2025: BITCOIN IN REVIEW | HODL & ODELL

29:12That's unavoidable. That's in the physical realm. But as a digital protocol, as an internet native protocol, we've never had a seizure and we've never had any transaction blocked, which is absolutely phenomenal. People do not appreciate that fact. And so to throw that out and basically preemptively try and steal Bitcoin because you're afraid someone else might steal it is insane to me. And it's a weird obsession that people have. And I think the cleanest thing to do here, narrative wise, if the concern is that large allocators are worried about potential market impacts on that hitting the market, is being very loud about the fact that that will not happen.

29:52We will not be preemptively stealing people's Bitcoin. Because I'll tell you, there's also the opposite side of the equation. Satoshi could have burned his Bitcoin if he wanted to. Large holders could have burned their Bitcoin. OG holders that are in old legacy addresses that are vulnerable to this theoretical attack could have burned their Bitcoin if they wanted to. They chose not to. Some of them might not be moving their Bitcoin because of concerns over market impact. This actual movement, this idea of spreading this narrative that we're going to preemptively seize satoshi's coins if satoshi is actually alive and out there right now i've fucking moved my bitcoin like you might actually force the market impact that you're so scared of because of of that preemptive fear yeah but when i say this is stuff we should be talking about this is exactly what i mean like this this is the important conversation to have because like i think it's also really short-sighted from another way whereas one of the key values of bitcoin is property rights and the fact that you can't do anything with anyone else's Bitcoin.

30:52And even if like, there's going to be a portion of the market that think we should seize Bitcoin because they think short term, it'll be better for the price chart, essentially. But like, what does that do to the long term value proposition of Bitcoin? If we've proven at once under these like extreme circumstances, we can steal people's Bitcoin. Like, I think people aren't thinking of the second and third order consequence of this. Yeah, there's probably a lot of people who haven't been around for some of the the messier times in Bitcoin too, you know, like where 2017 was a very messy year in Bitcoin.

31:23We had a full on block size war that was raging. There was a lot of uncertainty. There were all these airdrops, et cetera. And, you know, Bitcoin survived. And in fact, the price ripped that year. And I think people want easy answers to some of these things. And the question, you know, like the idea that we're going to put in a quantum secure encryption scheme before the threat is prevalent and we might make a mistake is in and of itself just as big a threat as if we don't get there in time. So you put in, you know, you're kind of damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So you have to be prudent and watch what's going on and then put in these, you know, schemes at the right time.

31:58And then on top of that, you also have, you know, I think it's worth double clicking on what Matt was talking about with the short range versus long range attacks. Like if you are in like a P2WSH, like multi-sig, you know, hash protected, like you're good. You know, Quantum is not going to get you. And that's long range. So that would be a long range attack if they were trying to get, you know, hodled Bitcoin secure, hash protected Bitcoin. But if you are, you know, transacting at the moment of transaction, you might be vulnerable to some sort of quantum actor if one exists. So right now it is still, you know, purely theoretical.

32:31And I think that that's really not that big of a concern, right? So you can kind of table it because it's not a big deal. Most people are just hodling their coins anyway. and it doesn't like destroy the value proposition of Bitcoin. But if people can get access to your coins, that's obviously a much bigger deal. And then again, you have to dig into quantum, how it works. And like, there's a lot of talk, you know, I'm not smart enough to understand it, to be honest, but there's a lot of talk about the error correction principles. And like, they haven't really gotten there on the technology side of like being able to error correct the quantum state of these machines.

33:03And so that means they're not really useful in production yet. Right now, there might be a breakthrough anymore. or in a couple of years or whenever, like that makes that possible. But right now it is still like, it's a theoretical conversation. We're having a theoretical conversation in public. And I think one of the things we should do, in my opinion, my estimation is to basically, we should have like sort of a state of quantum discourse, you know, every year, quarterly or whatever, where we just sort of update as we go and say, hey, if you're interested in what the Bitcoiners are thinking about quantum, they're thinking this.

33:37because one of the things that Nick Carter was saying is the devs are not paying attention, whatever. But there was a whole conference about this, talk about this at Presidio Bitcoin, where our highest level devs were going over the quantum threat, what the potentiality is, what can be done, what are the types of schemes. Hunter Beast has done an incredible, amazing amount of work on this. There's a lot going on, and people just don't know about it. And so I think it's really contingent on us to just sort of, instead of being, here's the other thing too about, I want to like put this out to Bitcoiners, like we've memed our way out of a lot of shit.

34:13So Bitcoin has no CEO. That's just something you can meme your way out of. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. What even is intrinsic value, bro? Like we can meme our way out of stuff. But if quantum is real or if it becomes real, it's more like a Bitcoin Y2K moment. And it's not something that you can meme yourself out of. And the story of Y2K, by the way, is not that Y2K was not a big deal. The story was that the people that were in charge of updating the mainframe systems took it as a responsibility and did the work ahead of time to make it so that Y2K ended up being nothing. And that is the same type of thing we will do in Bitcoin when the time comes with the quantum thing.

34:49But it's not something you can just meme your way out of. right so i think that's like the you know the message i'd like to get across to bitcoiners on twitter who are just like oh it's just fun bro like it could be a real thing in the future it's just not a real thing you know right now i was telling the real thing is going to be likely uh the first contentious fork we've had since 2017 which will be on seizing bitcoin and i just want to reiterate this one more time. If Navy SEALs or Delta Force or whatever found Satoshi and accused him of money laundering for terrorists and took his a million Bitcoin at gunpoint and added it to the strategic Bitcoin reserve, there'd be no conversations around forking out their Bitcoin.

