[00:02:21] Tuur Demeester: And I was like, oh, actually not.because I always do them in the bear market, but gimme some time and I’ll think about it. I did, I did have that feeling of kind of disagreeing with the consensus. Yeah. Which is usually a good time to put something out, and it seems like there was a kind of a consensus that a hundred thousand is nice.

[00:02:41] Tuur Demeester: We should be happy with that. Let’s just accept it’s a four year cycle, so we’re going to go, go back down and we’ll take some profits here and call it a day. And I was like, I don’t think so. Yeah, I haven’t seen a mania like it just, my gut was like, I think there’s a lot more here. So it was a great motivation to dig in again [00:03:00] and actually look at the data and see what comes out.

[00:03:03] Preston Pysh: It’s funny that you start off with that because I completely agree with you. Having been through a couple bull markets, this right now doesn’t feel anything like a speculative mania or anything that is like the past cycles at this point in time from the having. If anything, it feels somewhat bearish right now as far as just like, almost like nothing even happened, I think for most people.

[00:03:28] Tuur Demeester: Even though the price has quadrupled in

[00:03:30] Preston Pysh: Yeah, two years and a half. Yeah. I mean, the previous cycles always had this speculative blow off that usually lasted, what, six to nine months? Where it was just, the price was literally raging three to 5% What felt like every day. For like six months straight and we haven’t seen anything like that.

[00:03:51] Tuur Demeester: No, I think whoever’s buying is probably like hate buying right now. Like they, they kind of feel like they have to own some. They don’t like Trump, but you know, [00:04:00] it’s like you have got to diversify somehow. I just, yeah. It’s not at that stage where people feel like this is the be all, end all answer to all, you know, all problems.

[00:04:11] Tuur Demeester: It’s not there. And we have, it’s an institutional cycle. I don’t know if you agree, but I think this is the real institutional cycle. I don’t think retail is

[00:04:18] Preston Pysh: really in this market yet. Wow. Yeah. Your report kind of starting off there. The narrative or the talking point is whales are selling, but in your report you kind of say, you’re not saying the opposite, but your report suggests that whales are holding rather than capitulating and signaling a mid bull sentiment.

[00:04:37] Preston Pysh: Talk to us a little bit about this and what metrics you’re looking at that are suggesting that.

[00:04:42] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, so the Hobbler net position change is a metric I like to look at, and it basically looks at all the coins in aggregates, but waited for their age.  are we seeing net hobbling or are we seeing net moving of coins, which usually indicate selling?

[00:04:59] Tuur Demeester: And so you see these spikes in the graph. And usually in, in an early bull market, there’s just no, no movement whatsoever. Whales are just stoically holding. We have seen a few spikes down, but no moves really above a hundred thousand in the past. Six to nine months. Yeah, so you see those little spikes.

[00:05:18] Tuur Demeester: And actually in my video presentation, which was a little bit after the report, there was another spike down and that was that 80,000, the one that people were talking about, 80,000 Bitcoin being sold, which led to a. I think it was only a 3% move in the price. Yeah. Incredible. Um, and actually I looked up the BX hack back in the day.

[00:05:38] Tuur Demeester: I think there was 160,000 coins. . Even that, like, yeah, the market had a little sell off, but it, it didn’t do anything substantial. So I. Also, I think you have to keep in mind that there may be Bitcoin whales that are moving coins, not because they’re selling, but because they’re seeing the sailor strategy opportunity of, Hey, if I put my coins [00:06:00] in a vehicle here, we can now use leverage to increase our stash.

[00:06:04] Tuur Demeester: And for the first time in a kind of a, yeah, an illegally legitimate way. So I don’t want to put all my money on that, like, oh, it’s totally that. This time is different. I still think that there is some, probably some profit taking among whales as well because they’re accustomed to the four year cycle. We’re above the previous all time high, like it feels like a nice time to to do that.

[00:06:26] Tuur Demeester: I’m curious what your take is,because you are also really deep in the Bitcoin space and talking to people, like why do you think these older coins are moving a bit?

[00:06:34] Preston Pysh: Yeah, I don’t know. It seems kind of weird that you’re seeing such large blocks kind of come onto the market, the way that they’re coming onto the market because they’re going, it appears they’re going into the spot markets.

[00:06:45] Preston Pysh: Which for all intents and purposes means they want you to see that they’re selling. They want you to see it kind of getting ready to be released and then wanting you to position yourself for that event. And that’s kind of odd, right? Because if you really wanted to mask this, you would do it as much over the counter and behind the scenes in as slowly as possible if you didn’t want the market to know.

[00:07:08] Preston Pysh: So. I find that quite head scratching. I don’t have an answer for it, but if you were going to pick through the incentives of why somebody would be doing that, I guess they’re trying to signal to the market and maybe go into some type of derivative to catch after the move, to be more levered in the long term play, call it, you know, one year derivative or a two year derivative on the underlying, so.

[00:07:31] Preston Pysh: I don’t know, but it’s very different. It’s very different than what we saw in previous bull runs, and I think so much of it is just to your point that you made earlier, the institutions are here and Wall Street is here. Full steam, and they seem to be kind of pulling out a lot of the playbooks that they’ve used in markets for decades, which is, if you want to acquire the underlying, you do fancy stuff like this, I guess.

[00:07:58] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. It’s good. You make good points. Yeah, and it’s true that we don’t really know. I mean, I do think there’s blockchain analysis that’s fairly good, but still, you know. We don’t really know where these whales are, so yeah, I dunno, like what if you’re a Chinese whale and you’ve kind of had some visitors from the government, they’re like, Hey, you know, we want you to have a good future, but also, you know, we’re looking to acquire Bitcoin so maybe we can work something out where you os extensively sell a whole bunch of Bitcoin, et cetera.

