BTC092: BITCOIN ENERGY & CUSTODY

W/ PARKER LEWIS & WILL COLE

23 August 2022

Preston Pysh talks with Parker Lewis and Will Cole about Bitcoin’s profound impact on the energy sector. Additionally, they discuss the importance of custody and why it’s so hard for many legacy financial companies to handle Bitcoin in a safe and secure way.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN

  • What is happening between the energy sector and the Bitcoin mining space?
  • Regulator capture with Ethereum.
  • Has Bitcoin reached a tipping point with energy and mining being interlinked?
  • Blackrock endorsing Bitcoin as ESG compliant.
  • Parker’s concerns with ESG in general.
  • Taking custody of Bitcoin and why it’s so important to its role in the future.
  • Unchained offering final settlement to a person’s personal account.
  • Where are energy prices going in Europe from here?

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Preston Pysh (00:00:04):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday’s release of the podcast where we’re talking about Bitcoin. Well, backed by popular demand, I have Bitcoin thought leaders, Parker Lewis, and Will Cole from Unchained Capital to talk to us about everything happening in the energy space. Additionally, we talk about how and why the financialization of Bitcoin is so difficult for various platforms to do in a responsible way. We talk about some of Parker’s concerns with the energy situation in Europe from a macro standpoint and the environmental fund that currently exists and much, much more. Without further delay, here’s my interview with Parker and Will.

Intro (00:00:40):

You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Now, for your host Preston Pysh.

Preston Pysh (00:00:59):

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Like I said, in the introduction, I’m here with Will and Parker. Guys, welcome to The Investor’s Podcast. Welcome to Bitcoin Fundamentals on The Investor’s Podcast.

Parker Lewis (00:01:08):

Good to be here, Preston.

Will Cole (00:01:09):

Good to be here.

Preston Pysh (00:01:10):

Hey, one of the things that I just see this theme kind of coming up and you see a lot of it, maybe being missed with a lot of the proof of stake conversations. I don’t want to like pull that up here into the front of the conversation, but what I do want to talk about here at the beginning is just energy and Bitcoin, and Parker, I know you have talked about this quite a bit in how these two sectors are merging, whether the energy sector realizes it or not. I think the Bitcoin mining, I think, they definitely see where this is kind of the direction some of this is going, but for people that are joining us and maybe not dialed into all this, explain to them from a very top level framework of why these two things are coming together in a rapid pace.

Parker Lewis (00:02:04):

Yeah, absolutely. Since I’ve been helping to organize the Houston Bitcoin meetup over the past year and a half or so, I’ve started to pay a lot closer attention, not just to the mining side of Bitcoin and proof of work, but also the energy sector as a whole, but also how it interplays with Bitcoin. I’ve started to learn a lot more about energy and power production and drilling and natural gas and oil. I think that to start on the context of Bitcoin, we can talk about in the context of proof of work and proof of stake is that I like to simplify Bitcoin down to being of fundamental value to the world, because there will only ever be 21 million and that the killer app or the real fundamental value in Bitcoin is that it affords everyone the opportunity to be able to opt into a form of money that can’t be printed.

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Parker Lewis (00:02:55):

And that there are a lot of people myself included who leased up until the last 18 months and I’m still on my rabbit to send down the energy rabbit hole that take energy for granted. How I relate that to Bitcoin though, is that everyone took money for granted and that there’s a lot of people that think that Bitcoin waste energy, but people who do not understand why Bitcoin is of fundamental value to the world could never understand or justify the amount of energy necessary to protect it and to secure it. And if all value in Bitcoin derives from the fact that there will only ever be 21 million, you don’t get something of value in the world without a cost. And in this case, and in Bitcoin’s case, that part of the core backbone of what secures Bitcoin and what enforces that fixed supply of 21 million is real world energy.

Parker Lewis (00:03:50):

There are a number of other intricate puzzle pieces that also secure Bitcoin, but the energy component of it, the thing that makes it very costly to forge Bitcoin transactions or to write invalid Bitcoin transactions to the Bitcoin open public ledger is energy. And that the consequence of that is that Bitcoin is money, at least in my view and energy is what secures it. And what Bitcoin represents to energy is a fundamentally new source of demand and a new incentive to develop energy resources and that will have profound implications for the energy industry as a whole. I think a lot of us always focus on the money side, but the world of Bitcoin and energy are rapidly converging to one.

Parker Lewis (00:04:37):

And what I’ve seen in the last 18 months is that it certainly feels like we’ve crossed over a tipping point where the energy industry as a whole, and it’s not just oil and gas, but also the power sector, maybe more importantly, the power sector is starting to figure out that this thing Bitcoin can really not only help solve a problem, but also be a huge source of profit for their businesses. So, happy to go into more detail there, but I really do think that Bitcoin will help transform energy as much as it transforms money. Albeit I am still someone who is I don’t consider myself an energy expert. I know just enough to be dangerous.

Preston Pysh (00:05:18):

Will?

Will Cole (00:05:19):

No, I mean, I agree with Parker, I got into this not from the mining and energy side, but after attending the Houston meetups in particular, which since the Chinese ban on mining, as it were a lot of those companies and a lot of that hash powers flocked. Texas, and this has become kind of a central point for those discussions. No, I mean, everything of value, I mean, gold has the same issue, right? Gold’s price determines how much energy is expended to extract more from the ground. When it goes up, we can expend more energy, we can get more gold. Bitcoin has other safety measures in place to where you can’t get more Bitcoin, but at the same time, understanding that nothing of value comes without expending energy. And that when I think of proof of stake, as you mentioned at the very beginning, it much more resembles like sort of shareholder voting agreements or governance and a public stock or something like that. I don’t think that’s where value comes from. And in order for Bitcoin to have value, proof of work is essential for it.

Preston Pysh (00:06:21):

Parker…

Parker Lewis (00:06:21):

Yeah, one thing I was just going to add there, leveraging off of Will’s point is that one other way that I think about proof of work and Bitcoin mining is that really, and this comes back to a fundamental point around money, which is, and again, this is my perspective, but I also believe it to be a fundamental economic truth is that we all truthfully only need one form of money. It’s not coincidence that most of us have only ever interacted and traded with one form of money. That money converges in a consensus forms, because it’s actually necessary to converge in order to solve a problem of trade and that’s functionally what money does. And that via Bitcoin’s proof of work along with a number of other puzzle pieces, it actually solved this problem. And when I talk about solving a problem, it is being able to issue and validate currency.

Parker Lewis (00:07:15):

And for everyone be being able to credibly rely on the fact that there will only ever be 21 million or more importantly, that there will only be a fixed amount of money without the need for trust. The credibility of that is important and without the need for trust of that is important. And proof of work was critical to that equation. And if money converges to one and Bitcoin already solved the problem, then any other arguments around proof of stake of whether it works or doesn’t work, it can only work as well as Bitcoin already does. More importantly, in to Will’s point, the proof of stake system, part of that proof of work function separated ownership from validation and security of the network, such that everyone within the Bitcoin network has equal rights. The consensus rules are the consensus rules and nobody can change them.

