right? It's even worse if you outsource the third party that, you know, scams people faces and whatever. That's how a lot of exchanges do it. Because they will lose it, right? Like somebody that has it on a server will lose that information. And it's very scary in Bitcoin, right? Because now somebody, you know, can go and scam people to their coins or go kidnap them, right? So I think it's very important that... I think we can already make the legal case, you know, as long as some company ends up taking this to the courts to prove that, you know, like online identity, KYC requirements are actually detrimental to the citizens, right? Like you're causing actual harm. Then people can sue, right? Their service providers. You know, I got kidnapped. I'm going to sue you for damages now because you lost my identity and my home address. Brian Cubellis (15:59.206) I think we're gonna get to a point, it's just it's early, right? I mean, banks used to just photocopy your stuff, they still do. You can go to a branch, they photocopy your stuff and they put it in a file, right? Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my language now. We need to abolish the Bank Secrecy Act, which all this KYC AML nonsense stems from. And the data is out there. The goal of these KYC AML compliance regulations is to... prevent money laundering and identity theft. And the stat is that in terms of money laundering over the first 50 years of the BSA proliferating and these compliance regulations getting more and more insane, they've only stopped 0 .1 % of global money laundering flows. And then you get down to the question, like, what is money laundering? Like, does that even exist? Is that even a good term? Well, I mean, remember the bad guys by the law use HSBC. They don't use Bitcoin. Yeah. Right. When they want a money laundry, right? Like the cartels require that each of this HSBC has bigger windows for bigger bags of cash. This is a joke. This is a briefcase, right? There's dimensions that are required. Yes. They ask HSBC to have bigger windows and they put bigger windows for more cash. Like, yeah, they said, okay, we'll do that. Just make sure the briefcase has to be 30 inches by 18 inches and you can push it through. the from themselves for a lot of money and then they sell it at a loss and then they harvest that loss, right? It's like. Brian Cubellis (18:02.67) I mean, it's been happening in the auto world. With people's pictures? I mean, come on, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We're getting off kilter here a little bit, but what I want to bring it back to is something we discussed briefly pre -recording. And it's, I mean, it actually ties to what we're just talking about, these KYC AML regulations and the, the. ambiguity of what a money service business is these days. What are your thoughts on everything that's happening in terms of the Western regulators coming after open source developers and the reaction to the actions of the government over the past two months? Are we winning? Yes. I mean, people are losing their fucking pennies for no reason. I mean, like, You know, like, yes, that we have an overbearing, like legal system that like mostly goes after, you know, the wrong things. Sure. You know, like we, we can argue about all that stuff all day. Right. But realistically speaking, I mean, there is no law in the books that says you can't have your own Bitcoin on a hard wallet. Right. What they're after is not your Bitcoin on your hard wall. What they're after is people like evading taxes. Right. So they want to make sure that. You know, when people buy and sell Bitcoin and all that stuff, they're capturing some of that. Is that wrong? Absolutely. But let's not confuse that overburdening and overbearing taxation regulation and the side effects of that with the state saying you can't have Bitcoin, which is not true. Yeah. I mean, it's very important because the... Brian Cubellis (19:53.966) What's the, there's no shortage of like recent things that come out and people generally like to isolate and talk about like the one was the qualified custody, but in the trust, but there's the trust charter. And then the most recent one, yeah, it was money transmission. It's like these things we look at in like microcosms of Bitcoin or digital assets. Like this impacts everything else down through. Yeah, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Yeah, it has nothing to do with, I mean, it maybe has. I would make the case, I don't know how much has to do with Bitcoin, but it's this idea of it disrupts so many other people. I think they're certainly most threatened by Bitcoin because... Do you know that meme with that ad guy on the elevator, the madman guy on the elevator and the other guy says something and he goes turns to him and says, I don't think about you? Yes. Okay, regulators don't think about Bitcoin. Like they don't think, like, you know, from time to time, a crypto between quotes, right, like comes up like a... like a bill or something related to us comes up in their desk, right? But like 99 % of the time, we don't exist to them. They're preoccupied with like, you know, let's bomb someplace, you know, let's let's like, you know, like, go after Landers and like other shit. Well, in what for what actually supports that is this past week, because everybody thought there was like one side and trying to stifle innovation. And then like Trump says crypto, and then they're like, I like let it all go through whatever. We don't care. ETF, ETH, how long has it been? 10 plus years for the Bitcoin ETF. Another thing that people don't notice with all the KYC shit show and a lot of this tax recovery efforts is that this is international, right? So the OECD changed a bunch of rules. and whatever the name of the other group or organization that handles taxes internationally too. What they're trying to do internationally pretty much since 2014 is like they're trying to find loopholes that like average people like dentists and lawyers can use to shelter income. And they've been going after that. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. And they've been changing it so that, you know, only Halliburton can do it. Brian Cubellis (22:15.33) But like dentists and lawyers were sheltering the Caymans, you know, pre 2014 successful. So they're trying to remove those loopholes, right? And that has a lot of consequences to KYC, BSA and other shit locally as well. Brian Cubellis (22:35.694) At the same time, there's $34 trillion in debt with $220 trillion in unfunded liabilities. What's another trillion, Marty? These numbers don't even represent things anymore in real life. If you made a million dollars a day going all the way back to when Jesus Christ was born, you would not have made as much money as the US government has printed this year. Not even a very small fraction of it. It's insane. But how much does this money buy? Not a lot. Not less and less every day. The Sats per dollar number go down is very aggressive right now. We're winning. Moscow time is getting smaller on the on the clock. I was thinking about like I didn't run the numbers, but I was thinking directionally. If you just move dollars to Bitcoin over the past few years. and you look at inflation, which you could have compounded if the money wasn't losing purchasing power, if you had dollars and we're just investing or building, you're almost just staying even. You're not actually like really winning. You