[00:08:25] Tuur Demeester: And who knows? Like there’s so, yeah, there’s so many possible scenarios. But I do think in the aggregate, you do have got to pay attention to this. If we’re going to see bigger blocks move like two moves of like 200,000 coins, I think that’s often a sign that. The whales know something is up. . But I don’t feel like we’re there

[00:08:42] Preston Pysh: yet.

[00:08:42] Preston Pysh: Yeah, yeah. I agree. And you know, it’s interesting, there’s so many people running around saying, well, we’re here we are. We’re coming up on the point in time of the four year cycle that you sell your coins and you go away for a year and a half and then you come back. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in Bitcoin, it’s when you make a really simple, like.

[00:09:05] Preston Pysh: Decision like that, or you think you’ve figured it out, it seems to always figure out a way to prove you wrong and to change and to adjust and. I have no idea what to do right here. Absolutely no idea.

[00:09:18] Tuur Demeester: This is, yeah, I think that’s why I put out the report.because I had that same feeling and I was wrong back in the day in, uh, I think it was 2016, late 2016, early 2017 maybe, where we were like between 1500 and $3,000.

[00:09:32] Tuur Demeester: . So it wasn’t new all time high. Yeah. And people had this like mental Me too. It was like, ah, you know, I think this is. Too much. And people who are ignorant are getting in. And I remember even selling, selling some Bitcoin, just thinking like, oh, you never know. And then we went to 20,000. Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and I, I feel like there’s a lot of like bullish predictions of like, I guess the Samsung is probably the only one who has like very bullish prediction and a short term prediction, whereas most people are like, oh yeah, a million Bitcoin.

[00:10:05] Tuur Demeester: But by 2030. And most predictions seem to be hovering around like 200,000, which is, yeah, two x from here. But we, I don’t know. I just don’t. I dunno. I mean, get the blow off. I’m very happy to have egg on my face, you know, when, when it happens and, and, and be exposed or whatever. That I was way too bullish. I do feel like we could tack on another 18 months possibly to this cycle, maybe eight to 18 months or something like that, and have a real blowout because also the capital is now concentrated in Bitcoin.

[00:10:35] Tuur Demeester: Like, yeah, there is an old coin. We’re seeing that bubble up again, these coins in my opinion, but I don’t feel like it’s. People are so ignorant. They were in previous cycles. They know Bitcoin is the game in town. And also if, if you have appetite for risk. Go at it right In the Bitcoin space, any kinda risk you just is there for you.

[00:10:55] Tuur Demeester: You name it, you can buy it so you don’t have to go to these pump and dumps.

[00:10:59] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah. It just doesn’t, there’s no speculative mania that I’m seeing whatsoever compared to previous cycles that give you that big giant sell off is because people made a bunch of fast money. They don’t really realize why they made it.

[00:11:13] Preston Pysh: They just followed their cousin who told them about it, and then they bought in and it ripped a hundred percent and then they sold. And you know, that’s the collapse of it all. True. I just don’t, I’m not seeing that right now, but we’ll see. You can see how timid for people listening, you can, yeah, you can hear how timid we both are.

[00:11:29] Preston Pysh: Having been through and seen a lot of things in this space, you have got to stay humble. Like you

[00:11:33] Tuur Demeester: just can’t copy paste the previous cycle.

[00:11:35] Preston Pysh: No, you never can. You definitely can’t. You definitely can’t. Hey, you bring up in your report this risk of custodial confiscation by governments, and this is a risk that I’m looking at the incentives of the government.

[00:11:50] Preston Pysh: More and more spending more and more reliance on the basement of the currency. I look at the social construct of society and there’s a huge population that literally just look at the government like, oh, you’re going to print some money and just mail it to me? Yeah, that’s what I want you to do. Without the thought of the long term consequence, they don’t care about the long term.

[00:12:12] Preston Pysh: They just need relief Now. And so the politicians that are representing a lot of this population that need the relief now, I don’t see them looking at any of this as if they’re going to reign in and perform austerity or anything like that. So with that being the setup. Then you’re looking at the world potentially moving to this new form of money, and you look at the consolidation of the coins into the hands of institutions that are custodying, very large swaths of this quote unquote new money.

[00:12:46] Preston Pysh: Walk us through how you think some of this could potentially unfold. Is it a high risk? What are the probabilities that you’re kind of putting on some of this? Walk us through it.

[00:12:56] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, I mean, I think part of why this risk was [00:13:00] considered to be so abstract and you know, far, far away, is that most people had a bit of, I guess they would underestimate the craftiness of government in terms of, you know, coming up with a narrative that they can sell to the public because the image was.

[00:13:15] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, confiscation means the government barges in and it just kind of yanks 80% of the coins outta Coinbase puts it on their own account. And there we go. What are you going to do? We have the guns, you don’t. And then people would be like, no, this is America. That would never happen. But to look at what Trump did with the tariffs, he wanted to increase taxes.

[00:13:36] Tuur Demeester: He wanted some kind of VAT system like they have in Europe, but he couldn’t sell that. He couldn’t push it through the leg legislature probably, but so what he did was, call it tariffs and, but it’s in almost like the net same effect. He has a whole bunch of new tax revenues. That are by and large paid by.

[00:13:53] Tuur Demeester: It looks like it’s going to be American consumers that are going to pay for that. It doesn’t really seem like, I could be wrong, but it doesn’t  really seem like international producers are lowering their prices.because I think oftentimes they just have very thin margins themselves. They just can’t. Yeah. So, yeah, just to see how they pull that off.

