The Bull Market, Institutional Adoption & 2026 Recession? | Willy Woo

29:18Whenever the capital comes, they buy in a staged and it produces a very smooth inflow. Whereas in the past, you'd get a little bit choppiness and then like a real run up as the FOMO comes in, everyone's chasing price and so forth. So, I mean, you still get those oscillations, but even as it's coming in, it's very smooth. It's like someone's got sandpaper and rounded out the chart. So I haven't seen that before. So that's dampening volatility, both on the upside and the downside. Yeah, you could say that. I mean, it should do. There's a lot of impacts on price. This is what I call, liquidity flows is really the tailwinds that are either supportive or bearish on price.

30:11But how price moves relative to each hour, each day is much more tactical. And that's a different overlay. when you're looking at liquidity flows, these are the fundamentals. So it's very hard for the price to go against increasing flows coming in. But it can happen because you might want to, like you, I say, say you're a very high net worth trading whale, you could bring the price down by selling and then liquidating a whole bunch of people and it will work down. So there's this sort of tactical game and there's, you know, like I get a whole heads up display, right? Of like, what's the profit situation here?

30:56What's the liquidation situation here? Are we overheated anyway through normal mean revert of? Well, you know, it's over, price is overextended in one way. Yeah, the meaning I can't push it this way any further and it's got a rubber band back down. And so there's all this sort of tactical positioning between all the participants. and then you can get a probabilistic answer of where the price might go in the next, say, three or four days. But then you've got the fundamental money coming in by the buyers and that gives you the long-term, it gives you a read over the next one, two, four, even six weeks out.

31:38And then there's this random walk game that's happening. So it's a bit complex, But it's a proper full picture of what's going on. And so in terms of them being just dollar cost averaging every week or whenever Sailor's buying, which seems to be every week, what is that doing in terms of the amount of leverage in the market? Because Sailor's taking a little bit of leverage, but he's very low. And without things like FTX, is the market in a way a healthier spot for that?

32:10It's a different type of leverage, right? In these treasury companies, you have multipliers on your actual Bitcoin. So it's MNAV and it's traded around that. So if you're holding the equity, it looks like deleveraging when it goes against you, but you're not being liquidated. But then the question is, will these treasury companies be actually liquidated? If they're being if they it can be liquidated then it's leverage um and if you look at the debt structuring and the microstrategy is very robust yeah um their debt is eight to 12 years out meaning if they're in a exchange they would be liquidated but they can't they can't be liquidated to eight to 12 years out as long as they're paying their um interest bills i think that they're zero anyway So that's quite robust, very little kind of standard debt in there.

33:10And then you have things like MetaPlanet and MetaPlanet do this kind of synthetic ATM where there's one party here and there's MetaPlanet here that's stacking Bitcoins. and this party here is doing market operations and they're taking a big tranche alone out and then they sell out of this position using their warrants and they re-send money into MetaPlan to buy Bitcoin. So what you actually have is this big debt load inside MetaPlanet and then it gets paid back as the money comes back in. and in my opinion that's in danger of being liquidated because if they get caught off guard at the very top of the market the ATM system stops working they can't sell it into the market because it relies on the price going up a little bit and they can sell and then send money in so if you get that wrong footed and you've taken another like 300 million it's getting bigger each tranche and you can't sell it through, then you've got to pay that back by selling your Bitcoin and there would be a partial liquidation of MetaPlanet if they don't time the market right.

34:31So with MetaPlanet, you're really banking on them timing the market and they're very sophisticated. I noticed that their last significant buy, they unloaded almost 300 million at the very bottom wick of Bitcoin when it dipped in the last consolidation. And it was actually at a price lower than what was printed on the exchanges. Is that them putting in that bottom though, because they're buying and supporting the market? Yeah, they absolutely put in that bottom. And so obviously, Saylor's out on his own. He's gotten 600 ,000-whatever Bitcoin, maybe more, I don't know. The rest of these, there's a very long tail of treasury companies after that.

