The way we think about Bitcoin is as a portion of the total capital in the world. It is an accountability system. That's what money is at its core. A better accountability system than any fiat type of system, meaning this is what I say it's worth, right? It has value because I say it is and I'm in control. It's ultimately backed by the threat of violence. That's what fiat is. Conversely, this is a technology that's backed by code. And the reason I think that's so interesting.
America is the number one country in the world for immigration. We have more immigrants from abroad than the next four largest countries combined. Why is America such a popular place for people to come? Well, it's because of stability of property rights and process. Okay? Well, don't you want your money to be stable and have consistent property rights and consistent process? Like of all the things you want to have consistent process, it's your money. Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. The Bitcoin time chain is 861738 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Two days episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today, that guest is Bill Miller IV. Bill is the chief investment officer of Miller Value Partners and he's a Bitcoiner. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you are watching or listening.
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It's already feeling like it's been ages since Nashville. It feels like this distant fever dream. I don't know. I think that's just me with the newborn still, but yeah, it's strange. What a great week though, huh? It was. It was. And again, just very, very different than past ones. The political fanfare was something else. Unpressing that. Yeah. And you know, I've gone back. I've talked with a good number of people about this.
Like, oh, you know, obviously there's a lot of Bitcoiners who are super pro Trump. There's a smaller number, I would say, who are surprisingly super pro Kamala. But whatever your political inclinations, there were Democrats and Republicans and independents and the former president of the United States there at this nerd conference for magic internet money. Like that's pretty cool. I don't know. Two. Whatever you slice. And it is. I mean, come on.
It just vying for a community's attention and very much deservedly so. It does seem that we've kind of we've I don't think we've, you know, crossed the chasm in the in the actual, you know, adoption curve sense. Like I think we're very much still, you know, in that early adopter phase or the no man's land kind of in between. But it does feel like in a different way, we've crossed the chasm in terms of the shifting over to nwindow.
Like, even though there aren't really that many Bitcoiners out there yet, there's a lot more awareness of it. It's hard to like it's hard to not know or at least have heard of Bitcoin at this point, especially if you live in the United States, like, and you're in a Western privileged country. It's pretty hard to ignore that Bitcoin exists at this point. I would agree.
I still am baffled by how many people I feel like personally, at least, are still asleep at the wheel and just not paying any attention to what's going on. And that just the strides that the technology has made since its release is nothing short of incredible. And there's still so many people that just don't own it. And again, or asleep at the wheel. And I think at the end of the day, it's a it's going to turn out to be a hole in their portfolios just like it has for the past 15 years.
So I'm optimistic that more people will come along as the technology continues to grow, you know, as we both know, everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. But it is still so early. I still I struggle to think about all the implications of the technology longer term. I forget if I talked about this with you at the conference, I know I talked about it with a handful of people, but you almost can't have it happen too quickly.
Like everyone talks about this hyper Bitcoinization and Bitcoin eating the world and everyone using Bitcoin eventually. I mean, you cannot have that shift too early. It just has enormous implications for cost of capital, pricing of assets, all kinds of things. And so it is making strides very gradually, you know, best performing asset over the past decade and a half, yet still so much more to go at only one and a half trillion market cap in a world of a quadrillion dollars of capital.
So, you know, everything else is priced in a depreciating fiat currency where depreciation is a required part of the system. It's not a required part of, in fact, quite the opposite. It's an appreciating system when you work through the math and the psychology and what's going on.
So, still enormously optimistic and think it has so much farther to go, you know, as investors, you know, we were very enthused to see similar scientific come out earlier this year and say like, this is actually going to be a meaningful part of our strategy here. And they found sailors gospel and that you can have a shrinking business if you have a growing balance sheet. And so I think that is a challenge of a lot of companies actually.
And it's hopefully something that more and more companies will see and end up doing as these companies that adopt Bitcoin treasury strategies hopefully outperform like Micro Strategy has and we think will continue to. So, you know, we're really optimistic. I'm optimistic in general too, just about the future. There's so much doom and gloom out there in the world. And yet you hang around with Bitcoiners and you see just this unbridled optimism. Yes, tempered with realism.
You know, there's a lot of messed up shit going on in the world. That's there's a lot of people struggling. But there's hope for the future. And I think for a lot of people, if you don't have that thing that you're running toward, if you're only running away from something else, if you're only focused on trying to outpace the, you know, the monster chasing you, the world looks pretty dark.
But when you have a light at the end of the tunnel, it makes things a lot more bearable and actually quite exciting because you realize, ah, yeah, there's a lot of messed up stuff happening and that genuinely sucks. But wow, what an amazing time to be alive because we do have these brighter days ahead. If you know, it starts at the personal level at the family level, you know, take care of take care of that first.
But, you know, this is something that doesn't care who you are, Bitcoin is ambivalent to all of that. And that's a that's a powerful thing. It doesn't, you know, doesn't know how to discriminate. It just doesn't care. It just keeps on tick tock next block. It's a beautiful thing. And, you know, Bill, I wanted to, before we kind of diving, I've got a number of things I want to pick your brain on.
I think you sit in a very interesting seat to be able to comment on just a lot of the stuff we see going on in the in the Bitcoin and kind of more, you know, macro environment. So for folks that don't know you, can you just start us off? Who are you? How did you get here today to be, you know, I mean, you were you were speaking at the Bitcoin conference that the panel with with Eric Weiss was, you know, billionaire capital allocators.
It's quite a quite a hefty title to be taking into a conference for these. Because can you give people the background and just how you how you got here to be doing this? Sure. So I think that the title billionaire capital allocators is a little aggressive. But, you know, from a Bitcoin perspective, I started buying Bitcoin personally. I believe it was around 2013.
Wow. And it was I just had read in a newspaper about this weird technology that people were using to do weird things and its value had gone from zero to a couple hundred dollars based on nothing they said. And so I said, geez, if it can go from zero to 100 based on nothing, go up a lot higher for nothing. So I got to start speculating, just get involved and whatever I can afford to lose. Let's see, let's get it into this thing.
So the speculator and you got excited, of course, just because it was interesting and it was a question of invest and investigate and that it was unique, different and something that I just felt like I had to get involved in and then learn more about. So obviously I put some money in and I remember shipping my ID electronically to an exchange in Eastern Europe thinking I was either going to get my identity stolen or all of these funds were never going to be seen again or some combo of the two.
Luckily, neither of those things happened and it wound up working out really well. But after I bought it, I started doing more work on the technology, read the white paper, thought about the fundamental problem it addresses and what the longer term implications could be and how much more massive they could have been from that perspective at least in time. In 2015, so you asked me to talk more about myself, Walker. We run, I run an investment firm called Miller Value Partners.
I bought my portion of the business from my dad when he stepped back a couple years ago, a year or two ago. And now we just run a variety of investment products or registered investment advisor and we take a value oriented approach to everything that we do. And so one of the big frameworks we always rely on is what's the addressable market and then what's this technology's current market and how much bigger could it be and what's the rationale for that and how likely is that to happen.
And we took that approach back in 2013 and 2014. I think that same approach is exactly how we should look at it today. It is how we look at it today and we talked about that framework as a share of the world's total capital. Despite being a much more secure, robust governance and accountability system for accounting for who has what, than any system we have right now. And it's such a small portion of the total world, I mean of the world's capital.
