Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mark Mos Show, where we're talking about the decentralized Revolution. We're talking about where politics, finance and technology come together. Of course, it's always technology that changes the world, and that technology is bitcoin, the decentralized revolution.
You know.
I like to bring to you some interesting guests. You don't have to listen to me talk all the time, and that's what I have today. I'm joined by VJ Boya Patti. He's the author of the Polish Case for Bitcoin and now previously with Google, now a senior engineer. Was Swan a big friend of the show for sure. Anyway, VJ, thanks for joining me.
Thanks Mom, it's so good to see you again.
Now, I kind of cut you off before we jumped in here because I was explaining to you how my Twitter account got hacked. So about almost three months ago, I got what happened is I guess now that I've looked into it, they got my email address, put it into like some like spambot thing or whatever, and all of a sudden, my email just started getting flooded with emails, like thousands subscribed me to like thousands of like newsletters, and so then I figured they're going to try to hide something.
There was like a password to reset for Twitter.
I was able to get in and reset my password, but they set up a two FA divide two second factor authentication and I've probably filled out thirty requests from on Twitter. And interesting enough, just before I stopped, my good friend George Gammon also had the same thing happened to him, and he has an attorney that filed a suit against Twitter because they're still billing us and we can't get access, and they're responding to the suit. They're going back and forth with the attorney, but they just
won't reset the stupid two FA. I mean, it's like the most like just reset the two FA anyway. So you were going to tell me that something that you've done to protect your privacy.
Yeah, it's actually. One thing I've noticed is that I've had friends and family who use services where they get built on this regular cadence and then for whatever reason, something happens with that service. They didn't like it any more, like in your case, you got hacked. They continue to get charged and they don't feel like there's any way they can get out of it because they the service has their credit card information and they just continue to
build and there's no way to stop it. I really like and recommend this service called privacy dot com, which allows you to create sort of disposable credit cards on the fly, and you connect it to your bank account, and it's kind of this protective layer between your bank
account and the merchant that you're using. And so you generate a temporary credit card, and you know, when you sign up for a service like Twitter, you put in your temporary credit card number that they give you, and you have full control over how that credit card can be used. You can say the maximum amount that can be charged is ten dollars per month, or per year, or per transaction. If you ever don't like the service, you can say I don't want you can delete the card.
You can set the maximum amount that can be charged down to one dollar, for instance. And this has been for me great protection because our feat world is broken in so many ways that we need things like this to protect us, because once companies can get our bank account details or a credit card details, they can do huge damage to us. And unfortunately you're having this experience with it actually well known and well established company. It's not a scamm or it's just a well known company
that just happens to not be helping you. And another example of this, my wife signed up for twenty four hour Fitness and I'm sure many people in America know about this company that do this kind of marketing scam to get you on board, and she just couldn't unsubscribe and they were charging us like fifty dollars a month. So that motivated me to find this service, privacy dot com. I'm not affiliated with them, not an investor or anything like that. It's just one of those services I've had
such a great experience with. And whenever I hear friends and family tell me about this their experiences where they feel like they're getting scammed or they feel like they're getting charged and they can't stop it, I'm like, well you should try this out. Once you try it out, you want everyone to go back because it gives you that level of control where if they have your credit card information, you can really limit the damage they can do to you.
All right, well, I'm definitely gonna check that out. For sure, I could at least stop my charge.
Maybe they'd maybe they'd want me more.
If they won't get my money, I'll have to see you said that the Fiat world is broken in so many ways. I would agree with that. There's probably no end to the amount of conversations we can have in all the ways it was broken. There was a video
clip that I saw sort of going viral. Jordan Peterson just had this big conference, our conference going out in London, I think it was this last week, and the guy from trigonometry, Constantine I think his name is, had like a pretty a talk that went pretty viral, and in the end he said, he said, hey, and a message
to all you conservatives. You're not gonna be able to get the youth of vote for your conservative ways trying a conservaive system that no longer works for them in a world where they can't afford to buy a house, they can't afford.
To buy a car. You know, the system is no longer working. How are they going to vote for you?
