{ "episodeId": "SLP387", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "tuur_demeester": { "name": "Tuur Demeester", "role": "guest", "tag": "TUUR" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.61, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the easy way to buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin. Now, do you have any friends or family in your life who you really want to give the gift of Bitcoin? Swan Bitcoin makes it easy to do this, so you can give a gift of Bitcoin, your friend or family member will receive it. An email and they will get your custom message inside the email and they can then claim that gift. They can create their account and convert the USD value into Bitcoin. Now, you're not just giving the gift of Bitcoin, you're also giving the gift of Swan's world-class education and customer service. 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Don't stumble on your own infrastructure, go and get started at voltage dot cloud. Lend at HodlHodl is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform, so you can use this platform to go into an overcollateralized loan where you put up some Bitcoin and you borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin. This is done in a peer-to-peer way where people go and put up their offers or accept the offers that another person has put up, and so you can select the terms, the interest rate, and how much you're looking to borrow, and you can find a counterparty. And with this setup, you aren't rehypothecating, it's all overcollateral LendHodlHodl are the operators of Baltic Honeybadger, which is one of the big Bitcoin conferences in Europe. This will be in Latvia in early September, so go and check that out. The website is BalticHoneybadger dot com, and you can also check out the platform LendHodlHodl dot com. So for today's episode, my friend Tuur Demeester rejoins me on the show. For those of you who don't know him, he's a long-time author, analyst in the space, and he is a former fund manager also." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:42", "start": 161.86, "text": "Trying to make money in Bitcoin terms, as well as this question of the Panic of 1907 and some of the parallels with Bitcoin today. We also chat a little bit about full reserve banking models as contrasted with fractional reserve banking and whether this Bitcoin bear market will last long. Tuur, welcome back to the show." }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "03:00", "start": 180.17, "text": "Hey Stephan, how's it going?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:02", "start": 182.48, "text": "Going well. It's, been, a wild week or two in Bitcoin land and, you know, there's just so much going on, so, I wanted to chat with you as well. you know, you've been, tweeting some stuff out and sharing some insights as well. But, let's first get your view on where things are. You know, actually, this might be an interesting question. Would you say in the last few weeks is when we realized we are actually in a bear market?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "03:28", "start": 208.1, "text": "Yeah, I mean, honestly, I, I, I was surprised, and I think many other people were too. And, I think I might have been a bit blind to the amount of leverage that, built up in the system. It's just like, I don't know, like I just, I don't like counterparties that, that do risky stuff and that are hard to, you know, figure out and, and I mean, I think it's just also in general, you know, you stick with what you know, and if you've been in the space for So there's like, even today, I was just like reading about, I, I forget the name now, Voyager, it's like apparently some large exchange I'd never heard of. So it turns out these guys have been, doing fractional reserve banking and are probably getting in trouble now. So yeah, I mean, it was, a surprise to me. Like, I knew things were bad, but man, things were worse than I thought. And like after I kind of, you know, recovered from like a slight heart attack, like, what's going on here? It's like creative destruction at work, and, it's, it's, I think it's a kind of a, you know, it's, it's gonna be painful for a lot of people, but I think it's a needed cleansing before we can actually go off the races. And, and the beautiful thing about the Bitcoin ecosystem is that we can actually delever, like there are no too big to fail, like just, you know, we had Mt. Gox, which at the time custodied or was supposedly custodying, seven percent of all Bitcoin in circulation So, you know, Bitcoin survived just fine, so there is almost-- there's no magnitude of, of, of like a Wall Street type crisis that Bitcoin couldn't survive. And, and so in, in doing that now, I think we're setting ourselves up for this decoupling, that Bitcoin is gonna decouple from traditional markets and, and just skyrocket out of this dust cloud, 'cause other markets are in trouble too. Like, if you're in Bitcoin, it's like easy to think like, \"Oh, you know, it's just us,\" but like, there's on the horizon for, traditional markets. So, so that's my thesis, you know, this is a panic and, this is healthy and, this is setting us up for some incredible rallies the next few years." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:41", "start": 340.88, "text": "And to your point around correlation and de-correlation or decoupling, as you said, this was a common argument for years and years is Bitcoin isn't correlated with other things. And in recent years, maybe the last one or two years, that correlation was stronger with traditional markets, say the stock market So then, am I right to read you as saying that correlate, that de-correlation will come back?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "06:04", "start": 363.74, "text": "Yeah. Every time, you know, it's like every time a lot of people say like, \"Oh, Bitcoin is so correlated, this and that,\" it's like, I mean, okay, well then just express stock markets in Bitcoin and look at what you see. And of course, you can see, you know, it, it does tend to go like there's this, this sideways triangle pattern that you see. So it does tend to go in a range, trade in a range And Bitcoin has that rally that, you know, sets your hair on fire, and that's where everybody else is left behind, you know, and that, that just has happened over and over. And it makes sense, 'cause Bitcoin is, you know, superior money and, and it's being adopted, and we're in a, we're in a monetary crisis globally, so, it just makes a lot of sense that, that, and, and the only thing is that Traders tend to just look at the short term, and so in a way, they create that tension, and then it coils up and eventually it explodes higher. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:59", "start": 419.28, "text": "with the broader markets, it's probably also fair to say that there's not a lot that people are happy sitting in right now, because even someone who is doing the sixty forty stocks and bonds, they're not really that happy right now. A lot of other- Assets and other kinds of markets that people are investing into aren't just not doing that well, wouldn't you say?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "07:21", "start": 440.58, "text": "Yeah, I saw, I saw a graph, a few days ago, looking at the performance of the sixty forty portfolio and, i-it's, it's been worse than I think any time since two thousand eight. I think it was like minus fifteen percent. So I, I don't know if your listeners are, are all familiar with sixty forty, the idea is like sixty percent in, in stocks and then forty percent in bonds, and the idea is that when stocks go down, people are gonna hide in safe haven assets like cash and bonds, and so then the bonds are gonna go up and compensate for your loss. But so bonds are going down, so that's a weird thing, and like people are starting to have to look into, I, I saw this real estate guy, like a cons- real estate construction specialist, and he was like, trying to like look back in historical data, like, \"Oh, what happens when inflation goes up? What happens to housing?