Andy Edstrom and Lyn Alden: Swan Signal Live E40

Lyn Alden, Founder of Lyn Alden Invest­ment Strategy, and Andy Edstrom, author of Why Buy Bitcoin, discussed all of the most recent Bitcoin news, including Niall Fergu­son’s resounding endorse­ment of Bitcoin.

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Summary

00:00 Introduction 

03:25 Analyzing Niall Ferguson’s Bitcoin Endorsement 

16:30 Guggen­heim Invest­ments Eyeing $530 MM Bitcoin Buy 

28:17 Bitcoin Taking Gold’s Market Share 

35:20 Bitcoin All-Time High 

37:35 Janet Yellen: Former Fed Chair As Treasury Secretary

43:10 Future Govern­ment Actions Towards Bitcoin 

46:53 Is Bitcoin Too Big To Ban? 

51:20 Poten­tial of Bretton Woods 2.0

59:00 Post-Show Discus­sion with Brekkie von Bitcoin 

1:07:40 BitcoinTV.Network

1:10:10 SSL Sign-Off

Transcript

Brady Swenson:

Back to a special edition of Swan Signal Live. We’re here with Andy Edstrom and Lyn Alden. Before we dive in to this special episode, because there’s so much bull issues to talk about. We just had to get these two on to talk about it.

I’m going to sheel Swan for just a minute. So much going on at Swan, to talk about. We have, I mean, behind the scenes is just absolutely crazy, being absolutely produc­tive in the backend. We have daily buys rolled out now. We have a brand new onboarding flow, that has received rave reviews. It’s just easier than ever to sign up for Swan and start stacking, really smooth flow. We just had a tweet from James O’Byrne, Corp dev, actually, who gave props to the flow design today. So, props to the design team, Young Ruder, Young Pritzker, and team. They’re doing great work.

We are live in New York. We announced that last week. So, if you’re in New York and you haven’t heard the word yet, you can now stack with Swan in New York. That’s a big deal. Like I said, we have daily buys. There’s so much to keep track of. We have one-time buys coming soon. We’re working on it. We have other improve­ments to the product to make buys happen sooner. So, there isn’t a wait when you make your first deposit, et cetera.

We have wires. We’ve been receiving a lot of big wires lately, too. So, we have a million dollar wires being sent into Swan, big whales buying at Swan. It’s a great deal. We’ll take care of you. So, just get into, if you want to log into your Swan account, there’s a just the link right there in your dashboard to send a wire into Swan and execute your buy.

So, tons going on product devel­oping super quickly, really excited about every­thing happening there. Excited as well to talk about Bitcoin with Lyn and Andy today. Of course, Lyn Alden is an invest­ment strate­gist at Lyn Alden Invest­ment Strategy. And Andy Edstrom is a finan­cial advisor and author of, Why Buy Bitcoin. Both have been on the show numerous times. So, I hope you’re familiar with them. Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for coming on guys.

Lyn Alden:

Thanks for having me again.

Andy Edstrom:

Great to see you, Brady, as always.

Brady Swenson:

Yes, as always, Andy, good to see you too. And you as well, Lyn. All right. So, we have a litany of bullish news that has happened since our last Swan Signal Live, just last Tuesday, over the weekend, yesterday.

We’re going to start off with an endorse­ment of sorts the Bitcoin received from one of the world’s most foremost histo­rians, and in partic­ular, a finan­cial histo­rian. He wrote the book, The Ascent of Money, which is an absolutely fasci­nating read, if you’re into Bitcoin and you’re into money, and learning about what money really is, the history of it, is fasci­nating. Niall Ferguson in an article today drops a pretty, I would say, heavy endorse­ment for Bitcoin in this partic­ular time.

Andy, I know that you are familiar with Niall’s work and a fan of him. Would you mind kicking us off and talk about Niall’s work, and what you think this means for Bitcoin?

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah. Thanks, Brady. Happy to do that. I don’t think it’s an exagger­a­tion to say that Niall Ferguson is the most prolific histo­rian alive today. Certainly, one of the most prolific. I’ve read three of his books, which sounds like a lot, except that he’s written, I think 15 of them. And he’s not even that old. So, I mean, he’s just a prolific producer of histor­ical analysis, let’s say. And he’s just an impres­sive intel­lect. Now, he’s written about several topics. He’s written a lot about empire. He’s written a lot about geopolitics.

I think he coined the term in one of his books, Chimerica, which was his notion of the, basically this inter­re­lat­ed­ness and growing inter­weaving between America and China in the first decade of this century since China joined the WTO. His latest book that I read was The Tower and The Square, which was a histor­ical survey of networks including social networks, which I think probably informed his views on Bitcoin.

And as you said, he’s written a lot about finance, including history of some of the biggest finan­cial families, like the Warburg’s, like the Rothschild. Side note, my first job out of college was working for the Rothschild Organi­za­tion before I got recruited by Goldman.

And then specif­i­cally, he’s written about money and the history of money, as you said, The Ascent of Money. And that’s one of his, probably most influ­en­tial books. So, suffice to say he’s a big brain, but more than that, he is a bridge, I would say between academia and the real world. He’s not one of these ivory tower guys that just churns out material. He definitely is well-Known within people, spheres of people in power, govern­ments, compa­nies. He’s a very influ­en­tial voice.

So yeah, him making a positive state­ments about Bitcoin in one of the major finan­cial period­i­cals around is huge. And this is what I think mainstreaming looks like, and this is what we’ve all been working for.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. I think it’s huge as well. The title of the piece itself is bullish, as could be really, Bitcoin is Winning the COVID-19 Monetary Revolu­tion. There’s a couple pieces there. And Bitcoin is winning in monetary revolu­tion massive, just ways to couch what’s happening here. Right? And the idea that this is actually a revolu­tion, I mean, that’s a big word, Lyn. And it’s really big to hear it from an author and histo­rian who has such context. So, like to hear him, hear Niall Ferguson call this a revolu­tion, it’s something else than your average Bitcoiner calling it a monetary revolution.

Lyn Alden:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, instead of coming from within the commu­nity, it’s coming from without of the commu­nity. And so, that’s been the story of Bitcoin this year, is having a lot of people that weren’t on board with this asset class in the past, three to five years, they’re now coming in and chris­tening it as somewhat of a mainstream asset. So, they’re dropping some of the old narra­tives regarding like Bitcoin being used for criminal activity or things like that. And then focusing more on the fact that the network effect that it’s enjoying. And also, focusing on this, the fact that the market cap keeps going up. And then over time, it’s gotten more and more impres­sive as a store value.

And what I find inter­esting about the piece, is that he approached it in the same way I did, which was empha­sizing the store of value aspect of it. Because Bitcoin spoke both to the critics and the propo­nents of Bitcoin. I point out that the common narra­tives for Bitcoin have changed over time. So, and it also depends on who you talk to, right? So people.

The great thing about Bitcoin is it is what it is, and then people can inter­pret it in different ways to some extent. And so, it had that narra­tive of being a payment network, then it shifted more towards store of value. And then, it can shift to being money as well. And so, taking all those things together, he empha­sized the store of value aspect. And that’s what brought me to bullish on it as well, is really empha­sizing that key aspect to it.