And I thought about that, and I was thinking about maybe doing a video on that, just that it's not a I mean, I guess it sort of is a political thing. But the reason why it's not working for these people they can't afford a house or car is the Fiat money system that's broken.
You agree with that, Yeah, absolutely, And this is we've seen the culmination of a pure fiat money system that's only really existed for let's say fifty years. About fifty years, I mean, the US was on a gold standard. And some people think that US went off the gold standard in nineteen thirty three when Franklin Roosevelt confiscated people's gold from the bank vaults, but really the US went off the gold standard fully in nineteen seventy one. I believe
it was when Nixon closed the gold window. So the goldstand is still acted as an anchor on the credit expansion that was happening, and once that anchor was completely detached, the credit expansion went crazy. So we've been living this experiment for about fifty years, and I think we're seeing the full effects now. And yeah, it really has pervasive impact throughout society. It really increases people's time preference and in terms of the people who are growing up today
and who are moving into the workforce. This is really the first generation in I don't know, like two hundred years which can confidently say we're not doing as well as our parents, We're actually doing worse than our parents. That's the first time that's really happened. Every generation prior to us could say confidently, I'm living a better lifestyle than my parents and my grandparents. And that's a really sad statement I think about.
I hadn't really know about that, But what it makes sense as you say that, So which ways do you think it's a less quality of life?
I mean people used to, you know, have this expectation that when they left the house, you get a job and afford a house, right, That's that's one basic thing they could afford to have a family. There are a lot of people now who don't believe they can have a family. They're parts of parts of the country where people just don't think they's it's a possibility for them anymore. Like you look at the major cities on the West
coast or on the East coast too. If you're living in one of those places, it's just if you're living a regular middle class lifestyle, or even if you have a good job. Let's say two engineers at Google, for instance, who are earning good salaries. A lot of people like that, married who have two good salaries, can't afford to buy a home in the Bay Area. That's crazy now there's some local factors involved as well. It's not just the fact that we've been dealing with fifty years of uncontrolled
credit expansion and inflation. Local factors involved, such as bad policies that they don't let people build more in the Bay Area. But as a general rule, it's a really strange thing that people can no longer expect to have a lifestyle better than their parents, given how much technology has improved over time, and given how much we've advanced in so many different aspects of society, that this expectation
shouldn't continue into the future. We need to sort of reflect on what is going on, what is broken in our current system that's making this new reality come about.
Yeah, yeah, I think when you talk about that, there's other factors such as like building regulations and things like that. But a lot of the problems with building regulations and so forth is also because of the broken fiat money system that we have, as well as you know, overreaching government and misaligned incentives and things like that. If you're just tuning in you're listening to the Mark Mass Show,
I'm sitting down with VJ. Boya Patty, the author of the Bullish Case for Bitcoin senior engineer at Swan Bitcoin. We're talking about bitcoin, we're talking about privacy, we're talking about the vac currency, and we are going to talk about the bull case and a lot more. Don't go away, We'll be right back after a short break.
All right, Welcome back.
If you're just tuning in, you're listening to the Mark Moss Show, sitting down with Vja Boya Potty, the author of the Bullish Case for Bitcoin and the senior engineer at Swan Bitcoin. A great place to get bitcoin if you're trying to get something, you might want to after this conversation, now, j we were just talking about sort of like this fiat money system being broken, and like I said, we could sit here and talk about that
all day. The one thing I was thinking though, as you were saying, how it's sort of changed people's time preference, and that one is a whole topic and itself, but I always think back to Vladimir Lenin was quoted saying that the best way to destroy capitalism is to debouch the currency through inflation, and through inflation you can arbitrarily steal.
And then he said until all relation is lost, until the best way to get rich is through gambling and theft, and today it sort of seems like that could never be more true, right, I mean, everyone's just out for gambling and theft. It's like yolo into some whatever options trade or crypto trade or whatever it may be, or like theft. Maybe not out well in the Bay Area, outright theft and maybe there's a lot of grift and graph going on.
