2025: BITCOIN IN REVIEW | HODL & ODELL

I think this has been a very good year in terms of like fundamental Bitcoin value. It's easier than ever to use Bitcoin in a freedom oriented way. 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 sats and not chase easy wins that you think are easy that you're just going to lose all your money on. States are not really accumulating yet. Institutional players are accumulating. we are going to have to go through this period of sort of co-option. 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. 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. Bitcoin has to enter into the traditional system. If Bitcoin remains as outside capital forever, It never fulfills its mandate. How you doing, man? I'm ready. Let's do this. Let's talk about the year that sucked. Yeah, this. And why it sucked. Last year when we recorded this. Nick Carter's right. And he's rubbing it in your face, you know? Let's talk about it. Let's get into it. So last year when we recorded this, it was 92K. And I think we all kind of agreed. Matt put some caveats in because Matt always puts caveats in. but we kind of all agreed that this was going to be Super Cycle and the green green I'm sure I said a million I probably said a million like I don't know what I said What's happened HODL? I recall saying that if it was similar to previous cycles 2 million was in play I think I said that You said 2 million in 2025 No I didn't make it a call it wasn't a call I just said if it was similar to previous cycles then 2 million would be in play Damn Yeah, it's probably the year where I think everyone was wrong, though. When Matt said that, they liked it. I remember that. It's like it's the only year of Bitcoin I remember where I don't think anyone's got it right. Like normally when years like are turning bearish, there's always someone like last cycle was Dan Held calling Super Cycle. But there's always someone who's like right calling the top. And I don't think anyone did that a year out. No, not at all. I think, I mean, I guess the my feeling about it has been that we, the Bitcoin influencer class, have become superfluous and that we kind of don't have the money to pump this thing anymore. I think it was Matt who actually said, like, each bull run is the story of a group of investors coming in and basically deciding they can pump this thing. And there was basically no retail involvement this this time around. I mean, if there was, it went into MSTR and treasury companies. And then, you know, people kind of got wrecked before the bubble could even start. Like if you invested in the majority of treasury companies, you pretty much lost money unless you were doing them as quick flips. There was like a two to two week to one month period where you could actually make some money on some of the treasury company things. And then, you know, it just completely collapsed. And I think like, you know, there's this institutional inflow of capital that doesn't seem to stop. It's very consistent. None of us really understand how the institutional players are thinking about this market. We don't understand what games they play. We're kind of out of our depth. And I think we should just probably just be honest about that instead of throwing around cycle words at each other. And more likely than like, you know, we're in a super cycle. It's a this cycle. It's a crab bull. It's a bull crab. It's a bear crab. It's like, shut the fuck up. Like these are all just, we're kind of dumb and we don't really know what we're talking about. And I think that, you know, if you look at the way Bitcoin has been trading and potentially could trade in the future, it might trade more like an NVIDIA or something like that where every year we get an all-time high, but every year we get a 30 to 40% correction on top of that. Like that's kind of how the tech stocks trade. And so that wouldn't surprise me. It also wouldn't surprise me if next year is wildly bearish or wildly bullish. I don't know what's going on. I just don't know. And so it's like, I think this whole thing, like the influencer sphere, the podcast sphere, like the whole, it's out of our hands now. Like we're not really the guys that have control over this market anymore. We used to be, or we thought we were at least. It's interesting though, because like you say, we're not the people that can pump the bags, but like with the ETFs, like we all thought institutional money was actually coming. and yet here we are lower than we were last year. Do you think this might be the wrong two people to ask this question because you're not like markets macro guys, but do you think the option market on top of Ibit has had a negative impact on Bitcoin price? Well, I want to, I mean, first of all, I want to put some numbers here. Okay, so we're currently at $88,000, right? Just to put a pin in the cycle talk, we're currently at $88,000. If this was equivalent to the 2012 cycle, we should be at $3 million. right now. If this is equivalent to the 2016 cycle, we should be at $930,000. If it was equivalent to the 2020 cycle, we should be at $326,000. But we're at $88,000. So no matter how you cut it, this year was a fucking disappointment, a massive disappointment. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is at all time highs, silver is at all time highs, and gold is at all time highs. I agree with HODL that most of the existing influencers have become irrelevant. But also, a lot of them just sold out to these fucking treasury companies. They pretty much all joined treasury companies, and they all shot the bed. Any retail we had that came into the market went into the treasury companies instead of going into Bitcoin. And a lot of times they did it with leverage too. It was like the opposite of Stay Humble Stack Sats. And we're starting to, I think we seal, I think that probably was more of an impact than options on Ibit. We just don't have real spot retail demand. Even regular Ibit demand has been actually, that's probably been one of the most bullish fundamentals. But it feels like it got dwarfed by a lot of the treasury companies. There's just a lot of distractions there. And then the last piece that I would put out there is, if this is what a super cycle looks like, it doesn't feel that super. um we we we didn't even hit a new all-time high in gold this this time around yet i mean hopefully we do that next year maybe in four-year cycles are dead and we hit it next year but it's just been a massive disappointment i you can't really cut it any other way yeah i also saw alex thorn just tweeted like an hour or two ago saying if inflation adjusted we've not even broken 100k like it's