know, like that's how messed up like how bad people are from businesses and like people going backwards on holding dollars is like just by moving into Bitcoin, I think you're basically keeping keel with what health things were supposed to be. I don't know, man. If you bought like a few, a few cycles, even DCA, you're pretty much ahead. You Well, I think, yeah, that breaks down, I think, at a certain point, like call it, I don't know, maybe I think it's like epoch three, post, like the 17 after 1000, where I think that might, but then you have to take into like, if the money wasn't losing value, you would have been making money with it somewhere else. Yeah, but he was right. But yeah, but as I'm saying, so like, what would that money like there's still you would have had a net gain if the dollars were just static, you would have still increased those dollar amounts independent of Bitcoin if it wasn't Brian Cubellis (24:34.862) If it wasn't inflating the supply. So that's can you really can you make more than 7 % a year? Realistically speaking? No. I mean, unless you're super risky. Well, if you build businesses that are productive and you like do things in the world, that's what I mean. And that's, that's what I'm referring to. But that's the companies the risk, right? Yeah. It's just an interesting, I was just like, basically thinking about like businesses and treasury management. And it's like, you have to if you want to live or you're just going to die is have your position in Bitcoin. and was like looking at it's like, you just have to play the game or you're not going to make it. I mean, you really have two choices, right? You either have a PhD in finance so you can beat the market or you buy Bitcoin like there's no middle ground. Like how's an average person out there going to like, you know, beat S &P. The PhD in finance has structured the Solana or ETH ETF because I don't think you go further out in the risk curve because you're not even can make, you can't even. beat it by traditional like seven to nine percent is not beating it. You might be like losing to real percent year over year at seven percent or nine. Exactly. It's it's pretty brutal out there man. And DCA is a terrible strategy too. I mean like nobody should DCA like you know you should lump buy it. But anyways that's a different. Most people don't have the luxury. Most people don't have the luxury. Okay. Okay. Some people. No I mean. can earn and then wait a little and then buy it. Like they don't have to buy as they earn. Yeah, but again, fiat, high time preference, I think most people are like, I need to stash this way Bitcoin now I'm going to spend it. It's better to DCA than to not buy Bitcoin. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Brian Cubellis (26:21.998) Yeah. So I guess in the broader context of things, let's make this a. Let's make the case for Bitcoin is winning. And despite what many in the industry who are hyper focused on everything that's been going on from a regulatory perspective may think is an attack on Bitcoin, but you're putting forth that like these people really don't care. Things come, things go. How do you think Bitcoin, why do you think Bitcoin is winning right now? Because I always say we're going to win. And you hop in my Menchies, whether it's on Nostra or on Twitter, you say, Marty, we're already winning. Why are we winning? Yeah, I mean, like, listen, like, okay, like this started as like literally a magical internet money joke. Like, you know, like it's like, it's so hard to convey to people what Bitcoin the early, very early days look like. You know, it's like, you could either buy shit on Silk Road or like, you know, you know, spend 40 ,000 Bitcoin buy some pizza. or you know, like the idea like moon, the original moon meme was $1 ,000 Bitcoin, okay. So we're in Venus now, right? So I mean, Bitcoin is over $60 ,000, right? And steadily programmatically, like making its adoption wave psycho increments for the last 15 years, right? 15 years is a very decent track record. You know, Brian Cubellis (27:58.094) We managed to have a legacy finance interface added, which is the ETF. They were not able to prevent that. The majority of Bitcoin is in the hands of individuals, not institutions. And that's the great majority of Bitcoin is out there. We have state actors accumulating coins. We have state actors... fighting each other on how they see Bitcoin be, which is perfect, right? We need flight theory for Bitcoin. You know, we have the software being upgraded and updated and garden. We have no single source of truth in Bitcoin. So that means that like, you know, somebody says, we need to go this way with the Bitcoin code. It goes, it doesn't. It's always contentious. The more contentious it is, the more we're winning. That means nobody can run me through. We have the... the biggest computation capacity on earth by probably a thousand, a hundred X, anything else that includes every supercomputer, every single state actor owns all combined together. We have this incredibly asymmetric defense mechanism where like, you know, an individual with a hundred dollar device, can protect itself and its economic value more than a trillion dollar bank can protect it for them. The Bitcoin supply has not changed its schedule since its inception. We attract a lot of smart people. The low time preference still rules Bitcoin. it's just like, it's not like every property of Bitcoin is working. I mean, like, I don't understand why people freaking out. Like, it's weird. At the same time, too, I think this was probably the most encouraging bullish week that I've seen since since I've been following the industry since 2017 and watching. I've been on the pot a few times here calling out. Brian Cubellis (30:20.75) But I haven't understood the political calculus of the Biden administration attacking Bitcoin, attacking the industry, just because it hasn't made sense from. No, it does. It's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is white supremacy. It's like the you know, it's like it's a what is it? No, it's it's a white privilege to hold Bitcoin now. Right. It's just it's just for the masses. Like it doesn't make much sense, but it sells. But at the same time, you've got, you know, 27 % of Americans holding crypto. Are you gaining votes by attacking crypto broadly or are you losing them by attacking? And the answer is you're losing them because the people outside don't care. And with the Sab -121 vote that happened last week, seeing Democrats come across the aisle and say, hey, there's a bipartisan majority here that is supporting the issue. I think, you know, the it was two weeks ago, the Biden administration came out saying they were going to go veto this bill. They started feeling the heat. They started feeling the heat on Trump coming out and we're watching the game theory play out a lot faster than I thought it would at the national level, at the presidential level. And you're seeing crypto become a truly presidential debate stage issue. And you've got the Biden administration now backtracking approving an ETI ETF, you know, in over over the course of three days, all of a sudden, it's not a security after two years of attacking it. But they now realize they're in they have the incentive over until November to go pump number go up any way that they can to to not lose these votes because they feel threatened in the five states that matter in a presidential election