And so, I think his article is very bullish on. He also talks about the dollar index, which is another thing that I’ve been empha­sizing that, if you look at over the past five decades of this current, you can call it the petrodollar system ever since Bretton Woods ended, we had this floating exchange rate system. And if you look at that 50 year history of the dollar compared to a basket of major foreign curren­cies, it’s had these three really big cycles. So, it peaked in the eighties, then it had a big decline, and then it peaked again in the late nineties, early two thousands, then it had a pretty big decline.

And we’ve been in this third dollar bull period ever since late 2014, early 2015. And so, it looks like we’re starting to roll over. And that’s not, of course confirmed yet, but basically, the momentum is now down from this pretty bullish level. So, he had a nice chart in there showing that long-term dollar index.

And so, I think he made a ton of sense. He also did some back of the envelope math showing, he said, I think he refer­ences his math he did from two or three years ago. And he pointed out that if every million­aire put 1% of their net worth in a Bitcoin, the market cap would have to be huge. It would have to be like $75,000 per coin in order to accom­mo­date that flow of money. And so, and then he even refer­enced it down and said, okay, what if it’s just 0.2%, then you get 15,000, which back when he said that was pretty bullish, of course now we’re above that. But the point is, it’s still a tiny market capital­iza­tion compared to the big money that’s out there.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. As we’ve all been saying for years now, that there’s so much more upside to this, PTJ calls it the fastest horse. And it’s just fasci­nating to see this one after the other, these more mainstream finan­cial people, Niall Ferguson, I would call him a finan­cial person too, since he’s a histo­rian of the subject endorsing Bitcoin. And the way he did it again, in the title was amazing.

But a couple of quotes from the article. He says, “First, as we have seen Bitcoin offers built in scarcity in a virtual world charac­ter­ized by bound­less abundance. And second Bitcoin is sover­eign.” So, the two factors, the two features, I guess, of Bitcoin that he sites for allowing Bitcoin to be winning this monetary revolu­tion is scarcity and sover­eignty. And I think it’s extremely impor­tant that he noted sover­eignty. And at the very end of the piece closes out with this, that the United States should recog­nize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the finan­cial system, which after all was origi­nally designed to be less central­ized, and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less free societies.

This brought a smile to my face. And I think this has been a debate that we’ve been seeing on Bitcoin Twitter about Bitcoin and privacy, and big investors coming into the space, and Bitcoin regula­tion being inevitable, which I agree that it is. But also keeping in mind how impor­tant the sover­eignty aspect is to self sover­eignty aspect is to Bitcoin, and how impor­tant privacy is having that ability to opt out of payments panop­ticon is critical as well, critical feature of Bitcoin. Andy, do you think that, I mean, to me, this was a really big deal that Niall called this out. Any thoughts on that closing paragraph?

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s crucial. And he, Ferguson is better placed than most to think about this issue criti­cally. I mentioned the whole Chimerica concept, right? He’s been not only watching, but also artic­u­lating and analyzing what’s been going on in China versus what’s been going on in the US as well as the inter­re­la­tion for, I don’t know, probably a couple of decades now. And yeah, there’s no question. He recog­nizes the differ­ence between what is going on with that regime and how they manage their economy, and how they manage their commu­ni­ca­tions, whether it’s manage­ment of the internet or whether it’s essen­tially, substan­tially all payment traffic flowing through Alipay and WeChat Pay, which is not directly controlled by govern­ment. But clearly govern­ment probably has its eyes on those networks.

And of course, I’m sure he’s aware about what’s going on with the DCEP, basically the crypto “to govern­ment cryptocur­rency,” that’s being rolled out over on that side of the pond. And so, that’s a model of running a country and running a society that differs starkly from what we do here in the US and in the West, and highlighting that differ­ence and highlighting, basically the fork in the road, so to speak, that we’re facing right now. He knows this is a big issue. He knows that if the US follows and issues a govern­ment crypto, so to speak, then there’s going to be real issues around surveil­lance, around managing people’s data. We’re already seeing this with the internet giants, the monop­o­lists that have access to all of our personal data, use it themselves to target us, as well as sell it on to other parties. And a govern­ment currency will make this front and center all the more evident.

So yeah, he sees the writing on the wall. He sees the way this is going. I’m thankful that there are smart analysts like him that are highlighting this crucial issue because it’s central to freedom in society. And we’re facing a real cross­roads here.

Brady Swenson:

Lyn, how impor­tant is the self sover­eignty aspect of Bitcoin to you? And how impor­tant do you think it is to society as a whole?

Lyn Alden:

I think it’s really impor­tant. I mean, that’s what made it survive some of the early attempts by govern­ments to slow its path. Because we’ve seen, for example, some govern­ments like India flip-flopping on exactly how they want to approach Bitcoin regula­tion. And part of the fact that people costed it, it’s hard to confis­cate. That’s part of what gives it a degree of pushback against sover­eigns, that some other, a corpo­rate controlled payment network or a corpo­rate controlled asset might not have, the fact that it’s just totally decentralized.

And I was on a podcast the other day that, Break­down at CoinDesk, and the host point out that he’s almost thankful that China is going first with the digital currency, because it gives people in the West a chance to see how it could be used in some of the more problem­atic cases. So, for example, China has a high degree of interest in surveil­lance and poten­tially even tie that in with social credit scores and stuff. So, when they go forward with that and we started to get new stories about how that’s probably infringing more and more on people’s privacy, if they then try to roll that out in Europe and North America, I think you might get more pushback here because we’ve seen it used in a problem­atic way.

Whereas, if we were the first to roll it out, people might’ve been more accepting of it. Especially of course, when they roll it out and then say, “Hey, if you sign up for the fed wallet, you get a thousand dollars in free fed coins.” Whatever the case may be. I think that when people see some of that from regimes that might go even the more problem­atic route faster, it might give them some pause.

Brady Swenson:

Absolutely agree. And I really appre­ciate that Niall pointed this out here. And by the way, it’s Niall Ferguson, I’ve been saying Nile. Our producer just pinged me and reminded me that it’s Niall. So, sorry about that, Niall.

Niall Ferguson in his piece which was instru­mental today in really, to me just making me feel extremely bullish even more. This is out of all of the bullish news and endorse­ments that we’ve seen for Bitcoin over the past few months. This one just stands out to me as a little bit different, a little bit more impor­tant in just the histor­ical arc of Bitcoin itself. So, really excited to see that on a personal level. Thanks so much for the comments about that.

Let’s move on to talking about another piece of news here. Guggen­heim Invest­ments is eyeing an up to $530 million buy of Bitcoin. They sent an amend­ment to the SEC, I think it was last week, or it may be today, that they would be able to allow up to 10% of the net asset value to be placed into Bitcoin through the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. This is just another example of large funds, family offices, large invest­ment funds, hedge funds making public their inten­tion to invest big in Bitcoin. Lyn, is this one any different in any way, or is this just another domino falling and something that we expect or that you expect to continue over the next 12 months?

Lyn Alden:

I don’t think there’s anything partic­u­larly remark­able about this one. It is one of the larger ones that we’ve seen. And so, it adds on to what we saw from Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druck­en­miller, all these other big names that are already in the space. So that’s another big one on the list.

Earlier, I think it was a few weeks ago, we saw SkyBridge do something similar where they filed ahead of time saying their inten­tion to put a percentage in Bitcoin. And so, this is an even bigger case. So, I think it’s another bullish thing for the industry. And this is something that for example, Jerome Powell has been pointing out. He called it the insti­tu­tional wall of money that’s coming into it probably, it’s already happening this year, is probably going to happen in 2021.