Yeah, I think that's true. We lived through this period recently which is sort of unprecedented in history, where we had fifteen years of negative real interest rates. The Federal Reserve held interest rates at zero, and there's positive inflation during that period, so you really being punished for saving. If you kept money in cash or dollar denominated assets,
you generally punished for doing that. And so this creates this massive incentive to go out there and go further out on the risk curve and find assets that are almost chasing momentum, essentially trying to find those assets that are going up just because there's this inflation and the money that exists has to go and find safety outside of a regular bank account, for instance. So they ran this experiment for fifteen years and we kind of saw
the consequence as inflation started the inflation. Genie really got out of the bottle during the pandemic, and they're trying to put it back in the bottle. And so now we're actually back to what would be considered fairly normal historically, where you have real interest rates, real positive interest rates. If you are a saver and you put your money in the bank, you will get a real return, which
is treasury absolutely right. Sorry, you're correct. If you put it in short term dollar denominated bond securities, then you're going to get a real rate of return, and this has not been true for most of the last fifteen years. This has a beneficial effect in that it encourages people to save and it changes the way they plan for the future as well. Unfortunately, I think this is going
to be very short lived experiment. I think the FED is going to go back to what their default behavior has been for the last better part of the last two decades because the FIAT system can't survive like this. It can't survive because fundamentally, the US government has this massive amount of debt that needs to be serviced, and with interest rates as high as they are. While that's good for society as a whole, the US government can't continue to function servicing a debt that large one hundred
and approaching one hundred and forty percent. So the Federal Reserve, being a part of the US government, will eventually cave in because they will see that the government can't function like this and the system as a whole can't function. So we're going to go back to negative real interest rates. The reason the FED is doing what it's doing right now is they need to establish some credibility. They said that they have an inflation of target of two percent.
They could say they could change their mind to say, actually, our inflation type, we're changing our inflation target. We're going to make it three percent or five percent. But that's what banana republics do. And the FED really has only one weapon, and that weapon is their credibility that they're able to keep inflation under control because people believe that they will stick to their word and when they say they're going to bring interest rates down to two percent,
they will. I don't think they can though. I don't think they can sustainably do that because they've let the inflation genie out of the bottle and they have this huge constraint of if they really try and kill inflation. They make it so that the US debt is not serviceable anymore. And if they have to choose between these two things, make it so the US government cannot service its debt anymore, which basically implodes the government, or letting
the inflation genie out of the bottle. They're going to go with the former. That's what central banks have done for you know, the entire history of central banking. It's just a matter of time.
Yeah, And they have no choice. I mean, to your point, they lose credibility. I would say they've already lost credibility. Maybe most people for some reason haven't lost credibility with them. But now they told this inflation was transitory, this and that that obviously proved to be wrong. But I think there's a couple of big problems they have. One is that they can only try to basically limit consumer spending
so they can make you and eyebroke. But unfortunately, at this point now the government, the fiscal spending is overpowering the consumer spending, so they can only crush.
Us so much.
They got to stop the government spending like a drunken sailor. And the US fiscal deficit was a trillion dollars last quarter, and now the numbers came out, they're projecting one point five trillion for the next two quarters.
Yeah, that's the problem exactly right. And the US government and the population as a whole is in a really difficult place for fixing this problem. We need fiscal responsibility, but we have such unprecedented polarization in the country. We can't agree to anything. So it's very hard to come together and say things like, hey, can we make a compromise on your side and my side and get this sort of fiscal picture under control. It's just not going
to happen. And so I think what we can expect given the political reality we live in, is that the fiscal picture is going to continue to get worse. The government is going to rack up more and more deficits. At some point, there is a breaking point when the debt is actually not serviceable, when the amount of money that the US is bringing through tax revenue is not enough to pay interest on the debt. That's when you get the moment of crisis, which is what do we do.
Do we cut spending, do we raise taxes that's also politically very infeasible, or do we go for the last option, which almost all countries go for in the end, which is the easiest option because it's the politically easiest option. Let's just inflate the money supply. Let's reduce the debt by making it so that the amount of money the denominator is much much greater, and then then servicing the debts no problem, because it's always money sloshing around. Yep,
that's what's going to happen. And the question is what is the breaking point for the US government. What percentage of GDP does it become unserviceable?
Well, they got to get the GDP up.