definitely been well i mean can can you even really call this year a bull market year i I mean, we hit some all time highs. We were doing well, but we're going to end the year down. Right. So like there's the pattern which I was helped. I helped me in which is green, green, green, red. And of course, once you mean something, it dies. So I killed it. Now, green, green, green, red is now dead because we're unless, you know, something happens in the next few days, like we're going to end the year on a red candle. So it's green, green, red TBD. Like we don't know is next year red or is it green or is it whatever? I think, again, we have sort of brain damage from all these years in Bitcoin, and the game has fundamentally changed in the ETF era, and we're still kind of playing catch up to it. I think that's what's going on. And we're kind of like, we're doing divination where we're basically like, we're doing astrology. This is astrology for guys, like tuning into Bitcoin price talk, you know, like that's what we're doing. That's really what it is. and we need to stop and be sober and rational and reasonable and say, okay, yeah, the year was bad. It was a bust. It was flat, but really it was bad because of our expectations. You know, we had really high expectations because we thought, oh, there has to be a bull run every four years. And there kind of was, there kind of wasn't. I don't know. I think looking forward, I think it's more important instead of saying, you know, cycle this, cycle that, that we just look at, you know, how the market is going to trade, who the players are, who's buying Bitcoin, why are they buying Bitcoin? What are their reasons for owning it? How do they feel about it? Because price is set at the margin. And so these big buyers who come in, they are going to be able to set the price. Hodler set the floor and new buyers set the set the highs. So, you know, to me, I still don't really understand the new buyers. And it seems like states are not really accumulating yet. institutional players are accumulating. You still have BlackRock pretty, you know, fundamentally bullish on this thing. I saw Fidelity revise some of their price projections down, but, you know, they were like way over bullish. They were like, you know, they were as bullish as we were. They were like two, three million a coin. So anyway, I think the time is to be more, the appropriate thing now at this time is to be more rational and sober and act like adults instead of being like, it's going to bajillions next year, bro. I mean, I will say also we saw like Tom Lee was like he was posting his like bullish engagement predictions, but then behind the scenes sending out letters to investors being like, we're going to have a down year next year, which I mean is, I think, a bullish fundamental. But a lot of this stuff is momentum. And in today's market, particularly on the short-term side, a lot of things is like we live in a meme coin world, like a meme stock world in a lot of ways, right? With a lot of momentum trading. And if you do look, and I'm not someone who paid, first of all, I'm not a chart guy. I'm not a short-term trader guy. I definitely don't pay attention to the crypto markets, like the broader crypto markets, shitcoins, whatnot. I just focus on Bitcoin long-term investments in Bitcoin, whether that's the asset or the underlying companies that are building on it. But something feels like it broke on October 10th in the crypto markets. And that's when a bunch of liquidations happened. A lot of the shitcoiners got wrecked. And then a lot of the market makers that were cross-shitcoin exposed. like they were they held a lot of bitcoin but then they also were market makers in shitcoin land got really hit hard and one of the rumors is that winter mute which is one of the largest crypto market makers has basically been liquidating bitcoin since then or at least for a while after that happened right today is december 23rd i don't know you're going to release this in a little bit But for like two months, right, they've been like unwinding positions with the only thing they actually had left, which was Bitcoin, because like a bunch of shit coins like literally like wick to zero that day. And if you look at a chart, it's a crazy chart. Like I tell people, this is the one chart this year that is really, really interesting. And that is gold, silver, S&P 500, Bitcoin. and you can literally see the divergence that happened on October 10th. So who knows? Like maybe that doesn't happen. And what we've seen with Bitcoin, like we got the majority of our gains in a very short period of time. And then maybe, you know, what was the meme? Uptober. We were supposed to have Uptober. And we did for like seven days. And instead we just had downtober and downvember and downdecember. And so maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would have looked different if that didn't happen. Yeah. And so wait, I mean, you're suing Binance now. Is that right? And that was the other thing. I think that was right. I mean, if you want to be a conspiracy theorist, which I don't prescribe to this particular conspiracy, but like CZ got pardoned and then 1010 happened. Like you just was there like you get the pardon if you just nuke the market. Just nuke the market. let us get in cheaper and then you'll have your part in. Oh, I kind of like that one. But now CZ is getting sued. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy and all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig vaults. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is insured while not giving up custody. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're protected by AnchorWatch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to AnchorWatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today. That is anchorwatch.com. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by the massive legends, IRON, the largest NASDAQ-listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. IRON are not just powering the Bitcoin network, they're also providing cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with their founders, Dan and Will, for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, IREN is setting the standard. Visit iren.com to learn more, which is I-R-E-N.com. With fiat money constantly debasing, wealth preservation isn't optional. That's why I recommend Swan Bitcoin, a team of dedicated Bitcoiners who work with families and businesses to build and secure generational wealth with Bitcoin. Strong relationships with clients are at the center of everything Swan does. A dedicated Swan private wealth representative, which is a real person that you can text and call, will help you build a Bitcoin wealth strategy using Swan's comprehensive platform of Bitcoin services, including tax-advantaged retirement accounts, advanced Bitcoin cold storage using collaborative self-custody, inheritance planning with both trust and entity accounts, tax loss harvesting, asset-backed loans, and more. Swan have helped over 100,000 clients since 2020, and if you're serious about acquiring and securing Bitcoin, I recommend Swan. Meet the team at swan.com forward slash WBD, which is swan.com forward slash WBD. you were saying that none of the influencers have enough sway right now but i actually don't know if that's true because like like you hodl as an influencer maybe not but like the biggest bitcoin influencer now is michael saylor and he's been buying like a shit ton of bitcoin all year and not really done very much to the price like i i don't okay but go on yeah but that's my point first of all is saylor and then who else there's not many other people the ones that that remain that are Bitcoin specific, right? Like Larry Fink is the largest Bitcoin influencer in the world now. But the ones that are Bitcoin specific told everyone to buy treasury companies. Like Saylor literally was in Prague and was like, tell your friends and family you need to borrow a million dollars from them and buy Bitcoin with it. But he kind of was really implying borrow a million dollars and buy MSTR with it. And it's down like 50% since he said that. Yeah. Like that's not how you make a foundational like solid market. it's super tempting for the retail that does show up here like i think everyone's gotten the memo um when i talk to people you know i said this last year but it's it's true still which is when i talk to friends they know about the bitcoin price without me telling it to them which has never happened before in my decade in bitcoin um so now people are like they're aware of what bitcoin is trading at they're aware that it's a big deal they they believe in bitcoin you know they believe in the story broadly but they don't think they're going to be a participant and that's story. And so if you have all of those things and then you say to yourself, well, I want to get into Bitcoin, you know, people kind of think that leverage is like a way to cheat the system. And it's like, OK, I'm going to get in with leverage and then I'm going to make up for lost time. And that turns out to be, you know, just the quickest trip to wreck city. And the treasury companies are really struggling because, you know, like everything was great when it was like, yeah, bro, premiums on Bitcoin, bro. And you're like, why? And they're like, reasons, me, dude, come on, dude, premiums, dude. And then the premiums go away. And like all the guys like Jim Chanos are right. And they can just are about the premium super easily. And it's like, we're going to, we're going to like acquire businesses, man. And, and, and shit. And it's, and I don't really, you know, I don't, the treasury companies are not that defensible without a premium. I mean, I think that's the one call that we got right last year. I was listening to the show before we did this to see where we were wrong. We were wrong a lot, to be honest. But we did say that we thought the treasury companies, like the long tail, were going to get wiped out. And basically just the cream of the crop was going to be the only thing that was interesting and actually stuck around. And I think we're seeing that. Like the acquisitions that are happening now, that seems like bad news for most of the companies involved. Like I think Saylor is going to be fine. Strategy will always be there. I think there's probably two or three others. But I think this idea that you can have like a coffee shop that's struggling and buying Bitcoin is your like last chance at actually making the company successful. That's over. You said earlier in this rip that no one, I don't know if we can call this a cycle, but no one this cycle like successfully called the top or not. Like HODL just reminded me like Chanos' call was epic. Like people were giving him so much shit for that call. And it was a very simple trade. He was like, I am just short Microsoft's MicroStrategy's MNav Premium. And he held long Bitcoin and went short MSDR and pretty much nailed the timing. Absolutely nailed the timing very publicly and got a lot of shit for it. Yeah. And I mean, we're living in a weird, bizarro world where Peter Schiff is having an amazing year. I fucking hate it. We got to give it up to Jim Chanos. If you look at the asset charts, you know, that dude, Charlie Bilillo, he always puts it out. Gold is the best performing asset of the year. No, isn't silver? Is silver above gold now? I checked it only like a month ago. Okay, well, silver's now. Silver had a really hot month. Right, so it's precious metals at the top and Bitcoin at the bottom. And for the entirety of Bitcoin's history, that has never been true before. And so this is just, you know, you kind of got to ask yourself, like, okay, is Bitcoin a canary in the coal mine for something larger that's about to, you know, happen at the markets? or is Bitcoin a beach ball that's being held underwater? Those are kind of the two questions and nobody has a good answer. But I will say that whenever the Bitcoin price hangs out for a long time like this in a specific range, I tend to think it's going to dump. It either goes up or down. It's going to go hard in one direction. I think it's a simpler answer. I think we're basically living in a global depression right now, printing fiat has hidden that so people think that we're not to a degree but most people are poor as fuck um and there's a there's a safe haven trade going on and that's what gold and silver are benefiting from people are still treating bitcoin as a risk-off asset uh which is fine like i treat it as a safe haven but specifically like if you don't hold bitcoin in self-custody i think it's really easy to think of it as a risk-off asset like almost like a tech stock. And the only thing that's weird about the play right now or how the market's trading is the big tech companies are also at all time highs. But that starts to make sense when you realize that I think a lot of people are treating those as risk off assets. They're thinking of it as a safe haven because they have large treasuries, like cash treasuries. They're considered too big to fail, right like people think like the u.s government will not let nvidia fall google's a fucking behemoth apple's a fucking behemoth um and they're just they're they're treating them as safe haven assets themselves i think they actually might end up being