And so, that repre­sents a pretty big chunk of money that even when they put in a small percent of their fund into Bitcoin, that can really move the price, especially when you have the current supply demand charac­ter­is­tics of people huddling it, they having have cut new supply in half, in the fact that PayPal and Grayscale, and Cash App are already, they’re consuming more Bitcoins than are gener­ated per day. So, they’re already eating away at the liquid amount out there.

And so, if you look at long-term charts, whenever you get that happen, the price goes up. And it has to go up pretty signif­i­cantly to start getting some people to bring their coins out of a cold storage. And that creates more liquidity, but not until you get that squeeze higher. So, I think that’s the charac­ter­istic we’re seeing this year.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. Andy, I think we’re seeing as larger investors like Guggen­heim, et cetera, get into the game here, there are clearly an incen­tive or at least a plan to hold the Bitcoin for a longer term. Earlier today on CNBC, a repre­sen­ta­tive from Grayscale said that most investors are allocating to the space these days are really thinking about Bitcoin over a medium to long-term time horizon. This is, I think funda­men­tally different from the 2017 retail driven, trader driven run up. Do you feel like this will have some funda­mental differ­ence, make this cycle funda­men­tally different than the previous cycle? The fact that there are more long-term holders or might be more longterm holders during this run-up.

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah, absolutely, Brady. So, a couple things there just to key off. But what Lynn was saying about Guggen­heim. So, I have to have gone to school with one of the senior members over at Guggen­heim. Guggen­heim is a huge organi­za­tion. I think there are hundreds of billions of assets under manage­ment. So, he runs one of their depart­ments. And I think it was a couple of months ago, I guess he pinged me. And he told me he was looking at a possible invest­ment. It was actually in the Bitcoin ATM space. So obviously, part of the ecosystem a little bit tangen­tial. And of course, I talked to him, told him to read my book and stuff like that. And then I saw the news.

And so, it’s just an anecdotal reminder that there are people, not just at the junior levels, but at the senior levels of these organi­za­tions, who are doing their homework, they’re inter­ested in the asset itself. And they’re also inter­ested in the whole space around the asset, basically various indus­tries that touch it. So, it’s definitely a different dynamic than in the past.

Now, the second thing I think, keying off your question that we’re seeing as we speak, is we are seeing basically this explo­sion in price in proxies for Bitcoin, right? So, I think what’s happening right now, it’s indica­tive of the corpo­rate FOMO. So, what do I think is going on is, Michael Saylor, right? He did the legwork, he did his homework, got a deep under­standing of it, got his board up to speed. And then of course, crucially, he did the imple­men­ta­tion. He figured out how to both buy and custody it directly.

Now, I think what’s going on as you see Black­Rock and SkyBridge, and Guggen­heim, and various insti­tu­tional investors going a positive on this thing is that they want exposure. Now, they see the wave that’s coming, but they haven’t done the legwork, right? They haven’t set up the practical and legal links to those custo­dians that will allow them to buy Bitcoin directly. So, what are they doing? They’re scram­bling for the nearest proxy they can find, right? This is why you see MicroS­trategy stock going parabolic. This is why you see all the other crypto related stocks. I’m not going to name names. I think people know what they are, because I don’t want to promote them. But those prices have risen dramat­i­cally in the last week. And even, especially today, I think that it’s the insti­tu­tional investors are realizing they need the exposure, but they’re not set up to do it yet because they haven’t got the legwork on setting up with the insti­tu­tional custo­dians, and they’re just buying whatever they can buy.

So, is this time different? Yes. It’s different in that way as we speak. And then the question is, okay, how does the cycle play out? Are we going to see those 30%, 40% drawdowns that we saw in the last bull market, 2016, 2017? My base case is yes, we still will see some of those big drawdowns. However, I can also make the case that there’s that steady insti­tu­tional bid. We may have seen this dynamic last week, right? When we hit 95, then we drew down back to, I think it was 162 or 163. And then over the weekend I have to admit myself, I bought some last week, and then I sent wires basically on Friday intending to buy more. And I was thinking to myself, “Well, I could buy it now or I can hope and pray that there’s going to be a pullback over the weekend. And then maybe the corpo­rate bid comes in next week.” And guess what? There was no pullback.

I tend to think that we’ll see less of these savage 30% to 40% drawdowns. Will there be one or two of them? Yes, probably, but it would not surprise me at all if the drawdowns were shallower, at least on average.

Brady Swenson:

Lynn, have you thought about the idea or the possi­bility that more long-term holders in this cycle might reduce supply, create more of a squeeze, more of a supply shock than we saw last cycle, and also more of a price floor for those drawbacks?

Lyn Alden:

I think partially, I mean, as you get to a larger market capital­iza­tion, my expec­ta­tion we’ll see the volatility go down over time. So, a lot of those pullbacks in the previous bull run, a lot of them were in the 30%, 35%, 40% range. Whereas, I think there’s a good chance that the average pullback during this bull run, if indeed we have this bull run that we’re all expecting, I do think that the pullbacks on average might be a little bit shallower. But then I would agree with Andy that, we might get some savage pullbacks here and there.

And so, for example, back on, I think it was November 22^nd, I released an invest­ment report for my research service. And I warned about the poten­tial for a correc­tion year, just because we had come very far, very fast and we were getting some near term overbought indicators.

So, basically what I did was I wanted to set expec­ta­tions, so that people would be able to handle the volatility. So, I basically said, this is not infor­ma­tion that I’m trading around. I’m not changing my approach based on the fact that I expect to pull back. I’m not selling any coins. I’m not doing anything about that. But I wanted to reiterate that when you go parabolic like this in a short period of time, it’s natural to have some steam let off, especially because classic resis­tance level of testing all time highs and things like that. So, we got that pull back, especially because, it was around the holiday week. So, we had probably some of the less of those big buyers in the space. So, that was a good a perfect storm to have a pullback. And we’ve had a rebound since then. We’ll, it looks like it’s over.

But so, I think people have to be prepared for those you pullbacks. But if I were to guess, I would say, I expect them to be a little bit shallower. And I also agree with Andy’s point about some investors reaching towards proxies for Bitcoin. And so, to some extent, even I’ve done that, even though I have direct Bitcoin holdings. And the reason for that, and I made a point about MicroS­trategy during this, where people are doing this with MicroS­trategy months ago. I think it was on Peter McCormick’s podcast or some other, I basically pointed out that MicroS­trategy for some fund managers can now serve as a small Bitcoin proxy because they hold a lot of Bitcoin.

And say, you’re a manager of a fund, right? So, you invest in stocks. If you have any bullish on Bitcoin, you can’t buy Bitcoin, it’s outside of your mandate, but you can still buy MicroS­trategy. Right? So, if you happen to have a portfolio manager, it’s limited to equities, but it’s bullish on Bitcoin. He or she can express that view in the fund by saying, “I like MicroS­trategy. I like the discounted cashflow analysis. I like their invest­ments.” Basically you can justify it by just saying you like the company. And so, I think that’s a use case for it.