\" And like, he had this data set that started in nineteen ninety. It's just like, no, you gotta look further back, like, inflation, look at the seventies, like, look at the forties, like, you gotta like do your homework. You can't just-- This isn't like business as usual. So anyway, Stagflation, like we're gonna, like we're gonna like take it off the shelf and dust it off and like, w-what is that? Oh, it's like stagnation plus inflation, you know? So, so 'cause, the past thirty years Inflation has always been correlated with, you know, growth in the stock market, a-and the reason is that the Fed and everybody else has been stimulating consumption, and that stimulates stocks, but now, people are starting to tighten the belt, they're stop- they're slowing down their spending, and at the same, because of inflation, so that's when you get that stagflation beast on stage, you know, and, and, everybody needs to update their, their models." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:13", "start": 553.09, "text": "Right. And as you were saying, with updating models A lot of people were working in this paradigm where stocks and bonds, one would zig, the other would zag, but it seems what we're seeing now is because yields, bond yields are rising, then bond prices are going the other way, and so that is unfortunate if you are holding bonds. And so that is going to force a lot of people to really stop and stop and think. And so Of course, it'll take time for people to recognize what's a better thing, but in your eyes, how do you see people coming around to-- Do you see, you know, we, like, we don't think they're immediately just gonna come around to Bitcoin, it's obviously gonna take some time. How do you see that process happening for, let's say, the traditional investors?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "09:58", "start": 597.71, "text": "Yeah, there's a lot of bargaining happening, like people being like, \"Oh, but what if I just, you know, go to defensive stocks or, like, you know, look at the 1970s and, you know, dividend stocks did, did well then and energy stocks and like Warren Buffett is now, I don't know how much he's plowing into oil stocks, but it's, it's a lot. And I, I don't think those are bad ideas necessarily, definitely better ideas than, you know, real estate or bonds, like. But like the, the Potential investments, like that is just narrowing. We're starting to get like tunnel vision, in, in a kind of a necessary tunnel vision, 'cause, you know, this is a, this is a systemic, crisis that we're in. And, and more and more candidates are falling off the wayside. And so for example, even like, you know, land, like people think like, \"Oh, but land surely must be a good inflation hedge,\" and the, the data doesn't-- I don't think supports that. You know, maybe very mild inflation is fine. And of course, you know, at least if you have land, you're gonna be left with something and not nothing. So you're better off, with some farmland than with some Celsius tokens, you know, or Luna tokens or whatever. Like, yeah but is it gonna keep up with inflation? I don't think so. I don't think the next five or ten years are gonna, are gonna help you with that. Is it gonna be better than like some, some real estate development in the middle of nowhere that was hyped up? Like, yeah, of course, you know, like, th-th-there are, like, there's nuance in all this. but yeah, I think Bitcoin is-- I think what, what needs to happen and hasn't happened yet, is that Bitcoin needs to be considered to be its Separate from all these, you know, shit coins, NFTs, all these protocols that are either centralized or don't have anything new to offer, I think that has been hindering adoption of Bitcoin, and now we have what three, what was three trillion dollars in like the whole crypto cap, now it's back to like one trillion, and, and Bitcoin is, is winning, right? It's like, it's like the meteor fell and, all these dinosaurs are really struggling and like Bitcoin has been The hardy, the hardy rat that survives, and then that can grow into a new, a new era. So I think, I think this is what's happening now, and like as Bitcoiners, like not that we have any responsibility, but I think that probably now is an important time to like let our message be heard, because people, I think, are more listening now. Like, it's like, oh, like, you can't just buy an index of crypto and say, oh, I'm diversified, like, if there's nine scams in there, it's not Spending time, I mean, I feel like there's more signal now than before, and also you can actually talk about scams. Like, I, I feel like, you know, some of the, some of the Ethereum Maxis are, are a little bit less vocal than they were a couple months ago, and so it's, it just feels safer to come out and, and say things." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:57", "start": 776.82, "text": "Sure. And do you have any predictions in terms of what happens with Ethereum, you know, relative to Bitcoin, right? Just, I guess, just for context. So Ethereum's all-time high in Around point one five BTC around twenty seventeen, and I believe their recent high in this cycle was something around point o eight or so BTC. so I'm curious if you have any thoughts on Ethereum, in Bitcoin terms, do you think that they're gonna try to change the narrative, to try to pump it again or- Are they gonna try to say, \"Oh, proof of stake is here, look how good it is,\" or you've seen this narrative as well around so-called ultrasound money? Do you have any, thoughts to add on those?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "13:39", "start": 819.44, "text": "Yeah, let me just pull up a, a chart here just to jog my own memory. yeah, it's like I thought. So you're right, I mean, the, the, the recent high was point zero eight seven, almost like point zero eight nine almost in, in Ethereum. That was like, late twenty twenty-one. That was their And, and so it's dwindled down, and now we're like flirting with, some support at zero point zero five, and I think zero point zero five fits with a long term uptrend, and so they better defend that, and I think the traders probably know it, that that's an important level. I think if they lose it, like, I mean, the next level down is point zero thirty-six, but even that isn't very, isn't very strong support. I think it could be game over. Like, I think weirdly sometimes people hide the truth Satoshi, Stephan Livera, Tuur Demeester, Tuur, Demeester, Does, Panic, Relate, and so when Vitalik wrote his article Endgame, I think, you know, that'll be the beginning of the end in hindsight. Looking back, you know, I don't think they have another ace up their sleeve. You know, they've played so many So many hype narratives over the past six years, I, I don't think the public is gonna believe it the next time around, especially like what are they doing now? Like second layer Ethereum, like just do it on Bitcoin already. Like, you know, if you're gonna go second layer, which they've always were against, they were like, no, no, no, we're about on-chain scaling. If you're gonna build a second layer, you're admitting defeat. So let's just do, and also, all this crazy front running of these smart contracts, like, I mean, Millions of dollars that you can just see that is transparent for the whole world to see, like so, so it's just inviting just very bad practices. And it reminds me of, you know, the-- I think we've talked about this before, but like the domain name market, where, objectively, if you study