So that's still how we think about it and still think it has many, many times its current upside over the next decade, 100 years plus. And it's a very big part of our personal situation and it's part of our funds and something that we're heavily invested and excited about. So has Miller Value Partners, you said you got in at a personal level, started learning about Bitcoin kind of going down that rabbit hole in 2013. Was Miller Value Partners a couple years behind that?
As you mentioned, you guys do have exposure to Bitcoin through your funds as well. That's right. So as mutual funds, it's very hard to invest in these types of technologies, right? They're risky, unregulated, all these other things, right? So we were buying it personally and then when Sailor came out in 20 and said, this is what he's doing, we started buying it around then, I believe, in the funds as well.
So yeah, you get investors early as you can on behalf of your investors relative to what's feasible. And right now, this is all public information, but as a share of our ETF, which has daily transparency, combination of similar scientific and micro strategy is a mid to high single digit percentage of that ETF. And so your investment thesis is you approach this from a value investing perspective, but can you, for people who may say, well, what the heck does value investing mean?
Of course, you want to find things that are valuable to invest in. Can you kind of break that down? And then how does that value investing thesis, how does that really kind of go hand in hand with Bitcoin? Because you're coming from a very trad-fi world. Clearly, there have been a lot of firms who have not taken your very kind of forward thinking approach and are maybe now starting out the black rocks of the world have gotten in.
They're starting to pay attention, but until then, they were, you know, that's magic internet money. Right. So value investors try to find assets that are trading at substantial discounts to where they may trade in a few years because people don't necessarily appreciate those technologies or assets potential. Generally speaking, that framework has been applied to stocks. So one stock trades at 10 times earnings, another might trade at 50 times earnings.
Generally speaking, the traditional value investor likes to buy lower multiple things or things that have expectations for their eventual potential to generate cash flows that aren't fully appreciated in the stock price. Now, you could have a value investor that thinks Nvidia at 50 times earnings is a good value just because it's going to grow at, call it, they think it's going to grow at 100% for two decades, right? Something like that.
But you know, generally speaking, we're looking for gaps between current market valuations and where we think things could be in a few years. And the way we think about Bitcoin is as a portion of the total capital in the world, it is an accountability system. That's what money is at its core. It's a better accountability system than any fiat type of system, meaning this is what this, this is how this is what I say it's worth, right?
It has value because I say it is and I'm in control and it's ultimately backed by the threat of violence. That's what fiat is. Conversely, this is a technology that's backed by code. And the reason I think that's so interesting. So America is the number one country in the world for immigration. We have more immigrants from abroad than the next four largest countries combined. Why is America such a popular place for people to come? Well, it's because of stability of property rights and process.
Okay. Well, don't you want your money to be stable and have consistent property rights and consistent process? Like of all the things you want to have consistent process, it's your money, right? And so the process we have right now is not consistent in any way, shape, or form changes all sorts of, every four years there's a new president, there's all sorts of changing power dynamics and people are effectively trying to curry votes by trying to shift who gets the marginal money, right?
Oh, here's your tax cut. Here's your free handout. So there's always a way to shift that ledger and the politicians that are getting elected are trying to make promises, effectively economic promises, to shift that ledger. And well, maybe there's, historically speaking at least there wasn't a better way because somebody ultimately had to control that ledger.
Now with the computing power, technology, and thanks to Satoshi's white paper, we now actually have a system that is automated from a property rights perspective. We've never had that. There is no other type of, from the other reason people always say, oh, what about other cryptos? Why can't we come up with another one that's going to be better than Bitcoin?
Well, the reality is you have so much computing power securing the Bitcoin network that any other sort of proof of work network at this point couldn't arise out of just ambiguity and have that sort of ecosystem just jump up around it. And that's something that the causal ambiguity of Bitcoin is so unique that that will never occur again. And it has this first mover dominant advantage and this technology and energy advantage that it just can't be matched now.
And so you look at that, you look at the stability of property rights tied to the automation of money that was here to for never possible. And you go, wow, it's only one and a half trillion in the world's like a quadrillion dollars a capital. But I mean, that sounds pretty good to me, especially when you look at the historical track record of fiat currencies being, you know, if you run out the clock long enough, they all go to zero. And that may be what's happening here.
You know, Bitcoin is demonetizing arbitrary process. And that's that's its promise to me. And that's why it's so exciting. So we're still enormously optimistic on it. It's probably going to be, you know, the volatility will continue. I think it comes down over time. I think the rate of return comes down over time. But you know, it's, I don't, I hate to call it inevitable, but that's sort of my personal feeling about it.
It's one of the reasons I feel comfortable taking like a significant amount of time away from Bitcoin and not even looking at the price from time to time, just because it's, you know, it's like it may bounce around, but you know, in the longer term, I love it. Well, you know, the nice thing is that recently, Bitcoin's pretty much just been 58 K. So you don't even have to check. It's like, what's the, what's the fiat price of 58 K? I just don't even need to look.
I mean, today we're up a few thousand, whatever, but you know, it'll be right back to 58 K. I'm sure. Right. You know, I think you made such a great point in there just about these, the arbitrary nature of these fiat systems, that it is just, I mean, you know, from the latin, you know, let it be or let it be done, right? It's literally just because I said so. And again, because I can enforce you needing to pay taxes in this fiat under the threat of violence.
And you think about the Federal Reserve, for example, and they've got meetings, what, today and tomorrow, I think. And these, this is literally a bunch of guys and gals getting together behind closed doors. And yeah, we'll get the meeting minutes later, but deciding what the price of money is amongst this little group of people. And yeah, they, you know, they printed a bunch. I mean, they always print, right?
What, like the compound annual growth rate of M2 is something like high sixes or low sevens per year, depending on how you calculate it, where you start. But they raised interest rates at historically fast levels. Presumably, you know, they're going to have to start easing again and, you know, lowering those rates and really, you know, quote, firing up the money printer. But it all just seems so honestly insane when you look at that next to Bitcoin.
It seems like in a, you know, few years, maybe a couple of generations, people are going to look back and say, oh my God, you let the price of money be determined by just this group of unelected people. That's kind of, that's kind of nuts. When you had this other system that existed that was not, you know, in any way corruptible by a small group of unelected bureaucrats, like, what were you guys thinking? It just seems insane. That's exactly right. Completely agree. It goes back to stability.
So the Fed's trying to engineer a stable outcome, right? In terms of stable prices across the economy, stable full output. Well, you know, if we had a stable process, a more stable process, that might be a more natural outcome. So I'm excited about where we're headed. I am too. And, you know, just back to your Bitcoin story also. Was there a specific kind of aha moment for you? Was it just, was it reading the white paper? Like is that what did it for you? Was it some other part of this?
Was it just realizing that, wow, this went from zero to 200? Who knows where it's going to go from here? Or was there something else in there? It was a combination of things. It's also being a believer in the power of markets to allocate capital efficiently and just seeing that market cap, the dollars come in, the just sheer scale of the, the scalability of the technology is just incredible. But the energy intensity of it is so genius, right?
In that it requires energy to create new units instead of just waving a pen in the air and saying, oh no, this is where the units are now. And this is who gets these, right? And you know, people make it out to be like some sort of libertarian fantasy land. But when you actually look at the numbers, you were bringing up the conference earlier of the political leanings of the Bitcoin community. It's actually, I don't think it's massively skewed as much as people tend to make it out to be.
