Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you compare bitcoin to gold, gold I think will go up, but gold will go up not so much because gold is getting more valuable relative to everything. It's getting more valuable relative to fiat. Bitcoin is going to, I believe, I think it's gotten to the critical mass where it is going to start taking the form of a replacement of, or at least eating into the monetary value of gold. And so that optionality should be worth a 10x in Bitcoin's price, even if there were no deficits, no debasement of fiat currency, no appreciation in the gold price. But what I think will actually happen is the debasement will continue, gold will continue to rise and Bitcoin will continue to outperform until it gets to 70 or 80% of the gold price. And then we'll, we'll have to see what's going on politically and in budgets around the world.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Hello, welcome to the Money Adjustment. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Kramer, D.C. i am a chiropractor who loves investing and trading. Are you interested in what's moving market markets and your money?
Great, let's get started.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Prices move more incrementally because there, there's an elasticity to it. The higher the price of gold, the more gold miners are able to turn profitable or unprofitable mines to be profitable. So the more gold will get produced, the more higher the price of gold, the more scrap gold will come on the market. And the higher the price of gold, the less jewelry demand will be. And so gold is what's called elastic to the price. Bitcoin is, does not have that elasticity in for the most part it is some, its elasticity is OG holders saying, oh shit, I was worth, you know, $200,000 10 years ago and now I'm a multi billionaire and I'm still living in my one bedroom apartment. Why don't I go buy a mansion and my wife would really hella love having a yacht to be able to go around the Mediterranean and I can afford it. So why don't I want to sell some bitcoin to buy it.
So to that degree it's elastic. Everybody who talks about bitcoin is going well, totally inelastic because you can't mine more as the price goes up. And that's true. Bitcoin is totally inelastic when it comes to its baseline total supply because miners are going to mine every 10 minutes another block is going to happen. But the price has nothing to do with it. So if you owned it from 10 bucks and you own 10,000 bitcoin. You wake up one morning and you've been in a time warp and you say, wait a minute, it's at 100,000.
Oh my God, I could afford everything I ever dreamed of in my life. And even if you are a cypherpunk and you don't care about that, your wife will certainly care about that, right? Or somebody else will. And eventually you get there. So this notion that Bitcoin is 100% inelastic is wrong.
On the other hand, when it comes to the supply side, it's absolutely correct.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I'm very excited to speak with our guest today because I've been through DM trying to get through to him for a couple, maybe at least a few, few weeks now, maybe a month or. And the reason I reached out to him is because I've heard him speak on spaces. People who have been watching my recent podcasts know that I'm. I've been into Xspaces and the dialogue that's happening over there. And it's mostly been related to bitcoin and paper bitcoin. And I've had some guests on that have some interesting theses and some opposing views. And I feel like our guest today will give just another balanced perspective to help us all clarify and mostly for learning. In my mind, it's not about whether something is right or wrong, but it's an educational process. So I'm going to read something for my guest. I'll introduce our guest so he can say hello and then I will read this for him. Our guest today is Dave Weisberger. Dave, please say hello to the audience.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Hello audience. How is everyone in this fine summer day?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yes, I love it. As I, as I already mentioned, I'm very excited to talk to Dave. Dave, my first question to you is, have you ever groked yourself?
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Sort of of. A couple people have done the Pokemon thing, so I wanted to see what it would come out as. And that actually was kind of fun. It had me as some sort of Fox character.
It actually claimed based on my post that I'm wiser than I think I am, but so I've done that. But that's really the only kind of stuff I've done is just kind of that kind of screwing around stuff. Yeah, the prompt is basically, if you. Based on my posts and profile, if I were a Pokemon character, who would I be? And I forgot exactly what it was. I didn't save it. But it was some sort of Fox like character which was kind of cool. It was Certainly complimentary. More than I expected. In the early days of Grok, I asked it something else. I don't remember, but it was funny, but probably not that complimentary. But you know, honestly, I don't really care all that much one way or the other. I've gotten to the point in my life where if people like me, they like me. If they don't, they don't. They think I'm an idiot. Cool. They think I'm smart. Better. But, you know, whatever. It just isn't that big of a deal.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: I love that I have you on because I think you're smart. I'll say that if you look up in the I'm not sure what version of axe you're currently using, but if you look over people's names, there's the GROK icon, and if you click on that, it will give you a brief bio of the person that is there. So when I asked if you groked yourself, I was wondering if you've ever looked at your own bio.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: No.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: And because you haven't, I'm going to read to you what GROK has told me. So this will be your introduction here. So, Dave Weisberger, a retired coin routes exec, champions bitcoin as the ultimate savings vehicle and critiques government overreach, believing decentralized finance will disrupt traditional banking. David Weisberger1 dives into crypto surges, critiques fiat systems and debates baseball strategies with sharp witnesses.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: All true.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. So then it goes on. The X community praises Dave Weisberger1 for his insightful BTC analysis and macro strategy discussions with HODL, MD and Ottmelker, highlighting his compelling takes. Yeah, and so we'll get into it. And then what it does is it highlights one tweet for you. And this is the tweet of yours that it highlighted. Can anyone expl how the Fed circus is anything but bullish for bitcoin adoption? Bitcoin doesn't need a board of governors to determine its supply. Let's start by unpacking that.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: I mean, look, in 1913, the US government established the Federal Reserve. They're now Federal Reserve. Banks are equivalents in pretty much every country.
In 1971, Nixon finally closed the door on the gold standard as it was. It was kind of a pseudo standard because it was not, you know, it wasn't public that the public couldn't own gold because it was banned in 33 and et cetera. And if you look at the numbers, if you looked in 1913, gold was about 80% of all financial assets or take in 1971, it was between 30 and 40%. And I think the bottom of gold as percentage of financial assets, I think it hit around 6%. I think it's around 15% today. Now, why does this matter? Well, it matter matters because we used to have something that was an objective standard to value money. Now, gold has done a great job keeping up with purchasing power parity. So if you want to understand, you know, gold, to buy a basket of goods and services, or goods really, such as shirts or hamburgers, has done a great job. But the problem with that analysis is that purchasing power has of course been impacted by technology.
So tech drives down the cost of stuff by improving the productivity of the people who produce it.
So you would expect that a proper store of value would do more than just maintain purchasing power parity, but give you more. And in fact, if you look at gold during the industrial revolution from 1790 through 1913, in point of fact, if you had gold, you, you increase your purchasing power over time. And so it's very different between the two. So I like to look at it vis a vis monetary aggregates or investment. What's happened predictably is financial assets have dramatically outperformed, right, because we've created enormous amounts of money. The tendency of every government is to spend more than they tax and because they can. And so we have a $37 trillion deficit, give or take. You know, there are countries like Japan, which is 120% of our GDP. I'm not touting unfunded liabilities, although that, that's a big story. We can talk about that in a bit. Pan's at a 200% deficit to GDP. The only country that's under 100 is Germany, and they just agreed to fund more defense. So they're going to start going higher.
In this sort of a world where, and you can compare it to anything else, you have to expect that financial assets denominated in the fiat currency, which in our case is the dollar, should be increasing because the denominator, well, it's just supply and demand. There's more of it. And so relative to every marginal dollar, it should be buying less. And it turns out that most of that inflation over 40 years channeled into financial assets as opposed to into CPI. Yet the Fed only focuses on CPI, which is rather funny because they're focusing in the wrong place. I mean, they're focusing on the place that politically makes sense to focus on. People get really pissed off when the price of eggs and gas and everything goes Higher, but that. And people kind of like it when their stocks and houses are worth more. Until you look at people who can't afford a house. And housing affordability is a direct result of everything we're just talking about. Right? So that's sort of the framing. And so when I talk about savings in bitcoin, I mean bitcoin could stand still and it will go up in value. But with bitcoin there's this additional optionality, right? So if you compare bitcoin to gold, gold I think will go up, but gold will go up not so much because gold is getting more valuable relative to everything. It's getting more valuable relative to fiat. Bitcoin is going to, I believe, I think it's gotten to the critical mass where it is going to start taking the form of placement of, or at least eating into the monetary value of gold. And so that optionality should be worth a 10x in Bitcoin's price, even if there were no deficits, no debasement of fiat currency, no appreciation in the gold price. But what I think will actually happen is the debasement will continue. Gold will continue to rise and bitcoin will continue to outperform until it gets to 70 or 80% of the gold price. And then we'll have to see what's going on politically and in budgets around the world. And I'm happy to unpack any of that for you.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Well, one of the things right off the top of my head is what do you think the time frame is on this? Because we speculate in terms of it's not going to happen certainly anytime soon. But are we looking at decades? Are we looking at a century?
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Neither, unless two is decades, maybe two. But markets tend to front run themselves, people tend to pile in and things tend to happen faster than you expect. So every cycle happens quicker than it used to. I mean, it used to be the business cycle would take, you know, whatever decades and then it shrunk to smaller and that sort of thing happens. Everyone is trying to predict the next big thing or big event. And so you have people like the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest investment manager, calling for bitcoin to get to between 500,000 and 700,000, which is more than halfway there to what I just predicted. And they're predicting it, you know, within whatever years you have other people making predictions. It's really a question, question of does it become a self fulfilling prophecy and what makes that it a self Fulfilling prophecy is when the supply held by OG bitcoiners gets out into the wild, out into people who don't have $10, $100 cost bases anymore. When the average cost base of people who are willing to value bitcoin starts to increase, it will eventually accelerate the price appreciation of bitcoin. We saw this last week, an old wallet of like 80,000 bitco bitcoin was supposedly sold and bitcoin did nothing. It basically is at the same price now it was before that all started, give or take a percent or two, while altcoins have gone up. And I'm looking over at my coin route screen and I see the things that I watch. I mean solana is over 200, ether is pushing 3700. And so you're seeing that within the crypto space. But they have very different reasons for owning them. Bitcoin is really a distribution phenomenon and that is what needs to happen for it to get into the public zeitgeist.
Because that is happening. It's slow. It's not a retail thing. When by the time retail decides that bitcoin is the next big thing and it's going to a million bucks, it will be going by leaps and bounds. That tends to last for a period of time. And you tend to see what we would ordinarily call a mania. I haven't been asked by cab drivers about bitcoin. In fact, if I mention crypto, they ask me about Dogecoin, they might ask me about Ethereum, they ask me about Solana. Hell, I might even get asked about fart coin. But the truth is, is that people don't even understand. The average person doesn't even know that bitcoin is different than those things. And so we're early in this cycle. This cycle is being fed by retail investment advisors. I mean the dean of them, Rick Edelman, is calling for people to put between 10 and 40% of their portfolios in Bitcoin. Even at 10%, the Bitcoin price is going to double from here at 40. If that becomes de rigueur, you're talking about achieving the benchmarks, these very high levels. That's going to take time, Mark, it just will. But once again, there's a lot inside of that. But timing is really, really hard because it's also assuming no Black Swan events. It's assuming no White swan events. There are things that could affect timing. And so I always advise people that to save in bitcoin and you could, if you want to speculate, there are other vehicles to Speculate. And you could speculate in bitcoin, but segregate what your savings are.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Can I. Because you, you stirred something up in me and, and you, you brought up how there's still, there's like a threshold we have not crossed yet. And I always, I use my story as an example because. And you can give. I would love your feedback on it actually is I keep saying this, I'm going to fix this because I keep saying, oh, I've been studying Bitcoin since 2008. That's not true. I conflate the GFC, the global financial crisis as the emergence of Bitcoin. So then I say, oh, I've been studying Bitcoin since 2008. But the reality is I probably wasn't aware of it until like 200920 because it really wasn't starting to gain consciousness or originated until 2009.
Maybe in smaller circles in late 2008. But the reason I bring that up is because I didn't put any skin in the game until 2020. So I had watched it, I had been intellectually curious about it. I adopted all of the. Not adopted, but was like heard the fud. But because I didn't use the technology or fully appreciate it, I didn't really put any money into it and I didn't put any SK into the game until 2020. So even having watched it, I didn't even feel comfortable putting money in until 2020. And that being said, I did it through a custodial account. So it wasn't till now 2025 that I'm like, oh, there's actually this is a technology. There is something here. I need to self custody. It's through conversations that I've been having with you and mutual acquaintances like Darkseid and Joe who have been inspired me to, oh, I need to self custody. That's the actual, to the larger point, the bigger picture with bitcoin, which is unrealized at this point because I think to myself, as someone who's had some kind of interest for a long time now, I'm only now starting to appreciate what the actual potential of the technology is.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Well, I have two reactions to that. I screwed up.
I was given, I was following it a little bit, but not really. I played poker with some people back in 2012, 13, 14, kind of ignored them. A couple friends of mine were starting up a bitcoin exchange in 2014, couldn't get funding. Boy, was that a miss.
And you know, and, and, and, and I, and I'm looking at this thinking, you know, whatever. Then a really good friend of mine almost begged me, you know, she was like, look, Dave, instead of going and doing, you know, going and doing something else, and I ended up going to, to market, you know, through a company that got acquired by them to run their, be their global head of market structure. Instead of doing that, she was trying to convince me to go talk to this bitcoin company. I won't mention who, it doesn't matter.