[00:14:11] Tuur Demeester: Sold it. You know, it’s, it’s just the reality now. It’s been something that people would think was impossible six months ago, and now we’re just living it. And then just last week it was like, oh yeah, and by the way, Intel got a lot of bailouts or a lot of stimulus money during COVID, so we’re going to take 10%.

[00:14:27] Tuur Demeester: And initially Trump seemed to say like, oh, we paid good money for it. It’s a great investment. And now he’s tweeting like. Isn’t it amazing? We got it for free. We just took it. And I think the, the market is a little delusional to pump in the Intel stock, like as if this is great news for Intel that investors are diluted and that there’s a risk of even more of that happening to Intel or other companies.

[00:14:53] Tuur Demeester: In the near future. I think that’s just a short term, kind of short circuit in people’s minds. . . Uh, but so yeah, I think that’s the reality. And so when you think about how Bitcoin confiscation would happen, I think it could be similar where all of a sudden the government moves, all these companies are going to be publicly traded, so they can just kind of take stock in them and say it’s a sovereign wealth fund they’re building and then.

[00:15:16] Tuur Demeester: What probably you want to do as a government is to try and use those assets as collateral to then borrow against It is ultimately a government. Doesn’t really care so much about cash. Like they don’t really, they don’t want to be debt free necessarily. They just want to be able to service their debt, which means just issue more of it.

[00:15:33] Tuur Demeester: And if you have, if you’re losing credibility internationally in the way that you’ve always done it with the bond markets, which clearly is the case, bond markets are, in my opinion, are strong in a strong bear market corrected for inflation worldwide. So you have got to come up with other ways to do it. And I think also.

[00:15:51] Tuur Demeester: We have to keep in mind, local governments can also start, you know? Oh yeah. Coming up with schemes like this, there’s no limit. Almost. The advantage of Bitcoin, of course, is that it’s  highly auditable and you can move things around. So there is still time to kind of position yourself for this new reality, but I think you have to just.

[00:16:09] Tuur Demeester: It’s just another risk factor that you have to now really add to the list if you’re a Bitcoin investor. Because I said this to Connor in a podcast just yesterday, that as well, that of course we all know the risk in Bitcoin is not spread homogenously, but I think it’ll be the same for confiscation.

[00:16:24] Tuur Demeester: There’s not going to be a, I don’t think, a blank, blank out ban of Bitcoin. . That seems impossible with the Trump administration given how bullish the all these people are in the administration. But I do think certain vehicles could just have more risk than others.

[00:16:38] Preston Pysh: Hmm. It’s interesting that you kind of use the Intel as an example of how government could just dilute existing shareholders in a stealthy kind of way.

[00:16:51] Preston Pysh: Then borrow against the shares through a sovereign wealth fund, and most shareholders, or the public or people covering it. I mean, I would think that your typical American wouldn’t even really understand like what took place to be outraged or upset about with respect to something like

[00:17:11] Tuur Demeester: the, the story is we’re partners now, like, you know, with government and the U American people and Intel we’re partners now.

[00:17:18] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. Whereas if somebody in Bolivia, if a Bolivian government had done that, we would be like, this is confiscation. This is nationalization of the industry and yeah. And we all know. There is examples. There are studies of like oil companies. When the government owns 50% of an oil company or a majority share, their production goes down by about 50% on average, like that.

[00:17:40] Tuur Demeester: They just become, is this like

[00:17:41] Preston Pysh: Gazprom as as like an example or who you, there’s

[00:17:43] Tuur Demeester: several examples. You have Venezuela as well? Yeah. You just kind of compare it to pure private play oil companies and of course, because they have a board with market people, they don’t have bureaucrats on the board. We saw it in Belgium too, like the government nationalized, what was it again?

[00:17:59] Tuur Demeester: The telecom company and the postal company, and even the national, that’s a funny example. Actually, the Central Bank of Belgium had lots of gold and the government came on board as a partner, and so now even to this day, you can buy shares in the Belgian National Bank and have a claim to all the golds.

[00:18:18] Tuur Demeester: The chairs are trading at way below NAV. Yeah, way below NAV.because people don’t fool themselves to think that they could actually pull that gold out.

[00:18:28] Preston Pysh: You know, this is such a salient point because this is something that I’ve talked about on stage at different conferences and whatnot. I’ve always left it very generic as to the government’s going to eventually figure out that they’re broke and they’re going to need real money to pay for things.

[00:18:42] Preston Pysh: And I’m looking at this over here and this is a honeypot, and then it’s pretty much end of analysis and I don’t really get into the mechanics of how they might actually try to pull it off. What you’re describing here just makes so much, doesn’t make sense. It’s terrible, but from how, if you’re trying to predict or project what they would do next, this seems like a very viable path because it just kind of masks and hides the reality of what’s actually taking place.

[00:19:10] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s also new for me. Like I was like, yeah, I did write about the risk of confiscation. I just didn’t really know how it would happen. And I think in general, yeah, you always want to look at what is the government doing and then what if we extrapolate or what is it? They just keep doing it.

[00:19:24] Tuur Demeester: They apply it to different industries. I wouldn’t be saying this if the government had a 10% debt to GDP, but you know, it’s six point half percent deficit. It’s uh, a trillion, what is it, over a trillion dollars a year now that they have to pay an interest. Just interest. Yeah. And it’s bonkers. Yeah. It’s

[00:19:41] Preston Pysh: worse

[00:19:42] Tuur Demeester: than the Great depression,

[00:19:43] Preston Pysh: literally.

[00:19:44] Preston Pysh: How about the pivot from the start of the year? So when the administration came in and Elon was going to make the government efficient with Doge and all this stuff, right, it seemed like, it seemed like they actually were thinking that they might be able to implement austerity measures and get the, get the whole ship under control and save.