And for example, in my research service, I have different model portfo­lios that are held at certain broker­ages. And some of them, you can’t get direct Bitcoin access. So, you have to use proxies if you want to express that within the model portfolio. And so, for example, I put funds in the MicroS­trategy back in August. And now, I’m a little bit concerned about it now because it just went utterly parabolic this week. But back then it made a lot of sense in my view. And I still think it’s gener­ally going to keep up roughly with Bitcoin. But of course it has these days like here where I think, after his CNBC perfor­mance and other things like that, you got this extra layer of money flow into that. So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see somewhat of some steam being let out there, even if Bitcoin continues doing pretty well for a little bit.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. Yeah. On CNBC last week he was asked several times like, “So, are you a software company or are you a Bitcoin fund?” And he’s like, “Well, we’re still a software company. We just happened to have Bitcoin as our reserve asset.” Today, last time I checked up 26% on the day. So yeah, that makes clear right there clear evidence that is being treated by some as a Bitcoin fund or a proxy for Bitcoin. That’s fascinating.

Bitcoin also in October, around the start of October started decou­pling from gold. And this year the run, they had the charts had been just almost neck and neck with each other in terms of a corre­la­tion, very high corre­la­tion that has since broken completely down over the past two months. Gold has sold off a bit. Bitcoin obviously is gone on a tear. Is this something that we’ll continue to see, is gold being sold into Bitcoin? Do we actually see Bitcoin actively taking market share away from gold directly? And if so, if this might be the begin­ning of that trend, do you think it’ll continue? Lyn, I’ll start with you on this one.

Lyn Alden:

So, I would say, I think perhaps to a small amount I’d be careful about extrap­o­lating that. So, one thing I’ve covered is that gold tends to follow real industry rates, extra­or­di­narily closely. And it’s the single biggest variable that corre­lates with gold over the long-term. And the reason for that has to do with the oppor­tu­nity cost. So, gold it’s a scarce asset that doesn’t pay a yield. And there’s a storage fee for it. So, you can say it as a slight negative yield. But because it’s scarce, because it’s gold, it has some degree of infla­tion index­a­tion to it.

But now, so when you can get a positive real yield on a 10 year treasury rate, so if infla­tion is 2%, and you can get paid 4% for holding that treasury, you’re getting a positive real yield. And so, there’s the oppor­tu­nity cost for holding gold.

On the other hand, if infla­tion is still 2%, but the treasury yield is half a percent, you’re getting a negative 1.5% real yield on your treasury, as suddenly that zero yielding scarce metal gold looks more attrac­tive as a store of value. And so, what you see over the very long-term, in something going back 50 years is that gold tends to go up with broad money supply over time. But the fluctu­a­tions around that trend largely have to do with real industry. So, when you have real industry rising, gold is inverse to that. So, it starts to get sold off and go down. And when you have real industry is declining, gold tends to go up.

And so that’s, ever since August, so we hit a bottom in real rates. And we started to trend a little bit higher because we’re having ten-year treasury yields go up a little bit over that time. So, gold has been pressured from that trend.

Now, November 9^th was inter­esting date because that’s when real yields, they peaked a little bit and they started going sideways or down, but gold actually accel­er­ated sell off. Now, that’s not totally unusual. So, gold follows real industry rates over any kind of multi-month period gener­ally. But it can still have weeks of time where it deviates or overshoots that trend. So, it’s kind of entering oversold terri­tory now. I think it’s prema­ture to say that in a big way that, that Bitcoin is stealing its thunder. But I do think that Bitcoin’s very sharp move over that period, definitely could have contributed to that multi-week window, that window since November 9^th where the price made a little bit less sense compared to real yields. I think within that scope it’s possible. Yeah.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. That makes sense. Andy, I’m going to toss over to you. Before I do, I just want to ask everyone who’s watching now on YouTube, we have several hundred people watching, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. We do this every Tuesday and Friday on a regular basis. Every once in a while we have a special episode like this. We also have a bunch of other content on the channel, Bitcoin related educa­tional stuff, fun stuff. So, subscribe to the channel now and like this video, help it spread through YouTube, spread some Bitcoin educa­tion, after this broad­cast is over.

Andy, your take on Bitcoin decou­pling from gold recently. And do you see Bitcoin, meaning­fully taking market share away from gold, directly taking market share away from gold? Or do you see them both rising over the next year together?

Andy Edstrom:

Yes. So, Lynn, is spot on about the proxi­mate catalyst, I think the real interest rates. It is currently the refla­tion, “refla­tion” trade that’s going on in finan­cial markets overall, talking about stocks, bonds, right? There is hope that we’ll have plenty of vaccines for COVID soon. And that will be good for stocks. There is a percep­tion, I guess, that the much of the uncer­tainty of the election is behind us, although there’s still some ahead, but there’s less than there was. And so, this is good for stocks, bad for bonds. Bad for bonds means rates up. Yeah, which means real rates going up. So, I think that’s what’s going on the short term.

Am I a bull on gold still? Yeah, I am in the longer run. I believe that as you say, Bitcoin will take share from gold. Oh, warning, I may have a visitor here. Bitcoin, hello, Betty. Bitcoin may take share from gold, but I actually expect gold to accrue more dollars of value over the next few years. Let’s say in this having cycle or this epoch, right? Could Bitcoin go to two trillion or to five trillion? Yes. But could gold go to 15 or 20 trillion? Also, yes. So, total market cap accumu­lated or accrued by gold could easily exceed what Bitcoin does in the next few years. But as a percentage, that’s obviously much bigger in favor of Bitcoin than gold.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah.

Andy Edstrom:

This is Betty, by the way, I’m going to see if I can convince her to give me a few more minutes here. Sorry.

Brady Swenson:

It’s all right. Sorry. I got distracted there for a second. Bitcoin is certainly on a tear away from gold. I expect person­ally to see it, either way a golden market cap as the store of value narra­tive continues to take hold. We’ll see what happens. Lyn, we touched the all time high today. According to some measures anyway, the New York times called it an all-time high, CoinDesk called it all-time high at 1973, which is, the Wikipedia cited an all time high number. I think that comes from a CoinDesk average that was published back in 2017, 2018 or whatever. We now have this mainstream media, all-time high news hitting.

Bitcoiners are mostly waiting for 20K. That’s kind of the number that’s been seared into our brains over the bear market that we’ve been aiming for. So, I think we’ll see a lot more celebra­tion on Bitcoin Twitter, among Bitcoiners, specif­i­cally when 20K is reached. But we’re seeing out there in the mainstream media. What do you think about the news of the all-time high? Where do you expect us to go from here? Do you think we’ll break through pretty quickly or do you think we’ll stay down in this range for a while? I do know in 2017, we touched the all-time high of about $1,200, and then it ranged for about four months before it really broke through.

Lyn Alden:

Yeah. I don’t have a strong opinion about timing. Like I said, I warned about a correc­tion. I actually had some questions about that. People were like, “When do you think the correc­tion is over?” And I was basically saying that, saying when the correc­tion is over is a lot harder than having called a correc­tion in the first place. All right? Because we had all of those overbought near-term indica­tors and just a parabolic senti­ment in a sense. I was like, “Okay, I actually would welcome a correc­tion here, and just let out some of the steam.” But I think that the hard part is timing when that comes back. I would just say, basically once you firmly break out over 20,000, I think that that’s a really inter­esting time. And I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that happens tomorrow or if it happens like two months from now. I wouldn’t be shocked either way.

Brady Swenson:

Andy, how are you feeling about this all-time high territory?