35:11I don't assume after you get to below the top 10 treasury companies, they really have huge impact on the market because cumulatively the coins are like, I don't know, 100 ,000 coins or something. Yeah. I mean, 100 ,000 coins, significant amount of coins in a soft market. We just saw 80 ,000 get dumped though. Yeah, we did. And it was in an upward part of the bull market with flows coming in and the liquidity was there to hold it up. the question is if the stuff starts liquidating it's usually in the middle of the bear market when the market's really soft and so that's going to have massive impact that's why it's really important to measure liquidity like in the bull market you're sort of weak you're great, it's all coming in bear market's actually leaving and then you're dumping like 100 ,000 coins that's pretty damaging to the market on price So are you quite skeptical about the treasury companies?

36:16And do you think they will be the reason for the next bear market? I think they'll accentuate it. I really like them because they provide relatively cheap funding for shorting on equity markets. Because if you're on MNAV of, say, five and you short that, well, MNAV is going to compress to one or below. So you get a 5x leverage without needing to pay for it. I mean, I say that a bit tongue in cheek. You know, most people don't like the bear market. I think that that'll add to it. But I think that most Bitcoiners think that this infrastructure and development of the market and the way in which the capital is coming in, we're not going to have these 80 % drawdowns.

37:00I think also we need to look at where, you know, Bitcoin is now a$2 trillion asset. it's the newest global macro asset that's trading at scale to hit the world in 150 years. It's a global macro asset. It's not a separate thing on its own and the global liquidity needs to be accounted for. And everyone's bullish because global liquidity, by the way, means money printing. Everyone's bullish because people are money printing. But we've never really seen a business cycle downturn. we have liquidity cycles which every four years generally that seems to be the cycle that nation states print it but we have business cycle downturns every maybe decade or so and we kind of had one in COVID but it was a flash in the pan and there was so much injection of liquidity and it came in early the last one before that was the world financial crisis you know which is what was etched into the genesis block really.

38:06So Bitcoin's never experienced a business cycle downturn in a time when the US Fed is a holdout on injecting liquidity. And so it's going to come in late. So we don't know. Do you think that we're close to that, to a business downturn? I would say pretty high confidence that that's going to happen by 26. Are we not already in one in a sense in that like of the S &P 500, really only the top seven companies actually matter?

38:41I've heard people say this is like an everything bubble. I'm not an expert in equities. I track liquidity. I think the leading signs for a recession have already hit. And a lot of this work is with SwissBlock, which I work with today. They're kind of the OG secret trading firm behind Glassnode. And Glassnode was actually spun out for the world to use, even though they were using the early work in that data in 2015, 2016. So they're a global macro firm now. and some people might know Henry Zeeberg who is the economist inside there and so he's tracking all of the macro signals and in his words, the economy's hit the Titanic, hasn't sunk yet.

39:42There's more leading indicators, you could say, than the one that will hit the Titanic. That's already fired. There's no going back. there will be a business cycle downturn. But we're not there yet. It's not sinking. And that's the best part of the bull market. Everything goes apeshit crazy and we'll have a blow off top. And we're expecting that in Bitcoin too. Everyone's expecting that because we're not there yet. But it will be coming. And even the four-year cycle guys will say it's coming in 26 because of standard four-year liquidity flows. superimpose on top of that a business cycle downturn, which Bitcoin's never experienced, then we've got to see what happens.

40:29So do you know what he's looking at that is the leading indicator for recession? Because in 2008, obviously, the housing bubble was the thing that killed the market. Does he know what he's looking for in 2026? Yeah, they're based on economic data. I think housing is in there. It's global economy type stuff. You best talk to him. I'd love to. It's more, we can get him on. He's pretty knowledgeable about it and he's done some exceptional calls. In the zoomed out picture, they're exceptional. When everyone is bearish, he says now it's going, he said the S &P is going to recover back to here and go way higher.

41:20And it's so far played out when everyone was saying, no, this economy is broken. So, yeah, there's this setup, right? Liquidity cycle coming back down, business cycle downturn. We've got our treasury companies on top that are exhibiting high MNAVs. So if you're holding those equities, you're going to have that compression. and then we have the potential for these Bitcoin treasury companies, the weakest ones, to be liquidated if they're overextended. Because these guys are doing four-year bonds, convertible bonds, or some of them not at all. MetaPlanet, it's real time really. So you need to look at the details of the structuring, but I think some of it will be liquidated.