those markets, there is much more fraud happening on non dot com domain names like dot science or dot ru or dot eu, comparatively to dot com, and of course in- In that area, it's for sure that it doesn't have anything to do with technology, it's just purely the price mechanism. Like, you know, you have to pay more for a dot com name, and so you're gonna wanna invest more long term resources and likely have a more honest approach than if you can just, rotate and come up with a new name over and over 'cause these names are super cheap. Like pizza dot eu or whatever, like insurance dot eu, that name is probably way cheaper than, insurance dot com. So anyway, I just see this- The same thing in the, in the world of shit coins, where it's so easy to just rotate and, and I mean, Dan Larimer is the king of that, like you just launch a new coin whenever you have a new idea and, and hope that people forget about your previous ventures. So anyway, I, I just think that it's, it's showing, you know, that, that Bitcoin is a more robust platform in, in many ways, and now slowly smart contracts are, are gonna also start shining on Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:38", "start": 998.14, "text": "And so earlier we were talking about the leverage that had been built In the system, and perhaps even people inside this, quote unquote, industry weren't quite aware of the level of leverage. So maybe you could just expand a little bit on that and perhaps what we've seen over the last month or so with the everything that's blowing up." }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "16:59", "start": 1018.71, "text": "Yeah. So there were these funds, and that's also, you know, these hedge funds. So they are like proprietary, like the ide-- like a hedge fund basically is when you manage money for friends, like that's the idea, and so you have less accountability, you need to be less transparent And because you only take money from high net worth people, because you don't like actively market your fund, that, that's the original idea of a hedge fund. And so you have all this, all this stuff happening, and there's no way to audit what's go- And by the way, I don't think this model is bad. Like I ran a small hedge fund, like I don't think this model is bad, but it just kind of explains how it's hard to know how much, what is going on in the market, until it unravels. Like it's That's when you see who's been swimming naked. Yeah. And so, so we had, this, these algorithmic stablecoins collapsing, which was predictable, and then they were, invested in by Three Arrows Capital, and then they started to collapse, and then, there were these Shops that were offering people yield on their Bitcoin, which we can talk about, 'cause I tried to do that with my fund, it's very, very hard to do, and, like BlockFi, Celsius, you know, and, and so they are starting to really get in trouble because they were writing out unsecured loans to these hedge funds that were pretending like, \"Oh, we're gonna make you such and such returns.\" So it's all kind of-- there's a lot of contagion, a-and the buck stops with proper due diligence, like parties that are conservative, that do Diligence aren't, you know, it's not like, it's not like an actual virus, like, you know, you can actually just have some sound policies and avoid contagion. That probably explains why some platforms are blowing up that you and I have never heard of, like, what? So I think one of the parties that is, that is, also hurt, are also hurting, that is a little bit less talked about, is the Bitcoin miners. I don't know how reliable this is, but I, I sent you, yeah, it was Nick Carter who" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:02", "start": 1141.83, "text": "Yeah, so this is basically Bitcoin supply held by a refined, in stars, set of one hop miners. So maybe if you could just explain that, metric for people." }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "19:13", "start": 1152.76, "text": "Well, to be honest, I don't know exactly what a refined set of one hop miners means. I, I assume it means that, that they mine the coins and then the, the coins aren't moved more than one step, like just to their own cold storage. 'Cause otherwise, if they mine it and send it to an exchange, which would be two hops, well, then you don't know. gonna be sold, is it held in cold storage? But at least the miners that have their own proper, cold storage system set up, then, so it's, this is kind of like miners that maybe do it right, that have their own cold storage, or at least the ones that we are sure that haven't sold. So there was about seventy-five thousand Bitcoin held in that supply in the late summer, like only two months ago, there was like seventy-five thousand Bitcoin held by miners, and that has now declined to about fifty-five thousand Bitcoin, and, and, and it's- It seems like we're seeing every day like news of miners selling more bitcoins, and I agree with Nick that, before we can actually say Bitcoin is ready for another rally, we need to see this deleveraging continue, because what miners do, and I know this 'cause I invested in a, a mining company back in, back in the day, twenty thirteen, fourteen, what you, what you do is you, you develop, mining machines, or in this case, often you just buy them. You have a bunch of mining machines. you put 'em in a warehouse, and then you have a contract with both the warehouse and an electricity provider. And so these contracts need to be paid, like so it's, a-a-and either you have a whole bunch of dollars and you use that, or you just immediately sell the Bitcoin that you mine, or if you're really bullish on the market, you pay all that stuff with borrowed money and you keep all the Bitcoin, and then you're like, \"Oh, this is perfect, you know, as long as the market goes up, it's perfect.\" But once the market goes down Not only the newly bitcoins that you mine are worth less, so you might actually be mining at a loss on a day-to-day basis, but also the stash that you saved is worth less and less. And so in order to de-risk, in order to avoid going bankrupt, I, I believe we will see bankruptcies in the mining space, but in order to avoid that, you just gotta sell Bitcoin, and there's just no choice, like you just have to do it. So I think, I think miners are definitely, you, you know, they are like, they boost the price on the way up" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "21:32", "start": 1292.13, "text": "Push the price further down on the way down because they're, like in this case, they're forced to sell. I think it's just a sign that we're not in a very mature market yet because what miners should do is they should hedge with derivatives to prevent this kind of scenario from happening, like they should, they should have better hedges. But, you know, it's a young space, so it's inevitable that something like this happens." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:53", "start": 1313.09, "text": "Yeah, so there's lots there. I think one term that's been thrown around is, this idea of pro-cyclical, and I guess pro cyclical because they're hodling and, you know, in the bull market, everything looks good and they're just borrowing against their coins. And even in, in recent years, we've seen miners do this whole idea of borrowing against their coins, and that became a lot more prominent in, let's say, this recent cycle. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "22:18", "start": 1337.88, "text": "high demand, low supply. Yeah, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:20", "start": 1340.32, "text": "And so, and, and it's not just that, that they would get loans against not just Bitcoin, but loans against their ASIC miners. but then the dynamic can become even more difficult \"Quote unquote crypto bank that gives them that loan is now stuck on the other side with these m- ASIC mining machines that have also come down in price. We've seen a bear market in ASIC mining rigs, over the, you know, recent few months. So it's kind of, all of these factors are kind of coming together at the worst possible time. And of course, you know, there's always been cycles in Bitcoin, and this is part of it. And as you were saying, and I think that I've heard people use this term colloquially, this Because they, they were, let's say, too levered or not conservative enough in whatever other way, you know, a-and I think it's an interesting dynamic as well because it's highly competitive. So you might see a lot of, or, let's say, big public miners or even not public miners go and do all this stuff, and then other miners look at other miners and say, \"Hey, well, I'm competing with them to, say, buy ASIC rigs, or I'm competing with them to get rack space or set up a mining area facility.\" And so you can sort of understand Understand where maybe the competitive, aspect, and maybe when everything's in a bull market, everything, everything just looks like it's a good idea, but actually when, when the bear market comes, that's when things turn. Yeah, and" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "23:42", "start": 1422.26, "text": "also the value of these machines, like you would think like, oh, a Bitcoin mining company, like they have this big space, and it's like, well, the warehouse they probably rent, so that's not theirs. And then the machines, then they have people, but the people are skilled at mining, like that doesn't mean that that And then you have the machines that they can be bricked, like if the price goes low enough, the Bitcoin, they can always produce Bitcoin of course, but it could be that they actually operate at a loss, depending on the electricity cost. So in a bear market, nobody's gonna wanna buy your machines, at least not for any decent price, like they'll give you pennies on the dollar. Yeah, it's just something that the mining space is gonna have to figure out, like in order to survive cycles, 'cause they're gonna keep coming, there needs to be some idea of Like how to, how to hedge or how to diversify in a way that you stay robust, that you can stay, operating, keep operating in, in a bear environment. Even this short crisis, I think, is really making them sweat. We can talk about it more, but I think this isn't gonna be like a protracted bear market." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:49", "start": 1488.82, "text": "interesting. So, yeah, so as, as you were saying, miners might be, or some miners might be in a position where they have to puke not only their coins, but also their machines. Like, so" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "25:01", "start": 1500.97, "text": "In a way, they can pass on the buck, right? 'Cause if they pledge them as collateral, then it's, then the problem is these guys like the lender now. The lender is the one who then the lender is, 'cause then you can say, like, \"All right, you can pick up my collateral,\" and then they just come collect a bunch of bricks, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:17", "start": 1517.02, "text": "Right. And so the other aspect of it is maybe there's, there was this bull dynamic causing extreme risk and leverage in the system, right? So people putting, offering interest rate and yield because For yield in the normal financial system, they're getting under one percent or paying negative rates in Europe on their normal bank savings account, so they're running into these so-called crypto markets, seeing, \"Oh, look at all the yield that I can get if I just put my, money with this provider.\" And so I wonder as well, are there questions to be raised there around the business model? Is it that the business model is sound, but people just went crazy with it? or do you think that maybe there's some fundamental problem with, you know, yield, being offered?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "26:04", "start": 1563.79, "text": "Yeah, it's really interesting how people bring their own biases to the Bitcoin space. what was the other example I was thinking of? So you saw it in yield. Oh, yeah. So in, and when I first got in-involved in Bitcoin, pretty quickly, there was this mining craze in like twenty thirteen, like the price was going up, but- So many people were just like, \"Oh, I'm gonna order mining rigs,\" and it's, you know, and I think that came because they're not used to a hard asset, they're not used to actual scarcity, like they, they're just been conditioned to believe that in order to make money, your money has to work, like Warren Buffett always says, like it has, you know, your money have to work for you, or like Kevin O'Leary used to be like, \"Oh, my money is like little soldiers, and I, I send them out to war," }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "26:52", "start": 1611.52, "text": "It was like how people got kind of hoodwinked into investing dollars, into mining rigs that never arrived or that didn't, didn't do it for them versus just buying scarce bitcoins. And so I think similarly, the new, the new generation of, of bitcoiners, a lot of them were conditioned that you gotta make your money work for you and you need to like find a yield somehow, kind of not sitting down and being like, \"Hey, but like if my money is actually scarce, I don't need interest to compen- compensate for the dilution every year. I don't need that, I can just kind of focus on keeping it safe. So I think it's a little bit easy to say like, \"Oh, people are just greedy,\" it's just like, \"Uh, I don't know.\" You know, there's, there's a variety of factors at play. I'm trying to remember your question." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:35", "start": 1655.34, "text": "Right. well, I was talking about the business models of the yield, like it could be that maybe if, if you're offering, if you're a business offering some yield, that maybe But maybe people went overboard with the risk and the leverage, yeah. and that maybe if you were much more tamped down about exactly what scenarios you would loan for, as opposed to what we were seeing in, you know, and what we're seeing blow up now, I, I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on that idea? Like, is the business model inherently bad or is it just that the market just went crazy with risk and leverage?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "28:13", "start": 1692.96, "text": "Yeah, I think the, there is something to be said, and I think there will be an entire industry built around lending Bitcoin for a fixed amount of time and then getting it back with interest, like that's a traditional loan. a deposit contract you ought to pay for, which sounds weird, but like if you park your car in a parking garage, you pay. If there's a parking garage that says, \"Hey, we're gonna pay you to park your car with us,\" that's weird, right? It might mean that on the other- other side of the parking garage, there's a sign, \"Cars for Rent,\" and they're gonna like rent out your car while you're just on vacation, like, you know, and then it comes back damaged and whatnot. So, so those are two very different industries traditionally, and only the past hundred years with the, with, central banks being able to bailout banks, have those models been fused into what we now know as banking, where you, you know, they're both a lending intermediary and they're a deposit, depository in- Institute or whatever you call it, a custodian. and those models are antithetical, like you, you cannot blend them without blowing up. But, unfortunately, people aren't educated, so they just think that this is how banking works. but so in terms of being a, a lending