I just have a couple of years of double triple digitiflation and that GDP number goes up, right, So I mean they can get that number down. I mean that's the most likely scenario, this financial repression playbook. You know that they ran in the forties, the Israel ran in the eighties. The IMF put out a white paper in twenty fifteen called Liquidation of Government Debt, which is basically spelling that out.
If the debt to GDP is an equation.
If we can't get the debt down, let's just get the GDP up And so It's like, hey, we're selling iPhones for a thousand bucks. If we sell ten of them, that's ten thousand. But if we take the inflation pushes the price of two thousand, and we still sell ten iPhones, now it's two thousand.
Right, It's a magic trick. And now too.
I think maybe the last piece that I want to get into is you have this. Maybe you said contrary and take as to this bitcoin bull market, but I'll say this, I gotta take a quick break. But you know, can the Fed admit defeat and change the target. It's going to be very difficult for them to do that and maintain credibility unless we have a war. Jannet Allen says, we can afford to fight two wars at the same time,
and so maybe that could be the scapegoat. If you're just tune in, you're listening to the Mark Mass Show. I'm sitting down with VJ. Boya Potty, the author of the Bullish Case for Bitcoin, and a scene engineer at Swan Bitcoin. We'll be back with more in a minute after a very short break.
Don't go away, We're back.
All right, Welcome back. If you just tune in, you're listening to the Mark Maas Show, sitting down with VJ. Boya Potty, the author of the bullish case for Bitcoin, and the senior engineer over at Swan Bitcoin, and we're kind of going through, I don't know what we'll call it, the unwinnable situation that the US is in, and not just the US, every every government, every central bank is sort of in this same scenario.
And I kind of threw out at the end.
You know, if the Fed FED doesn't want to lose credibility, they're trying to regain credibility by getting back to that two percent target unless they can come up with some good reason scapegoat as to why they can't do that, potentially like multiple wars. You kind of shook your head and discussed when I said that, So if you want to address that, you can.
But then you had said that you think that.
Maybe this bull market in bitcoin has already started, which might be controversial for some who think that there's this massive macro picture that's going to crash everything down.
So maybe explain that to me.
Yeah, you know, one thing, this prior ballmarket was really shortened or curtailed. I think, you know, people have put out a lot of reasons, but I think the main reason was that the FED ended this unprecedented period of fifteen years of zero interest rates. And I think when there are positive real interest rates in the market, that's generally bad for competing monetary goods. And the classic example
of this is gold. You go back to the nineteen seventies when gold was going through this decade long bullmarket and parabolic moving gold very similar to one of bitcoin's bull cycles. The graphs actually look very similar. These hype
cycles are almost identical. Then Paul Volker, the central banker at the time, really was determined to get inflation under control and set interest rates close to twenty percent, I believe, and had very real high, positive real interest rates, so you would earn money, you would earn real value by keeping money in the bank. That's generally a period of time which is bad for competing monetary goods, and it was really bad for gold. It was bad for gold
for two decades. So I think the same thing happened with bitcoin at the end of the ball market. How long can the FED go along with this, I think that's that's that's an open question, but I think about to.
That point real quick though, So if you look at like Bitcoin's history, which isn't super long, so it's not like, you know, super conclusive, I guess. But if you look at like the Having market data, for example, we can see that on every Having, the peak of bitcoin is eighteen months after the Having.
So so far that's been true.
And I, you know, going into this this last event after the Having, knowing that as eighteen months, but we'd all thought maybe the price at bitcoin would be you know, one hundred and fifty thousand or wherever it was going to top out. Right then, you know, I have Michael Sailor in the back of my ear going all your cycles are broken, and you see the big institutional adoption
coming in, and so maybe it would be higher. And so then as we get to this November date, this eighteen months after the Having cycle, I remember thinking this can't be it now, this this cycle is going to be broken at this point because the price should be so much higher. And right on cube, right at eighteen months after the Having cycle is when the price dropped. And yes, it was with the Fed's announcement that they
were going to start, you know, raising rates. Now, they didn't actually raise rates until they announced it in November. They didn't actually raise my thing until January after, but just the announcement was nothing to do with the market.
But anyway, is that just coincidence?
Do you think that it just happened to be right at the eighteen month mark or you know, was it or is it more of the having cycle?
