[00:03:27] Joe Carlasare: to bring charges, right? But they kind of want to sort of dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. And then the confusing thing came is then in the spring, right? We got those back to back lawsuits. And I remember being on podcasts with you where boom, we get the Binance suit and then boom, we get the Coinbase suit back to back within a couple of days.

[00:03:43] Joe Carlasare: And that’s really confusing, right? Because usually what happens in these types of investigations, Preston, is that criminal moves first and civil always takes a back seat. The traffic ticket sort of civil penalties that the SEC brings, those are never going to be as impactful as criminal charges where they’re hauling you away in handcuffs and, you know, you’re facing sometime behind bars.

[00:04:04] Joe Carlasare: So, you know, me and some other lawyers in the space were chatting about this. We’re like, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I mean, in the CFTC suit against finance, there was actually a allegation that they knowingly aided and abetted funds being transferred to Hamas and to terrorists. And so if you’re doing that, if you’re knowingly engaging in money laundering, particularly for hostile actors, for nation states like Iran who have negative views of the United States, that violates numerous international and federal laws.

[00:04:32] Joe Carlasare: And obviously you’re doing that knowingly catering to U. S. customers, which gives the DOJ its hook. What was happening? Why did, why was the SEC and why was the CFTC given the green light to go file these charges? Well, we know the answer now. The answer was because even at that point in the spring, they had been in an active investigations, active negotiations rather with Binance and staff to say, you’re going to pay something.

[00:04:55] Joe Carlasare: Okay. You can come kicking and screaming, and we’re going to find you wherever you are and extradite you back to the United States, even though you claim you’re not subject to US jurisdiction. Or you can come with us and come along and let’s negotiate some agreement. You may not like, you may not be comfortable with, but at least you can live with, and you might, you know, not have the same fate as someone like SBF.

[00:05:14] Joe Carlasare: So that’s an easy calculus, right? That’s an easy thing. If you’re facing certain prosecution from the U S government to continue negotiations. And that’s why DOJ probably said, we’re close enough on a deal that we’re going to green light this and say, you guys go ahead, SEC, CFTC, you do your thing because we’re going to probably get this guy to plea.

[00:05:32] Joe Carlasare: So that’s what happened.

[00:05:33] Preston Pysh: Good Lord. So then the amount, the 4 million dollars, how is something like that even determined?

[00:05:40] Joe Carlasare: So there’s a whole memorandum that’s put in place by the government, why they’re recommending it. And it’s basically a percentage of the laundered money. They, I don’t have all the numbers, some of which are still protected by seal, but I think the idea is that you’re taking a certain upper threshold of what is in fact, And it’s negotiated, right?

[00:05:57] Joe Carlasare: It’s not necessarily the whole full amount, but they’re going to say, we can, we can agree to this and we will support this if the government backs the police. So I think there was some calculation where they said it based on some conservative estimates. It was like 25 to 30 percent of the laundered money.

[00:06:11] Joe Carlasare: That’s how they came up with that calculation. Now, keep in mind, that’s the government’s recommendation. Usually the court will defer to the government on sentencing recommendations, but not always. And we do know that there is some dispute still that remains between the government and between CZ’s lawyers, right?

[00:06:27] Joe Carlasare: Most notably, there was a request from CZ’s lawyers where he said, let him leave the country, let him go back when he’s pending sentencing, that doesn’t come until February. And guess what? The judge said, no, I’m going to look at this issue and for now, you’re about to stay in the United States.

[00:06:41] HODL: I think a big question I have, and a lot of people have is is CZ actually going to see time inside of an American prison for this?

[00:06:50] HODL: Okay. So what kind of, what kind of time will he be looking at, at sentencing?

[00:06:55] Joe Carlasare: Well, the government in some file documents said that they’re going to, they’re going to go for a closer to the maximum statutory amount. So, you know, it might be again, if I asked me what’s the judge is going to do. I think it’s a couple of years at most, probably less, you know, I think 18 months makes a lot of sense given his cooperative nature.

[00:07:14] Joe Carlasare: Keep in mind, he did the exact opposite of what SPF did. And if you recall at the time, there’s no way SPF doesn’t plead. They’ve got him dead to rights on the facts. Well, CZ’s taken the opposite approach. He voluntarily came to the United States, they didn’t have to extradite him, he showed his face in a federal courtroom.

[00:07:32] Joe Carlasare: said, I plead guilty. I’m not disputing any of these. He’s going out of his way to try and be cooperative with the government. That’s a huge factor for the judge. The judge is definitely going to take that into consideration. That being said, you know, he knowingly helped get money in the hands of terrorists.

[00:07:46] Joe Carlasare: He also knowingly helped Iran evade, you know international rule of law to prevent, you know, money laundering. So he does face serious, serious charges and the government’s probably going to, you know, try to stretch it out a little bit more than he would like. The government, like I said, they’re, they’re going to go for years of time.

[00:08:02] Joe Carlasare: I think most likely though, the judge is going to be very lenient on him.

[00:08:06] Preston Pysh: But he didn’t donate a billion dollars to all the politicians on both sides. Right. But maybe that, maybe that was the, why the approach was different.

[00:08:14] HODL: Well, remember that text message also, or it was a signal message, I think that said, LOL, bro, we are literally financing terrorists.

[00:08:21] HODL: I mean, when you have an admission that’s that glaring yeah, you, you just have to play. There’s nothing else you can do.

[00:08:28] Preston Pysh: Right. I wasn’t even aware of that. This is, this is CZ that had that. I’m not aware of this.

[00:08:32] HODL: It was Binance employees on an internal signal chat.

[00:08:36] Preston Pysh: No way.

[00:08:37] HODL: Seriously, dead serious.

[00:08:39] Joe Carlasare: Wow. The complaint’s stunning. I mean, the, the amount of text messages and CZ, CZ’s signal that they were able to get is just amazing. It was a done deal. I think when the CFTC’s complaint was filed, that there was going to be some charges coming. The only question is, you know, what variety of them, what plea was going to be negotiated.

[00:09:00] Joe Carlasare: But yeah, I mean, it was, it wasn’t, there’s no defense for that, right? When you, we, there’s actually a text, another one that says, you know, we see the bad and we look the other way. I’m paraphrasing, but effectively like they knew that this was money laundering. They knew it was an unregistered exchange and they ignored it entirely.

[00:09:17] Preston Pysh: I guess like a tangential question here is like, if this is happening on Signal, how in the world are they acquiring these texts?

[00:09:25] HODL: Dude, I personally, let me go full tinfoil hat, I have always thought that Signal is a cutout for an intelligence agency because I don’t know if you remember this, but the FBI put out a list some years ago that were like here are all the encrypted chat apps that we don’t have access to.

[00:09:40] HODL: And it’s like Signal. Yeah, we can’t get that one, bro. Go ahead and use it criminals. Like to me, almost like an advertisement. Yeah. If you have one side of the Signal, if you have access to somebody’s phone on the other side, You can break the encryption that way. It’s pretty easy, right? So you just nab, nab up a low level employee and take their phone and go through all their messes.

[00:09:58] Preston Pysh: On a side note, I see Jack Dorsey and others on Noster promoting Simple X. I’ve played around with it a little bit, and I mean, it. There’s no KYC from what I can muster. I did download it out of the app store. So, you know, I guess there’s some type of connection there that Apple would know that I’ve downloaded that app.

[00:10:18] Preston Pysh: But the setup was definitely different than a lot of these messaging apps. Whenever I did set it up, I don’t know if you guys have played around with it. Sorry.

[00:10:26] HODL: I think anybody, I mean, you know, Joe’s the attorney. I’m sure he’ll echo this thought, but Anybody who’s out there using Signal because it’s, you know, it’s encrypted and you can just like, Oh yeah, bro.

[00:10:36] HODL: Let’s talk about financing Hamas over Signal. Probably not wise.

[00:10:41] Joe Carlasare: I mean, listen, in cases I’ve been involved with people think because they’re sending it over Signal, there’s no way it gets out, which is just nonsense, right? Because there are numerous ways that if you compromise someone who’s getting the message, they can preserve it.

[00:10:53] Joe Carlasare: right? They can, they can take a screenshot of it. They can take a photo of it and they could preserve it. So, so it doesn’t really get you off the hook once something is right in writing and no matter how encrypted or how secure it can always be compromised. But one more, I want to give to you Preston for the audience here.

[00:11:05] Joe Carlasare: This, this, this is from the CFTC complaint. It was actually referenced in the government sentencing memorandum. In February of 2019, going back to 2019, the Chief Compliance Officer, Samuel Lim, LAM of Binance says regarding Hamas transactions, Lim explained that terrorists usually send small sums as large sums constitute money laundering, and then his colleague replied, who, they don’t name the colleague, which is interesting, but it says, can barely buy an AK Like, come on, they are here for crime.

[00:11:36] Joe Carlasare: We see the bad, but we close two eyes. That’s a quote from some messages that they’re getting from the chief compliance officer at Binance.

[00:11:42] HODL: Wow. I like how even the terrorists are aware of structuring, they’re structuring it under the limit. Yeah. Hilarious.

[00:11:51] Preston Pysh: I want to go a little bit outside of this particular topic, but it’s tied to the Senator Warren letter that she wrote to the president.

[00:12:01] Preston Pysh: which was immediately followed by this FinCEN proposal that like the next day and in her letter to the president, she was wielding around this Wall Street Journal article that, you know, was claiming that 120 million was being siphoned through crypto to Hamas and then chain analysis came out, I want to say like four or five days later and the number was more like, I think it was 450, 000, which is like a third of a percent.

[00:12:30] Preston Pysh: of what she was claiming. When you look at this FinCEN proposal, I don’t know how much you’ve gone through it, Joe, but it is really substantial. Like the ambiguity in this thing, and I guess it’s nested under the, the Patriot Act. Is that, is that correct? The update to it?

[00:12:47] Joe Carlasare: Well, the proposal to it. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s FinCEN regulations in itself, but the Patriot Act has some internal US rule by making, but FinCEN at large has also has its own regulatory authority.