42:16So the interesting thing there is that it feels like on one hand, you're saying the structure of the Bitcoin market's changed. Like maybe like people talk about super cycle or elongated cycle, whatever that is, but the structure has changed. And maybe that's just reduced downside and upside volatility. But then you're also saying potentially we'll have like a 2026 blow off top. Like do you, what do you see Bitcoin doing in the next, say, 12 months? Yeah, so I'm saying the, it's like a superposition of all these impacts, right? And I think structurally, Bitcoin's solid, whereas in the past, we had these big downswings.

42:53The attribution to a more robust market, let's say, is there's that. And then we've got your standard liquidity downturn, but then we've got a business cycle downturn on top. And some of that all, maybe some people say, oh, we're only going to get a 50 % bear market. Yeah, sure, if that was every other normal cycle that Bitcoin's existed in the 16 years. But we don't know this thing called a business cycle downturn and its impact on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin happens to be the most sensitive of all the global macro assets to liquidity changes. And so if we've got that, then we don't know how that, you know, add more drawdown to the 50 % you think, whatever number you come to.

43:44So that's how I'd approach it. And when you're looking at Bitcoin price, how high do you think it can go before this drawdown? It depends how long we've got to run. If it's soon, like if it's fourth quarter of this year, and if it's early first quarter, then 140 to 160. If it goes into 2026, then it could go way higher. So one thing I've been thinking, which may be too simplistic, is if you look at the incentives of someone like Trump, who's got the midterms, I think October next year, or like third quarter next year, he's going to want to run the economy really hot going into that. So I assume he's going to pull out all the stops to make sure markets are flying.

44:29And so in my head, I've kind of had late 26 is the top of this cycle. Right. Yeah. You can see this already is that Trump wants lower interest rates, but Powell's like, nope, nope, nope. And the thing is, never mind how much power Trump has, he doesn't have the power to influence Fed policy. And for that to happen, the Republicans would have needed to be in power for 12 years and outvoted the Democrats on who gets to be on the Fed board and have that qualified by Congress. So it's a pretty full-on thing to get full power of the Fed and it's designed that way. So he could try talking it up, but unless the Fed actually changes rates, and in our opinion, it's too slow anyway.

45:27It's probably too late. The liquidity injection should have happened a long time ago and it's late. And the rest of the world is injecting liquidity, not the Fed. So we'll see. So other central banks around the world are printing money right now? Yeah, yeah. Global liquidity is going up, but it's not coming from the US as such. So do you think Powell's been wrong on this call to not lower rates? Yeah, we think so. We think so. Henrik is very outspoken, saying this is a really bad setup right now that he should be printing. and we don't know why he's not. The inflation is not so high. Yeah, inflation is not.

46:06But we know that money printing does lead to inflation. And obviously, Powell knows that better than anyone because he's been at the helm while that happened. Why do you think he should be printing money? Because it's great for us as asset holders, but is it good for the population? Oh, well, obviously printing money is bad, right? If like, I mean, on fundamental level, printing money is really bad. We know that as Bitcoiners, but in terms of an economy and how far it's going to wreck people in the short term, right now, like the role here, you know, with the changing of the interest rates is really to buffer these really harsh drawdowns.

46:52That's the whole point of a central bank is to try and take the pain out of the market. And that's probably not the best move for the role of the Fed. We can debate whether or not the Fed should be able to dictate this. Obviously, as a Bitcoin, I don't think this is a good setup. Yeah. But yeah. So looking out, you're quite bearish. I'm bullish over the next few months. Yeah. Short term bullish, long term bearish. Look, the audience shouldn't do what I do. I participate in the markets. So if it's bearish, I'd love to have a really bearish market. And if it's bullish, I'd love to have a really bullish market.

47:42Because I don't huddle that much. The thing is, I've been in these markets for well over 10 years now. And I think the number came out from Arthur Hayes on BitMEX, only 1 % of traders actually make any money on that exchange. And those are your odds. And so even if like for myself, I have some amount of capability where the market is at and where it might likely be to go,

48:15that didn't make me profitable until I figured out how to manage risk. These are so many things you have to learn. And so that's why we huddle. But yeah, for myself, I'm bullish right now. And I'm expecting to be bearish by next year, if not sooner. But I have no crystal ball of the top. The thing about these markets is the bottoms are very, very stable because that's when liquidity comes in. At the top, liquidity dries up. And when liquidity dries up, the tops become quite unstable. You'll see the volatility and it's whipsawing around and it's highly emotional. That's very hard to predict. So it's good to be bearish late until it's really riding on the wall.