[00:20:06] Preston Pysh: Then it was what may timeframe that it seemed like they did literally a 180 hard pivot and was like, okay, like this whole thing’s going to hell in a hand basket. And then they really leaned into the Genius Act and like all this, and I know that they were kind of working on some of that stuff since the start of the year, but it was like they just kind of forgot about all when Elon and Bessett had their blow up and it just like the whole thing just spun 180.

[00:20:33] Preston Pysh: Like what are your thoughts on some of that?

[00:20:36] Tuur Demeester: Well, I mean, I agree with that analysis. Additionally, I do try to put myself in the shoes of the administration. Be like, okay, what is this like from their point of view? Yeah. And maybe one of the things they underestimated is just how much of a, it’s almost like a covert civil war that’s happening.

[00:20:54] Tuur Demeester: Like there’s just so much strife internally in the US There’s, you know, on the international stage, there’s the threat of war everywhere. I think that’s like, that feels very imminent to these people who are trying to run the ship and trying to, first of all, yeah, not sink. Trying to keep it on course more or less, trying to not get overthrown by the previous, some more like liberal elites, like for them to come back and just take it over.

[00:21:21] Tuur Demeester: So I think that is maybe in that sense, a reality check. I also feel like, yeah, Scott Besant. It feels a bit like his, the confidence is, is just less than what it was like. . Whoa. We’re going to pull this off. It’s going to be great. Doge. The $5 million, what is it called? Golden tickets that we’re going to sell to get 5 million people, million wealthy people in the country.

[00:21:42] Tuur Demeester: All those revenue sources. I do think the story of the tariffs is kind of going pretty well. It’s going better than what people expected. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that. But it, it’s not enough. Yeah. So what are you going to do? And I think for Bitcoin savers it’s important to. Probably keep in mind that this is kind of a story separate from the Bitcoin price.

[00:22:06] Tuur Demeester: It doesn’t mean if the government gets aggressive, it’s not a world government, it’s the US government. 300 million people live in the US. There’s, yeah, so many, there’s so much money outside the US and you saw it with Roosevelt as well. When he confiscated gold, the literal gold price went up 50% in the 12 months following.

[00:22:24] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. So that’s counterintuitive. But it can totally happen to Bitcoin too, where we have a raising bull market. In a way, it’s the biggest possible endorsement, like what is the asset that they’re after? It’s the most valuable asset on the world stage. So it’s a huge endorsement of Bitcoin. The asset class.

[00:22:40] Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

[00:22:41] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I, at the beginning of the year when all this was coming out, I made a video back in, it was like probably January of 2025, and I said. This is literally impossible. What they’re trying to do, simply because if they are like reducing the expansion of the units, they have to replace them. They have to put, the whole thing is literally a Ponzi scheme.

[00:23:01] Preston Pysh: And if you’re removing units out of that, you’re going to get so much impairment across debt instruments. The market’s not going to be able to handle it, but there’s just not going to be enough money or currency in the system to service the demands and the flow of commerce. And it seems like they’ve figured that out.

[00:23:21] Preston Pysh: And it seems like, and you, you write about this in your report with the M two and how Bitcoin tracks the M two growth rate. Back when I was talking about this, I was just looking at the M two and I’m like, Hey, they’ve aggressively contracted on a global scale, the M two, and they’re kind of at the limits of where everywhere we’ve looked in the past 20 years where the trend line has to keep going up into the right was where we’re at right now.

[00:23:45] Preston Pysh: So like I just don’t see it happening. Talk to us about this, this idea of M two growth and anything else that you want to kind of unpack with some of those ideas. And I guess my question to you and all of that is, is it really a Ponzi? Is the fiat [00:24:00] system just the total Ponzi scheme and they have to keep expanding it or else things start melting down?

[00:24:05] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, it is in my opinion, and you know, I really respect you and other people who go into the nitty gritty of like, you know, Lin Alden and like really understanding how it functions. But that was that realization back in 2006. Seven for me was, was the start of trying to find an alternative place to go and finding real scarcity really, because Yeah, it does.

[00:24:28] Tuur Demeester: There’s just more debt than can ever be serviced, so the only way to to keep doing it is to extend and pretend to roll it until you hit a wall, and that’s for inflation. And then of course, the debt gets washed out. Uh, and you get a huge restructuring of society. Certain people, there’s all these stories, of course, of people borrowing huge amounts of money in Y Mart, Germany and getting away with it, like just buying real acid justbecause they had the right connection.

[00:24:50] Tuur Demeester: They made the right decision at the right time. But then at the same time, you get the mass of the populace who just gets impoverished and that’s a new problem. It means they get angry, they have very little to lose. You can get revolutions, those kind of things. And then the government has to try and find a way to keep finding revenue sources just to try and keep the machine running, at least from a, a governance point of view.

[00:25:14] Tuur Demeester: Maybe the Ponzi scheme is, is broke, but yeah, you have got to find a way to, to keep it going somehow. Or you just, you have a literal civil war and the country falls apart, something like that. So it’s, it’s very hard to, and there’s so many moving pieces, right? There’s just so many moving.  I’m also surprised to see how fast.

[00:25:32] Tuur Demeester: The international tensions are ramping up, and I think it is because once the Ponzi scheme comes to an end, all of a sudden you realize how weak you are. It means that even in the past outsized forces that were considered to be weak, like these gangs or whatever. All of a sudden they can make their way in because they’re profiting off of your instability.

[00:25:52] Tuur Demeester: Like in when, um, Russia had their hyperinflation, it was so hard for Moscow to get even some revenue, like you probably know this, but, but Yeltsin did like organize a commission to figure out like, why are the tax revenues not arriving in Moscow? What’s going on? Like, we can’t raise money. What had happened is that, and this is way down the line, I’m not saying this is for tomorrow, but what had happened is that these provinces, technically they were paying their taxes in kind.