Yeah, you know, I had the conversation about this with Stephen Levera on his podcast as well. I think there are two factors that play. There's the internal bitcoin market dynamic, and I actually believe the harving is a real driver of price movement. I think the harving will be again because the market in the band market has to find a plateau where there's an equilibrium between supply and demand, and we have We've had that equilibrium essentially for the
last several months. But then the halving comes along, and it really is this huge supply shock whether the supply is halved. So the amount of fiat money that needs to come into the bitcoin market to maintain the current price is something like forty million dollars a day, and then suddenly you only need half of that. But the demand the people who are buying bitcoin, that demand doesn't halve.
It's still that same level, and that supply shock makes demand above supply and it starts moving the price up, and then it starts on itself, and then you get the madness of crowds phenomena. So I think there's that internal market dynamic. But I think bitcoin now is big enough that it's a macro asset and it is affected by macro factors like interest rates, So I think both of those things are at play. I would probably say
the one hundred and eighty days is a coincidence. My strong belief is that it was really interest rate lead. I think the FED hurt all risk assets, all interest rate sensitive assets, and I think bitcoin is an interest rate sensitive asset. But bitcoin also has this internal market dynamic which you're talking about, which is the four year harving cycle. And I think that's still very powerful, and
I think it's going to trigger the next ballmarket. But for me, it's not just the fact that we're approaching the harving. It's just looking at the price action of bitcoin. That price action tells a story, and as telling a story that bad news is not hurting bitcoin in a bear market, good news does not help. In a bull market, bad news does not hurt and so when you see
that price action, you know we're entering a bullmarket. And there's been you know, plenty of news that would normally knock bitcoin down, but the price keeps going up higher and higher and higher. Then there's other factors as well well that could be propelling it, including the potential approval of an ETF, which I think will be a good market catalyst, but it's undeniable. You look at the price action a bitcoin right now, it looks like it's ready for a big bull run.
Yeah. One chart that I've been amazed by. You you mentioned real rates earlier, and you can look at charts with inverted real rates and it's like lockstep with gold. I mean, since the last couple decades, gold and real rates have just moved almost in lockstep. And now there's this massive divergent So there's something going on there that tells us something right, And then you look at other
factors like this narrative shift, if you will. Larry Fink, the you know, largest asset manager in the world from black Rock, came out and said people are running to bitcoin for safety. Like to hear him come out and say that, And and so I think that's why gold is diverging, right. I think people are starting to realize and maybe not the United States, but the rest of the world is like, we don't want us treasury, so we can see central banks are net sellers of treasuries and net buyers of gold,
and so it's causing this divergence. But I think it's also bitcoin and gold sort of moving in that way. Just to kind of go back, so back to the hiding cycle. If the if the Fed would have announced they were going to raise rates a month later, then this whole eighteen month after the having would have been broken that that that'd be your that'd have been your base case.
Yeah. I honestly believe if the Fed had maintained zero interest rates, say yea longa, we would have probably hit one hundred thousand. That's that's my belief.
Yeah, yeah, all right, So do you think it did maintain it's it's a having cycle kind of structure. Do you think we're back into this having cycle structure again?
Now? Like so now we're about a year and a half before or.
I think so. And it's really remarkable you look at these price charts for each cycle and you overlay them and they're they're eerily similar in terms of timing from halving, just as you use the harving as the anchor point. And Satoshi did something incredible like choosing this system where we had a four year halving. You could almost imagine that this four year halving, if it had been some other number, it might not have had the same impact.
It's almost like four years is enough for the pain to be forgotten of the previous cycle and the enthusiasm to rebuild units. He almost tapped into some human psychology here to know what the ideal time was for creating these supply shocks. If they had been every six months or so, I think it wouldn't have had the same impact as it does.
Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't really think about it like that.
But you know, typically I started my career in real estate investing, and typically the old ad edge was, you know, don't buy a home unless you plan to hold it for at least five years.
So you have sort of like these.
Five year you know, these longer maybe eight year business cycles, and so to your point, there's sort of long enough. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but from a psychological standpoint, pretty interesting. I want to come back, and we've got to take a very quick break. If you're just tuning in, you're listening to the Markmos Show talking with VJ.