49:07So, I don't know, everyone likes to pick a top price and it's almost impossible. If you get it right, you're lucky. And even like Peter Swift has it like, is it Philip Swift? There's the cycle top and it's a crossover of two magic moving averages and that uses Fibonacci numbers and that's called every top in the past. Even that it doesn't call a price. It's like a timing signature. So it's yeah, tops are hard if you want a number to go by and no one should be trading to a imaginary number. So if you don't really hold Bitcoin, I know you've been trading for 10 plus years or whatever. Have you outperformed if you'd have just bought and held Bitcoin?

50:03I've outperformed, yeah. But when you say I don't hold, I'm always going to come. I don't hold for a year when it's in a bear market, usually a year, six months to a year. But I'm always coming back. I see. Right? I call myself a Bitcoiner because I'm a maxi. I think this is the biggest change in the world and it's going to take over. And I'm going to be pissed off if I'm going to have less Bitcoins each year. And the biggest opportunity for me to get more Bitcoins is the bear market. Sit there in cash and do nothing. And so you might be in a long bear market then coming up. Yeah, it might be.

50:40It might be 12, 16, 18 months. Is there anything that either the Fed or just central banks around the world can do to stop this happening? Or is it too late? Well, Henrik would probably think it's too late. It's his wheelhouse. I think it's too late. Yeah, I'd say from data he showed me, I'm pretty convinced of his thesis. Yeah. So without them injecting crazy liquidity right now, which it doesn't seem like they're going to do, maybe this thing's already gone. Yeah. Well, the indicator shows that it's too late. The economy is, and it's natural, right? Every 10 years, you do get a business downturn and it is fired.

51:19The question is how deep will it go? And you can do something about that. And if the Fed does their job by lowering rates to soften this ahead of time, then it'll be okay. Like COVID, they did that, but they did it too much. They printed too much money and now we've had to. But presumably if this market does start rolling over, they will step in and inject liquidity at that point. Yeah. But you think that just takes time to get into the market and it means you have a 12 month bear market or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's a super tanker. It's going to turn around real slightly. Yeah. And people, myself included, think of Bitcoin as a risk off asset as well as a risk on asset.

52:04It performs as a risk on asset, but to me, this is long-term savings that is almost like risk off. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think the market will see it that way and Bitcoin might actually perform well in that kind of macro bear market? Not in the short term. I think I called it the world's first risk on safe haven. You know, it'll run just as well as a tech stock, but it's a safe haven asset. But you'll see even gold crash, you know, world financial crisis, gold crash. Everyone sells everything to get to cash. How long did it crash for in 2008? don't know. I can't remember. Was it a month, two months?

52:43So it recovered before everything else? Yeah. It recovered and went on for a three year bull run. I think three or four year bull run to 2012, right? Four years. Yeah. So yeah, because the confidence was knocked in the banking system. And right now we're seeing gold run, right? And the confidence is being, I think, shaken in the US dollar. Definitely. And so, yeah, and Bitcoin's still quite new. It's not trusted by people who hold the 900 trillion. They need to see that play out in decades. I think it'll be great. If you look at it in sheer performance against gold, it just tears it apart. If you look at fundamentally what it is.

53:33Gold's had its time. We've had 6 ,000 years of gold, gold and silver. There's a reason for it. Like gold was our money. It was our de facto money. And what is money? Money is a ledger, right? People think money was this thing to assist barter, but it was a ledger. It was always a ledger. It was, I do you a favor, you do me a favor. It's social debt and it got formalized. That's the latest research on money. this whole idea that we used gold to assist barter is this philosophical thing not backed by evidence so you've got this 6 ,000 year old use of gold being the fear ledger that meant the accountant couldn't diddle the books and give more money to himself so if you're at this situation that we have 6 ,000 years of gold being the de facto fear ledger and now we've got, we're moving to the space age digital age, space age, and you've got rockets every other day launching and the price per launch is dropping off a cliff and robotic technology is going through experiential climbs.