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah, it feels good, Brady. The question is, did we already hit all the time higher or is it ahead of us? I’ve been staring at the 2016 chart, right? When we broke through in that cycle. That was before I was around in the sector. And we went up and down a couple of times. We went through it, retraced. So, I had no idea what it’s going to look like. I could see it going either way. I could see us bouncing around and strug­gling to retake the high and hold it, or I could see blown through it. Of course, the argument for blowing through it and staying above it would be that steady insti­tu­tional and corpo­rate bid. But I’m not going to take a strong view on it.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. It’s just fun to specu­la­tion. It’s a pastime amongst the Bitcoiners when we get up here, of course to this level. Okay. Some other news that I want to get into is, Biden has appointed or declared that he will appoint Janet Yellen, nominee Jenny Yellen, as the treasurer, or the head of the fed chair. During his admin­is­tra­tion, obviously Janet Yellen has been fed chair before. And we under­stand her approach to running that insti­tu­tion. And she’s even commented a bit on Bitcoin in the past. What does this partic­ular appoint­ment mean for Bitcoin and for the future of monetary policy for the dollar as well? Lyn, you want to take this one?

Lyn Alden:

So, I don’t think the news is that surprising. It came down to, Brainard was in the running and Yellen was in the running. So, it’s not that surprising. I think one inter­esting signal that it sends is a close cooper­a­tion between the Treasury and the fed. And so, histor­i­cally those insti­tu­tions are supposed to be as separate as possible, because that’s how you prevent banana republic printing. Because techni­cally the Treasury even though they issue the currency, they still have to borrow if they want to spend. Whereas the Federal Reserve they can lend money, but they can’t just for example, spend and give it to people, right? So, you have the separa­tion of powers between the Treasury and the fed.

And you have to go back to the 1940s during World War II to find a period where they worked together as close as they have this year. And that was because that was the only other time in history where US federal debt as a percentage of GDP reached as high as it is now. And of course, that was for war funding. So, what you basically had back then was war time MMT, where the govern­ment was running, absolutely massive deficits that are even a little bit bigger than today. But this is the only period since then, we’ve gotten even closer to those World War II deficits.

And so, but of course, when you’re running that big deficit and you’re racking up debt over a hundred percent of GDP, there’s not really enough buyers for them. So, what the fed did was the fed worked with the Treasury. They bought a lot of the Treasury bonds, but then they also kept the yield curve at 2.5%. So, even though there are these spikes of infla­tion that at time reached double digits, the fed just said, “We’re going to hold the entire treasury yield curve at 2.5% or less, and we’re going to print money and buy treasuries if we need to, in order to maintain that peak.”

And of course, what you have with that scenario is that the release valve is the currency, right? Because if the market can express itself through yields, it can express itself through the curren­cies. The currency can week and compare it to other curren­cies. And so, by having a former fed chair be a head of the Treasury, if she gets confirmed, which I would expect she will, I think that’s a pretty powerful signal to the degree that the insti­tu­tions will be working together in the 2020s, which is unusual in histor­ical sense.

Brady Swenson:

Andy, what was your reaction when former fed chair, Janet Yellen, is claimed or Biden said he is going to nominate her for Treasury secretary?

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah. I mean, my first reaction was that Bitcoin sign guy was already legend, but we’re just to need more of that, which I love. The second thing is the point Lyn just made, which is the crossover, the revolving door, not only among govern­ment depart­ments, but also among govern­ment and industry. And I guess, I’ve talked about this before, but histor­i­cally, and this is work done by econo­mist, Steve Hanky, who I think is not yet a Bitcoin bull, but he’ll figure it out eventu­ally, indicates that when you really get infla­tion is not when you have long or multiple periods of just quanti­ta­tive easing and buying assets, but it’s really when a govern­ment, the treasury depart­ment in whatever country you’re talking about starts monetizing, or excuse me, when the fed starts monetizing the deficits that the treasury is borrowing to fund. And that’s where we are. Right?

So, the fed has made it very clear that they’re going to pursue infla­tion by any means neces­sary. Their target is symmetric. So, if they have under­shot for the last few years by their measure, then they plan to overshoot for a while. Will they succeed? I don’t know. But certainly, the relation­ship between fed and Treasury looks as cozy as it’s been as Lynn pointed out in a very long time, in almost a century here. And yeah, it’s going to be deficit. It’s going to be, in my opinion, defacto moneti­za­tion of govern­ment deficits. They will try to make it look like something else.

But when we just went through a period back in March when there was liter­ally outright funding of one depart­ment by the other, plus leverage to buy assets and save finan­cial markets from the liqui­da­tion that was happening, that all the barriers, at least, whether they were real or psycho­log­ical in the past, the barriers to govern­ment doing whatever it takes to “solve” this debt problem. There’s no limits. There’s no rules. Yeah, it’s all coming together.

Brady Swenson:

So, from Stacy Herbert in the chat and co-host of the Orange Pill podcast, along with Max Keiser, she’s asking about whether or not it’s too late for govern­ments to get hostile to Bitcoin, to take that route as an approach to squash Bitcoin? Would the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s opinion on Bitcoin even matter with these massive insti­tu­tions buying into Bitcoin with it every day on a weekly, monthly basis, becoming a more entrenched part of our finan­cial system? Lynn, what do you think of the chances of a hostile reaction or hostile, I guess, attempt to ban or to basically hinder Bitcoin in any way from the US govern­ment or other govern­ments around the world?

Lyn Alden:

Yeah. So, there’s certainly a spectrum of things they can try to do, right? So, there’s, of course, on one end of the spectrum, you have an outright ban which is what the United States did to gold back during the thirties. But on the other hand you have other things that you have, know your customer regula­tions, you have things that make it harder or impos­sible to self custody at some of the major exchanges, things like that. They’re things they can do around the margins to bring it into their regula­tion fold. And so, I think that’s something to keep an eye for. That goes back to the whole encryp­tion debate that goes back decades, that the govern­ments largely lost out on.

And so, this is a topic I examined in my recent article on Bitcoin, about the question of, can it be banned? And so, of course, in the absolute sense, you can’t ban Bitcoin because it’s decen­tral­ized and encrypted. But you can, for example, ban it legally in such a way that you’d prevent, you put it in the black market in that partic­ular country. You can make it so insti­tu­tional money can’t go in. And many retail investors that are not hardcore wouldn’t go in because it’d be illegal to do so.

I think in the really long run, like we saw, for example, some countries like India, not have a ton of success with that approach. And because, Bitcoin goes around that over time. I do think that could of course, damage a bull run. If this bull run is going to in large part be based on insti­tu­tional money coming in, then of course, a ban in the United States, if you get that extreme outcome, would impair that partic­ular moment in time for the price, I think.

But one kind of thing I point out is that I see some people saying that if Bitcoin gets big enough, that govern­ments will ban it. Whereas I view it some as the opposite, the larger it gets the harder it is to even try those bans in some of these major markets like United States, or Europe, or Japan. Because once the donor class has billions of dollars invested in Bitcoin, it becomes even harder to ban it at that point, right? Because now, there’s multiple publicly traded compa­nies on major exchanges that have Bitcoin. There’s multiple billion­aires that have Bitcoins. There are hedge funds that have Bitcoins.