that. They're going to lose voters as a result of what they're doing here. And like we're this is the game theory. This is what we go on these pods, you know, every week talking about the incentive structure of Bitcoin. This is it playing out. They're fighting for our votes to in trying to do their best to to increase the number right now so that they can make people forget what happened the last two years. Brian Cubellis (32:40.526) Is that true? I'm curious, it sounds good in my opinion. Mitch has been pinging me about this all week that it's insanely bullish. So we had him on to talk about this exact comment and others, but I don't know, it feels too obvious or too simple in that format. I am on the Mallers camp on this. Reality is the banks don't want to buy more shitty paper that doesn't pay them. So they want... They want to cut like it's the same shift that happened in 2016 with the ICOs that all the VC large funds wanted a cut of the crypto market. Right. So a 16 Zed caused that pump. Right. With all the ICO insanity. So now I don't think it's about votes. It's about like the scammers have way more money to lobby than Bitcoin does. Right. When they were talking Bitcoin nobody was with that effect. against politicians, but now that the scammers are behind crypto and have to fight the politicians, that that battle is going to get fought at one, right? Because the scammers are much closer to the money printer in the contillionaire effect than we are, right? So they will go knock on the door of their representatives saying, hey, do you still want to like, you know, get get that cash that Sam is not going to give it to you anymore because he's in jail? for your next election. And they're like, yeah, you know, I'll take it. And they're, you know, they're put it's the playbook of Wall Street. Right. Like, I mean, there really is no difference on that. But there is the path that it helps us. And I agree. absolutely. I mean, like, you know, you're saying the same thing. We're saying the same thing because why they just don't care about Bitcoin. They're just to care about dollars. Exactly. But what I don't think enough people in this industry realize how much of a detriment Sab121 is for, I'd say, as the plebs and the people still have access to cheap Bitcoin here. But at the same time, your corporate treasuries, they've got to get comfortable with Coinbase's the bit goes of the world in single party custody, with institutions that are crypto native to be to be custodying their... Brian Cubellis (35:02.446) their treasuries here because the Bank of New York, Mullins and State Streets, they don't have the opportunity to step into the space because of SAB 121. And it's just it hasn't been worth it for them. And you've got all these these backwards incentive structures of how how large companies would have to hold their Bitcoin and trust single party custodians. try to figure out ways that they can be covered on insurance or balance sheet recovery in case of loss. And it's just it's not the way this industry scales. And if we want to get the corporates involved the way that adoption is going to take place, you've got to let these companies with larger balance sheets step in that they're comfortable with. And yes, they're absolutely going to make money off of us. That's what the ETF is. You're going to have to. Yeah, I've been harping this for a while, right? Like I find this anti ETF like thing that Bitcoiners do extremely childish and sort of like very like almost ignorant in a way. Like the reality is like we have to get economically big and fast and if we don't get killed. Yes. Okay. And it's not going to be pretty. It's not going to be on our terms. You know, it's not going to be nice. Reality is like, you know, monetary systems or assets or whatever you want to call it, you know, if they don't get big, they get killed. And, you know, if the ETF is how like a lot of this, this entity is coming to Bitcoin, we suck that value in and we become more powerful, then so be it, right? Like we're going to need 50 things like that. What did people think was going to happen when Bitcoin gets big? Like, you know, like a... a big teacher's pension fund is going to have a cold card in the office? No. Right? Like that's not how like all these legacy systems work. Like these things that need to happen in a way that's palatable to them. Is it great for them? No, because they have shitty paper Bitcoin, but it's better than no Bitcoin exposure at all. Right? And do this force a centralized Bitcoin a bit? Yes. Is that great? No. Brian Cubellis (37:27.598) But it's also better than Bitcoin getting killed because it didn't value fast enough. I totally agree. And what I see here, look, I don't think anyone here is going out to go buy the Ethereum ETF. But what I see going on is we're getting wins for the industry, broader crypto. What does that do for Bitcoin that provides us installation? And when... the industry gets attacked, it's going to be on the outer stuff that are like the edge cases that are getting approved here, whether it's Solana ETFs or whatever it is. We're providing layers of insulation that we're going to become more untouchable because the like. assets are going to grow assets are going to grow for the industry, it's going to be more meaningful businesses to the Black Rocks of the world, to the teachers funds out there and the pension funds. And it's we're, we're growing fast, just like you just said, it's, it we, it's not bulletproof, but it's the more we become part of the stories for these companies, the revenue models, the harder it is going to be to, to break it. Well, I mean, Yeah, this is what any case is like we are winning in the sense of and we kids live through these cycles and I remember previous cycles building other businesses of like everything get they eat it's they eat themselves like, you know, it's a lot of ETF will effectively eat itself and then everybody's sitting there and the people that were doing it the right way exist and then you just take larger market share so you just have to stay around long enough, which is part of the other thing. And this gets to something that Michael, you and I talked a lot about behind the scenes and. Bringing this back to sab 121 particularly the problem with sab 121 is that the regulators were expecting Banks if they were to custody crypto to hold the same amount of dollars They had to basically have the same amount of dollars as crypto and like one company that did this that went under I mean not this is not why they went under they They basically folded Decided to shut their doors Brian Cubellis (39:48.398) under their own volition with Silvergate. I mean, they had to do this. And it's just completely insane when you consider the fact that these banks are zero reserve banks at this point. They don't even do it for their dollar assets. But now that's how 121 has been passed and it seems like they're going to allow these institutions to hold Bitcoin on behalf of their customers. That then begs the question is, do we think that they will recognize that this asset is wholly different and will they? turned into just like block fires on a much bigger scale where they're like, we can just lend this out, get yield, give it back to the customers and have ruggings on the scale of which we have not seen maybe since Mt. Gox in terms of Bitcoin lost on the balance sheet. So like, I think that's the big question. Like everybody's happy at