intermediary, or you could do a hedge fund, right, where you, you accept an investment and then there is only certain conditions where, liquidity becomes available, like that's how, that's how you do it. It's like, you know, you, you are locked Plus you have to wait sixty or ninety days, and then, you know, even then we can pay you just to, just so that, to compensate for the fact that you're investing in longer term assets, longer term, contracts. So, so then when you get to the nitty-gritty, like how do you actually make a yield? Well, the, the, the most straightforward thing is that you're gonna lend it out, like you're, you know, you're receiving the Bitcoin that people wanna invest, and then you're gonna lend it out to other parties. And so How wrong that can go. Like if you lend to Bitcoin miners, for example, that can go really wrong. if you lend to other hedge funds, that can go wrong, it can go to zero. If you lend to a shit coin, that can go wrong. If you invest it, it can go either way. Like if you buy another token, it can go up or down. What I did with my, little hedge fund back in twenty nineteen was we used the Bitcoin that was deposited in our- Our fund as collateral, and then we borrowed some dollars against that, and then we bought some more Bitcoin with that. So we would like slightly lever up, and the idea would be that if we were right, that Bitcoin was undervalued, and the price would go up, then you have a dollar profit, you sell those Bitcoin at some point, and you pay back the loan and whatever's left, that's your pure alpha, that's your alpha on top of Bitcoin. But that was, to me at least, that was so stressful and scary, even with the conservative Leverage that, we had and, you know, with the metrics in place and, and all that, and being right with timing, you know, I was, I was right, you know, like to launch the fund at, ten thousand dollar Bitcoin, was the right time in twenty nineteen. But even so, like I, I lost so much sleep over it just worrying, like, what if a s-- black swan event happens and the market goes against us in a matter of a week or two weeks? And so I ended up, for that reason, you know not fit to deal with that kind of stress. I, wound down the fund. We had, in the end, even though markets were really volatile, 'cause they went-- I don't know if you remember, but like twenty nineteen, like price went to five thousand, to fifteen thousand, like it was bouncing all over the place. So we ended up with like a four percent loss in Bitcoin, and I felt terrible. I thought I had, this is like, \"This is terrible. I really need a time to kind of like, alright, you know, what, what Where you're down, you're kind of like not doing your job, strictly speaking, 'cause you're meant to be better than the market. So then you can choose to either double down and try to make up for it, or you whine it down, and so that's what I did. And, and it was, it was a hard decision to, to, to do that. but so, you know, seeing Murat's fund, I forget the name of it, like they collapsed in twenty-- early twenty twenty, I think. what was the name again? I think Seeing three arrows and the other funds, seeing them go to zero, I, I feel a lot better about like having lost four percent, and trying that strategy. But so yeah, just from experience, it's very, very hard to make a yield in Bitcoin. I think there is something to be said if you lend to a market maker, like that is pretty safe. Like if you lend to like a square, right? Like they, they just need-- they're like a vending machine, so they need inventory to sell the Bitcoin and they immediately buy more once they-- but they need a bit of Inventory, or like even a, a gambling website, like back in the day, like Satoshi Dice or, you know, the house needs money, and then you, you, you kind of just pay it out, but statistically you know that you're fine. or any Bitcoin exchange, like they, they also similarly need a pot of money to kind of, pay out fees and deal with that. And, oh, sorry, and also lend to people that lever, right? So that, that's a s- a kind of a safe way to do it, especially if you only" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "33:43", "start": 2022.66, "text": "If you lend to people that lever up, you can pretty much always liquidate them if you have, you know, safe margins and if you have your system set up. So, but the problem is that it's, it's so lucrative and reliable that most of these operators have their own Bitcoin to do that with. So, anyway, so it's just like, I wish I had better news, but, you know, if you're looking to make more than one or two percent per year, it's gonna be really hard, unless you're gonna do active trading and have some kind of leverage strategy that can blow up. Yeah. So it's, it's, Bitcoin is hard money and, yeah, it, it encourages saving and not so much, yield generation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:24", "start": 2064.5, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Taking control of your Bitcoin keys is a key step in improving your security, but also a big responsibility. This is where Unchained Capital can help. Unchained offers concierge onboarding. This is a personalized service to help guide you from Bitcoin security beginner to a pro. 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Now back to the show Right, and I think that's a good point, and the way I'm interpreting you there then is it's saying essentially that it's not that the overall business model is totally flawed, it's just that the actual return and the sustainable yield that's possible without taking like very, very high levels of risk is a lot lower than what people were perhaps being promised, and certainly not the lunar UST anchor protocol with twenty percent return, obviously not sustainable. And so I think, m- perhaps what- What's happened is this competitive desire in the market and, you know, people are having to offer more and more and more to attract in the retail money to put their deposits in, and then unfortunately there was a lot of risk being hidden in there that people weren't really thinking that through, unfortunately for them. And so" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "37:41", "start": 2261.26, "text": "I think it also- Sorry, I, I would add the, the what is, what is flawed is fractional reserve banking as a model because you cannot promise perpetual availability of your coins and a yield. Yield, because by definition to create the yield, you have to let the Bitcoin leave your own facility and lend them out or whatever. So there's gonna-- it's called maturity mismatch, like there's gonna be a mismatch, and so that means that when there is a bank run, you're gonna, you know, lo- look at the movie A Beautiful Life, you know, that, that's a bank run, people can't access their money, that's what we're seeing now in Voyager, they're like reducing the amount of money that you can withdraw. To me Or you're just a pure custodian, you're boring, and you charge money for custody, like that's what I think is what it should be. Of course, yeah. So this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:33", "start": 2312.75, "text": "this also very deeply gets to that question of should the industry tolerate rehypothecation? Should the industry tolerate fractional reserve banking? And obviously, I think you and I are probably aligned on this idea that, no, we should just be operating in a full reserve banking world. And of course, there's a big debate about this, right? In the Austrian world, people like Bob Murphy will debate people- People like George Selgin on this exact question, right, on the question of does fractional reserve banking cause financial instability? And so this also brings us to that question around arguably what one of the, one of the guiding motivations behind Bitcoin, Satoshi put this message about Chancellor is on the brink of, bailout, right? Sec- Chancellor on the brink of second bailout. And so I think that also brings to mind this whole question about who is the one to do bailouts? And this, I think, perhaps is what- causes people historically to cry out for some kind of entity that's going to do the bailouts, right? Namely, the Federal Reserve or, you know, the government intervention. And I think this is probably a good spot as well. You had a thread on, Panic of nineteen o seven. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about what happened here?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "39:41", "start": 2380.8, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I mean, i- like if you read the Wikipedia page, it's a little bit confusing, like what actually went on here, 'cause that's, i-it's so tempting to just be like, \" A, there was a, a bank, the, Knickerbocker Bank, one of the largest banks at the time, and they invested kind of in the Three Arrows Capital of nineteen o seven. Like, they invested in, in a, a fund that was like, \"Hey, we're spotting this opportunity and you're gonna make, you know, this return on your money.\" And the strategy of that fund was they were gonna, squeeze the shorters. Like, there was a bunch of people short this copper company, and so they were gonna be Like let's just go in and buy lots of those shares and we'll squeeze out the shorts and make like a, a really hefty profit. And it went wrong. And so the thing went wrong, that whole scheme imploded, the whole fund imploded, and as a consequence, the Knickerbocker Bank, Knickerbocker Bank, which apparently was too overlevered, they went under. And then there was contagion, similar to today. So I think the, the, you know, the point that matters isn't the exact details of like what was the spark, but it's It happened because there hadn't been a forest fire for a long time, but also because, growth had been incredible in the US, which I think we can, I think that's where there's a valid analogy with the Bitcoin space. We've had so much growth, people are starting to assume that we're gonna keep growing the next month, the next six months, and that's where the leverage comes in, that's when people get greedy and they do, they're less diligent with their, with their research and, and as, so I think that's, that's what happened point about how the economy of the US had been growing up to the point of kind of, arrogance, you could say. in the forty years from eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty, this is like the golden age of the, the gold standard. You know, the forty years from eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty, the popu-- oh, sorry, but I'm just noticing it's nineteen thirty. But so to give an idea, like it's that period of very high growth, the population of the country doubled, the value of farm property increased three and a half times, pig iron production increased four times, exports quintupled, coal production quintupled, freight traffic, which is train traffic, five and a half times. So, you know, it's like enormous explosion in activity and, and productivity. So yeah, so the bank blew up and, there was contagion in the system. And so people like, the Rockefellers and, J.P. Morgan, they stepped in, like they had a lot of cash, they were basically prudent financiers, like they weren't Not all in, like they had reserves, kind of like Warren Buffett today, like a bunch of reserves, and you could-- that, that was more justifiable at the time because you had hard money, so you could have your reserves in gold, and that would gradually go up, like there was a slight deflation every year. And so, yeah, so, so they started rescuing these companies, but of course, nothing is for free, so they would kind of do it in exchange for equities, like, \"You're in distress, alright, I can, I can buy a bunch Haircut, I'm gonna buy it at thirty, thirty cents on the dollar or whatever, and then you're gonna live another day, and your customers live another day. And so that's how the contagion was stopped. But, the public at large was like resentful against these, what they saw as profiteers, like people that profited off the crisis. And so they apparently thought it was a better idea for the government to be like the final backstop, and that's how the Federal Reserve was founded. If you look at the original Federal Reserve Act, nineteen thirteen, the literal first paragraph is talking about the Panic of nineteen o seven and what happened, and that we need to prevent this from happening again. So what the government is gonna do is have this vast-- they, they presented it as like a dam, like we're gonna dam up the river and create a vast reserve of funds so that when there's another crisis, we can be the JPMorgan, and we're gonna do it out of the kindness of our heart, and, you know, we're gonna save these institutions. But of course, what people didn't realize is that that- Opened the door, for the dollar itself to be gradually undermined and, and poisoned and become just a paper certificate. So, so in the end, the cure was way worse than, than, than, because the, the nineteen o seven crisis only lasted eighteen months. Like the stock market almost entirely recovered in eighteen months. So there was not like mass unemployment, it wasn't like a great depression at all. And that is the nature of crises in a healthy economy. It's like a healthy person- And you get sick and you heal in a matter of months instead of becoming ill for ten years 'cause there's something constitutionally wrong with you. So I think that's an important lesson is that, you know, if you look at the duration of crises in the fiat era, they're way longer than in the hard money era. And so, this is just a, an important, I think, time to reflect on these things and not to think, \"We're doing something fundamentally wrong. We need new rules. We need new institu- Institutions, we need a Federal Reserve of Bitcoin. Like, no, this is just normal, this is just normal, and, and Bitcoin has had many of these little crises, and we'll have many little crises in the future. We don't need to really change anything. If anything, we just need to educate ourselves better and other people better, and that's it. Build better technology maybe." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:14", "start": 2714.2, "text": "Right. And so we can certainly see there's an inkling of what's going on, that maybe there's some similarities. People have been commenting publicly saying Sandberg, S-B-S-B-F of, FTX is, they're sort of making this analogy that he's like the crypto JP Morgan, that he and FTX have offered a loan for BlockFi and, hundred and" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "45:38", "start": 2737.55, "text": "fifty million dollars. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:39", "start": 2738.95, "text": "Yeah. And so in a similar sense, there's this argument going there, and then is there going to be a parallel in the future that, let's say, the government may use this crisis or other actors may use that crisis to say, \"Oh, look, see, these crypto kids, they can't, Manage their own thing, so look, me, the responsible, mature adults in the room, have to come in and, et cetera, right? You can, we can all sort of see how that argument is, gonna be played out, of course, even if we disagree with that, and so I think it is important to point out how Bitcoin is different, right? And, as you, as you did do in your thread as well, how, in what ways is the Bitcoin world different to that?