Parker Lewis (00:08:12):

What effectively a proof of stake system does much like JP Morgan, Chase and Wells Fargo and Bank of America, it combines validation with ownership. What we’ve seen historically is that has really bad outcomes and we actually solve this problem via Bitcoin and proof of work. And we would basically just be uninventing the wheel or going back to a screwed up world. And so, the proof of work function is not only very necessary, but it functionally obsoletes the need for any other form of money in the context of Bitcoin, which therefore obsoletes the need to try to even think about proof of stake because the best it can do is match Bitcoin, being able to credibly enforce a fixed supply without the need for trust. Can’t do that, but part of the reason why you can’t do that is because Bitcoin and proof of work already solved the problem.

Preston Pysh (00:09:00):

You were getting into a little bit of, and proof of stake, how it has this JP Morgan, like Fiat based incentive structure built into it. There was recently a video that came out this week where a person was talking about the Ethereum merge and all of the concerns that they had around regulatory capture and what they were getting at is by people staking their coins in order to do the validation of the new supposed protocol that’s going to be rolled out with Ethereum that there’s regulatory capture happening at the exchange level because people are incentivized to just take their coins, put them on the exchange.

Preston Pysh (00:09:43):

Then all of a sudden the government can come in there and tell the exchange what it is they are aren’t going to do with all those coins that are being staked into the exchange’s hands. And so talk to us about your thoughts on how you see this progressing through time. I laid out a little bit of the person who made this video and hopefully we’ll have it in the show notes here, so people could check it out to see his thoughts, but what are your thoughts on, do you agree with him? Do you see it maybe even being worse than that, better than that? What are your thoughts?

Will Cole (00:10:15):

I mean, I’ll start. Yeah. I mean, I see some of that, the regulatory capture side of it. You’re starting to combine different layers of counterparty risk, right? You were already had certain amount of risk of having your coins on the exchange to begin with and now layer on top of it that you’re trying to get certain rewards from staking from that, and that you’re putting a target on pretty much anyone who wants to have a say in the protocols development, you’re putting a target on their back, making it very easy for governments and to influence decisions on the protocol level.

Will Cole (00:10:51):

But also, I mean, is this not true? I could be wrong here. I don’t want to say any untruths, but I think it’s also true, at least at the beginning, very similar to the beacon chain that you can stake on right now is that you can’t withdraw. Once you make that decision to stake, you’re essentially locked up and that’s an indeterminate amount of time and there’s even more risk other than just regulatory or typical exchange counterparty risks there, which is the same risk of what happened to Celsius, right?

Preston Pysh (00:11:19):

Which is crazy, which is crazy. I mean, I hate to interrupt you. That’s nuts.

Will Cole (00:11:23):

Yeah. It’s just risk layer on top of risk layer on top of risk. The sort of regulatory capture risk, I mean, it doesn’t even have to be a government having malicious ideas of how to control the protocol, but if you’re on an exchange, you’re already subjecting yourself to jurisdictional risk of where that exchange is located. If they’re in New York and they decide that proof of work rules and proof of stake is terrible or vice versa, you’re again, risk layered on top of risk, layered on top of risk. Yeah, I mean, I haven’t read that or seen that video yet, but I would tend to agree that the incentive to keep things on an exchange in general, in addition to the risk that already exists is going to be bad for the protocol overall.

Parker Lewis (00:12:06):

Yeah, it’s 100% a centralizing force, but I always try to come back to the fundamental, which is Bitcoin already obsoleted all other forms of money. Everyone else is just catching up. And that if we are going to kind of talk about it is, like the most important part of this whole thing is that in order to affect, it requires the hard work and other protocols do this all the time. But when I talked about the fundamental value in Bitcoin deriving from the fact that there will only ever be 21 million and that happens credibly and without the need for trust, well, that is dependent on decentralization. And proof of work functionally just continues to further and further decentralize the Bitcoin network. It’s not the only layer at which Bitcoin decentralizes over time, but the mere fact of changing a protocol that’s even possible demonstrates in front of everyone’s face that thing is so centralized that you could change the rules and that defeats the entire purpose.

Parker Lewis (00:13:10):

Because if one rule can change, then any rule can change. And this obviously isn’t the first time this happens with other protocols on a quarterly basis. It’s pretty comical, I think, to the people in the Bitcoin world who are paying attention, but just like with a lot of things, there’s a lot of noise in the world and people have to figure out by touching the hot stove and hopefully podcasts like these help people learn without having to deposit their Bitcoin in a Celsius, or God forbid hold their form of money and something other than Bitcoin, and then even worse potentially have it be in an even worse position than just being on the exchange, but it staked on an exchange.

Preston Pysh (00:13:48):

Parker, you had mentioned earlier that you were doing this Bitcoin meetup down in Houston. I would imagine you have some major players out of the energy sector participating in these meetings. Is that the case? And is there anything that you’ve heard or seen just on that front that has surprised you or that you think is noteworthy?

Parker Lewis (00:14:12):

Yeah, I think that there’s certainly people from the majors who come through. I mean, it’s an open meet up. We don’t check IDs and also we do value privacy, but it’s really interesting because if anybody’s ever been to Austin bit devs, and for those that aren’t familiar, we host the Austin Bitcoin Developers meetup at the Bitcoin commons downtown in Austin. And if you walk in that room, it’s a group of developers that are working. There’s a mix of people, but it’s a very tech centric group that’s working on protocol development or application development that is impacted by protocol development. When you walk in the Houston meetup, it is an entirely different complexion. It is an energy first group of people and it’s not just oil and gas drillers and landmen, it’s power producers.

Parker Lewis (00:15:03):

I think that what I’ve seen and there’s kind of a combination, but there are people who come through the meetup that work at the majors. There’s private oil and gas, there’s large power producers, there’s power brokers and they have different cross sections where some end up focusing on grid and those might be power producers that are kind of a key part of the supply chain to building substations or manufacturing transformers, or procuring power or producing power. But then there are also oil and gas guys that are focused more off grid of how Bitcoin mining can solve a problem there.

Parker Lewis (00:15:43):

I’d say my greatest takeaway kind of zooming out is that the energy industry, I wouldn’t maybe say as a whole, but that we’ve passed over a critical point, a tipping point where enough people have figured it out that there’s real signal here, that it’s only going to accelerate that enough people have looked at this and said, you know what, there’s something real here and it can solve a problem. And once you cross over a critical mass, there’s no going back, and then what we’re witnessing right now is an acceleration in terms of the convergence between the energy sector and Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:16:20):

You think we’re there right now, we’ve already passed over that?