So, at that point you’re angering in both retail, like savers in Bitcoin as well as big money donor class. And so, I think as it gets bigger and bigger, their window for even trying to all out ban is low. So, I think the battles can be really around the regula­tion approach. But there are people that are special­ized in the legal aspect that can go into way more detail than I can about its prospects for all those different kinds of regula­tion categories.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. We did have a legal, deep dive with a couple of Bitcoin lawyers, a couple episodes ago. So, if you’re looking for an overview of the regula­tory environ­ment in which Bitcoin is operating right now, that is a great episode. Andy, somebody in the chat just said, Jeffrey Lane just said that, is Bitcoin too big to ban? Are we at that point now? Or are we getting close? A ban would in the future, if this continues, this trend continues, it could be a massive disrup­tion to the economy?

Andy Edstrom:

Yeah. I agree. I see the risk of prohi­bi­tion as extremely low. A few weeks ago, I tweeted that, we finally reached a point where the regula­tory risk embedded in investing in the internet giants, right? Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, exceeds the regula­tory risk of investing in Bitcoin. Right? And you can look at the set of circum­stances, whether it’s the controller of the currency, making it clear that banks can hold Bitcoin, or whether it’s PayPal, adopting it and basically offer it to customers, or whether it’s the granting of banking licenses in Wyoming, et cetera, et cetera.

And so, yeah, I see the odds of prohi­bi­tion as extremely low. We know what prohi­bi­tion looks like in the US, it’s ugly. It leads to organized crime. It fails anyway, right? It always gets repealed. So, I am not very worried about prohibition.

And I would add that what Lynn said is, well, to the question of is that already too big to ban? It’s both too big to ban and too small to matter. Now, if we want to have a discus­sion about when will govern­ments care, you can pick a number. I think it’s maybe it’s six figure, Bitcoin price. Maybe it’s a hundred thousand dollars when it’s actually big enough to even matter. And of course, I would argue that we’re already past the point of adoption and entrench­ment, and involve­ment with the legacy finan­cial system for Bitcoin’s success. And we’ll be that much farther at prices up there at that level. So, yeah, I’m not worried about it. Extremely low risk.

Lyn Alden:

I think it’s a great point about comparing it to some of those tech compa­nies, right? Because that’s an increasing risk to watch out for some of those large mega cap compa­nies, whether or not it relates to their monop­o­lies over their app stores or, Amazon, for example, people have often theorized that maybe the cloud part where you split from the retail part. And Google has like a near monopoly status on search result, even though there are other search engines that people can go to. So, it’s not quite the same as monopoly, but just the fact that they’ve gotten such a lead over the others. And so, I do think, or even just not even breaking them up, but they’re just could be massive, like digital taxes on them, which is kind of things we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years.

And so, when I look at the risk of Bitcoin, I keep it in the context of comparing it to the risk of other asset classes. And so, I say, in some ways, I view it as riskier to have zero Bitcoin than an alloca­tion of Bitcoin. But then of course, it becomes a matter of how large you want that alloca­tion to be. And so, I think each investor has to weigh that for themselves. But I view it as it’s in a different risk category, and there­fore it’s somewhat uncor­re­lated to investing in things like Apple and Google, and Facebook ‚and things like that.

And I’ve been toying with the idea of like a trillion dollar market cap as kind of the too big to ban number. It’s arbitrary admit­tedly, but basically when it’s like a quarter of a trillion or a third of a trillion, and then especially when you take into account the fact that only a percentage of that is in any one country, right? So, there’s maybe, there’s call it a hundred billion in the United States, for example, maybe more, that’s still in the realm of you can get a lot of regula­tory pushback against that. But once you have hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of billions of dollars of American money invested in it, you’re going against almost everyone, if you try to do that prohi­bi­tion approach, right? You’re angering both people that have been in the Bitcoin commu­nity for a long time. And then you’re also going after the big money that just recently invested in it.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah, absolutely. We’ll wrap up with one more question from the chats. And this was posted a little bit ago by Iper1875. Does anyone here, do either guests think that a new Bretton Woods will happen in the near future?

Andy Edstrom:

Can I answer that first.?

Brady Swenson:

Yes.

Andy Edstrom:

And I had talked about this at the Max Keiser show a few weeks ago. I think we are so far from a Bretton Woods, that it’s comical to talk about. I mean, obviously I guess it was the… I’m trying to remember, the IMF, outright came out and suggested that a few weeks ago. Bretton Woods was an agree­ment that came out of a total war in which there was a clear victor, and that victor was something like 40% of US GDP. Lynn, I know has made this point more than once to her clients and on other podcasts. So, that is not the circum­stances that we face today, sort of the opposite. We have rising power that’s challenging the estab­lished power. That estab­lished power is, I don’t know, maybe 20% of GDP. And every­body is running fat deficits for the most part. And it’s a race to the bottom.

So, are all parties going to come to the table and agree on some Bretton Woods type system? Extremely, extremely unlikely in my opinion. Could we have something more like a Plaza Accord, where it’s a little softer, and you get some level of coordi­na­tion about rates of depre­ci­a­tion among curren­cies, among the major players? Maybe it’s possible. But I think something that is as trans­for­ma­tive, or as all encom­passing or perva­sive as Bretton Woods is extremely low proba­bility in anytime in the foresee­able future.

Lyn Alden:

I agree. And so, I actually have an article coming out soon, but it’s also something I’ve talked about in previous articles, on previous podcast, is that, so for the past 50 years or 45 years we’ve been in the petrodollar system, which is basically the idea that all around the world oil is priced in dollars. So, oil producers only sell their oil in dollars. And so, any countries that wants oil, then has to go to get dollars. So, a lot of them price their own trading dollars. And so, the dollar has a dispro­por­tionate large share of global trade and global reserve, which is what makes it the reserve currency. But we’re already starting to see that kind of regime starting to fray.

So, in 2013, China said, “We’re no longer going to reinvest our dollar surpluses into buying more treasuries.” And instead they announced the Belt and Road Initia­tive. And indeed in this past seven years, China they have less treasuries now than they did seven years ago, because they’ve been investing those dollars elsewhere. So, they’ve not been in keeping in line with the petrodollar system.

And we’re starting to see, for example, Russia as one of the largest oil and gas exporters’ is getting more and more successful with pricing their oil in non-dollar curren­cies. So, they’ve been selling it in euros. So, if you look at trade between China and Russia, it has rapidly de-dollar­ized over the past three years. The trade between Russia and India has also de-dollarized.

And in addition, even though Europe is in general allies to United States, we’ve seen trade between Russia and Europe shift more and more towards the Euro. And of course, we’ve seen a lot of US sanctions against the Nord Stream Pipeline, which also gets to the heart of the petrodollar system.

So, what we’re starting to see is inher­ently more decen­tral­ized energy pricing payment network world out there. And so, that’s my long-term base case. And I agree with Andy that a unified Bretton Woods is unlikely, because the previous one came after total war at a time when there was one clear victor and some smaller counter­par­ties, like for example, the Soviet Union. And so, United States was able to forge an unusu­ally large deal like that.

But going forward the world is increas­ingly decen­tral­ized. And so, I think you’re going to start to see more and more decen­tral­iza­tion when it comes to payment networks. I do think that you could have, if you go back to the Mark Carney speech at Jackson Hole, so that was the governor of The Bank of England at the time. It’s one of US’s closest allies. And he’s at a US hosted event for central bankers with Jerome Powell and others all present. And he said, “The dollar is too dominant. We need to shift to a more neutral currency.” And he was basically talking about like a govern­ment form of a Libra or banker, like a basket of curren­cies that could be used as an inter­na­tional medium of exchange to settle trade. And so, that was also proposed back at Bretton Woods. It’s always been the alter­na­tive option. But that’s the one of those examples that requires a ton of coordination.