Not, not at all. And I just had, I don't know if you've seen the work that Troy Cross has published recently, just they did a pretty. I'll send it to you after this. I recently had them on here, but they did a great study, basically a survey. And I think they had 3,500 or 4,000 people. It was a really well done survey, you know, but they went into this assuming that the political inclinations of people who hold Bitcoin would be just as you said, kind of this much more libertarian leaning.
And it was not the case. It turned out that very much the, the makeup of Bitcoin holders just looks like the makeup of America. And this survey was focused on America specifically, you know, American citizens. But that's kind of a shocking thing, I think, for a lot of people, especially, you know, perhaps for politicians where they think, oh, this is some fringe niche thing. I don't need to worry about these people. They're not going to vote for me anyway. So, you know, screw them.
No, it's these, in the words of Troy Cross, Bitcoiners are everywhere. They're in every party. They're in, you know, every, you know, every district. This is, and according to their, their survey, it's something like one. And seven Americans hold Bitcoin. Now there may be some, you know, who knows, maybe that's not exactly right.
But that number to me was actually shockingly high, just based on personal conversations I have with friends who are, you know, not quite in the depths of the rabbit hole yet. But that's also very heartening.
I think it means there are a lot of folks out there just going about their day who aren't on, you know, Bitcoin Twitter or on Noster and they're just, you know, say, have a little bit of Bitcoin or maybe they're DCAing, who knows, but they have Bitcoin and they're all over the place and you can't pin down a specific, this is what a Bitcoin or is. This is what a Bitcoin or, you know, believes.
Like to me, a Bitcoin or just somebody who holds Bitcoin like that, you know, you hold Bitcoin, you're a Bitcoin. And we can, we can get into various, you know, scales of that, but that's what it comes down to, right? Do you hold a superior form of money? And do you want more? Maybe, maybe that is actually the real thing. Not only do you hold it, but do you want more? And are you doing everything you can to create value to try and accrue more yourself?
And you know, we, you mentioned, you know, micro strategy, a similar scientific kind of following their playbook. We've now got a number of meta planet in Japan. There were a number of other ones that I think actually announced at the Bitcoin conference that they were, had picked up a Bitcoin strategy, you know, seemingly companies that have, you know, nothing to do with Bitcoin, but they're seeing this micro strategy playbook and they're realizing, Oh, wow, there's something here.
Do you think we start, is this a trickle that becomes a flood? Do you think it's, or it's only going to hit a certain, you know, if we're talking about public companies specifically, does it only make its way into a certain number of public companies balance sheets? Or is this one of those things where eventually you'll have to hold Bitcoin as a publicly traded company? I love the Lin Alden line, not necessarily in reference to this topic, but you know, nothing stops this train.
And people are going to see publicly traded companies that adopt a Bitcoin treasury strategy. I believe, I think if there's a high likelihood at least people are going to see companies that adopt this strategy outperform and they're going to say, how can I outperform? Maybe I should start doing that. I mean, you know, it's actually a little more widespread even than just micro strategy and similar scientific. So we own a company and have for a long, long time called Alliance Resource Partners.
So they're coal miner and founder, largely founder control. I think the founders and management team own something like 30% of the company, but they recently decided they're going to use some of their stranded coal energy, mind energy to mine Bitcoin. And so they're just mining it and holding it and sitting on it. And so, you know, this is a, we've always said it's going to be a founder led revolution and that's how it's shaping up.
But there are companies out there doing it and they're going to, I think, you know, you think about like, there's, I think a misplaced idea that coal is this forever shrinking situation. It's not, but the perception around the terminal value of something like that, you know, when you say, okay, I'm going to put my money into Bitcoin. It totally changes the perception, at least I think, of the longterm value and potential of that asset.
I think it's interesting what you said too, but just this, this is kind of a founder led revolution. Micro strategy being a key example of that, you know, Michael Saylor founder CEO for, I mean, he was like the longest or one of the longest running CEOs, I mean, that we've had, right? I mean, he was there for 30 years. Now he's the chairman. I mean, quite a, quite a tenure. But I mean, is that what it takes?
You know, for example, you compare that to, let's say the, the apples or the Googles who have ungodly amounts of cash sitting around incredible acts, the best access to capital in the world. But they're, they're more bureaucratic. I mean, they're bigger. It's, it's not, it's, it's their neck on the line if they screw up, but if it goes well, maybe the incentives aren't there to really, I mean, is that kind of what it comes down to?
Like you have to have somebody who is so invested that is a founder that is, you know, at least a significant stakeholder in that business to be able to take that leap because it's a, it's a big personal risk if, you know, something, if, if Bitcoin dies tomorrow, you know. But incentives are a powerful thing.
And if you think about traditional finance or these large bureaucratic organizations, most people have a boss who have a boss who has another boss and at some point in that chain, someone's not going to like Bitcoin or, or think it's stupid or, and so if, if the person decides to make an investment in Bitcoin and it goes well, they get a pat on the back, maybe a begrudging pat on the back and if it doesn't go well, they get fired.
So you need people that have taken the time to understand the technology that have the fortitude to be able to hold it and, you know, withstand criticism to the extent there's downside, which there inevitably will be with a volatile asset that has gone up as much as Bitcoin has. So yeah, it will be a fact, it will continue to be a founder led revolution.
But the thing that I think is so interesting about the ecosystem and the scalability of it is that none of the bear cases that you could have come up with that people still use today, none of those have been a productive perspective on the asset. And I don't think there's any reason that any of them will start to be a productive view on the asset just because governments are going to print.
The US government has to inflate assets at three, at minimum 3%, 4%, whatever the mortgage rate is out there right now, the kind of the weighted average mortgage rate. I mean, houses have to go up faster than that, right, or people are going broke because that's their main asset. So you know, the overall economy has to inflate, whereas at a much faster rate than the Bitcoin supplies going up.
And that's true globally around the world, maybe not to the same extent as it is in the US with housing, but all of these, most of these currencies are defined, are designed to just continue printing. And that's what they've done for thousands of years, so it's not stopping. The beauty of Bitcoin is that you don't need to be a professional investor to get exposure to it. Literally, anyone can start saving the value of their time and energy in Bitcoin.
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I don't know about you, but it feels to me that we're at this kind of calm before the storm type of moment. You know, the 58k meme has been very powerful. We've been chugging along, you know, kind of range bound there for a while. And it seems to me that with, first of all, we've got an election coming up in the U.S. and all around the world, you know, every four years, give or take the place you're at, there are elections. And potential for some shifts in power.
But you mentioned the U.S. specifically and how we basically, we have to print. And you look at the interest expense and the debt, which is now what, bigger than our military budget. I mean, it's this insane amount. And they basically have no choice, right? I mean, that's fair to say they have to inflate because they need to be able to inflate away the debt.
Like that's the only way that you get through this, unless you, the darker scenario is maybe you go to war in a large scale war and you have sort of a reset of things. I mean, is there another path out of this for the U.S., but for governments more generally? But I mean, obviously the U.S. is the biggest bully at the playground. I mean, they could crash the economy, but that's not good for their job. Right. So, I don't think there is. Your point on war is a good one.