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "46:18", "start": 2777.85, "text": "Yeah, I mean, what we have that they didn't have back in nineteen o seven is, is ex-very high auditability features. You know, you can selectively make things transparent in the Bitcoin space. And so, for example, collateral, collateral can be monitored and, and you al-- you know it's always there. You don't have to just rely on the word of somebody else. And it's, it's not like magic that, you know, but it's, it's a factor, it's something that can help. it's not a, a- Silver bullet, I think. And, because it's true, you know, that you don't-- if there's overlapping claims on the same Bitcoin like that, it's a bit tricky. Like, presumably, if people pool their insights, maybe then it's for cryptographers to figure out whether we can do that. But there's definitely, for sure, there's much more possible than with gold. Like, auditing gold is a nightmare. I think the last official kind of a, somewhat of an audit of the Federal Reserve was like 1953, you know, sorry Goal is really, really hard. Much easier to do with Bitcoin. You can do it from a distance, you don't need to physically be there. It's so much better. So technology-wise, that is a factor. Multi-sig of course allows us to not only reliably store Bitcoin, but not have to trust on one counterparty. Like we're-- I think in the future we're gonna not have Custodians so much as we're gonna have key banks, like banks that are known to store keys, and then they will collaborate to, store particular pools of Bitcoin with, in a multisig fashion. So then you can have a bank in Australia and a bank in, in the US and a bank in South Africa all collaborating, securing the same multisig wallet, so it just, it just ensures against a lot of political risk. And so the fact that Bitcoin is so, oh well, maybe- Maybe that's another factor. Bitcoin is digital, so back in nineteen thirteen, pretty much, you have the United States as a country, it would be so cost prohibitive for gold, physical gold, to leave the continent. So the risk of the gold fleeing abroad was very low, and so they could be sure, like, you know, we can do this, like, what are they gonna do, right? I mean, the money already is in the banks, physically, so we can just require the banks to hold a certain, amount, certain percentage of their gold. With the Federal Reserve so that we can come and, you know, rescue, the banks that aren't doing well. Which by the way, isn't that crazy? Like, sorry, but just to make the point, like, you're gonna reward the worst actors, like banks that are lending intermediaries that are responsible, like, for example, and not that I'm promoting them, but like, I think, for example, maybe like a Genesis Capital seems to be coming out of this crisis relatively unscathed. There's a few examples of companies in Bitcoin that have barely been hurt by Panic. shouldn't they be rewarded by the market, right? but so instead what you do with the central bank is you start subsidizing the worst actors who take the biggest risks. A-and then you get a really rotten system. So anyway, so I think that the fact that Bitcoin is, is digital and there's always the risk of the capital just fleeing abroad, even if it's technically still owned by US citizens, I think that is gonna also prevent some of these wild ideas of like, let's just pool together all the Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:38", "start": 2977.51, "text": "Right, and so it's certain technological aspects and arguably even maybe a cultural aspect of Bitcoin, this whole not your keys, not your coins culture, I think, because what are the things that help governments drive us down into this pathway that we're in with fiat currency? One of them, as argued even by, by many Austrians, but Gero Hulsmann makes the argument really well in The Ethics of Money Production, is this idea that with government legal tender laws, they force us To consider the IOUs all as equivalent. Yeah. So as an example, if you have an account at Wells Fargo and I have an account at Chase or whatever, we treat all our IOUs the same because of legal tender laws. And so there's maybe a bit of an argument there, right? So I guess now let's transpose that into Bitcoin land. It would be like saying you have an IOU at, let's say you have some coins at, you know, Cash App. Yeah, and I have some coins at Swan, a-and treating them all the same, but in, but in a self-custody culture, you don't have to trust that the IOUs are the same, and we don't treat them differently, right? We don't say, \"Oh, I'm assessing, you know, whichever lender like Celsius as a, as a bad actor, so I'm gonna-- in my mind, I'm gonna value their bitcoins below par, right? I'm not gonna treat the bitcoins out there, right?\" but let's say it's a reputable actor, okay, I'm gonna hold them at par in my mind mentally, like, okay, coins held here are one to one. So I think that also plays into it as well, this idea that we should really be more cognizant about where it's an IOU versus it's a- Actually, coins that you hold in your wallet, not your keys, not your coins." }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "51:07", "start": 3067.23, "text": "Yeah, and we saw this in the last days of Mon Gox, you know, when, when the market was starting to feel like, \"Oh, this thing is going really wrong,\" before the official, you know, the official bankruptcy, the official failure, you saw that bitcoins there were trading at a discount, so you, you, they were cheaper, 'cause they were Gox coins, they were locked into Mon Gox, and you just didn't know if you would ever see them again. W Bitcoin traded at a premium on my Gox before that, and the reason was that, people that had coins stuck there, they wanted them out, and but they, they, they were, Gox was, was throttling the amount of bitcoins that were allowed to go out. And so what you would do is you would sell them on the platform and get your dollars out. And so because a lot of people were, it's like literally the showing that people were trying to exit. They were all kind of like, you know, pushing towards the exit, and so they were- Bidding against each other to get dollars for their Bitcoin on the Gox platform and then get the dollars out, and of course, that failed too. But, but it's just interesting to see how if you allow a market to operate, there's so much information communicated by the price." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:17", "start": 3137.34, "text": "Yeah. So I think maybe that's really the lesson is to basically people need to assess, which parties and companies they work with, and if a company goes under because they did some bad risk management or they took the wrong risk, then they should be allowed to fail, right? I, I think I've, I've always" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "52:34", "start": 3154.23, "text": "advocated for, for diversification. A-and, and I don't mean shit coins, I just mean like diversified the ways in which you store your Bitcoin. 'Cause we are fallible individually, but also institutions are fallible, and so, you know, just consider that, like, you know, I think that's probably one of the wisest things you can do, if, if you own Bitcoin. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:56", "start": 3176.14, "text": "And so for listeners who are thinking, okay, are we staring down the barrel, barrel of a long bear market Be a shorter one, okay, it might take some time. Do you have any thoughts on that?" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "53:07", "start": 3187.05, "text": "Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think this is gonna be a protracted, bear market. Like, I mean, definitely, it's probably obvious, but there, there's definitely been, let me pull up this, this chart for myself. Definitely there has been, like, the hubris is flushed out, right? I mean, people aren't like, over, overconfident anymore, which is always good. also the, me that they were, they were managing, of, you know, funds back in two thousand eight, and in, he, he said in three days all the leverage was flushed out, and it's because it's so contagious, it just like cascades, and so there's only, it's only, that only lasts so long. I do think miners need to capitulate that'll go slower because they don't get their margin call right away, they get like this slow trickle of like, you know, they have to pay every month, so that, that can take longer, So small still, it's less than a trillion dollars, and, and we're just seeing the assassination of every single asset class globally. Now of course, stocks are down, so people are like, \"Okay, if I sell my stocks, like, what the hell do I buy, right? Or if I wanna diversify, what the hell do I do?\" And, I think the thesis of- You know, the Wall Street types of the world is, okay, the Fed is tightening, so we're risk off. This is all risk off, risk off, so just dollar-based assets, very short term, you know, maybe very short term bonds or something like that. But I think the market is underestimating how quickly the Fed can change and pivot, and I think we're already seeing signals from the Fed. I think I, I wanna like claim the hashtag Powell pivot because I think it's gonna happen, and we'll all talk about About like how, how Powell pivoted, that he goes from, you know, playing the hard, hard line, pretending to be Volcker, but he can't, to like more soft talk because the White House is, is, exerting pressure on, on the Fed because people are hurting because of inflation and everything else, that the politicians clearly are saying like, \"Hey, you know, it's, it's, it's bad enough that we have inflation, you guys are gonna create a recession on top of it,\" like, \"No, we have elections coming up, Elections. So I think they're gonna turn dovish, you know, maybe, I'm not no Fed expert, so this is just pure, you know, amateur speculation, but, I think maybe a few more mild hikes and then they're gonna call it a day. There's gonna-- there's some stuff blowing up in Europe today, like the banks are in terrible shape in Europe. the Eurozone keeps printing money, like they're not easing, sorry, they're not tightening. Japan is going crazy printing money now. Japanese yen Has dropped below twenty-year support on the charts, so I think, I, I think, the Widowmaker trade is finally paying off. Like there's finally people that are shorting Japanese bonds. They, they, they always lost money in the past thirty, forty years, but now is the time. And, and it's, it's, I, so I think Japan is, is going down. So basically, the dollar is the last man standing, and, I, I just don't see this tightening continue for very much longer. Like maybe a bit But, but we're also even seeing US government bonds yields spiking, so they're gonna have to ease more pretty soon. Anyway, so that's, that's my take is that Bitcoin, we're, like, in a way, it's great that we're first, like, we're the first to have a serious correction, all the leverage is flushed out. I think that's kind of how I opened this, this interview is like, \"This is just so healthy, it's like we're gonna be so laser focused, we're gonna have a massive rally, and, I suspect that this whole crisis will be over probably in, in twelve to eighteen months, you know, maybe two, two years tops, but it just doesn't make sense to me that we were barely, like, twenty nineteen was still bear market, right? So like in what, in two, we only had a bull market for two years, like in an environment where central banks are printing money up the wazoo, where inflation is starting to get to close to ten percent, like, no, like, I don't think we're gonna have a protracted bear market at all. This is just a A depression or a prolonged bear market." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:26", "start": 3445.64, "text": "Right, and certainly it does seem that most people are confident that Bitcoin is just taking a breather and they still are bullish on Bitcoin long term and still a value. I think it's fair to say that most people, who are holding Bitcoin or in this broader system, that they're seeing something like that. And so, yeah, I think, I think that's probably the likely outcome. So we'll just have to, wait and see. But I think, I think you're right. I think it's going to- Gonna be a, a, maybe a little bit more of a waiting for the minor capitulation and then sort of chilling sideways for a little bit before, the stackers, and this is a great opportunity for those who are stacking. So" }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "58:04", "start": 3484.06, "text": "I mean, to, to, to be fair to like just kind of the gods of, of, you know, odds and statistics, like if this contagion continues and if we see like, like a Coinbase, if we see a bank run on a Coinbase and it turns out that they don't have what it takes, they don And then we could go a bunch lower, then we could really challenge ten thousand, five thousand dollar Bitcoin or something. Like, I'm not saying for a long time, but I think briefly we could see, kind of like in twenty thirteen when Gox went under, like we had a rally to two hundred sixty, and then we still went down to eighty bucks because, because my Gox went bankrupt. So if this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, then, yeah, you know, all bets are off in terms of how low we could spike, but even then You know, there's so much Bitcoin that's cold stored. I think we're only-- if we're talking about the exchange ecosystem and stuff, the financialized bitcoins, maybe we're only talking about one or two million Bitcoin. Like, there's just no more than that that is in, in, in kind of like semi-hot wallets, the rest is just cold stored or lost. So, you know, there's a limit to-- and so if that, if you think about it that way, it's like, okay, let's say there's only one million Bitcoin circulating," }, { "speaker": "tuur_demeester", "time": "59:22", "start": 3562.5, "text": "Let's say it drops to, five thousand dollars, well then you could, you could scoop up all those Bitcoin with five billion dollars, right? You could just kind of set a bid order, like, you know, work with some large, prime broker who has access to all the trading desks in Bitcoin, and just put a firm bid at five thousand dollar Bitcoin, and you just, you gobble up every single Bitcoin that becomes available at that price. So, five billion dollars is not a lot of money, so, you know, that, that-- so that's why I Below ten thousand, even in a bad case, you know, we could dip below it briefly, but I don't believe in a sustained bear market under ten thousand." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:01", "start": 3601.34, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah, interesting to see. And so then, I guess let's, let-- I guess let's leave it there then. So, really interesting commentary, and I think it gives us all some things to think about in terms of how the industry and ecosystem develops, how much should we care about technologies, as an example, proof of reserves, tech-- you know, the- The culture of not your keys, not your coins. I think these are all, and arguably it's easier to sell that message after a moment like this, right? Like just like after Mt. Gox's collapse, it was then, it's a lot easier for people to get the message about self-custody of Bitcoin. so I suppose we'll leave it there then, and, listeners, go and find Tuur online. You can find him on Twitter at Tuur Demeester and anywhere else you want people to find you. No, that works. Okay Thanks so much, fun. My pleasure. If you're interested in the links for the thread that Tuur wrote or the Panic of 1907, you can find all the links as usual at my website in the show notes, stephanlivera dot com slash three eight seven. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }