MI Rewind: Bitcoin, Long-Term Debt Cycles, & On-Chain Analysis w/ Dylan LeClair

22:41And there's a lot of wasted energy out there. So that marginal production cost is going to go the other way, which is up. And so all the things that are desirable in a monetary bearer instrument, When you think of gold as money or previous monies in history, Bitcoin is the best by far. And so people would think, maybe there's a margin of error there. Maybe there's some flaw in my thinking. And I basically, for better or worse, am quite certain that there is no alternative. My question to that is, the central banks run the show right now, and the central banks own a whole lot of gold. So why can't gold be something someone should hold in this scenario?

23:16or why isn't this a potential solution going forward? Maybe they set up some sort of financial system based on a gold standard again. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. So, I mean, I would say that it's probable. I mean, right now what you're seeing is, you know, Russia de-dollarized and they've accumulated gold for the last almost decade. And so gold isn't obsolete yet. And maybe it won't ever be in terms of, you know, having that monetary premium. Like it's not just an industrial metal, like say copper or tin or, iron, there's a monetary premium to gold, the base metal because of its properties.

23:47And so will that go away tomorrow? No. But I would say there's a reason why we're on a fiat standard in the first place. And it's because of that trust and that cooperation required on a gold standard. I can't go to the store with a bar of gold and shave a little bit off to pay for my candy bar or my gas in my car. So what's required? Well, what's required is some certificates gets a deposit, some counterparty holding my gold and issuing me some note saying that I own it. Well, we already tried that and it failed. That's what a bank run is. The incentive to kind of create money in the form of, you know, Clay, you deposit your gold bar at my institution.

24:21And I fractionally lend out two of those notes because I realized that people don't come and redeem them. Like that already happened. And so I think that kind of natural incentive of, you know, human greed, if you can print money, you will print money is inevitable. And so, So if Russia came out and said, we have some gold-backed currency, that's cool. But I don't really trust that you have the gold to do it. And if you want to prove it, great. But how is that verified? How are those incentives aligned? And I just believe that fundamentally in a 21st century economy, it's just not feasible to return to a metallic monetary standard.

24:53So at the end of the previous long-term debt cycle was the Great Depression timeframe, where we saw asset prices just collapse. So is that a possible scenario in the end of this cycle? Could we see a deflationary bust? And how does that affect Bitcoin? Yeah. So I mean, if you just look at what happened over since November, people will say, Bitcoin, the central banks can manipulate it by tightening monetary policy, or they pop the bubble. And they're not necessarily wrong in that sense. To a certain extent, central banks still have that lever to kind of control the value, or at least the Fed, to control the value of that dollar, right?

25:29If they tighten monetary policy, well, BTC, USD, if the denominator is going up, then Bitcoin probably takes a hit. During a credit unwind, Bitcoin's not insulated. But what they can't manipulate is Bitcoin's own monetary policy. And so can a Great Depression type event happen? Well, yes, just with how over-indebted the system is. But again, there isn't that gold standard base collateral for everything to collapse upon. In a fractionally reserve fiat system like we're in today with all of this counterparty risk prevalent during an unwind, it just goes to zero. And that sounds crazy, but money is created in this fiat system through only lending.

26:04Every dollar in circulation was lent plus interest. And so if that loan or if that money is defaulted upon, then that money is conversely, it's destroyed. And so what you have is balance sheet impairment across the entire economic system and collateral value is falling, and it's just this aggressive unwind. And so that's why they have to come in and save the system because they can't let it. And so I believe, regardless of both scenarios, I believe if they let everything unwind, which all of the political incentives don't align with that happening, well, I still have a monetary bear instrument, Bitcoin, with a provable production cost.

26:36And I'm 99.999 % sure that a block will come in in approximately 10 minutes or so, and I'll be able to settle this value somewhere in the world. But if that scenario doesn't happen, and they don't let everything completely unwind and go to zero, and they do what their incentives a line and monetize the debt, fiscal stimulus, the whole nine yards, well, there's going to be more money in the system. And I would bet money that the price of Bitcoin in nominal dollar terms goes up as a result. So I think either way, you're going to maintain that purchasing power that with the Bitcoin network, it's absolute scarcity and that production cost.