I'd be worth so much, many multiples. But what did happen with me is in 2017 my son had the idea to build a company to navigate crypto markets to help people trade and do so cheaper, better, faster. And my whole background was in building trading algorithms. I'd been building algorithms for Solomon Smith Barney through Citigroup, built like the first ones before that I built program trading systems. So that was a natural to me. And that started in 2017. And that's when I dove in. And to be blunt, we built a company that has saved our clients probably hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings. And the company itself has done well. It's called Coin Routes. And that's how I got into the space. But from an investment point of view, I started investing in 17 really toward the end, but really in 18, which was not a great time for it. But I've been accumulating ever since I went the pain that I didn't do in 15 and 14 of figuring out how to do a self directed IRA, which was hard, really hard to do that. But when you talk about self custody, I find it fascinating because I have some self custody bitcoin for sure. But I also have accounts at pretty much every major exchange that I'm allowed to have an account at. And you can say why? Well, I'm paranoid. I don't like counterparty risk and I don't want to have enough in a wallet that, you know, like if someone came to my apartment to try to wrench attack me on a wallet, they would be shit out of luck. Why? Wallet's not here, you know. And I have the seed phrases, you know, in a totally separate place than the wallet.
As I said, paranoid. But that's only a fraction of my net worth. Most of it is in exchange accounts, which once again don't allow, you know, I don't have full access to, I have nothing on my cell phone, you know, etc. Etc. For that exact reason. But the other point is, is that bitcoin custody today requires some technolog capabilities and I don't want my wife to lose access to coins, to wealth. And so, and that's another big problem that a lot of people have. Now, in my case, my son could obviously help my wife because he understands the technology. But the fact is that, that there's still a long way to go for self custody to be the kind of thing that people rely on. People in our con, in our culture accept unacceptable levels of surveillance, unacceptable levels of control in order to gain safety. But, but there has to be some level of control and safety in order to be able to be completely off the grid and do what you want to do. And so I think that these arguments are silly because it's not that you're not a real bitcoiner if you hold money in an ETF, or if you hold money in a Coinbase account or a Kraken account, or a Gemini account, or a bitstamp account or a Paxos account. By the way, I have all the above. So I don't care. Right? You can call me less of anything that you'd like, but the truth is that there's reasons for, for different things. And counterparty risk is real and operational risk is real. And people who ignore that, ignore the stories. I mean, you know, what's that dude in England who is trying to spend millions of dollars to dig up a landfill because he knows he has a computer there with a seed phrase. I mean, you've got to be kidding me, right? You know, who wants to deal with that crap? So that, that is, and that's the kind of thing, by the way, that's holding back adoption. Those stories are getting less and less because more and more people are adopting it as a financial asset and as a savings vehicle. And at that, it works perfectly well in any one of the forms that I mentioned.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I relate to that. And I wouldn't have called it paranoia, but I have multiple accounts where I keep my bitcoin as well. And for me it was a way to manage the volatility. I felt like if I had a little bit in various different accounts, then I could, for me personally, I could sleep at night because I didn't see it in my primary accounts where I would see a big 40% or 50% drop or preparing for something like that.
But beyond that, it's. The self custody thing is very fascinating to me because it's, it's a unique experience to actually get a cold wallet. And then I just. Honestly, Dave, today I put my first. I bought my first bitcoin.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: It's empty.
Yeah, there's an empty one. But you know, I have a few. This one, this one is yet to be used, but yeah, it's easy.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: This one.
Treasure.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I have one of those too. Once again, nothing in it. There are scenarios when you clearly will want the portability of your own wealth without having to touch anybody else. Frankly doubt that I'm going to face any of those scenarios. But there are scenarios and I understand it. When I bought gold and silver before I was into bitcoin, I bought silver because I figured that gold was going to go to such ridiculous that the point that when I would need physical gold and I own some but not a lot, gold will get to a point where I would actually need it. It would probably be priced out of actual day to day transactions, but silver wouldn't. So I own a few monster boxes of silver. Now that's just to me, that's exactly the same trade as having a bitcoin wallet.
It's like, what are you going to do with a 1oz silver coin today worth what, just under 40 bucks an ounce?
It used to be that a 1oz silver coin would buy a really, really nice, really nice dinner at a top restaurant or a suit on Saville Row. Well, it doesn't anymore and one could make the argument that it will. And I used to think that that was going to be the case and it may still be the case at some point. I see more expo, more growth, more savings potential in bitcoin than I do in both. The point here is that there's lots of individual circumstances that people have to go to. And the thing I thought we were going to talk about is the fact that you can hold it, that it is provably scarce and how that relates to the price. Because to be blunt, at least one of the gu guests who I actually am friendly with and genuinely like has this crazy theory that somehow because of the way bitcoin is that someone's going to do a Hunt Brothers which for those who know the history, the Hunt brothers took silver from like 4 bucks up to 50 bucks and tried to corner the market by manipulation that someone could do the same thing in bitcoin and or it could happen because of derivative transactions. And I don't think that that's actually true for a whole host of reasons. And we could talk through that too.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that would be great actually, because I, I, I for context here, I'm positioning myself as what I am, which is a retail investor, I'm a chiropractor by profession, somewhere in life got really interested in finances, partially because my parents were aging.
I knew I was probably going to inherit some money and I wanted to understand the complexities of that. And that in itself was its own financial education and journey. It was kind of going from a somewhat of a month to month month mindset to all of a sudden having to man actually deal with bigger problems, quite honestly without getting too divergent on that path. I brought that up only to again set the context of I'm not a financial, I'm not a financial advisor, I'm not a financial industry person. I'm taking in this information because I stumbled on some spaces and I'm like, wow, this macroeconomic stuff is really cool.
That being said, that being said, I kind of found myself like I've interviewed both of the people in question, taken in the information from both sides. I did have you on just to gain further clarity on this. And I will give you my layperson's take of my current understanding and for whatever usefulness that will be. I'm assuming that people watching my videos now are people that are also in the spaces because I'm interviewing people from the spaces. So I'm hoping to add value by taking you guys outside of the space spaces me a little bit more time to unpack things in a very safe environment because I genuinely just want to understand this better. And I think it's great, if nothing else from a learning perspective because just you have to understand self custody. You have to understand what a bearer asset is. That's like the idea. And you have to understand counterparty risk. Those are key terms that in order to get the bigger picture of what's happening, you have to have some conceptualization of those terms. And for anybody that's just tuning into me now and wants to get into those terms more deeply, encourage you to watch these past videos because I'm creating them in the spirit of education so that people can go back and learn from this, this conversation that we're having. So that being said, I have like now taken self custody very small bit just to play around. And like you said, we are a long road from that parallel system emerging to the extent that it's of significant size. I know one of Joe's points is that the bitcoin market cap is 2 trillion. The global economy, the money supply is 100 trillion going to 2 trillion. So the idea that a 2 trillion asset could disrupt the markets and it's not just the asset itself. And I appreciate you giving me a chance to talk through this a little bit because I don't always get to express these things. And you'll see how well I understand it or don't understand it. So you have this $2 trillion supply.
