Bitcoin TINA and CK Snarks: Swan Signal Live E10

Join Chris­tian Keroles (CK Snarks), editor of Bitcoin Magazine, and Bitcoin TINA (a famous perma-bull) to discuss the inevitability of Bitcoin, future price predic­tions, and a transi­tion to a Bitcoin economy. This episode was hosted by Swan Bitcoin’s Brady Swenson, and featured a guest appear­ance by Cory Klipp­sten, CEO of Swan.

Subscribe to the Swan Signal YouTube channel and Swan Signal podcast.

Transcript

Brady:

Welcome to the Swan Signal podcast, a produc­tion of Swan Bitcoin, the best way to accumu­late Bitcoin using automatic recur­ring buys at swanbitcoin.com. I’m , head of educa­tion at Swan. Every week, I host a conver­sa­tion with Bitcoiners along with our founder, Cory Klipp­sten, and sometimes, co-founder Yan Pritzker joins us. We broad­cast these live and then we publish the audio here on this podcast feed. We call these sessions Swan Signal Live. We pair up two Bitcoiners you have likely not heard together before and we talk about the latest Bitcoin and macro­eco­nomic news, about the technology and we muse about Bitcoin’s future.

Brady:

This week, we are joined by Bitcoin permabull, Bitcoin TINA, and Chris­tian Keroles, AKA CK Snarks. He is the multi­media editor for Bitcoin Magazine. Be sure to follow @SwanBitcoin on Twitter so you can tune in live there whenever you can. We also broad­cast on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. But if you can’t do it live, you’ll always be able to catch all the Swan Signal Live conver­sa­tions here on this podcast. I’m glad you found your way here, hope you enjoy.

Brady:

All right. Welcome to Swan Signal Live. It is the first Swan Signal Live of the fourth epic having came and went as expected, TikTok, halving block came and went. We have two awesome guests to kick off the fourth epic today. Bitcoin TINA, welcome to Swan signal, man. How are you doing?

Bitcoin TINA:

Thanks Brady. I’m doing great. Glad can you hear me?

Brady:

Yep. We got you.

Bitcoin TINA:

Good. Okay.

Brady:

Glad to hear you are doing well. And we’ve got one of my favorite Bitcoiners, just a great dude all around, Chris­tian CK Snarks. How’s it going, man?

Chris­tian Keroles:

Doing good man. And honored to be here as one of the first guests of the third epic with Bitcoin TINA. Sorry, the fourth epic, yes.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’m always honored and it is always a pleasure to hang with CK. We spent a lot of time together doing that four part series and I’m a huge fan of CK. I’m also a huge fan of yours too, Brady. I kiss every­body’s ass here.

Brady:

Appre­ciate that. The feeling’s mutual all arounds. We aren’t even drinking, but it’s all it’s already gotten to the I love you man stage, which is great. Got to have some love going around in times like this. Before we started recording, we were talking about these times we find ourselves in and TINA had very aptly stated that the cure may be worse than the disease at this point. Why don’t you keep going with that take and let’s talk a little bit about this macro situa­tion we find ourselves in from this COVID situation.

Bitcoin TINA:

Well, I guess obser­va­tion­ally look, I’m older than most Bitcoiners in the space and I may be higher risk. And so for me, I probably need to be more careful than other people might need to be. And I’m willing to be more careful and I’m willing to live accord­ingly. I think that it’s useful that people adopt the idea of also being concerned and maybe do things like wear masks. But I also think that we have to get the economy open. There are millions of people out of work. These people have got to get back to work. There are businesses that are going to wind up closed. We can’t lose these businesses. You have people have to be able to. We live with risk every day. To be alive is to live with risk. Now we can live with risk in a foolish way, we can live with risk in a smart way. I opt for living with risk in a smart way. And I think that we can’t ignore. We can’t ignore the risk of having an economy closed down.

Bitcoin TINA:

I think there are tremen­dous risks with that. I think there’s tremen­dous risks to people’s health, to people’s life, to people’s incomes. And these are very real risks too. We have to find a balancing act in what is a very, very diffi­cult time. And I don’t like what I’ve seen in terms of the nature of this enforce­ment. It feels very total­i­tarian to me. It feels very Orwellian. It feels very unthinking and uncaring and I don’t like that and I think that’s a problem. I hope it wakens some people up to the idea of the dangers of that sort of situa­tion for the United States and probably for other countries as well. I think if it does awaken people to those kinds of problems, then in some sense, this will have been a good thing. But at this point we’ve got to figure out a way to make it work. We can’t just continue to live in this scare­demic. We have to find some happy medium.

Brady:

Yeah, it is definitely worri­some, the fallout. I’ve been saying this from the very begin­ning. I think most of us have who have been watching what’s going on in the economy and keeping up with things. Bitcoiners have been waiting for this kind of every­thing bubble to burst for a long time. Dreading it for sure, but thankful that we have this alter­na­tive in place at least. And this situa­tion, this shutdown, mandated slash volun­tary shutdown that we’re in now is probably the pin. Jay Powell came out this morning to make some comments and I want to get into those, but first CK, I wanted to get your take on the situa­tion and where we are with econom­i­cally speaking.

Chris­tian Keroles:

I’m definitely not an expert and I’m definitely not one to make recom­men­da­tions for what we should do, but I guess I’ll comment on what I think we’re doing wrong. And I really think that the fact that we are taking a very top down federal govern­ment mandate approach is the problem. I can under­stand New York being completely shut down. That makes sense. When you go and you see videos of a mother in Iowa being arrested for pushing her daughter on a swing, in Bumfuck nowhere essen­tially. It really makes no sense for every single person in every single juris­dic­tion, in every single state and city to be under the same exact kind of rules. And it really indicates why localism and local decision making is so impor­tant. And I think that the best thing about what is happening right now is that we get to have a lot of exper­i­ments across the globe of different attempts to quell this virus.

Chris­tian Keroles:

And we’re going to see in real time what works and what doesn’t. And we’re going to see in real time, which states really abuse their power in which states don’t. And I think this vision of really consumers having more choice of juris­dic­tion is going to become a lot more appealing and it’s going to become a lot more obvious. I’m just, I see signs of nation states breaking down, of localism, the advan­tage of localism kind of being highlighted. And I’m sad by really a lot of law enforce­ment and execu­tives and people that are kind of part of the state using this as an excuse to be inhumane and to flex their power.

Brady:

Yeah. I hear that completely. This sort of just very blunt approach, this top down approach is, it’s ineffi­cient in a lot of cases, but in a situa­tion like this, it’s probably even more impactful. Here in Kansas City, we’re really just starting to get kind of the peak of, approach the peak of our infec­tion rates and hospi­tals really kind of filling up. We didn’t need to be shut down for the past two months. This thing spreads in waves to different places of the world, geograph­i­cally speaking. Yeah, so having the ability to have more local control over shutdowns makes a ton of sense. And I think in a Bitcoin world, we’ll probably see more empow­er­ment of local govern­ments. At least that’s sort of my hope and what I see happening. What do you guys think about that?

Bitcoin TINA:

I want to correct something from my perspec­tive, because I said it a little differ­ently than CK. I think that it’s been thrown into the hands of the states and I think what we’ve seen is we’ve seen people make a bit of a polit­ical football out of this whole thing. I’m not sure that I don’t think you have the federal govern­ment trying to run the shutdown show. I think the shutdown show is getting run on a state by state basis. And you have Democ­rats in states like Illinois with Pritzker, Newsom in California. I can’t remember her name in Michigan and other democ­ra­t­i­cally elected, Democ­ratic party states where they are using the shutdown in ways that don’t make any sense to me.

Bitcoin TINA:

I heard a while back that in the Home Depot in maybe it was Michigan. I don’t remember what state it was. They liter­ally taped off areas that you were not allowed to buy things because they were deemed nonessen­tial. What if something in your house broke and you needed to buy something to fix it? That seems pretty essen­tial to me. We’ve created a bit of an artifi­cial­ness and like every­thing else in this country, this has become another polit­ical battle­ground. I’m not so sure that I agree with the idea that it’s being controlled from the federal level down. I don’t actually think it is. I think this is become a polit­ical football and this is what’s disturbing to me. I question some of these states that have shut down and are pretty much following the leader. And I’ve seen actions that really seem pretty repug­nant to me by some of these local politicians.

Bitcoin TINA:

And even if you have cases, we’re likely going to have cases, that doesn’t neces­sarily mean you need to be in a shutdown because you have cases. I thought we were going to have liter­ally tens of millions of people sick in the United States. I thought by now we’d poten­tially have half a million to a million people dead in this country. That’s what I thought was going to be the case. That’s not the case. Those are not the numbers at this point. The numbers are bad. They’re not that. And so the question becomes, how do we find a way of living with this thing? And we can’t let this be a polit­ical football. You had Fauci warning that we’re going to have school shutdown and maybe schools should be shut down. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we’ll have more homeschooling. I actually would like that idea because I’d like less indoctrination.