the institutional level that this bill has been passed, but I think that's the big question. Do these institutions recognize what they're working with and how bad? Are they going to mismanage this asset if at all? You know, I mean. Silvergate was scam, but let's not even go there. The government didn't like them, so they made sure that they don't exist anymore. That's the truth about Silvergate. But going back to this, the more freedom we have and the further we have this freedom options, the more freedom to scam, scammers are going to have too. Right? And to still mend some of the Bitcoiners' argument against ETF is like, you know, you're going to have the scam coin ETF and then they're going to make us look bad. Yes, but, you know, if you have the low time preference mindset, you know, we're going to have the next 80 % crash, you know, we're going to get Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, you know, every pension fund buys it and then it crashes 80 % and then there's going to be, you know, Brian Cubellis (41:45.166) screaming on the TV that crypto is evil and it could cause problems and look what happened and people are going to say that you have to make the laws, that the price can't go down by law or whatever, or it's going to be too big for them to take away from us anyways. It's going to be very messy. It's going to be very, very messy. You know, you don't just replace a monetary system, you know, like in any pretty way, like, you know, look at, look at like gold had 5 ,000 years, right? And like, look at the amount of like killing, fighting and like stealing and, you know, faking it and that happened through this time, right? And then, and then look at the amount of shit, how many places they bombed and raped. when they ended the gold standard. Look at the 70s and 80s, what countries, first world countries did to other countries that had gold, right? So it's like, this is just a path, right? It's not like for the people that want to be aware while the thing happens, you have to be mindful that shit's gonna be messy. And if you don't want to like... If you don't want to accept that and then close your eyes stack your sats and go do something else and don't pay attention but like You screaming on Twitter that the scammers are gonna have ETF and that's bad. This is not gonna change the fact that the scammers are gonna have an ETF Yeah It's important like the the messy dynamic is what I think people are afraid of not knowing order It's a proxy for volatility, right? Like fiat's dampened volatility, but volatility always exists. And so then when it doesn't fit in the box because certain rules around privacy and the idea of money laundering and it gets mixed up with the KYC and what Samurai was going through or other firms or people leaving when you can make the case, certain people were probably either going out of business or leaving either way for this. And it could have been an excuse. Like all these things happen and they get lumped into certain reasons versus this stuff's gonna be naturally messy to your Brian Cubellis (44:04.302) any case point like there's a lot changing in the world outside of Bitcoin. And so it all starts to look a little uncomfortable, but you have to just recognize that. And we've lived in a world there. There hasn't been a lot of volatility historically outside. You know, the past four years have been a little crazier, more volatile. But this is just how it's going to move for the next next decade. And you have to be prepared and you have to plan accordingly and have redundancies and all the things that are involved to like actually make it and not be in jail and played by the rules. There's something you said with, with Peter, which is like, you have to have good accountants and you have to have good lawyers if you're going to, you know, want to operate because you have to have people to make sure that you're, you're playing by the rules. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, like you can't change the world from jail, right? Like really, like, you know, like, and you want to have a life and, and, you know, you have to exist and there is no freedom in any country, right? Like, You know, some countries, you know, like you have the freedom of shooting somebody entering your house. Some countries like to like have less KYC requirements, but like, but at the end, every country that we have in the world right now is common. So like you have to play within the environment you're in to have a reasonably fulfilling life, right. And, and then sort of like, hopefully build as fast as you can, like power and ammunition so that you can like fight way. fight your way through a better world, right? Like, it's not like the person screaming in front of a government office that changes the world, right? I want to like, first, the, you know, talking about those builders, like, the win this week, I think about all the, it was cathartic, because at Bicco, my job was working with all the builders in the industry, or as many as we could, hundreds of people that I saw affected by self -regating signature going down, you know, as a result of the government largely fighting us to, you know, all the Wells notices that were served. And, Brian Cubellis (46:08.59) all of that compounding over and over again, every single month to, you know, the I think the SEC case, you know, losing, losing against Grayscale was the first chink in the armor. But this felt like that it was cathartic that like for once we weren't being fought against and we were actually being embraced the way that we were voters in this country. And, you know, we should our vote should be fought over. And it. Realizing how much it helps all those builders out there. Yeah, Marty, I think you're totally right. I think the there will the amount of bullshit that we're about to see from the traditional finance system where they're going to be lending the Bitcoin that's sitting in custody. That's absolutely coming. Michael, you're right. This is just like that cat's going to be out of the bag. This is the world we're operating in. So we don't have a choice. It's it's going to be there. Will there be? failures to the degree of BlockFi, it'll be worse. You know, you're going to have traditional financial institutions that are getting hurt here rather than the BlockFis of the world. So it's all coming where we're absolutely going to see a cycle again, where, you know, where we're going to see the appreciation, we're going to see the people who come late to the space, we're going to see them get hurt by, you know, over leveraging in the system. We're going to see, you know, it won't be NFTs this time, it'll be meme coins or whatever the hell it is. But... there will be the reaching out on the risk curve and the people who get misguided and find shit rather than actually finding the way that money potentially can be stored in this industry. And we're going to go through it, rinse and repeat all again. But when these traditional financial institutions are coming into this space, it's just I keep stepping back to we're getting protection with they're going to help us get big, they're going to help us. Provide really get sticky where they're not like the attacks are not going to To be able to come in the fashion. They did the last couple years. It's yeah, it's new I want to I want to be I want to be clear I want to be clear my comments on sad 121 weren't like I don't think this should have been passed It was like I'm an accelerationist. I'm like, let's speedrun this shit get the get the cum rocket ETF out there Let people speculate on it. Let all these companies blow up. The reason bringing that up is for the listener. I do think Brian Cubellis (48:34.83) We do have the potential obviously that's what on ramps doing is what you're doing your small part at Queen Kate Rodolfo is There is a right way to do this stuff and to like educate the listeners of this like now This is now that this law is passed like this is all possible However, we do have ways in which this could be prevented and the market has to demand it Can we just like at least acknowledge? I think like this is another truth that the quitters refused to acknowledge is that like, you know Bitcoin is available to everyone, but it's not for everyone. I the majority of the people are going to use Bitcoin the same way everyone in the world uses dollar, right? If you are a Brazilian government, that's dollars with risk result, right? There is no such thing as other currencies in the world. It's all dollar. Like the euro is dollar. Because at the end of the day, for you to build that truck in Europe, they're like dollarizing their debt to either the external country's debt or their own debt as a company, then buy commodities, they're all dollarized, it's dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar, that you, you know, it's gonna be the same with Bitcoin, right? Eventually, you're just gonna have Bitcoin being the underlining of everything, regardless if you have a cold card of Bitcoin in it, right? You're just gonna be more ahead if you have the underlying asset, but at the end of the day, you know, that's the path, right? Like, and you have to accept that, like, there is only two quadrillion Satoshis. right and that's not enough for everybody because you know it's not equally distributed you're gonna have 1 % of the world population it's already 100 times better than the current distribution you know having the majority of the Bitcoin yeah and yeah and this is where like it gets messy and the the point is really well taken in the sense of like both things can be true in the sense of it's good for the industry to Mitch's point but then to Marty's to answer question directly, like this is foundationally why we exist and why I like took, you know, the opportunity to build this was after FTX and seeing what was coming from like the existing incumbents, we're building centralized entities. And to any case point, you basically ultimately for a long time, you either had a cold card or you had Coinbase, right? And I know it sounds hyperbolic, but at the end of the day, like it's Coinbase, FTX, BlockFi, Celsius. Brian Cubellis (51:01.422) B and Y Mellon, like it's all centralized custody. And so if you have orders of magnitude larger carnage in the future with the existing market structure, because they will relend it and they'll do all the same things, because in my mind, nothing's changed since 2022. And it's kind of crazy that nobody talks about that, that we will see all of those losses and those will be individual. There'll be a lot of people, there'll be institutions that are made up by individuals, there'll be individual losses. So while it's good for the industry, it's also bad in the sense of a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money, but. it's also messy and that's just part of this process. And so part of the education and conversations is figuring out all the different ways that you can store your asset, knowing the different counterparties, all the things that we talk about. So there's like, it's all right and it's all wrong in the sense like it has to play out this way. And it's just like, do you want to play with the way I think of it like gravity, you either like live in it or you know, I guess you don't you either have to kill yourself for just like going a corner. But the point is, it all is going to go in one direction, whether we like it or not, you just have to play with it. I think. Michael to your point like I think the most important thing now is this like with Bitcoin you don't need permission to own it Right with everything else Like ever you needed permission to own it and if gold they come knock on the door and fucking take it, too So at least you have a thing now that a person can go and buy it You know without any permission and and like quietly too, right and they can travel with it so we can enter this new massive world in a much better place as individuals. Right? Like, so, so. How can this not be better? How can this not be winning? Everybody has this opportunity. And at this current prices, even if you're somebody in Africa, you can still buy a little bit of Bitcoin. That's not gonna be true in 10 years. But you can still buy the underlying asset even if you're very poor. So it's hard not to be bullish on this. Brian Cubellis (53:04.942) Yeah, still by the underlying asset of something that I keep coming back to it. The the where our votes are being fought over here in the US and there are so like you saw the dynamic last week or this last week of, you know, when when Biden got bullish and started to to talk about the Ethereum ETF, what did Trump do? He accepted crypto payments to try to. change the narrative and become more positive crypto in that direction, it's going to go back and forth. These people are are already got guns up there. The only winning move is to play. It's like exactly, you know, this is many years ago. OK, twenty fourteen, I think they were trying to get politicians to accept Bitcoin. Okay. For political campaigns, because if the politicians had Bitcoin, they wouldn't make Bitcoin illegal. In those days, you could make Bitcoin illegal and kill Bitcoin. It works. It's the same mechanism. It's like, these guys have bags. Nancy is not going to make unrealized cap gains on stock because she is a big stockholder. Right? Like we want all these assholes to have the assets so they don't master them. And when in the world though, Can someone is someone in Africa or wherever they are in the world benefited from game theory that played out where they're holding an asset and then you've got presidents, potential presidents arguing over who's gonna increase their value in buying power more. The dynamic is totally changed. This has never existed before. And this is the game theory. On that note Mitch, Logan, pull up the tweet I put in. As we went live, breaking news, not that one. yeah, this one. Marathon Digital partnered with the country of Kenya to harness their underutilized energy assets to mine Bitcoin. So we have a public -private partnership between the Kenyan government and Marathon Digital, a publicly traded miner here in the US, to basically mine Bitcoin with their excess energy assets. It's pretty insane, right, that you can monetize streamed energy remotely. Brian Cubellis (55:27.214) Like it has never been possible, right? Cause you have to take that energy, right? Put in a capacitor or put in a line and to take it somewhere else, right? And you have a lot of loss to do that. And you know, now it's like, Hey, look, I have a hole in the ground. It's not doing anything. Like it has energy in it. You put a miner on it, it's like boom, I'm making money. You can't compete with these incentives. No. it reminds me of a Right. And then, and then you can't, it's just the incentives are impossible to fight with. It's just that every single sort of like more moral, ethical way of, of like storing money and, and monetizing the money, right. Have always been things are less moral or, or, or, you know, ethically not great or, or they were not extremely monetizable. Right. Yeah. And. And that's why we always lost. It's always been this choice, it's like, well, I have to be ethical or I want to make money. And with Bitcoin, it's like, fuck you all, I'm just going to hold my Bitcoin into appreciates being moral in my corner. I'm going to be sitting on my little pond flourishing until you all fucking fight each other to death and sort it out. But number go up and it can do number go up ethically. You can't fight this fucking incentives. Yeah, I mean, that's a key thing that Marty's been talking about. He brought up the other week about what's more important. It's like the banks or the energy sector. And he made the case. And I think it's the energy sector because once you have the energy, that's what powers the world. And you tie it to Bitcoin. It reminds me of this quote because everybody talks about the UAE and what's happening in Dubai. And they say like UAE is like a speedboat. Like you can move and it shifts fast. And Saudi Arabia is like a Brian Cubellis (57:48.526) Like a battleship and it takes a while to turn but when it turns it can like take over the world and this notion of like when they start to grok and they're starting to get there and they start mining Bitcoin and leveraging a lot of the excess Energy and a lot of the renewable stuff that they're powering over the next decade like those incentives from a geopolitical Jurisdictional perspective just completely wipe out a lot of this like conversation around. where am I gonna live? Who's gonna be fair? It's like everybody wants your Bitcoin and they're gonna make it known and you're gonna have a lot of places to go in the future I mean, and if you have your shit coin mining, they're all going to have to move to proof of stake because the AI companies are going to pay more for computational GPUs than they will. Right. So they're all going to move to proof of stake. So they're all fully capturable. Right. Bitcoin, you know, we already have all the tendencies of money to become monopoly. So like Bitcoin has that going for it. It already has the Lindy. Right. It has the computation. So nobody's going to like come for the king that way. It's again, extremely bullish. Well, and to add to that, so this is something you're really passionate about. I know Marty is like this whole idea of NOSTER and all the open internet is like starting to think about you have price and then so utility of the assets better, right? On an open network standard, but then you have price and those are going to converge where the person wants Bitcoin. So they naturally are going to adopt it as a price appreciates. They're going to just opt in for these other avenues that aren't, you know, Twitter or aren't these other like open standards. And so these things are both like combining together and it's not one or the other that comes to the market. They literally just like grow together at the same time. You know, like contrary again to, you know, what the few good people think. It's like, it's not like, you know, Bitcoin documentaries or, you know, freedom loving stories that get people to adopt the technology. It's number go up. You know, number go up is the best marketing that Bitcoin has. Don't tell Rockstar that he just put a good documentary out, you know, it's a great documentary. It feels great for us. I love it. Right. But, but I am not the 99 % of the people that had do not give a flying fuck about this stuff. Right. And, and then what's cool is that like, you know, number go up is going to get them. Yeah. And what's going to do that. It's giving the ability for financial institutions for Apple to go buy Bitcoin. That's going to make number go up. U S government saying we're not going to go. Brian Cubellis (01:00:11.47) dump the Bitcoin that we've seized, we're going to hold on to it as a strategic treasury reserve. That's what makes number go up. And everything I'm seeing over the last couple of weeks, it's starting to move us in that direction. Yeah. I mean, I think the US government's going to dump the coins and then buy the ETF, but that's a different story. Well, that's, it's like the, it's like the meme with the guy behind the guy or whatever. It's like the US government is the, they can't help themselves. I disagree. I have some of like the I think you have was that disagree with what the that they would dump it and buy the ETF I do think from a national security standpoint, you know, that red software, it's on the shelf behind me. I do think we have we have friends in, you know, in the government that understand some of the the national security concerns of maybe, keeping not holding on to that Bitcoin. And I do think there's a little bit of infighting right now between different branches that potentially hold on to some of that. The problem is the mandate. No, no, it's even legally the mandate of all this government entities that acquire the Bitcoin from people forcefully. They have to sell. It's not a choice. They have to forgo the asset. And then what happens is it's other entities of government that are involved in other things that buy the asset. They can't just transfer from one branch to another. It's, it's, you know, it's government incompetence. Like, you know, it's funny we talk, we talk about this, like I don't, I think of Coinbase and whatever Bitcoin they hold is the government. Brian Cubellis (01:02:10.958) I don't think there's any difference. If Coinbase and the ETF is holding the Bitcoin, then it's the government. And whether that line is tomorrow or three years or five years, there's a certain point. I mean, Condoleezza is a board member at Coinbase, right? Really? It doesn't get more deep state than that, yeah. Or at least was. interesting. Yeah, I mean, you see this with their partnership with the IRS, the partnership with the hacking team back in the day, their partnership with USDC. They're trying to be the compliant, government friendly. I mean, their partnership with Tether, right? I mean, they told Tether, OK, you guys can all have anything else. It's not treasuries. Tether becomes the 16th biggest purchaser of US treasuries on the planet. Let's just say that they have full freedom, right? Yeah. Yeah, they don't get talked about enough. Like you can't move that amount of money through a banking system without having certain relationships. It doesn't. No, I mean helicopters show up. Helicopters show up. Those Apaches and Chinuts show up for a lot less than that. It's true. Brian Cubellis (01:03:32.846) But we need companies like this doing it. Like they pave the way so that like the builders in our like you need the coin bases, you need the tethers to go cozy up because that allows the framework for companies like OnRap to come into the space and go do this better. It's the framework, right? Like this is this Bitcoiners need to shed this framework of like thinking that we have some agency of what people are going to do or not do. It's like we don't allow or disallow Coinbase to exist. Like, fuck Brian, right? Like, I mean, those guys are horrible human beings in that entity and they hate Bitcoin. But like, it's not in our control, like, you know, in this free market that we're building, you know, to like have any agencies to