27:11Yeah. So essentially, despite us being in the quote unquote everything bubble, there's every incentive in place for them to continue to expand the monetary base of the fiat currency units, which in turn will lead to continued adoption of Bitcoin since it has a fixed supply and all of its other attributes. Yeah, 100%. And it also needs to be said that this Bitcoin itself, through its own kind of adoption, there's a ton of volatility just because of the absolute scarcity of it, because of the HODLer conviction and oftentimes the wall of money that comes in after Bitcoin breaks an all-time high and the reflexivity of markets and cycles and sentiment and euphoria, and then overlay that with derivative markets on top of it.

27:53And things get really crazy. And you see liquidations and it's just madness. There's a lot of volatility. Now, combine that with the fact that we have a fiat system that's more over-indebted than ever before. And we're seeing, look at the VIX, look at the volatility index in the current system. We're seeing a ton of volatility recently, and it might get even more volatile. So I would say for anyone that's holding this asset, make sure that your mark to market leverage, like as a Bitcoin holder for just less than, you know, a little less than three, four years, I've seen multiple, I think I've seen four separate 50 % declines.

28:25And like, at this point, it's just, it's nothing but a thing because my cost basis is obviously a lot lower and it's, you know, rising daily. But if you can't withstand 50 % drawdowns, if you're marking that leverage to market every second and you're 2X long, well, you might lose your coins because of that exchange rate risk. I guess that's the one thing that I'd say is that volatility increasingly in the fiat system, but also in this asset class, I wouldn't expect it to flatline out like a lot of people say. And because of that, don't put yourself in a position. The worst thing to do is put yourself in a position to become a forced seller of this thing.

28:56Let's transition to talk about institutional adoption. We saw some huge institutional players come in over the past couple of years, notably MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Square. as far as public companies go, but we haven't seen too many recently, at least over the past year or so. Why do you think that other public companies haven't really followed this trend, despite the high levels of inflation and monetary easing? Yeah. So I mean, I think the one thing is that from a corporate standpoint, it's not very attractive from a GAAP accounting standard. If you look at MicroStrategy or Tesla, they have to mark to market their losses as an impairment when the price goes down, but they don't get to do that on the way up.

29:39It's not treated as the cash equivalent. So I think that comes in due time, but it makes perfect sense, in my opinion, to kind of adopt a Bitcoin standard or at least a partial Bitcoin standard in this environment. Obviously, you have a bunch of institutions that are interested in 2021 after the price already 6X and is at 60 ,000. No matter how good the idea is, it's really tough to buy into something that's already gone absolutely vertical. And so I think, maybe not on the public side, I think you see a lot of institutions, hedge funds, Wall Street guys come in when the price is at 30K or the chart looks kind of bad and say, Harry, I'm going to get a little bit of an allocation here.

30:15But in terms of full public company adoption, I think we'll have to wait and see. And as the kind of asset class matures, we'll see more of it. But it makes total sense as the cost of capital in these markets, again, like MicroStrategy borrowed a billion dollars, $500 million at 0%. It was a convertible bond issue, but they borrowed 0 % were 0.5 % coupon for six, seven years out and they bought Bitcoin with it. And so just doing the calculation, even the purchase of$57 ,000, I think there is, and they bought at 57 ,000. His breakeven in 2027 is 65 ,000. So obviously they're underwater now, the stock's getting beat up, but if you can hold and if you're not becoming a fourth seller, well, that's obviously pretty advantageous.

30:56You're seeing that also with publicly traded miners, right? They're mining all of Bitcoins and they're just using this artificial kind of cheap debt to finance their operations. And that's a new dynamic that we hadn't seen in Bitcoin before where miners don't have to sell their coins because of this kind of integration with public financing. Yeah, that's one piece I find really interesting is all these public miners, there's Riot, there's Hut, and there's a number of others. They're able to take on these cheap debt loans, like you just mentioned, call it 3 % interest, give or take. And they're going to invest in these mining operations that are paying, even if Bitcoin's price stays level, they're getting something like 100 % return on their money.

31:34And then they're able to take on additional debt to maybe pay off those expenses. And they can just hold the Bitcoin indefinitely, which is just insane to think about. Yeah. I mean, if you look at public market data right now, and this won't always hold true, it's up to hash rate and the block subsidy and all this other stuff. But the average production cost for publicly traded miners is like plus or minus 10 ,000. Bitcoin's trading at$44 ,000. And so they're producing this commodity. And unlike any other commodity producer, this is what people don't understand. Look at gold miners. They mine all their gold and they dump it.

32:05Look at oil producers. They produce all this oil, they sell it. Look at Bitcoin miners. They mine all their Bitcoin, they stuff it on their balance sheet, they borrow more money to buy more Bitcoin. They don't want to sell a single Satoshi of this asset. And it's really interesting because when you're thinking about Wall Street and the kind of fiat lending coming with this hard monetary asset and combining over collateralized Bitcoin lending, people say it's so risky to borrow against your Bitcoin. Well, for the lender, it's a no loss business. If I over collateralize two to one and borrow money from you, Clay, you can mark that to market and assure that you lose none of your capital because it's liquid 24-7, 365, and it's in any jurisdiction.

32:42And so I think you're going to increasingly see, right now you can get a mortgage at 3 % or 4%. Well, you can borrow against your Bitcoin at certain lenders for say 7 % or 8%. For the longest time, you couldn't do that at all. I think that ultimately, the Bitcoin collateralized lending space is going to be the cheapest in the world. You can go to Goldman and get Fed funds plus 50 basis points on your equity if you're a multimillionaire or something. I imagine that that's going to be true for Bitcoin really everywhere because it's a no loss business once again. And I think that's not very understood.

33:14I am not going to lie. I can't wait for the day I can put Bitcoin down as collateral and avoid having to give the bank a large down payment for the loan. That's going to be a pretty incredible development for people that own Bitcoin. Yeah, it's coming. I mean, people are building it. And so it's not well understood, but the convergence of this hard monetary asset with this fiat zero cost of capital world, it's converging faster than people think. And I I think that's when things get really, really crazy. When you have guys that are a lot bigger than MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor. I mean, Michael Saylor is a billionaire, but let's be real.

33:50He's not a big fish billionaire. And so when you have a lot of people, and again, when you're thinking about fiat currency, money is created through lending. So when you go borrow a billion dollars in the corporate debt markets, it's actually like, and this sounds crazy, but it's actually creating money supply. So if Stan Druckenmiller goes and borrows$10 billion from Goldman Sachs and buys Bitcoin with it, well, he's acquiring a fixed supply of this 21 million and creating a bunch more fiat units. It's called a speculative attack. I mean, this happens in currency markets all the time, but we haven't seen this with an absolutely scarce asset ever.

34:20So there's some pretty big implications here. And I don't think a lot of people have walked through the game theory of this all. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

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37:44That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. You know, when I really dug into Bitcoin in 2020, the risk reward to me just seems so good. You know, the narrative was these four-year cycles and the Bitcoin halving happened in 2020. And we did see violent price action to the upside in the later half of 2020, but we actually haven't seen it perform as well as prior cycles. What do you think the difference is between this cycle and the prior ones? Is it just the macro landscape having such a large effect on just the price of every asset? Yeah. So I mean, I can't lie.

38:24The having and the kind of the stock to flow model and all that, people hate on that model. It definitely helped make it click for me that the impetus to allocate to this thing, get in. I was showing my parents the stock to flow charts and saying like, hey, look at what happens after the blue dot. So I mean, that is definitely a great way to kind of think about Bitcoin and these cycles. But I think now with the block subsidy and the annual inflation rate at say 1.8%, next halving in 2024, the block subsidy is going to get cut in half again. 3.125 Bitcoin every block will be issued. That inflation rates can be less than 1%.

38:57I don't think it has a huge impact on the market as much as it did in the prior halvings. And I think more so it's just the state of the capital flow into these markets. So we saw a lot of that institutional capital, and it was just probably a couple hundred billion dollars worth, maybe a hundred billion dollars worth of flooding all at once to try to secure this thing. And because supply is inelastic, and not a lot of people were selling, price goes parabolic. Ultimately, you have some people will distribute, we'll see somewhat of a kind of distribution, that's what's occurring right now. But under the surface, and this is part of the reason why I love on-chain analytics so much, is you can kind of see these like supply demand imbalances occur in real time.

39:36So like, you know, people say like supply squeeze, we're actually like in a pretty tight supply squeeze dynamic right now. But for the last three, four months, what we've seen is marginal selling for the most part from kind of these like macro allocators, right? If you're just thinking about the guys that are trying to ride the like tide of the everything bubble, well, what have they been doing since November since Powell said, oh, wait, inflation is not transitory. Like we got to hike guys, we weren't planning on this. Well, there's some marginal selling. Well, who's buying? The convicted Bitcoiners that understand this end game.

40:05So ultimately, when the macro allocators, the hedge fund guys, anybody that wants to secure a Bitcoin position, which is quite a lot of people, I think in the future, well, they're going to have to buy into a super, super tight supply dynamic. And we have a lot of people that are publicly stating, I'm not selling at any price for fiat. And so we can kind of see like 61 % of Bitcoin haven't moved in a year. 86 % of Bitcoin haven't moved in the last three months, despite price getting cut in half. Over the last year, price got cut in half twice and it doubled once. 61 % haven't moved. And so that sort of thing, you can't really see that in any other asset class.

40:39But also I think the conviction and the type of investors or holders of really any other asset class aren't this convicted crazy. We don't see that anywhere else. Let's talk a little bit more about on-chain analytics. For those who aren't familiar, you know, haven't been following you or Will Clemente, what is on-chain analysis and why does it even matter for Bitcoin? Yeah. So with Bitcoin, we basically have this public ledger of property rights, if you want to think of it. And so it's not, you know, it doesn't say this is Dylan's Bitcoin, but in a pseudonymous type of fashion, we can see every single Bitcoin that's ever moved and what address is holding it and when the last time it was moved.

41:16We just, we have this ledger of property rights. And so with that, we can do a lot of cool things, A lot of what we focus on is potential market impacts, but it doesn't have to be market related at all. A type of on-chain analytics is like, what's minor revenue over the last month? We can see that and we can pull that data up like this. You can't see that with gold. I mean, you can guesstimate it, right? But you can't see any of these sort of things. You can't see what's money velocity in the dollar standard. Well, you can guess and we can have a group of 10 ,000 PhDs at the Federal Reserve try to crunch numbers and come up with an answer, but it's not like verifiable and mathematically certain.

41:51With Bitcoin, we have that. You can spin up your own full node, you can run it on your laptop or a little computer this big, and you can look up all this data yourself. I mean, luckily we have companies like Glassnode and CoinMetrics and all this do this data for us, but we can see underneath the surface what's happening in the Bitcoin market. And it's pretty fascinating. Like those four-year cycles that we're talking about, throughout a lot of the history, what you saw was really this convicted Bitcoiners, you saw this supply squeeze dynamic really build up into a parabolic bull run, whether the chart looked good or whether it's some kind of macroeconomic dynamic.

42:24What you saw was this real supply side liquidity crunch, if you want to think of it like that, formed at the same time wall of money hit the market. And so what happens? Price goes parabolic. And so people think it's seemingly random that these blow off tops happen, these parabolic runs happen. But really, a lot of the cool thing is that we can see this stuff happen on chain, we can see when price goes parabolic, a few million coins that accumulated at the depths of the bear market distribute, you know, like, yeah, hodl, but like, if price runs up 20x or 100x, maybe some people take a little bit off the top, and we can see that happen.

42:57And you know, the marginal seller, the marginal buyer comes exhausted and price dips. And so that's, I think, one of the most fascinating things about on chain analytics is that we just have a transparency that doesn't really exist anywhere else. Yeah, I do think that's really cool how the ledger is completely public. Anyone can go out and pull the data and do their own analysis on that. What are some of the most important on-chain metrics that you keep your eye on? Yeah. So I think one of the most basic ones, well, maybe not basic, but I think one of the most simple ones and easy to understand is what I like to call a realized price, or you can think of it as realized cap.

43:32So market cap is just circulating supply times price for any asset, right? But with a realized market cap, what we can see is every single UTXO, which is the technical term for Bitcoin on chain, we can see when it was last moved. So for instance, Satoshi's coins mined in 2009 never moved. There wasn't even a market price when they were acquired. So there's about a million or so Bitcoin that are presumably Satoshi's that have zero market price. And so because of this in the realized cap calculation, they hold no weighting. Whereas in the market cap calculation, it's a million times 44 ,000. They count for$44 billion of market cap valuation.

44:06What we can see is the relative valuation or ratio of the market price versus the realized price. And historically, right now, about that realized price is like$24 ,000. So you can think of that as like the average on-chain cost basis of all the Bitcoin on the network. Is it a perfect measure? No, because if you buy your Bitcoin on an exchange, or if you just say cycle some Bitcoin between yourself and wallets that you acquired six years ago today, it may move up the cost basis. But in aggregate, it's a pretty accurate measure of average market cost basis. And so we can see this ratio of market price to a realized price and come up with some pretty interesting relative valuation framework.

44:44If that measure ever gets below one, it's usually like generational buy opportunity. So that's what in my research, I often talk about it. I'm like, if we get below 25 ,000, who knows what happens next? But traditionally, that's a sell the farm type of event. So do we get it? Who knows? But in terms of previous cycles, that's the level. Yeah, it's kind of funny. March 2020, I was watching Bitcoin that day. It went down like 50 % in one day in less than 24 hours. It's just insane to think about. But when you look at the actual fundamentals, nothing about the Bitcoin network changed. It was continually producing blocks.

45:16And it was just the macro framework where there was just a giant bid for dollars. So if nothing has fundamentally changed about Bitcoin and you're bullish on the asset, and you see, look at some of these metrics, like you mentioned, the realized price, You can just identify those generational buying type opportunities. It was really, really cool, I think. Yeah. You're 100 % accurate in that March of 2020 event. Nothing changed about the network itself. I mean, you had a derivative market liquidation. You had the Dixie go to 100. There was a bid for dollars. You nailed it there. And so at that point, people were liquidating Bitcoin for dollars because of that denominator, BTC, USD.

45:53I think that that's something that's not going to even really change as long as the global debt market is that size. But in the meantime, you can use these relative frameworks of valuation, whether it's, you know, the MBRV, or we have all sorts of like cool things we can do, like we can quantify the conviction of hodlers with on-chain metrics. And we can like, you know, put a, whether it's oversold or overbought. And is it perfect? No. Is it going to time tick the bottom at the very second? No. But we can say like, you know, this is in the fifth percentile of relative valuation. And so it gives a pretty good idea of risk reward and when it's attractive or not to allocate based on the conviction of what other UTXOs are doing.

46:31Now, Bitcoin whales are the wallets that hold the most amount of Bitcoin. What percent of the supply do Bitcoin whales hold? And is that a concern for you at all? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, so it's kind of tricky with on-chain stuff. I see a lot of data or reports published and they'll say X amount of Bitcoin. I'm not even sure what it is because I mostly disregard it. They'll say X amount of the Bitcoin supplies held by the top 900 addresses. And are there whales in Bitcoin? No doubt. I mean, there's people that understood what we're talking about today back in 2011 and said, all right, I'm going to mine this on my computer and I'm never going to sell.

47:07There are 100 % whales. And, you know, do they manipulate the market? No, it's a free market and they can buy or sell whenever they want. And that's the beauty of it. But there are people with thousands of Bitcoin, tens of thousands of Bitcoin, maybe even 100 ,000 Bitcoin. And the beauty is we don't really know if people have their privacy measures and they do it right. But in terms of how much percent of the supply whales have, well, about two and a half million Bitcoin are on exchanges. And so we can say like, well, those exchanges guesstimate there's about 100 million people that use those exchanges or have access to them that have onboarded onto them.

47:39So how much of that Bitcoin is to each user? Well, we don't know. And so that's why address analysis isn't always all that accurate. I mean, it's like saying like, how much of the dollar supply does the Federal Reserve have on its balance sheet? Well, the Federal Reserve serves a lot of member banks and they serve all these people. It's just not a great way to frame it. And so for that sense, wallet data, you can do stuff with tracking whales, right? You can see like, oh, what are whale holdings doing if you filter out and do all this heuristic stuff with exchanges and all that. But for the most part, just straight up supply high percentage analysis.

48:11There's a little bit of nuance there. And so that's why for the most part, I don't stay away from it, but there's nuance there. You mentioned a bit earlier that one of the potential catalysts for the next Bitcoin price movement upwards is Bitcoin spot ETF. We've seen one in other countries such as Canada being released. So what's the holdup with one being released in the US? Yeah. So I mean, I'm not entirely sure what's on Gary Gensler's mind. There is a Grayscale product, GBTC, that has 650 ,000 Bitcoin, I think a little bit less than that, which is just an outstanding amount. They were a huge driver early in the bull market of 2020 and 2021.

48:50And just with how that fund works and the redemption structure was very interesting that because it was trading on OTC markets with a premium, you had accredited investors that could go and give Grayscale a hundred bucks of Bitcoin or dollars. And if say the GBTC product was trading at a 30 % premium on the secondary markets, they could go and get$130 of GBTZ shares from Grayscale immediately, but those had a six-month lockup. So all these Wall Street books went to Grayscale and just immediately marked up their books with a 20, 30, 40%, whatever premium it was, and scooped up all this Bitcoin and this GBTC trust.