Bitcoin TINA:

But we have issues that are going to come out of this. We’re going to have issues of domestic abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse. And there are a lot of patholo­gies that come from unemploy­ment. There are a lot of patholo­gies from people being stuck at home. This is really serious and the negative patho­log­ical, social outcomes that are coming from this are really quite severe. And I thought we needed to treat this very seriously at the begin­ning and I still don’t think we can ignore it. I think we need to figure out ways of finding some middle ground, but this can’t be a polit­ical football. And I think it has become a bit of a polit­ical football. I have a slightly different view than CK does on this. And maybe you too, Brady. But I think that we’ve turned this into another polit­ical football for this country, which I’m not happy about.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Just to jump in, I am thankful that at least in the United States is a variance between states. Whereas other countries that don’t have kind of strong state rights or province rights or whatever, they don’t have that. It’s much more top down. It is what it is from the top. I think that that’s actually a benefit for the US. We live in a polit­ical world. I don’t see anything that affects massive amounts of people not becoming a polit­ical football in our current system. I think Mr. Cool BP, one of the guys behind a WTF, happened in 1971, made a really great point that it is a shame that this happened during peak fiat. It’s a shame that it happened when so many elderly people were just shoved into homes because their children can’t take care of them anymore. It’s a shame that it happened when no one had any cash whatsoever.

Chris­tian Keroles:

The polit­ical football is inevitable because we’re living in this polit­ical fiat time. And I think that that’s just happening, but I am grateful that there are different juris­dic­tions trying different things. At least we can see right in front of us. And I really do think that the fact that this origi­nated in China and that the Chinese Commu­nist party was the one that reacted first to this, really created a mold for other govern­ments to copy for how to react to this. And I think that if it would have started somewhere else, we may have seen different policies coming from different govern­ments. But the fact that it happened in China, we saw China’s reaction to it, that was obviously draconian and crazy and welding doors shut and stuff like that. And a lot of govern­ments use that as a model and we allowed China’s response to teach us how to respond. And that’s why we’re seeing things so crazy. And nothing scares me more than things like videos from Australia, US, Canada, where police officers are just acting in completely inhumane ways to enforce the law.

Brady:

Go ahead, TINA.

Bitcoin TINA:

If we’ve learned from the Chinese, then we really have a big problem on our hands because there’s nothing about the commu­nist Chinese that I like. I think that’s a pretty bad model from my perspec­tive. There are other Asian nations that took pretty aggres­sive approaches and they mostly started doing things like wearing masks. I don’t think, maybe I’m wrong, I don’t think the people in Japan had this kind of a lockdown approach. It’s nothing.

Brady:

Japan did not.

Bitcoin TINA:

I don’t think it’s enforce­ment like this. They haven’t suffered from these kinds of problems. They’re not the only country. I think there are other countries in Asia that did not take the same kind of approach that the commu­nist Chinese took. I think the commu­nist Chinese took that approach because they had an inkling as to what they were dealing with. And because they had this inkling that this might have been a bio weapon, that they felt the need to take such drastic actions. And that’s a really a bit of a problem.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Or massive govern­ments just have a hammer. And all they know how to do is enforce regula­tion rather than making recom­men­da­tions, admit­ting that they don’t know what’s happening, telling people to take precau­tions and be safe and letting people have any sort of personal respon­si­bility. Govern­ments do what govern­ments do. And we had the worst govern­ment essen­tially be the example for the world. I see other Asian nations as not doing maybe what China did because they’re used to this because they’re always affected by China and they under­stand so closely what the Chinese Commu­nist party and life in China does to the rest of the world.

Chris­tian Keroles:

If you go to Korea, if you go to Seoul, Korea, they liter­ally have a tower that is in the city that changes lights based on the quality of air that’s being blown in from China to warn the Korean citizens. A, should you be wearing a mask today or not? All of Asia is so intimately aware of China and how to deal with China that that explains to me why maybe they acted differ­ently. Whereas, in the US, you have senators and pundits talking about how this just proves that central down authority is the only way to do things, which I think is the opposite takeaway of what TINA and I are describing.

Bitcoin TINA:

I still actually believe in this weird document we have called the Constitution.

Brady:

Yeah. There’s still a lot of infor­ma­tion out there. I think one of the big issues was like you said, TINA, that we were expecting poten­tially a much bigger impact from the virus. And it’s impos­sible and diffi­cult to try to model this thing out when you don’t have any infor­ma­tion. And the infor­ma­tion you do have is extremely unreli­able. Making decisions based on these very early models on how things are going to spread is tough. However, I think when more infor­ma­tion is coming out, then you have to adjust those models and the policies. I think we’re seeing that more so in the United States. I think states have been kind of loosened up or free to kind of make their own decisions. Even where I live, the county has a different policy than the state right now, in terms of lockdown and regula­tions on restau­rants and other businesses.

Brady:

That is good to see that it’s a little bit more surgical in that regard. I hope that we continue to get more infor­ma­tion and make better decisions moving forward, but we still have whatever happens, this economic fallout to deal with. Jay Powell was inter­viewed this morning and spoke about his prospects, which are pretty dim for the future of the US economy and the world economy. He was, I noted very quick to blame the virus. He said, I think it was, I’ll approx­i­mate here, but he said that the problem, the economic fallout was due to the virus and not because we were in the midst of a bubble, any kind of economic or credit bubble. Which I think, all of us will probably disagree with. And Stanley Druck­en­miller, who was also inter­viewed last night, said the exact opposite, that we were in the midst of this massive credit bubble that might be popped by this virus. What do you guys think about Jay Powell’s comments this morning? And I can summa­rize some more if you haven’t been able to catch up with them. TINA?

Bitcoin TINA:

I did not hear Jay Powell this morning. I want to just conclude one thing from our prior conver­sa­tion, because it’s applic­able to almost all things. And that is it’s okay to be wrong and then learned this as a trader. I heard Richard Russell actually used to say this. It’s okay to be wrong, it’s not okay to stay wrong. And we need to use this as a guiding principle for things that we do. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s not okay to keep making mistakes. Jay Powell is very fortu­nate that he has this conve­nient thing that he can blame. I think we have had the wrong diagnosis for problems for over a decade. But at this point, I’ve come to embrace policies of negative rates and UBI and money printing because from my perspec­tive, it will just accel­erate the process of Bitcoin. I see the system as being irreparably broken.

Bitcoin TINA:

I think it’s been irreparably broken for decades. It’s just been, we’ve been inexorably moving here. I have a state­ment that I like to say, vis-a-vis fed funds that 0% rates are an indica­tion of failed policy. Negative rates are an indica­tion of insanity. I think we’ve had monetary madness for 30 to 40 years. We’ve had bad policy, at least since the crash of 87, the post-crash of 87. We had a brief moment in time when Volker ran the Fed when you tried to correct things from the prior 30, some odd years. Where we had exces­sively easy policies. Those policies were tended to be high taxation and easy credit, which created a pretty bad infla­tion, which Volker teamed with extremely high interest rates, which was very painful. The US economy. Volcker was so roundly hated by so many people, he had secret service protec­tion. He was burned in effigy.

Bitcoin TINA:

I think this go round will ultimately have Bitcoin save the situa­tion. People can buy into Bitcoin and ride Bitcoin’s coattails into poten­tially a new economic system. It will be painful for some and that’s unfor­tu­nate, but the ultimate outcome will be dramat­i­cally better. But we’ve created a situa­tion where we’ve created credit which is too easy, which has created a form of debt slavery. We see this very much so with regard to student loans and what kids, young people have to pay for college and univer­sity. When I was in univer­sity a long time ago, it was much less expen­sive even on a relative basis. We’ve had infla­tion to the tune of 9% or so compounded annually for 40 to 50 years. Hold on one second. Which is devas­tating. You have young men, young women gradu­ating college with question­able degrees, saddled with enormous mountains of debt.

Bitcoin TINA:

They can’t really start their lives. They can’t afford to start businesses. They can’t afford to buy homes. This has been a disaster. We need to remake and redesign the way these educa­tional services are deliv­ered. We don’t need free educa­tion. We need people to use the creativity and genius they have to find another way of deliv­ering these services at a much lower cost. Look, it’s great to have fun in college for four years and party and have a good time. Who doesn’t want to have a great time partying for four years? But at the end of the day, people can’t afford to spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars partying for four years. That’s not a world we live in and that’s a pretty high bill to pay. And sure it’s fun. And of course it’s fun. Lots of things are fun. Doesn’t mean we should do it. Doesn’t mean we can afford to do it. Most people go to college and take courses because they want to improve their ability to earn an income. That’s why vocational educa­tion exists.

Brady:

I think that might be an outcome of this situa­tion that we’re in now is that lots of univer­si­ties are going to online educa­tion and similar to corpo­ra­tions and their work from home policies. It’s going to be hard to justify needing to be on campus, for every student needing to be on campus at all times, or every employee needing to be in the corpo­rate office at all times after this situation.

Bitcoin TINA:

Have you heard any of them looking to give back money to their students? Have you heard any of them talking about cutting their costs and cutting what they’re charging them? I haven’t heard any news items. I’m sure it would have been big if some univer­si­ties came and said, “Oh, tuition next year will only be 10% of last year’s tuition.” I haven’t heard that. Did I miss that in the news?

Brady:

I don’t think you missed it.