Boya Potty.
I want to talk about when we come back, maybe this bullish case for bitcoin. So we talked about sort of this US demand, but I want to talk about do you really think this ETF is a big but enough catalyst or do we need something bigger from the rest of the world. So I want to ask you those questions when we come back. We'll talk about that after a very short break.
Don't go away, We'll be right back.
All right, Welcome back. If you're just tune in and you're listening to the Markmas Show. Sitting down with VJ. Boya Potty, the author of the Bolish Case for Bitcoin and.
A senior engineer over at Swan Bitcoin, and you know, VJ.
We were talking about sort of this this Bolish case for bitcoin, sort of looking at price action and having cycles and things like that. I know a lot of people are putting a lot of weight onto this ETF getting approved. There's some controversy there from like real bitcoiners.
I'm a little fearful of potentially this sort of shakedown or this event that seems to be happening where you have like Elizabeth Warren going on this rampage, specifically going on what she's calling non custodial wallets, brand new technological innovations. She's calling it of non custodial wallets. And in the UK they just passed a bill that they could seize
or freeze your crypto accounts without due process. And so the only way they could do that is again if you had your bitcoin on a custodial exchange, right, So it seems like there's this attack vector coming from both Elizabeth Warren and from the UK on custing your own bitcoin, and at the same time you have this ETF narrative, and so it's like, hey, we could buy it on an ETF or maybe keep it in coinbase, but you can't hold it yourself.
So there's that. And then I want to kind of frame.
This up even more where you know, we just had the fifteenth anniversary of the Bitcoin White Paper, and Satoshi in the white paper talked about that we no longer require trust. To use the word trust fourteen times in the white paper. I think it's like the third most cited word, and we don't need to use these trusted third parties, these trusted intermediaries, right, And so it seems like bitcoin is made for enemies, or we might say
for adversary right. So like if I'm being sanctioned by the Tally ban or by North Korea, we can go peer to peer, and so it almost needs this adversarial.
Opponent to really have value. Right.
So like in America, like the dollar works pretty good, most people don't understand why we need new money. But if you go to Lebanon or whatever, Peru or Argentina, they already know why they need new money, right, So it almost seems like we need this adversarial lens more for the bowl case. So I don't know, curious your take on that.
That's a really interesting question.
You know.
The one time I felt worried about bitcoin was during the block size walls, when bitcoin did go through this very adversarial struggle where the most powerful companies and powerful mind and some of the biggest holders tried to change Bitcoin into something that would be I think, much less beneficial to the world that we're trying to change it into essentially a piece of software rather than this immutable unchangeable institution that allows people to transfer value with complete
confidence that they can't be censored. They were trying to change it, essentially into what a theoreum is today. It's just kind of this plaything for engineers who can just tinkle with the interest rate or sorry, tinkle with the money supply and change it at will and roll back transactions if they want to. When Bitcoin got through that, my confidence grew to the point where I don't worry
about Bitcoin anymore. I don't worry that you could have a fairly large concentration of ownership in an ETF, for instance, because what I think would happen is if they tried to use that to control the network in any way, the people who really believe in bitcoin's principles and it's true value to the world would just say, we don't want to be part of this system anymore. We will continue running the original Bitcoin that's unchangeable, and you can
go off and do your own thing. If you want to change the money supply and you want to add inflation to bitcoin, you go and do that. And I think what I believe I discovered during the block size wars is that value will accrue to that immutable, unchangeable institution, because that's something that's truly unique in the world. And value follows that. Value looks for savings, looks for a vehicle that cannot be manipulated or changed. It naturally flows into vehicles like that, so.
And scarce assets.
Into scarce assets exactly. So I think it might be used as an attack vector in the future, but I'm much less worried about it than i I would have been if the block size war hadn't happened, because really that was I think the peak threat for Bitcoin, because the most powerful companies in the space really banded together to try and change Bitcoin, and they were not able to And I think that was a testament to Bitcoin's resilience and this underlying belief and philosophy in the ecosystem
that it's something that should not be changed. And of course the market incentives and the economics of it people want that. And it was really it was a real revelation to see that the people who were trying to change Bitcoin, despite all the reasons that they gave, ultimately the economics were too powerful for them. They decided that they wanted to stay with the system that was unchangeable, and that's where they put their capital, despite saying that
their system was better. So it bitcoin sort of reveals the truth of what real money is just on its own.
