Will defi replace traditional finance? Will Bitcoin ordinals cause Bitcoin transaction fees to skyrocket? And is this the end of the US dollar is the world's dominant currency? Today we welcome Matt Greenspan of Quantum Economics back to the show to answer these questions and discover how a simple Bitcoin price prediction may or may not have caused a $2,000 spike within hours. We're here for cutting edge info you can use wrapped in quantum silliness. This is episode number 680.
Of the Bad Crypto podcast. Five.
Four, three, one zero. Ignition Boost. Bad. What do you call it before?
It's quantum. Right. If we're before quantum physics and quantum computing, what's the current terminology for?
They just call it physics, right? Just physics? I think so. I don't know if there's a there's maybe there is another term, but what is it called before you eat the corn, before it digests? What is it called? Digest, which is still corn? What do you call it after? It's still corn. Quantum corniness.
Corn is corn any way that you slice it? Welcome to the Bad Crypto podcast. The show for the crypto Curious Crypto serious over 10 million downloads well into our sixth year. In fact, July 18th will mark six years of doing this silliness with Sir Lord Travis. Right. There's no sign of stopping. Sorry, not sorry.
You know, we keep seeing the technologies. We keep finding ways that they work and we want to explain them to you as we are figuring them out ourselves. There's a lot of stuff that's going on and and it just feels like this conversation is going to even validate that. It just feels like we are edging up out of this bull, out of this bear market into another another big bull run potentially. So we're about to it's about to go boom. Not financial advice, but it should be good.
This should be fun to pay attention to.
Well, you know, it's been years since Matt's been on the show. And this interview was really triggered by a tweet that I saw him make. And we're going to share more about that.
Well, you were triggered. You got triggered. I got triggered. Oh, man. Joe got triggered.
I can't handle it anymore. Go listen to this interview. And it's been a long time since this person has graced the Bad Crypto podcast here at the Republic of Bad Cryptopia. The last time that Matty Greenspan was with us. Oh, you don't go, Matty, right? You go by Matty, right? Matty Correct. You go by Matty. All right, let me do that.
People say, Matty, I don't correct people unless you ask, you go with my.
Okay. Take two. And it's been a long time since this guest has graced us here at the Republic of Bad Cryptopia As I can pull up, for those of you watching the visual version, it was October 14th, 2019, Episode number 320 that Matt Greenspan, who was with eToro at the time, came on the show and talked all things Bitcoin and cryptos with us. He is now free of the corporate shackles and he is the founder of his company, which is quantum economics. And we're going to
talk again about Bitcoin and cryptos and things, mate. Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me, dude.
Yeah, this is actually John. This is not the last time we talked to him. We he was on the virtual Blockchain week as well, so we interviewed him on that for an episode. But we had like we had so many awesome people on that. And Matty was just another one of the awesome people and he's been doing some stuff with quantum economics now and making some pretty good calls. In fact, you mentioned to me you said Dude, Monty said that on Thursday we're probably going to hit
31,000 or something. And then we did. And so either a soothsayer or a Nostradamus, one of the two.
Let's let's give context to this, because a show airs a little later on April 10th. He posted that in 10th, I believe was a monday, that Bitcoin would be 33,000 by Thursday. And at that time it was 28,000. Over the next two, I to say ten hours, Bitcoin went up $2,000. And I tweeted and I'm like, What? Because we've been going sideways for weeks and all of a sudden, three weeks. Yeah. And it goes up. What? What happened?
Yeah. No, I don't. Well, as I probably told you before, I don't predict what's going to happen. Don't predict the future. I don't know. And, um, the disclaimer comes to mind. Past performance is not indicate future results. And anybody who tells you that they can tell you what's going to happen in the future is is certainly lying, including myself. So, um, I don't know. You know, I've been toying with price
calls since I left Utah. I mean, obviously Adi Toro And with a financial license, um, there was always this you cannot be wrong attitude and therefore, um, you know, don't predict the future, and you won't be wrong. You'll be okay. Uh, so lately I've been, um, advising on this platform called Lubitz, which is the link that you showed there on my Twitter portfolio. And it's basically a social network for Web3 with smart contract enhanced monetization methods.
And actually they even just put in real easy to use GPT and Dall-e photos. So you could like just making it easier for creators to to use these tools. And they have this feature called price calls. So this is just me like testing out that feature. And um, yeah, there I am with the cereal head nft.
Okay. Looks like another social network that we need to sign up for.
And it's the next generation social.
Platform for Web3 enthusiasts.
Joe Nerds.
The the CEO Albert. Every time he tells me something like I hear, I hear Elon Musk saying it like two weeks later. I don't I don't know how he does it. He, you know, he's just ahead of the game. Mm.
That sounds good. We'll have to take a we'll have to keep an eye on that for sure. But we've been keeping an eye on you. So. So tell us, you know, a lot of people are saying that, hey, you know, we are again, past performance does not indicate future results, but we are one year away from the having ballpark ish. Right. That tends to seem to be the time when things start working its mojo, baby. So what do you think? Where are we in the time scale? 2021 was good for a lot of us. 2022 was
not so great. 2023 started out, man, it's starting to look better. It's starting to look like they're beginning sniffing of that next bull run, baby.
2023 started out, I think, the best year for Bitcoin ever in January and it went up like 40%, I think in January. Don't quote me on the number, but I'm pretty sure that was around that ballpark.
It looks like we were around 16 five at the turn of the year. And yeah, as of this recording is happening on the 19th of April 2023. Bitcoin is currently down a little bit from where it was yesterday, 29,002 90 is is it because the SEC, Gary Gensler and all this crazy silliness, is that spooking people?
Well I mean why is it down today? Actually, I think that today and yesterday and the like, the last few days is kind of trading in a range, literally. But I do believe that the banking crisis added fuel to the fire. January was just anomaly like the year just started out with a bang. Like there's no real literal explanation for it other than the price was low.