[00:26:20] Tuur Demeester:because you know, the ruble was worthless. But it was so hard to oversee all that, that literally, like for example, the province of Samara in Russia was paying taxes, quote unquote. And what it was is they had filled a container with toxic waste and just literal toxic waste, like chemical waste. Send it to Moscow and be like, this is our payment.

[00:26:42] Tuur Demeester: You know, deal with it. Or like you would have the local construction company and they would have to pay taxes and then the city would be like, you know what, how about you guys build us a metro system? You know, just do that and that we’ll consider that to be your tax payment.

[00:26:55] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:26:56] Tuur Demeester: It’s just, it’s not the end of the world, but it is like, it [00:27:00] is a difficult environment.

[00:27:01] Tuur Demeester: One’s the, the money is the blood of the economy. Of course, you and I agree, there’s anemia, there’s all these problems. So once, once that really hits a certain critical point, the coordination becomes so hard in the economy and now in the world economy, it’s probably the first time that we’re seeing a fiat crisis on a global scale.

[00:27:20] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know the details about China either, but like they’re probably going to run into issues with Yuan. Europe obviously is going to have issues with the Euro. The yen is already toasted pretty much. So now I’m seeing news that it looks like France is going to need a an IMF bailout, the uk. The same like that is, it’s moving out.

[00:27:40] Tuur Demeester: That’s acceleration.

[00:27:41] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah. It really is. . Talk to us about gold. You’ve covered gold quite a bit through the years. Bitcoin is still not breaking out to a new, all time high against gold, which I think is an interesting discussion point. How do you kind of [00:28:00] see the coming five years with Bitcoin and gold and how it’s kind of treated on the international stage with all this institutional adoption happening now on Bitcoin?

[00:28:09] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, this is a little pet peeve of mine, and maybe looking back, it’ll be some kind of bizarre coincidence, but when I look at the Bitcoin chart expressed in gold, I see these psychological points of resistance. You know? . One gram of gold. . One ounce of gold. . A hundred grams of gold. And now one kilo, a thousand grams of gold.

[00:28:30] Tuur Demeester: We hit that point in 2020 and now five years later, we’re still at a kilo of gold. And so I do think we’re going to break above that just because Bitcoin is more provably scarce than gold. There’s a lot more you can do with it. It’s not as geographically constrained. It’s more auditable, all that stuff that we all know.

[00:28:48] Tuur Demeester: And so, yeah, I do think it’ll be very meaningful once Bitcoin breaks up. In terms of gold, I think the next obvious target is 10 11 kilograms of gold.because you know, 10 is maybe a [00:29:00] psychological. Target or maybe like how many kilos is 400 ounces?because I think that’s like a good delivery industrial bar.

[00:29:06] Tuur Demeester: Hmm. That’s also somewhere around that, maybe that’s 12 kilos. And then people estimate that 11 kilos of gold is pretty much parody for Bitcoin in terms of market cap. So if we get 11 kilos, then. The gold market cap and Bitcoin market cap going to be the same. So that would be an excellent next point of resistance where people just, they don’t think it’ll go above that.

[00:29:27] Tuur Demeester: Maybe eventually, of course, I think it will, but for the coming cycle that’s, or for the coming 24 months even, that might be an interesting target. So yeah, I think it’s very important to look at those graphs because. I mean, I don’t know if, if you’re into technical analysis, but it’s just, it’s become impossible to look at long dated charts expressed in dollars.

[00:29:46] Tuur Demeester: I can’t see rhyme or reason in them. They’re all just going parabolic because the denominator is, is being destroyed on the gold front.

[00:29:53] Preston Pysh: I mean it’s Do you, or I guess this is the question. Do gold bugs look at that chart. Or is this [00:30:00] Bitcoiners that pretty much look at that chart?

[00:30:01] Tuur Demeester: I think somehow they have to, you know,because it just, it’s been such a, like I said, that one ounce resistance, that was also a three year resistance.

[00:30:10] Tuur Demeester: . That was not, you know, not a small potato type thing. That was a big deal. I remember, yeah. In 2014, people were really talking about coin at one ounce of gold. And this is important and meaningful. I do think gold bugs, at least the informed ones, probably the movers and the shakers. You know, they, why wouldn’t you?

[00:30:29] Tuur Demeester: Why would because they, that, that’s been a tradition, a longstanding tradition in the gold world is to express all kinds of asset classes in terms of gold and to look at resistance and, and support and those kind of things. So my bet would be, yes, absolutely. Like maybe not every retail investor, but I think the long term, very dedicated gold investors are looking at Bitcoin in terms of gold.

[00:30:51] Tuur Demeester: So

[00:30:51] Preston Pysh: something that you and I have talked about for what feels like almost a decade is this difference between Bitcoin and crypto when it comes, and I [00:31:00] guess now that we have nation state involved and a potential adoption, Eric Trump was, I guess, on stage saying that there was some nation state out there that bought tens of thousands worth of coins.

[00:31:12] Preston Pysh: How damaging, in your opinion, is the conflation of the two? For Bitcoin’s political acceptance moving forward?

[00:31:21] Tuur Demeester: Well, I mean the more they are conflated Bitcoin and all these centralized crypto coins, the more you can try and sell the illusion that Bitcoin is just another fiat currency and that it’s the same thing, and that anybody can just be a victim of the endless pump and dump and dilutionbecause a centralized.

[00:31:42] Tuur Demeester: Chit coin, it can very easily be influenced by political actors who do have the guns and the intelligence and everything. So even if you’re like, oh, but you know, yes, we’re 10 guys, but we’re spread around the world, it’s like it’s not that hard for an intelligence agency to track those people down and say, Hey, let’s partner up.