[00:13:00] Preston Pysh: I’m looking at this and my concern is they’ve made it so broad. And so overarching that you could pretty much lump anything into it. So if you’re a full node operator and they don’t like the fact that you have five channels open to other nodes, like all of a sudden you’re now a money transmitter. But like the, these definitions that they put into this thing and the sheer amount of legal horsepower that it’s going to take to fight anything that they want to kind of throw at whoever they want.

[00:13:30] Preston Pysh: I think becomes a major issue if it doesn’t go through the way that it’s currently proposed. And I know the comment period is going out to the 22nd of January for people to respond to this. I’m trying to type up something that kind of addresses, they had like 30 or 40 questions that they proposed to the public to respond to in their public record.

[00:13:52] Preston Pysh: for this proposal. I’m trying to address all of these questions and put it out there on Twitter for people to kind of look at, template. If they like it, they can post it right into the register to respond to some of these questions and some of the points that are being proposed in this FinCEN proposal.

[00:14:07] Preston Pysh: I want to hear your point of view on this, because that’s my point of view. I think that it’s just, they’ve taken a million pounds of crap, threw it against the wall, and like, it’s just going to stick, like, there’s no way you can clean it all off, like, it’s just there, it’s, there’s so much to try to respond to, and the burden of proof is now on, on anybody in this space to try to defend themselves.

[00:14:29] Joe Carlasare: I work both in Bitcoin and represent some crypto clients as well. And we’ve had talks about this at length, and I think what everybody who’s listening to this, if they’re involved in the Bitcoin space should have in their mental model is that there will be laws that are passed internationally, nationally, state level, local level that are overbroad, that are vague, that are confusing, that will not withstand scrutiny when challenged from a judicial perspective. What I mean by that is that a government regulator has an invested interest to craft the broadest possible legislation, the broadest possible rulemaking, because they don’t want to have to be in a situation where they don’t have the teeth to do what they need to do.

[00:15:08] Joe Carlasare: Now, problem with that, and we see this in many industries, they see this in the insurance contacts with some of my clients. When you have a very broad law that is confusing, that is vague, it is welcoming challenges, okay? And the way to fight back against this, I truly believe, and two might disagree with this, is the court system.

[00:15:28] Joe Carlasare: The court system is very willing to strike down laws that are void, that are vague, avoid for vagueness, that are overbroad, that basically capture innocent activity. And the court system has sort of a hacksaw where they can cut away at some of these provisions to clean them up. And I think from the regulator’s perspective, they’ll say, that’s fine.

[00:15:48] Joe Carlasare: We’ll take the legitimate challenges, and if the courts want to pare back our authority, so be it. But that’s the way I think this goes. I think it goes with overbroad, vague statutes that are passed, so there’s no doubt they have something to use to go after these folks. And then at the end, they say, yeah, all the legitimate folks, they’re going to have to bring legal challenges to cut this thing up and make exceptions from a judicial perspective, have a judge basically make the exceptions to protect the innocent activity.

[00:16:14] HODL: I totally agree with Joe’s perspective. And I do think that like, this is a serious era of Bitcoin where we’re going to have to fight for Bitcoin’s existence. Not in the shadow realm, not, not in the gray market, but you know, in the white market, in the light, like Bitcoin has to, basically nobody gets a free pass in America.

[00:16:32] HODL: You have to fight for every right all the time. Like the price of freedom is constant vigilance. Nowhere is that more true than in Bitcoin. So like everybody who thinks they’re going to cypherpunk their way out of it. I think if you look at the Canadian situation, which we all had some friends get caught up in, yes, your Bitcoin is permissionless and it can cross borders and it can do amazing things.

[00:16:51] HODL: But you are a meat puppet who lives on government land, and if the government wants to suddenly, you know, retroactively call you a terrorist for sending some money to some, you know, nice Canadians, unfortunately, that’s a reality that you have to deal with, and that’s a reality that’s coming for all of us, I think, with these FinCEN regulations and other overarching regulations that I expect in the future, because dox Bitcoiners.

[00:17:15] HODL: And it’s not going to stop trying to tax Bitcoiners. It wants to get those two things done, and you know, it’s going to be successful to some degree.

[00:17:23] Joe Carlasare: And just, just to think about this, okay, and I don’t mean to get all political on this, but people should be aware of it in their mental models when it comes to Bitcoin.

[00:17:29] Joe Carlasare: There was numerous mask mandates that were put in place, okay, by local authorities, by the CDC. Those things were put in place by lawmakers and regulators who thought that this is essential for health and human safety. This is essential for the country to operate. And the judiciary eventually looked at these things.

[00:17:49] Joe Carlasare: Just case law in Florida and many other states where they basically struck them down. They said, these things violate and exceed your authority. So the reason I bring it up not to go down a dangerous path that’s controversial is because if they’re going to do that with health and human safety, with a, with a national epidemic or pandemic.

[00:18:06] Joe Carlasare: If they’re going to do that with that, what do you expect for Bitcoin? Right? You should expect in your mental model, draconian, overbroad legislation, regulation that you need to challenge through the legal process. And thank God we live in the United States where there’s an active judiciary that will hold the feet to the fire.

[00:18:20] Joe Carlasare: And this Supreme court, okay, has displayed consistently a tendency. to err on the side of liberty and freedom. That’s one thing that the United States has going for it is the United States Supreme Court is currently constituted is very much focused on individual rights and liberties. So that’s one thing from your perspective you might want to consider.

[00:18:39] Preston Pysh: The way I’ve been trying to approach this, and this is where I guess I need your help, or just kind of your, your opinion or point of view. Everything you said is, is exactly how I am seeing it play out. So I’m thinking, all right, so if we can put as many comments into the, into the register, when they have the public comment and we’re commenting, Hey, this is violating, you know, this particular piece because of this, all these case law that have, you have this precedence.

[00:19:07] Preston Pysh: You’re breaching my rights as a citizen because of X, Y, and Z, and you’re listing it out as, as, you know, let’s say we have a thousand, I think there’s already over a thousand comments on this proposal, but like, let’s say there’s high quality comments that are pulling case law, does that provide ammunition to these businesses that are going to be battling this on the other FinCEN, This person here, Joe Schmo, on the, back in 2023, was pointing out that this case law was violating this right.

[00:19:43] Preston Pysh: Like, they knew it, they passed it. Does that help their case?

[00:19:47] Joe Carlasare: Yes.

[00:19:47] Preston Pysh: It does?

[00:19:48] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. It helps everyone’s case because here’s what happens. When you make a regulation, and there’s numerous different regulatory bodies that have a tremendous amount of power. You know, the sort of shadow government, as people say, like the regulatory state, when they’re doing a rule change, and this goes for all levels of government, and you have public comment, and you’re soliciting public comment, that becomes part of the official record, and what ideally occurs, and this is not always the case, but what ideally occurs if there are legitimate, high quality comments like you’re saying, The regulators should respond to those concerns.

[00:20:21] Joe Carlasare: They should say, well, this isn’t a concern, you know, these types of legitimate activities shouldn’t be affected because of X, Y, Z. So then what happens is when you’re actually as a legal challenge and you have a plaintiff who has standing and can say, no, no, you were wrong. Your response to the comments was wrong.

[00:20:39] Joe Carlasare: It was misguided. You didn’t understand the technology. You didn’t understand the second and third order effects. Then you have something to literally point to when you’re in a legal challenge saying not only were they warned of this by numerous people through the comment period, but their response to the comments was insufficient.

[00:20:55] Joe Carlasare: They could basically glossed over it and ignored it, which to me, if I’m looking at something, depending on the type of challenges being brought, if you’re a judge and you see that, that they not only, it’s not just like an unintentional consequence, this is something you overlooked as a regulator, I would hold their feet to the fire.

[00:21:10] Joe Carlasare: It’d be a little bit, I would apply more scrutiny to them and their process. If they purposely ignored legitimate comments made by good actors, trying to be comprehensive.

[00:21:19] HODL: Now they’re going to do it anyway, though. I mean, like Henry, Henry Kissinger just died today. And there’s a quote from him. I think of often, which is the illegal we do right away.

[00:21:29] HODL: The unconstitutional takes a little longer. That’s Kissinger. Right. So like, they’re going to do it right. And we’re going to have to continue to fight it in the court. And Joe’s going to make a lot of money because, you know, we’ll fund it.

[00:21:41] Joe Carlasare: Well, yeah, I mean, listen, this is, this is the biggest, you know, I’ll just go on one, one digression.

[00:21:45] Joe Carlasare: Okay. The idea that we’re going to be able to become the backbone of the global financial system, and you won’t have Bitcoiners stand up and won’t have them fight for it. I think is just naive, right? You’re going to have, and by the way, by the way, the ETFs are a big part of that process, right? As you have an ETF come to market, you now have more firepower from a legal and regulatory standpoint.

[00:22:08] Joe Carlasare: Those folks that are going to go in there and advocate, because guess what? We have clients now that have this money and it’s part of our assets under management. We have to go fight for it. This is all part of the big process. So aside from, you know, the guys saying, well, we, everybody should just self custody Bitcoin.

[00:22:22] Joe Carlasare: I get it, I understand that, I’m sympathetic to that, but having big entities being willing to put legal firepower and spokesman firepower behind these talking points, that’s going to be huge.

[00:22:33] Preston Pysh: I’m going to prove my psychopathic tendencies here. I’ve been working on a response to this FinCEN thing for probably two weeks.

[00:22:42] Preston Pysh: Just I think I’m at like page 35 on this thing and still not done. And I’m just trying to, I guess what I’m trying to do is just create a turnkey template for people that they can kind of pour through this thing and they’re just like, I’m really passionate about this particular right that’s being violated.

[00:23:00] Preston Pysh: Here’s the case law that, that backs up why it’s being violated. And it just gives them something that they can copy and paste like straight into the register on the proposal. So. I’m not a lawyer, but I am leveraging AI as best as I can. And I mean, it’s kind of insane to be able to kind of interact with almost like a lawyer in your pocket.

[00:23:20] Preston Pysh: Now, obviously it’s, it’s not up to Joe’s caliber or anything, but it’s definitely good at being able to help me digest all the legal jargon in the proposal itself. and to kind of be able to go back and forth to like try to find nuggets in all of this. So any advice, Joe, or yes.