Look at the average prices people were buying. Then when the banking crisis hit, I think that that gave an additional boost to Bitcoin because obviously Bitcoin is the alternative to banks and governments who are causing all the problems. People losing faith in the US dollar, you know, and now we have Russia and China, Saudi Arabia and Iran all making friends, which is very uncanny and a bit scary. Um, and that's all bad news for the buck and that
makes people want to flee the ship. Best way to do it.
Best way. You know what was interesting to me and I don't even I don't even think Joel and I have even mentioned this at all or chatted about it yet. But I was watching the thing about Gary Gensler and he was talking about regulating crypto, but he's never actually used an L1 platform. He's never actually used crypto. And here he is regulating it. That's like saying, I'm going to get on.
The Facebook, but it's the internet and I ain't liking it, so I'm going to vote against it because I'm, you know.
It's it's weird to me, you know what I mean? And hello, friend. We have a new friend on the podcast. What is up?
This is or or.
He's four years old.
Or since.
He was two years old and he has his own YouTube channel where he plays Roblox.
Awesome. Oh, very.
Nice. When he turns five, are you going to call him? I've.
I've. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Okay. I got it. Yeah. No, I thought that it was amazing how Gary Gensler could not answer answer a simple question. Like, you know, they're asking him, is Ethereum a security or a commodity? It's got to be one or the other. It can't be both.
Right.
And he wouldn't answer either one.
Travis? Yeah.
Talk to him.
Yeah. Hello. Hello. Hi.
Nice to see you there. Or and if you're tuning in, listening in the podcast, you don't see there's this awesome little Matty Junior basically.
Hanging out here on a TV.
What do you think or what.
Do you think about Bitcoin?
Yeah. Yeah. Is it is it. Is it expensive or is it cheap? Expensive.
It's expensive.
Oh. Uh oh.
Is that a cell signal? Right there? Is that. That is.
Right there.
You heard it. Here, folks. Sell Mortimer.
All right, go watch on the go watch TV.
So, you know, we're talking about Gensler and the SEC and him not, you know, him just being bad, as, you know, a chairman of the SEC. And we've got people that are calling for for his resignation. Of course, none of these people in this administration ever resign, no matter how disgraceful they are. They they stick around and do more destruction.
So United States.
That's true. Yes.
Yeah.
In the US.
I've seen I've seen politicians. Well.
Well, I didn't go my way, so let me resign.
Like a little different scent.
Yeah, it's a little bit different over there with that, mate. But what's interesting to me about Gary Gensler and.
The regulation of.
This whole thing not having used it, Janet Yellen really not familiar all that much. There's not really used it. From what I understand, Elizabeth Warren hasn't really used it. But so how are they going to how do they in all consciousness feel like they can regulate it if they don't even know anything about it?
No, no, no.
Regulate implies that they're trying to help make sure that it works properly and that everybody's doing it properly. There isn't a way to regulate it. Literally, Bitcoin was invented as a way to transact without the need of banks and without the need of the government. And quite frankly, they can do whatever they want with it because we now have the power to do whatever we want with it.
Right. I want to I.
Want to get to that in a minute and get a take on this. But, you know, to set the stage for it in the last few months, this year, you know, we've had all kinds of horrible things happening in the financial markets. And most recently, Signature and SVB have really alerted us to what's going on with with the banks. From your perspective, what triggered that? What caused that?
Oh, that is actually a very good question, Joel. And I point my finger directly at the Fed and Jerome under Jerome Powell leadership. And if you look at it, actually, what happened was that SVB bought Bonds, long dated bonds, meaning that they bought them in 2021. Money was flowing in. They didn't really know what to do with that money, but they had to park it somewhere. And the Fed at that time was saying long term bonds are a good investment because we're going to keep the interest rates
low for very long time. The Fed was literally telling them this at that time, and then the Federal Reserve switched their attitude within a three month time period from very cheap money to very expensive money. And they raised interest rates at one of the fastest clips in history of the of the United States. So basically, they they basically rubbed SVB like literally they told them you should buy these bonds. It's a good move right now. And then once those bonds got expensive, the yield of the
bond goes up. And when a yield of a bond goes up, the price of the bond goes down. So if you're holding several billion dollars worth of bonds and the yield spikes on you, the value of those assets plummets. Right. So basically, the it created a large hole in their balance sheet. And when people got wind of that whole. You know, people do what people do. They say, wait a second. If everybody tries to cash out now, they're not going to have enough money. This is a run
on the bank. This is basically we know the psychology of it. Is basically this the same psychology that led to the toilet paper crisis of COVID. Right. It's like, you know, there's probably enough toilet paper out there, But my dumbass neighbor. Right. He's going to think there isn't enough toilet paper, so I better.
Run to the store before he does. Because if I don't.
I'm wiping with my hand.
You know. You know, you can use leaves like before your hand and you know.
Plenty of them over.
T shirt. I mean, you went right to the hand. And I'm like, come on, there's a lot of in-betweens there.
Two days in my house, I don't even use them. I'm like, But it seems like a day seems like a much better solution than a hand because then they get it under your fingernails and that's just a whole other scenario. You don't want to go there. So you know what? I actually talk about the bonds and stuff because we had the conversation we had tickets to are on our show in January and I asked some questions. He was busting my balls and he was like, No.
Man, because you want to put your money in bonds. The the yield on them. Like like right now we want to he we literally were hedging their bets. He was talking about T-bills and bonds and because of the one month bonds or the.
Whatever because there was value in that and he looked at me like I was crazy and I was like, dude, we're like near.
The like, the dollar.
Looks to me like it's near the end of the lifecycle of paper money, like the world economy is teetering.