Yeah.
I did this whole segment earlier talking about the green curtain crumbling, this green movement from evs and renewables and all this, And so after the Great Financial Crash, there was no ESG funds that were open. Then Blackrock and State Streets started opening these ESG funds. They were projecting they had twenty trillion and under under management, they were projecting fifty trillion by twenty twenty five. And now all
the funds are crumbling. Blackrocks shut most of them down, and it's because they're all losing money, so they're not making sense. And so as you were talking about that, I was thinking about it, where if the value accruised to the scarce asset, if the value accruised to what can't be changed, the Wall Street the institutions can try to co opt it, but they just end up with an ethereum. But if the value accruised to the non changeable chain, then all that money is going to want
to come back. If they change it, then they didn't care about the attributes. What they cared about was the alpha they could make. But I guess the question I was asking more was about, do you think like this chasing money narrative, this ETF narrative, is.
Enough to be the bowl case?
Meaning like, so what black Rock is going to send the signal and every financial advisor in the United States is going to sit down with their client and go, hey, now you can invest into the ZTF through your stock account, right, but they're going to look at two years of data and go, dang, I would have lost money if I held this for a couple of years. So maybe it's not the strongest compelling case if I'm only buying it for the money. Well, the last two years of data doesn't really look that good.
Right.
We saw like SpaceX had to liquidate a huge position at a loss, right for example. And maybe what I was saying is the bowl case might be as we have more need for it as we see the EU crack down on pushing. They just announced they're moving to the next stage of their CBDC, for example. So as we get these CBDCs, as we get these digital IDs put into place, and we have to adopt it.
I guess that's what I was asking something like that.
Yeah. Yeah, I think what the ETF does is it really expands the liquidity channel into bitcoin, and ultimately Bitcoin's price level is determined by how much liquidity goes into bitcoin.
I think what you're saying is correct. There will be these other events that will trigger people's desire for bitcoin, but the fact that the liquidity channel will increase substantially, I think will also mean that those flow of funds can be much larger than they are now, So it will be much much easier for people to invest, say their IRA or their four oh one K money into bitcoin when they haven't when they have access to an ETF,
it's still not particularly easy to do that. So I think the flow of funds will actually be fairly substantial with an ETF approval, and I think it will have a meaningful impact on the price. But I don't think that's alan the driver. I think it's going to be a combination of multiple factors. That it will be the
ETF approval and the increasing liquidity channel. It's going to be the harving, and I think it's going to also be the FED pivoting at some point in the next couple of years, or maybe even in the next year, when they realize that the FIAT system as a whole cannot survive with positive real interest rates. And when that happens, I think we've started to see the cracks emerge in the economy, certainly in some parts of the economy which
are in a deep depression right now. The real estate market is in probably the worst depression it's been in the last century. Like the housing market is completely frozen. The number of transactions that are happening is the lowest level in a very, very long time. So we have depression in some parts of the economy, but some parts of the economy are still kind of booming because of all the inflation that came out in twenty twenty, so
the service sector. But I think as the cracks continue to spread to other parts of the economy, the FED is going to be forced to pivot. So we have a confluence. I think for what will be a huge ballmarket, we have the harving, we'll have an ETF approval. I'm fairly confident that that's going to happen sometime by January, and we're going to have the FED pivoting. I think that's going to really be three key drivers for bitcoin's ballmarket this cycle.
Man, I love it.
You're just tune in here listening to the Mark mass Show. I've been sitting down with VJ. Boya Potty. He's the author of the book The Bullish Case for Bitcoin and a senior engineer over at Swan Bitcoin.
But that's what we got. Hopefully enjoyed this conversation.
Let me know. Hitmib on social media at one Mark Moss and let me know what you think. Leave a comment if you're listening on the podcast, a review. I'd really appreciate it.
And that's what I got. Thanks so much for listening.