54:39I think it's around 2040-ish that we will be able to start to showcase mining of asteroids. And they found an asteroid that was something like a thousand times world GDP with a gold on it. And so if you think you're going to secure a ledger with atoms, you're going to be mistaken because there's a lot of atoms around. There's no meteorites with Bitcoin on them. That's right. Right. And so Bitcoin is secured by energy. And so for the scientists in the room, they know this because it's called the Kardashev scale. That's how you measure a technology of a civilization. And you see this in world GDP as GDP goes up, energy use goes up because fundamentally the economy eats energy and raw material to spit out goods and services and they get more and more sophisticated and we know that the latest stuff, AI, just eats this energy.

55:37So energy is always going to be scarce relative to demand. So you have to secure it with that. And we know that works a thousand years into the future. And so we're at this precipice where money is going to be redefined by going from gold to energy secured ledger. Gold was an atoms secured ledger. And right now we have this thing called a social consensus ledger. It's a paperization of a liquidity crisis. It's a very, very recent thing since 1971. It doesn't go back 6 ,000 years. It's not going to go forward in the next few thousand years either. And that'll collapse soon. and that the social consensus is, trust me, bro, I'm good for it by the Fed.

56:22That's how we manage our ledger right now. But it's always been a ledger. It's going from atoms currently. It's the social consensus, trust me, bro, and it's going to go to energy. And that's what Bitcoin is, and that's what we're buying. We're buying money for the next thousands of years. And that money's got to expand from one to two trillion, two trillion today, to whatever money needs to get to. And that'll be usually equivalent of world GDP. World GDP is, I think,$110 trillion. So if world GDP turns to$500 trillion, it needs to get to$500 trillion. So when you go through that kind of history of money, you have 6 ,000 years of gold, this sort of fiat blip that we live in now, how do you see us transitioning from that fiat era into Bitcoin?

57:07Do you think there'll be a period where fiat is backed by Bitcoin before full sort of hyper-Bitcoinization? Or how do you see that playing out? Yeah, it's really hard to say. It's really hard to say. We don't need backing with Bitcoin. I can say that. The reason we needed paper notes to trade around gold is because it wasn't portable. You couldn't ship it around at the speed of light. We can do that with Bitcoin. So fundamentally, we can be using Bitcoin as the money. people think it's volatile but it's not volatile when you're paying for it in Bitcoin everything that becomes the unit of account given enough time you know we're not there yet we're still in the store of value phase probably will be for another 10 years at least maybe it will take maybe it'll take another generation but hey we're talking about 10 ,000 years of money here so 25 years Yeah, it's okay, but we're lucky because we're at the forefront of this effect happening.

58:11And the guys that came in in 2011, 2012, they got to buy the stuff when the market cap was in the millions instead of the trillions. So yeah, the Bitcoin's price is going to inflate, the market cap's going to inflate because it's being adopted. It's being adopted by corporate treasuries, adopted by nation states now. So I'm no doubt on the long run of this. And I don't have any fears over quantum computers or that this technology will break because everything that can break can be fixed. Yeah. See, I can totally see, give it long enough time period, 10 years or whatever, quantum being a threat.

58:54But we will just change things. There's already people doing work on the address signatures. I don't see that being a big existential threat for Bitcoin at all. When you look at the kind of maturation of the market, like we've started this conversation being like the Bitcoin market is maturing. But then at the same time, you're saying we're in the incredibly, incredibly early days. What does this market look like in 10 years time? I think it would look much more like how maybe gold is perceived, but with all the bells and whistles of a digital commodity that moves at the speed of light. That's the bit that's hard to predict, right?

59:29Because we've not had that before. But in 10 years time, it'll be accepted like gold. It's probably market cap will have exceeded or matched gold. It will be taken seriously by everyone. It'll be the size of the US dollar. I think because gold is the size of the US dollar in terms of M2 money supply. So I think the, let's call it the trade fire acceptance will be there. Then the question is, what does it look like when Bitcoin becomes, that does its thing because it's a beast. It's a digital asset that moves the speed of light and it's got layers on it, layer two, layer three. And they're somewhat self-custodial as well and even faster.

1:00:11We've got AI. I've said the problem with real estate is there's less people. The population is going to peak and it's going to drop whereas the population of people that need Bitcoin is going to increase because AI agents will be using this. So there's all this future-facing stuff that's almost impossible, I think, to figure out. We couldn't figure out the future we live in today back when the internet first came about. And I think, yeah, it'll take some time. Maybe you call it, I used to say it takes a generation to figure out what the medium is for. Like when we did TV shows, the first ones with radio were pictures and it took another generation to invent the sitcom.