[00:23:38] Joe Carlasare: So I think the biggest advice when you’re dealing with legal advice, don’t give me legal advice.

[00:23:43] Joe Carlasare: No, no, no, no, no, no. I appreciate that. No, but, but the, the, the, the best recommendation I can give you just from a policy standpoint, and this goes at every level. Okay. And this will be a continual battle we have over the years, both with state and local and federal lawmakers. is that when, when you start from the position of what the government is trying to do, right?

[00:24:04] Joe Carlasare: You have to sort of confront that head on. And I think right here, what is the primary goal? I don’t think you should ascribe to them that they’re really just, even if they are right from a persuasion standpoint, whether they’re trying to crush the technology, they’re trying to inhibit Bitcoin. adoption. I think you should approach it, listen, you want to make sure bad actors aren’t avoiding, you know, money laundering requirements, aren’t avoiding KYC, aren’t committing horrible bad acts.

[00:24:29] Joe Carlasare: Well, here’s how you do it, right? Here’s how I would propose a framework that would prevent that from happening. And you try to have a softer touch. Okay? So the advice or recommendation I would give the folks on a policy standpoint of doing this and trying to engage with regulators Here’s the alternative Preston that you would recommend because the idea that they’re just going to stay hands off when at least, you know, if there’s 40 million that’s going to terrorists, I think they still propose a rule.

[00:24:54] Joe Carlasare: It can be, you know, your argument’s spot on about how it’s such a tiny amount in reality that Elizabeth Warren and others are focused on. But that’s, it could be a dollar. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to go after it because it’s a very easy target and it doesn’t have the support of other industries.

[00:25:08] Joe Carlasare: Preston Pysh, this was my frustration.

[00:25:11] Preston Pysh: So a month I think it was in October, the U S had sent 6 billion to Iran. Then you’d look at the news that followed this. And it was like, no, actually we were holding it back. And then you read it depending on what political bias you had. You could find an article that suggested whether it was sent or that it wasn’t sent.

[00:25:35] Preston Pysh: And like, the irony to me is you had this chain analysis that took place and they’re like, No, it was actually 450, 000 that was sent and like, here’s the proof because this is a public ledger and everybody can look at it. Meanwhile. You have 6 billion, which is 60 times larger than the lie. That was three tenths of the amount, which was 400, 000, right?

[00:26:00] Preston Pysh: That we have no idea whether Iran got it or not. Like the irony of that. And that we’re dealing with these ledgers, these money ledgers that are behind barriers that you have no idea what the heck’s happening is like the ultimate irony of the entire letter to the president. Right? Like, it’s just, like, there’s, there’s moments like that where I’m just like, am I living in crazy town?

[00:26:24] Preston Pysh: Like, this whole system is so corrupted. It’s, it’s nuts. Like, we can’t usher this stuff in fast enough.

[00:26:32] HODL: I think we as Bitcoiners have gotten so used to transparency that when we go back and reflect on the current system, which is largely narrative driven, we, we look at it and just go, this is bizarre. It doesn’t make any sense.

[00:26:47] HODL: I can’t, but you know, we all used to live in that. And that was like the dogma that pervaded our life. And it was just every day you read the New York times and the wall street journal and basically whatever they said was gospel. And you just said, okay, yeah, I guess that’s what’s happening. But we now have the ability to check on chain exactly how much money went to Hamas.

[00:27:02] HODL: Now, again, to Joe’s point, you know, the old world, the elites, they still live in a narrative driven economy. And Elizabeth Warren is like, you shouldn’t even exist. We should be able to crush you, destroy your industry.

[00:27:14] Joe Carlasare: It’s just like the Bitcoin mining debate. You can make all these analogies about how little as a percentage of the global energy consumption Bitcoin uses and how it’s positive for the grid and all these things.

[00:27:24] Joe Carlasare: But you’re talking to someone who thinks this activity shouldn’t exist, period. That it’s a wasted activity. And so it’s not going to be, in my view, it’s not going to be effective when you make the argument. Well, Christmas lights use up more, more energy, electricity than Bitcoin, because they would say, well, we like Christmas lights.

[00:27:40] Joe Carlasare: They have, they have a purpose, right? Like, we, we like to dress up our houses, Bitcoin mining, it’s just wasteful. Nobody needs an open distributed ledger that can’t be corrupted and has no single point of failure. That argument doesn’t hold water with us.

[00:27:51] Preston Pysh: Because most people don’t have any savings, right?

[00:27:54] Preston Pysh: Like, so if you’re not able to retain any savings because you’re in debt up to your eyeballs and you’re playing the debt game, you’re, of course, you’re not going to understand Bitcoin. You have nothing to save. Right? Like, and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that that’s the majority of the populace around the world because most people around the world are debt slaves at this point.

[00:28:14] Preston Pysh: They can’t save any money. They have no disposable income. Bitcoin is that technology for people that have disposable income that are producing more than they consume.

[00:28:26] Joe Carlasare: So, yeah, which is why UBI is the most bullish thing for Bitcoin ever. I mean, right. That’s why I want to talk about this UBI once we get there, which I think we will, at least many countries will that’s incredibly bullish for Bitcoin, right?

[00:28:38] Joe Carlasare: Cause you’re putting money right into people’s hands directly and they can then transfer it into Bitcoin, which is harder than the asset they’re being given.

[00:28:46] HODL: Well, and again, UBI is the Trojan horse for the CBDC, because people will go, why should I accept this controlled state money?

[00:28:53] Joe Carlasare: Other way around. The CBDC is the Trojan horse.

[00:28:56] HODL: CBDC is the Trojan horse that comes with UBI, yeah. I mean, people will basically say, why should I accept this controlled state money that has time decays on it? And the answer is going to be because, yo, you’re getting a thousand bucks. That’s pretty sweet, man. Go buy a kayak or whatever, you know, right? So like, most people are just going to opt for the short term incentive there.

[00:29:15] HODL: And I’m not going to think about the long term ramifications. And that’s, what’s going to drive the divide between the producers and the consumers in society is because the consumers are going to be getting all the coupons and the net producers are going to be holding the Bitcoin. And then we’re like, yeah, I don’t, I don’t accept that.

[00:29:32] Preston Pysh: I don’t want that. Yeah. So. Let’s talk about, there was this post recently by Andrew Abacus, and he, every time he posts, he’s, he’s posting about Barry Silbert, and DCG, and Genesis, and GBTC, and recently his, his post that he just came out with is, I mean, he’s, he’s not mincing any words here, he’s basically saying DCG continues to run a PR games and a fraud via subsidiaries like Genesis.

[00:30:05] Preston Pysh: I’ve heard people say that there’s a bunch of marketing that they’re seeing on GBTC again. They continue to suck all these fees out of the GBTC product, which is this trust, the Bitcoin trust. And, but the rest of the entire architecture of, of Barry’s business is bankrupt and they have huge amounts of liabilities that far exceed their assets.

[00:30:28] Preston Pysh: Either one of you guys, like, do you have a take on this is my real question on this is if you’re Larry Fink or BlackRock or any of these big Wall Street major players on Wall Street, are you trying to convince, and I know Joe’s point of view on this is he doesn’t think that there’s any type of coordination between the SEC and big Wall Street banks, but I know HODL, you, you have a much more tinfoil hat opinion like I do.

[00:30:56] Preston Pysh: If I’m those guys, I’m trying to get them to fumble this 620, 000 Bitcoin out of that trust so that I can, I can buy it at existing spot prices. Joe’s already rolling his head.

[00:31:09] HODL: I’m going to, I’m going to add some more tinfoil here and then we’ll let Joe tell us how stupid we are. But you know, I do think that BlackRock has a big problem here, which is GBTC is obviously the market leader.

[00:31:21] HODL: They have like some ungodly amount of Bitcoin, or whatever. Right. You know, it is the golden goose of Barry’s empire. If you remember a year ago, the big FUD item of the bear market was bro, what if all the GBTC is fake Bitcoin, right? Like, what if they don’t have it? What if they lent it all out? That was the big FUD item, right?

[00:31:40] HODL: And I actually went through some diligence on that with a friend and then we both decided, nah, they have it. And then we, we made buys at the bottom, which turned out to be really good buys. But, you know, if you’re BlackRock, if you’re Larry Finck, you got to get your hand on some significant amount of Bitcoin to be the market leader here.

[00:31:55] HODL: And there’s really no way you can do that without running the price. So, listen, I’m not alleging that there is some sort of a conspiracy here, but It’s a big club and I don’t think Barry Silbert is in it, you know what I mean? Like, and I don’t think they want to let Barry Silbert in it. I agree. I don’t know.

[00:32:10] HODL: I don’t know the kind of massaging and, you know, unspoken agreements that go on, you know, we’re in the smoky room and okay, now Joe can tell us how you know, the logistics actually are.

[00:32:19] Preston Pysh: I agree with you, HODL. I’m with you. Let’s hear Joe’s point of view.

[00:32:24] Joe Carlasare: Okay, Grayscale is probably most responsible for the ETF that’s going to come in January.

[00:32:31] Joe Carlasare: And you have to start with that position because Grayscale defeated the SEC under a very high standard that was difficult to meet, proving that their treatment of the spot product was arbitrary and capricious. Grayscale met just a few weeks ago, actually, just at the, I think it was the later part of October and into November, maybe they actually met with the SEC and they pointed out to the SEC that they had something called the the transfer agent agreement with BNY Mellon, which will allow them to convert to the spot ETF.

[00:33:04] Joe Carlasare: And there’ve been other, well, I gotta be careful with what I’m saying, but there are other indications that Grayscale will be launching its conversion at or near, or potentially even before some of the other players in the market. So the notion, yeah, yeah. So the notion that they’re going to be somehow sidelined from this process when they’re meeting with the SEC where they have effectively, and this is a public document that’s become available, where they’ve effectively talked about an uplisting, that’s the term they’re using, uplisting date for the exchange traded product. That is massive, right? That, that just shows you from my perspective that this is going to get green lit with all the others and Okay, so if you’re going to give them the same treatment as everyone else, plus they’ve got a massive multi billion dollar advantage structurally because they have all these customers and they have this huge pot of money and they’re going to be lowering their fees, why would anybody move and incur a taxable event potentially when you’ve already closed the discount?