[00:31:59] Tuur Demeester:  Kind of like how the mafia knocks on your door as a shopkeeper and be like, let us protect you. Protection rackets. So I do think these crypto coins are going to stay in existence, I think. Hopefully the separation is going to continue. I think Bitcoin dominance is just so huge now, and I feel that people are seeing Bitcoin increasingly as a conservative investment, and they’re not saying that about Ether or Cardona or any of the other coins.

[00:32:25] Tuur Demeester: Those are not conservative investments. So I just feel like that fits in the zeitgeist. The whole world is looking for safety. Like what is safe, what is permanent, what is universal, what is apolitical? And Bitcoin fits that to a T Of course. Now, interestingly, within Bitcoin, we’re starting to have that debate of like, hey, like are these latest upgrades?

[00:32:47] Tuur Demeester: Is that actually conservative? Should we be doing that? So, but that think that’s just a sign of the times that that, . Kind of the speculative mania type zeitgeist versus the newer counterculture of conservatism. [00:33:00]

[00:33:00] Preston Pysh: Yeah. One of my frustrations with the institutions and Wall Street showing up right now is I haven’t seen or heard anybody from that, from those institutions really kinda laying out Bitcoin from, especially as they’re comparing it to call it Ethereum or Salon or any of these other things.

[00:33:19] Preston Pysh: They don’t get into any of the tech or why it’s more decentralized or why it’s more secure at all. It’s just kind of like a wave of the hand, here’s Bitcoin, here’s these other blockchains. We think you, and they’re clearly incentivized to just sell product. They just want to sell ETFs that are wrappers on top of all these things.

[00:33:39] Preston Pysh: And so maybe the reason we’re seeing that is they’re incentivized to just kind of like not really get into it because they have more to sell. Um, but. True.

[00:33:49] Tuur Demeester: But then again, they’re no longer and the Wall Street is no longer the only game in town. Yeah. Like they might believe that. They might want to believe that, but you know, look at Tether, they’re making more profit than JP Morgan.

[00:33:58] Tuur Demeester: Yeah, yeah. The new generation [00:34:00] is here and they don’t need to live in New York City. . At all. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think it’s like to the extent that they will. That Wall Street will just continue on this road. It’ll just be digging its own grave. Yeah. You know, similar to how London was, supposedly the financial heart of Europe and everything is happening from there.

[00:34:20] Tuur Demeester: And maybe there is still that to an extent, but it feels increasingly like it’s a kind of a pretend thing. Like it’s already gone. Like people have already given up on London. So, you know, New York has that risk as well. And I think that’s a little bit of the Achilles heel that maybe Trump has, is that he grew up in that environment.

[00:34:38] Tuur Demeester: He has that New York DNA of just like deal making and, and whatever’s moving. Like we want to be involved in that. And of course there’s a lot to be admired about the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, doing the 10,000 hour type study of one particular platform or technology. . That’s usually not really part of the New York mentality.

[00:34:58] Tuur Demeester: I, I would say, yeah. 

[00:35:00] Preston Pysh: My frustration, and we talk about this on the show quite a bit, is just like when you look at the Lightning Network and you look at if Bitcoin layer one is optimized for decentralization and security and not optimized for scalability, that’s, and this is the tri that we’re talking about here, the scalability’s pushed off into subsequent layers that are above it.

[00:35:21] Preston Pysh: When you do go to those subsequent layers. The scalability is the thing that shines when you get into the layer two, and it still comes with the security and decentralization of layer one. And so when I’m looking at all these stable coins, and we had tether back in January, say that they were going to try to use I, I believe the Taproot asset protocol from Lightning Labs to issue tether on Bitcoin lightning, it’s going to move faster, it’s going to have lower fees.

[00:35:52] Preston Pysh: It’s going to, um, have the decentralization of the node network and not for people running a quote unquote full node. It’s going to have tens of thousands of nodes that are running and having the reliability and, and all of that that comes with it. And so I’m looking at it and I’m saying long term, it just doesn’t make sense to me that something that has better incentives would lose.

[00:36:16] Preston Pysh: I’m assuming you agree with that, but do you, and are we just impatient? Do we just need to give this more time for real world assets being tokenized on top of lightning being a better use case with no native token, unlike Ethereum, Salona drawn, you name it.

[00:36:35] Tuur Demeester: Well, there’s probably a bit of, you know, there’s a test phase that kind of needs to happen and I think.

[00:36:44] Tuur Demeester: There was a little bit of over excitement, maybe early on about lightning. I think it was not realistic to think that everybody would just run a lightning node and do it well enough to keep doing it. Similar to maybe early on, people thought anyone is just going to run a an email server, their own email server in their basement.

[00:37:01] Tuur Demeester: So, yeah, you need to kind of build that infrastructure. It does seem maybe that lightning needs to be interoperable with one or more other protocols to really become like that performance juggernaut. . Uh, and that also takes time to do it well. We need people that, that have the knowledge and the risk appetite to invest in those companies that make it happen.

[00:37:21] Tuur Demeester: So I’m not surprised. It’s been, I think 2016 was the lightning paper maybe. So I’m not surprised it’s been nine years also because. The real

[00:37:36] Tuur Demeester: trunk of Bitcoin is that store of value property. Yeah. Like that is the real kind of the root, the strong foundation of it all. And then the branches and the leaves, like that’s more retail. That’s more that high speed stuff. But I do think, you know, especially now that we’re seeing the middle class is kind of disappearing.