Not, I mean, it's a fair point. It's one that I'm certainly increasingly concerned about. When you see the propaganda and the headlines and the, you know, some of the international relations getting worse. It's not, it's not enjoyable to watch. So who knows where that winds up. But you know, you hope, you hope the world moves, continues to move in the right direction, you know, and it gets better and new technologies like Bitcoin come out and help demonetize violence.
That's just a super interesting, powerful nature of the technology. We touched on it earlier about how fiat's tied to effectively force and violence at the end of the day, whereas this is just tied to a collective belief in code and what code and what energy is worth. And you know, I think that's a lot easier for people to get behind than threatening people with violence. But you know, some people, at the end of the day, there's room for both and probably a requirement for both.
I just think the relative importance of the two in society is going to shift meaningfully over the next 20 years or so. I mean, I certainly hope so anyway. You know, and it's an interesting thing, you know, you just talked about belief in markets earlier. And it's a fairly simple thing when you look at it that a market is going to function or can only function when there is voluntary cooperation, right?
It can still function, I guess, to a different degree when there is coercion, but it's not going to function as efficiently. It purely can't because it goes back to incentives. Any time you have any sort of government intervention, you know, the idea of price controls has been floated, which I just find absurd that we're floating ideas in 2024 that you can open up just about any history book and find some great examples of how that has failed time and time again.
But when there is intervention in the market, you're going to have misplaced incentives and you're going to have people not acting rationally, not acting as they normally would. And it seems to me that, you know, Bitcoin is kind of this this great measuring stick for reality, right? It's hard to measure things in fiat. And you see this, you see this in the prices at the grocery store changing, you see this in prices of housing changing, you see this in the cost of capital changing.
It's a very poor measuring stick, especially, you know, it was the only one we kind of had for a while. Gold has been around and gold's been a pretty good measuring stick, but also is not practical in a digital information age. And again, it seems that Bitcoin becomes just very, very obvious, but then it's clearly non obvious still to the majority of people in the United States and around the world.
And I'm curious from from your perspective, because you obviously, you know, you're from this tradfi world, you understand this world, you talk with people who, you know, live and breathe this traditional finance world. Do you have a lot of folks who are who are asking you, you know, colleagues, you know, or contemporaries who may be curious, you know, okay, I know you, you know, Bill, I know you guys are deep into this Bitcoin thing. Can you tell me more?
Is there, is there, are you seeing more of an appetite or is there not so much? I don't get asked that directly all that often, but you know, I certainly follow Twitter views and analytics and what people are interested in reading about. And at least on my personal profile, people care much more about reading about my Bitcoin thoughts than my market thoughts. So that's encouraging, I think, that there's so many people that are interested in hearing about it.
I hope they continue to buy it and adopt it and make it an automated part of their, you know, making an automated part of their lifestyle and economics. But you know, it's, it's, when I go to use the word inevitable, you, how long do you have to see this thing continue to outperform and scale and eat into traditional arbitrary measuring sticks until you say, I got to buy some of this and make this part of my regular plan.
I mean, it's just, it keeps going and there's, there's no reason that it will slow down when you think through the system and what would need for happen, what would need to happen for a sustained Bitcoin, you know, decline in price. And the reality is you'd have to have people start dropping out of the community, people that have been long-term buyers, just all of a sudden come up with some reason not to own it, which when you look at its lead and like, what would cause that?
I mean, so it's funny because everyone goes back to the diamond statement on Satoshi. Um, coming off the screen and printing more. Uh, reset about it. Yeah. Yeah. Good old Jane. What was he at for that? It was it, uh, was it the world economic for him? Or he was, yeah. But the point, I guess the point he's trying to make is an understandable one in that when you're dealing with a new technology, traditional finance guys, I mean, like, I'm not a computer scientist.
I haven't gone in and validated the open source stuff, but I get comfortable with it by seeing the tens of thousands of people at these Bitcoin conferences and these miners spending a jillions of dollars on it and the people working at Coinbase. You just look at the probabilistic nature of stuff. All of these technologists, I'm not, again, I'm not a comp sci guy, but everyone that has looked at it as a comp sci guy, no one has called BS on it ever. Right.
And anyone that has has been shot down and the thing keeps continuing to scale. So like, that's how I get comfortable with it. You know, some people have different epistemic thresholds, but I understand that sort of, everyone's waiting for the rug pole after 15 years, but you go, okay, what rug pole is coming after 15 years and this, the nature of the way this thing scaled and the, the extent of the people involved in it now, right? Like it'd be, I mean, okay, here's one.
Maybe Michael sailor comes out and says, I'm so totally. So she watched me move these coins, but that, you know, I'll do it online. Like that would be the only thing that would potentially crash it as if Satoshi was unmasked and you know, I mean, even, well, if Michael sailor was Satoshi, I think that'd be awesome. Maybe he is. Who knows. That would have been a quite a long con on his part. That's right. But no, I think you're right.
That's basically, if you have to think about failure cases or, you know, cataclysmic events, that would be one is, you know, okay, Satoshi comes out of the woodwork and does this. Again, I, I mean, I don't know who Satoshi is. None of us, none of us do, no matter how much some people may claim. Thankfully, we can legally now say, you know, Craig Wright is a fraud, which is lovely. After all the hell he put so many people through.
But yeah, you know, that's a, okay, that's a, you know, an outside, there's a, maybe a non-zero chance, you know, you couldn't put it at zero. But it's at least fairly, fairly low. And as you said, we're 15 years in here. But I think at the same time, a lot of people see this as, even though it's, wow, 15 years is a long time.
You know, we say, you know, we're still early though, but a lot of people, I think from the outside looking in, especially maybe if they've been following Bitcoin for a few years, let's say since, even since 2020, when it, you know, it crashed down to whatever 3500 during the, that COVID crash. But now they see it sitting at, you know, 58K, 58K forever, but they see it sitting there and they think, oh, well, how can, you know, I missed it. I missed it. Like clearly we're not early.
What do you, what do you say to those types of people? I mean, do you still firmly believe like, yes, we are still early? Yes, there is still a massive amount of appreciation to come for, for measuring this thing in fiat. Oh, firmly. Yes. And you made a good point, which is, okay, there is a non, there's a non-zero chance that it goes to zero. Okay. That's, you know, logically true. However, there's also a non-zero chance that it goes up another 5, 10, 50 times or whatever. Right. So, all right.
If you can make many, many, many times your money, but you can only lose one times your money, right. Maybe we should put a small portion of our money into this thing, knowing that it's possible it goes to zero, but the reality is, if it does what it's done for the past 15 years, and that, that track record adoption continues, massive addressable market for, for good accounting and digital accountability, you're going to do great.
So like it's an allocation thing and depending on your own personal comfort level, but to not own any is just betting against an incredibly powerful trend that's showing no signs of slowing and potentially signs of acceleration. So, yeah, I think it becomes increasingly irresponsible to not at least own a little bit of Bitcoin. And there's also the, it's so easy now to acquire it for the average person too.
You've got all, you know, many different types of exchanges where you can set up an automatic buy like Jen just literally said it and forget it, you know, invest the amount that a, you know, a Starbucks coffee would cost you per day. And like that's, that's pretty doable for most people. So and, you know, if you want to buy peer to peer, you can do that as well, a little bit trickier, but you know, you can also try to earn it there. There's a lot of ways to acquire Bitcoin.