[00:34:01] Joe Carlasare: What advantage does BlackRock have? I mean, BlackRock has the name, right? But if, assuming this is correct, right? Obviously we’re just making predictions here and that’s always dangerous, but assuming they all launch at the same time. I hope you guys will admit then that there was no secret sauce or, you know, preferred entry for BlackRock because what entry did they get?

[00:34:20] Joe Carlasare: What advantage will they have structurally if it all comes together at the same point?

[00:34:24] HODL: I think what me and Preston are wondering together out loud is is there a way they can turn the screws on Barry so that he no longer has ownership of GBTC?

[00:34:35] Joe Carlasare: That’s like, I think that’s, that’s exactly what we’re, what we’re saying.

[00:34:39] Joe Carlasare: Well, you guys know that the New York AG is suing him, right?

[00:34:42] HODL: There’s a lot of rumors about criminal activity. I don’t know what he did or didn’t do, but there’s a lot of rumors.

[00:34:50] Joe Carlasare: Ongoing interviews with the Southern District or Eastern District of New York, potential prosecutors looking at this as well.

[00:34:57] Joe Carlasare: The New York AG is suing him for making false statements. They’re also suing Gemini for that matter, and they’re suing Gemini, they’re suing Genesis, and they’re suing Grayscale for them knowingly making false statements about the Earn program and the other lending activities. So, so you’ve got a whole host of allegations and with all of that, the SEC is still meeting with them ETF.

[00:35:21] Preston Pysh: So, Joe, help me with this. What type of timeline do you think they could charge Barry with all of these entities by? Could it happen prior to this ETF date that I know you’ve posted about being early January? Could something happen between now and then where it’s like oh, hey, Barry, it’s going to be 2 billion.

[00:35:43] Preston Pysh: And then you’re off the hook. Right. And then he’s forced to sell the GBTC product into the straight into the hands of call it BlackRock. And then he has just enough to, to pay the bill because of the premium that he would get for his 620, 000 Bitcoin.

[00:35:59] Joe Carlasare: When you say charge that there’s an active suit right now by Leticia James of New York, right?

[00:36:05] Joe Carlasare: She’s suing that 1. 1 billion in losses. related to fraud committed by Gemini, Genesis, and and DCG.

[00:36:15] Preston Pysh: And the product, if he was going to sell the GBTC product is worth a billion, a little bit more, a billion and a half, somewhere in that ballpark.

[00:36:25] Joe Carlasare: You’re talking about the actual, the trust?

[00:36:27] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. The trust, he can’t The brand. The brand, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, because he can’t, he can’t sell the trust. I just don’t want anybody who’s holding GBDC to think that he can Correct. He can reach into the trust and get the Bitcoin.

[00:36:38] Preston Pysh: But if he’s going to sell it, if he’s going to, if he’s going to sell it, those these were the numbers that I had heard.

[00:36:43] Preston Pysh: It was around a billion to maybe a billion and a half that he could sell it for.

[00:36:46] Joe Carlasare: But why would he? Well, if he needs to get up, wouldn’t he, if, if, okay, let’s, let’s put on our thinking caps here for what we would do if we were, if we were him. Okay. The most important thing he can do right now, free advice, right?

[00:37:00] Joe Carlasare: Not giving advice, but free, you know what I mean? The most important thing you can do is do whatever is necessary. to ensure when the ETFs launch in January, that he is right there, right in the mix of things, that he gets his conversion done day one. If he does that, you, number one, get a bunch of new inflow, which means your fees are going to be coming through.

[00:37:21] Joe Carlasare: You can string the litigation along for as long as possible, and again, this New York AG suit was filed just in October, and you guys know how slow litigation moves, it can take years, potentially. There haven’t even been charges brought from the feds, right?

[00:37:35] Preston Pysh: So that answers my, yeah, that answers my question that, that I see.

[00:37:40] Preston Pysh: I don’t know. I don’t understand that timeline of like how long that would take to shake out. You’re suggesting it could take a long time. Oh, okay.

[00:37:45] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. It could take years. I mean, you know, the, that’s why you want people, that’s why the feds always go for, we want you to plea. We want you to plea. We, we bring the hammer because we can get justice and we can make headlines and we can get money and we can do it instead of years.

[00:38:01] Joe Carlasare: We can do it really quickly. I mean, look, they ran this SPF case. That was like rocket docket, right? That was filed last year and they just got a conviction. When did the conviction come last month? He was convicted like in two hours or something. His sentencing will not be until March. Ironically, CZ will be sentenced in February before SBF.

[00:38:23] Joe Carlasare: How is that possible? How is that possible?

[00:38:28] HODL: Cause he pled.

[00:38:29] Preston Pysh: Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:38:31] HODL: No trial. I have a friend who was given a private audience with Barry a few months back. And basically the view from the inside there is that Barry is in fight like hell mode, defend the empire. Like he’s not, he’s not giving up easy.

[00:38:44] HODL: He’s not going to roll over. So they’re going to have to come up with everything they got if they, you know, if that is the outcome, like tinfoil hat. And then, you know, I also think Barry’s a pretty smart guy, and if he did things that were unscrupulous, I would imagine they were papered in a way that was legal.

[00:38:59] HODL: That’s just my personal feeling about him.

[00:39:02] Joe Carlasare: He’s also got a suit against him by the Winklevii, right? The Winklevii are suing him directly, saying he personally misled them about the Genesis and DCG and committed fraud on them.

[00:39:13] Preston Pysh: He’s a big blocker. Like how, how smart could he be? HODL.

[00:39:22] HODL: Oh, geez. So good. By the way, I am a GBTC shareholder from way back.

[00:39:26] HODL: I’ve been holding GBTC in my retirement account since 2015. And my God, that’s, it’s been a way more of a, a rollercoaster of emotions than I ever thought it would be or should be.

[00:39:38] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. By the way, one little nugget from the AG suit, she alleges in New York that Barry and Gemini, both of them, both of them knew that Genesis’s loans were unsecured and at one point concentrated as much as 90 percent with Alameda, obviously SBF’s operation.

[00:39:58] Joe Carlasare: 90%. So those folks, you know, if you’re blaming Sam and everything, rightfully so, blame him, right? But there were many actors that knew of the extreme concentration at Alameda. And they looked the other way.

[00:40:10] HODL: You know, who got caught without a chair? Doquan, Machinsky, SBF, CZ, right? But there were other players who found chairs that are going to make it through relatively unscathed, you know?

[00:40:21] Joe Carlasare: Honestly, you have to look at the finance deal. Look at CZ and what will eventually, I think will come down on this is that he’s getting away with controlling his ownership in finance. Number one, he’s getting away with something where he’ll be a free man at some point, you know, not too long from now.

[00:40:38] Joe Carlasare: And he’s getting away with what, how much, what is it worth? Bottle billion, couple billion.

[00:40:43] HODL: Yeah. It’ll, it’ll diminish him quite a bit, but he’ll be a, he’ll be a multi billionaire still, you know?

[00:40:49] Joe Carlasare: Right. I mean, how many people would take that trade? You know, and, and, and by the way, by the way, in making that plea, right, he’s basically gotten protected against future criminal prosecutions.

[00:41:02] Joe Carlasare: Okay. So, so like if, if the monitor gets in there, which we haven’t talked about, but you guys, that’s the biggest thing about the Binance plea, right? There will be a government independent monitor in there that will have access to all the books and records for a period of three years following February.

[00:41:16] Preston Pysh: Which there’s been a lot of talk online about that particular point and them having access to all the KYC and just being able to see everything that’s happened on that platform.

[00:41:30] Joe Carlasare: Right. So if they go in there and find the bodies that are buried effectively, they’re not going to be able to do much. Right.

[00:41:36] Joe Carlasare: They’ve kind of already done the plea. I got a question here for Hop, if I can go. Or actually both of you, I really want to know. So I think this is coming. I think it’s a done deal with respect to the ETF. I think it comes early part of January. If not January, then at the latest, you’re getting it by March.

[00:41:53] Joe Carlasare: I think you’re going to get a host of them. I think this is going to come in and it’s going to, you know, I read something today that close to 60, 70 percent of FAs said it would be, they would be more likely to put some money into Bitcoin, some allocation with an ETF product that they can offer to customers as opposed to the products that currently exist.

[00:42:09] Joe Carlasare: So let’s assume this is all happening and let’s assume we’re talking next year before Christmas. And I always like to think like, okay, we’ve got that there. We’ve got the ETF taken care of. That was a huge thing for years, you know, five, six year battle. What’s next? Like what’s the next big, you know, mountain that Bitcoin has to conquer?

[00:42:29] Joe Carlasare: Because there always is one, right? Like on this progression, we’re going to, what comes next in terms of a big thing we need for the industry looking forward after the approval of an ETF.

[00:42:40] HODL: Something we need for the industry, or are we talking about price appreciation?

[00:42:43] Preston Pysh: Both. Let’s go.

[00:42:45] HODL: Okay. Yeah. I think the ETF is really interesting.

[00:42:48] HODL: I’ve thought quite a bit about it for a long time. It’s been, you know, me and Preston are like same class at Bitcoin have been in almost 10 years and the ETF has been talked about the entire time. So the fact that it’s finally going to happen is, is pretty wild and it’s the end of a pretty long road.

[00:43:02] HODL: Right. But I think it signifies Bitcoin going through a maturation phase. but also the potential for sort of a shadow prohibition era of Bitcoin. Because if you end up getting quite a bit of Bitcoin in the public markets, that’s all under custodial control, you end up with weird incentives and you know, things can get perverse from there.

[00:43:25] HODL: And really like the revolution here or you know, the, the evolution, whatever you want to call it is. is self custody. It’s, it’s being able to keep control of your own wealth. And so if we end up in a world with, you know, middlemen and custodians who are controlling our wealth with permission to access, right.