So, I do think it’s possible. You could see small versions of that pop up. Like if you have a certain trading block, for example, that new Asia-Pacific Trading Block. I do think you could have agree­ments like that to have like a stable coin, that’s like a basket of multiple curren­cies. It’s less ambitious than trying to get to the world agree, if you just get a bunch of trading partners like a dozen trading partners to agree on something like that. So, I do think, whatever form it takes, I think you’re going to see more and more decen­tral­iza­tion when it comes to global trade over the next five, 10 years.

Brady Swenson:

Fasci­nating. That was fantastic. Both of you brought some great takes today. That’s why we wanted to have you on the show. Really appre­ciate your time. We’ll let both of you go. And I will wrap up by talking a bit more about Swan. Thanks again, Lyn. Really appre­ciate it.

Lyn Alden:

Yep. Thanks for having me.

Brady Swenson:

All right. And Andy, thank you so much, man.

Andy Edstrom:

Thank you, Brady. Thank you, Lyn. Really appre­ciate what you’re doing to educate people in the space. You’re doing great.

Lyn Alden:

And I think you made some great points. I really liked the point about comparing it to the regula­tion of the tech compa­nies. I think I’m going to steal that, refer­ence it, of course, but I think it’s a great point.

Andy Edstrom:

Please do. All the best, Bitcoiners. Steal everyone else’s material and repackage it better.

Brady Swenson:

True. Twitter is a distil­la­tion of all of these ideas, and we get them down to three words. And that’s what happens there. It’s a proving ground of ideas. All right, thanks again to both of you, and we will see you next time.

Lyn Alden:

Bye.

Brady Swenson:

Bye. Okay. Thank you all so much for joining us today. It was awesome to see so many people tuning in on YouTube. No doubt, many of you are fans of Lynn. We heard a fantastic, just summary of all kinds of great topics from her today. You should go ahead and subscribe to this channel. Lynn has been on this show a couple of times before. She is an advisor to Swan Bitcoin, the company that produces the show. And she’ll be on again, no doubt in the future.

Andy Edstrom is also an adviser, author of Why Buy Bitcoin. And we pair up great guests for some really compelling discus­sions. I encourage you, if this is the first time on the channel, subscribe, like this video and dig back into the archive. There’s some great shows that I think you’ll really enjoy. And we do this every Tuesday, and sometimes we do them on Mondays or other days when there’s some bullish stuff to talk about. And we also have Swan Lounge, which is kind of a Bitcoiner hangout on Fridays, a lot of fun. Brekkie, you want to jump in with me?

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

I’m jumped. I’m here. What a show, oh.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah, right?

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

Wow.

Brady Swenson:

Two great minds. Lyn Alden is just as sharp as can be.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

She was spectac­ular as always. Andy, I’m sorry, but then you have to try to keep up with her.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. So, we talked about Niall Ferguson, who wrote a fantastic piece and published it in, widely, it was syndi­cated across the internet. And he wrote a book called The Ascent of Money. And is a very well world renowned histo­rian. And he basically endorsed Bitcoin as the winner of this monetary revolu­tion. And Kerry said, basically it’s winning because it’s scarce, because of scarcity and because it’s a sover­eign money, a self-sover­eign money. And thinks that it will win, obviously because of sover­eign money princi­ples, but also because it protects privacy. And both Lynn and Andy, agreed that this is a big selling point of Bitcoin. A big feature of Bitcoin is that it’s a much more private money than the payments panop­ticon that is being built with central bank digital currencies.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

You’re a hundred percent right. And something that I’ve found, just to be really bullish and kind of amazing is, a year ago I would share articles, not like the ones that have come out, but I would share what I thought were bullish articles. Now, I sent today’s article on the Druck­en­miller News, and I send these all to friends and family. And at the very least, I don’t get a bad response. And sometimes I get a really good response. So, things are changing, and it’s a wild time to be a Bitcoiner.

Brady Swenson:

It’s absolutely wild. We talked a lot today about just more bullish news, dominoes piling on top of each other. Guggen­heim Invest­ments has filed an amend­ment with the SEC, declaring that they are able now to buy a 10% of their net treasury, their net assets under reserve that in Bitcoin through Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. That’s bullish news, just adding again to the dominoes of large insti­tu­tions, public compa­nies buying Bitcoin up in bulk.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

Well, what was partic­u­larly amazing for me for that little bit of news, is one of my close friends used to work at Guggen­heim in that exact fund. And so, when it came out, I sent him the news, and I never thought I would see him do it. He sent a text to our big group chat. He said, “You were right. I was wrong.” That’s all he said. It was a wonderful moment.

Brady Swenson:

That’s fantastic, man. It’s hard to own up to that stuff. But hey, he’s still early. It’s still early days, everyone watching. Still, if there’s anybody watching right now, who’s relatively new to Bitcoin, you think you may have missed out, no, it’s still early. This is the process of a new money monetizing itself. And the upside is tremen­dous, far beyond where we are now, $350 billion market cap, far beyond that.

So, get yourself some good Bitcoin books, listen to some good Bitcoin podcasts, develop those strong hands as we call them, some deep convic­tion to hold for the longterm. This is a five, 10, 15, 20 year invest­ment. And eventu­ally a lot of us think it will become the global money. And so, it’ll just be the money. And you’ll have the best money that humans have ever known. So yeah, all-time high, buddy. No, go ahead, man.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

One thing to add, so just to that quick text message conver­sa­tion between my friend who worked at Guggen­heim, he said, “I was right.” No, he said that I was right and he was wrong. And what I said back to him was actually, “No, we’re so early, that we can both be right.” It’s not a matter of who’s right and who’s wrong. This Bitcoin is amazing. So, let’s all get on board now because we still can.

Brady Swenson:

A hundred percent man, a hundred percent. All-time high talk, both nodding their heads when I said that we’re really waiting as Bitcoiners for that 20K number, that’s been seared into our brains this whole bear markets. I think that’s the big number that we need to get across for widespread celebra­tion. But we did see New York Times and several other large mainstream publi­ca­tions, CNBC included call all-time high today when it passed $19,783.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

I don’t really have much to say, I’m just here on the roller coaster. This is good stuff. Maybe we should just play some bullish videos like the Raul video we have, or I don’t know.

Brady Swenson:

We should do that. We should do that. For sure. The MicroS­trategy price run, it’s up 26% today. Both agreed that it’s a sounds like MicroS­trategy is being used by some investors as a proxy for buying Bitcoin, because they might not be able to get access to it through, because of rules through their funds, for instance.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

I don’t want to talk about this. Okay? I liter­ally have some money in my stock brokerage account, which I don’t even hold any other stocks right now. Okay? And I was planning to buy MSTR, and I kept waiting for the dip, and just like Bitcoin, it didn’t dip. And I feel like I missed my chance.

Brady Swenson:

It’s early. It’s still early on MicroS­trategy as well. This is why you got a dollar cost average into MicroS­trategy, buddy.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

That’s true. We should start SwanMSTR.

Brady Swenson:

Oh yeah.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

We sell Bitcoin and MicroS­trategy stock. That’s it.

Brady Swenson:

Last thing I wanted to recap on was the last topic that was addressed in there. I thought there were some fantastic contri­bu­tions to the idea of whether or not there’s going to be a new Bretton Woods happening in the future, this great reset idea. And I thought both had great points. And both thought that this is very, very unlikely to happen. And I tend to agree with them on that front.

The idea that Lynn had that trade will trend toward decen­tral­iza­tion over the next decades. And we have possibly regional agree­ments like Bretton Woods style agree­ments that would use stable coins for instance, or agree upon basket of goods for regional trading. I thought that was really interesting.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

It’s definitely going to be inter­esting to see what happens. As they mentioned the Euro, dollar system that we currently have, it’s very unsteady and nobody likes it. It’s what we use. And if you look at how global trade is arranged, every­thing is denom­i­nated dollars. But I think when countries start to realize that there is another option, some of them might go to Bitcoin. A lot of them are going to do their own central bank, digital curren­cies, blah, blah, blah. But who knows.

I mean, I think it was yesterday, Max Keiser was, he tweeted out an article. He was quoted in talking about how China seized, I think over a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, or maybe it was a much higher number. I can’t remember. But if any of these countries start deciding to hold on to that Bitcoin and not do, for example, what the US did with the Silk Road Coins, auction them off. I think all bets are off. I think once we get nation state FOMO, it’s going to be a mad dash. And pair that with the ability to use Bitcoin for settling inter­na­tional trade. I mean, it could be bonkers. So, exciting times.

Brady Swenson:

People have this idea of Bitcoin as a savings technology has been much more widely under­stood over the past year or so by larger and larger investors. And that can only lead to, I think, more supply being taken off the market, reducing the avail­able supply for trading and whatever else is happening with Bitcoin. But it could lead to a supply shock, I think. It’d be very fasci­nating the result of that.

Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about Swan and wrap this thing up. Thanks again, everyone for joining us. Subscribe to this channel. We put out some great Bitcoin content on the regular. We do this show every Tuesday. We do Swan Lounge or Bitcoin hangout every Friday. Every once in a while, we’ll do these impromptu shows when there’s just some big news that we need to talk about. And we have other great educa­tional content on the channel as well. We’re also streaming Bitcoin TV. Brekkie, tell us about Bitcoin TV, man.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

Bitcoin TV is my favorite thing on the internet, today. It is a ²⁴⁄₇ live stream of Bitcoin content, highly curated. Some of the best talks on Bitcoin, some of the best explainer videos. We have some incred­ible documen­taries in there as well. There’s an incred­ible four-part series from Reason TV about the whole history of the cypher­punk movement.

And this is only the begin­ning. We’re about to launch some UX, some upgrades and as well as adding tons of new content to the channel. So, I am so excited. I have it playing on like three or four different screens in my house, just so that when I go from room to room, I don’t miss anything. It’s a lot of fun.

And frankly, the best part about it is the chat. There’s a ²⁴⁄₇ chat going on the entire time. Bitcoiners, just hanging out, talking about what’s on, talking about the price. People learning too. Somebody popped in the other day and was asking about how, they saw something that was playing and they wanted to know about running a full node. And before I’d even gotten there to reply, someone else had shared some fantastic resources.

So, it’s a multi­lay­ered resource. And I really hope you all give it a shot, give it a try, share it with your friends. If you are living with pre-coiners, you can put it on the televi­sion and not tell them, and just start watching and see what happens. We’re basically gearing it towards both pre-coiners and long time Bitcoiners. So, hopefully there’s something for everybody.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. It’s classic stuff and new stuff as well. High quality, the best stuff on the web. And it’s been a ton of fun. Just turning it on every once in a while, seeing what’s up and playing and diving into the chats. There’s consis­tently number of people watching at any given moments. We are just getting started with it. This is the version, the alpha version, the version 0.1. And we are going to be making more improve­ments to it, the way it’s presented, the way it’s organized. And just really excited to get that out the door and see what people thought about it and great reactions so far. So, check out Bitcoin TV. It’s a lot of fun.

We are in New York, man. We’re in New York, big deal. I think we should close on your amazingly produced Bitcoin in New York, Swan Bitcoin in New York video.

Brekkie Von Bitcoin:

Let’s do it. Bitcoin in New York. Before we show it, go to swanbitcoin.com/newyork, become a member, and get $10 of free Bitcoin. Ladies and gents, thanks for joining us today. We’ll close on this.

Narrator:

In a world filled with uncer­tainty, Bitcoin gives us hope. And if we work together, we can bring about a bright orange future, just a little bit sooner with low fee, automatic buys, daily, weekly, or monthly, free automatic withdrawals, and world-class Bitcoin educa­tion. We’ve made it safe and easy to accumu­late Bitcoin because you have your life to live. So, go on and live it.

All over the US, people are choosing Swan to achieve their Bitcoin goals. But in the finan­cial capital of the world, the options for building your Bitcoin future are limited. Today, we are proud to announce that Swan Bitcoin is now open for business in all 50 states, including the great State of New York. Sign up at swanbitcoin.com/newyork, and get $10 of free Bitcoin when you become a member. Together, we are helping to build that bright orange future from sea to shining sea. We are advocates. We are educa­tors. We are Bitcoiners.

Past Episodes

Episode 8 –Andy Edstrom and Ansel Linder

Episode 9 –Rockstar Devel­oper and Jeremy Rubin

Episode 10 – Bitcoin TINA and CK Snarks

Episode 11– Gigi and Knut Svanholm

Episode 12 –Adam Back and Preston Pysh

Episode 13 –Alex Gladstein and Matt Odell

Episode 14 –Robert Breedlove and Tuur Demeester

Episode 15 –Isaiah Jackson and Max Keiser

Episode 16 –Gigi and Udi Wertheimer

Episode 17 –Aleks Svetski and Jimmy Song

Episode 18 –Stephan Livera and Marty Bent

Episode 19 –Mark Moss and Ben Prentice

Episode 20 –Samson Mow and Parker Lewis

Episode 21–Lyn Alden and Jeff Booth

Episode 22– Robert Breedlove and Cory Klippsten

Episode 23 — Saifedean Ammous and George Gammon

Episode 24 –Jameson Lopp and Eric Martindale

Episode 25 –Preston Pysh and Andy Edstrom

Episode 26 –Lyn Alden and Nic Carter

Episode 27 — Erik Townsend and Yan Pritzker

Episode 28 — Max Keiser and Tone Vays

Episode 29 –Preston Pysh and Andy Edstrom

Episode 30–Raoul Pal and Vijay Boyapati

Episode 31–Dan Tapiero and Dan Matuszewski

Episode 32–Robert Breedlove and Parker Lewis

Episode 33– Danielle DiMartino Booth and Michael Saylor

Episode 34– Jeff Deist and Stephan Livera

Episode 35–Will Reeves and Yan Pritzker

Episode 36–Alex Gladstein and Marty Bent

Episode 37–Brandon Quittem and Robert Breedlove

Episode 38–Jake Chervinsky and Rafael Yakobi

Episode 39–Alex Adelman and Desiree Dickerson

Links

Swan Bitcoin

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Swan Bitcoin on Twitter

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Swan Signal Podcast

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Andy Edstrom

Andy’s Personal Website

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Why Buy Bitcoin –Andy’s Book

Lyn Alden

Lyn Alden on Twitter

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Lyn Alden on LinkedIn