safe haven assets like i don't think the government can let nvidia fail like i think the government is so reliant on ai working as like a productivity boom to make the economy work that they will probably do everything they can to not allow that stock to fail um but i think what huddle said earlier is right in fact i think you said this maybe on another show recorded that it's just the weirdest thing that's happened this year is bitcoin isn't volatile enough for people which is why they're going into treasury companies i think that's why they're going into ai stocks that are absolutely pumping like but the thing that i never expected was gold to have more retail fomo than bitcoin i i would never have guessed that and i just wonder if we're like are we missing a narrative in bitcoin because like it feels like every cycle there's some sort of dominant narrative and this time it seemed to be like every corporation was going to own Bitcoin. And then a ton of corporations put Bitcoin in the balance sheet and ended up trading at a discount. I think, you know, gold has the unit bias thing going for it, actually, because it's a lot easier to wrap your head around owning an ounce of gold than it is to wrap your head around owning a hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin. And I do think that for retail, the average person looks at, you know, Bitcoin price of a hundred, $125,000 and they just go, that's great, but that's completely out of my realm of potentiality here. And they don't realize that you can buy a fraction of Bitcoin. There's still a learning curve there. And so that's one of the forcing functions that pushes people towards treasuries or towards other things like gold, for instance. I also think gold is somewhat easier to wrap your mind around. And then listen like there there are you know I don even know if I want to bring this up I bring it up The quantum thing is an actual consideration in the mind of new investors I agree. Because if there's this boogeyman out there that's like, hey, this thing that, you know, is being sold to you as rock solid could potentially be obliterated within, you know, a period of, I don't know, five years time, 10 years time. How investable is it? Should you be investing? And what is the timeline? Is the timeline three years? Is it five? Is it 10? Is it 20? Is it bullshit? Is the error correction on quantum not real? What's the difference between a short range and long range attack? Like these things get confusing. They're confusing for me. And I've been in Bitcoin for a long time. So I think, you know, Nick Carter recently came out and talked about quantum. And that's been all over. And like, you know, at least now we're not talking about spam anymore. So we got something new to talk about. So that's been nice. Got that going for us. But I do think that he's right, that there is capital that's scared of quantum. I think Nick is being incredibly alarmist for engagement. But as someone who runs a fund that competes with his, he is correct in that we have heard this from large allocators. Like large allocators are thinking about it and there's not a real answer because I think the real answer is it's not a real concern right now. And it'll be fine. But that's not satisfying. What they want to see is they want to see some tangible technical option for people that want more quantum resistance. I mean, right now, if you hold Bitcoin and you're doing it under best practices, you're holding self-custody Bitcoin, you're not reusing addresses, you're very well protected from some kind of quantum breakthrough that is purely theoretical right now. But that's not an easy answer for them. I do think it's probably weighing down the market a little bit and it's adding a little bit more uncertainty where we already had uncertainty. And I think the key here, though, with gold is gold is not – I don't think it's a retail-driven rally. I think gold is institutional sovereigns. This is very, very large allocators. And for them, it's actually easier for them to allocate to gold. First of all, there's way less career risk. There's already a bunch of different avenues for large allocators to move into gold in size. The story is very clean. You know, it's a multi-thousand-year asset that has historically been a safe haven. And Bitcoin is, you know, is new. And it's hard to understand. The interesting thing, though, by the way, and I'll just hand up, probably first time in my life that I've ever felt any kind of gold FOMO. It's like everything we said is true, but gold and silver are fucking ripping, and I feel sidelined. I feel sidelined to a degree. There's no easy way for smaller people to allocate to gold. like i don't i don't even i was i joked about this on rabbit hole recap is like well i need like a btc sessions video on how to verify physical gold like i just assume that if i go out and try and buy physical gold in any reasonable size then it's going i'm probably going to get a bunch of chinese fakes and and to me bitcoin is is way easier to allocate in those middle ranges, like the $500,000 to $2 million ranges, you can go out and get self-custody Bitcoin on strike and have it fully verified in 30 minutes. By the way, the cheap, easy way to assay gold is you take an impact drill and you just drill into it. But doesn't that hurt the value? I mean, you're destroying some portion of the gold. Anyway, I decided to just just for it to be clear here I've decided that I'm not going to allocate to gold at all um and instead my bitcoin hedge is just large quantities of ammunition which is much easier to verify whiskey prescription pills ammunition absolutely I know you've got some gold around your neck right now uh Odell but we should talk about besides made x's jewelry we should talk about one thing because like I maybe I know you kind of get sick of the conversation that but like it from my perspective it probably will be true in my lifetime i'm not anywhere near competent enough to put a kind of time frame on it but i would imagine it happens in my lifetime and so i think we do need to start having the conversation in a reasonable way because like you saying that if you hold it in self-custody you're not reusing addresses like you're pretty safe but that's not really the big threat the big threat is like what happens to all the old coins what does that do to like the price of bitcoin so so yeah there's yeah correct there's two things So if you're concerned about quantum is someone stealing your own Bitcoin, you're going to be fine. We have some of the smartest minds in the world working on more advanced quantum protected schemes, signature schemes for Bitcoin that will be