Chris­tian Keroles:

I went to college recently and just looking at tuition prices at my univer­sity from just five years ago to what they are today, they are mooning. They are experi­encing hyper­in­fla­tion or appre­ci­a­tion or whatever, in terms of the cost of college. It’s now 25% more expensive.

Chris­tian Keroles:

In terms of the cost of college, it’s now 25% more expen­sive, my unbeliev­ably expen­sive tuition costs, which just absolutely blows my mind.

Brady:

Got a related question from the chat room from Al’s Lacrosse for TINA. And C.K., you can definitely weigh in as well. What does TINA see as the trigger for the tipping point of tradi­tional finance buying Bitcoin over Treasuries? Are negative interest rates enough, or does more need to happen?

Bitcoin TINA:

We’re a long way from there. I don’t even think about that, Bitcoin versus Treasuries. Bitcoin is way too small an asset to even consider that. That’s not a question for several years at least, maybe seven to 10 years from now.

Brady:

So what needs to happen? Do you think it’s a certain Bitcoin market cap that would need to be reached in order for that to be considered?

Bitcoin TINA:

Bitcoin will become perceived as the riskless asset. It’s not perceived as that yet. So right now, I think we’re primed for extremely high numbers. I wanted to come in and tell people that pretty strongly, that I think you should stop thinking about trying to acquire more Bitcoin and should figure out a way to make sure you don’t sell the Bitcoin you have too cheap. I think that people under­value what they own. I think that many, not Hodlers because I think Hodlers have a different mentality, and you probably have mostly Hodlers listening to this. I’m probably not talking to the trading types, and they won’t listen to me. They’ll think I’m an idiot. They’ll think I’m foolish. I think in the course of the next several years, I think plan B is probably right. My own mental model for this coming bull market was a range of $200,000 to $400,000 in Bitcoin pricing. Plan B says in his cross asset model he’s got a target. Hold on one second. Sorry about that. I’m just going to take a sip of water here.

Brady:

Yeah. So his target is $280,000 if I remember correctly.

Bitcoin TINA:

His talk is $288,000. And I don’t think that’s crazy at all. And I think we’ll overshoot that by a fair bit.

Brady:

That would put us up a $5 trillion market cap, still too small for finan­cial insti­tu­tions to buy Bitcoin over Treasuries. What do you think that-

Bitcoin TINA:

Marketable Treasuries, I have to back into this. There’s around $5 to $6 trillion in inter­gov­ern­mental loans. And so the balance would be marketable. So you’re talking probably about approx­i­mately a $20 trillion marketable Treasury market, plus or minus $1 trillion, so that’s a pretty big market. Bitcoin is not going to be a substi­tute for Treasuries for a number of years. I think the asset grows dramat­i­cally larger in the course of the next decade through the various cycles we’re going through. And maybe that’ll be a more reason­able discus­sion to be had in 2025, 2027, 2029. I think it’s too soon, too presump­tuous and completely unnec­es­sary to even have that discus­sion. Bitcoin’s going to go up an awful lot in the next number of years. And I expect in this cycle, the numbers will be shocking. I have some radical notions on Bitcoin. Pretty much every­thing I think about Bitcoin is gener­ally radical. So I think if you’re guiding-

Brady:

It sounds like you’re being bearish to me, TINA. eight years or something? I’m like, what’s this?

Bitcoin TINA:

Eight years, I’m talking $5, $6 million Bitcoin. I’m not sure how bearish that is. I think that you’re going to have massive up moves with a greatly dimin­ished downward pricing in bear markets. I think the upcycles are going to be absolutely staggering. Put yourself in other people’s shoes. So I’ve seen this in markets. Remember, people who’ve been in markets for a long time, they forget when new people come in, they look at it differ­ently. They’re looking for making money. If you’re selling to them, you think it’s going down. They think it’s going up. So forget about short term basis, but people were buying it. The question is, what are they looking at as far as poten­tial price? If you’ve been told that Bitcoin is nonsense and it’s garbage and it’s silly and you’re looking at a Bitcoin price of $250,000 Bitcoin… I forget how many. Let’s see. At $1 million, that’s a penny a set. So you can buy four sets for a penny, so you’re looking at Bitcoin priced at four sets to the penny. You’re buying it because you think it’s going to go up. The person selling to you is selling it to you because they think it’s going to go down.

Bitcoin TINA:

But so often we’ve seen in great big bull markets, bull markets like the tech bull market in the ’90s, these things went up and then they went up and then they went up and then went up and they took a little bit down and they kept going up. And that doesn’t mean that you didn’t have sharp correc­tions along the way, but moves were staggering. So people who flip in their psychology and say, I have to own this thing, well, they’re looking at the thing going higher. So are you going to have lived through the last however many years, two years, three years, four years, five years, and then sell to somebody on the cheap and let them ride Bitcoin from $250,000 to $5 million Bitcoin? Are you going to part with it? You say, oh, well, I’m rich now. I have 10 Bitcoin. I made myself $2.5 million. Gee, this is wonderful. Well, threw your Bitcoin away, and you missed $5 billion Bitcoin. That’s $50 million in today’s buying power. That would kind of suck.

Bitcoin TINA:

I think that we find it so hard to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. And so we see this over and over again in markets. When you sell, somebody is buying from you. They think it’s going higher. They may be right. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t make money. Markets don’t care what price you paid for something. You have to forget. It’s not relevant what you paid for it. You might’ve paid $10 for it. That’s not relevant. It’s relevant to you, sure. You’ve made a lot of money in it. But I think we have to think defensively.

Bitcoin TINA:

I think there are things that we do that are foolish and piggish. If you need the capital, if you want to enjoy some of it, great, do it, sell it. Don’t borrow against it. We should learn from March 12^th and 13^th that if we borrow, if we take it on collat­er­al­ized loans on our Bitcoin, there’s a really good chance we get blown out of it. We’re still going to have a very volatile market going forward. But that may change in five, six years. It may change in four years. And I don’t know the timing of this, so it might not be the cycle. So we might go to $280,000 and then shoot to half a million. And maybe we go back down to $100,000. And so what I’m sawing might not be right this cycle.

Bitcoin TINA:

At some point though, here’s what I want people do a thought exper­i­ment of. If I am 50 years old and I’m watching this asset go up that I thought had no credi­bility and I see it print a price of $260,000 and I think, wow, I would have liked to have made money in that, when I see it sell off, at what price do I decide I want to step in and buy some of it. At what downside? 50% down? 30% down? 90% down? If I feel that I’ve missed a trade but I want to be in that trade, at what point do I want to start legging into that trade? I don’t think we tend to think of this all the time. And you have to think what other people are going to want to do. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but I know we need to think about what they might want to do because it will change the way the markets work. So just because something worked a partic­ular way in the last 10 years doesn’t mean that it’s going to work that way in the next 10 years.

Brady:

No doubt about that. CK, any reactions or thoughts before our next question?

Chris­tian Keroles:

For the most part, I agree with TINA. If I were to add anything, I would say the most impor­tant thing for a Bitcoin investor is risk manage­ment. Like TINA said, a small amount of Bitcoin is actually worth if Bitcoin succeeds a lot more than you think, and you just want to put yourself in position where you don’t have to sell when you don’t want to. So I think that’s the most impor­tant thing in being successful here, is to protect yourself and stay defen­sive rather than put yourself in harm’s way in order to poten­tially overex­pose yourself.

Chris­tian Keroles:

I think Brian Harrington, @BrainHarrington on Twitter, has been doing really great work around just the personal finance angle of being a Bitcoiner and this idea that you should always be increasing your bottom line, whether it’s your Bitcoin or your USD bottom line. Both sides of your balance sheet should always be going up. And you should always, again, be putting yourself in position where you don’t need that Bitcoin invest­ment to live and you’re not even consid­ering it as something that’s going to help you in the short term. It’s just something that you’re putting away for the future.

Brady:

Yeah. Sound advice. You don’t want to overex­tend yourself. You don’t want to be in a position where you have to sell that Bitcoin in order to survive. You want to be able to hold it for the long term. Yeah. Cory, welcome to the call, man. How’s it going?

Cory Klipp­sten:

I don’t usually go by CK too, but I’m cool with it. It’s okay.

Brady:

Cory Klipp­sten. We have two CKs, Chris­tian Keroles, Cory Klipp­sten. CK Swan and CK BDC Media.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. Hey, TINA. How are you, man?

Bitcoin TINA:

Hey, CK.

Cory Klipp­sten:

All right. All right. Somebody on Twitter just posted gif of one of those muscle-bound, over-steroided bulls as the avatar for TINA. And I think we should figure out how to display that when he is blank on one of these from now on.

Bitcoin TINA:

Nice.

Chris­tian Keroles:

TINA, you can upload it onto your Zoom.

Cory Klipp­sten:

There you go..

Bitcoin TINA:

I got to find the avatar.

Brady:

Somebody DM that avatar to TINA.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I will.

Brady:

Well, we started talking about Bitcoin and Treasuries, when Bitcoin might supplant Treasuries, at what market cap that might happen. We drifted into lots of different topics from there, but I want to-

Cory Klipp­sten:

Oh, I’ve been listening the whole show.

Brady:

Yeah, cool.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’m all up to speed.