[00:37:57] Tuur Demeester: Something that used to be very easy, like, oh, pay [00:38:00] $20 for a wire transfer. You know, wait for four days for the money to arrive. Maybe younger people especially are not going to. Be willing to endure that anymore or just not be able to afford it anymore. So, you know, maybe those people will just kind of become Bitcoin natives increasingly.

[00:38:18] Tuur Demeester: But that’s then also a generational thing, so that that takes some time as well. Like boomers are now going to run their own nodes, but they still have the majority of the money in the economy for now. I keep saying it, but they’re, next year, boomers are going to be between age 62 and 80 years old. So it’s really kind of getting to that point where they’re going to be liquidating, they’re going to be gifting, you know, sometimes just to stay afloat, sometimes just to kind of do family planning that’s coming in the next five to 10 years, especially if the pain in the real estate keeps increasing.

[00:38:53] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Speaking of pain, what institutions or industries do you think will be most disrupted [00:39:00] coming in the next five years? 10 years?

[00:39:03] Tuur Demeester: You mean within Bitcoin or Bitcoin?

[00:39:04] Preston Pysh: Within Bitcoin and also I think when you combine that with AI, like what are we in for coming here in the next five years as far as disruption go, goes

[00:39:16] Tuur Demeester: well, I think from the highest possible level.

[00:39:23] Tuur Demeester: I think yes, I do think robotics is going to be huge. Like you’re just seeing what they can do. Like really they can get into human environments and just take over. Yeah. Like the work that I used to do as a job student in a factory, like, you know, you can just put a machine there, but at the same time, you know, they are maybe more.

[00:39:44] Tuur Demeester: Vulnerable to supply chain disruption, those kind of things. Like you have to maintain the rows, you have to get all the parts, and then what if there’s trade wars happening where you, you know, there’s delays like you, you wanted to do business in Latin America. You ha you had, you were facing all those problems even in the past [00:40:00] 50 years.

[00:40:00] Tuur Demeester: So, so I think it’s important to not be too. Rose, you know, put your rose colored glasses on. Too much of like, oh, robotics is going to solve it all. Especially if, you know, look at the US there’s, there’s so much stuff that is not being produced here anymore. . And maybe it’ll, it will lose access. So I don’t think the boom and blue collar jobs iss.

[00:40:23] Tuur Demeester: Is going to be stopped by AI or robotics anytime soon, like definitely the next 10 years. I think we’re just going to see more and more people get into welding, get into all these kind of productive production type jobs. Maybe go back to agriculture to an extent. Also because the core of the economic machine is just going to be focused on that more like people just won’t be able to afford so much a cruise ship or a Netflix or those kind of things.

[00:40:49] Tuur Demeester: It’s tightening the belt. That’s kind of the macro idea. Then, sorry, what was the question? Oh yeah, the new what? New things are coming up. Yeah. I do think mining and [00:41:00] AI is a marriage made in heaven. Like these data centers, like they can just switch from one to the other. If they’re close to a cheap energy source, if they have political stability on a relatively around them, they can really flourish and we can even see new towns, new cities be built around that.

[00:41:16] Tuur Demeester: I think that’s going to be huge. I think there will be new financial centers around the world. I’m not really sure where yet. It’s a little bit, kinda wait and see. I was looking into, maybe this sounds a bit overly dramatic, but when Rome fell wealthy people, elites, they had to go somewhere. And so there was a flourishing of this, uh, city called Ravenna in like, it was kind of in the area of Venice.

[00:41:40] Tuur Demeester: But it was protected by the coast on the one hand, and on the other hand, the mountains and then also the river. I think it was the Poe River. So they kind of built this city in a swamp. So very kind of unintuitive like, oh, you know, it wasn’t the obvious answer, but it just kind of gradually became the answer to these bigger [00:42:00] centers.

[00:42:00] Tuur Demeester: And so who knows what, I think in the US there’s a lot of room, so who knows? Maybe it’s um. The Appalachian Mountains or maybe, I don’t know, like, you know, and it doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to live on a farm or something. Like we could actually have cities that, that start to flourish in unexpected places.

[00:42:16] Tuur Demeester: So I’m just kind of open for that. But that’s why I’ve been trying to follow Argentina as well. Like that might be an area where, where a lot of capital could find its way eventually, if they can maintain their stability in some way. I mean, people have been betting on El Salvador to an extent . I don’t know how sustainable that is, but yeah.

[00:42:33] Tuur Demeester: So. Because there’s so much inertia with these big centers that are built around a different philosophy that I don’t think it, it’ll be very easy to just say, we’re going to revive New York. You know, we’re just going to pivot New York and it’s going to be, I don’t know, there’s just so much inertia

[00:42:49] Preston Pysh: there, uh, that it seems like the, the simpler, the more opportunity there is, like, right, because if

[00:42:56] Tuur Demeester: you want to be in from, if you’re a Bitcoin or you know, like, let’s punt some money there and we’ll see, you know, let the younger people build it out and then we will kind of join them.

[00:43:05] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. And then specifically industry wise, I mean, I’ve long been bullish on the insurance sector. Like I think it also fits in that people want stability, that there is that more conservative mindset nowadays. So how do you protect your family? It’s going to be life insurance, deposit insurance, those kind of things.

[00:43:19] Tuur Demeester: . . Very boring sounding, but an insurance sector that’s built around paying out claims in dollars might not be sustainable if we’re going to get 30, 40% annual dollar inflation. So I think that’s really going to need reinvention and it’s already happening, you know? . We’re starting at the beginning of that, but yeah.

[00:43:37] Tuur Demeester: I’m curious, what areas are you looking at?