When I asked Dark about this, and I said, well, Joe says it's too small to be disruptive, Dark's response to me was that it's maybe small now, but if we assume the growth and even you brought up David, let's assum a 10x multiple on it, it will get larger. And even if you just assume 10x and we're looking at a whatever 20 trillion, it's still. 20 trillion is only 10% relative to the upper range of the global money supply.
So even that seems like it's still too small of an asset to be an issue. Now I know that's not even the bigger point here. The bigger point is around the paper. Bitcoin, and that was the term that I heard Dark use. And it makes. It's a simple way to think about it. Oh, you're shaking. You know what? Jump in. Because, because you're shaking. Your like, just jump in there.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Look, first of all, people who believe in binary outcomes are almost always wrong. That's not the way the world works. It's not binary. We don't have a series of binary decisions. Computers break them down, but they hide it from you. So effectively, what's a disruption? You know, if the gold price went from, you know, 3,000 to 10,000 in three days, how many firms will go bankrupt? Probably a couple. But would it matter that that is a move of 40 trillion I just described? That would be more or less. Yeah, it'd be front page for a couple days, but nobody would really care. People would care. Would be women would be running to the cash for gold stores to selling the gold they don't like in order to buy shit they do like. So you'd see that. But the reality is prices don't do that. Prices move more incrementally because there's an elasticity to it. The higher the price of gold, the more gold miners are able to turn profitable or unprofitable mines to be profitable. So the more gold will get produced, the more higher the price of gold, the more scrap gold will come on the market. And the higher the price of gold, the less jewelry demand will be. And so gold is what's called elastic to the price. Bitcoin does not have that elasticity in for the most part. It has some.
Its elasticity is OG holders saying, oh shit, I was worth, you know, $200,000 10 years ago. And Now I'm a multi billionaire there and I'm still living, you know, in my one bedroom apartment. You know, why don't I go buy a mansion and you know, it would be, my wife would really hella love having a yacht to be able to go around the Mediterranean. And I can afford it. So why don't I want to sell some bitcoin to buy it? So to that degree it's elastic. Everybody who talks about bitcoin is oh well, totally inelastic because you can't mine more as the price goes up. And that's true. Bitcoin is totally inelastic when it comes to its baseline total supply. Because miners are going to mine, every 10 minutes another block is going to happen. But the price has nothing to do with it. The price has to do with the competition between miners. But it's not elastic there. But it's absolutely elastic in terms of the people who owned it. So if you owned it from 10 bucks and you own 10,000 bitcoin, you wake up one morning and you've been in a time warp and you say, wait a minute, it's at 100,000, oh my God, I could afford everything I ever dreamed of in my life. And even if you are a cypherpunk and you don't care about that, that your wife will certainly care about that, right? Or somebody else will. And eventually you get there. So this notion that Bitcoin is 100% inelastic is wrong. On the other hand, when it comes to the supply side, it's absolutely correct. So I get into arguments. A guy named Mike McGlone from Bloomberg all the time, and he compares it to gold. And I said, well listen, gold price goes up. Lots of gold comes on the market both from miners and scrap. There's no such thing in that in bitcoin, it doesn't exist. So those two things matter. Now the paper bitcoin, where I started shaking my head, what a Crockett.
What a crock of. It's complete nonsense. The reason it's complete nonsense is unlike gold where there was no verification and there was clear manipulation and we've had fines and huge fines in the gold market for people who use paper gold to manipulate the gold price. In bitcoin, every derivative is cash settled. There's no nothing, and it's all based upon the spot price. If someone tried to manipulate the price of bitcoin by selling paper bitcoin to drive it down, down, and you couldn't get spot sellers to sell the expression traders would have is they'd get their faces ripped off because somebody would turn around and say oh okay, you're trying to do this great, I'm going to buy all this cheap paper bitcoin for this. And now I'm going to because I don't I can afford to lose a ton of money. I'm going to go and I'm going to buy some spot and force and force the price up. No one is setting themselves up for this. I mean Dark's thesis is that people market makers are going to be caught short short and therefore they're going to have to cover and they're going to have to cover it in the spot market. It's going to do what I just said. But market makers aren't dumb. Look, I ran Two Sigma Securities, a market maker. I ran electronic market making for Citigroup and I can tell you that market makers are smart and when they are accessing when they, when people make this idiotic claim and you hear it all over spaces that oh, that didn't move the price because it was done otc that may be the single dumbest thing that gets said as if it's fact on Twitter space basis people say you've probably heard that all the time Mark, have you not?
[00:31:13] Speaker B: I, I, I. To be honest with you, I'm still wrapping my mind around otc.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Okay, let me explain otc an OTC broker. There are some really good ones that do a lot. There was one was discussed last week. I don't want to name names so it doesn't matter in a good way. An OTC broker is, is someone where if you're a large institution, you go to an OTC broker, you say listen, I need to buy $500 million worth of business bitcoin. I'm not going to go out and I don't have the technology to do it myself do it for me. So either and they could take, they could do one of three things three different ways they can do this okay, all happen way number one, make me a price of 500 million. OTC broker looks like Homer Simpson at that point when he's contemplating pork chops because they can mark it up and then they can get they can hedge themselves out and make a lot of money money. Someone wants to make a big block price. The brokerage community will make it as a very widespread and they will end up making money on it. That's the most profitable. That's way number one. Way number two we're going to look we are in touch with some large sellers that were also asking us if they we could find buyers. And they pair those off and those trades get done because neither one ends up having to go to the market. That is called by people as, oh, we see that, that's manufactured. That's how you trade OTC with that movie price. Except that those large sellers were going to go into the market if you didn't find them at the OTC broker. And the same thing about the buyer, if you don't find the large seller, they were going to go into the market. So that turns out to be a pretty small percentage of the overall flow. But it's real and it happens. And OTC brokers perform an incredibly useful service doing that. By the way, everything I'm describing happens in the stock market too. We just don't call it these words. So essentially it's the same thing. Now, the third way is what's the most interesting to me, and that is the OTC broker says, okay, I'll work the order for you. I will use my technology to do so. And so what they will do is they will use technology such as I built for coin routes. Coin routes. What it does is it has the ability to look through, look at the spot markets on every single exchange, the derivative markets on every single exchange, and buy upside exposure. And depending on the nature of the OTC broker, they might just use the spot markets, they might use the derivative markets. If they use the derivative markets, then what they end up doing is for a little while, they will be long, they will, they will borrow and short the spot to the client. And they'll be. And they will have bought the derivatives. And so but they will flatten themselves out eventually. And they generally can do this because sometimes the derivatives trade at a premium, sometimes they trade at a discount. If it's at a discount, then of course they're going to buy the derivatives. Right? Because then they're buying it cheaper. They can manufacture is the way that the market works. And these algorithms, such as we built, trade take a $500 million order, it might break it up into 10,000 pieces. I'm.
10,000? Yeah. That's not a crazy number. Might take that. I'm looking at a transaction cost analysis report at coin routes for a time period where it took $11.6 billion worth of orders and broke it into 14,000 orders. And those probably each have a hundred to 200 executions underneath them in the market. So you quickly can start seeing how these things can multiply. Computers can do this sort of stuff. Retail investors or humans don't think this way. But it's no different than, you know, a human pilot can't adjust the way computers can. And that's why modern avionics control every takeoff, landing and most of what's happening, because it's the same thing. It's that computers are really good at this sort of thing. And so the OTC market makers all have either their own or rented technology to do it, and that's how they do it. But they do those three, three things. And by the way, when they do the first thing, they make a price. They use algorithms to work out of it on their other side. So it's really, that is how markets work. And in the stock markets, over 80% of volume gets done that way. In the crypto markets, that share is increasing. It's still relatively small, still a lot of blocks and whatnot. But it's important to understand that that's the kind of thing you can do, because crypto is very transparent. I mean, I'm staring at a screen right now and I'm looking and I see the prices between all of these exchanges and how they're moving around in real time. And honestly, in retail you don't really have to care about that per se, but if you're, if you want to, if you're doing a big order, you will care about it. But the notion, the notion that a derivative market maker is going to get caught short and just gap the price up because they desperately need to buy it is just wrong. That's just not the way the world works.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot there. And part of it is I find it interesting how you and I even wound up having this conversation from, from the sense of like, I downloaded Coinbase in 2020 and I was like, oh, I could buy Bitcoin through Coinbase. That was my introduction. Like, I don't have all this behind the scenes, layered outside of like in the 2020 era. Watching countless hours of CNBC, watching YouTube videos, educating myself, similar to how a lot of the people I'm watching now educate themselves.
There's this odd retail, this educated retail investor out there because maybe, I mean, maybe likely because of the technology has made it so easy to get similar types of information. Not the exact type of information and not at scale.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: Can I ask a question, mark? Have you ever traded stock? Have you ever traded stocks?
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Of course, yeah.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Have you used any of the trading, investing, have you, have you ever traded on like, you know, any of the trading, the pro trader platforms on either schwab or Trader Fidelity.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: I have. I used to use Thinkorswerk. Swim the White Privacy.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Perfect.
That's great. Okay, so let's do this. Can you see what I'm showing?
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: This is a coin route screen. This is how easy it is. This is going to use. You see up here it says simulator. So this, these are not real trades, but they are using simulators to do it. So if I. This is how basically it works. So you could go in here and say very simply, I want to buy. Buy 100 bitcoin, which is a big order, right? You know, we're talking, you know, $11 million, which is just.
And we're going to let it trade on these simulators on Coinbase, Kraken and Okex. And I'm trading Bitcoin. $. I could, by the way, trade any one of these things. All I have to do is hit buy and then. And now you're done. Now you can watch what the order is going to do. What is it going to do? I hit details and you can see that it's waiting, but it's going to route orders in a second. It'll get started. Okay, so it's routing orders. Orders. And you can see all these orders. This is, this is 100 Bitcoin. It's routed every one of these things. You see how many orders are routed. Some are canceled, some are closed. You can look to see what it's doing.
Right now. It's traded 17.
You can see it's trading on Oak, on Okex and Coinbase. Coinbase used to be GDAX was there. That's, that's originally what their electronic exchange was. You can watch this thing trade and it will get things done and it will take some time. And we can come back to it. You know, we'll, we'll allow it to because for the purpose of Julia Childs in the kitchen.
Let's see how much is done. It's done 19. So let's, let's do another order right now. We'll just come back to it. Let's just do a sell of.
Just to make the point. A sell of five. Let's just sell five bitcoin. It's the same thing. So I just wanted it to finish faster.
So you'll watch.
And right now it's done, you know, half the order. It'll get done quicker. We'll come back to the other one just to show it. But I want you to get the idea of what's happening. You see, it's done four already.
You noticed it's already done.
We are. It's already done. This many orders just to get five Bitcoin done, it's broken it into pieces and there'll be orders sitting out there. Now why is this interesting? Well, because it's trading 0.34, 0.3, 0.2. You'll notice it's all different. The computer is calculating sizes to that are disguised so that nobody knows there's an order for 100 or an order for 5. It's calculating prices that won't move the market and it's posting them, trying to achieve a better overall price and eventually it will finish which it's at 4.5. So we'll wait to see which one of these orders finishes. You can see them both. They're both open down here. Now why is all this relevant? Look down here. This is what's going on in market data, right? That's the order books and you can see the mid price here. You can see you have Kraken on one side, okx, Gemini, Coinbase on the other. And so the markets are constantly moving. It's a dynamic entity and when it's finished, like this one is basically done, it's 4.999. So let's go back and open it again when this thing finishes, which will consider itself done in a second now. Yeah, there's a tiny little sliver that it's waiting to finish. And when it finishes it, a transaction cost analysis will pop up and you'll see how much you paid to buy it.
You know, you see it's trying to get itself done on Kraken. It will finish itself now it's continue to go. But you can see that this is a computer. I have done nothing other than look at this.
When you trade in thinkorswim, you could do stuff like this or sometimes you can, depending on which you have that.
The fact that this could be done in crypto, and that's what these OTC brokers are using, it's like what's the old expression to, you know, to the uninformed. Technology can look like magic.
There are so many people who trade in crypto that don't know that any of this stuff exists. They say, okay, well it must be magic how they create, you know, how they get prices done.
And that is. And, and we're not even talking about orders. You can see down here spread orders and whatnot.
It is important because that's the way the markets go. That's how they get professional. That's how market impacts happen. So when People uninformed make assumptions about how the market's going to work, and they don't understand that there's technology like this available to the professionals.
Then they make bad assumptions. And so that's really what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to. I'm just waiting for this thing to be done. Let's just look.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Sure. Can I interject for a second there, Dave?
[00:41:25] Speaker A: Sure. Well, I think I made the point right. No, that's fine.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. No, actually, that was fascinating to me, and she got triggered because we all come into this in different ways. And I always respect the fact that you are in a profession, you are in an industry. It's very different than what the retail investor is, someone who is not an institution or in the industry, and they don't always get to see how the sausage is made. And so just for me, being intellectually curious and then having these conversations with Dark, just my imagination starts to run wild. And what you showed me are like, the average retail investor wouldn't know that's what's happening, but Dark is a quant and his background would suggest he does know, he understands that aspect of it.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: So I think that his misconception on this, and as I said, I've talked to him, he's a good dude. Right. You know, I like him. He thinks that there's a. This. That the derivative markets are a coiled spring, and he doesn't understand that everything is incremental. Right. Market makers are not sitting there short.
You know, first of all, options are not nearly as important in crypto as they are in everything in every other asset class. Why? Because of perpetual swaps? Because perpetual swaps are very cheap. So if you, if you're. You said you use thinkorswim. So in the US Market, you want to get. You want to buy leverage and get access to Tesla, or you want to get leverage access to the Qs or to the S and P. You buy opportunities, options, because that's really the only way to do it. Unless you want to go to the Qs of the S and P and you want to do futures. Now, futures, turns out, are more expensive than the ETFs and the spiders or the Qs.
The thing about futures are you need to have professional accounts, and if you deposit $100,000 to the professional account and it goes badly against you, they could give you a margin call and say, okay, you owe an extra million. They don't have a product such as a perpetual swap where you could set yourself up at a Hundred thousand, take leverage, get wiped out, but that's it. Your loss is limited. If you want limited loss in with leverage in the US market, until Coinbase just got approved for perpetual swaps, you literally have to use options. You can't limit your losses with futures, it's just not possible. Right. And so that, that's a very big deal. Plus that those losses can trigger, you might not know about them for 36 hours of market movement. Right. Because it happens at the end of a day, at the beginning of a day. It's, it's just it, it turns out that rather than having a real time, time liquidation engine or a real time risk management, futures aren't like that. So crypto did all of those things because of the nature of real time liquidations and real time risk that every market maker has built into their system. It never gets to the point where you could have this massive, oh my God, I just lost $10 million. And I, and I didn't know it. You, whatever your collateral was, that's what you've lost. And yeah, you're wiped out and you're done and the market moves on. And so that mentality is very different in the crypto world than in the traditional world. So in the traditional world, if you had this incredibly volatile asset and you got short futures and you thought that your loss was limited to whatever, a hundred thousand dollars, and it turns out that the market move was so much larger than you expected and you end up having to write a $2 million check and you don't have $2 million, then what do you do? You know, that sort of mentality doesn't exist in the world. Everything is much more incremental, much more real time in risk management. And I think that's where the misconception comes in.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Okay, so this is all interesting to me and just piece together, I can hear that both of their voices in my mind and I was like, okay, this is what Joe was trying to say with that.
Because Joe, based on what you're describing, you're more in the camp of Joe.
Look, I, I'm in trouble for even doing this and people are blocking me because it's, yeah, I don't, I don't.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: Care what, I don't care what anybody thinks. Dark is a good dude. He's a good dude, he's taking. But he is an option figure pro.
He understands the options markets extremely well.
But options in crypto is the tail wagging the dog.
Options in S and P are the dog.
Right. Options volumes are bigger than spot Volumes.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Do you.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: Do you swap? Volumes are bigger than bitcoin spot volumes, but options are tiny by comparison.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Right, right, right. So. So again, for me and my mind, there's a little bit of it comes down to size and scalability partially.
I'm trying to narrow it down to simple things that when I'm explaining this to someone, no one would listen to me. I have to talk to you guys because no one would in my world would understand this. But couple things come to mind. Just entertain this with me for a second here.
Sometimes I think, is it a temporal issue in the sense that. Because I even heard Joe said, yeah, maybe 50 years or 100 years, like there was like a time component on it versus dark. I hear in his voice, he said, no, it's going to happen sooner than people think. Which gets a little alarmist and kind of like, okay, maybe there's a question there. Maybe I say, maybe every. Like, there's definitely a side that says no way. So I'm acknowledging that both of those sides exist.
[00:46:37] Speaker A: Let's cut through the crap. The fact is that the sole question of whether bitcoin is going to have a massive rally at some point is whether or not that elasticity I mentioned of the original holders is real. If it got to the point where the original holders in Mass said to themselves, okay, I've sold enough of this 100,000 ish level, I'm done. I'm not going to do anything else until it gets to a million. Now that's obviously a ridiculous scenario because it doesn't work that way. These are 700, 800 individual or individual firms that are not making decisions as a hive mind. But let's just go with it.
If it turned out that every one of the original holders said, said, we're going to sit on our hands and let's let the bitcoin price go where it's going to go, we're not going to sell a damn thing. But let's just go with it.
If it turned out that every one of the original holders said, we're going to sit on our hands and let's let the bitcoin price go where it's going to go, we're not going to sell a damn thing.
And we had all these treasury companies, all the corporate financial companies, all the RIAs starting to put people into bitcoin, the price could explode, higher, way more than people expect, which would then trigger a retail mania and FOMO and you'd see an overreaction. And that is entirely possible. This has nothing to do with some idiotic notion of a derivative short squeeze. This isn't a short squeeze at all. This is simply there aren't enough sellers to accommodate buyers. And that's. You can get to the same answer without the notion. The thing that's interesting about retail is we all remember and think about, oh, GameStop. Now, GameStop requires a lot of nuance to it, but the notion there was, there was, generally speaking, the Wall street community completely undervalued the community that could be generated from having all these dedicated users going to all these stores. And the idea that you could somehow make this into something bigger was just foreign to them. And so they just kept shorting it and eventually got to the point where they're just there. There wasn't enough stock to borrow and it exploded past them. That is, the people who held it had no interest in selling at those prices. And so the short squeeze happened because of the rules. And in, in equities, the rules are that if you're a market maker, you get a week more or less. Actually, it's less. Now it's four to close your positions. You have this thing called reg show, which is when something goes into the hard to borrow, you can't short it unless you actually have it. And you can't just say, okay, I know I can find it. It's just a bad system. It's one that blockchain, by the way, that will fix. And we can talk about why that doesn't exist in crypto. If you want to sell bitcoin, you quite literally have to borrow it and then transfer it to an exchange and sell it. If you want to short a perpetual swap, you get liquidated if it moves past your available collateral. Whereas I told you you could go a long time and have implied credit lines in the, in the, in the GameStop world. In fact, it was in the movie about it, you know, the dudes from Melvin Capital were out securing credit after the fact for the entire value of their firm. It's just a totally different setup. And so it doesn't require a short squeeze. This is just a demand outstripping supply. And so I just don't understand why people have to invent things. Here's some data for you in. You could argue that this is a bad metric, but it doesn't matter. In 2020, Bitcoin got to between 60 and 69,000, right? We all remember that at that time, the hash rate of the bitcoin network, many of the other network components as well, you know, strength of the Bitcoin network was 1/7 what it is today. So if you think about it, it's very simple to get to the same level of what I will call euphoria would require bitcoin to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 to 400,000, at least triple where we are today. But it goes further than that. Arguably that's actually underestimating because in 2021, other than people like Max Kaiser who called for 220,000, there wasn't anyone like Larry Fink and others who were calling for bitcoin to go to 500,000 or more today.
[00:50:42] Speaker B: When you say that people that are credible in. In.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: No, it's not that. Max is incredible. It's not about credibility.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: I'm not saying about Max. I'm saying because I remember in 2020 because I'm watching the YouTube YouTubers and the YouTubers were going nuts and I think of like Raoul Paul or someone who was saying he was calling for half a million and he was. Seemed to be one of the more credible voices within the. The Internet space. Let's just.
[00:51:06] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. Within the Internet space. And how many people in 2020 were it that controlled trillions of dollars of assets? Listen to Raul Paul compared to how many people who control trillions of dollars. Listen to, to Fidelity and Black Rights Rock and, and, and. And Rick Edelman and Mark Cuban.
It's. It's a big, big, big difference. So anyway, my point is is you could see a very sharp rally in bitcoin that has nothing to do with a short squeeze. It was just simply the supply is less elastic. And that I think gets you to where kind of in between Joe and Dark. Whereas Dark it keeps. Is fixated on the options market. But the truth is is that he and I don't really disagree about what's likely that most likely to happen. He just thinks that it's going to cause alt firms to go under and things. He thinks they're making bets that they're just not making. They're not making those bets. There's no. Citadel is not sitting there and shorting naked bitcoin. They're not doing it right.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: So Joe's argument in that regard would be like these are vetted very professed. Like these aren't dumb people that are at the end of this that don't for would not take into account that risk factor. So like play along the like. I'm just using my imagination here and it's like a, you know, it's like a fiction novel. The premise, the, the kind of one, I'm just going to use the word mythology, not because it is mythology, but it's interesting to think about it that way. The mythology of bitcoin and the promise of, or some people would believe, myself included, just to know that understand this part of the narrative is that if bitcoin fulfills its true destiny, there will be no dollar amount good enough to purchase bitcoin because you won't want the fiat dollars. So have you heard that before?
[00:52:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a, it's an. It's.
[00:52:57] Speaker B: Yes, let me finish.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: No, I don't want to use pejoratives effectively. If you believe we should go to a hard money standard, then you would need the dollar or any other currency that's circulating to be referred to, valued, to be evaluated in Bitcoin in exactly the way the dollar was backed by or evaluated. And I say backed by was pre1913, evaluated was post1913 and ignored was post71 by gold. So bitcoin could be the backstop of the financial system. I think that is entirely possible. I do. I think that it's more likely to be the measuring long before we get to a bitcoin standard. Bitcoin might become the de facto measuring standard stick for financial assets which, which implies a dramatically higher price. That's. That's where you get to. That's where you get to. Michael Sailors.
[00:53:47] Speaker B: You know, I see that, I see that now as again kind of bringing it back to someone who just dipped his toe into self custody. And now I'm starting to. I have never up until this year started to value things around me in satoshi or bitcoin or start to think about it conceptually like that. Which is to your point, that would have to be the standard. How do we value how something's doing? My st price went up 100 bucks. It's valued in the denomination of the US dollar which most, I mean people agree on this that are understanding of it is the dollar can go to infinity. How do you know the true value of anything when you don't know?
[00:54:24] Speaker A: I mean that's true, but it's not true. I mean the problem is is that in the real, that's great in the, in the fictional world and that's great in the YouTube world but in the real world that's not how it works. Even in Germany during the Weimar inflation, what a dollar they do, they reconstituted a new mark in Brazil. The reason their currency is the real is because it used to be the cruzeiro Then it became the real Crucero. Why? Because they had to reconstitute the currency because it got out of control in Zimbabwe.
[00:54:52] Speaker B: Yes, we're going to reconstitute the dollar. What I'm asking you. No, I like it. I get where you're going. Do you think you can reconstitute the. Do you think we're going to reconstitute the dollar?
[00:55:03] Speaker A: I don't. I don't know. I don't know if we've reached escape velocity or not. I think that the current plan is pretty bodacious. What Treasury Secretary Bessant is trying to do and trying. And I say him because he articulates it better. I don't know. I think what Trump wants to do is they want the US Economy to be growth on steroids. They are going to accept financialization of raging asset inflation to do so and hope that technology, productivity and growth will allow the American standard of living to go up instead of down, which will make it politically palatable. And by doing that, they inflate away the deficit. But in order for that to. They have to. In order for that to stick, they have to also rein in the fiscal stupidity. Now, I don't know they're gonna be able to do it, but there's no version of this that doesn't have runaway or very, very significant monetary inflation in asset values at the same time is encouraging massive productivity growth via AI and investment to keep the public. Okay, that's the plan. Now, will they succeed or not? I don't know. I think it's going to be very tricky. But it's the only possible way to succeed because every other ending, other than that one, is going to require some very serious fourth turning style social upheaval and unrest.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting because people keep referencing that we are in the fourth turning.
[00:56:22] Speaker A: Sure, but the fourth turning doesn't always.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: In that crisis stage. Right now, yeah, we are.
[00:56:27] Speaker A: We're in the crisis, crisis stage. The question is, you know, is are we going to go in the direction that New York wants to go with this, this socialist, racist mom Dhumi and end up with demagogues that's going to cause massive social unrest and problems or are we going to end up with growing our way out of it? And that's really the question. Are we going to go. Are we going to allow markets to become freer, to allow us to grow our way out? It really is that simple. I hate to say it, but there's no way we're staying in the middle. We're either going to go one way, which is going to be social unrest, or the other way, grow our way out. And people don't understand that. They don't, they don't get it.
[00:57:03] Speaker B: And hopefully, I mean when you, when your choices are social unrest or grow your way out, grow your way out to me sounds like a more palatable. Whether it's better for us or not, just an easier way to take medicine. Would you consider. I don't want to take up too much more of your time and I really, I want to. I have so many more places that I want to go with you. But like, would you consider the stablecoin being a reconstitution of the dollar?
[00:57:26] Speaker A: No, not at all. Stablecoin is a way to kick the can down the road. The goal is the dollar is the best of all the fiat currencies on the planet. It is the best of the bad bunch. So now the question is if you make it easy for every person in every locality to trade in dollars globally to buy and sell whatever the hell they want to do globally, it becomes a standard standard. More people are going to use it. That more use will be. Will help fuel demand for Treasuries, keeping interest rates low, which will help us grow out and it creates a virtuous circle. That's the goal, whether it succeeds or not. Once again, there's other factors. Will it help? Absolutely. But it's not a refactoring of anything. Say we have this currency, it's called the dollar. It has $37 trillion of debt underneath it. Could we get to a stable sense where our accounts are balanced? Because if you actually look at the balance sheet of the United States, it's not that bad. Not as bad as people think. It's terrible when you take unfunded liabilities into account. Why? Because the US government owns way over $100 trillion worth of land just to start. This 37 trillion in debt is bad. But if we could get to an actual situation where our balance sheet was funded, it'd be okay. The real problem is Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. Excuse me, potentially take that 37 trillion and make it more like closer to 200 trillion if you look at the demographics. And so that's where you start to get into trouble. So there's all sorts of reasons. Lyn Alden is famous for the Nothing stops this train. The only way out of this train is financial inflation, asset inflation, not consumer inflation. I will continue to say that because that is the plan. That's what they're doing. And that implies much higher prices for financial assets, particularly ones something like Bitcoin, which is not tethered to earnings, it is not tethered to housing affordability. And so that's why I expect Bitcoin to outperform.
[00:59:25] Speaker B: Right, yeah, that all makes sense. I, if you just give me two minutes to just. I'm going to try to land this plane here. Because when I started with the metaphor in terms of having the Bitcoin in self custody, taking supply off the market, there's this, this, this ideology, for lack of a better term, Bitcoin is the new currency. Do you think it' a fantasy? Not a fantasy, but like, because I've heard Dark describe it as the solution. So like, do you think it's like a just a deep desire that this corrupt system will be destroyed? Again, forget the word. I'm just, you know, it's fiction. I'm talking in storytelling.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: There's good reasons for it. Mark, you have to understand the ability to deficit spend on a global scale is why we have so many wars today, full stop.
It used to be when Spain went to war back in the 1500s or 1600, if they couldn't pay back the gold to the bankers, guess what? They repoed their ships and couldn't fight. So you know, people learn that. And throughout history, massive war campaigns have met with, have generally met financial constraints to stop it. So the argument is if we went to a sound money principle, that it would stop that maybe, certainly that would be a good thing. I'm not arguing against it. I think raging deficits, spending which started in this country with the Vietnam War at the same time as Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and has never really reversed except for a couple years under Clinton. I mean, you could make that argument, and it's not a bad one, that the world would be a better place if governments didn't have the unfettered ability to print money and do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Is it a fantasy that it's going to happen? Well, I don't know. I mean it's certainly a fantasy that it would happen in the United States before it happens elsewhere because we have the strongest currency and the strongest, strongest military. But could it happen? Sure. And would that be a good thing? Arguably, yes. But remember, different situations create different problems. Right. Whoever, you know, it's like what, what's the old expression? Know, whoever has the, the gold makes the rules. Well, you know, that's the golden rule. It's not my golden rule. Whoever's the bitcoin makes the rules be the same problem. Right. You know, if it's hoddled by a group of people who believe that, that we should be anarcho capitalist, is that necessarily gonna be a good thing? Well, I, I don't know. Depends what, what kind of policies are put in. Will the public put up with it? Will people with guns put up with it? You have to really start going down the rabbit hole to think through all these things. That's why I personally, my hope and it's hope. It's not, not. There's no Nostradamus here. I'm not predicting it. My hope is that we can use the discipline that Bitcoin and sound money to gradually reform the system and get us to a better place along the way. Those who believe in it early will make a lot of money and be in a better state situation. And there is a correlation between those who believe in it and people who think that the current problems should not, you know, derive from this and are less likely to repeat the current problems. But we'll see. I don't know. I don't know what's fantasy or not.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: I love that, Dave. I'm going to end it there because I feel like there's a, I feel the hope in that, in that there's a promise there that, that two things. It's called the money adjustment. I'm into investing in trading. So people who want to make money can make money by appreciating, educating, investing in and adopting this technology earlier, rather later. Would you like to leave our guests with any final thoughts?
[01:02:39] Speaker A: I think the most most important thing that anyone should think about when they're investing and we haven't talked a lot about this, but I showed the coin route screen. The other thing is discipline. Like you made a comment about volatility I wanted to come back to, which is, yes, it's a volatile asset. So if you save in Bitcoin, then save in Bitcoin. If you want to trade, then pick a methodology of trading like one of the companies that I do some work with called Arch Public. And you can go archpublic.com and look them up. They have a quantitative way for you to accumulate Bitcoin slowly and taking advantage of volatility, making volatility your friend. Volatility should never be your enemy, it should be your friend. But the average retail investor invests in trades emotionally and your emotions are wrong. The analogy I always use, Mark, is skiing. When you learn to ski as an adult, it's really obvious to you when you learn to ski as a kid, maybe not so much. When you learn to ski as an adult and you start falling when you're going down the hill, your first reaction, your brain tells you pull back. But if you pull back when you're skiing, you're done, you're flipped. That's it. You're the agony of defeat on, you know, you're all over the mountain. What you actually have to do is the opposite of what your emotional response is. You have to lean into the hill, go further down. You have to correct yourself by pushing in. Well, in trading generally, to use the expression selling when they're yelling is probably good. So when people are overly euphoric, that's when you sell, people are overly pessimistic, that's when you buy. In order to do that, it's really hard to do it yourself and really hard to be glued to a computer screen. So that's where algorithms like Arch Public comes in because they allow you to do that. So I know it's an infomercial. I'm sorry about that. But it is anyone who is interested in they can always DM me at Daveweisberger1 and I can connect them or they could go on Arch Public's website. But I mention it that because volatility should be the trend, should be the friend of an investor, but a trend turns out that for most people, it's their enemy because they don't know how to handle it.
[01:04:34] Speaker B: I think that's sage advice for my audience, which is mostly retail traders, I'm assuming, because that's how I'm positioning myself. And as a retail trader, I appreciate those as sage words. Would you consider coming on again?
[01:04:47] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: Not anytime soon. We don't have to do it anytime soon and I won't mess with your schedule. But I really enjoyed having you on and I really appreciate you taking the time to do this and enjoy the rest rest of your day.
[01:04:57] Speaker A: Thanks. You too, sir. Take care.
[01:04:59] Speaker B: Thank you. We'll see you. Bye, Dave. Bye, everyone.
Thank you for watching this episode of the Money Adjustment. If you want more like comment and subscribe, you can follow me on X ark Kramer until the next episode, stay healthy and wealthy.