And I think it's going to be perhaps become increasingly difficult to acquire Bitcoin at any sort of reasonable fiat price in these coming years. I mean, we see also, we talked about companies earlier, but you've got nation state adoption happening at least at some level. El Salvador being the key example, but the kingdom of Bhutan as well.
They've got something like $780 million worth of Bitcoin that they've generated through mining because they've got a lot of hydropower and they've just been, they were quietly mining Bitcoin. I think it came out maybe a year or two ago that they were doing this, but even then it was pretty quiet news, but I just saw recently a couple of days ago again, these stories started to come up again.
I think they've made some of their holdings public, but that's a, you know, that's a very large non-zero amount. And so I wonder too, if the same sort of founder led approach that happens at the corporate level where those founder led companies become the first ones to jump into Bitcoin, if you have a similar, you know, analog there in the nation state world, like it's, it must be smaller nation states first, like El Salvador, like the kingdom of Bhutan.
I don't know, and I'm curious too, just what your thoughts on that, but then also, do you think there are any real, like, are there legs underneath this Bitcoin strategic reserve that, you know, Kennedy talked about, Trump talked about, Lummis put a bill on the floor for it. She actually did the work there, so shout out to her for putting out some real proof of work. But, you know, what do you think about that?
Do you think some of these things are just Lummis aside, because she's actually putting this out there, but as far as campaign promises go, do you think these things actually materialize? Is this something that's actually ultimately beneficial to Bitcoin, or are there some negative externalities to that level of, you know, United States nation state adoption that maybe people aren't thinking about? No, greater adoption for the asset is good for Bitcoin.
You know, whether that's nation states, companies, individuals, greater access to it's a good thing, greater adoption of it, and greater demonetization of arbitrary policy is a good thing. You know, to your question on nation states, that's a really interesting idea that I hadn't considered before.
It certainly seems like it's been the case so far, but I bet if you look at what's the total dollar amount of Bitcoin held by the U.S. right now, it's probably greater than what, how much do you say Bhutan has? I want to say it's like 780 million. It's for, you know, it's not a crazy amount. I mean, certainly not if we're talking, yeah, that's a lot of corn, but I mean, the United States still has what, like 200,000 Bitcoin. So I believe so.
I think they still have those from, what is the Silk Road coins? They've got, oh, they've got Bitfinex coins as well, some of which belong to Bitfinex, obviously, but who knows if they'll give those back, but the United States has a lot of Bitcoin. Right. Significant amount. Well, that's an interesting point just to be aware of right there, right, is that, look, here's the, like, even though we own it, we're still selling it, right?
And every sale has been an idiotic move and it's lost the United States money. And hopefully someday someone is, there's a name tied to whoever's deciding to make these sales and when and why they're doing it. We don't know. Now it's just the government selling Bitcoin. We don't know. No one will put a name on it though, will it? Which is interesting too. So we didn't need to stop selling it first for sure, but it is good to see other countries buying it. We'll get there.
I mean, Germany certainly seems to have, I mean, they managed to really sell the recent bottom, which was impressive. The memes that came out of that were good too. It's one thing I really love about Bitcoiners is, like, they will never waste an opportunity to make a good meme out of something. I think that's a superpower. Oh, absolutely. Bitcoin has the best memers and content producers on the planet. I mean, it's awesome. And it's ultimately like, what is a meme?
A meme is a way to disseminate information very efficiently in an incredibly high density format. And I think that's, you know, going forward, as Bitcoiners not only gain, well, Bitcoiners are gaining in economic power. I think that ability to also be very effective at disseminating information combined with that economic power increasing means that the Bitcoin community becomes an even more powerful political force.
So you've already got former president's presidential candidates at the Bitcoin conference. Like, I mean, that's hard to top, but I think we'll manage somehow. And I think there's a new generation of leaders coming out of this too, which gives me a lot of hope. People who really care and who are going to be financially independent to the point where they can, you know, I mean, it's the idea of, you know, fuck you money, right? It's like, yeah, do the right thing. What a concept.
I think you're right. Something else I wanted to ask you about just on more, I guess, kind of a personal level, because you've talked about just wealth preservation just across generations and kind of the necessity for that. As a new father now, it's something I'm thinking of more and more. How do you think about this? How does Bitcoin fit into that? Is this kind of a unique tool that we've come across now for wealth preservation that obviously we didn't have before?
But what, you know, I guess I'd say, you know, what advice do you have for a new dad that is really thinking about these things now? And it's very real because, you know, I've got the little guy right upstairs. Wow. It's home. So I don't want to be on the hook for giving you financial advice, but I can say that. Not financial advice. Just, just how do you think about it? Maybe it's a better way to say.
Yeah. Bitcoin within that context, I think it's an enormously powerful tool for transferring wealth across generations and time and space. So, you know, something I think about personally in my portfolio, I've said this publicly a lot, but I try to sell anything if I need proceeds to eat or spend or whatever.
I try to sell anything but my Bitcoin, just because I still believe that if you can tolerate the volatility that over the next three to five years, it's likely to be, continue to be the best performing asset. And so I want that to be a very meaningful part of my personal situation. I advocate going full maxi. I don't know about that, you know, like full, full maxi.
And of course, somebody advocated that to me six, seven years ago and I said, eh, that seems a little aggressive and obviously it would have been the right thing to do. So, you know, you got to manage risk the way you feel comfortable with it. But I feel very good owning a lot of Bitcoin and as a portion of my total picture. And so, you know, I'm always looking for more exposure to it. I look for ways, active ways to generate more fiat to then convert into Bitcoin if possible.
So it's a calling almost. And you know, I think there's, I think there's more of us to be created and come along. So like for my kids, Roblox is realer than dollars to them, you know, so think about that. I mean, and that is kind of just magic internet money. But hey, it matters to them, right? You can only buy skins and swords and stuff with it, but you know, imagine you can do with some Bitcoin. At least they don't enforce that digital currency with violence though.
We can, you know, so Roblox. And they'll kick off the platform if you do something wrong with it. Well, I guess that's its own form of perhaps censorship. But you know, yeah, maybe we'll see them integrate some lightning payments at some point. I don't know if we're there yet, but who knows. That would be cool.
Another thing that I wanted just on kind of more of the personal side, you've talked to a lot about just being very careful about choosing where to live and how this is actually a quite an important decision in terms of wealth accumulation. And I think a lot of perhaps a lot of Bitcoiners struggle with this idea of, OK, especially right now interest rates are pretty high.
Really don't want to take out a mortgage to buy a house, but then are kind of also looking in this, you know, three to five or 10 year time horizon thinking, well, yeah, but you know, maybe I don't I don't want to buy a house for its investment quality, but I do want to buy it because I want a place to live and raise a family. And that's that's important to me.
And that's something I would, you know, I would spend Bitcoin on, especially if Bitcoin, you know, continues repricing real estate assets. But how do you look at location? I mean, because again, even if you you're not buying it, you know, this isn't your second or third house. This is your, you know, let's say your forever home.
So yeah, maybe you don't care as much about the if the value changes, but it certainly is, I guess, better to pick a good location than a bad one in terms of you'd rather have that wealth go up. You'd rather have it lose less value versus Bitcoin than lose more value versus Bitcoin. So how do you think about that? Yeah, that was one of my most popular tweets ever, Walker.