35:32But if some math genius working in a secret lab somewhere figures out this insane crypto breaking computer to attack his Bitcoin, then we're going to do a protocol change to stop the Bitcoin. That makes no fucking sense. It just logically does not flow. So this goes back to Ethereum's DAO fork, which is like they came to this crossroads and they made the wrong decision. And this was back in 2017, I think, or no, even earlier, 2016. They made the wrong decision and somebody attacked the DAO, which had a lot of Ethereum in it, and they made the community you know, a decision to roll it back and give those coins back to the Ethereum foundation and all the other holders.

36:17But that was the wrong when that's and it created a chain split, right? And then there was Ethereum Classic and Barry Silver started buying up all the Ethereum Classic, whatever. That was the wrong decision. They took they hit that fork in the road and they made the bad path. And if Ethereum has done anything for us, it's shown us what not to do. So we can learn from their example and just not take the bad path. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well by mining bitcoin with Blockware you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful Bill allow American miners to write off 100 % of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year.

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38:47It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress. And Time named BitKey one of the best inventions of 2024. Get 20 % off at bitkey.world when you use the code WBD. That's B-I-T-K-E-Y dot world and use the code WBD. All right, Matt, just before we move on from this i want a one word answer yes or no do you agree with that analogy what that's like the doubt for it yeah i think it's it's it's close enough do you remember when we were recording at your house i used that exact same analogy you told me it was a dumb take

39:34so uh what was my what was my reasoning for saying i don't remember that was quite a while ago but i remember you telling me it was about that was when you forgot to record car you see you're always just you're slippy you're getting out of it um we should talk about trump though because this was one area where matt when i was listening back you had a really poor take you said 90 sure we would have a strategic reserve this year yeah well we didn't we did get one but it's it's a shitty one what what's your take on trump's entire first year oh my god it's been wildly disappointing. Just like the Bitcoin market, it's been disappointing.

40:20I think, you know, seems that the focus, I think the big thing that the Trump base feels is that the focus has been much more on geopolitical foreign affairs than it has been here at home. And people are not really getting what they voted for. And so there's disappointment about that. And then the Trump admin is doing sort of these performative measures like for instance the deportation numbers are not as high as they should be and so ice is doing tiktok edits to little dark age on x and it's like yo look how like fucking cool we're being while we deport this person right it's like nobody actually wants that that's uh i don't know why you're trying to be cool on x instead of governing right so or like you know we it kind of seems like we have podcasters running the government, man.

41:08Like Dan Bongino, like was on a podcast saying if he got into the FBI, he would fix it. And then he got into the FBI and he was like, this shit is tough. I'm going back to podcasting. It's like, what the fuck? I don't know, man. Or like, it's, it's weird. It's like, I'm watching, you know, Stephen Miller's wife has a podcast and Cash Patel is on there with his girlfriend. Like, why is the FBI director on a podcast with his girlfriend? This is like just weird norm breaking for me. And it's like, what is it accomplishing in the middle of a manhunt for the Brown shooting suspect? He's like doing the podcast.

41:43Like it's very odd what's going on. It's like this. I don't know. The whole Trump admin has been very performative. And obviously I voted for Trump. And, uh, you know, I think it's better than what we would have had with Harris because with Harris, we would have been completely under the gun, especially as Bitcoin people. And we probably still will be in a future Democrat administration. So keep your nose clean now. Maybe don't tweet that thing about the Democrat Senator you hate. But yeah, it's been disappointing. Yeah. I agree with that. The funny thing is though, especially as an outsider, you can't say anything negative about Trump without being told you have Trump-draignment syndrome but this year seems like a shit show like i i don't see that much positive stuff that's come out of his his campaign so far and i agree that like harris might have been worse but it doesn't mean trump's been good um and matt i'm giving you shit about the strategic reserve call like i thought the same thing obviously you were never gonna know but do you think now the like first year is nearly up that the kind of idea of good bitcoin policy is over or do you think there's still legs in it well first of all i'm still thinking about the dow fork and i just want I'm going to apologize to you.

42:54I forgive you, Matt. But clearly people's opinions change. I would tell you, when we chatted last, I wasn't thinking about quantum as much, and now I have to talk about it all the fucking time. So, look, I think on the Trump side, first of all, way better than Harris. Like, it's not even close. Absolutely not even close. Like, we were on the verge of, like, us and our friends and important businesses and Bitcoin throughout the country, having the feds raid their houses at gunpoint. It was really, really bad. And we got Ross free. Ross is free. That's a huge win. I would love to see the samurai developers get pardoned.

43:31I think that's another easy, tangible win for the administration on the Bitcoin side. I think the Trump administration himself and a lot of the people around him are very, very transactional. and it seems like they've been filling up their own coffers rather than filling up the US government's coffers on Bitcoin. I mean, his son literally has his own American Bitcoin company. Trump has Trump Media. You mentioned the Brown guy, by the way. Trump Media is not only stacking Bitcoin, but they're also doing a 50-50 merger with their fusion company right after our top fusion researcher gets fucking murdered in his house.

44:14so you know maybe it's code maybe it's not but I think there is a play where you see the strategic Bitcoin reserve stuff happen after he has like him and his cronies have their bags fully packed but as Haddle said we do technically have a strategic Bitcoin reserve it's mostly just not selling Bitcoin that we've already stolen I do not like that the precedent is being set that stolen Bitcoin is ceding the reserve and will be used to I would much rather see a law in the books that says stolen Bitcoin has to get burned. I would not advocate for a protocol change to force that, though. And that's where we all come back together.

44:56But I will say that, look, no matter how you cut it, you know, the last year of Biden versus this year, it's just been way better for Bitcoin. It's been so much better for Bitcoin. I'll say on the policy side, I think, you know, the guys at BPI are doing an incredible job. they only seem to be getting better and better as time goes on. And it's been nice to have our own think tank of really intelligent, smart, young, ambitious guys who are doing a lot of that leg work in Washington. And I'm very bullish on their team. And I think there are more policy wins ahead. I know they're working on a lot of stuff.

45:34Obviously, it's not so easy to get things accomplished in Washington and it's a big effort and it's a fucking daily grind. You got to show up and really pound the pavement, talk to people and shake hands and kiss babies. So yeah, I think that we are going to see more wins. It's just, you know, we're going to have to be patient. I will say on the SBR side, not only did we have technically the SBR get created, but we also had a sovereign wealth fund get created. and the big one was I think we bought like 10 % of Intel the US government did now this is a non-zero call but not I'm definitely not confident in this call at all but I'm just going to point and try and hit the home run next year to stop the bleeding of the Bitcoin market what if the US government goes out and buys 10-20 % of microstrategy at a discount and turns the whole fucking thing around.

46:41That would be, I don't think that's the most far-fetched scenario to play out. And actually would probably be way more positive. It would definitely be way more positive than going and stealing people's Bitcoin and putting it in the SBR. If they went and bought 10 % of strategy, would that basically just lay the groundwork for them going in and stealing strategy in the future? And basically like bail out the entire industry by buying microstrategy at a discount. Yeah. I don't think there's any way for them to steal coins when they can print currency, you know? Like, the reason that the Strategic Reserve is being seeded with, you know, stolen Bitcoin or, you know, the investigation, sorry, the proceeds, criminal proceeds from law enforcement investigations is because they thought that that was an easy, clean way that they could win on this and give the Bitcoiners what they promised us while also not stepping on toes in Washington.

47:40And to us, we see the negative, you know, long term downstream consequences of that action. But to them, it was just like, hey, here's an easy win. Give the Bitcoiners this. You know, we already have it. We already took it from the criminals. Just give it to them and put it in the reserve or whatever. I think that I have said this as a MicroStrategy shareholder, and I still own MicroStrategy. I've owned it for a while now, like five years now. That I kind of think sometimes to myself when I'm alone that we're just engaged in this project of stacking America's Bitcoin. That's kind of what we're doing as MSDR shareholders.

48:15And I do think Matt's call is probably going to age well that there will be some type of relationship between MicroStrategy and the US government, similar to the Intel relationship. But like my question on that though, is like, do you have a, like, realistically, be very honest, do you have a fear that the US government steps in and tries to take strategies coins at some point? I don't think they're going to do it outright like that because it gives up the game of American capitalism. So that would be, they're in truly dire straits and it's a Hail Mary effort, you know, at the very end of the game.

48:51I think much more likely it's going to be this slow and sippid thing, kind of like Matt pointed out where it's like you take a stake and then you take a slightly larger stake and take a slightly larger again all with printed money and then you know it's that's like getting something for nothing so why do you need to come in as as like jackboot thugs and steal it all in one go when you could just like sort of transgress slowly over time and end up with the entire horde anyway yeah it's an american technology company that's holding their bitcoin with multiple american financial companies. That's also, I don't know what the exact MNAVA is right now, but it's pretty close to trading at a discount if it's not already trading at a discount.

49:34So you can come in. The shareholders would actually be very, I think would be positive after this year for MicroStrategy. I think shareholders would be ecstatic if Trump came out and announced that he bought 20 % of MicroStrategy at a slight discount to market price. and I think most people would be happy as opposed to as Hodel said which is like pretty obvious authoritarianism move of just stealing all the Bitcoin now I just want to put this out there once again that you know the US government could also see the SBR by having a secret quantum computer that attacks Satoshi's Bitcoin. And it's interesting, I wonder if, and I haven't had these conversations yet and I plan to have it because I think this is going to be a very long conversation that happens for a while.

50:31But with the proponents of the freezing stuff, if it changes depending on who seizes it, who steals the Bitcoin. If it's the US government and it gets seeded into an SBR, are they cool with it? If it's the Chinese government, are they not cool with it? If it's a startup, are startups not allowed to stake it? It's interesting because it kind of changed. I think it changes people's framing on how they think about it. But yeah, I mean, for all intents and purposes, regardless if they buy a stake in MSTR, MSTR Bitcoin is American domiciled Bitcoin that can be taxed and harvested and taken advantage of.

51:15You don't have to actually seize it. Right. Exactly. I want to talk a little bit about the samurai devs, Odell. This one's right up your alley. So this obviously didn't start under the Trump regime. This was under Biden. But when it went to court, I did expect them to get a more lenient sentence than they got. It was the absolute maximum I think they were up for. Do you think there's any realistic chance of a pardon for them? Well, they were being charged with conspiracy for money laundering conspiracy, which had up to 25 years. And they were being charged for unlicensed money transmitter business, which is basically like not running KYC on like a financial institution, which had a charge of five years.

51:58And they pled guilty in a plea deal for the unlicensed money transmitter business to drop the money laundering charge and then got hit with the max sentencing for that. So they got five years. So they didn't, you know, technically they didn't get the max sentencing. Now, it's a self-custody wallet. Like FinCEN themselves said they are not a money transmitter business. So it's a ridiculous fucking charge to be found guilty of. Now the counter argument is that they pled to it. Now, Keon and Bill, Keon has publicly said that it was basically a coerced plea. Like He was like looking there, they have families.

52:39They didn't want to, they were afraid they were going to get thrown in jail for 25 years. And they took the deal. I would like to see them pardoned. I think it's a travesty. I think it's really bad for America. I think it's worse for America than it is for Bitcoin. But as an American, as someone who builds businesses here, as someone who's building a family here, like I would like to see that wrong righted. But, yeah, I think it's important to realize, once again, I'm not a lawyer, but this is a federal court, but it's the New York federal court. This is the same court that went after Trump. This is, you know, in a lot of ways, I think leftovers of the Biden administration.

53:24And Trump has got a bunch of things on his plate. For him to, like, preemptively get involved there is, like, was never really going to happen. We also didn't have that much money behind them. You know, like I was involved in raising their fundraising. I think we ended up getting like in legal defense ones, like a little over a million dollars. If you're someone like CZ or Justin Sun or whatever, you can pay Trump like tens of millions of dollars to guarantee a pardon. We just didn't have that kind of capital behind us. So it needs to be more of a narrative story, I think, to reach him because I think that does work with him.

54:01And he has commented on it recently. So hopefully we do see a part in here. I think they deserve one, and I think it's good for the country. Wait, I missed that. Did Trump comment on the Samurai case? Yeah, there was a decrypt reporter specifically in the White House that asked him about it, and he didn't seem aware of it, but he said he was going to look into it. I watched the videos that Keon's wife had posted of him going into prison and of them having early Christmas dinner, obviously, because he was going to be in federal prison, and those were very difficult to watch. And, you know, I think there's a like Matt said, like the plea thing, by the way, is the norm.

54:38It is coerced, but that's why the feds have such a high win rate is because they coerce everybody. So the feds really don't bring a case against you unless they know they can win it. And the way they win it is by being like, you're going away forever, or you can go away for this five year stretch and get back to your life after five years. And like, again, if you have a family and you're looking at 30 years versus five, the smart play is to take five every time. and like it doesn't, you know, make you cool on Twitter, but who gives a shit about being cool on Twitter when you're talking about missing 25 more birthdays of your children, right?

55:09And so that's a really rough reality that they're going through. And I think the thing that Matt was talking about, the reason why it's bad for America is because, you know, I'm not a lawyer either, but in America, the law of the land is essentially that if something is not explicitly illegal, that it is legal to do. And in the case of, you know, coin joint implementations, In my opinion, those were in a legal gray area. They had not been explicitly defined. And so I think it is a disaster that we're throwing startup investors in jail for doing things in the fintech space that were not strictly illegal.

55:45you know i mean the government's claim is that they were strictly illegal based on intent essentially but that's not my view at all and i think like if you look at the cases of you know ross albert versus kion rodriguez um you know ross is doing something that's much more explicitly illegal totally than kion was and not that i think it was wrong what he did or morally wrong you know i think ross deserves to be free but like i to me the samurai case is even cleaner and i do think that you know we these are our guys right so like yeah yeah i mean there was flame wars on twitter and you know were you wasabi or were you sam or whatever who gives a fuck we're all bitcoiners these are our guys we don't leave anybody behind let's go get them out of jail you know period we got ross out let's go get them out yeah i think the narrative is going to be really important because like the reason ross is free is like obviously down to a ton of amazing work from like his mom and the libertarian group and then bitcoiners but it was also a really strong narrative that resonated with trump voters like i think we need to make a lot of noise and try and make him care about this topic but odell was it frustrating that this only raised like just over a million dollars when i think the tornado cash guy raised was it 10 times that amount yeah i mean look it was it was super frustrating trying to build support for this stuff behind the scenes and in public um while all the all the limelight was on name and influencer joining a treasury company board.

57:10That's literally just to get their piece, right? They weren't doing it for the good of Bitcoin. Let's be honest here. That's fine. They were doing it to get their bread and to reward their family for years of Twitter posting. That's what they were doing. And that was highlighted as being heroic. And people were like, Bitcoin Twitter became like LinkedIn. It was like, I'm joining the board of bullshit treasury company. And then all the posts underneath was like, congrats, congrats, congrats, congrats, congrats, congrats. And then meanwhile, like fundraising or getting any kind of real tangible support for Samurai was really floundering.

57:45Now I will say that was very disappointing this year, but the last month or so, it's been really cool to see people coming around to, there's been a lot more support than I've expected. So I think on the positive side, it's been good to see in the last month. I will also say it's been broader than Bitcoin. Like we're seeing it in libertarian circles. We're seeing it just in freedom-minded circles. I mean, Keon got on a television show in the UK. Like they hate freedom over there. But for some reason, they wanted to support Samurai. And like that was really cool to see. I want to be clear here on the American side.

58:27None of us are lawyers, and there's a lot of misunderstanding. This doesn't set a legal precedent in America because they pled. If they tried to fight it and lost, then it would have set a legal precedent. So there's not a legal precedent we have to be worried here. CoinJoin, self-custody wallets, privacy-focused self-custody wallets remain in a legal gray area. That's where we are right now. But what has happened, and I see this all the time, particularly on the OpenSat side, where we're supporting 350-plus developers in 40-plus countries, is there has been a tangible chilling effect on people working on self-custody and privacy-focused software, period.

59:11and that makes sense because no one wants to be thrown in jail and it's worse than just being thrown in jail they had like 40 plus federal agents with guns raid his fucking house like he did just a non-violent if he was a criminal it's a non-violent crime and they they did like a tactical raid on his house to or to arrest him which is insane is that chilling effect still there because i know after they got arrested like wallace toshi pulled out of the u.s phoenix pulled out of the US, but they're, I think, both now back now. And obviously, like, Trump gave people some degree of confidence that they could build this stuff without going to prison.

59:46But do you think that's not enough? Is there still that sort of chilling effect happening? Yeah, man. I mean, I was an investor in Mutiny. I think Matt was as well. And, like, Mutiny, you know, the day this happened, like, came down, they were like, you know, we're going to be a privacy-focused AI company now. So, like, they just completely shut down the business and went a different direction because they were planning to make money on CoinJoin implementations. So, yeah. I will just say, I don't know if that pivot was only because of legal concerns, because if I'm going to make another call, I think privacy-focused AI might become even more of a hot-button issue than privacy-focused financial transactions.

1:00:26At the time, I'm not sure that was for, you know. Yeah, I think there was a lot of disillusionment, and I'm not going to put words in their mouth, but I think there was just a feeling that it wasn't, you know, trying to build a business that is focused on freedom usage of Bitcoin is a very hard business to run, period. There's not a huge market for it. Right. Most of the successes we've seen in the industry is financial services, is buy, sell Bitcoin, is loans. that that's where you see the real business opportunities right like strike is absolutely crushing um companies that are trying to focus on freedom focused bitcoin are having a much harder time and then with the samurai stuff it's like if and then so you you either completely fail as a business or if you somehow find success samurai found a lot of success they were very profitable then you get thrown in jail it's like you lose you lose in either situation and on the phoenix on the wallet of Satoshi side, was I think that was a bit of an overreaction by non-American-based companies that thought a very easy risk management solution was to just remove themselves from the US market, which I think it could even be argued that that doesn't really help you anyway, because, I mean, they're not doing KYC on users, so Americans could get around it regardless.

1:01:45But those aren't privacy-focused wallets. Like, you don't really get, you're getting no privacy benefits, really, from using wallet of Satoshi. It's relatively easy to track, particularly in their new configuration. And with Phoenix, Phoenix sees all your transactions. So if they are hit with a subpoena or something, we don't know if they're complying with them or not to track transactions. So it's a little bit different. If you're looking at people working on join market, which is like a direct one-to-one comparison, it's a CoinJoin implementation that doesn't rely on a centralized server, but it's completely open source.

1:02:18There has been a massive chilling effect on that side. and I think there was a bunch of there remains a bunch of developers that were more experienced on privacy focused Bitcoin that have just stepped away I'm just going to focus on my family and I'm not going to deal with that yeah that's not good to see if you're looking forward this can be a prediction we'll see if it was right or wrong do you think this gets better or worse? worse you think we're going to see more devs thrown in jail? I think that the two things that, okay, listen, like the days of us saying, you know, hey, they're going to ban Bitcoin, that's over.

1:02:58It's completely over. They're not going to ban something Larry Fink is all on board with. So what's the reality of the situation? The reality is they want to dox you and they want to tax you. Okay. So if you're doing things that prevent the government from doxing and taxing, the doxing is for the taxing, by the way, the taxing is the big thing because they want to take your money from you. If you're doing things that prevent the government from being able to, you know, levy their tax against you, you're going to come under the eye of Sauron, is my opinion. And I don't think that that's going to get any better anytime soon.

1:03:32And I think, in fact, like Matt was alluding to this, the AI world that we're heading into makes privacy a whole shitload worse. So it's only going to get worse from here. And I think there's going to be a lot of controversy about anyone who's offering any kind of private AI stuff and quote unquote what are they doing with it and we can't track them and we can't control them I think on the social media side we've also seen a push towards more KYC and less privacy I mean the UK particularly has kind of been leading the way for that in the western world it's absolutely insane that people are being thrown in jail for tweets so I think it probably gets worse before it gets better I do think the cat's out of the bag though I think it's going to I think freedom Freedom technology will be there For people who want to use it And it's going to be It's basically impossible to stop Now the one thing on the Bitcoin side That could throw a wrench in all of this Which is Non-zero but not likely Is some kind of near term Cap gains policies shift if if if bitcoin is not subject to cap gains and i'm not talking about like i and this is so unlikely because of the bullshit even though even the most likely outcome of this is like a 600 de minimis or something which is insane it's like you can't even buy groceries with$600, is if they remove that aspect, then all of a sudden that incentive, right, that incentive to go after people that want financial privacy gets removed.

1:05:13And I think this is bigger than Bitcoin. Like, I think, I mean, I think we should remove cap gains across all asset classes, period. Right? There shouldn't be cap gains on gold either. But the reason this is unlikely is because in a hyperinflationary environment, cap gains is quite lucrative for the government, right? They print money and then you have fake gains that aren't real gains, but they're denominated in their bullshit currency. And then they take fucking 20 to 50 % of it. And it's across the whole, in America, it's across the whole stack, right? Like the local governments take some too.

1:05:46See, the thing that I can, like I've been asking this question for the entire time I've been doing the podcast, but like is this future scenario that you're both kind of outlying, is that Bitcoin winning? I don't know if it is. it's, it's a nest. I've been saying this for years and I think I'm right on it. You know, I don't think I'm right about the price, but I think I'm right about the, which is, um, that we are going to have to go through this period of sort of co-option or shadow prohibition or, you know, ghettoization, like whatever you want to call it, where Bitcoin enters the traditional system.

1:06:24And it kind of appears like we're losing freedoms, but we're still maintaining number go up. But those freedoms don't go away. So like, they're intrinsic to Bitcoin. And really, it's just laws on paper that, you know, it's the problem here, again, is that there's this global cabal that sets the rules. Like, whenever you have a revolution of elites, it's about rulemaking, Who's allowed to set rules for whom? Who's allowed to change rules? Who sits at the table of power, right? And there's a small club that has all of the money. They have all of the guns and they make all of the laws and none of us are in that club.

1:07:01So it's going to take some time as we march forward, change, you know, progress happens one funeral at a time. It's going to take some time for us basically to get a seat at the table of power and be able to rewrite the rules to enable more freedom. And I think that if you're in Bitcoin, it's a long journey. It's a long bet. And if you think that you're, you know, yeah, like we had a shit year this year. Okay, who gives a fuck? I'm not buying gold. I'm not going into tech stocks. I'm still here. I'm going to be here for the foreseeable future. And I will be here during the shadow co-option period.

1:07:34And, you know, there will be an old version of American HODL gray hair who will tell you, like, I'm glad I went through it, son. And now we're sitting here, you know, with more freedom and, you know, whatever. I think that it's a necessary part of this whole thing because Bitcoin has to enter into the traditional system in order to continue to succeed. If Bitcoin remains as outside capital forever, it never fulfills its mandate. it. Yeah, I mean, this is just Bitcoin growing up. I think, look, the success of any freedom technology, whether that's Bitcoin or something like Tor or message encryption or private AI, the success is always a small subset of users.

1:08:15It's just the ability for anyone to decide to take that path if they're ready to take that path. But the problem is, the core problem is that it requires more personal responsibility. And people don't want to take personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is more difficult. If you can live your life without taking personal responsibility, then other people deal with your shit for you. And then if it's not that bad, then people are just going to take that path. I think it's important for us to give people the tools and the education available to them so that they can choose that path. But like I said, I think success is like, I've said this in the past on your show, I think success is like zero to 5 % of people using this stuff.

1:08:55And I just want to reiterate on the financial privacy aspects specifically and where it relates to Bitcoin is, I think people don't realize this is, it is all downstream of tax policy because tax policy is why the US government wants to track every financial transaction, whether that's income tax, pretty much everything except property taxes and tariffs is why they want to track every transaction. Sales tax, sales taxes, Is the government sitting in between you and the person you're buying something from? And if they can't track every transaction there, then they'd be worried that they're not collecting all of their taxes.

1:09:32So one of the most optimistic things on the financial privacy side that Trump has said was early on, he said he was going to slash taxes across the board. We just haven't seen that. And that was one of the reasons I was cautiously optimistic about tariff policy is because tariffs are actually a tax policy that does not require financial surveillance on citizens. It just requires financial surveillance at the borders when stuff enters. But we haven't seen that. and and until we unless we see that which is still i think very unlikely like there's it's gonna there's gonna be a war on financial privacy period even though most people need financial privacy not to avoid it's not to it's not to cheat on taxes like that's not the reason one thing i've been thinking especially after i had marks on from um open secret and i do think that private ai might open people's eyes to privacy um before anything about financial privacy even enters their equation like i think when people see how much data is being stolen from ai and how that can potentially be used against them i think that's going to be like a sliding doors moment you'd think that with a lot of other things um but i the yeah the main the main use case of ai regardless of the chat stuff right like chat gpt is tracking everything you do and they're going to harvest that data.

1:10:54But the main use case of AI at scale right now is surveilling people, right? You take all the data that the governments and companies already have and you run it through an LLM and it's great at parsing through that data and giving you actionable insights on that data. I think it's kind of questionable if that's going to be what shows people the light. I think maybe, yeah, I think what we see is we see data leaks happen, compromises happen, people realize the need for privacy, but it's a smaller subset that do, right? The overwhelming majority do not actually, they're the proverbial frog boiling in the pot slowly.

1:11:41Then they don't actually get shocked into moving away from it. Yeah. Matt, I know you've got a hard stop coming up soon-ish. um can we do something i got 40 minutes oh i thought you had 10 minutes okay cool um should we do some predictions for next year like the one i really want from you matt is uh what year will we hit 250k by conference day i said 200k by conference and that was in 2021 yeah okay so when will we get that it was mostly originally it was mostly to troll the engagement accounts we were just made fun of tom late they all do this right samson and is Omega Candle. They do it every fucking cycle.

1:12:23It works. Yeah, I had enough of it that cycle. So in all caps, I was saying 200k by conference day. Now where I will put my hand up is I thought we were going to at least hit 100k. I think it was like$35 ,000 during the conference. So I was way the fuck off, like hand up, that's on me. But who knows? Maybe we never hit 200k. Maybe gold becomes the reserve currency of the world. Gold is always the play. I just, I really, look, hodl hodl nailed this earlier which is like our freedoms seem to be constantly eroding particularly in the digital world but at least we were soothed by number go up i do not like the scenario where our freedoms are getting constantly eroded and we don't have number go up as well so i'm hoping i'm optimistic and hoping that we see 200k next year.

1:13:18That would be nice. I'd be down for that. I'm all in on Bitcoin and then some. So that would be ideal. But I don't pretend to have any fucking idea. It doesn't have to be price predictions, but anything you want to put your neck on the line and claim for 2026. HODL? Yeah, a million a coin, of course. No. uh so i you know sentiment is shit sentiment is something worst i've ever seen it honestly and you know i i don't think sentiment was this bad during ftx at least not amongst the bitcoin faithful i was at a uh i was at a bitcoin beefsteak um you know at 15k bitcoin right like 16k bitcoin and this was after the ftx implosion and vibes were high actually there was you know like people were playing guitar and like it was like a you know we were having drinks everybody was like there was like a calm energy of we were we're gonna win and now there's this uh energy even amongst like ogs i know that's like this is fucked we should just sell all our shit and just be rich.

1:14:31Fuck all this. You know, I mean, that's like the I'm just being honest. And some of the more hardcore guys I know are not thinking, you know, like so like, you know, I know some people who are really, you know, up there. Oh, geez, big whales. And they're not thinking that. But it's the guys in the middle range who are thinking that it's like the eight figure guys, not the nine or 10 figure guys. And I've never seen that before. And I think there's just a lot of like fatigue, like hodler fatigue. And, um, I get it because this year has been just a slog. It's just been really shitty. But again, like F like with FTX, like every it's there's magic, there's this magical thing that happens when the, you know, the ball drops in New York and there's a new year and it sort of etch a sketches the previous year from your memory.

1:15:20And it's like, boom, we're onto 26. And so with that in mind, I don't know, man, I just have this instinct where I kind of want to fade everybody and just say that 26 is going to be bullish as fuck. But I said that last year and the year before. So I might as well just stay consistent and be like, I'm bullish. I'm always bullish. I'm a permable. If you ask me what's going on, that's what you're going to get from me. So, you know, I think the sentiments make sense to me. Like when FTX collapsed, like I think there's two things that play into that. It's one that you're thinking, well, thank fuck I wasn't on FTX.

1:15:55I didn't have any of these shit coins. but then also i do think you have that sense of everyone's wrong and we're right and we're going to be proven right and like you kind of just dig in at that point whereas this year it's just been boring nothing's really happened with the price like it's gone up from the start of last year sorry the start of this year to the absolute peak is like 25 grand it's like that's not a very exciting year in bitcoin considering the starting point look i would say gun to my head i agree with hodl right like i my family's all in bitcoin like if i didn't think if i wasn't bullish for next year if i thought we were entering you know a two-year bear market or whatever like i would downsize significantly i will also say though i've never successfully done that ever so uh i'm right there with hodl that i'm just like always bullish i think this this year with sentiment right it's really interesting right so i've been i've been thinking about this too because it does feel that way, which is crazy, by the way, because we are fucking right.

1:16:54Bitcoin's$88 ,000. Let's be clear here. And we've been very loud about it for a long fucking time. I've been loud about Bitcoin since$1 ,000 or something, like$900. It's a fucking insane run that we're on. Is one, gold. like gold ripping really kicks a lot of us in the nuts and it kicks me in the fucking nuts i mean what huddle is saying is like oh like shift being happy on on twitter and stuff while we're in this doldrum it really sucks and silver right like is bitcoin silver to silver silver like that sucks like what the fuck is that um so i think that hurts i think the second piece is you know after After 2017, so Ethereum was born in, I think, like 2014, 2015.

1:17:472017 was the big Ethereum run. And there was all the ICOs, and a lot of us thought we were crazy. We were sidelined, and people were buying$100 million penthouses in Toronto and shit with their Ethereum gains. And then we were right. Everyone got wrecked, and we were right about that. And a beautiful Bitcoin-only, Bitcoin maximalist culture got born in 2017-ish, after 2017, after Bcash, after Ethereum ICOs. And we had a good run. There was like a very strong community there. It was global. We got rich together and we got poor together. Treasury companies changed that whole ballgame. Different people are getting rich and different people are getting poor at different times with different bags.

1:18:31and you just don't have the camaraderie of getting rich and poor together. To me, that was the final nail in the coffin of the good times of the Bitcoin-only culture. It's just over. We don't have that anymore. It was going to end anyway, I think. Everyone says you don't know the good old days until it's behind you. But that was the nail in the coffin. The nail in the coffin was people going leverage long on a stock that was already leverage long on Bitcoin and everyone doing it to different stocks. And this is not something that was only retail. Like people did it in size. Like we saw OGs come in in size and seed a lot of these treasury companies.

1:19:14They got wrecked. And they're all in different bags, right? Everyone's got different bags. And that's, I think, what we're feeling right now. I think that's 100 % right. I've not really heard it summed up like that, but I totally agree with that. I'll put my neck on the line. And I think 2026 is going to be like turbo bullish. I think sentiment being shot right now is like a good sign. I think Trump's going to juice the fuck out of markets going into midterms. I think like government picking winners, like it's picked AI and data centers. I think Bitcoin could potentially be one of those winners that the government picks.

1:19:45Do you think we're going to hit an all time high in gold terms? I don't know what that is. I don't know what that would pause at. That's all that matters. Do you know what that would be? It's much higher than we're at right now. Yeah, it's a lot higher. I don't know but I think we'll get significant all time highs next year I saw someone posted and I did not verify it but it sounds right and it kicked me in the nuts that gold added 21 million bitcoin in market cap in the last 5 days in 5 days that's a big gold added a full bitcoin market cap I don't know if we'll get to new all time highs versus gold but I think it's going to be a good year but you're going to have to come up with a new meme huddle it's kind of bad that we're all bullish should I go the opposite direction I'm bearish as fuck I shot treasury codes and now I'm eating ramen I'm dying over here you need this year to be bullish what Bitcoin did in like 6 years it felt like a bit of a therapy session

1:20:47alright guys anything else you want to talk on before we wrap up let me think oh yeah okay hodling gets harder as you go there's a false perception that hodling gets easier as you go bullshit it gets harder it gets harder every time and the reason why is because you know i've said this the the most important meme in bitcoin is the guy the one with the guy with the shotgun in his mouth and it's like bitcoin hits a thousand and he's like yes and then it's like bitcoin drops to ten thousand it's like he's worried and then it's like bitcoin plummets to just a hundred thousand has a shotgun in his mouth ready to blow his brains out that is the experience of hodling and the reason why it gets harder as you go is because in the beginning, you're actually not losing that much money, you know, in nominal terms.

1:21:34But later on, you're losing a lot because like if you bought Bitcoin at$200, well, nowadays, the Bitcoin price fluctuates$200 like fuck every second, right? So like you're losing your entire initial investment or gaining your entire initial investment every second. And that will happen for people at$88 ,000. It doesn't sound like it will, but it will because when Bitcoin's at, you know, whatever, 2.6 million versus 2.7 million, are you going to notice? Like, not really. And it's going to do that all day intraday. And so the thing is, you're going to quit your job. You're going to, you know, become a Bitcoin rich person.

1:22:07You're going to retire and then you're going to lose, you know, these large sums of money every day. And what you're actually losing is like peace of mind, time with your family, you know, experiences that you could have, things you could do. And so that's the reason why it feels bad emotionally, because you're giving up pieces of your life for what? At some point, you actually have enough money to live a good life, the kind of life that other people envy in perpetuity forever. You have what they call generational wealth, right? But there are people in Bitcoin who have generational wealth who stick through for longer.

1:22:43And you have to have a bigger why as to what are you sticking around here for. And to me, my why is so that we can attempt, I don't know if we're going to be able to do it, but attempt to create a better world when all is said and done, a world with more freedom. And that only happens once the number's gone up a lot, we get a seat at the table and we allow Bitcoin to sort of do its thing from a legal perspective. And that bet will take my entire life. And so I'm here for that bet. And in the meantime, I have to kind of live a little more, you know, monk-like from time to time and be like, have less attachment to what comes and goes.

1:23:24Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, have less attachment to things and experiences and whatever, and just focus on the small things and be grateful. Like, I think the times like this in Bitcoin, again, this sounds like we're at the bottom of a bear market way I'm speaking, but like - $88 ,000. Yeah, I know. Times like this in Bitcoin are time, or it's time for gratitude and like, sort of look around and take stock of what you have and the relationships you have and what's important to you and spend time with people you love, et cetera. Again, it really sounds like we're at the bottom of a bear market when I'm speaking this way, but that's how it emotionally feels.

1:23:56So I'm just going to say it like it is. Do you think that's why we saw this like 80k Bitcoin sell from that OG because hodling got too hard for him? Did you think he lost his why? Oh, oh, this is another thing. I don't think people know about this, but But a lot of OGs moved to Puerto Rico in 2015, and then those coins got seasoned this year and they didn't have to pay any cap gains on it. So they fucking divested. Like that's part of what happened. Interesting. Yeah. If you lived in Puerto Rico for 10 years, your cost basis effectively went down to zero and you didn't have to pay cap gains on it.

1:24:28Or you got to reset your cost basis at the market buy or the market sell. So I think some of that was these OGs. And I don't want to dox anybody or anything, but like I've heard some of these large sales were boating accidents and that the OGs still have a shitload of coins, but they wanted a way to like be defensible and say like, no, this is the reason I'm rich or I'm a billionaire is because I sold all my Bitcoin, but they still have Bitcoin because how could they not if they believed in it for this long? So it's crazy to think about, but like the people with 80 ,000 coins might have 200 ,000 coins.

1:25:00I'd never heard that Puerto Rico take. There you go. Some alphas close out the show. Odell, anything before we close out? I mean, I will say those whales that sold above 100 K was a pretty good trade. Even if they paid cap gains, they're in the black right now.

1:25:20And the other piece here, by the way, first of all, we have that every cycle. Just the numbers are bigger this year. Because everything gets bigger as time goes on. And it's been a narrative forever. Like, oh, the original people are selling out. And that's why it's always so hilarious when And people say you got lucky holding long term because most people don't. It's the hardest path. It's always the hardest path. But I think another piece here is like, look, like no matter how you cut it, the Trump and his family and his friends and whatnot grifted like crazy on top of Bitcoin and crypto. I mean, Trump coin, that was earlier.

1:26:02If we're going to do a year in review, like this all started with Trump coin. And they had Melania coin. and I think it left a really sour taste in people's mouth. And so if Vance doesn't win the next election, there could be a reckoning. And I could see why large holders would want to be, as Hodel said, in a defensible position going into that potential outcome. There could be a whipsaw reaction. That's what we see happen all the time in politics, but particularly in modern politics. just feels like we're whipsawing back and forth over and over again. But look, my analysis has always been very consistent.

1:26:44I think this is a long-term game. This is a grind. I think the best path and the hardest path is to stay humble and stack stats and not chase easy wins that you think are easy that you're just going to lose all your money on, which is usually some kind of leverage wrapped up in something else that you don't think is leverage. You think it's just smart financial planning or something like that. But on the positive side, I think this has been a very good year in terms of fundamental Bitcoin value. It's easier than ever to use Bitcoin in a freedom-oriented way. It's easier. You have way more tools available to you.

1:27:16The businesses in the space are starting to really become real businesses. We're seeing some juggernauts being born, basically. um uh the the one that you know that that i'm constantly in the trenches with is strike and it's just been insane watching that company become go from like a regular like a small startup to what i expect to be like a fintech juggernaut um you know mentioned in the same circles as robin hood and the big banks and whatnot um but i i look i i and the development side i think development side strong. We're getting more Bitcoin developers on the open source side. I think BPI has been very strong.

1:28:01Best policy we've had in America on Bitcoin since we started. So there's a lot of reasons to be positive. Basically everything except the price. Which is good. I think it's good even though the price is the most important metric. So I'm optimistic. I'm cautiously optimistic. People should stay on the stack stats and don't take your foot off the ghost. Let's go. our year in the view wrapped we'll definitely do this I mean I'll speak to you both before then but we'll definitely do this next year and I would take a sizable bet that will be higher than 88k it's bad that we're all I would probably I wouldn't take the other side of that bet someone's gotta fade it let's fucking go go on you've gotta fade it I can't I'm the most bullish person here man alright well we're all fucking bullish then let's go thank you guys I'll speak to you both soon cheers gentlemen Thank you.