like, you know, they can exist or they can't exist, right? People normally argue about those things as if we have any agency. We don't, right? I mean, The incentives are such that they exist. It is funny though, on Twitter, people thinking that they have agency of these sort of things, but they grab the popcorn and watch. That's all you can do. And I think we can. When they started. No, no, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I think they conflate the agency of them versus the agency of themselves. Cause we're saying both the same thing. It's like the market's going to do what the market does. You don't have to participate in it and you shouldn't because you're probably gonna get rugged. Well, this leads. To a good last topic too, is like while all this is going on, and MBK won't put words in your mouth, but I think we're aligned in the sense that we think a lot of the regulatory, quote unquote, regulatory clarity and Wall Street getting introduced provides cover for people building out cypherpunk tools, like whether that's on chain, via the Lightning Network, now these Chalmia mints combining all of this with Nostr. Like we could look up a decade from now, and while everybody's focused on institutionalized, White glove Bitcoin you have this movement of open source developers building out Sci -fi tech that is fundamentally better from a user experience point of view that enables people to actually like use Bitcoin and truly sovereign and As a medium of exchange over over these protocols Yeah, I mean, you know like we like money is not very good Even the best money is not good. I Brian Cubellis (01:05:59.886) if you can't coordinate commerce, right? And the comms are all compromised and censored, right? So if you can't have clear means of coordinating that commerce and price discovery, then money could die. And so like we can't depend on Twitter, we can't depend on anything that's centralized, right? Like we've learned that with money, that you cannot depend on a database to have a fair monetary system. So, Bitcoin exists and exists outside of this centralized sort of like dynamics. And, you know, for a long time, we didn't have a solution to go around like Twitter and to go around email and things that are sort of like very, very centralized or have centralized tendencies. And Nostr resolves a lot of this, this problems, you know, and I think the two combined like give us like, you know, a superpower, right? Like you can now, coordinate, price discover and exchange, right? And you don't need anything else to build civilization, right? The rest is just people being people and sorting shit out. Brian Cubellis (01:07:17.55) What is it, can you break down the, this is something I'm working through is like the idea, the e -cash is one component, but the dollar peg and this idea of the guys working on it, like one of the angles from the use cases, just because people aren't used to seeing sats and the numbers and decimals. So this natural way to receive the dollar, kind of obviate what's happening in the background. And then if you want to get out of it, you know, obviously need the edges to get into back in a fiat, but like where do you see the use case there? If there is a use case because I know this left this this stuff just like started to get you know More popular the past few weeks, but curious like how you guys are thinking about it I think there's like two parts to this one is we have the unit bias problem, right? But don't worry when one sat dollar happens in the next few years that resolves that problem The the issue is like, you know, the best shit coin in the planet is the US dollar Right? Like what people want is not Ethereum, Solana, or any of the shit or even Bitcoin, but they want this dollars. But they want freedom dollars. Right? And if you are in pretty much any country on the planet, there is no freedom dollars unless you use cash. And even then, you know, you're losing on you're losing if you try to store it. But people for commerce, they need stability. Right? You need to know that your contract that you signed today has similar economical. purchasing power in six months, right? Otherwise, like if you ever dealt with currencies that are very volatile, it's a fucking nightmare, right? I mean, Canadian dollar lost like, I don't know, 30 % in the last few years, right? It's very unpleasant to do business in USD denominated debt if you're doing a Canadian underlying transaction, right? So, you know, for business to operate, business needs to be concerned with that contract being similar in six months. so that they can close that trade. Now, you can't do that with Bitcoin. It's very difficult to price out six months in Bitcoin for you to do that contract. So what do people do is they use Tether, because Tether is freedom dollars, at least kind of. They block a lot of people, but a lot of people get through. And so think about Tether as the old school Swiss bank account. It's like... Brian Cubellis (01:09:39.31) You know, it was Frank that I'm a native really. You could have us the nominated at a time. But the point is you have you have a stable point. That's what US dollar is. And the demand is high for that. But people need freedom, which the dollar doesn't offer anymore. So what do you need is how can it dominate denominated USD, but still have an underlying freedom asset. Right. And people are trying to do that with Bitcoin. It's complicated. It's tricky. You can get very fucked because the price moves so much. So, you know, creating those hedges is tricky. But the point is you can now create a stable coin based on Bitcoin. It's as risky as it is. But the people using those freedom dollars on e -cash that are backed by Bitcoin, they don't need that money for a long time. And their alternatives available to them are horrible. Right. What's the alternative to that? for an Argentinian person, Argentinian peso, good luck with that. Or somebody in Africa somewhere, like good luck to that using your local currency, you don't want that shit. So the demand for stable dollars backed by something they have access to, to have those stable dollars is only gonna grow. And eCash is absolutely perfect for that. eCash is free banking, right? And we all know that free banking, you know, like it or don't like it is a very natural demand, sort of like a service, right? Like there's very natural demand for that because people need credit or you need credit to create stability on some hedge, right? And I think eCash is going to fill that niche very well because it can always be cleared between the minutes on Bitcoin that be lightning or on chain. So sort of like sorry for the roundaboutness, but it's kind of important that like we recognize why the stable dollar is important and why the underlying thing that holds the dollar is important. Brian Cubellis (01:11:49.39) No, that's helpful context. I mean, it's why I've thought for a very long time, and I don't know if this will be controversial take or not, but a lot of these E -cash mints look a lot like on -ramp return because the reality is whether it's the consumer wanting to know who's running it and the like idea of exit scamming, all these things become a lot less likely when you have not only a single custodian that can't unilaterally move and rug you, but they also have laws and regulations and balance sheets that protect it. And then as it starts to play around with this like dollar denomination, as you