Brady:

Awesome. You posed a question actually in the chat room. So why don’t you go ahead and ask it? You’re on here now.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, sure. So TINA, I know you’ve mentioned a Bitcoin super­cycle, and you were starting to hint at at least what the numbers might look like. But we’re kind of used to these four year epics and kind of what that looks like with our whole two to three data points. But what does it look like if things just go so nuts that it divorces from kind of the four year cycles, either this ethic or the next one? And what might happen?

Bitcoin TINA:

I think that’s a real possi­bility. I think you have to open up your mind to the idea that that can happen, which is why I think you have to so carefully guard your Bitcoin and not sell it too cheaply. Right now, we’re at such a phenom­enal price. When guys like you, you’re offering service to people. So few people are going to take advan­tage of this soon enough. I look at Bitcoin, a $9,000. It looks like it’s free to me, Bitcoin at $9,000, to me from my perspec­tive on a risk-reward basis, is a better risk-reward than it’s ever been.

Chris­tian Keroles:

100%

Bitcoin TINA:

It’s cheaper than buying it at $10 because the upside is so much more likely.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Right.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. The likeli­hood is something that I think has really factored in. I got really noisy, just kind of watching what was going on in late February, early March, and when the market started to… Basically, just another demon­stra­tion that the Legacy Finan­cial System is so incred­ibly messed up, that it just won’t survive in this form. And because the life of Bitcoin to date has corre­sponded to the longest largest bull market in history, it was hard to deter­mine whether cracks would really show in the finan­cial system or if it was different this time. Because we had very smart people saying that, hey, if you look at demog­raphy and essen­tially the end of 2018 crash that, well, that was peak spending for Gen X.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And it got picked up so quickly that maybe we now just go all the way through to 2038, which should be peak spending from millen­nials. And this may just be the biggest extended new normal or whatever. And in that scenario, the likeli­hood of Bitcoin really taking off is somewhat less. So whatever your expec­ta­tions were for price or for timing for when Bitcoin becomes really impor­tant and really large, you need to if you haven’t made the adjust­ment in your head, like you’re saying, TINA, where you’re 2Xing that, 5Xing that or 10Xing that or pulling that year forward. Like I used to say, I think you’d be able to use Bitcoin as a unit of account pretty much globally in a local currency and in Bitcoin by 2035. I’ve pulled that forward. I think that’s probably more like 2030 at latest. And then obviously-

Bitcoin TINA:

I agree with that. I think that’s a real distinct possibility.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And then, yeah, when it comes to price and when we hit those milestones, in my head, all those things are pulled forward. And when you think about Bitcoin compa­nies and people building infra­struc­ture, whether it’s the Unchaineds or the Casas or us or whoever around the world that’s building these Bitcoin compa­nies, I think their likeli­hood of success has 5Xed or 10Xed. If they’re alive right now and doing some business, this thing is going and you want to be involved.

Chris­tian Keroles:

If I could jump in, I totally agree with all of that. And I really love how Preston Pysh has entered the Bitcoin space because I think that the way that he artic­u­lates a lot of this stuff is so clean. And I love the way that on the most recent Noded [Podcast] where he appeared with Pierre and Michael Blitstein he talked about the having as kind of being Bitcoin getting ready to make a crack at the King. And then if it fails, it kind of dumps back and kind of goes back into hiber­na­tion and tries to build up strength for the next go around. And thinking of these kinds of halving supply-shock eras or epochs as different attempts of Bitcoin kind of going for it. Every time it gets stronger. Just between 2017 and now, the onboarding into Bitcoin, the educa­tion into Bitcoin, the memes prolif­er­ating, we are living in this process of hyper Bitcoiniza­tion and the world waking up to what Bitcoin is. And eventu­ally, it’s going to head up the S curve, and it’s not going to fall back down from one of these bubbles.

Chris­tian Keroles:

And that’s why, again, it’s so impor­tant put yourself in position to not sell your Bitcoin, put yourself in position to write it because this is going to be the biggest bull market in history. And when an idea and a technology meets the right oppor­tu­nity in time, it’s an unstop­pable force. And it really seems as though Bitcoin has kind of wedged itself in the perfect oppor­tu­nity in 2020 and beyond.

Brady:

Well said. Well said, CK. We’re only about 6X away from a $1 trillion market cap. It’s about $55,000 per coin. To me, that’s the big number, the “big number” ahead of us in this cycle. The $1 trillion market cap, what is that? What will that do in the finan­cial world? What kind of waves will that make and moves that will incent? TINA, what do think?

Bitcoin TINA:

Well, I think about it differ­ently. I don’t think the $1 trillion mark is that impor­tant. I see it very differ­ently. For me, my model for how we get to $100,000 has always been the idea that people who are well to do, too rich, start to buy some Bitcoin that they put on… People who are comfort­able with trading and markets, people who trade for a living, Wall Street types and types who also trade for a living who are not neces­sarily working on Wall Street, analysts, portfolio managers, hedge fund managers, sales­people. And they put on a what the fuck position for their own account, for what they call their PAs, the personal account. So you get a guy who is worth $5 million, $10 million, $20 million. Let’s take a $20 million person, they put on a WTF, or what the fuck, position 1% or 2%. That’s $200,000 to $400,000. Paul Tudor Jones put on a what the fuck position. His position is probably, what would we guess, a 1% position? $50 million to a $100 million what the fuck position? He’s worth at least $5 billion. So I think that a guy like Paul Tudor Jones gives a lot of intel­lec­tual cover for a lot of people to start thinking about putting on these positions. And they’re going to start thinking about it.

Bitcoin TINA:

So I think north of $20,000, the world starts to shift, and you’re going to see this thing make it from 20,000 to 100,000 within about a year. So we get to 20 and we’ll get to 100 within about a year because people are not going to want to miss the trade. And if Tudor is doing it, maybe I should do it too because he’s amongst the very best traders who’s ever lived. So he’s now provided a massive level of intel­lec­tual cover. So I have my own specu­la­tions about this. Stanley Druck­en­miller said that he learned from George Soros, again, too, Druck­en­miller is also one of the best traders who ever lived, that if you are right on something you want to be right in large enough size that it matters.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’m pretty sure that Tudor probably thinks that way also. So I think 1% to 2% is his starting position if I had to guess. Now, I’m just guessing. I don’t know. I’m just guessing. He doesn’t talk to me. My guess is that he owns physical Bitcoin and he’ll trade futures against it for his PA. For his money under manage­ment and his funds, he’ll probably use futures. This is a guy who’s very comfort­able trading. He probably trades more times a day than most people trade in their entire lives. So he’s going to end up upping that position, and we’re going to see an awful lot of people where it wasn’t serious consid­er­a­tion start to put these trades on. That’s a lot of money, and that’s going to take to $100,000 pretty fast. A lot of eyes are going to pop out.

Bitcoin TINA:

JP Morgan. JP Morgan Chase is now doing business with Gemini and Coinbase. And so they’re going to do business with other exchanges. This is a huge about-face. It’s a huge public about-face for this company. This is a really inter­esting start to this epic. We have some major Wall Street hitters who have rung the bell. $9,000 Bitcoin is just so cheap.

Brady:

Yeah. So you think it’s more just the intel­lec­tual cover given by big names getting into Bitcoin and kind of justi­fying invest­ment in Bitcoin more so than a big number in the cycle. Cory, any thoughts on what TINA has to say there?

Cory Klipp­sten:

So I have been following the Paul Tudor Jones things very closely. It does appear that out of the fund at least, which he’s public about. We don’t know what’s in his personal account. Out of the public, out of the fund at least it is suppos­edly low single digits. I’ve seen the $100,000 number bandied about, which kind of makes sense because I think the specific fund is about a $4 billion fund, $4.1. So that would be 2.5%, something like that. And it’s, I think, a CME futures position and I guess the max number of contracts you can have out as one fund basically nuts out to $100 million. So it’s kind of all kind of squares there.

Cory Klipp­sten:

TINA, I was actually just curious, like anecdo­tally, as we’re kind of ramping up to what we hope is a face dripping bull run, just people from your gener­a­tion, your social circle, people you talk to, are you getting hit up a lot? So not the Paul Tudor Joneses, but the normies and whatever beautiful golf course laden commu­nity you live in. What’s it like, and are you hearing some noise?

Bitcoin TINA:

I can only stand to talk to Bitcoiners. So I have no idea.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Okay. We’ll have to have Gary Leland on the show again and talk about boomer outreach.

Chris­tian Keroles:

So I can talk a little bit about this topic. At least I would say I’m a millen­nial of millen­nials. I jumped into a couple of chats with my normie friends, and they were talking about Bitcoin leading up to the having. Talking to my girlfriend’s mother, she has never been more upset with the govern­ment and has never asked me more questions about Bitcoin. People are waking up to this. Look, I’m not that smart, so I’m just going to keep quoting people that are much smarter than me that I listen to. But Jeff Booth has been kind of jumping in on the scenes on the Bitcoin space. And I love his example of how exponen­tials work and showing that in this idea of folding paper. Bitcoin is an exponen­tial technology, and people don’t under­stand that from fold 50, or from fold 49 to four 50, you go from taking a piece of paper to going all the way to the sun in terms of distance. And Bitcoin operates in the same way.

Chris­tian Keroles:

So the last epoch we had, we had the coin bases of the world. And then in this epoch, we have the JP Morgan Chases of the world and the SoFis and these massive insti­tu­tions jumping in. Maybe the next one is when we start having signif­i­cant countries jumping into this space. So as Bitcoin ramps up…

Chris­tian Keroles:

… trees jumping into this space. So as Bitcoin ramps up exponen­tially adoption, respect, money flows, relevance to global commerce, they all increase exponen­tially. And just to add onto that, whenever I hear people fighting about Bitcoin fees in the future, it just pretty much shows that they don’t under­stand what this exponen­tial change looks like and what that means for Bitcoin’s usage. Talking about Bitcoin fees in any sort of defin­i­tive way based on how fees are working today is just absolutely ludicrous and hilar­ious. So across the board, adoption is increasing exponen­tially. Aware­ness is increasing exponen­tially. Relevance is increasing exponen­tially, and maybe today you can’t notice that, but in the next year, you’re going to notice it. In the next four years, it’s just going to be just jaw dropping. So it’s just very, very diffi­cult to reason with exponen­tials and this idea that if you fold a piece of paper 50 times, it makes it to the sun. That is an insane thing that people are just not aware of and not used to even contemplating.

Brady:

Yeah. Our brains just don’t work that way, but yeah. We see it. Intuitively it’s becoming, well, it doesn’t happen intuitively in our brain, but it’s becoming easier to observe as these exponen­tial technolo­gies and network effects pile up on each other and things just move faster and faster. So Bitcoin is lever­aging all of the long history of the last century of exponen­tial technolo­gies and network effects and combining that with another technology that has had network effects innate for ever, which is money. So you combine those two together and yeah, like Tina likes to say, it’s a mad ripping sort of a wake up call for a lot of people. I have another question from the chat room and this is for the table, but we’ll start with Tina. This is a good one because it’s counter­in­tu­itive to expect that there might be defla­tion in a time of astounding money printing. So how is that possible, Tina, that we have defla­tion now setting in as the fed claims while we are printing enormous amounts of money?

Bitcoin TINA:

The whole conver­sa­tion of defla­tion infla­tion is actually very compli­cated. A lot of the time when we’re talking about defla­tion, we’re talking about defla­tion of assets like stocks, like real estate. We’re gener­ally not talking about CPI, PPI defla­tion. Most of the defla­tion that we might see in those assets come because you’ve got enormous dollar-based loans outstanding. And those loans act as a depres­sant on the price of assets. So in a debt liqui­da­tion cycle, the way a debt liqui­da­tion cycle works is that as you pay down debt, you sell assets to pay down debt, the value of the assets go down more than the value of the debt, resulting in a worse ratio of your debt to your equity or your assets.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’ve heard a lot of people who I have a lot of respect for make a very strong argument for defla­tion. I used to make similar arguments. I’ve made it for years. The biggest mistakes I’ve ever made is making the arguments for defla­tion. Had I not been making those defla­tionary arguments, I would have bought a lot of things back in 2002. I would have bought a lot of those things back in 2009. I do think that an asset like Bitcoin, which has no counter­party risk is ideal regard­less. If you have signif­i­cant asset price draw downs, you don’t want to be in an asset where you are depen­dent on your counter­party, bank accounts, not your own, brokerage accounts. Naturally in the event of a problem, hold on.

Bitcoin TINA:

In the event of a problem, you’re a creditor. I’m not suggesting that this will be the case we saw from MF Global in 2011, MF Global was ultimately bailed out. I think Pacific, but I’m not positive. John Corazon was the CEO. He took some bets, I think some emerging market debt. I forget what emerging market debt he took. He was ultimately right, but it still pushed MF Global into, I think, bankruptcy. I’m not sure the exact details now. It was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure it’s 2011. If you were a trader who cleared MF Global, you were not allowed on the floor where you were trading from. You didn’t have access to your account. You were basically locked out of your account until they fixed those problems and paid you back based on a SIPOC and basically getting a bailout. Well, if you had custody or owned Bitcoin, you don’t have that problem.

Bitcoin TINA:

Will the price be volatile? Yes, more than likely the price will be volatile, but you actually have your own asset. You have custody of your own assets. You can still transact with that. You might want to transact with it from one person to another. You might want to transact with it with an exchange. So the whole issue gets very diffi­cult and very compli­cated. I think that we’re going to see a shocking amount of spending, a shocking amount of moneti­za­tion by the fed. I expect the spending numbers to be well beyond what we think possible. We saw fed balance sheets grow from 800 billion to 4 trillion. I think the balance sheet will grow a staggering amount in the coming years. I think that the spending will grow a staggering amount in the coming years. I’ve said before that I expected massive spending. I still do. I expect UBI.

Bitcoin TINA:

It’s very hard to know how these things play themselves out, and to me what’s more impor­tant is owning assets that can withstand the scenario that we might go through. I feel very comfort­able in having cash and having physical Bitcoin. I would advocate people should have cash because you never want to have to sell your Bitcoin. Look, Bitcoin could have a draw down. Bitcoin could easily get cut in half. We’ve seen this happen over and over again. You have to have cash to be able to withstand periods of volatility. If you have income, you still want to have some cash because things can happen to your job. So you want to put yourself in a solid position of being able to ride these things through.

Bitcoin TINA:

So to me at a minimum, having cash and a Bitcoin position makes sense, then you’ve got to figure out the ratio that makes sense to you. I have no idea what ratio is right for you. What’s right for you might not be right for me. I’m probably a lot older than you. I’ll probably want a lot more cash than you’re going to want, but these are very diffi­cult things. I tend to think that net, we will see longer run infla­tion. Not sure if we see asset infla­tion, I would not be surprised to see a flattish stock market.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’ve said it this way for a lot of years, that when you operate with a monetary policy that makes sense, your range of outcomes, of poten­tial outcomes, is your one set. But when you operate beyond the norms of historic monetary policy, which I think we’ve been operating on for a long time, I think you have a much larger set of poten­tial outcomes. So it’s very hard to know what the outcomes will be. I think that the outcomes that you need to expect that happen have to be much larger than the outcomes you think possible. I think there are more possible outcomes than we’ve ever seen before, and I’m not sure exactly what those will be. My only sugges­tion is you want to position yourself for a broad set of poten­tial outcomes.

Brady:

Sure.

Bitcoin TINA:

I don’t have a good answer for you. I wish I had a better answer for you.

Brady:

Corey, what’s your answer, defla­tion versus infla­tion in this cycle and why would we even see defla­tion at a time when we were printing a bunch of money?

Cory Klipp­sten:

I’m just a consumer of infor­ma­tion from all these macro guys that I’ve been learning from, but I’ve also been studying macro for 20 years now. So I’ll just give what is starting to feel like the consensus view, which is that we’re sort of in a defla­tionary environ­ment for the next minimum two years and maybe as long as five to seven years, but that you can’t hide all this money printing forever. So eventu­ally it turns infla­tionary. But yeah, we’ve already seen the April month was the largest drop in the US consumer price index since the thirties or something like that. It was really, really drastic. I think 0.8%. Still 0.4% even when you strip out fuel. So I think that is we’re going to see falling prices.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I think you’re going to see when people actually get to start visiting homes when they’ve been blocked from going and looking at homes and people have just been surfing on rent, forgive­ness, or rent delay or whatever. A lot of people are just going to be out of their homes now and I think there will be a big drop in housing prices around the country. Obviously it’ll vary market by market, but should happen. We’ll see how long that counter­vailing force plays out against all of the money printing. They’re going to try like crazy not to let defla­tion set in because you liter­ally, this country and no country around the world can pay their debts in a defla­tionary environment.

Cory Klipp­sten:

They absolutely need infla­tion and ideally higher infla­tion than histor­i­cally, which is why we’ve seen the fed, as we’ve talked about a few times with other guests on the show, rollback the usual. Let’s stay under 2% and instead say, “We’re going to go ahead and like average 2% over the long term,” and we don’t know how far they’re going to go back to pick up all those under years, because there’s been a lot of them and try to make it all even out over two. That gives them flexi­bility to target three, four or 5% in a year. We have no idea. When Tina starts to say, “Okay, that’s like 4 trillion, 5 trillion. How much money are we going to print here?” We do have estimates from Jim Bianco from Bianca Research who’s a popular guest on Eric Townsend’s show Macro Voices saying that he thinks the numbers 45 to 47 trillion. And you’ve had Jim Moscow on Jason Calacanis’ this new show and say that he thinks the …

Cory Klipp­sten:

I’m sorry, you know what? I’ll give Pomp. This was actually on Pomp’s show. I think that Chamath said he thought the number was 50 to 60 trillion that would need to be printed essen­tially to backstop every­thing that’s broken around world that more or less is dollar tied or dollar to nominated. So it’s going to be really, really … Man, it’s scary. What a time to be alive to watch. This is really watching the world wake up from history. We had a 30 year hangover after the end of the Cold War in 1990, and it’s taken 30 years for people to … It’s just been this drunken celebra­tion for the 30 years since then, trying to keep the old insti­tu­tions alive and trying to keep this train on the tracks where every­body gets to be rich. This is the wake up call, you know? Yeah. Take care of you and yours and get some Bitcoin.

Bitcoin TINA:

I want to chime in one second. I think we’re going to see massive infla­tion in Bitcoin. I’m very concerned the prices may go to million dollars of Bitcoin. I think we’re going to see some truly terrible infla­tion in Bitcoin.

Cory Klipp­sten:

It sounds really scary. Are there enough sets? Are there enough sets to go around?

Chris­tian Keroles:

At least enough millisats

Cory Klipp­sten:

Okay. Millisats, good.

Chris­tian Keroles:

I think the person that makes the most sense to me right now, and he’s not the only person making this analysis, for me is Ansel Lindner. So he’s been on your show before and I think his analysis of one, the Euro dollar system, as well as the, gosh, why am I blanking out on this, on the term, but the repo markets, as well as the repo markets is, it just makes a lot of sense to me. He’s really painting what is money is assets that can be swapped, or that can be used as collat­eral on the repo markets. And the way that the repo markets are archi­tected is that they’re archi­tected in a way where if no one is accepting collat­eral, money is destroyed, right? All of these assets that were counted, “as money,” as things that you can get liquidity out of, they instantly become illiquid and that has an effect of money destruction.

Chris­tian Keroles:

So I definitely see how the system is levered in a way where if loans aren’t being made, money is being destroyed very quickly. And what Tina described as people are trying to sell collat­eral to make up for their debts, the value of that collat­eral dumps much faster than the value of the debt. Again, I’m not an expert here, but I do really think that Ansel’s analysis has at least helped enlighten me a little bit. I also think a lot of the stuff that Jeff Snyder’s and the people on Eric Townsend’s show Macro Voices talk about, Luke Groman, about the Eurodollar system and how the dollar as a unit is not being controlled by the American Federal Reserve.

Chris­tian Keroles:

The dollar as a unit is a global system. It’s almost like a shadow banking free market system. It’s just really, really hard to see into it because it is something that is outside of the purview of the fed. So it’s super, super compli­cated, no trans­parency in shadow banking. Like Tina said, the future outcomes are so, so varied that the most impor­tant thing is to just hedge, hedge, hedge. Put yourself in position to act offen­sively and put yourself in position to ride the wave.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I’m going to just put a little example on two of those things. So one of the assets that a lot of these guys like to use for collat­eral is high yield debt. And because it was being marked down so quickly, the fed decided to break all the rules that they’d ever had before and basically decided to backstop that market and buy up a bunch of it. This is what a lot of people are forecasting will happen with equities as well, which is against the fed’s mandate and they’re not allowed to buy equities, but at one point that was against the mandate of the Bank of Japan as well, and they own 80% of the ETF market in Japan. So this thing probably doesn’t stay on the rails without massive social disrup­tion without the fed buying stocks in the US, so that will probably, they’ll do some sort of like judicial jujitsu and figure out some way to put that within their mandate or change some rule or something.

Cory Klipp­sten:

They’ll probably just use an SPV. It’ll look a lot like Enron, frankly, which is what they did with the high yield thing already. They basically created Raptor7 just like the Houston guys did in 2001 or whatever. Then on the Euro dollar thing, just to put an example on that. A German bank can lend money to a Greek company and denom­i­nate that loan in dollars basically in a system that relies on credit to create the money supply, which is what the dollar system is. It’s a credit-based system. Essen­tially they’re creating money right out of thin air there and saddling a Greek economy let’s say that may have some trouble paying, we’re paying down a dollar denom­i­nated debt over time if the dollar gets stronger over time and their economy goes to hell in a hand basket. They may have some trouble paying back that German bank and that essen­tially affects the whole dollar system.

Bitcoin TINA:

I want to throw a grenade into the discussion.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Sweet.

Bitcoin TINA:

I’m still very dubious about the idea of defla­tion. Okay, so we have to differ­en­tiate defla­tion. You’re talking about defla­tion of assets, like stock prices in real estate, or defla­tion in terms of CPI, PPI. So I don’t think you’ll see defla­tion in CPI, PPI at all. Asset prices I expect to be staggering amount of spending. I expect stability of asset prices and I expect the stock market may not go up very much, but I’m still not sure that the stock market will go down a lot. I think it’ll actually be problem­atic for a lot of stock­holders that they won’t see it move forward. But here’s the question. So if the US govern­ment were to issue 20, 30, 50 year paper, I have my AirPods talking to me. If the US govern­ment were to issue 20, 30, 50 year paper with a 0% coupon and some small yield, half a percent, 1% yield, which they might be able to do at some point, and then the fed buys up most of that paper. Was that money printing?

Bitcoin TINA:

I think that is money printing and I think that becomes very problem­atic for the markets as much as seeing a sharp decline in asset prices. I think that what we’ve seen through each cycle is that policy responses get more and more aggres­sive and the numbers that Chamath threw out, the numbers that Bianca threw out, I don’t find surprising and shocking at all. And the numbers will be reached. I think the numbers will be astounding. So what we have to ask ourselves is if the politi­cians surprise us on the upside of what they do, then what do the outcomes look like? So that gets me back to owning Bitcoin and it gets me back to only physical Bitcoin.

Bitcoin TINA:

I don’t happen to like stocks. I’m dubious that the real estate market will be either all up or all down. Selling New York apart­ments, they might be hit very hard in price. Whereas buying apart­ments in the suburbs of New York, or buying houses in the suburbs of New York might go up in price. It’s not neces­sarily going to be all one or all another thing. So to me, if they do something like that, that looks a lot like money printing and we haven’t seen them really do that before, because we’ve never been in this situa­tion. Imagine we have negative rates. What if you issued $20 trillion worth of paper with a ‑1% rate on the part of the US government?

Bitcoin TINA:

That sure it looks a heck of a lot like money fronting things might not quite work out the way we expect them to. We also have to challenge our assump­tions that we make and I’m not sure if people making these views and giving these prognos­ti­ca­tions as to how they think things will work out are fully challenging the under­lying assump­tions. So what if you issued, the US govern­ment issued $30 trillion of long dated paper with a ‑1% yield? Then what?

Brady:

Who wants to jump on the grenade?

Chris­tian Keroles:

Are they issuing faster than money’s being destroyed globally is the question?

Bitcoin TINA:

Up the number.

Chris­tian Keroles:

It’s hard to tell.

Bitcoin TINA:

Up the number. Up the number. Remember they respond with greater and greater amounts each time. We’ve been more preemp­tive this time than we were in 2008, nine, much more preemp­tive, much more aggres­sive responses. I expect more aggres­sive responses, and I’m not just talking about the Federal Reserve. I’m also talking about politi­cians. So if we assume the world has to work out a certain way and people do the things that they did last time, then we might get results that we expect. But what if they don’t do what they did last time and they change what they do? We have to open our minds to the idea that the responses may be different. Responses have already been different. I say, vis-a-vis the fed, and I would expand it beyond this, the basic things you need to think about. There are no rules and whatever it takes.

Bitcoin TINA:

So I’m very dubious of a defla­tionary outcome. I’m very dubious that it lasts that long, and if I had to bet, I would bet on many assets remaining stagnant. Maybe it’s like your bathtub where you are both letting the water drain out of the drain and water come in through your faucet. Net, much of that liquidity goes into Bitcoin. I think the ultimate outcome of this period that we see is a massive infla­tion of Bitcoin. I was joking when I said that, but I was actually serious. I think money flows into Bitcoin because it’s the best asset to own. And I don’t mean to always sound like this awful Permobil who thinks Bitcoin is going to go to three to $5 million by 2030. I know that sounds crazy to nearly everyone, but that’s what I think. Sorry.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Sorry, not sorry.

Cory Klipp­sten:

One thing I think is also inter­esting, I’m trying to sort through this a little bit is when you may have a little bit of a recency bias thinking that this crisis is similar to the last one which was really just a finan­cial crisis and this one is a global economic crisis in every way. Last time it was the subprime bubble and this time it’s the every­thing bubble. Also, the relative standing of the US versus the rest of the world has only strength­ened in the last 12 years as the Eurozone has shown its cracks and no other country is really doing all that well. So my broad take there is that probably what happens is some really crazy shit happens elsewhere in the world because of this crisis and then it comes back and this actually bites the US in the ass because of second and third order effects and just the inter­ac­tion of all kinds of different actors and occur­rences in a complex system.

Cory Klipp­sten:

But thinking that just using the same tools that we used last time and only thinking about the inputs and the outputs in the same way and using the same language in the same paradigm as we did in 2008, 2009, we’re just missing the entire fourth quadrant of all the unknown unknowns. Right? So again, I can only think of one hedge for stuff you can’t know about, and it’s actually owning an asset that no one can change your owner­ship of. That’s why I think it’s such a good time to be in conver­sa­tions like this. I’m-

Cory Klipp­sten:

In conver­sa­tions like this, and I’m almost done listening to a Peter Zeihan’s book, Disunited Nations. And then he’s been on the inter­view circuit giving updated talks sort of in a post COVID world, and kind of updating his thinking on the inter­play of different countries and nations around the world, and what this means essen­tially for pulling the future forward by at least a decade or so, and watching what probably would have taken one to two decades play out over the next two years. So I can’t recom­mend anyone highly enough to supple­ment some of your Bitcoin listening and your macro listening, listen to some geopol­i­tics as well. He’s somebody I’ve been reading and listening to for the last 12 years or so, and he’s pretty awesome.

Chris­tian Keroles:

I think he a good story­teller. I was very unimpressed on his under­standing of Bitcoin. He gave the standard answer of govern­ments won’t allow it.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, he doesn’t under­stand Bitcoin, but that’s not what I listened to him for. I don’t listen to Taleb for his views on Bitcoin either. You got to pick and choose, man.

Chris­tian Keroles:

As long as you’re careful.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, his books don’t talk about Bitcoin, just Pomp hit him with some Bitcoin questions at the end of his recent appear­ance, and he has no idea what he’s talking about, but neither does Erik Townsend. Erik Townsend wrote a book on Blockchain and thinks this going to be like central bank, digital curren­cies. He really doesn’t under­stand Bitcoin at all. And he’s my number one guy to listen to for macro stuff. So we know about Bitcoin. They can ask us.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Well hey, I have to bounce out, but I’ve never seen more people that are well positioned to learn about Bitcoin just being part of the conver­sa­tion in Bitcoin. And it’s slowly but surely, more and more of these guys, like the Erik Townsends, are going to start to have their eyes opened to Bitcoin. And like TINA said, once Bitcoin hits that 20K mark again, I think that that’s when every single macro investor and hedge fund manager has Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and has a thesis around it.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Awesome. Well, thanks CK. I can be the only CK. Let’s keep going for a couple more minutes.

Chris­tian Keroles:

Peace out, you all thanks for having me.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Later.

Bitcoin TINA:

Take care, CK.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, I think the big numbers are 20, 50, and 100. I think it’s the denom­i­na­tions that we’re used to, and those are the numbers that every­body kind of can do quick math on based on 20 million-ish Bitcoins, and 20 being the all time high. And yeah, each one of those, I think, will have blow off tops. It’ll pass 20 and it’ll go to 40 before coming down to 28 again, then it’ll go slowly up … well, slow in relative terms, up to 50, and then it’ll just blow through that, and then pull back. And I have no idea what happens when this thing goes over 100K. It’s going to be insane.

Bitcoin TINA:

How insane is it going to be when it’s over $ 288,000?

Cory Klipp­sten:

I don’t think any different than 287. Why, what’s 288?

Bitcoin TINA:

No, that’s PlanB’s number, but the point is how crazy is it at 300? I think we so under­es­ti­mate what it’s going to be like to be buying an asset which is price inelastic supply with a fixed amount. I think it’s so hard to under­stand what that really means, and I think the upside is going to be so surprising, and people who are so desperate to own it and will be buying it. And when we sell stocks that are crashing, we’re desper­ately reaching for cash. When we sell the things that we own to buy Bitcoin, we’re desper­ately selling those things to buy the new cash, the new money. I think it’s so hard for us to invert our thinking as to what this is going to be like. And I just think that the coming bull market is going to be so much harder than the last two and a half plus years, because the numbers are going to go on a relative basis.

Bitcoin TINA:

That doesn’t mean tomorrow. I’m talking about over the course of the next year, two years, three years, maybe four. So it’s not a tomorrow thing. So don’t assume that I mean that. I don’t mean that, but it will feel incred­ibly fast. And I asked this question earlier, let me ask you, Cory. If you’ve never been in Bitcoin, you’re a well-to-do guy, trader, used to trading in stocks. You’ve watched this thing go to $250,000, $300,000. It sells off. At what point in a sell-off do you say, “I have to buy some here,”? Let’s assume that 300 is the top. At what point do you say,” I need to buy some,”? Do you wait until it’s down 50%? Do you wait until it’s down 80%? Do you wait until it’s down 30%? When do you start to put your toe into buying that thing that you watched, that you thought was garbage, and you watched go to what seems like a crazy number to you?

Cory Klipp­sten:

So my answer to that is it has so much to do with how well Bitcoin, and Bitcoin commu­nity, and then just the general press actually educates accurately about Bitcoin, because what I don’t have a good gauge on, because I was not here for the last halving, or not really paying atten­tion, I really got drawn in by the price rise in early ’17, is whether you were sitting there in 2016, 2017 as a Bitcoiner who’d been around for three years, or six years, or whatever, and you thought that you had enough visibility by the outer world that you could see something like that. You wouldn’t ever see a really, really dark, deep bear trough again. And so that’s the argument that we’re making now is saying okay, is there enough liter­a­ture out there? Are there enough people speaking about this? Is Paul Tudor Jones, and Chamath, and a few other Peter Thiel types, is that enough? Or does it need to be 10 X that number of names that really under­stand Bitcoin, and care about it, and buy it, and tell their friends to for us to avoid an 80% drawdown?

Cory Klipp­sten:

But I don’t think there’s any chance that we’re not there after the following cycle. I think it’s maybe a coin flip. I don’t know, you got to handicap it somehow. Maybe we’re there this one or not, where yeah, you see $150,000 Bitcoin and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s just too cheap. Even if it goes down from here, I know it’s going back up, because it always does.” And yeah, you soften that cycle at a drawdown of 30%, or 50%, or something, instead of having to go 80, 85% down. I don’t know if it’ll be the cycle that … And essen­tially I think that is kind of the defin­i­tion of a super­cycle, where the pullback, just never really quite the tradi­tional full bear doesn’t actually happen, and you just go up again, but I’m pretty damn certain that will happen by the one following.

Brady:

How do you guys think that … Sorry, TINA, go ahead, and then I’ll ask a follow up.

Bitcoin TINA:

I maintain this is the first mainstream bull market. I maintain that pretty much nobody knew about Bitcoin last time. I started buying Bitcoin in 2017 as well, but I maintain that pretty much nobody knew about it. The world just got a slight inkling at the peak in 2017, but then dismissed it as being another Charles Mackay Extra­or­di­nary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds story, like the South Sea bubble, the Missis­sippi bubble, or tulip mania. And so I don’t think that last go round was a mainstream bull market. You have compa­nies like Fidelity. You have compa­nies like JPMorgan Chase doing business with these guys. My guess is that come 2022, 2023, you’re going to have a lot more players, big name, marquee name players involved in buying and selling Bitcoin. You’re going to have players coming in, figuring out how do they not let this thing pass them without getting involved. So my guess is that the downside softens pretty substan­tially. What that means, I’m not quite sure what that amounts to being.

Bitcoin TINA:

So here’s the next follow up question, that if you only go down 30 to 40%, when is the right time to sell your Bitcoin to try to make more of it? I’m talking as a US citizen, somebody who pays taxes. So as somebody who pays taxes. And so even if you pay 20% capital gains tax. So there are places out there that they don’t pay taxes, so that answer is different, but assuming you pay taxes, with a 30 to 40% drawdown, where’s the right place to sell in order to try to make more of it?

Cory Klipp­sten:

You just huddle, bro. No point.

Bitcoin TINA:

The answer is never. There’s no right place to sell, because you won’t get it right. And that’s the thing I wrestle with. And I think there’s a really good chance, and I don’t think we’re thinking that way. I think practi­cally, everyone thinks where can I sell so I can make more Bitcoin. And I think the risk to most Bitcoiners, the biggest risk to most Bitcoiners today is that thought process of where do I sell so I can make more Bitcoin. For many people, if they make that choice to sell, not to sell to pay for expenses, not to sell to say, “Okay, I need to sell some because I need to carry myself for a year, two year, three years of expenses,” depending on what you do, if you have an income, if you don’t have an income, but I mean to sell where you’re trying to trade to make more Bitcoin.

Bitcoin TINA:

And I think that’s a really serious risk for a lot of Bitcoiners. You may have been an early Bitcoiner. You may have what 10 years from now is really a lot of Bitcoin. You may have 10 Bitcoin, which would be a lot of Bitcoin in a world of $5 million Bitcoin. That’s worth $50 million in today’s buying power. That’s a lot of money. 10 Bitcoin doesn’t seem like a lot to people. I mean sure, if you have half a Bitcoin, 10 seems like a lot, but in the scheme of the world’s invest­ments, $90,000 isn’t a lot of money. It is, but it’s not. If you’re worth $5 million, $90,000 is not a lot of money. If you’re worth a $100 million, $90,000 is not a lot of money, but compare $90,000 buying power to $50 million of buying power. And that’s the world I think we’re going to, and I’m talking to people who are 25, and 30, and 35 years old. You’re only going to be 10 years older, maybe 12 years older. That’s a lot of money. You’re really rich with $50 million.

Bitcoin TINA:

And so I’m so afraid for so many Bitcoiners that they’re going to try to get more and they’re going to wind up having much less because they don’t value what they own. And I’m so worried about this. And I said to PlanB the other day, I said, “Actually I become more convinced of the idea of stock to flow with the fact that Bitcoin has traded the way it has traded. I thought we’re going to be at $50,000 Bitcoin, come the halving. And we weren’t, of course, but it’s fasci­nating the way this thing works. And I’m so excited to see what happens in the coming few years, because I really think PlanB has an amazing model. And we’re going to find out. If we can’t make it to 100,000, which I think is pretty unlikely, then I’m going to have to reeval­uate my views. I feel pretty confi­dent I’ll be right, but if I am right, you really need to value what you have. You’re sitting on top of …

Bitcoin TINA:

It’s like being in Texas, and you’ve got this massive reser­voir of oil under­neath you, and it’s worth a fortune, and you’re going to let somebody come in and buy it from you, and they’re going to pay you pennies on the dollar. Don’t sell it to them. You have to really under­stand what this is. It’s like buying on the Island of Manhattan in Midtown Manhattan in 1800. And it looks like farm land, but it’s going to become New York City. And it’s going to be worth more money than you could imagine in not that many years. And this is my biggest concern for Bitcoiners, they really have to be so cautious about not parting with that Bitcoin at too cheap a price. And I don’t think we get this. And I still think even the most diehard Hodler will be thinking where can I sell some?

Bitcoin TINA:

And just want to sell some, and for good reasons. I want to sell it for a house. I hear people say this all the time. “I want to sell it for a house. That’s worth a house.” That’s great. But what if you’re selling it for that house, which is a beautiful house. It’s a 2, 3, $400,000 house. But what if that house is really costing you … Instead of that beautiful 3, 4 or $500,000 house, what if that’s really a mansion on the ocean with 20 acres? That’s really a $40 million piece of land with a house on it, and you sold it for $400,000. And this is what I’m thinking. And I know, I’m very crazy in my views.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Hey, well, we wanted a bull on the show.

Bitcoin TINA:

You got one.

Cory Klipp­sten:

We got one. Awesome.

Brady:

One last question, and then we can wrap it up, as long as you’ve got a few more minutes, TINA.

Bitcoin TINA:

Yeah, no problem.

Brady:

Okay. So I’m curious what you guys think about Cash App has, I guess, published numbers $300 million of the Bitcoin bought in the first quarter, which came out to be something like about a quarter of all freshly mined Bitcoin, where obviously you expect that to be going up this quarter, and moving forward, and they have recur­ring buys now, services like Swan, and recur­ring buys, and that DCA mentality really spreading among Bitcoiners. How do you think the automated purchasing of Bitcoin, a accumu­la­tive regular buy of millions and millions of dollars every week, month by Bitcoiners will affect the stability of the price?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Do you want TINA to go first?

Bitcoin TINA:

I don’t know how it affects the stability of the price, because I think you’re going to see a lot … I think you’re going to see a lot of people with fairly large buying power come in. So like I said, the example, the guy was worth $5 million, which a guy who is 40 to 60 is worth $5 million who trade stocks for a living. So if they decide to put on what I call a what the fuck position, 1%, that’s $50,000. That’s a lot of buying versus 50 or 100 a week or a month. So I think there’ll be a fair number of those people. So I don’t know what it does for stability. What it will do is the more Bitcoin that’s held widely, and widely distrib­uted, the people who Hodl it tightly and hold onto that, and are not willing to part with that Bitcoin, it’s going to make Bitcoin’s price extremely unstable on the upside, and you’re going to see prices go to crazy, crazy, crazy numbers. I think it’s a fabulous base to have.

Brady:

Yeah, which increases that floor, so I think that gets to this idea that the downside, on the bear cycle, won’t be as bad moving forward. Maybe, like Cory said, we won’t even get into some kind of regular bear cycle as we think about it. Cory, what’s your thought?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. I mean I think it’s a cool number to think about, but the supply of Bitcoin that’s for sale on any given day is all the Bitcoin that’s on all the exchanges there that could be very quickly brought out for the right price. And I think probably the best way to look at that as what has moved. So these charts that you see of coins that haven’t moved in five years, two years, one year, six months, whatever. So it seems like there’s gener­ally three or four million Bitcoin for sale over the next few months. So it’s a cool target, and it’s fun to talk about, but I think there are a lot more inter­esting things, inter­esting forces and dynamics at play than not. I just look at it as how cool is it if you’re sucking up all of the supply. I just think that’s awesome.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And there have been periods where … Sometimes the markets actually do get very thinly traded, so I’ll argue the other side of it. There are times when there’s just so little appetite for Bitcoin, for whatever reason. And if there’s always somebody on the bid, because there’s all these automated auto-stacking platforms like Swan, and Cash App, and obviously Coinbase and Gemini have this as well, even though they overcharge by an arm and a leg, it could actually make a big differ­ence, and kind of smooth out and get rid of some of those cascading margin call type situa­tions and things that might happen when there’s low liquidity, and just a break in the news cycle or something like that. So maybe that does actually matter at some point over the next couple of years. Sorry, I argued both sides.

Brady:

Love it. I love it. All right, I think it’s time to wrap up. I will give you a chance to some brief closing words, TINA and Cory, if you want, before we close this thing up.

Bitcoin TINA:

Other than number go up, the most impor­tant words in Bitcoin are gradu­ally then suddenly.

Brady:

Cory.

Cory Klipp­sten:

All right. Yeah, that’s a pretty good one. Well, I’m just going to use the last couple of seconds here to shell a little bit for anybody still on. If you go to swanbitcoin.com/halving and sign up, we’ll top you off with $10 of free Bitcoin, and also donate five bucks to Bitcoin Optech for everyone who comes in through that link. And then we also just launched our global refer­rals program, so even though we only have US customers, we now have people from all over the world that have gone and signed up at swanbitcoin.com/earn, and are spreading the good word about Bitcoin and about Swan, and earning some stats. And those payouts are in Bitcoin, which is pretty cool as well. So that’s kind of the cool things we’ve got going on.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And yeah, it’s just been a stunningly fast ride here over the first six weeks. We launched March 30^th, and we’re not quite halfway through May. We’re now buying about three and a half million of Bitcoin annual­ized on an annual basis for our customers, so that’s a good number to hit, and just crossed 600 customers a couple of days ago, so that was a good number. I’m sure we’ll be charging toward 1,000 pretty quick. I think our five biggest signup days have all been in the last eight days or something like that. So business is picking up. People who like Bitcoin, check out Swan. Shell ended.

Brady:

Swanbitcoin.com.

Cory Klipp­sten:

We sponsor this podcast.

Brady:

We do. All right, thanks TINA. Thanks to Chris­tian for joining us. Of course, Chris­tian works at BTC Media, Bitcoin Magazine. He also has the POV Crypto Podcast that he co-hosts along with his ethereum friends, so if you want to hear Chris­tian defend Bitcoin against the ethereums, that’s a fun one to get into sometimes. BitcoinTINA is our favorite permabull, and you can find him on Twitter at BitcoinTINA. Thanks for your time, man. Thanks Cory. Swanbitcoin.com. Go start your auto-stacking.

Bitcoin TINA:

Guys, that was fun. We still on?

Cory Klipp­sten:

We’re here.

Brady:

We stopped the livestream.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Still says recording though.

Brady:

Yeah, we are recording, but we’re not live.

Brady:

Thanks to TINA and CK for joining us. You can follow BitcoinTINA at BitcoinTINA. And in case you’re wondering, TINA is an acronym. It stands for, There Is No Alter­na­tive, as in there’s no alter­na­tive to Bitcoin. And thanks to Chris­tian, as well, for joining us, of course. You can follow Chris­tian at ck_SNARKs on Twitter. Subscribe to the Swan Signal Podcast at swansignalpodcast.com. And on behalf of the Swan team, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this episode. You can join us live next time, as I noted on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch. Jump into our Swan Signal Telegram Chat Room. We have a lively crew there that chats throughout the week, but also during our live conver­sa­tions. You can be in the room and ask questions. It’s a lot of fun. You can find the chat on Telegram at t.me/swansignal.

Brady:

Swan Signal is a produc­tion of Swan Bitcoin at swanbitcoin.com. We are the best way to accumu­late Bitcoin. We have automatic recur­ring buys. You can also automat­i­cally withdraw to your wallet. We’re focused on stacking sets, not trading. We have no distrac­tions here at Swan Bitcoin, no Allcoins. We’re forever Bitcoin only. And we are committed to Bitcoin educa­tion with content like this podcast. Follow us on twitter at swanbit­coin and subscribe to the podcast. Again, that’s swansignalpodcast.com. That’s it for this week. Thanks so much for joining us.

Other Episodes

Episode 12–Adam Back and Preston Pysh

Episode 13–Alex Gladstein and Matt Odell

Episode 14–Tuur Demeester and Robert Breedlove

Episode 15–Isaiah Jackson and Max Keiser

Episode 16–Gigi and Udi Wertheimer

Episode 17–Jimmy Song and Aleks Svetski

Episode 18 — Stephan Livera and Marty Bent

Links

Swan Bitcoin

• Swan Bitcoin — the best place to buy and invest in Bitcoin
• Swan Bitcoin on Twitter
• Swan Signal on YouTube
• Swan Signal on Facebook
• Swan Signal on Twitch
• Swan Signal Podcast
• Swan Signal Telegram Chat Room

Bitcoin T.I.N.A

Bitcoin TINA on Twitter

Bitcoin TINA on Bitcoin Magazine Podcast (Parts 1 – 4)

Bitcoin TINA on Medium

Christian Keroles (AKA CK Snarks)

Bitcoin Magazine

CK Snarks on Twitter

CK Snarks’ Podcast POV Crypto