[00:43:40] Preston Pysh: No, I just, your point on if there’s natural resources, particularly on the energy domain, that’s huge just because of the data centers and the Bitcoin mining and just kind of what energy means at its core. Right. But you also have to have the policy and the government domain that’s on the wrapper on top of that, that is wide open saying, yes, come here.

[00:44:03] Preston Pysh: Like it’s whatever you can build, whatever you can capture and kill, it’s yours kind of thing. And when you look at cities that are very established, you mentioned New York, right? I look at the policy and procedures of some of these cities, and I’m saying they’re, they are going to have a very hard time competing, I think, in the coming decade or two, just because they’re just not going to be agile to how fast all of this is changing and like what incentives they need to be putting in place to attract the future businesses and what they’re looking to do.

[00:44:40] Preston Pysh: And so I think the simplicity, if it’s got a lot of energy and it’s got a government with policies that are like, yeah, come on in here and do what you will, I think they’re going to crush it. I think they’re going to be really like far out in front.

[00:44:53] Tuur Demeester: And I think Singapore has been a great example. Something that that’s already been shown and proven.

[00:44:58] Tuur Demeester: Yeah. When entrepreneurs would come to Singapore, they would be so surprised that . Like all of a sudden you get a visit from the government and it’s not like, you know, how can we. Extract all the possible value out of you. But it’s more like, what can we do for you? How can we help you? Like what do you need?

[00:45:12] Tuur Demeester: We want you here. They would, even the Singapore government, they would travel abroad and like have these diplomatic missions. I remember early on visiting Kathy Wood in her little New York office. This is like before they blew up and she had to cut short my meetingbecause she was meeting the Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund.

[00:45:29] Tuur Demeester: Wow. Who were like, you know, come to visit.

[00:45:31] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re out there doing

[00:45:34] Tuur Demeester: outreach, right? Yeah. Because it’s a young, that’s the thing. It’s a young place, you know? . Like the founders are still alive.

[00:45:42] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think that’s going to be huge. Hey, so at the end of your report, you compare Bitcoin to the power of the piece, and you have this artwork channeling technology towards order and harmony.

[00:45:56] Preston Pysh: And Bitcoiners are known for saying Bitcoin solves everything. But in this case, do you genuinely believe Bitcoin can reduce global conflict or is this just inspirational hope?

[00:46:07] Tuur Demeester: No, I do think so. Yeah. I really do think so. It can reduce global conflict. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. And also it’s going to be the stage for this enormous wealth redistribution .

[00:46:21] Tuur Demeester: That we’re seeing. So we’re basically going to have new kings that are going to be made. Then of course it’s up to those kings to make it happen. Like you can’t just assume they’re going to be great guys. Like we’re going to have to kind of try and be vigilant andbecause to an extent, it won’t just be the kings who decide like, I’m the king now.

[00:46:38] Tuur Demeester: Like it’ll be because there is a critical mass of people who believe in them and their project. And so that’s why when I look back at that edge from vix, from back in the, I think it was like the late 15 hundreds. They don’t just show technology and being like, oh, swords and the plow shares and then we have this big furnace in the middle.

[00:46:57] Tuur Demeester: The main characters are the virtues. . So you see like fortitude and justice and they’re personifying the moral virtues that are needed to make all that happen. Yeah. You see in the sky you see peace and justice. Uh, and so yeah, it has to be a collaborative effort. We’re going to have to, um. To the extent that we’re critical of previous generations of like, they messed up.

[00:47:20] Tuur Demeester: It wasn’t just because they had the wrong technology. It was also because there was a laxness, there was an indifference towards universal moral values. And so I think that that’s why, you know, trying to go back to the core or the origins of Bitcoin, the Cipher punks, like that was a really moral project.

[00:47:38] Tuur Demeester: And so I think that’s the rabbit hole to keep going into. . Or the source to keep tapping into. And I think. Still libertarianism probably is not enough. Like just this, I think property right is very important, but it probably won’t be enough to really kind of have a real renaissance, like a kind of a revitalization of society. But it’s a fantastic start.

[00:47:59] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I love when you put some of this artwork out there. You are a master at finding awesome stuff from the past to kind of show the correlation and being hopeful for the future. True. Wait. Less

[00:48:10] Tuur Demeester: of a master than, than the actual artist, but yeah.

[00:48:14] Preston Pysh: Alright, well tur, we’re going to have links to the report. Uh, anything else that you want to highlight and we will have a link to your Twitter account where you’re active or your X account. I’m still calling it Twitter and not really, I mean, I have a couple episodes still coming out on my podcast, but I’ll publish that.

[00:48:30] Tuur Demeester: No, I mean, I think it’s, it’s just, it’s still exciting to be in the Bitcoin ecosystem and I think in a way we, we were often annoyed at these cycles, like people are so ignorant and then they get overexcited, but still, it’s been a great gym to just kind of use personally to not get overly invested in, in the price too much and try to keep a long-term perspective.

[00:48:53] Tuur Demeester: So I do feel grateful for all that. And then, you know, it’s interesting how. With the Bitcoin [00:49:00] development, just to see, again, that moral debate is like, what is Bitcoin actually about? Is it about these financial transactions and storing them as best as possible in a very lean ledger, or is it an agnostic ledger where we should be able to put anything like the tools that people use to debate?

[00:49:16] Tuur Demeester: Are. Yeah, I mean, superficially it’s all technological arguments, but ultimately it’s about that moral argument of like, okay, what is this really about? What is the higher goal of this entire project? So that’s just very fascinating still and important. Yeah.

[00:49:31] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Well, we’ll have links to the things that we mentioned there in the show notes.

[00:49:36] Preston Pysh: Tuur, thank you so much for making time and I obviously look forward to the next time we can chat.

[00:49:41] Tuur Demeester: Always a pleasure, Preston. Always a pleasure.

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