1:01:03And maybe we'd start that clock in 10 years when we have general acceptance. And then you wait another generation and see what the population does with what it really is. And we don't know what it really is. We think of it as digital gold, but I've just said it's not digital gold. It's a ledger secured by energy, which will work for the next thousand years. So what can this thing do? Well, we can start looking at it 10 years from now maybe and see what happens. I love it. Yeah. So you're short-term bullish, intermediate-term bearish, and then long-term ultra bullish. Oh yeah, long-term. I'm maxi, right?

1:01:41I think it's going to eat up a big chunk of wealth assets for sure. I've actually done this thing where I've actually not, I'm not self-custody anymore. Is that because of personal like security risk? Yeah, that I think you'll see a lot more people that have been in the space a long time and know and they'll, yeah, we were just in an institutional day here at Honey Badger Conference and like the banks are saying, oh, the lollies whales are coming in and they don't want to hold their coins anymore because of the personal OPSEC. That does not apply to everyone else, right? Everyone else should self-custody because we want the custody to be decentralized.

1:02:20It's fundamental. But what I'm doing is I'm selling a lot of this liquidity to go back into the ecosystem, the startup ecosystem, the picks and shovels, the things that will support Bitcoin's infrastructure moving forward. So it can have this future, it will have this future. I like to be part of it.

1:02:42Also, the work with SwissBlock now is starting to ramp up. So as this whole institutional adoption is coming in, we think that the Bloombergs of this world will come in as well. And they'll want to come in and represent the data from Bitcoin and represent that to TradFi. And we think that it's, you know, we've been doing this for 10 years and we'd like to have a shot at actually doing this very well native to the industry with the Bitcoin ethos. So we've launched a whole bunch of institutional grade publications. They predict price. It's using 10 year old frameworks that have been very robust.

1:03:22And I always spun up, you know, because my heart's with retail. So we've done Bitcoin Vector Lite. The institutional product is Bitcoin Vector. The Lite version is for retail to assist stacking assets and just giving a read on the market so you don't freak out when the market's pulling back. You know, okay, it's cool. it's doing its thing and that was expected and these are good prices to buy it so so is this a rebirth of the substack it's that channel's a rebirth thing but it's it's a different thing it's for it's not for traders you can try and trade with it it's pretty good but if you're a trader you should use an institutional product which for life signals But the whole premise of this is to provide a data product that's going to represent our industry.

1:04:12And so right now we're wanting to get the reach out there so that, you know, the data within Bitcoin and these digital assets ecosystems is represented by within the industry. I think that'd be pretty cool. So when you say you sold your Bitcoin to put into some of these startups, like, do you think we're at the point where Bitcoin businesses will be able to outperform Bitcoin? Oh, yeah. Those that got in on the seed, the earliest investment rounds of Coinbase, which was a huge success, outperformed Bitcoin by a factor of 0.5, meaning they got half their Bitcoins back. My first investment in the space was Exodus wallet in 2015, 16, around that time, that outperformed Bitcoin by, it's public now, 2 to 3x.

1:05:03So I got two to three times my Bitcoin value back. And back then, Bitcoin was growing by 100 % annualized growth rate. So it was really hard. And back in the Coinbase day, it was growing sometimes 1 ,000%. So it was really hard to outperform Bitcoin. Now, if you know what you're doing, it's still very high risk because a lot of these companies go belly up. But I think it's relatively safe bet that these companies would significantly do more than the two to three X if you get onto a winner. And if you get a loser, hey, that was a good well-spent experiment to show this thing doesn't work. Or, you know, you've got to have a lot of failures for successes.

1:05:44And what are the kind of businesses that you're looking at? Yeah. Mostly stuff that I can have a hand in with my existing knowledge with knowing markets, knowing how hedge funds work, a bit of crossover with the banking system and TradeFi. So for example, I invested in Debify, which is the, they provide a platform where you You can get a private key, lock your Bitcoin into an escrow and get a USD loan or a fiat loan so you can borrow against your Bitcoin, but you can do it with a private key. So invested in that, probably going to do something in the space by providing some TradFi liquidity into that as well.