49:26But everyone did that. It became a crowded trade. And now, funny enough, GBTC trades at a 25 % discount in that asset value. So it's not like an ETF structure where every dollar of inflows means a dollar of allocation to the base asset, like an S &P 500 ETF would be. So what is Gary Gensler doing and why is he holding up? I'm not sure. And I think there's a whole kind of another realm of things that you would have to tackle in the crypto space in terms of what's a security, what's not. And I believe that he's made it pretty clear that Bitcoin is not a security in his eyes after teaching a class at MIT and all this other stuff.

50:00So I mean, I think ultimately you should really work to hold your own keys and utilize self-custody best practices. But that spot ETF, when it comes, I think it's not an if, but it is a when. It's going to unlock a whole bunch of institutional capital that's going to flood into this. And it's going to be probably a pretty big catalyst for the next bull market whenever that comes. Is there any possibility that an ETF could lead to Bitcoin's price being artificially suppressed like we've seen in the gold market? Yeah. So in October, we actually had that futures ETF pass, right? So there is that CME market.

50:34And interestingly enough, unlike other futures products, say on Binance or BitMEX, there is no Bitcoin settlement on the CME structure. It's actually they use cash collateral, treasury collateral for these Bitcoin futures. And so the CME tethers its price to a spot index. Interestingly enough is that we're not seeing that Bitcoin settlement occur in these future markets like you are seeing on other derivatives exchanges. So that unlocks the question, well, is it going to suppress the price like gold? And I believe because we have kind of this final settlement occurring 24-7, 365, the ability to withdraw your keys or the ability to kind of arbitrage spot prices, right?

51:15That gold doesn't have. If you just think of the settlement process with gold, any dislocation in futures price with say the futures ETF was being shorted, or there's a CME product and people were trying to artificially suppress the price. Well, I think that would be reflected in, you can look at the, there's a spot market Bitcoin price, and then all of these derivative contracts have their own price that's traded free of spot. Oftentimes when you see, say like a huge volatile move to the upside or downside, what that is essentially is that's forced selling or forced buying on a derivative product that got margin called.

51:47We can see that happen in real time where there's a liquidation engine, there's forced buying or selling, shorts are getting squeezed, lungs are getting liquidated. Whereas you don't see that settlement, that mark to market every single second occur with say a gold ETF. And so if there was some kind of price suppression on say a paper product like CME, what I would look for, and I don't see this at all, would be a really different price relative to spot price. If CME was trading at 43 and the Bitcoin price was trading at 48, well, one, One, I wouldn't want to be buying Bitcoin on CME because I don't know if I can redeem that and take that off the exchange.

52:23But two is, yeah, we're going to have a true and kind of a free and open market somewhere around the world, whether that's with baseline dollars or stable coins or whatever it is that will reflect that free market dynamic that we don't see with gold. Yeah. The thing with Bitcoin I keep hearing is that it's just so easy to take personal custody of it. If you buy gold, you need to take physical delivery, you need to have it shipped, you need to pay for these transport costs. Whereas with Bitcoin, you can just instantly have it transferred to your account. So people are going to want to be able to take custody of that Bitcoin or at least have the option to, in my opinion.

53:00Yeah. I mean, I haven't told too many people this. I actually bought gold in March of 2020 and ordered a coin, an ounce coin. It was like $1 ,700 an ounce. And the entire process took two weeks. It feels cool in your hand. But I realized I didn't want it a month later. I was like, I should have bought Bitcoin. What am I doing? I went to sell it and I got arbed on the bid. I got arbed when I paid for it, 50 bucks above the spot market. And then when I sold it, I think I sold it for like$100 below the spot price. And at the same time, gold was rising, but I lost money on the investment because of just how the dealers worked and how slow and clunky everything was.

53:34It was just a nightmare. I was like, I'm never, ever buying gold again, other than just like trinkets. This is like the worst form of liquid collateral that I can think of. It's not even liquid. It's very eliquid in that sense if you're doing it with a small amount. Dylan, thank you so much for coming onto the show. I really, really enjoyed this conversation and appreciate you coming on. Before we close out the episode, where can the audience go to connect with you? Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on. This was a fun riff. You can find me on Twitter at Dylan LeClaire underscore. That's where we connected first.

54:06It's super fun just throwing ideas out there and interacting with the community. So yeah, I appreciate you having me on. It was awesome to connect and I'm sure we'll see you around out there. Awesome. Thank you, Dylan. Bye, man. Catch you later. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically. And if you haven't already done so, be sure to check out our website, theinvestorspodcast.com. There you'll find all of our episodes, some educational resources we have, as well as some tools you can use as an investor.

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