We just had, you know, the UK.
The Bank of England, saying that they are insolvent, right? And there's some crazy stuff going down.
And like what? You know, he.
Was like, Oh.
Bonds or.
Whatever. And I was like, Really?
And then he acted like I was an idiot. And so.
I was like, okay, well, we were sitting face to.
Face, too, and I was like, And then here we.
Are. We've not we've not really communicated with him after the fact and be like, Well, SVB.
Just shut the bed, yo. And they were doing the bond thing, like, you know.
But yeah, it was, it was a.
Couple of months before.
VB But it wasn't, it wasn't the, they weren't, I think they weren't, they were, he was, he was talking to short one month ones or the three month ones, not the long term ones.
So maybe the yield.
Is a little different on those. But I was just like it just man, I just never had faith in this system since I learned about the corruption in July of 2000 when I learned that paper money is fractional ownership and I thought.
The stock market.
Was a little wonky. I thought things are going to be start rug pull. I just learned.
I was red pilled a little too early.
But let me give you.
Some some some much needed confirmation bias. Travis When you're buying a bond, essentially what you're doing is you're lending money to the government. Um. Yeah. I don't know if you are familiar with the government. They're not very good with money. I don't.
Know if I heard about that or not, but it seems to me like.
Literally more than.
$30 trillion in debt. And it's just.
How how.
Is it that you take every.
40% of.
Everyone's salaries and you're still 30 trillion in debt? Like. Yeah. Seems like the government needs a money manager.
Better respect to.
Tica, I would not buy bonds if you put a gun to my head. I don't know what the government is doing with that money. I don't know where it's going. And I'm. Yeah, like you mentioned, I'm, I'm mad enough of that. I have to pay taxes. So no, giving them more money. It doesn't doesn't really compute for me. Think about this. The president of the United States is in power for 4 to 8 years. He is he is able to buy to borrow money for 50 years
or more. His direct incentive is to borrow as much money that he can without worrying about how it's going to be paid back.
Right.
This is a system you want to lend money to. Not me.
Right.
That's what I'm out like. Literally, there are a million better investments in that.
So the dollar is struggling. The US government is struggling to have regulation around crypto. They're scared of crypto. You've got some predictions about what's coming next and I want to want to take them one at a time as I'm reading them here in the written word. Let's just tackle these. The first one is that Defi will completely replace traditional finance. Isn't this opium? Like there's so much power in the governments and the Fed? Isn't this opium?
No, no. See, Joel.
And Travis, you guys live in a bubble called the United States. Yeah. I mean, even Puerto Rico is part of that bubble. There's a whole nother world out there. So the United States is regulatory, that regulatory unfriendly ness or harshness or however you want to call it, their uncertainty that they're doing on purpose in order to try and squash it. That is not hurting crypto. That's hurting the dollar.
Right. This is.
I mean, I don't see any other way to see it. The dollar is supposed to be a global reserve currency. They've weaponized the dollar by kicking Russia off of the system. That hurts Russia in the temporary. But it also hurts the dollar because the dollar is no longer a global currency. I can't transact from the United States to Iran in
dollars even if I really want to. Even if I have a relative there, even if I have want to support somebody who's protesting the Iranian government, I cannot send them money, literally not with US dollars, but can send them Bitcoin. Right. So they have they basically harmed the dollar's utility by kicking Russia off the system, by kicking Iran off the system and several other countries by fighting, having a silly spat with China. Um, a potentially a
proxy war. I don't know if you want to even go there, but now this war with crypto, I don't know if you know this, but 45% of Nigerians are already using crypto. I mean, adoption rates are 3,040% in a lot of developing countries. They've just basically cut off all of that business and all of that transaction ability with the US dollar, that just limits the dollar's utility even further. It doesn't limit crypto because crypto is borderless.
Right? That's one I think so.
My girl is in is.
In Russia so I can't send her how money like I might be used to in the past. But what I can do is I can send Ethereum or I can. So they still have access to Binance over there. That's really the only solution. They don't have access to MoneyGram, they don't have access to pay sand, PayPal, any of that other stuff. The only way you can get money in and out of there now is with crypto. And
so that right there is an interesting challenge for for them. However, whenever the the war started in in Ukraine, I was like okay wow the value of the of the ruble plummeted and.
It was like $1 was 120 rubles.
Now $1 is like 50 something rubles. I want at that moment like dude, let.
Me load.
Up on, you know, digital.
Rubles. How do I how.
Do I how do.
I get ruble stable coins.
Right?
How do I.
It's a that's where there's a problem is, is that.
I can only get stablecoins in US dollar USD Usdc. Where's the US?
Where's the euro?
D Where's the euro? C Where's the yuan? T Where's the ruble?
C Like looking up or something?
I need these, you know what I mean? Like, it's almost like it would seem to me that.
A stablecoin would be even more stable if it was a.
Basket of currencies and it was like there's a little bit of gold, there's a little bit of dollar, there's a little bit of yuan, there's a little.
Bit of rubles, there's a little bit.
Of, you know, whatever.
Rupees like.
BRICS.
Currencies, like.
What is the best sort of hedge.
Now?
Because we're like, Oh, we're going to just put them in your stablecoin and you're.
Like, Then your.
Stablecoin happens.
To what happened to Usdc?
And oh, Circle has too much, you know.
Doesn't have enough liquidity in SVB Bank.
And so now that's going down.
So well you don't want to keep it there. What happens if that goes away?
Oh, put it in Bitcoin. Well, what happens if the price of bitcoin goes down 1,520%? Like it's.
Like.
Like really? It's a weird time to try to even figure out how to hedge your bet on some of this stuff.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, fiat currencies are intentionally designed to lose value over time. I mean, whenever somebody's trading the forex market or foreign exchange, they're basically betting on which one is going to fall the fastest. And it's it's a weird game.
World, huh? Like all the countries.
Is going to stay all.
The most. Let's go. Yeah.
The countries are incentivized to devalue their currency because it promotes exports. Meaning, you know, if you are selling, if you're Switzerland and you're selling watches and you know the franc goes down, your watches are suddenly cheaper elsewhere. Right? It also devalues the debt that they have in their own currency. So countries are incentivized specifically, they don't even try to hide it. They call it inflation. I mean, it's we believe that inflation should be 2%. Why you
want your value of your currency to go down. So, yes, Bitcoin is designed to go up in value over time. So if you're talking about saving, I mean, obviously it's volatile in the short term, but if you're thinking about a period of anything longer than 3 or 4 years, I think that that the the choice is obvious over there. But as far as, you know, decentralized finance, which was I mean, kind of the topic at hand, um, I believe that um, the Celsius and have have highlighted something
seriously wrong with the way that capital markets work. And it's not only them. I mean, we can name like Bernie Madoff, we can name like Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, and all of a sudden, like just as they're in trouble, they get hit with these massive fines. Right? They're always. Doing shady shit and with decentralized finance mean for the first time we can actually see everything on the blockchain.
We can see all of that. We can trace all the transactions, even if we don't know who they belong to, and we can see where the money is going, how the contract, the smart contract is designed to work, right? Nobody can trick the blockchain and funnel money out the back end without some auditor going, Hey, wait a second, where the hell is that money going? Right? So yes, it's experimental in the beginning because you're playing with new
economic models. Things get broken, but over time, those smart contracts get battle tested. And every time that a hack or a leak or something happens, the system gets stronger. Right now, it's not necessarily stronger than a traditional financial bank. I think that if you're holding a large amount of money, I personally at this point would not hold more than $100,000 in Stablecoins. It makes no sense. You have so many risks and none of the extra returns that you would.
Buy in financial assets.
We often wonder if the domino is going to fall on Usdc or usdc. So we just had a guest recently on the show, our friend Clinton Donnelly, who's a crypto tax accountant and lawyer from, you know, understanding the regulation, you know, that's going down. And his take on this is that the US is not going to lose dominance
because the US is a bully. They've put laws in place that make all the rest of the world report back on what US citizens are doing and that they're doing everything they're doing to crypto is not to drive crypto out, but to put it under the umbrella of
the brokerages that exist. The reason that they're not creating regulation, according to Clinton is because they're instead going to enforcement and that they are going to treat crypto like securities and that you will go to Schwab or Fidelity or wherever to buy your Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other coins, and they want all of the money from the world pouring into those brokerages in the US. They're actually encouraging crypto. They just want it done their way where it's under
their control. But you say that the US dollar will not remain the global reserve currency, so make those jive.
I mean, have you not seen the movie Nerds.
Like.
Or any other movie where there's a bully that comes out at the beginning? We know how this ends. There's one bully and there's the rest of the class. Like literally at some point they're just going to band together and say, We don't need the bully anymore and go play somewhere else or get their revenge because they're smarter than him. Um, not that the people in the US government are stupid. Gary Gensler is in no way a fool. Um, nor was Jay Clayton before him. But there's a revolving door.
These type of people that are in power, they're always thinking about what are they going to do next? He's not thinking about his chair right now. He's thinking about what's his next job, Right? He's thinking about how he's building his his application. Jay Clayton, the previous the previous chairman. You know what he does now? You know what he did like as of several months after he quit or he was fired from the SEC.
High Dollar Company.
And Web3 investment firm, literally as soon as he walked out. He's like, hey, look, look at my qualifications. Amy. All right. So these people's incentives are not aligned for the good of the people. They're not aligned for the good of the nation. They're aligned for themselves. They're self they're selfish actors in a grander system. And they can't possibly they
can't possibly work together towards a common goal. You know, people say Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren, but look at like the people who are standing up for for crypto like Patrick McHenry and Tom Emmer. Right? I mean, we all we saw them play in Gary Gensler live. So.
Um, you know, they're.
The at especially within the United States, the political divide keeps getting wider and wider. It's going to be harder and harder for them to get together and actually create meaningful legislation. The only thing that Gary Gensler can do is stall. Eventually he'll be out whether he's kicked out or he's quits or he's just his term is over. There will be somebody else and that other person might continue his line of thought, but it might be in
their best interest to go along with crypto. We'll see when that happens. In the meantime, there's a you know, I want to I want to quote Lou Kerner, who's the head crypto analyst at Quantum Economics. He says, I try to spend about as much time thinking about regulators as they think as they spend thinking about me.
That's great. That's great. So we've been really trying to hedge our bets and trying to figure out what is the best way to sort of hedge our bets as we are, you know, in the bear market moving into the bull market. And I got to give it to Joel because Joel did really good. He bought a bunch of eggs.
At $0.06 and then he sold.
Him at $0.60. Dude, he ten eggs. His money.
Was excellent.
That was what was. Is this cold storage or what?
Well, they're from 20, 20 eggs. They're not.
So good. But I mean.
They don't know. You can't tell when you're buying them, like.
Right.
You can't tell until you open it up and you're like, why is this brown?
They were worth at least 50.
When you threw them at your neighbor's house, right?
You know, I'm looking back at all of those Halloweens where I was egging people's houses and I was like, This was not cost effective analysis where it was quantum economics.
Back in those days, they.
Were not around. So wait.
Did you just miss the opportunity to say quantum.
Economics? I kind of did that.
I kind of said economics, but it's so kind of sounded like, yeah. So yeah, this this is a good time. This stuff's going on right now. So. So putting on.
Your hat, that doesn't it's not the.
Hat that's telling us the future because you don't see the future. You're not Nostradamus, You're the guy who's going to say, well, maybe this is that. Maybe. So where are we in the grand scheme of things now? Like is.
This looks to us like this.
Chart, what it's doing.
Right now, It's looking pretty.
Healthy.
It is, but also it.
Is looking, as my son said, over overbought or he said expensive. Okay. Um, literally, I mean if we zoom way the flip out right and think about the block having in a year from now or so. Right. And then we if we try to flip the log scale, obviously the long term trajectory is upward. And especially if we think about digital scarcity and all of those type of things fundamentally. However, um, this is a daily chart
where each candlestick is one day, right? The blue line here is the average price over the last 200 days and the red line is the average price over the last 50 days. So basically we can see that we're extremely high over the 200 day average. It is expensive right now. Do you know when it.
Crosses that's a good time to buy, right? That's like, oh, you can see where it crossed right there.
You're picking up on the Golden Cross right over here, which is short term moves over the long term, which is the opposite of a death cross which happened over here. And we've been going down pretty much in the bear market. So this is a very bullish indicator right over here. And it has indeed played out. However, mean reversion to the mean would probably not be unexpected if we try to draw like a line of support, even if we
assume like, let's disregard this one over here, right? And then like, you know, create a channel, right, upward channel. But this is a very aggressive upward channel. I think that if we kind of do take into account like we have a kind of a wider channel here that we could say this this kind of makes sense. Like a reversion over here would not be surprising. 25 K
or whatnot. Right? Or even, you know, touch, touch the red line, possibly come towards the blue line, wait around here a little bit, let the blue line catch up, something like that. But obviously, I mean, these type of things they do, they mean this is technical analysis.
Yeah. And for those of you listening, you might not have any idea of what he's talking about. You might want to go over to YouTube, Rumble or Odyssey to see the video version of this so you can see.
But Joel.
I want to ask this, is that what was it, Marty, that you saw on that one day where Joel said, oh, it's 28, it's going to be 33 by Thursday? And that was on a monday. What were you looking at that show that what was the signal that made you go, Oh, damn.
Um, so it was just it was just flattening.
Out, right? It was. So we have in the technical analysis, when the support line, which is the lower line. And the resistance line, which is the upper line. When they start converging, right, you have a range which is where you have a clear high and a clear low. And when when that happens and the market starts to get that in their head, they start going, okay, the average price is somewhere in the middle. So the buyers start to accept a lower and lower price and the sellers
start to accept a higher and higher price or vice versa. Actually, I think my brain just farted, but the idea is that it becomes a triangle, it turns into a pennant, and then the pennant has to break eventually, right? It has to come to the point of the triangle and break out. And what I was looking at was it was completely flat. Flat or it was flattening for three weeks. It just got to the point where it got completely flat.
It started to move a little bit and said, okay, now's a good time to to make one of those price calls. And it worked out in my favor.
Yeah, it went.
It didn't hit 33. Some of.
Them don't.
It didn't hit 33, but it did go pop, pop. So as long as we're talking price, let's let's talk price for, you know, a year now or more, people have been saying, oh, Bitcoin is going to go down to 10 or 12. So let's go ahead. 2.2, two questions in this one. Question one, is that never going to happen now in two? What do you see us hitting for a high on the next bull run that we're expecting by late this year or early 2024?
Yeah.
So nothing is ever impossible. You know, I think that we. We saw the meme. This is your last chance. This might be your last chance to buy below 20,000. Think I did tweet that out several times, and one of them actually might have been true, but we have no idea. Um. Right. And, you know, so who knows? Like this is this is the market. Any literally anything can happen. Um, my money is in Bitcoin. That's where I feel like, you know, because I do believe in the long term transformative potential
of this technology. Um, I do believe that digital scarcity is only found in Bitcoin and something like Ethereum doesn't really recreate it simply because bitcoin's coded a hard coded into the 21 million cap. It will never be replaced. You guys know this. Don't I don't have to tell you again. Um, but what I do. What's different now is the audience. Because the nfts that are minted on
Bitcoin literally are taking a Satoshi off the market. It's not the same as like Ethereum where, okay, I'm paying a bit of gas, the gas goes to the miners, but now I have a million nfts whatever I want them to look like. It doesn't matter. There is no digital scarcity. There's only the project who says we're only going to make 10,000 of these, but they might turn around next year and say, Hey, well, we need another thousand. Why? Because well, hey, look, we voted on it. It's okay.
There's no actual scarcity there. I mean, there's only a scarcity of as much as you trust the people who are controlling the smart contracts, Maybe the smart contract is designed to ensure that scarcity. Maybe it's not with Bitcoin that Satoshi is off the market, right? If somebody is holding that ordinal, I mean, he could spend it without touching the ordinal, but they're basically just taking it off the mark. There's that bitcoin literally. That's wild and hot.
So there's.
780,000, right? There's 780,000 ordinals so far. So that's not even one bitcoin yet.
I believe the number is upwards of a million by now. Think Dune Analytics is the ones who are who are keeping track of everything. We celebrate a million. A couple of weeks ago I grabbed a few toads under half a million because I feel like, I don't know, in ten years from now somebody's going to go. You have one of the first million half million ordinals, right? Like, and that might be worth something to somebody someday. Um, but literally what happens is that it creates because as
soon as people understand this, people realize it. Some already have the fact that digital scarcity only exists on Bitcoin. That's only going to put the Bitcoin more in demand and the more that goes. I mean, we've seen how the frogs and, and you know, and monkeys and tacos, these type of things. I don't know why cats internet goes, Ooh, I like it. I saw, you know um, a GoFundMe page for a potato salad, which I believe hit six figures. So, I mean, people just go nuts.
Delicious.
That's really, really good.
It's like, hey, need to make a potato salad.
Anybody want to help me? And then, like, suddenly he's having a potato salad party that was like a block.
Party or something. Yeah.
Yeah, it's good. We're going to talk more about ordinals in an upcoming episode. We've got somebody coming on that's going to share some thoughts with us on that. Probably more than.
Me, honestly.
I went ahead and I minted one, I created the the genesis of Genesis. You know, this is our Blockchain Hero series. And what's what's more Genesis than the sketch that became the the NFT. So I went ahead and, and I minted this just because I could ordinal 167,353. The question is around your assertion that these ordinals are going to cause Bitcoin transaction fees to go to $1,000. You just rendered bitcoin useless?
Nope, not useless. Okay.
Go ahead.
Not useless at all. I mean, actually what? I was extremely upset when I when I came to this realization because I saw the blockchain starting to flood. I mean, we were up to like 100,000 unconfirmed transactions. I don't remember the number off the top of my head. Just as ordinals came out and there was a rush to be like the first ordinals on Bitcoin and the blockchain was flooded. Miners were not keeping up with the load. And um, simply the transaction cost went from like pennies
to like dollars. Like it went mean. I often send, you know, 15, $20 to somebody in, in a developing economy, right? And like, um, literally, you know, it doesn't make sense to do that when it's three and a half dollars, right? It's like you're okay when it's, when it's $0.10, like, okay, who cares? Negligible.
That's Western Union types percentages.
And I dmed Woody Wertheimer. I met him offline a few times. I like him. He's a bit he's a bit weird, but like, Dude, what the heck are you doing with these these wizards? Dude, you're flooding the blockchain. And we had this whole conversation in the background, and, um, look, the end of the day.
I can't stop.
Him from doing what he wants to.
Do. It's Bitcoin.
Just like the Bitcoin maxes. Can't tell me how to use Bitcoin.
I can't tell him.
Taproot was invented. It's on the blockchain, It's in the code. People can now do these things. He's just being a capitalist and I can't fault him for that. He tells me you should. He said, Look, if you want, if you're concerned about layer one transactions use Stablecoins on Tron. I've never used that before, but apparently it's a thing. And he says, Well, you could try using Lightning Network.
There are other solutions for. For you, sir, but the Bitcoin main chain is never going to remain cheap and easy to use as it is right now. And as soon as he said that, I went and bought some.
Frogs, man.
Like said, like, you know, you can't beat them, join them because like, what the heck am I going to do? Sit here and shout till I'm blue? He's not going to stop what he's doing other. It's just going to fuel the fire for other people to use these ordinals and it just gets more popular. So literally, you just got to accept it and move on. But um, yeah. Mean Ethereum transaction fees before, you know two successful very
successful so far upgrades right? The merge and then the what was it, the Shanghai or whatever it was called just now. Um, it was $400, $500 transaction cost to buy a stupid NFT. Right. So if Ethereum right pre scaling reached 400 or $500 and there's no digital scarcity involved and at the time there was an inflationary model. Right. It's going to reach 400 and $500. I mean, I'm pretty certain that Bitcoin can can put that to shame.
I mean, if we.
If we do see that kind of rush to ordinals.
So let me ask you this then, because one of the things that I that that we chatted about multiple times over the years.
Is.
So Bitcoin, there's 21 million.
Bitcoin ever. One of the things they could do is just move the decimal point.
So instead of having eight decimal points for Satoshis, maybe now they have ten, maybe they have 12. And then it just makes this a Toshi worth a lot more because now that's divisible, you just won't see that happening.
The military scrunchy face. Did you see that when you was.
Making scrunchy face mate? Yeah.
I mean you can.
Do it in a centralized platform, right? I mean, literally, if somebody is showing you a balance that's a fraction of a Bitcoin. And you know, I mean, you can you can transact. I mean they're, they're, they're transactions that don't round in traditional finance. And if you're with your your bank and it happens to come out with a half a cent I mean maybe they'll round it off and keep it for themselves, but they could technically, you know, keep that half a cent on your balance. Um.
Well, I mean.
Think about it, Bitcoin becomes worth $1 million then once Satoshi is technically worth a dollar and it's like, well we need to be able to divide that further. So I think it just depends on how high the price of Bitcoin.
Gets before the.
Bitcoin, You know.
Foundation votes.
On that and says, Well, let's just move the decimal point. Yeah.
And that vote.
Could.
Potentially be extremely divisive. Yeah. I mean you don't just need 51% to agree because you know that you're going to have militants fighting it and you're going to have blockchain Bitcoin cashes and Bitcoin cash ABC's and BS and is that really worth it And you know and it's going to be it could it could potentially be.
A war.
Literally like people could die over this shit man. So like I don't know if that's ever going to happen. It would require a broad consensus of the entire world population. And I don't know if you know something about people, but they don't usually agree on everything.
That's the truth. Well, okay, so there's an answer I didn't get from you. And that was calling this next bull run. I know. You know, you say you don't like to make predictions, but you do like to make predictions. We're just not going to hold.
You, right? That's true.
All right. All right. Time. So the next bull run, when do you think it's officially going to start? Set a set a date range, You know, give a third, you know, give a month in year. And then how far do you think we'll go on this next one? You got to have something in mind.
I think it's already started.
I mean, I'm fairly certain, like with a 98% certainty, we've seen the bottom already, right? I mean, 16,000. That's that's that's pretty damn low. That start of 2020 3rd January taking off like a rocket. I'm pretty sure that's that's it.
But but that's I.
Mean where we are now, that's not a bull run signal. Like a signal that's like 16.
Months before the, the having. Yeah. Right.
So 40 K is a signal. Like what, what's the actual signal that we're like, yeah, this is, we're going to the moon and this is how many dollars don't.
Just want to text. Could you just message him on the day that it looks. I want.
To know. I want to know right now.
No, I.
Literally mean, anything that I could say is just is just an educated.
Guess.
That's fine. We'll take it.
Yeah. So I think that we're about let me share my screen again and I'm going to use, even though I think that Plan B is a hack and he's his predictions are silly. Um, this chart does have something to it as far as the having cycle is concerned. Um, and we're at around this where it's getting this dark green area. And if we think about 2019, that was a fake out, like a huge fake.
Out.
Right? And then it leveled out around 10,000, stabilized around 10,000 for a while until the until the having started. And then the bull run really kicked off after the having um but also this weirdly correlates with monetary policy right and it's.
Difficult to.
To tell which one's influencing which. And according to our research at quantum economics, more than the having the number one thing that really affects Bitcoin price so far has been the Federal Reserve. And when the printing presses are on, a lot of that money is being channeled into Bitcoin and when they start pulling back and money gets scarce, people need to sell off their bitcoin to pay the bills and fulfill obligations and shit like that. So I
mean literally it can be seen. I mean 2017, 2018, I believe is around when Janet Yellen started like, um, you know, pulling back, uh, the money. Stimulus and started leveling off. Right. And then, you know, once COVID hit, they just turned the printer on go BR Right. And all the way up. So literally.
It looks like we're.
Going to get to that. So if you don't know this is stock to flow model he's looking at buy bitcoin worldwide slash stats slash stock to flow you can see that over on the side. So when that so when that turns to that darker green, then it's going to turn to blue and then all of a sudden it turns red. So is that. But it looks like from when it hits red, then it really starts taking off and going off again, like restarting or something. So I don't really fully understand that, Right.
It's it's it's.
Right before it turns orange. So what happens when when the having comes is basically like imagine the mine the it starts with the miners right And we're setting up a Bitcoin mining facility.
At the moment.
So a little bit about this. Basically, the miners are getting a set reward. Right. And they have their calculations for how much hash they're contributing and how much their machines cost, how much their electricity. They're throwing all of these things into a big spreadsheet and making their calculations. Now, all of a sudden, you know, it's happening in advance, but all of a sudden that reward, that profit, that that revenue that's coming in is basically cut in half.
It's like, um, our CEO, Jason Dean, who's running our mining operation, explained at one time in a blog at the last heading, which was brilliant. He was basically goes, it's like sticking your hand in a jar of beans and just, you know, um, constantly the jar is full and you just stick your hand in and grab the beans out and all of a sudden the jar is pretty empty. Like the beans just aren't there anymore, right?
So suddenly the bitcoin starts to get scarce, right? Cannot the people who are hodling or the people who are selling it up is the it's where the mining rewards start to affect the natural flow of the market.
Okay. You still haven't answered my question and I'm going to hold your feet to the fire for the third time, mate. When and how much?
Oh, educated guess we accept that.
Can I throw this out there? Because it seems looking at that stock, the flow model you just showed, it's going to be over 100,000. It looks like that's like that's a no brainer. But how high would it get this time, this for the next cycle?
Well, you know, $1 billion by eventually I mean, last time you guys tried to ask me this, I think that I was pretty explicit, like anywhere between $100 and a million by the end of the year. Like, it can be anywhere in between. Yeah, but you.
Don't believe that because your money is in Bitcoin for a reason.
Because.
Because I don't believe in the dollar and have no other alternative.
I believe coin.
I believe that Bitcoin over time will go up because it's the only instance of something scarce that we have other than gold. And gold is not transactional.
So it just it only makes those.
Infinitely not scarce. If they find a big ass pool of it somewhere, right? Like they did in Uganda, they found a bunch of gold like, Whoa, nice. I got some.
Gold coins, man.
It's. It's okay.
When you're.
Like a pirate and holding a bunch of gold coins, you're like, you're mighty fucking.
Yeah, because it goes down.
Bitcoin isn't going to save you. You have to have something to barter it. Yeah.
Bullets actually invest in bullets.
Yeah. You don't want you don't want to.
Spend a whole gold coin.
On. Here you go.
Got a gold ring? This was my father's. It was one of the things. Is that a.
Lion?
Yeah, it's a lion.
You know, if the Internet goes down, that might.
That might get you.
A gun, literally, you know? So, um.
But silver coins, I think, are a bit more transactional. If you need a loaf of bread, you.
Don't want to give that gold coin away. Right, right, right. You got you got to have a bit of both. Maybe some diamonds also.
Because that'll get you.
Out of the country. Right.
So literally, you know, you got it. You got to
be diversified about these things. But I mean, for for for myself, you know, a few thousand dollars, I'll stick it a D5 because I'm playing around with it and building the system, making it better every time I'm, you know, using it, you know, using using a yield, using a smart contract, making the system grow, making the system strong for for anything more than, you know, 20, 30, 100 KS like you got a you got to be in Bitcoin because like it's not really much of an.
Alternative to me.
So it would seem to me looking at the chart that this go round maybe we hit 200, 250 K like a quarter million potentially as a potentiality. And if that's the case then Bitcoin just did almost a 20 x right. It did a 15 x or something and then it comes and come back down to the 50 k range or whatever before it goes up to the next big number, right? If it does that because 50 K then comes down and then does another 15 to 20 x, then it hits the million. So it's like,
is that within two? Because you know, John McAfee was always joking, Oh, well if it doesn't hit a million by the end of 2020, I'm going to eat my junk and then literally little. They know Spain was going to eat his junk.
And.
Then. Yeah, yeah.
You know what? The thing about that is, Travis and especially as far as influencers are concerned, whoever's.
Whoever picks the highest number wins.
You get.
The most.
Oh, so.
Influencer Monte Greenspan says Bitcoin to hit $250,000 on the next bull run. Oh, why that man?
I'll say it's going to hit $10 billion by tomorrow.
Oh, shit. Yeah.
Let's go viral. Like what?
The viral. Well, Tim.
Draper does that a lot. Tim. Tim is in the news a lot for making projections.
Well, that's because.
He did he.
And got a whole shitload.
Of it and was like, oh, I.
Got it for super.
Cheap.
I really want this to be really high. I got a lot of it.
Yeah. No, usually. Usually. But, but that's.
But that's for small time influencers. The big guys like Jamie Dimon, man, he tries to squash it so he can get it cheaper.
Yeah.
Jamie Well.
Matt, we appreciate you coming on your website. Is quantum economics.io. You guys can go sign up for free email right there. You guys just did an acquisition. You know, as you say, you're playing with Defi Revolt Network. What what is, what does Revolt Network do and what does that lead you into now?
Yeah.
So Revolt Network is a place to find and allocate money within the defi world. Um, basically we don't own the smart contracts, but we allow people to search all the smart contracts that are out there and find the highest yielding ones. Um, that in my mind is the true meaning of Defi because it's decentralized. We're actually not
the broker themselves. Nobody's handing us money. We don't custody any money, but rather we're a gateway to finding to finding smart contracts and liquidity pools where people can in fact earn the yield. And of course, you know, this is this is a very early stage, a very early iteration of it. Um, but eventually we basically we add tools and obviously this is this is safe enough, not safe enough that I would recommend anybody put some serious
money into. But you could play around with it and you know, with, you know, on small on small money and there's no there's no limit to how small. Also, there's no there's the blockchain you can literally come in with, with, with, with fractions. But um, the, the idea here is that we add tools to make it safer. Um, insurance and smart contract auditing services. I mean, those are the obvious ones.
And the more, you know, a smart contract has been audited, the more you could say, wait, wait a second, It's more safe, more eyeballs, more programmer eyeballs and bid on this. And the more you have insurance, the more somebody can say, okay, well, I'm willing to pay out of my profits a little, you know, a few percentages because it might blow up in my face. And if it does, I'll get my money back. Right?
So this is this.
Is in my mind how we make defi stronger. And this is, in my mind the type of tool that's going to allow us to do it.
I find that revolting. Travis, what do you think?
Well, you need to stack your riva's I guess so let me ask that. So is it. It's a platform. They have their own token, but you were able to acquire the company as a thing. So it's a centralized thing of some sort.
But it helps.
People with with decentralized finance choices.
Not only.
That, um.
The.
Old development team who got it from, uh, you know, literally, they kind of, sort of rubbed. I mean, they, they, well, I mean, they, I would say that they ran into bear market trouble because, like, they were trying to get listed in South Korea and then Terra Luna happened. And then, I don't know, the founders started fighting. They stopped talking to the community. It's actually run as a Dao, right?
So in the legal documents, when we were going through the legal documents, we realized that actually the DAO has to be on board with this decision. Like the Dao have to vote to be acquired. And we spoke with the Dao and we actually had several AMAs and people liked our vision, obviously. And the vote was the vote was unanimous. Um, we had 1.4 million Rivas in favor zero against. So yeah. So and.
Would have voted.
Against just out of principle because it doesn't need to be unanimous.
That would be incredibly vindictive.
That's not how I roll. That's good.
Thank you. It is not nice at all.
You can follow Matt on the Twitters at Matt Greenspan and he's going to make predictions that says bitcoin's going to be somewhere between $100 and $1 billion. I would I'm going to bet that he's completely accurate about that. Matt, thanks for, uh, for coming on again and sharing with us, man.
We appreciate it.
Thanks a lot for having me, guys. It's been a pleasure.
Okay. I'm not triggered anymore.
That was good. That's so good.
I'm so grateful to hear about that.
I'm always worried.
I'm de trigger fied.
You know, we can do what's be kind of fun. I noticed, like, on some of these interviews, it's like we should take a wide background image, slice it in two, and then whenever we're there, it's going to it would look like like if we had that, that, that earth you have behind you. And we had like one big earth, like a big rainbow, like we could both be on both sides of it and it would look seamless, would look, oh.
Well, you're the artist.
Make us a cool look.
Hey, we can do one of those. I'll. I'll try to find where those extra wide ones chopping in half. You get one, I get the other. Just make sure we're in the right place and they can look cool.
I'm feeling extra wide these days.
That's good. Well, you're.
About to go on a big cruise, so you're going to come back probably wider. If you don't pay attention to that.
That may or may not be true. Yep. Spring vacation. Oh, it's a buffet again.
Everybody, time for the buffet.
Uh, we got a lot of things going on, gang. A lot of great content coming your way. Thank you for sticking with us. And please tell a friend about the Bad crypto podcast. You know, convert a phone. I do this. People are like, Oh, what show do you host? And I tell them we're like, Oh, I should listen to that. I say, Well, hand me your phone. And I take it and I go to their podcast player and I either follow or subscribe depending upon what they're using to listen and just convert them.
Follow, follow us on the Bad crypto podcast on the YouTubes. That's good. We like subscribers over there. That's really helpful. And a lot of our stuff is becoming more visual. So if you're a visual person, you know, tune in that way. It's kind of fun. You can, especially if you've got a smart TV. We were doing a lot of cool stuff with that, so.
It's because we get more attractive the older we get.
So I'll tell you what, I'm debonair as fuck. I don't know if you know that or not.
Suave.
Af, suave and debonair.
And then.
I would say Joel is pretty.
Swath. I'm bad.
That is a 1980s flex term right there.
No, you was your boyfriend was was like me swaps.
And then and somebody else redid that song later but it was swaps so mix a lot it's an early sir makes a lot song before baby got back matter of fact.
Okay you know.
Things I did not know and now I did. Now I do know. And now you know. And I know that you're going to do something for us. And you're going.
To stay back. Stay bad. Stay swaps. Stay swaps. Oh.
Who's bad?
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