Parker Lewis (00:16:25):

Yeah, I think we’ve passed over the critical mass.

Preston Pysh (00:16:28):

And Will, do you agree with that?

Will Cole (00:16:31):

Yeah. I mean, in Texas, it’s obvious, but right now, I’m sitting in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I’ve been having these discussions here for, I don’t know, since 2014 or so. The big hold up here, off grid has become very popular here amongst, not even oil and gas people, just land owners, but the utilities were always the more difficult side of the equation in Wyoming. We’ve seen a lot of deals being made just in the past year, new capacity that will come online over the next six, eight months in the state here, because after seven years of trying to wrap their heads around this, there is sort of a tipping point that’s been reached. Honestly, Texas is sort of set the standard.

Will Cole (00:17:15):

There’s jealousy involved. There’s if they can do it, we can do it. Obviously, Texas has a lot of advantages given the nature of their independent grid and the size of that grid already being what? Over, I think, it’s 70, 77 gigawatts or so of capacity. So, places like North Dakota and Wyoming are going to have to catch up, but off grid, it’s very, very exciting here amongst the oil and gas people, landowners, and then even on grid, you see it happening. There’s hardly a discussion that happens or a meetup in the state where there isn’t some contingency from the energy sector present and participating.

Parker Lewis (00:17:52):

Yeah. One thing too, like I didn’t want to oversell it in terms of, there’s still a lot of people from the energy sector that don’t understand Bitcoin, and I’m not suggesting that there’s 50% of people and now, the other 50% are going to be dragged along, but I’m talking about enough of a contingent that looks at this and says, there is something real here. And being able to see month after month, the type of crowds and the type of people and that they’re energy first people, right? They’re oil and gas operators. They’re energy professionals across the industry where they weren’t Bitcoin miners and then started to learn about oil and gas and power production. And that one of the things that I’ve witnessed is that a number of people got into Bitcoin to solve a problem, whether it was they had drilled a well, and they had natural gas that was stranded, and it wouldn’t have been economical to build a pipeline and Bitcoin solve the problem for them.

Parker Lewis (00:18:50):

Another kind story that one producer out in west Texas told that, not the last meetup but the meetup before, was that a permit got pulled because I think it was… I can’t quote the number, but on order of magnitude, it was like a 20,000 MCF pipeline and got a permit pulled because they were flaring like 400 MCF a day and went to the railroad commissioner and said, if I show up with Bitcoin miners and capture this flare, can I get my permit? Yes. Then in other instances, I think people in the power sector started selling Bitcoin or started selling infrastructure or helping procure power and working on PPAs for Bitcoin miners, just recognizing that there was a signal that there was end demand and that it was worth investing their time and energy.

Parker Lewis (00:19:40):

And now they’re back filling on the Bitcoin knowledge side and where at that point, where enough of them have started to find the true signal that I think this is true in all cases, when peers hear things from themselves rather than Bitcoin enthusiast telling them about how Bitcoin’s the best form of money, but it’s more Bitcoin can solve a problem and they can actually see it and hear it from their peers. That’s the point where we’re at, where there’re a sufficient number of those that nobody gets. I don’t want to say nobody, but it’s a lot harder to laugh people out of the room. And once we get to that point, a lot of entrepreneurs and innovators, which is core to the energy industry, not just in Texas, but in America, that when they get turned onto something that is off to the races.

Preston Pysh (00:20:26):

This past week I saw something about BlackRock coming out and basically saying that they found Bitcoin to be in alignment with their ESG initiatives and that it wasn’t bad for the environment. And to be quite honest with you, I was blown away and I thought it was a really big deal. And not because I put this importance on BlackRock necessarily, I mean, they’ve got trillions. It’s more because of all the companies out there that are cramming ESG down the throat of every company board on the planet, it’s them. I guess I was just surprised that to see this out of them, because I would’ve expected the exact opposite. Were you guys surprised by this or is this a bigger deal or is this a nothing burger? What are your thoughts?

Will Cole (00:21:25):

I mean, when you put it that way, if you’re at the top of the food chain as a confidence trickster around a scheme like ESG, you get to set the terms, right? And so am I glad? Like yeah, it makes things a little bit easier, right? I don’t know if it’s genuine or if it’s just because all of their clients are begging them to get into Bitcoin and use the vehicles that they have in order to do it. In order to do that, they had to come up with their own narrative. I happen to think that they’re right, right? I’m not sure if they would agree with me on the reasons that they’re right. I won’t complain, but no, I mean, I see it as like unholy alliance, but one that works in our favor for now.

Preston Pysh (00:22:06):

I agree with that. I totally agree with that. Go ahead, Parker.

Parker Lewis (00:22:11):

I would just say, whole ESG thing is a fraud. They’re all scammers.

Preston Pysh (00:22:15):

Tell us why.

Parker Lewis (00:22:15):

Right?

Preston Pysh (00:22:15):

Tell us why, go into details.

Parker Lewis (00:22:18):

Because BlackRock, they care about making money and charging investment management fees. I think that the whole premise to think that the people that incepted this and then pushed the rules, like they don’t actually care and it’s all about control. I think that the more that you pay attention to this, that it’s obvious. And so, in this case, I’d say beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is they recognize an opportunity to make money. They back solve the rules and then they’ll do things to… Just like they’ve done to the oil and gas industry, they neuter it, right? They figure out how they can make money off it, but then they virtue signal or do whatever they want to do to control the behavior that they want.

Parker Lewis (00:23:12):

And they do that fee of the money system, right? And so I think that I would be very cautious around this of celebrating it because I think, I would say ESG’s a fraud and therefore Bitcoin’s not ESG, that Bitcoin will do all the things that all of the people who espouse to have principles around ESG, just because of the incentive structures around hard money. And that we should celebrate the energy producers, particularly natural gas, particularly oil. It is our lifeblood. And if they could, if BlackRock could basically make the entire energy industry bend their knees, just because they see a profit opportunity, don’t think that they’re going to not try to influence things just the way that they have and in ways that have been incredibly harmful for our energy stability and security.

Parker Lewis (00:24:09):

I think, when you get down to the brass tax, we should not be celebrating BlackRocks kind of working with Coinbase to enter into Bitcoin. I mean, it’s fine, right? I’m not worried about it at the same time. I just wouldn’t be out there being a champion for BlackRock because the incentive structures are broken and they don’t actually give about anything other than their investment management fees and exerting control. They exert control through the financial system. Here in the state of Texas, it was either the… I think it was the Lieutenant Government sent a letter to the comptroller basically saying that, Larry Fink, I believe is the CEO of BlackRock came out and said that they’re supporting a net zero policy and that the Texas Lieutenant Governor basically instructed the comptroller to pull all funds.

Parker Lewis (00:25:05):

I don’t think it actually happened, but to pull all funds from BlackRock, BlackRock managed funds because a net zero policy was destructive to the Texas energy industry and the Texas state house had passed a law that public funds could not be invested with anyone that from a financial perspective that worked in opposition to an industry that is an important in strategic to Texas, and that in this case, I’m almost positive was BlackRock. Yeah, I’d follow the incentives and just watch for the next move. If someone like Marathon, now they reverse course, but if they started getting into ESG mining and we start labeling what is and isn’t okay in terms of what energy can be consumed to secure the Bitcoin network, that’s a really bad path, and BlackRock has a really bad track record.

Preston Pysh (00:25:54):

Love that.

Will Cole (00:25:55):

Shake down artists will find a way to shake you down eventually.

Preston Pysh (00:25:58):

I like that, Will, that’s so true. I just like the way Jeff Booth frames a lot of this where he says, if the money isn’t scarce, everything that’s desirable on the planet will become scarce. When I just look at, you’re seeing this narrative run around on Twitter quite a bit where we’ve got a “energy crisis.” And I think for people that are looking at it without any type of understanding of financial markets, or what’s kind of playing out with Fiat currency, I would rephrase or recage that as we have a Fiat crisis where banks and BlackRock being one of the major players in all of this that are pulling strings are flooding the planet with Fiat currency.

Preston Pysh (00:26:49):

As a result, the things that truly are valued and I think you’re seeing the barometer in energy, first and foremost, especially over in Europe, those charts are like, I got a chart I’m going to pull up a little bit later, some of the electricity costs and things like that. I mean, it’s like Weimar hyperinflation looking charts and I think that’s the barometer. That’s how you’re actually seeing the crisis, which is a Fiat currency crisis. And the desirable thing that everybody wants is energy, because it’s at the core of everything. So, sorry to go on there. I’m just piggybacking and agreeing with everything you guys just said.

Preston Pysh (00:27:27):

I think it’s important for people to have their guard up, but I did find that quite interesting this week with their announcement. What do you guys think about paper Bitcoin? Caitlin Long talks about this quite a bit, and just concerns of the financing of Bitcoin and turning it into paper Bitcoin and people owning that and losing touch with reality of what it is they even own and whether there’s a way for regulatory capture. Similar to what we were talking about with proof of stake and Ethereum, does Bitcoin have a concern from your vantage point in this area? Is this something that the community’s got to be careful with?

Will Cole (00:28:10):

I know that this has been a long term concern of every gold bug, I’ve known since 2006 or so. They’ve always explained it to me and I’m sure there’s monkey business that goes on with the paper gold and the paper Bitcoin. At the same time, zoom out enough and I don’t really worry about it, I think it’s kind of a loser’s argument at the end of the day, is that first of all, you have no control over how those things turn out and what regulations get passed and whether there’s going to be futures markets and whether there’s going to be ETFs and whether there’s going to be all these things. And how they end up getting regulated is that I don’t think it ultimately matters for Bitcoin long term.

Will Cole (00:28:50):

I admit that there are probably schemes in order to try to depress the price over a short term that could be deployed. But in Bitcoin’s case, again, I see this as kind of a loser’s argument because what else are you going to do? There’s being concerned about it doesn’t matter, build things that are valuable. Bitcoin has a core value proposition that exists with or without these paper Bitcoin markets that most of the people that play in that world are going to get rug pulled anyway, because Bitcoin’s a bare instrument. And just like the gold people have learned, there’s no substitute to actually holding Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis (00:29:23):

Yeah. I think the other thing I would just add there is that while very few people in the U.S. financial system can take physical delivery of gold or do, you can take physical delivery of Bitcoin. And that if you borrow Bitcoin and presumably the only reason to borrow Bitcoin today is to short it or to sell it, that if you are borrowing Bitcoin and shorting it, you can only do… And it’s not to say someone can’t buy that Bitcoin and lend it out again. But in that individual operation, you can only short it once and what you do is you create demand on the other side. If you’re short Bitcoin, then you need to purchase it back and using the perfect example. I think as Will stated it, it was perfectly correct, which is you could potentially manipulate the price over the short term.

Parker Lewis (00:30:11):

You can’t over the long term. The perfect example of that is Celsius. Celsius, people deposit their Bitcoin in Celsius, send Celsius limp that out and now Celsius doesn’t have the Bitcoin. Bitcoin eliminates moral hazard. When Bitcoin are lent and they are lost, there are no bailouts, and those Bitcoin that Celsius lent out that were sold, they’re in somebody else’s hand, they’re in someone else’s cold storage and the market cannot ultimately be manipulated over the long term because Bitcoins supply cannot be manipulated. The supply of paper gold can be manipulated, but you can’t functionally take that paper gold and say, give me the physical goal. It’s mostly hedge funds that have no interest in owning the physical. And in Bitcoin’s case, if Bitcoin gets onto an exchange and then’s withdrawn, it’s withdrawn and it’s secured by private keys and there will only ever be 21 million. There’s currently 19 million of issuance.

Parker Lewis (00:31:02):

All 19 million of those Bitcoin are controlled by keys. And if Bitcoin was sold to you and you withdrew it to your own keys, that those short term financialization manipulation games that can happen cannot be sustained because the Bitcoin is all accounted for by someone, right? And that when you live in a world where you can take delivery at virtually no cost and secure it at very low cost, you’re incentivized to do that. Then when the tide goes out, those who are swimming naked are revealed.

Parker Lewis (00:31:32):

In this case, it was Celsius, other platforms, Three Arrows BlockFi’s got issues. I really don’t worry about it. Also, coming from a world of having shorted stock. Again, you can only shorted stock once, you can short more of it, but then you got to buy it back on the other side. So, every time you create a liability, it’s creating artificial demand on the other side. So, as much as you might suppress it, you’re going to send the other way on the back end. I really do believe this is noise. I mean, I understand why people have concerns over it, but when you get into the fundamentals of actually understanding the flow of funds and the ability to influence price, it’s a non-issue in my view.

Preston Pysh (00:32:17):

I agree with you guys. Yeah, go ahead, Will.

Will Cole (00:32:20):

I was just going to say, I have concerns, but for the people that buy paper Bitcoin, not for the marketplace of paper Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:32:29):

Yeah. And if it is double and out, your borrowing costs just keep going up and up, right? Which is only making that point of realization to the timeline to slide further and further to the left.

Parker Lewis (00:32:44):

I’ll just say this, if you’re buying Bitcoin futures and not physical Bitcoin taking delivery, you’re playing the wrong game.

Preston Pysh (00:32:54):

So true. So true. I think for people, especially in the gold community, you mentioned this, Will, that feel like they’ve been burned in this area. I would just challenge a person if you’ve never taken physical custody at Bitcoin and you either have, or haven’t taken physical custody at gold, start your stopwatch and do it, and then secure it after you eventually receive it. One’s going to come a lot faster than the other, then secure it and look at the deltas between those two approaches. Then I think people will understand why I think the physical market isn’t nearly the concern that you have in the physical gold market.

Will Cole (00:33:41):

I mean, it’s one of the primary things that Bitcoin now competes gold on, right? And make sure when you’re doing that transaction, that your counterpart’s in France.

Preston Pysh (00:33:49):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You guys are with Unchained and Unchained takes a lot of pride in helping people hold onto their own keys and help people secure their Bitcoin in any kind of way. Do you guys have anything brewing, any new products, anything that you think will help people take ownership? So we don’t have more paper Bitcoin. What are you guys up to these days?

Parker Lewis (00:34:13):

Well, I mean, I think just like at the core of it and it’s part and parcel with this discussion, which is what we ultimately do and with the foundation of our platform is helping people hold their own keys. And so when we think about what’s happened in the markets over the last three months, Bitcoin, I hate using the term crypto more broadly, but all these discussions that we’ve been having about kind of the state of the markets, that the consequences of what’s happening in the broader markets, ultimately in Bitcoin comes down to the ability to how you secure it. And that the key differentiator in Bitcoin and the key differentiator kind of in terms of the currency itself and how you can hold it. But also the network is that it’s permissions, it’s permissionless, it’s decentralized.

Parker Lewis (00:35:04):

Anybody can access it and anybody can transmit Bitcoin to anyone in the world. And that the most I’d say core thing, at least to me about that is the ability to hold Bitcoin with your own private keys, because it doesn’t matter what anybody else in the world is doing. If you can control your private keys, then you have the ability, truthfully, whether you have a node or not, you could spin up a node and that becomes your permissionless access to network. But if you have your own keys, you’re controlling your wealth and you can take that wherever you want and go wherever you want to in the world. And so really that’s at the core of what we do and that’s our underlying mission and we continue to build that out, BitBlockBoom is next week, or I guess by probably by the time that this gets released, we’ll be in BitBlockBoom week.

Parker Lewis (00:35:51):

And we are planning to make an announcement there, but it’s really just an extension of what our core mission is, which is helping more and more people hold their own private keys, but we’re going to expand what had initially been a private launch around the trading side. Will, I don’t know if you want to talk about that, but really, we focus on the private key ownership, expanding that base, solving a lot of these problems that people have come to face in these last few months around losing their Bitcoin or giving it to somebody they shouldn’t have and we’re just trying to further that mission by being able to help more people hold their own keys and also being able to buy directly there. Will, if you want to go into more detail.

Preston Pysh (00:36:31):

Well, can you spill the beans on something?

Will Cole (00:36:33):

Yeah. Without bearing the lead, the idea is buy Bitcoin directly to cold storage with keys that you control with an added value proposition of affecting final settlement faster than any place else in the world, right? If you have an Unchained vault that you are sovereign over the keys and over the funds, we can affect final settlement Bitcoin in your hands faster than anyone, the motivation…

Preston Pysh (00:36:59):

Like in the next block, it’s straight into your vault or what?

Will Cole (00:37:04):

Well, it depends. We take USD through wires to speed things up, because it’s the fastest Fiat settlement. If you’ve prefunded a large amount or something like that, then typically within the next hour or two, we can affect final settlement. Typically, for most people it would be like T+1. Once the wire clears, then we set off an operation to settle the Bitcoin to your vault. And of course, that’s the entire thing that we’re going to be working on over the next year. The idea being as we get MTLs around the United States, you can prefund those vaults, you can therefore the USD settlement side has already taken place. And therefore when you execute a trade, if we’re signing multiple times a day, you’ll get same day settlement that way.

Will Cole (00:37:54):

You compare that even to an exchange, even if you’ve prefunded, you’re subject to withdrawal limits, oftentimes unless you have some sweetheart deal. If you’ve let things build up or you’re doing a large purchase, it can take quite a while. If you’re DCAing on a platform like Square, which I love, I’ve used, but Bitcoin then triples in price and you have weekly withdrawal limits. It could take you weeks to get your Bitcoin off. This is sort of in my own personal story, something that I’ve wanted… Well, I didn’t know to want it in 2011, but I knew to know to want it by 2013 or so. And we never really had the ability to cut out part of that counterparty risk, which is just the time it takes from purchasing Bitcoin to taking full sovereign control over it.

Will Cole (00:38:43):

And so right now, most of those transactions are settling around T+1, but regardless of the size of the purchase, but we’ll be working to get that into the same day over time. I think that again, from my personal story, it’s not just time of settlement is a really big deal because there’s so many different… We talked about earlier the layer on top of layer on top of layer, counterparty risk you take when you’re with an exchange or any other way to buy Bitcoin is just that it’s not just withdrawal limits, it’s not just exchange hack risk, it could be jurisdictional. I’ve had friends here in Wyoming that bought Bitcoin before 2017 and between 2016 and 2018, it was stuck. Not because Coinbase was hacked, not because they were doing anything nefarious, but because they read the money transmitter license rules in Wyoming and decided they couldn’t do business there anymore, which included allowing you to withdraw funds.

Will Cole (00:39:41):

And so, people’s funds in Wyoming were locked up for two years and because Wyoming’s so small, most people have never heard of that. Then we changed the law in 2018 and then people got their money back, right? But if you think about what’s going on in New York with proof of work and what could they do? You just have so many different risks that we say not your keys, not your Bitcoin. At Unchained, we’ve been facilitating people taking custody of their coins. But when we look at that, we say every one of those coins was bought somewhere or mine somewhere, right?

Will Cole (00:40:09):

Everyone took a certain amount of risk, getting it from whatever situation they were in before to where they ended up within Unchained. And wouldn’t it be great if we could, how do we cut that down to the bare minimum risk that someone could take when transferring dollars in order to get Bitcoin? Yeah, that’s what we’ll be launching, we’ll be in 26 states at the time of launch for working to get all 50, but it’s pretty exciting. It’s something that I personally wanted for a long time and hoping that other people see the value in.

Preston Pysh (00:40:39):

It’s awesome. It’s awesome. Let’s shift gears into some macro talk. Parker, I asked you before we started chatting if there was any charts or anything that you wanted to look at, you had told me that you think one of the most important charts out there is just the global central bank balance sheets. For people that are listening, describe why you think this is important. I’m going to throw it up on the screen for people that are joining us via YouTube, but talk to us about this chart.

Parker Lewis (00:41:11):

Are you going to pull it up so I can see it? Or you just want me to imagine it?

Preston Pysh (00:41:13):

Yeah, I’m trying to, I’m having a little technical difficulty.

Parker Lewis (00:41:15):

I mean, I know what it looks like the back of my hand. So, are you pulling up the Fed balance? It is the Fed balance sheet or actually the federal reserves?

Preston Pysh (00:41:22):

Yeah, the Fed balance sheet.

Parker Lewis (00:41:25):

Yeah. I think that there’s been a lot of talk about the fed increasing interest rates and out of control inflation. I think in the last meeting, the fed increased interest rates, 75 basis points, but what really matters is the dollar supply and all dollars are created and destroyed by the federal reserve. And the size of the Fed’s balance sheet is really what dictates dollar interest rates more so than short term interest rates, essentially that when the fed increases short term interest rates, they do and can potentially seriously screw up some short term funding markets. But the dollar supply is really what influences everything so that the Fed’s balance sheet so goes the Fed’s balance sheet goes the world, every other balance sheet that’s dollar based, or really just Fiat based is levered to the feds and that this is so interrelated to Bitcoin because I think oftentimes people intuitively come to understand why it is so destructive to have your money be printed, but it’s really on either side of that equation.

Parker Lewis (00:42:37):

It’s the process of creating money and eliminating money from the system on either side of that equation is destructive to the economic structure. That manipulating the money supply is really the fundamental problem. And what the fed is signaled is that they’re going to start to unwind the balance sheet. But despite the fact that they’ve been raising short term interest rates, they haven’t really moved the needle at all. If you look at the chart, it’s a flat line effectively. It’s down, I think like $30 billion, but they printed 5 trillion in the last two years. It’s a rounding error. And so that truthfully is the whole reason why Bitcoin exists and that when we look forward to what might come in a broader financial markets and the potential disruption, it is the Fed’s balance sheet that really is the greatest influencer.

Parker Lewis (00:43:29):

And the feds signal that they’re going to start to unwind the 5 trillion. The truth is they won’t be able to, but when it comes back to the energy discussion too, it is that the fed increasing interest rates is going to do nothing to create more energy. It’s only going to further impair those supply chains. And so, I think, it’s just whenever the fed comes out and says anything that they’re planning to do, it just reinforces why we do what we do in Bitcoin, not just what we do is Unchained, but I think what all Bitcoiners do in terms of helping to spread the knowledge base.

Parker Lewis (00:44:04):

But I do think the Fed’s balance sheet more so than what the fed is doing in terms of raising short term interest rates is really the more important financial, the more influential kind of driver of everything that happens in the market. And the relevant thing today is they really haven’t done much, but that they’ve signaled that they will and I don’t believe that they’re going to be able to drain a lot of dollars out without breaking the system, but what they choose to do from an actual balance sheet side is more consequential than anything.

Preston Pysh (00:44:37):

I have to tell you guys, this is the first interview I’ve done with a new computer. As I was trying to share it here with Zoom, Zoom gave me a message that I had to stop recording and reload the software in order to share the charts. So, no charts for anybody until we’re done with this interview, and then we will…

Will Cole (00:45:00):

Show notes, show notes.

Preston Pysh (00:45:01):

Show notes, there you go.

Parker Lewis (00:45:02):

I’ll just describe it. In 2007, the Fed’s balance sheet was about a trillion dollars, and then they increase it by 3.6 over three series. So, imagine three humps. And then they took out 700 billion and then they printed 5 trillion. And now, they’ve been flat for six months and they’ve signaled that they’re going to reduce it. But fool me once, shame on you, fool me four times, shame on me.

Preston Pysh (00:45:36):

Exactly. You had made the comment that as they’re tightening, you think it’s going to break supply chains and potentially even lead to further inflationary prints. I think this is in the realm of possible here. I think that’s a very contrarian take to people that are heavily involved in financial markets for years and decades. They would say we’re on the cusp of a recession, and we’re probably going to see a lot of the interest rates reverse course that we might even see deflation here in the next six months. Walk us through your narrative, Parker, because it seems like you don’t share that belief.

Parker Lewis (00:46:19):

Yeah. I think that it’s just a very common sense perspective, which is essentially the fed is trying to destroy demand to bring prices down.

Preston Pysh (00:46:31):

Yes.

Parker Lewis (00:46:32):

Right. But when you destroy demand, you can also destroy supply chains. And if you destroy supply chains and producer’s ability to produce, then you can end up in a much worse situation. The demand for energy over time has proven to be very inelastic. We need gasoline to get in a car, go anywhere to produce and deliver goods to market. Just hearing things interacting with more people in the energy industry, just to give a few anecdotes, but I hear it consistently is talking about how, and this is also part of the function of ESG, but I think also has a big impact now is that there’s been a large underinvestment in CapEx across the board in the oil and gas space.

Parker Lewis (00:47:25):

And that a lot of the drilling is necessary to just sustain current demand. But when you have a very tight and constrained market, where I went up to the Minneapolis Bitcoin meet up a few weeks ago and flying back, I sat next to a guy who’d been working on well sites for the past 42 days and he was talking about how they were at max capacity. They were starting to reduce the quality of people that they were hiring. They couldn’t keep people, they were paying people. They started to hire people straight out of high school, paying them 75,000 as a straight out of high school job and they couldn’t keep people on staff. And that basically the industry’s at a maximum capacity and such that if you start to make the cost of capital more expensive, or if you start to massively reduce the reserves and the emergency reserves and start to artificially bring energy oil prices down specifically, you impair the ability.

Parker Lewis (00:48:30):

You do two things, you impair the ability of producers to capture that price. But then when you start to raise interest rates, you start to increase the cost of capital, such that if people wanted to go finance more production activity, it now cost them more. What’s going to happen in that environment where the producers are capturing less price, they can’t hire people? You are actually going to get less of the goods and services to market than you actually need. And the things that are most inelastic are oil and gas and then the more refined products down market. And so, but it all comes back from a very common sense perspective that you do not get more of these things by essentially cutting off the capital or making the capital significantly more expensive to finance these activities.

Parker Lewis (00:49:21):

It’s one of the problems the Fiat system as a whole, which is cheap debt is what has financed infrastructure, including in oil and gas. And so, if you make that more expensive, you’re just going to impair the ability to produce more of it. I think that’s what we’ll see. People will actually need as much natural resources and as much gasoline, as much power as they’ve ever have, but less and less of it will be coming to market or not enough to meet the demand. It’s like the symptoms and the problems of money printing are vast and I think that we’re going to find it out in a bigger way through this cycle.

Preston Pysh (00:50:01):

Will, what are your thoughts?

Will Cole (00:50:03):

Well, I won’t pretend to be able to hang with you and Parker when it comes to macro, but I’ll just say that, what Parker just said on top of supply chains that are already strained by shutting down an economy for two years and you think that raising interest rates are going to help the situation seems again, from a common sense perspective. I look at all the other macro commentators, especially in the Bitcoin space. I listen to Parker and you and Lyn and others. Then if I watch any mainstream news, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Preston Pysh (00:50:41):

Which means you totally understand everything that’s happening?

Will Cole (00:50:45):

I mean, maybe that’s the first step to understand, I guess.

Parker Lewis (00:50:49):

Yeah. I just think that it’s like anytime the fed comes out and does anything, it’s just like, there’s a very loud signal being sent that something’s wrong, right?

Preston Pysh (00:50:57):

Oh yeah, big time.

Parker Lewis (00:51:01):

Energy prices are up through the roof, even the United States, like if you look at natural gas prices, I think it was… Like Henry Hub, I believe, was $2 an MCF. I might get my units wrong, but it was like $2 three years ago and now it’s $9 today, right? What does that translate into? That translates into higher electricity prices and it’s just starting to ripple through, right?

Preston Pysh (00:51:31):

Not today Zoom, I got my phone out and I pulled up the chart off of my desktop. Let me just look at that whopper. It’s insane. It looks like a hyperinflation chart.

Will Cole (00:51:43):

Looks like a startup projections.

Preston Pysh (00:51:44):

It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

Parker Lewis (00:51:46):

Yeah. And so, I think everyone feels it in their daily lives. I don’t think that many people connect it to the issues with our money system. What’s that one?

Preston Pysh (00:51:56):

This is natural gas in the UK and my screen is like refer… I’ve got all sorts of technical issues tonight.

Parker Lewis (00:52:03):

Well, pull up natural gas, pull up Henry Hub natural gas.

Preston Pysh (00:52:06):

My light’s getting in the way. I mean, just look at that. It’s totally…

Parker Lewis (00:52:10):

I can see a reflection of myself on your phone.

Preston Pysh (00:52:14):

What a disaster.

Will Cole (00:52:17):

Hey, it’s full operation here.

Preston Pysh (00:52:17):

Oh yeah. We’re just trying to make things happen.

Parker Lewis (00:52:18):

This is a total boomer move. I know that Preston is not a boomer, but we’re descending down the path of being our parents.

Preston Pysh (00:52:29):

In Bitcoin, I kind am. In Bitcoin, I classify myself as a boomer, I guess.

Parker Lewis (00:52:33):

Yeah. But yeah, even if you look at the U.S. prices too, and I think that again, most people do not make this connection to the fact that our money’s broken. And it can be really difficult to kind of operate in an environment, not from an investment perspective, although I’m sure everyone who’s investing is chasing their tails as well. But it just every single day, the more that happens, the more convicted, the more important Bitcoin kind of as a project really, it’s like, I think we probably all feel that way, but more people figure it out. And so it’s like, I see the kind of chaos that the fed and centralized institutions all over the world create and that people have to start keying into it. But also, people do as a function of the market test that what we’re here for, of building Bitcoin and helping deliver infrastructure that provides a more sound monetary system is the most important that anybody could be working on. And that includes you in terms of just…

Preston Pysh (00:53:47):

Amen.

Parker Lewis (00:53:47):

… helping to ex expand the knowledge base around it.

Preston Pysh (00:53:52):

Completely agree with you. This is vital, I mean, when you just think about what it offers, which is settlement between any two parties, it doesn’t matter who you are, who you know, to be able to transmit value instantly, anywhere in the world, regardless of jurisdiction and to physically take custody to me without there being any debasement, a terminal debasement is just indescribable. I don’t know how people can’t think that there’s something just unbelievably massive here.

Parker Lewis (00:54:32):

What percentage of your audience you think hold their own keys?

Preston Pysh (00:54:38):

I bet you it’s less than we would like to think, but I don’t know. I have no idea. The only reason I say that is because so much of our audience came from traditional finance and have come into it. I think for some of them, they’re just like, hey, I buy into the idea that maybe the money’s broken and maybe I need to have a hedge against that particular event happening. And so, they’re probably just looking for something to have exposure to the upside, the asymmetric upside, and they just want to be able to do it in the easiest way possible.

Will Cole (00:55:13):

Also, we need to scare them off of paper Bitcoin as well.

Preston Pysh (00:55:17):

I mean, I’m trying with the show and talking about why I personally, I mean, that’s not how I operate. I mean, everything that you say, Parker and Will, I’m with you 100%. I think this is a way bigger deal and you know what, Parker? Your take on this potentially continuing to blow out with respect to energy, I think is a way higher probability. And I’m not saying I completely agree with it, but I think it’s a way higher probability than what most, because I think if you took most people anybody on Wall Street, anybody who’s a professional like hedge fund manager or whatever they’re saying, we’re going to have deep deflationary forces here in six months to a year, like deep. I think in some areas, some products and some types of services, I think that may be true.

Preston Pysh (00:56:07):

But I think for energy specifically, look at Europe, it’s saying the exact opposite. There looks like there’s no end in sight for where that’s going. You’ve seen a little bit of a drop in oil recently, but you’re not outside of like it continuing to rip. I just think that it’s an important consideration and I think it’s something people need to think about because I think it’s in the realm of possible. I don’t know if I would say it’s my high, my base case, but I think it’s in the realm of possible.

Parker Lewis (00:56:41):

I mean, I think when you start to understand, and again, I don’t pretend to be an expert, but if you start to talk to energy professionals, of people actually in the field that understand the supply chains, it is a consistent. We’ve underinvested massively and we are at max capacity. And that when you understand the disruptive impact of tightening financial conditions, you create, we already have a supply constraint issue and that only becomes worse, right? Or at least that’s my perspective and there was a recent podcast that Griffin Haby on Marty Bent’s podcast that I encourage people to listen to where he specifically talked about and he’s a Bitcoin miner today, Griffin is, but he came from the oil and gas background where he basically said, we don’t really know what the price of oil is today because they are depleting emergency reserves in massive proportion.

Parker Lewis (00:57:47):

That’s basically flooding the system with oil that’s not produced today at current costs, right? And then when you start to understand that producers are struggling to find the labor to expand capacity, that’s the core fundamental driver and anything that the fed is doing to potentially quote, destroy demand or increasing financing costs, doesn’t make the supply issue go in the right direction. And so, I do think, and I talk, because when I go around and educate about Bitcoin, the more I get involved in the energy community or develop friendships and relationships in the energy world. I’ve started to think about this a lot more, but oftentimes they’ll ask me because they oftentimes they’ll find their way to Bitcoin because it actually solves a problem for them before they actually understand the money, the hard money dynamics of it.

Parker Lewis (00:58:44):

They’ll often ask me whether or not like Bitcoin is savings or it’s money or an investment. I say it is the right way to think about it in my view is that it’s a better form of money. It might not operate like a better form of money or might not be perceived to that because of its volatility and different characteristics that don’t line up well with what people have known money to be. But there is a reality that most people have taken money for granted and don’t actually understand why the dollar is of value, but that it is inevitable that people think about Bitcoin the first time that they buy it. Or definitely if they’re buying paper, Bitcoin don’t do that, bad idea, just buy the real thing. That it’s impossible not to think about and as an investment initially, that is unavoidable.

Parker Lewis (00:59:30):

And that, the more that you go down the rabbit hole, listening to these shows, reading the Bitcoin standard, other resources on Bitcoin. When you get to the fundamental of it, you will start to see it as money, but that can’t happen without going down that rabbit hole and it certainly can’t happen the first time that you buy Bitcoin. A lot of people I think, and you probably see this a lot in your world, Preston, where people talk about how Bitcoin’s a hedge to inflation, and now they don’t understand why, hey, if Bitcoin’s a hedge to inflation, why did it come down? And there’s this whole massive credit bubble and the dollar was de-leveraging and everything’s levered to the dollar. It’s perfectly reasonable there, but Bitcoin is not a hedge to inflation. It is the solution to inflation, the permanent solution, that it is, inflation is a function of money creation.

Parker Lewis (01:00:19):

And when money is free or freer than free as the people on CNBC famously once said that this is what you get, you get economic distortion, economic disruption, economic imbalance and the only way to restore that balance is by finding a better form of money and that is what Bitcoin is. And that’s why my construct of it is like when we think about inflation, it’s not just the function of people printing money, it is that the supply chains and the economic distortion actually create supply and demand and balances, just that the goods that we actually need cannot be delivered to market, and you actually need a reliable form of money to coordinate all the inputs and that’s why just my view is it’s Bitcoin is actually the solution to inflation, not a hedge to it.

Preston Pysh (01:01:05):

Amen. I just don’t know how people can think anything other than that on a long timeframe, right? How can’t you think that if you add more units into the system that the prices and it’s not linear, and I think this is Michael Saylor’s big point where inflation is a vector of all these different things, depending on where you’re taking the measurement at. But if you’re continuing to add units into the system, collectively on a global scale, like how can’t people think that, that’s what causes inflation. I mean, I just think it’s really straight and very obvious. To your strategic petroleum…

Will Cole (01:01:39):

Well, they’ve been telling us for eight months that doesn’t cause inflation and then they came around to it. The fed just learned this and their century plus existence that have just figured out that yes, that is what actually causes inflation.

Preston Pysh (01:01:55):

To Parker’s strategic petroleum reserve comment, just to give people a heads up. I’m looking at the chart back in 2020. There were 656 million barrels in the strategic petroleum reserve, today, we’re at 464. I think you could say about a third of it has been depleted just in the last two years and still aggressively being depleted to offset prices and so far, it’s…

Parker Lewis (01:02:22):

But think about what that does too, because this is something very fundamental. It’s like, it’s the other side of printing money. They’re printing oil right now, right? Because that those oil that were in the strategic reserves, they weren’t produced today. They weren’t produced at current cost. So they’re flooding the market, right? And they’re manipulating the price of oil down. Well, the actual price response, if you’re working in a stable form of money regime, which we’re not, the supply response, namely the price of oil going higher is what incentivizes producers to be able to go produce more, to capture those prices, such that when you’re depleting the emergency reserves, you’re basically hitting the producers on both sides.

Parker Lewis (01:03:11):

You’re raising interest rates, increasing financing costs, and you’re artificially reducing price, which you otherwise could be capturing to go form new capital in the form of rigs and wells and new production. Now, the feds not releasing the reserves, but these two things are incredibly destructive to new capital formation, which would translate into an increase in supply to alleviate price. It’s like, they’re chasing their tails and we all will be chasing our tails until we can do away with the entire kind of scheme, [inaudible 01:03:58], scheme, legacy structure, centralization, right? Because this is also as a function of the perils of centralization at many different layers so yeah, it’s a…

Will Cole (01:04:09):

Well, it’s incredibly unpredictable too, right? Because that’s a political decision that’s being made to deplete the reserves as if they’re just hard forking rules, and you never would know what you’re going to get. Going back to our proof of stake conversation, when you make that a possibility, you make it incredibly unstable and incredibly difficult area to operate in.

Preston Pysh (01:04:31):

Guys, I can tell…

Parker Lewis (01:04:32):

And what do you…

Preston Pysh (01:04:32):

Go ahead, Parker.

Parker Lewis (01:04:33):

I was going to say, what do you think that oil producers would produce and if the barrel oil costs $5 versus three, right? It’s like, what’s the only thing that’s caused or not the only thing, but what’s a big thing that’s causes those prices to come down? The U.S. government selling oil and it is functionally competing with the oil and gas industry.

Preston Pysh (01:04:53):

It’s incentivizing more consumption because people have a price that they can afford it at three and not at five. So, you’re incentivizing further consumption, which is you’re just warping the incentive structure of free and open markets period.

Parker Lewis (01:05:10):

Right. And look, we should all want cheap energy, right? And so it’s not like we’re… I’m not saying like, oh, well, I wish oil still costs $120 a barrel and the gasoline still costs $5 versus coming down. It’s that energy abundance is the key to reducing energy prices. I think the point that you brought up about Jeff Booth’s comment is like the scarcity of money is actually what creates the abundance of all other goods, including energy.

Preston Pysh (01:05:46):

Amen.

Parker Lewis (01:05:47):

Because money is the input required to coordinate all of the energy inputs to actually extract it and so when you manipulate things, you ultimately get far worse outcomes in the end, rather than just letting the free market work.

Preston Pysh (01:06:02):

Guys, I could talk to you all night. This was brilliant. Can you give people a handoff to anything that you guys want to highlight, your Twitter feeds, any of that stuff? And we’ll throw it into the show notes.

Parker Lewis (01:06:11):

You want to go first, Will?

Will Cole (01:06:14):

Sure. I’m @willcole on Twitter. You can visit us at Unchained.com. If you’re looking to find a way to not be subject to withdrawal limits or get your funds locked up for an excessive amount of time, look forward to our announcement on Saturday, the 27th, around our new trading tool that is being released and a little bit over half the United States next week.

Parker Lewis (01:06:38):

Yeah. I’m @parkeralewis on Twitter. We run a lot of meetups and we help people hold their own private keys. So people can check out our website, Unchained.com and look out for our announcement during BitBlockBoom. If you want to hold your own keys, come to Unchained.com. You can schedule a consultation, but that’s what our mission is to help more and more people do that and to help people get off Coinbase and avoid the exchange altogether. The more that people do that, the less they’ll have to worry about paper Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (01:07:12):

Love it. Guys, thank you so much for your time. This was a blast.

Will Cole (01:07:15):

Thanks, Preston.

Parker Lewis (01:07:16):

Thanks, Preston.

Preston Pysh (01:07:17):

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 learn 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. So, anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. With that, thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (01:07:50):

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 before posting.

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