[00:43:42] HODL: Request granted, you know, like, no, I don’t ask anybody’s permission. Free men don’t ask. I don’t ask anybody’s permission to send Bitcoin. I just send it. Right. So if we’re in a world of custodians, we end up having like something like, I don’t know, 5 million Bitcoin in the public markets or something like that.

[00:43:58] HODL: And then there’s some sort of coordinated campaign some sort of a, you know, contentious fork, like, I don’t know, I think all the options are on the table. And then at the same time, you got, you know, nation states coming in. I just heard somebody the other day, I don’t know if this is true or unsubstantiated or whatever, they told me the nation of Bhutan has as many Bitcoin as Michael Saylor.

[00:44:18] HODL: I’ve never heard that before. I just heard this for the first time yesterday. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not, who knows. And then after, after nation states, you got central banks, right? So like the ETF will unlock pensions and you know, it’ll take place of gold and investors portfolios. If you look at fidelity and the sharp ratio and all this stuff, like.

[00:44:36] HODL: It makes a lot of sense. Gold is not performing well. You know, digital gold is what you’re going to want to have in a digital era, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But then, yeah, you got it. You got the dominoes of like nation states and central banks are like the next big ones after this. And the game is changing and it’s getting much more serious and there’s much more big money here.

[00:44:54] HODL: And so I don’t know, man, it’s TBD on the outcome, whether Bitcoin is capturable or not. We know for a fact that gold is capturable. We have a good feeling that Bitcoin can resist capture, state capture. But we don’t know that for certain. And so we’re going to have to see the game play out. And I’m, I’m excited for the next 10 years, you know, cause that’s what I think is unfolding.

[00:45:16] Preston Pysh: I agree with HODL. And I, I actually really like that. He’s not just kind of waving his hand and saying that it’s ordained, that it’s not going to be capturable. Right. I think that it’s important for the community and for the builders and the space and everybody just to, to continue to refine this thing, to try to make it as foolproof as possible.

[00:45:36] Preston Pysh: Now, obviously, you know, if you ask my opinion as to do I think it’s capital, I don’t think that it is. And I’ve obviously given many reasons through all the shows and time as to why I think that it’s not. One of the things that I think is, is also going to be important is when you look at who’s going to have the incentive to kind of move to this first, from like a payment standpoint, it’s going to be all the countries where they’ve just been decimated by dollar dominance.

[00:46:04] Preston Pysh: I think you’re already starting to see some of that play out where they’re moving towards this. And I think that on this next bull run, once we make a new all time high, it’s going to be, Hey, how, how can I get, it’s going to transition from, Hey, how can I get my hand on some tether dollars at exposure to dollars?

[00:46:22] Preston Pysh: And I think it’s going to more and more people around the world are going to be like, Hey, how can I get my hand on some sats? and then people are going to be willing to accept that as payment because it’s running. And I think, I think this next bull market is going to run really hard just because of how much compression we had on this last cycle because of bad actors.

[00:46:42] HODL: By the way, I think in terms of price appreciation, those scenarios is in my opinion, if Bitcoin is capturable, you have kind of a, a cap on it at one to 2 million. If Bitcoin is not capturable, then sky is the limit. It’s infinity.

[00:46:57] Preston Pysh: Yeah. In fiat terms. Yeah. This is one I wanted to bring up here. Joe, you had a post recently.

[00:47:04] Preston Pysh: You said the plaintiff’s bar is thirsty for blood. If you’re an influencer with a decent amount of followers and promoted altcoins, I’d be preparing for litigation. So you say this, and there’s this really strange video of Charles Hoskins. Is that how you say his last name floating around where he’s like going to something like that?

[00:47:27] Joe Carlasare: Well, you heard about Charles Scampling. You heard about Ronaldo, right? Today, you heard about that class action that got filed, right? No, no, really? Oh yeah. No, I I’m breaking news here. It’s not breaking news, but no, there there’s a class action lawsuit over his promotion of Binance. 1 billion is what’s being sought.

[00:47:49] Joe Carlasare: Okay. And you know, he was in, I think he was on social media ads talking about a partnership and how they’re going to change the, the NFT game. And you know, there, there are, there’s other suits that have been filed recently about, I think ones against the MLB for their role with FTX. And, you know, there are folks that associate this is what finally, finally, you’re getting what I think is far more equipped to deal with the altcoin market, the private litigants. The private plaintiff’s bar, which has a lot of resources, think of how many lawyers are in the private sector versus the SEC’s, you know, few hundred that can take care of this industry. And by the way, they also have to police Tread Fi. The plaintiff’s bar finally is realizing you can file class action lawsuits against these entities.

[00:48:35] Joe Carlasare: You can group a ton of people who have lost huge pots of money betting on all these different assets that, you know, aren’t Bitcoin. And you can haul them into court and make them answer for why they did what they did and why they made representations about things. And Even if the cases don’t all stick, enough of them settle because of the extreme defense costs that are involved in some of these things, that that is in some ways difficult for folks.

[00:49:00] Joe Carlasare: So it’s not the, the DOJ, it’s not criminal, right? But In many ways, it is on par with what the SEC can do, because this is a big thing. I think Harlow and I have had a lot of discussions on Clubhouse and elsewhere about this. Like, at the end of the day, what the SEC can do is they can go in there and do really two things.

[00:49:17] Joe Carlasare: They can get an injunction, which is a court order that says you cannot do this in the future, or they can effectively issue a speeding ticket that you have to pay X amount of fines. You have to pay such a disgorgement of your profits that you made money on. But that’s it, right? That’s the end of, I think people were under the misapprehension that Ripple executives were going to end up behind bars or something.

[00:49:39] Joe Carlasare: That’s not what the SEC does. The suit is a civil enforcement agency trying to recover sums of money. So to me, if you equip the plaintiff’s bar with thousands of tens of thousands of potential litigants and they file class actions over anyone who’s issuing these types of things, In many ways, that’s going to be you know, transformative, because you’re really going to have to be on guard for the variety of different suits that are going to come.

[00:50:03] HODL: I mean, the SEC’s got to find you first, though, Joe. And they can’t find Richard Hart. If anybody’s seen him, let the SEC know. They can’t find this guy.

[00:50:15] Preston Pysh: On that guy, I just don’t know how anybody could watch this guy, like, decked out in like the Louis Vuitton gear and it’s like, it is the most vibrant, like, weird stuff.

[00:50:27] HODL: Like, how could anybody look at that guy and take him seriously? Like, I cannot. You know how the Nigerian, you know how the Nigerian email scammers will misspell words as a filtering mechanism? The full Gucci tracksuit is a filtering mechanism for anybody with an IQ above 100. So if you’re taking financial advice from a man in a full Gucci tracksuit with a male You know, that’s the filtering mechanism.

[00:50:56] Preston Pysh: Oh my Lord. People like that, like, I just can’t block them in my Twitter feed fast enough because it’s just like, it’s like toxic chemical that you pour into your brain. Like, I can’t even look at that kind of stuff.

[00:51:08] Joe Carlasare: It’s just, it’s so insane. It’s amazing to me that people still buy the thing and still think it has some value.

[00:51:14] Preston Pysh: That’s the even crazier part.

[00:51:17] HODL: Well, here’s, here’s a question. Here’s a big question. Is there going to be, I mean, there’s a lot of actions, you know, enforcement actions, like Joe said, like the private sector is getting wise to what’s going on here. Are we going to see another, you know, celebrity endorsed and you know, fueled shit coin bubble?

[00:51:34] HODL: Are we going to see another one? Is there going to be another alt season?

[00:51:37] Preston Pysh: Yeah. What are they selling this time? I mean, last time it was monkey pictures. Is it dog pictures? Like. Like what, what do you pivot to when you had that sheer amount of insanity on the last cycle of like, and it wasn’t even like they were different monkey pictures.

[00:51:55] Preston Pysh: It was the same monkey with like different teeth or different sunglasses or like somebody just went into like an AI bot and was like, here, just bang out like 10, 000 pictures of this same monkey with like different hair and different, whatever. And we’re going to sell these, each one of these things for like a.

[00:52:11] Preston Pysh: They were doing it with rocks. There was JPEGs of just a rock and they were selling. I mean, it’s all money laundering. It has to be money laundering, right? There’s no other rational thing that would say that a JPEG of a rock could be 100, 000 or whatever the crazy amounts were.

[00:52:27] Joe Carlasare: It’s, it’s money laundering, right?

[00:52:28] Joe Carlasare: Yeah, well, I mean, some of it’s coming to Bitcoin, right? With this ordinals and inscriptions thing like that, that I keep seeing people on Twitter all the time talking about. How they’re purposely going to try and drive up the cost of transactions with you know, these things put on chain and that that’s where the money’s going to be and that they can give use cases for Bitcoin beyond you know, just a store of value.

[00:52:50] Joe Carlasare: What do you guys think about that? That’s going to be a weird cycle, right? If you’ve got a lot of this stuff on Bitcoin.

[00:52:56] HODL: You know, here’s where I’m at on that is I came up with the analogy that putting an order, like, you know, sending a super high transaction fee to put an ordinal on the blockchain.

[00:53:06] HODL: Is kind of like paying for a first class Emirates ticket for your, to fly your beanie baby collection across the Atlantic, you know, and it’s like, I’m a capitalist. If you want to do that, that’s your prerogative. Like, I’m happy to sit in first class with your next to your beanie baby. It’s ultimately more, you know, it’s more space for me.

[00:53:25] Preston Pysh: Anyway, you couldn’t describe it any better than that. Oh my God. Yeah, I guess my point of view on it, Joe, is, is very similar to, to Hodl’s, like, the real innovation with Bitcoin is it’s actually a, a true free and open market. Whether you like inscriptions or not, like, you can do it. You know, if these people want to pay really high fees because they want to have this raw data inscribed into the blockchain and they want to pay thousands of dollars to get it there so that everybody running a node basically has a copy of it, I guess I’m okay with it.

[00:54:01] Preston Pysh: And I think the higher fees are maybe forcing us to really kind of think hard about how layer two functions and like how to keep fees intact and immediate settlement and that type of stuff. So I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing right now. I think that it’s actually forcing the engineers and the innovators in the space to really kind of think hard about like what layer two looks like because of it.