opt-in that people can move to if they want to. in the short to medium term, and that's like five to 20 years, the current hashed addresses on Segwit are probably fine, you know, because you're only subject to an attack at the point of spend. And so like you're like imagining someone with a theoretical like magic computer, basically, that is able to like attack you within 10 minutes to an hour, which is just not going to happen. So then what's the real concern that people have? The real concern people have, and these two things are mixed together, is old coins and lost coins. And the easy meme way to talk about this is Satoshi's Bitcoin. Satoshi's got a million Bitcoin that's just sitting out there for a quantum attacker. I, like, this is what you sign up for with Bitcoin. This is also what you sign up for with gold. Like, if someone steals someone's gold, it doesn't invalidate the gold's value prop. If someone steals someone's Bitcoin, it doesn't invalidate Bitcoin's value prop. We earlier in this year, people were cheering on the strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is literally designed to be built on stolen Bitcoin. And they cheer that on. But if for some reason, someone has a massive breakthrough and is able to create a quantum computer that actually fucking works, and they get some Bitcoin, which by the way, they can't dump in size without destroying the value that they created. people lose their fucking mind and and start advocating for seizures that we've never done in bitcoin's history bitcoin has gone 17 plus years without a single seizure and without a single transaction blocked at the protocol level like yes there's been seizures where people take people's private keys or governments come in and arrest you and put a gun to your head and force you to give them the private keys that's unavoidable that's in the physical realm but i as a as a digital protocol as an internet native protocol we've never had a seizure and we've never had any transaction block, 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. We 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'd fucking move my Bitcoin. You might actually force the market impact that you're so scared of because of that preemptive fear. Yeah. But when I say this is stuff we should be talking about, this is exactly what I mean. This is the important conversation to have because I think it's also really short cited from another way where it's one of the key values of bitcoin is property rights and the fact that you can't do anything with anyone else's bitcoin um and even if like there's going to be a portion of the market i 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. We had a full on block size war that was raging. There was a lot of uncertainty. There were all these airdrops, etc. 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. And 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 a 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. and 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 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 they haven't really gotten there on the technology side of being able to error correct the quantum state of these machines. And so that means they're not really useful in production yet, right? Now, there might be a breakthrough any moment or in a couple of years or whenever that makes that possible. But right now, it is still, it's a theoretical conversation, or 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. Because, you know, like one of the things that Nick Carter was saying is like, the devs are not paying attention, you know, whatever. But there was a whole, you know, conference about this, like talk about this at Presidio Bitcoin, where the devs were going over, you know, our highest level devs were going over the quantum threat. what the potentiality is, like, you know, what can be done? What are the types of schemes? Like Hunter Beast has done an incredible, amazing amount of work on this. Like 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. So 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. But it's not something you can just meme your way out of. So I think that's the message I'd like to get across to Bitcoiners on Twitter who are just like, oh, it's just FUD, bro. It could be a real thing in the future. It's just not a real thing right now. The real thing is going to be likely 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. But 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 decision to roll it back and give those coins back to the Ethereum Foundation and all the other holders. But that was the wrong, 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 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. That's right, 100% write off. So if you have $100,000 in capital gains or income, you can purchase $100,000 of miners and offset it entirely. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining Bitcoin right now without lifting a finger. blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low-cost power to configuring the pool they do it all you get to stack bitcoin at a discount every single day while also saving big come tax season get started today by going to mining.blockware solutions.com forward slash wbd of course none of this is tax advice speak to your accountant or tax advisor to understand how these rules apply to you and then head over to mining.blockware solutions.com forward slash wbd and you'll get one week of free hosting and electricity with each hosted miner purchased. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Ledin makes that possible. They're the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending and since 2018, they've issued over $9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets. With Ledin, you get full-costal loans with no credit checks or monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat. As of July 1st, Ledin is Bitcoin only, meaning they exclusively offer Bitcoin-backed loans with all collateral held by Ledin directly or their funding partners. Your Bitcoin is never lent out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Ledin. The whole process was super easy. The application took me less than 15 minutes and in a few hours I had the dollars in my account. It was really smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to ledin.io forward slash wbd and you'll get 0.25% off your first loan. That's leden.io forward slash WBD. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets. Complex setups, clumsy interfaces and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKey fixes that. BitKey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It 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 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 so 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 a shitty one. What's your take on Trump's entire first year? Oh my God, it's been... It's been wildly disappointing. just like the Bitcoin market. It's been disappointing. I think, you know, seems that the focus, I think the big thing that the Trump base feels is that the focus has been, um, 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. Um, like for instance, the deportation numbers are not as high as they should be. And so ice is doing tick tock 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, I don't know why you're trying to be cool on X instead of governing. Right. So or like, you know, we kind of seems like we have podcasters running the government, man, like 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 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. Like, 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, 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. Don't, you know what I mean? like maybe don't tweet that thing about the democrat senator you hate but um yeah it's been disappointing disappointing yeah i mean i agree with that like the funny thing is though as especially as an outsider you can't say anything negative about trump without like being told you have trump arrangement 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 going to 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 to apologize to you i forgive you matt but uh clearly people's opinions change i'll tell you when we when we when we chatted last i wasn't thinking about quantum as much and now I have to talk about it all the fucking time. Look, I think on the Trump side, first of all, way better than Harris. It's not even close. Absolutely not even close. We were on the verge of us and our friends and important businesses in Bitcoin throughout the country having the feds raid their houses at some point. 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. I think that's another easy tangible win for the administration on the Bitcoin side. I think, you know, 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 U.S. 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. So maybe it's Cope, maybe it's not. But I think there is a play where you see the strategic Bitcoin reserve stuff happen after him and his cronies have their bags fully packed. But as Hadle said we do technically have a strategic Bitcoin reserve It mostly just not selling Bitcoin that we already stolen I do not like that the precedent is being set that stolen Bitcoin is ceding the reserve and will be used to the reserve 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. But 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 legwork in Washington. And I'm very bullish on their team. And, you know, I think there are more policy wins ahead. I know they're working on a lot of stuff. obviously it's not so easy to get you know things accomplished in washington and it's a it's a big effort and it's a fucking you know daily grind you got to show up and really pound the pavement talk to people and shake hands and kiss babies um so yeah i think that we we are going to see more wins it's just you know we're going to have to be patient i will say um on the sbr side uh not only did we have technically the uh sbr get created uh but we also had a sovereign wealth fund get created and uh and the big one was i think we bought like 10 of intel um the u.s 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? I don't think that's the most far-fetched scenario to play out. And actually, it 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 a for them to steal coins when they can print currency. The reason that the Strategic Reserve is being seeded with stolen Bitcoin or 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. And to us, we see the negative long-term downstream consequences of that action. But to them, it was just like, hey, here's an easy one. Give the Bitcoiners this. 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 mstr shareholders and i do think matt's call is probably going to age well that there will be some type of relationship between microstrategy and the u.s government similar to the intel relationship but like my question on that though is like i do you have a like realistically be very honest do you have a fear that the u.s government steps in and tries to take strategies coins at some point um i 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. I 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 then 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. So you can come in. The shareholders would actually 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 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 U.S. government could also see the SBR by having a secret quantum computer that attacks Satoshi's Bitcoin. And it's interesting, like, 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. But with the proponents of the freezing stuff, if it changes depending on who seizes it, who steals the Bitcoin. If it's the U.S. 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 take 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. You 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. Like it was the absolute maximum I think they were up for. Do you think there's any chance, like 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. and 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 they 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. and Trump has got a bunch of things on this 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. Like 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. And 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 decryptor 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 I think there's a, like Matt said, the plea thing, by the way, is the norm. It 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 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 it doesn't 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? And 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, CoinJoin implementations, in my opinion, those were in a legal gray area. They had not been explicitly defined. And so I think it's actually, you know, 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. you 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. I think we need to make a lot of noise and try and make him care about this topic. But, Oda, was it frustrating that this only raised 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 super frustrating