I think it got like almost a million views or something, but it was a thread on thinking about thinking more carefully about where you live. It's just not something most people think about, right? It's like, here's my job. Here's where I grew up here, you know, and it tends to fall out of other factors of your life.
But if one of your goals is to accumulate more options and spending money over the next 20 to 30 years, there's actually been a massive discrepancy if you look across the U.S. in terms of home price appreciation. Some areas have grown at close to double digits and others have been roughly flat.
And so if you look at that HPA over the time during which you'll own the home and pay the mortgage, that discrepancy is massive in terms of accumulating wealth when that's your primary source of cash being put towards something every single month. So that HPA matters. And so the whole point of that tweet was to say, okay, let's look back over the past, you know, 10 to 20 years and see what sort of places have done well and why.
And maybe you should, if you can, and have some flexibility, just think about that if, you know, you're not completely satisfied with where you live or crime's high or you don't like the political regime or whatever. So that is something I do encourage people to think very carefully about is where you live and what that's likely to do over the next 10 to 20 years and why.
And so one of the conclusions, at least I came to when I looked across the dataset was there's a handful of things that tend to drive, or that the faster growing, faster home price appreciation areas tend to have in common, one of which is good weather. And there's, you know, people want to live in temperate climates. I like to go outside and see the sunshine, have access to nature 365 days a year.
So that's one good governance is another, you know, sensible business friendly climate, attraction to arts and culture. So are there educational institutions in the area? Are there museums? Are there, is there theater? Are there, you know, people doing these types of things together? There's sports. And then is there just access to travel? So can you get out at their infrastructure? Is there an airport?
And those types of things, you put them all together and there's, I mean, you could probably pull up right now, where are they building airports right now? I mean, start looking there. That's a good place to start looking for somewhere to live. But yeah, just the whole point of that was to be more thoughtful about where you live and then integrating that with the Bitcoin perspective. Well, first of all, mortgage rates are high. You point that out. They've come down a lot over the past year.
One of the great things about being a borrower in the home market is that if rates continue to go down, you can always refi and take advantage of that, right? So you know, you're taking on a high cost now. But if you can afford that cost now and rates and or inflation continue to move lower, you could potentially refi. So that's important to consider. And if they move higher and inflation picks up, you're doing well because you bought the house.
But you know, that's one of those game theory things where I think you probably better off owning the house. And even if we have another sort of cataclysmic capital event and housing in the next five to 10 years, like it's a game theory thing. They've got to bail everyone out. Everyone's got to everyone. At the end of the day, people's labor is worth something, right? And houses are a labor intensive process. So it's very hard to devalue people's labor.
And that's another reason why, you know, this train is not stopping just because you need to just got to keep going higher. So that's what goes into a house. Owning a house is a good thing. But the capital discipline there is what's really powerful and that every single month you have to put your money into this thing, right? So it's like paying yourself first. Same goes for Bitcoin. Encourage people to do that consistently and pay themselves first.
And I think that's a, that will go down as some of the best advice that people could possibly follow, not financial advice. Consider it monetary advice, you know, to choose a better money because it really is, I think, kind of Bitcoin doesn't write. I don't think you fully get Bitcoin until you start saving in it and start really viewing that not as, you know, yeah, I can start out as speculation, but it's not a get rich quick scheme.
You know, it's a very volatile in the quick time period thing. It's a, you know, save wealth slowly scheme, accumulate wealth. And I think that it's so powerful once you, you know, I only got in in 2020 when I realized, oh my gosh, they're printing ungodly amounts of money and locking everybody down and stock market just crashed. And now it's, you know, going back up and, you know, just going gangbusters, what the heck is going on here?
What was that Bitcoin thing I heard about way back when maybe I should look at that again. But it's powerful when you start just, as you said, having that discipline to say, you know, okay, no, I'm going to pay myself first. I'm going to use this as my savings instrument because saving in dollars, you know, yeah, it's good to have a little bit of cash, you know, in fiat dollars, but that's a bad way to store wealth for any meaningful period of time.
And I think that we're seeing this play out at the individual level, at the corporate level, at the, at the nation state level to a certain extent as well. But I'm curious what you think as far as, you know, kind of the next wave of adoption, I don't think, you know, where does it come from? Does it come from one of, you know, does it come from the corporations? Does it come from the nation states?
Does it come from a bunch of retail FOMO that, you know, once Bitcoin starts, you know, breaking all time highs again, is it a combination of all these, you know, because it feels like right now we're kind of again at this just chugging along 58K forever, but, but it's not forever, you know, at a certain point things change and they might change pretty drastically pretty quickly. But have you thought about that at all? Where do you think that next kind of wave comes from?
Well, it can come from anywhere. It's the beauty of it, right? I mean, if you just look at, I think pensions and endowments are something like 50 trillion or something combined. And so if they were to collectively say I want 10% in, it's 5 trillion in demand on top of one and a half trillion. So that's a, that's three times on top of what we already have. So I mean, that's a, that's a nice move right there. But you know, there's a lot of different places it could come from.
I think corporate adoption is going to continue to move the needle. It'll keep ticking along. It's just, it's slow and steady, but slow and steady, meaningful moves. And if you look at even the bond market with El Salvador's bonds, it's been one of the best performing bonds out there, micro strategies bonds, bonds tied to Bitcoin have done really, really well. So if regulators don't get in the way of it, maybe you continue to see things issue capital to, you know, put into Bitcoin. Who knows?
And maybe those things continue to outperform like micro strategy has and, and it just, it just keeps picking up steam. So, and, you know, one of the stats I saw and keep coming back to this was a couple months ago, but it's directionally still right. This was before the ETFs, but there were, at that time, there were only like, you know, like 10 million wallets that had over $1,000 in Bitcoin.
And there's how many billion people in the world are, you know, and how many people can afford to have more than $1,000 in Bitcoin, right? A lot more than 10 million and should. So a lot more to go here. Yeah. I know it's just talking about numbers. It's kind of mind blowing. What is there's something like, like 25 million millionaires in the U S alone. And I think, you know, like 50 million worldwide, give her, give her take. Let's ballpark, right? I think there's 21 million Bitcoin.
And it's like, okay, we know that, you know, several million of those are lost forever, you know, beyond even Satoshi's coins. I think there's a lot more lost coins that people probably don't even realize are lost yet, but they will at a certain point. So we're dealing with maybe, you know, 15 to 16, 17 million total coins that are ever going to be available. And 90, what 95% or 94% are already completely issued. They're out there floating around.
And we've got till 2140 for the last coins to, to asymptotically approach 21 million, but never quite reached there. It's kind of in again, just insane when you start thinking about it from that perspective, like not even every millionaire in the world can own a Bitcoin or even a half of a Bitcoin. And this is the only verifiably scarce thing that we have. You have gold, yes, which is, you know, takes energy to mine, but you can't possibly audit all the gold out there.
Who knows what more advanced methods will come up with for extracting gold from the sea floor or mining it from asteroids or whatever. And it can be plundered. Right. And it can be plundered. And so it's like, I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense. You know, say I was talking in the context of other cryptocurrencies, but in terms of assets in general, like there is no second best, what, what, what can you pick that is better than Bitcoin?
No. And then going back to the whole intrinsic value idea, like what is the intrinsic value of a technology that demonetizes violence? You tell me. Do you, do you believe that intrinsic value exists or what is your definition of that? Because this is something you will often see the, the Peter Schiff's of the world say, you know, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value or, you know, other people, it's got no cash flow. It's got, you know, how do you think about that?
You know, are you of the camp that the kind of the Austrian camp, you have value is subjective, intrinsic value doesn't exist. Is there a quantifiable intrinsic value or how do you position those? No, intrinsic value has to do with people's collective belief in the potential or the current value of, no, I, intrinsic, not current, the potential probabilistically implied value of the technology, right?
If you think about all things and what, what each of those characteristics is worth relative to other things that can be observed now, that's, you know, or relative to it's the measurable value of whatever benefit it brings, right? Discounted to the present. And so, you know, that is incredibly high, right? If everyone just collectively believed in Bitcoin, is it okay? I'm not gonna pay much more attention to this dollar or, or whatever. I mean, that would be awesome, right?
Imagine what the world would be like then. I mean, it's super cool. So, you know, from here to there, I think is a bumpy road, but, and I don't think by the way that we have not seen the last, the last of the governments trying to shut this thing down.
Like as it, my perspective, I'm making, I'm just thinking broadly out there and I think as it continues to gain power, like one day, there will be a day when the Fed tries to do something, enact, you know, monetary policy and the levers just aren't getting the same desired effect, right? And then people will get upset at that point in time. It's a ways off, but we get closer every day.
You know, also most of these big money step functions in money supply happen, that's, it's not necessarily gradual, it's step function over time, right? COVID, housing crisis, right? So every day that approaches, we're moving closer towards one of these step functions in money supply, right? To fill in some void or another to make sure inflation continues in a positive direction, even though deflation is a much more powerful force. So we get closer every day.
Are you, do you have any, you know, predictions for what the Fed is actually going to do here coming into out of their next, you know, this round of meetings they're having now? Are you, and does that meaningfully impact your investment thesis, either for Bitcoin in the short term or for other assets that you're invested in either personally or through Miller Value Partners? Good question. We necessarily change the portfolio relative to our prediction of what the Fed will do.
I mean, there's entire markets that are relatively efficient out there pricing the probability that Fed's going to move in one direction or another. The way we think about it is the end of the day, everyone wants the economy to grow. There's this incentive for inflation, there's an incentive for growth for people to keep their jobs, to hold stuff together, and, you know, as we discussed, there will be step functions and mess ups and it'll, it'll be, continue to be messy.
Systems increasingly well understood. But I think this week, with regard to your question, two is a better move. I think if you think about just today, there was a piece out by Nick Timmerhouse and Wall Street Journal who's very close to the Fed, pointing out that a regret minimization framework probably argues for 50, just because you don't want to keep it too high and crash stuff, whereas you much rather cut it because it's probably going to have to go lower.
Like the R star, the neutral rate of interest is probably lower than five and change. I don't know anyone that thinks it should be up here. And if you look at the economic data that have been coming in, the policies are working. I mean, the rates are high, things are slowing down. If you look at the three month, or the three last reading, chain together annualized inflation rates, as low as it's been in like four years or something, three or four years.
So the bond market now predicts, or at least the inflation break even rate over the next two years is 1.65 or 1.7 percent annualized inflation expectations. Now to some extent that's a hedging mechanism for the bond market, so it's not necessarily exactly where they think inflation is going to come out. But I mean, that's lower than I think the Fed wants over the long term. So point being, things are slowing, forward looking markets are recognizing that.
If I'm in the Fed seat, I want to get ahead of that, because right now they're saying it's a, you know, they're most likely going to cut too. But efficient markets are also saying inflation over the next two years is going to be like 1.617. So those two things are true in conjunction, right? So like you better cut two or potentially even more if you want inflation to pick up beyond that, right? So I'd be able to advocate it too.
I think they've done a relatively good job given kind of the tools at their disposal, but it's time for better systems and they are emerging and so we're excited to be part of that. You know, as we, I guess, go forward, you mentioned earlier, you know, not wanting this idea of hyperbic coinization to happen too fast. And I think people have different ideas about what hyperbic coinization means to them.
Like I, some people would say, okay, that hyperbic coinization means every fiat currency is at, you know, crashes to zero and things are really gnarly for a while. Excuse me. And then they get better and everything is, you know, bathed in a glowing orange light of the, you know, utopian Bitcoin future. And other people would say, well, hyperbic coinization is just the, you know, eventual or the kind of ongoing process of more and more adoption.
You know, it's not necessarily, it's a journey more than a destination. And you know, at least personally, I don't want to see fiat currencies around the world collapse to zero because that means an incredible amount of pain and suffering and death for untold millions or billions of people. So that's, that's something I think would be bad. But how, how do you see, I guess, Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin's kind of future state role?
Like let's, let's go out, you know, however many years you want to take it 10, 20, you know, 50 years. Is this something that is just, you know, fiat currencies do eventually go away and we have this, you know, complete hyperbic coinization or fiat currencies are kind of always there. Bits are always going to need some sort of instrument that they can play with, but Bitcoin is a better check on that, you know, just uncapped printing. I think that's where we wind up.
I think that's where we've been for 10 to 15 years. And I think that continues. And I think people that continue to allocate capital to Bitcoin end up gaining economic clout globally. You made that point earlier about, one of the reasons I think the political interest in the Bitcoin conference this year was so high is because there was huge donations from the Bitcoin community because the Bitcoin community can give huge amounts of money because they've made a lot of money on Bitcoin, right?
So, you know, that's an interesting dynamic. Though I believe longer term there is room for both fiat and Bitcoin. I think things that have obvious fixed supply, whether that's, you know, scarce waterfront property, unique art paintings, stuff like that gets priced in Bitcoin, whereas consumable goods maybe not so much or things that we have to keep churning through.
But who knows, you know, it's, it'll be an interesting dynamic interplay of asset price changes and unique, unique situation to watch moving forward for sure. Yeah, it's, you know, again, I go back to this, it's an exciting time to be alive because, you know, no matter what crazy stuff happens in the world, Bitcoin exists. And it's nice to know that that lifeboat is there for people should they take it.
And I think a lot of people, especially in the younger generations, I'm a millennial, you know, myself. But, you know, now we've got the zoomers below us. And I think there's just a lot of general apprehension about the future. And that comes from a lack of a solid foundation that they are personally standing on from a financial point of view.
They say, you know, they look at their, their boomer parents and they think, well, gosh, I'm never going to be able to afford a house and to, you know, afford kids. And, you know, I can't even afford to not have roommates right now. And so that's, you know, you can see how that's a dark position, but it's, you know, I come back to education around Bitcoin being such an important thing because the awareness is out there now, right?
Like, you know that Bitcoin exists most likely, but there's a reason that still the vast majority of people still haven't taken that step. And I'm curious what you think, you know, does this just come, does more adoption come, does crossing the chasm come from a place of just pain? Does it, you know, do people get smart by force, not by choice? Do they adopt Bitcoin because they realize that they are absolutely screwed without it?
But it only comes, you know, we don't start seeing massive waves of, let's say like retail adoption of, you know, just, you know, your uncle Jim and, you know, your cousin Timmy adopting Bitcoin until things get a lot worse in kind of the, let's say the fiat world. That's a really good question. I think people will continue to come around.
People, self-interest is a very powerful force and people are naturally curious about how to make more money, how to get ahead, how to, how do you, how to input their money to work for them, right? Pay themselves first, have a brighter shot at the future. And I think that's what Bitcoin represents.
But even more than that though, I think the collective belief in an independent standard of value whose accounting units, the accounting stick doesn't change every year is just like the coolest thing, right? I mean, it's a completely new idea that was just launched 15 years ago. It's still relatively early in the process.
A whole bunch of smart people are checking it out and innovating and using it, whether it's for their own business or personally, to get ahead and like, how are more people not just fired up about this money? It's just, I don't know. I love it and I'm excited about it and I want more and I hope more people come around to that view. But it's an intellectual curiosity, I think a lot. It's such a unique technology.
It kind of sits at the intersection of markets, money, psychology, systems engineering, sociology. I mean, it's just so interdisciplinary and it brings in so many unique people with different perspectives that it's a cool thing to be a part of and I think people will just continue to come around to it. I mean, you look at the Bitcoin, MAG, their conference numbers every year and it keep moving higher, right? So that's just, and the energy is palpable. Political candidates are now involved.
More companies are involved than ever. We're just keeping picking up speed here. I don't think there's never been a time when Bitcoin took a step back over three to six month period as there are never. I mean, it just, people keep grinding and it keeps moving forward and it's cool to be a part of. Hey, man, to that.
And last thing I would ask you is just if you've, I don't usually like to talk about price too much on this show, but because I have you here and you look at these things with much more, a lot more expertise than I do, you know, Sailor gave that presentation at the Bitcoin conference, just talking about like his bear, his neutral, his, you know, bull case over 21 years, which, you know, a great number to pick 21.
But I'm just curious more broadly, did, you know, looking at that from your perspective and what you're seeing, do you view those estimates to be pretty reasonable? Do you think that's a, you know, the methodology he was using was pretty sound? And would you kind of concur with those assessments? I would. I think they're completely sound. I actually talked about the whole framework with my dad after the conference. He concurred as well. He was also an early Bitcoiner.
He's a, you know, he was in the investment business for a long before I was far better than I have so far. And he's a huge Bitcoiner. He completely agreed with Sailor's perspective, thought he nailed it. So I think we're directionally in the same place. You know, more near term, you know, I think we hit a new all time high by, ooh, certainly this time next year, right?
But like, hopefully before then, but I think within the next 12 months we see an all time high, hopefully on a much more definitive basis than the last one. So that's, that's how I view it. It's funny too. I find that, you know, kind of the longer I am in Bitcoin, you get to this weird part of the place where, yeah, you're, you know, you get happy when the fiat price goes up.
But at the same time, you get a little bit sad because you think, ah, it's gonna, it's gonna come, I'm gonna get a lot less Bitcoin for these dollars, the, you know, the same amount of dollars like shucks. I hope that, you know, so that's why these 58k months are honestly just, just wonderful just to hover and right around there. It's a bit of a gift. I think we're going to look back on this and say, oh, wow, you know, remember when it was at 58k, what a, what a treat that was for stacking sats.
Yeah, I put a new daily buy on, like a month or two ago, I think so. It's a good way to do it, you know. And I love it, you know, you're, you, you DCA as well. This is a, is that just, you know, for folks, is that what you would recommend again? Not financial advice, but let's say savings techniques. Do you think DCA for the majority of people is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin or do you go more of the lump sum methodology?
I think automating the good behavior is most important in sort of hacking yourself, right? Because once that, once those dollars hit your checking or spending account, you're probably going to do something with them, right? That's not going to wind up in Bitcoin. So I, you know, I think the best thing people can do is to automate good behavior, hack themselves, take that decision-making process out of it and just have an automated situation going.
And then if there are big dislocations and they are in a position to add at those times, that's a great way to, to, you know, really lower that average cost. Yeah. Amen to that. And the last thing I would ask you, which is totally non-Bitcoin or monetary related or, but maybe it is for you, is are you reading anything right now that you're really enjoying and would recommend? Yeah, I'm always working through something interesting. So let me, let me get the exact title of this book for you.
It's called, I got to get the author, the art of living a meaningless existence, existence. And it started by this guy who started, I guess, this incredibly popular YouTube channel called something like the pursuit of wonder. Have you heard of this? No, I'm going to have to check it out. So, and he started this thing because all these publishers rejected his book. And then that got super popular. And now he's like, I got to write a book. So now he wrote a book and it takes, it takes ideas.
It's a philosophical book and it takes ideas from a variety of disciplines and just provides perspectives on life, meaning interesting, bigger questions. And I've gotten, it's a really readable book. It's super quick. So I'm enjoying that. I encourage people to think through some of those bigger questions from time to time. My dad recently gave me, earlier this year, I should say, I'm Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
I got through that and put out, I think, like my 20 or 25 favorite one-liners from that. That's a good one because you can, you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can just pick it up and highlight it, get some insight and move on. I love meditations and I always find it funny that it's basically like we're all reading through Marcus Aurelius' personal diary. He had no idea that this was going to be somehow made public.
But so, thank you to him for writing all that down because again, any of the Stoic works, either by Aurelius or I'm a big fan of Seneca, there's just so much genuinely great life advice and actionable life advice put in really simple terms. And when you start reading it, you also realize, oh my gosh, this information has just been sitting out there for 2,000 years and nobody told me this.
It's kind of like an incredible moment because you're just thinking, oh my God, why don't more people know about this? It's been there for 2,000 plus years and we're still running around like idiots. Yeah. I guess this goes back to that. We have all the access to information we could ever, the library of Alexandria times a billion in our pockets, but you have to have the initiative to go out there and look for it. That's right. And it's out there. You just got to do it.
Well, Bill, I really enjoyed chatting with you, picking your brain. Appreciate you sharing your scarce time because Bitcoin, like your time is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So I appreciate you jumping on this one. Anywhere you want to send people in particular, I'll link your social in the bio or in the show notes, and if not sending anyone anywhere, anything else you want to impart? Oh, sure.
So if you want to learn more about our firm, Miller Value Partners, just go to MillerValue.com or MillerValueFunds.com. I'm at Bill4 on Twitter, at BILFOUR. We are at Miller Value as a firm. That's my personal Twitter. And I think that's about it. I appreciate you having me on Walker. It was great to catch up. I enjoyed talking with you. I hope you, Carla, and little guy are Apollo, right? Is that his name? That's right. Yeah. He's doing great. He's bigger by the day.
He started pulling himself up on stuff now. So that's a whole new set of things. We realized very quickly. Oh, boy, we thought we could wait on the baby proofing, and we cannot wait on that any longer. So life comes at you fast, I guess, but it's beautiful. That's awesome. And congrats again. That's super cool. Thanks, Bill. Well, hey, thank you again for coming on here. Really appreciate your time. This was a blast.
And yeah, looking forward to seeing you again in the flesh, hopefully sometime soon, having a couple of beers. So nice that we can do this with the internet and separated by miles, but it's always better to do things in person. So looking forward to the next one. True. Thanks a lot, Waffer. Have a great afternoon and I look forward to catching up soon. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.
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