1:06:33That's like a perfect thing for me. Because you can get the lenders to come into the platform. Yeah, I'm in TradFi sort of like with the overlap of hedge funds. And yeah, so like let's go get some USD and send it to the Bitcoin as well. And that should be profitable. And, you know, I really like the idea of having a profitable business that incentivizes self-custody. the more self-custody people that are out there, the more I'm going to be able to lend to. So that's what I like about that one. It's a weird world, isn't it? I'm not self-custody, but I won't even encourage it. But you're trying to push it.

1:07:15Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're putting all your money into Bitcoin businesses, you've got nothing to self-custody. It's decentralized custody. It's just being spread out amongst a bunch of other people. They're holding your Bitcoin for you. Yeah. A lot of them hold Bitcoin treasuries. and even that de-risks it. Even the startup goes belly up, you probably get the Bitcoin value back of what's in the treasury. Are you investing in any of the Bitcoin, like the pure play Bitcoin treasury plays? Yeah, I hold MicroStrategy. I've invested in Adam Back's BSDR because it's a bull market. It's a bull market.

1:07:53MNav will expand. I don't want to hold that in the bear market because I expect to compress, but we've had that conversation around I'm not a hodler through the entire cycle. I think these ones will work really well as well, long term. They will just have higher expansion and higher compression along the way. I do not like that it centralizes the supply. And I think that's a risk on the system. Yeah, I agree. I've struggled to get my head properly around the Bitcoin treasury companies, not in terms of whether they are sustainable as a business model, but whether it's good for Bitcoin. And the truth is, it doesn't matter what I say.

1:08:31Bitcoin's money for enemies. People can do with it what they want. But it's not the future that I maybe saw. Yeah, well, the thing with it is Bitcoin needs capital. If it's going to flip gold and it's going to flip fiat, actually that's what we're really talking about is ending fiat. It needs to get bigger and it's got to swell up big chunks of capital. And so the ETS and these equity-based treasury companies allow easy access and that, you know, they suck in from traditional bond markets. They're eating huge amounts of capital. So that's the good side. The bad side is that it makes Bitcoin more brittle because, hey, what if the US government decides this Bitcoin thing looks like gold?

1:09:19We could back it. We could back our US dollar with Bitcoin. We've done that before. why don't we just nationalize all the gold back into our digital Fort Knox, you know, and the low hanging fruit would be all these public listed companies. They'd probably do it through an offering, but they can nationalize the gold and the Bitcoin. So, and they've done it before. So that's the risk. That's a risk. That's not a 0 % risk. I could see that future. It's happened before, right? Yeah. It's happened before. And then what happens when the big bags, they didn't nationalize all the gold. India had gold.

1:09:57Everyone had gold. But they managed to put the money back into one location, which means that you can then close that redeemability, which happened in 1971. You're back to fiat. And so I think that that's a decent risk. The idea of going from fiat to Bitcoin and back to fiat is one of the scariest propositions. I know, right? We don't need that to happen. People will say, oh, we tried that before it didn't work, you know? Yeah. And so... True fiat has never been tried. Oh, you know. True fiat is actually probably what holds the whole world up right now because when we cite all the cases of fiat dying in the past, they were localized countries that went to fiat because they mismanaged themselves so bad and they debased themselves and became fiat and they blew up immediately.

1:10:50And what happened was we had the entire world, after World War II, we had all the worlds agree that the US was going to be good to use the US dollar. The new deal was that. And then the US said, well, it's still gold backed, but all the gold is going to be in Fort Knox. And so that whole process when the redeemability got snipped meant that we managed to rug the entire world to fear it all at the same time. And that's what's holding it up because we're in the same boat. We're all debasing together. Whereas in the past, only one country would debase to oblivion. And so let's see how long it lasts for.

1:11:42But it's probably not going to be pretty. No, I think it's a, I mean, who knows if even that gold is still in Fort Knox as well. Right. No audit. Yeah. We were promised a live stream audit by Elon Musk. And I wonder why that never happened. Yeah. Well, yeah, that would have been good. Yeah. They're falling out now, so. True. But thank you so much for this, Willie. This has been good. We better get to the conference. Oh, yeah, Danny. Let's go. But thank you, man. That was great. All right.

1:12:23Thank you.