trying to build support for this stuff behind the scenes and in public while all the limelight was on name an influencer joining a treasury company board. Like that's literally just to get their piece, right? Like 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 like heroic. And people were like, 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. Now, 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. None 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. and 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 the US, but they're, I think both now back now. Um, and obviously like Trump gave people some degree of confidence that they could build this stuff without going to prison. But 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 coin joint implementations. huh so yeah i would just say i will just say i don't know if that pivot was only because of of legal concerns because if i'm going to make another call like i i think privacy focused ai will might become even more of a hot button issue than privacy focused financial transactions but um time i'm not sure that was for you know yeah i 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. Most of the successes we've seen in the industry is financial services, is buy, sell Bitcoin, is loans. That's where you see the real business opportunities, right? Like strike is absolutely crushing. 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 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 in either situation. And on the Phoenix and the Wild of Satoshi side, because 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, but those aren't privacy focused wallets. Like you don't really get, you're getting no privacy benefits really from using wallet satoshi it's relatively easy to track particularly in their new configuration and with phoenix like 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 um 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 uh you know it's a coin join implementation that doesn't rely on a a centralized server, but it's completely open source. There 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. It'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. And 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 there. 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 I do think the cat's out of the bag though I think it's it's gonna you know I I I think freedom freedom technology will be there for people who want to 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 which is non-zero, but not likely, is some kind of near-term cap gains policy shift. If Bitcoin is not subject to cap gains, and I'm not talking about like, and this is so unlikely because of the bullshit, 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. And 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 percent of it. And it's across the whole in America, it's across the whole stack, right? Like the local governments take some to see 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 those, which is 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 and 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 they're intrinsic to Bitcoin and really it's just laws on paper. The problem here, again, is that there's this global cabal that sets the rules. Whenever you have a revolution of elites, it about rulemaking Who allowed to set rules for whom Who allowed to change rules who sits at the table of power And there 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 the club. So it's going to take some time as we march forward, change, 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. 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, 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, uh, I will be here during the shadow co-option period. And, you know, there'll be an old version of American huddle 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. It'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. And 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 tax 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. So 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 unless we see that, which is still, I think, very unlikely, there's going to 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. But yeah, 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. But like 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, you know, 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 frog proverbial frog boiling in the pot slowly then they don't actually get shocked into moving away from it Matt I know you've got a hard stop coming up soon ish I got 40 minutes should we do some predictions for next year? The one I really want from you Matt is what year will we hit 250k by conference day? I said 200K by conference day, and that was in 2021. Okay, so when will we get that? Honestly, it was mostly, originally it was mostly to troll the engagement accounts. We just made fun of Tom Lee. They all do this, right? Samson and his Omega candle, they do it every fucking cycle. It 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 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 that would be nice i'd be down for that i'm all in on bitcoin and then some so uh that would be ideal but i don't pretend to it 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. You know, sentiment is shit. Sentiment is something the worst I've ever seen it, honestly. And I don't think sentiment was this bad during FTX, at least not amongst the Bitcoin faithful. I was at a Bitcoin beefsteak at 15K Bitcoin, like 16K Bitcoin. And this was after the FTX implosion. And vibes were high, actually. People were playing guitar. And we were having drinks. There was a calm energy of, we're going to win. And now there's this energy, even amongst OGs I know, that's like, this is fucked. We should just sell all our shit and just be rich. Fuck 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 OGs, 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 I get it because this year has been just a slog. It's just been really shitty. But again, like with FTX, there's this magical thing that happens when 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. And it's like, boom, we're on to 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 and like when ftx collapsed like i think there's two things that play into that is one that you're thinking well thank fuck i wasn't on ftx i 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 will say, gun to my head, I agree with HODL. My family's all in Bitcoin. If I wasn't bullish for next year, if I thought we were entering a two-year bear market or whatever, I would downsize significantly. I will also say, though, I've never successfully done that ever. So I'm right there with HODL that I'm just always bullish. I think this year, with sentiment, it's really interesting. I've been thinking about this, too, because it does feel that way, which is crazy, by the way, because we are fucking right. Bitcoin'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. Gold ripping really kicks a lot of us in the nuts. And it kicks me in the fucking nuts. I mean, what Hodel was saying is like, like shift being happy on Twitter and stuff while we're in this doldrum, it really sucks. And silver, right? Like is Bitcoin silver to silver to silver? Like that sucks. Like what the fuck is that? So I think that hurts. I think the second piece is, you know, after 2017, so like, so Ethereum was born in I think like 2014, 2015. 2017 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 like 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 the 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 we got poor together treasury companies changed that whole ball game different people are getting rich and different people are getting poor at different times with different bags and you just don't have the camaraderie of getting rich and poor together like that was the to me that was the final nail in the coffin of the good times of the bitcoin only culture. Like it's just over. Like we don't have that anymore. That's it. It was going to end anyway. I think, you know, like 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 leveraged 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 they got wrecked all and and they're all in different 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 um i'll put my neck on the line 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 government picking winners, it's picked AI and data centers, and I think Bitcoin could potentially be one of those winners that the government picks. Do 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 pull us at. Do you know what that would be? It's much higher than we're at right now. 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 five days. In five days. That's how big gold added a full Bitcoin market cap. Yeah, I don't know if we'll get to like 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, isn't it? Should I go the opposite direction? I'm bearish as fuck. This is the most bearish. I saw Treasury Co's and now I'm eating ramen. I'm dying over here. You need this year to be born. That's part of my most bearish what Bitcoin did in like six years. This felt like a bit of a therapy session. All right, guys. Anything else you want to talk on before we wrap up? Let me think. Oh, yeah. Okay. Hoddling gets harder as you go. There's a false perception that hoddling gets easier as you go. Bullshit. It gets harder. It gets harder every time. And the reason why is because I've said this, the most important meme in Bitcoin is the one with the guy with the shotgun in his mouth. And it's like, Bitcoin hits 1,000 and he's like, yes. And then it's like, Bitcoin drops to 10,000. It's like, he's worried. And then it's like, Bitcoin plummets to just 100,000. He 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. But later on, you're losing a lot because like if you bought Bitcoin at $200, well, nowadays, the Bitcoin price fluctuates $200 like 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 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 become a Bitcoin rich person. You're going to retire and then you're going to lose these large sums of money every day. And what you're actually losing is like peace of mind, time with your family, 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. And 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 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. You know what I'm saying? Have less attachment to things and experiences and whatever and just focus on the small things and be grateful. I think the times like this in Bitcoin, again, this sounds like we're at the bottom of a bear market the way I'm speaking. $88,000. Yeah, I know. Times like this in Bitcoin are time or it's time for gratitude and 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, etc. 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. So 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, this is another thing. I don't think people know about this, but a lot of OGs moved to Puerto Rico in 2015 and then those coins got season this year and they didn't have to pay any cap gains on it. So they fucking divested. 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. Or 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 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 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. I'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 100K was a pretty good trade. Even if they paid cap gains, they're in the black right now. And 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 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. If we're going to do a year in review, like this all started with Trump coin. They had Melania coin. And I think it left a really sour taste in people's mouths 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. It just feels like we're whipsawing back and forth over and over again. but look my analysis has always been very consistent I 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 sats and not chase you know 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 on the positive side I think this has been a very good year in terms of like fundamental Bitcoin value. It's easier than ever to use Bitcoin in a freedom-oriented way. You have way more tools available to you. The businesses in the space are starting to really become real businesses. We're seeing some juggernauts being born, basically. The one that I'm constantly in the trenches with is Strike, and it's just been insane watching that company go from like a small startup to what I expect to be like a fintech juggernaut. You know, mentioned in the same circles as Robinhood and the big banks and whatnot. But look, 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. Best 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 is good even though the price is the most important metric so I'm optimistic, I'm cautiously optimistic people should stay humble and stack stats and don't take your foot off the gas Let's go Our year in the view wrapped we'll definitely do this 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 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 let's go thank you guys I'll speak to you both soon Thank you.