know, when it's 10 million, a hundred million, maybe nobody cares, but you're talking five, $10 billion. Now people start to care and you have to be able to navigate the accounting legal and tax perspectives from it. So yeah. Have you heard of this term called million mint? So when you move the trust to the edges, right, that's what the cash does. And if you have a million mints each holding $5, which state actor is gonna go after a dude holding $5? It's certain there's gonna be selective enforcement, whatever, right? Like it's not pretty, it's messy, but reality is you can't shut down a million mints each holding $5. Like, good luck. And that's the idea behind this as well. When you think about ETFs and financial service partners, as we work with banks and other things step in, they just hold one of the keys in a quorum for their own partners and they can't rug themselves. And they also can't be rugged because they don't have unilateral control. And you just spread that game theory. Two parts of Rodolfo, he doesn't know his involvement in this business. When we first were bringing this out, I showed him it in his mind. Most people looked at multi -institution like, what is this? He's like, of course, like this makes complete sense. And the other one was, I think it was in Utah at a beef steak I brought up. We were talking about a... I think you and your wife referenced the last trade as like, this is just the last trade. And obviously this is the name of the show. It was a mutual, I think you may have said it first or we were both talking about it, but the idea wasn't solely mine. And I don't think anybody knows that yet. So you're very foundational even in this show and the last trade. I appreciate it. I mean, it really is, right? I mean, once you buy Bitcoin, you might have to spend some Bitcoin to do things. Brian Cubellis (01:14:02.766) but like nobody sells Bitcoin to hold. There's nothing else to buy gold or to buy stock. Can you imagine like who's selling Bitcoin out there to go buy some Nvidia? Like nobody's doing that. They might they might just like have new cash flow that they are locating some to Nvidia, but nobody's selling Bitcoin to buy it. I think you're wrong. I think it is happening, unfortunately. And but I don't. I think it's our job. I think he just barks himself. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think this is actually podcast. No, no, no. Yeah, we're gonna have to wait for two parts. We're gonna kind of quasi rug. I don't want to. There are a lot of people short Bitcoin that we thought held, you know, or, you know, talk about being having been absolutely. Yeah. So you, if anybody's on Twitter, you look at these large exchanges and you think people, they're holding Bitcoin, they like might have zero Bitcoin. That's all I'll say about that. So maybe he did docs himself in his Nvidia position. You heard it here. No, I wish I had. In the Nvidia Max. Mitch is in the Nvidia Max. We're going to spread that rumor. I, so number one, I think you think about like the ETF flows. Like those people are 100 % selling Bitcoin to go into something else for whether it's rebalancing or yeah, but that's not it. That's not Bitcoin number two, like there I mean messages with friends that don't that we've dragged into Bitcoin that don't totally understand it yet. Focused on you know, maybe they're up 10 % and they get out and go buy something else. They don't get it yet. It's the last trade happens not when you first buy Bitcoin. It's when you actually understand it's the last trade. So I think there's Let me put it to you this way. Yeah, I think I don't want to sound like gold posting But I guess it should have qualified that comment a little think about it this way. I don't think a single person Like who has the coin in a hardware wallet, right? They took self -pustody is moving that they came back to an exchange to buy in video Totally agree. Totally agree with you there, you know Brian Cubellis (01:16:22.83) And that's what I would consider a big winner. The rest is just in for the ride. But I'm talking about the people who actually took self -custody of it. I can't imagine that flow. I seriously cannot imagine a person doing that. Yeah. It's a... It's still early. They had their earning calls today, right? Mitch, what's how good did Nvidia do? They crushed it. No, I think it was up like 10 % yesterday. What do we think? Are they in the next Enron? I've seen people saying they're in the next Enron. It's real. It's real. Like the amount of fucking silicon those guys are selling, it's absolutely lunacy. Like you can't do AI without that. It's like somebody just discovered oil. Right? And like whatever thing you need to do, oil say steel, right? Like they're the only people who have the best steel. Like think about it that way. Like you just, you can't exist with this new tech. You doubt them for now. Brian Cubellis (01:17:32.846) This was an amazing pod and it's very different than our regular pods in the case. So you should just know that I think some of the listeners are gonna appreciate it and some are gonna be like, wow, that had some range from the last trade. But the reality is there's a lot of pragmatism in like first principles thinking that go into this minus a little of the shit coins and the cursing, it's okay. But appreciate it. You can beep all my curses, beep all my curses so you guys can keep it. Nobody told me it had to be a... no, it's better when it's authentic. Marty knows this. Beep it. It's all good. Beep it. Logan's sitting there shaking his head like I'm not spending time to go through and peep all this. There's a lot of beeps. The. So I guess what would be the parting note for anybody that you think is listening to this podcast? Institutional investors are trying to navigate the space. How should they be approaching this? I think that, you know, like it's very difficult for a person in an institution to be the person who sticks the neck out because you lose their neck if the price drops. But but but. The truth, the uncomfortable truth is like you have no choice. You're going to be buying Bitcoin. So better buy early, get cheaper than buy later expensive. And you know what? If you lose your job, it might be a great thing too, because you buy some Bitcoin and you might be in a much better place later. You know, you drown your, your, your firing pension package into BTC and move on. There is no avoiding it. You know, your company depends on it. Like you can't. It's like saying you have treasury strategy and you don't have a SMP 500 on you. You'd sound like an insane person. It's no different. And it sounds all insane now. It's all very comfortable for me and these other three crazy people here to talk about the stuff with so much certainty. But you either take the leap of faith and be ahead or just be dragged later. Brian Cubellis (01:19:45.39) Anybody who's listening is unaware of MVK, CoinKite, what he's built. You just sat down with an OG for an hour and a half, you're getting high octane alpha. A builder in the space too. I mean, you are a rare breed of somebody who's been building in the space for over a decade. Most people don't last that long. We're having too much fun. It is a lot of fun. Michael, Mitch, anything you guys want to end with? No, thanks for joining. And like MBK said, you can't find economic reality. So you better figure out what your strategy is. Get as much Bitcoin as possible. We'll see you guys next week.