[00:54:26] Joe Carlasare: This is not my view, but I want to bring this out because I had a tweet about this and I was kind of surprised because one of the folks on there that I had a similar view, right? You want to pay the money, you want to use up the block space. That’s your right. You’re burning cash, you know, go to it, you know, by all means.

[00:54:42] Joe Carlasare: Luke Dash Jr. commented and he wrote, and I’m just going to quote him verbatim. He wrote, forcing every Bitcoin user to do something without their consent isn’t okay. Bitcoin doesn’t support JPEGs. Then Ari Paul responded, clearly it does. I think you mean you want to censor them because literally we can all see it does.

[00:54:59] Joe Carlasare: So you must be talking about social consensus. And then he wrote, no, it doesn’t. You’re just lying to people. We need to fix a policy bug. There’s no software needed. And he actually tweets out a GitHub basically saying we can fix this. And this is, this was never intended. It was never part of taproot. It’s a glitch, right?

[00:55:15] Joe Carlasare: And, and just like when there was a issues with the supply glitch that was out there, the you know, the inflation bug that was fixed. We can fix glitches. This is not the purpose of Taproot and it’s being abused and manipulated. So what say you, Hodl and Preston?

[00:55:30] HODL: Yeah. I mean, listen, Luke is Luke is always, Luke always has very extreme opinions and he’s, he’s a guardian of Bitcoin, you know, and I respect all of his work, but I still am more of the opinion of, you know, I’ve always been sympathetic to platform maximalism, which is just, you can do a lot of different show on Bitcoin if you want to.

[00:55:49] HODL: But I’m also very sympathetic to monetary maximalism, so yeah, I just, I can’t find myself taking an extreme hardcore stance here. The ordinal thing just, it’s not something that bothers me.

[00:56:01] Preston Pysh: I think it’s, I think it’s a function of fiat itself is, is a huge part of this because you have so much just nonsense just sloshing around and they just add more monetary units into this thing and there’s all these money launderers out there.

[00:56:17] Preston Pysh: I think that it’s, it’s a function that you see, it’s so dang prevalent. When money fails, everybody becomes a speculator. So like all of these, all these activities are non value accretive type activities. And so like, when we look at where we’re at in this moment of time, which is like, We’re approaching peak clown world and it seems to only get more clown like by the day.

[00:56:41] Preston Pysh: Like, I think we should expect these really strange, like, if we were 40 years into the future and looking back at this moment in time, we’d be like, how in the world was anybody doing that? And not trying to create value for each other and exchange like these, these monetary units by exchanging, performing value accretive things for each other.

[00:57:01] Preston Pysh: And so like, I guess when I look at them, just like, Hey, like, let’s let the free and open market sort this out. If you, if you want to fly next to the Beanie Babies, fly next to the Beanie Babies. And I think time is just going to naturally solve it where nobody’s going to actually have an incentive to do this because everybody’s going to be then pretty focused on creating value for each other scamming one another.

[00:57:23] Preston Pysh: in some type of speculative play by selling something that has no value to somebody else by conning them or making them think that it will have value because they sprinkled some social BS on top of it. But so let’s play it out. Let’s say we’re 10 years down the road or 15 years down the road. And like, this is still, and I don’t even know that it would take that long, but like, it’s, it’s still like dominating.

[00:57:47] Preston Pysh: And it seems to like, maybe be causing other issues that we haven’t really kind of figured out with the patterns that are kind of playing out in society. Well, then maybe I might be more on board with, with where Luke’s at right now.

[00:58:01] Joe Carlasare: I got another one for you both real quick, because I’ve been dying to hear this.

[00:58:05] Joe Carlasare: So you’re going to have multiple ETFs launch, right, in January, just going back to that for a second. As Bitcoiners, right, we love to sort of say this is the Bitcoiners hardware wallet, this is the Bitcoiners exchange, right? I want to know what you both think coming here, assuming all the ones that have applied the, you know, eight or 10 of them that are, that are in market had come to market similarly at the same time, what becomes the Bitcoiners ETF?

[00:58:30] Joe Carlasare: And I’ll just say full disclosure, I have said publicly that to me, if you’re going to try and cater to Bitcoiners that really are passionate about transparency, openness, that sort of thing. Free advice again not, not advice to any of the ETF issuers, if they want to cater to the Bitcoin community, they should absolutely be transparent about the Bitcoin they hold, give on chain addresses, be as open and honest about that and not do the whole we’re going to keep the on chain Bitcoin hidden and secreted.

[00:58:57] Joe Carlasare: That’s my view. I think that’s what they should do. I think that should be the strategy because you’re going to be vying for market share. But what do you guys think? What will be, in your view, the Bitcoiners ETF? Is it really going to be BlackRock? Is that going to

[00:59:11] HODL: The obvious answer here is that there is no Bitcoiners ETF, right?

[00:59:15] HODL: And any Bitcoiner worth his salt would never buy an ETF. But I will honor the spirit of the hypothetical and say that I’ve always had a lot of respect for Fidelity. And I think Fidelity has been an early pioneer in this space. They have a great custodial program. They seem to be really You know, they really get digital assets and a lot of people you know, who we all know have come out of there.

[00:59:39] HODL: And also they had like a report that said Bitcoin was going to like a billion dollars by 2038 or something. So it’s like, those are my, those are my kind of people, you know.

[00:59:48] Joe Carlasare: Weren’t they just citing stock to flow for that? I mean, wasn’t that the basis?

[00:59:51] HODL: Hey, whatever, however they got you that number, that’s a great number.

[00:59:54] HODL: You know what I mean? I like to hear it.

[00:59:57] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I like that answer. I think that Fidelity has kind of had their head around the actual value prop from the very beginning on. It obviously comes from a very high leadership level within the, within the organization from the very top. that has allowed them to kind of approach it from day one very differently than everybody else on Wall Street.

[01:00:17] Preston Pysh: So I will give them props to that. I would like to see them, because I don’t think you can do withdrawals through Fidelity right now to self custody if you want to. So I think they need to get beyond that. And as far as like the ETF goes, this is not something people should be buying, but I understand why they probably will be buying is it’s just easier, and they don’t care about the like for the three of us. And I might be speaking, you know, out of turn by saying this, but we’re here for the freedom tech. Like we’re here because we deeply believe that this is going to usher in a much fairer world world for, for all the participants and that the existing system is extremely corrupted.

[01:01:03] Preston Pysh: I just don’t think a lot of people, like if you lined up a hundred people off the street, that they are going to empathize with that really deep, the hardcore opinion of like, that’s what Bitcoin means to them. And so like, they’re just going to be looking at it as like, oh yeah, I want some, I want some price action to that thing over there.

[01:01:21] Preston Pysh: Now, maybe they’ll get there five or 10 years later or whatever. And so like maybe where the ETF is a good thing is. Like using a drug example would be like a gateway drug for people to maybe come to a much more deeper and profound understanding as to like what this is ushering in for society and for humanity by at least having some type of exposure and then maybe they get on the rabbit hole and get a lot smarter on, on like what it actually is.

[01:01:48] HODL: One thing I often think about is I think about Satoshi’s genius with the supply issuance curve of Bitcoin. The fact that so much of the supply came online so early and changed hands so many times. And the Bitcoin that mass amounts of Bitcoin did end up with very ideological Bitcoiners who are really, you know, here for the cause.

[01:02:07] HODL: Same way you outlined. One thing I’m, I worry about though is back to the legal challenges and the regulatory challenges that Bitcoiners are going to face over the next 10 years. It seems clear that people like Elizabeth Warren hate self custody. They despise it because they realize it’s powerful. And they don’t want you to have personal power or sovereignty or be able to transact in a peer to peer fashion.

[01:02:31] HODL: And I worry about them creating such onerous requirements on self custody, like reporting requirements, etc. that it would cause most people to say, I’m just not even going to bother and I’ll just buy the ETF because the brokerage will do all the reporting requirements for me. Right. I worry about stuff like that.

[01:02:51] HODL: And I think that’s a, that’s a likely attack vector. It’s much more likely than them banning self custody because they’re not going to be able to ban it from a constitutional standpoint. And we’ll be able to send guys like Joe to court and argue on our behalf and we’ll win. But are we going to be able to get out from under onerous reporting requirements that I don’t know? And if there’s enough friction there, it’ll cause quite a large number of people to just default to say, I’ll take the path of least resistance here.

[01:03:19] Joe Carlasare: Well, you guys have, have you followed the, the, the debate or sort of the, the, the push and pull between BlackRock and some of the others in the SNC about the use of in kind creation for shares?

[01:03:29] Joe Carlasare: You guys know about this? A little bit, a little bit. Okay. So you, you clarify if any of this is, is not clear. Okay. HODL. So, so basically the debate is this. When you’re going to create shares, okay, can you create the shares by using in kind, right? In other words, I have Bitcoin, I give my Bitcoin to BlackRock, BlackRock issues me shares.

[01:03:53] Joe Carlasare: And BlackRock has reportedly pushed for the in kind creation as opposed to cash creation, which is different, right? Where cash creation is, I have a million bucks, I want a million bucks worth of shares. I give you my million bucks. You go out and you source the Bitcoin from the private market. That is a huge issue in my view, not because I think the price is going to be manipulated or anything like that, but it’s really important to create as much flexibility from the standpoint of being able to move Bitcoin into the shares and move the shares back into Bitcoin.

[01:04:26] Joe Carlasare: And that could be a huge thing. I mean, unlike things like the GLD, right, in terms of the ETF where you can’t really redeem the gold very easily, Bitcoin could prevent, present a novel product that could potentially be very interesting for us. We’re, we’re okay. You want to get a margin loan? Okay. You can do that through your Fidelity account.

[01:04:45] Joe Carlasare: You can put a small portion of your stake of Bitcoin in exchange for shares, potentially not even incurring a taxable event, and then get access to margin liquidity through the traditional financial system, because that’s marginable. That’s huge, right? That is a massive windfall, and you don’t have to sell your Bitcoin, right?

[01:05:02] Joe Carlasare: Because there’s a way structurally to do it without actually having a taxable event. It’s difficult. You’re going to have to get the SC to go along with it, but that would be a game changer in my view.

[01:05:12] HODL: That’s interesting too, because you would think that if it was cash settled, that it would have more of an effect on the price.

[01:05:19] HODL: But if it’s in kind settlement, then there are other positive externalities and it allows you to hold BlackRock accountable should they be a bad actor because you can more easily redeem the Bitcoin, right?

[01:05:30] Joe Carlasare: Well, you’re just, you’re just talking about how, how are the shares created, right? How are the shares created?

[01:05:34] Joe Carlasare: So can they create shares? through just someone turning over their Bitcoin. And by the way, this is what GBDC does, right? This is how they were extracting the premium. People were tending over their, tendering over Bitcoin, right? Descending over their Bitcoin. They would get shares that would go to, subject to a lockout period, thereby extracting the premium, then selling those shares.

[01:05:54] Joe Carlasare: So you imagine an open door sort of where you could get Bitcoin in, shares, use your shares if you want liquidity or margin, and then if you want your Bitcoin out, theoretically, you should be able to withdraw the Bitcoin from the exchange.

[01:06:08] Preston Pysh: So how is this not an attack vector? that they could rehypothecate between audits and basically do exactly what happened on this last cycle.

[01:06:19] Joe Carlasare: The way you would prevent them from doing that rehypothecation is open transparency about what Bitcoin they hold and when they hold it and have that number published every day. That’s how you do it. If not, your point is a valid one, right? You definitely have windows there where there’s less transparency and between audits where you can kind of slip through and not have all the Bitcoin you purport to have.

[01:06:39] Joe Carlasare: But this is, this should be something if you recognize that an ETF on balance is a positive thing, even if it’s not the preferred way of holding Bitcoin you should push for transparency and you should say, okay, fine, we want the, if the ETF is going to come and we can’t get around it, have it come, but also have there be very clear accounting and use the latest technology.

[01:07:00] Joe Carlasare: The whole point of Bitcoin is that you can see in real time who holds what, identify your addresses, make it clear what you hold.

[01:07:07] Preston Pysh: Hopefully because there’s so many that there are going to be entities that choose to treat it that way.

[01:07:14] Joe Carlasare: That’s my point. Like, right, like when I asked the question about what’s the Bitcoin or ETF, the entity that does that will have me publicly say, don’t buy from an ETF, hold Bitcoin natively.

[01:07:24] Joe Carlasare: But, but, if you’re going to buy Bitcoin on an ETF, Go with the Franklin Templeton Transparency ETF, you know, that, that sort of, I don’t know. I’m just, you know.

[01:07:34] HODL: No, no, I think, I think that’s a good point because, you know, culturally, a lot of people like to say, Oh, Bitcoin Maxis, bro. They’re boomers, bro. They don’t understand, man, whatever.

[01:07:41] HODL: And culturally, Bitcoin Maxis do have a lot of power. And if everybody is marching in the same direction and saying, like, that’s a shit product, don’t use that. It holds some sway, right? So like, I like that as a market force to keep the ETFs a bit honest or a bit more honest anyway.

[01:07:58] Joe Carlasare: I mean, you know, when one of them does it, they’re all going to do it, right?

[01:08:01] Joe Carlasare: If you got one of the ETFs to be transparent about what they’re holding, I think it would be a, it’s like fees, right? It’s like anything else. Once one of them does it, they kind of all have to follow suit.

[01:08:10] Preston Pysh: To not give a competitive, I’m just going to cut this clip and send it to Steven McClurg and just tell him, hey, Joe has some advice for you.

[01:08:18] Joe Carlasare: Well, you, you guys, he, he’s going to be upset that you didn’t promote the Valkyrie ETF as and you went with Fidelity.

[01:08:23] Preston Pysh: It’s, oh yeah, you’re right.

[01:08:24] Joe Carlasare: He’s not going to, he’s not going to come back on the show anymore. He’s going to be very mad at me.

[01:08:28] Preston Pysh: You’re right. I didn’t even think about that. Yes. Even though he has like the funniest ticker ever.

[01:08:35] HODL: Okay, so let me ask the big question. The big question is, all of the ETFs are going to hit in January. That’s, Joe seems pretty confident about that.

[01:08:43] Joe Carlasare: Approved, approved.

[01:08:44] Preston Pysh: He’s not just saying January, he’s saying the 5th of January. The 5th of January.

[01:08:48] HODL: The 5th of January, that’s right. And there’s going to be a lag time, yeah, there’s going to be a lag time before implementation, right?

[01:08:53] HODL: But like, you know, GBTC will probably be first in line, etc. And then all of a sudden, BlackRock has to buy up a bunch of Bitcoin and the price starts to run a bit and, you know, where do we think we’re heading over the next like 18 months, 24 months, you know, where, what does this look like? Last, let’s be honest here, last cycle was a bit disappointing. You know what I mean?

[01:09:13] Preston Pysh: I was, I was talking to my uncle, I think it was today. And we were talking about like, okay, so like where are we at in a year, Preston? And like his response back to me, I’m not going to tell you the numbers that I was saying to him. He’s like, Oh my God, man, you need to put the crack pipe down.

[01:09:34] Preston Pysh: So I’m very, I dude, I think the coming year, I think the coming two years is going to just melt people’s brains. And so much of it just has to do with how much compression we’ve had on this past cycle. And you can see it, the. You know, there’s, there’s a little bit of a meme going around online right now.

[01:09:53] Preston Pysh: It’s like, oh yeah, it’s 70 percent of the coins haven’t moved in a year. But I think that that is extremely profound. And I think it’s really important. And I think that the speculators that come in at the end that bid the price to the moon that last like kind of six month period, at least historically, It’s truly because there’s no coins left, right?

[01:10:14] Preston Pysh: And the psychopaths that have been stacking it through the 80 percent drawdowns, their basis is from a cycle or two even before that. And the fact that it would bid to like mid six figures or whatever the number is, Like, it still doesn’t entice them to sell any meaningful amount of their base position.

[01:10:37] Preston Pysh: And like, I think it is just so lost on people, like how, how important this idea is of like these hodlers of last resort, which is a Trace Mayer term, right? But he’s right. And it’s just, it’s vital as to what causes these price pumps, because you have, you’re dealing with a fixed supply, terminal supply thing.

[01:10:59] Preston Pysh: That’s like nothing else on, on this planet. Joe, what do you think?

[01:11:04] Joe Carlasare: I think that the possibility for Bitcoin going exponentially higher this cycle than the prior one is very high. And I’ll tell you why. And let’s just step into it. Just a little bit of a macro conversation here. The Fed has been explicitly targeting a recession.

[01:11:21] Joe Carlasare: They’ve almost said that explicitly when they wanted labor, the labor market to become more into balance. They want it to rise. Their targets all show unemployment going up. They’ve talked about specifically how there’s going to be softening in the in the real estate market. And much to their dismay, I think we’ve not gotten one.

[01:11:39] Joe Carlasare: And I think that when you have government spending running currently at about 7 percent of GDP, providing a ton of cash, basically running wartime deficits into the economy right now, and you cannot trigger a recession despite very high rates, you have two potentials that could come from that. Number one, the Fed is forced to just throw up its hands and say, We tried to, we tried to slow this down.

[01:12:00] Joe Carlasare: We can’t, we can’t, we can’t we don’t have the option. We did everything within our power, including QT and fastest rate hiking cycle in, you know, 30 years. And we still couldn’t slow the darn thing down. But for a variety of reasons, structurally, we can’t have the government run these high deficits. So we have to cut in the face of very hot inflation, right?

[01:12:20] Joe Carlasare: Still far above trend inflation. That is going to be massive for Bitcoin. Right? I don’t think it was a coincidence that we had this aggressive sell off when the Fed began its rate hiking campaign really in the early part of 2022, right? That was in Bitcoin took it and it affected some of the weaker players in the industry.

[01:12:39] Joe Carlasare: So that cascaded out. Well, if you have the opposite happening right now, if you have, we avoid a recession and we have the Fed is easing proactively because they just throw up their hands and say, we can’t do it in the, in the government tax burden. It’s just too much with these high rates. That’s going to be massive.

[01:12:53] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. The other possibility, okay, that I think is very bullish is that if you have these structurally higher rates moving forward, combined with the government spending and Lynn Alden talks about this with fiscal dominance, right? That is effectively liquidity built in to push the packs of push Bitcoin forward, right?

[01:13:10] Joe Carlasare: You’ve got a constant flow of cash from the government’s continuing to borrow more and more money and pumping that through for the entitlement program. So all of those things show you’re in a very different environment than I think pre COVID. And, you know, you’ve got a potential new administration coming in.

[01:13:26] Joe Carlasare: And if you remember, HODL, we talk about this all the time. What did the last administration do? I have these tweets, I think they’re funny. Sometimes I go back and review them. And you had the former president, who looks to be the front runner this time, saying, we need negative rates. We need rates incredibly low.

[01:13:42] Joe Carlasare: The Fed should be doing more QE. You’ve got sort of the political appetite out there to just to the moon, right? Whether that’s a good thing, bad thing, depends on where you sit. But to me, like, that’s huge. I mean, and you really want to try to time that and like, try to figure out, you know, what, who’s going to win the white house, like, and decide whether you’re going to buy Bitcoin.

[01:14:00] Joe Carlasare: To me, like, I think all roads are going to lead to Bitcoin, like they say, because at the end of the day, okay, we know that debt can only be solved with more debt. That’s their only solution to everything. And as the system is constructed now, you can bank on there being more and more debt, which eventually finds its way, that liquidity finds its way into Bitcoin.

[01:14:18] Joe Carlasare: So yeah, I’m pretty bullish.

[01:14:19] Preston Pysh: You pumping this hopium into your veins there, HODL?

[01:14:23] HODL: I’ll give you, I’ll give you my perspective is you know, I track. I track the investors psychology around the Bitcoin markets pretty closely because I’m here all the time, 24 7, 365, and I pay, pay attention to what people say and what the chatter is.

[01:14:36] HODL: And I think there are a lot of people who believe that diminished returns are the rule of the land. And the one thing I know about being around Bitcoin for 10 years is that whatever everybody believes is absolutely going to happen is categorically not going to happen, right? So, like, I think it’s likely that we see some sort of a sell off.

[01:14:54] HODL: Right after we break a hundred K, like around like one 2130, people start to sell, take profits. People go, God, I’m not sitting through another cycle again. It was terrible. You know, I’m finally going to buy that house, you know, that I wanted, yada, yada, yada. And then the price, you know, it sort of evens out for a bit.

[01:15:11] HODL: Maybe it goes down a little, then it starts to run again hard, right? I mean, you can definitely see this scenario playing out. And all of those people who sold are suddenly, you know, these are, most of these people will be long term hodlers who are looking at themselves going, holy, this thing is, it’s happening.

[01:15:26] HODL: I’m getting back in. I’m fully invested. Then, you know, the marginal buyer who’s bipolar, by the way, goes, wait, these guys are all in. I’m, I’m in even more. And then you get the euphoria stage and like everybody thinks when they go through the bear market, they go that you tell yourself a lie in the mirror every morning where you go, I’ll never get that greedy again.

[01:15:44] HODL: Nope, not me. No, sir. And then price rises and the greed hits you like a ton of bricks and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re strapped into the rollercoaster again. So to me, I think we’re going to see the diminished return narrative get its legs chopped out from under it. And then we’re going to see a real run at Valhalla, you know, we’re just going all the way to the moon.

[01:16:05] Preston Pysh: Yeah, that’s what I’m predicting. I think that is, I think you are all over it. I think you are going to have a lot of people from the 2020 cycle that, cause that, that cycle was pathetic compared to the 2017 run. I mean, it really was. You’re going to have a bias there with a lot of people that kind of entered that market that I think get shaken out very early on and what they think is a big move.

[01:16:27] Preston Pysh: And it’s just. Just another little blip on the, on the radar of where this thing’s getting ready to go. So, I’m with you. I mean, great time to be a bitcoiner.

[01:16:38] HODL: It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be exciting no matter what happens.

[01:16:41] Preston Pysh: All right. One final thing to talk about. So, let’s say that, so, a lot of people are expecting a recession to kind of really, we’re getting these deflationary winds potentially that are, that are brewing.

[01:16:52] Preston Pysh: I’m hearing that we’re going to have our first cut in the first quarter. Let’s say that we do manifest this, and I know Joe, you just kind of gave all the reasons why you didn’t think that was going to happen, but let’s just say that it does, and maybe we see a liquidity event similar to like March 2020, where Bitcoin was, I want to say it was up 10, 000, 13, 000 and got punished the whole way down to 4, 000 in short order because of this impairment in liquidity, cascading liquidity event that happened through COVID.

[01:17:25] Preston Pysh: Who knows whether we could see some type of contagion like that, if that would play out, I’m of the opinion that you would see Bitcoin probably react very similarly to what you saw during that March 2020 event where it sold off really hard, but the bounce was near immediate. I mean, you were within 30 days, you were back up to a price point that you were at.

[01:17:47] Preston Pysh: I think the market is primed for a very similar response if we would see some type of contagion in the traditional markets. I’m curious if you guys would agree with that.

[01:17:59] Joe Carlasare: Well, I’ll just say that it depends on what the contagion is, right? I mean, in the COVID circumstance, which I think is, A unique set of factors where you had a very uncertain situation where there was a mad dash to get cash and you had disorder in the treasury market, which primarily cascaded through every other asset class.

[01:18:19] Joe Carlasare: Yes, I would agree with you. I think Bitcoin takes a hit. I don’t think that’s really likely given some of the measures that have been put in place both before and after COVID to absorb those types of shocks. Things for example, like, you know, the BTFP, those measures that have been put in place, they, they keep trying to perfect and come up with new tools to prevent these sudden quick shocks.

[01:18:42] Joe Carlasare: I think the far more likely scenario is this slow grind for a lot of traditional assets, kind of like what you’ve seen with the bond market. You could have a selloff in equities. It doesn’t have to be a sharp, you know, vicious decline. It can be one of those slow grinding bear markets where things go down further.

[01:18:58] Joe Carlasare: And in that environment, I’m not as convinced as perhaps some others that Bitcoin’s going to really struggle. What Bitcoin tends to very much freak out about in my research is volatility. When volatility goes off the cliff and basically explodes higher, you know, you’ve got a VIX bearing down on, you know, sixties, fifties, that range, Bitcoin really takes it and it gets hit.

[01:19:19] Joe Carlasare: But you can have plenty of selloffs and plenty of bear markets and equities and bonds where you don’t have some explosive thing. And I think that’s what everybody keeps expecting, which tells me that I don’t think it’s coming, where you basically just get this real hard down. And to your point, like, you know, you could have a recession, you could have unemployment rise, you could have equity sell off 10, 15, 20 percent or more.

[01:19:40] Joe Carlasare: And it, depending on the rate of the decline, it doesn’t necessarily mean there needs to be this huge shock to Bitcoin. We have had just this year, right, periods where you had equities were sold, they sold off 10 percent into the end of October. Bitcoin didn’t budge, right? It actually just kept on its train going because of all the things you’re talking about, all the coins locked up by the diehards.

[01:20:00] Joe Carlasare: Unless you get some systemic risk, I don’t expect a hard down on Bitcoin.

[01:20:05] Preston Pysh: It’s an election year. HODL, any comments on the-

[01:20:09] HODL: Yeah, the election is, God can we just skip over these things, man? Like, honestly, I, it’s, it’s going to get so brutal.

[01:20:18] Preston Pysh: It’s just so crazy to me how detached as a society we have become to this idea of free and open markets, right?

[01:20:27] Preston Pysh: Like, like people say it and they, and if you tell people they’re not free and open, they’re like, yeah, I know they haven’t been free and open for years. But then it’s just like, and I don’t care and that’s just how things are and I’m perfectly okay with that and I don’t know I’m just maybe it’s the military background in me like I guess maybe I thought that that what I was doing it and like Defending was this free and open market society that like and I guess that’s why I’m such a hardcore Bitcoiners because like it’s the only thing I can see That it doesn’t matter who the president is, like this thing is a force to be reckoned with, with respect to actually introducing free and open markets back to society.

[01:21:11] Joe Carlasare: And free and open markets require transparent, they require transparency for one, but they also require personal responsibility. And the problem we have is that people don’t want to have personal responsibility. They may say it until their stock portfolio falls 50%.

[01:21:24] Preston Pysh: You’re right.

[01:21:25] Joe Carlasare: Come on. Help me out here.

[01:21:27] HODL: We live in a nerfed world and, you know, I mean, if. How many people that are, you know, investing in their 401ks and just, you know, some passive flow of, you know, index funds know what is in those index funds? Nobody has any idea, right? Yeah. And all they know is you throw money at the stock market and it spits back more money.

[01:21:46] HODL: That’s, that’s all anybody knows, right? There is no capital allocation going on, you know, Charlie Munger just died yesterday. Right. So like. You know, I mean, Charlie Munger was one of the great value investors. You know, I learned a lot about, from Charlie, about how markets should actually work. And when I came to Bitcoin originally, I came from a value perspective lens, which I know Preston did as well, and Joe too.

[01:22:09] HODL: And Bitcoin was one of the only places in the world that I actually saw value. When I first bought Bitcoin, it was 200 and I was like, well, if this thing does what I think it can do, the sky is the limit, million dollars plus, right? And that was a crazy thing to think back then. But being able to buy something for 200 that you thought was worth a million is, you know, crazy value for money.

[01:22:29] HODL: And yeah, that was the lens by which I first approached Bitcoin and it feels good. to actually be doing capital allocation, because if I was wrong, I would have lost all my money, as it should be. That’s the way things should be. If you’re wrong in an investment, you should lose. You should go to zero.

[01:22:43] Preston Pysh: That’s right. That’s right. 10, 000 was an insane number back then, by the way. Yeah, it was. It was like, could you imagine if this thing like went to 10, 000? All right, guys, let’s wrap right there. This was a blast. I love just having these candid chats with you guys and really appreciate your time and just your thoughtful comments.

[01:23:05] Preston Pysh: It’s, it’s really appreciated. Do you guys have anything that you want to highlight? We’ll start with Hodl.

[01:23:10] HODL: Nothing to highlight. I think stay humble and stack stats. That’s the best thing anybody could ever tell you. The best advice.

[01:23:17] Preston Pysh: And you’re active on Nostr, is that correct?

[01:23:20] HODL: I’m still on Noster, I’m still on Twitter. Just, you know, shit posting. There’s not tons of value there, you know.

[01:23:27] Preston Pysh: Joe?

[01:23:28] Joe Carlasare: I always have to plug here, if you want my help in any litigated dispute, I’m always happy to have a conversation with you, talk about anything I can. Obviously, if you’ve been around in Bitcoin or the larger crypto space. You’re aware that as we talked about tonight, the space is rife with fraud and there are plenty of good people that have been taken advantage of, and also people that are facing very onerous suits at this point unfairly because of you know, the, the idea that whenever there’s a bear market, whenever assets decline, people bring out the litigation and I’m very busy, but I’m always willing to talk to new clients.

[01:24:02] Joe Carlasare: So you can Google my name and you’ll find my law firm, happy to talk Joe Carlisari at Amundsen Davis. And I’ll just say. I think next year is going to be absolutely crazy. I mean, I honestly get excited just thinking about all that’s coming down the pipe. I mean, where you’ve got markets at, where you’ve got litigation, keep in mind, like you’ve got these major pieces of litigation, Coinbase and Binance that are still pending with the SEC.

[01:24:26] Joe Carlasare: The SEC came out and said, The FTX style fraud was committed at Binance. And that’s to be determined once you get that monitor in there is going to be providing government documents out to the public. So stay tuned. And also like how it all said that you have to survive until 2025, that should be your slogan, right?

[01:24:43] Joe Carlasare: Like, cause we’re, we’re in for some craziness next year. Love it. Absolutely.

[01:24:47] Preston Pysh: All right, gents, thanks for your time.

[01:24:51] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[01:25:04] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

[01:25:24] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.