The Bitcoin Cheat Code | Mark Moss

Bitcoin is the cheat code. And if all you want to do is buy Bitcoin, it's the cheat code because you can outperform Wall Street and you can outperform private equity and venture capital and all those things just buying Bitcoin. But not everybody is able to buy enough Bitcoin to really get the life that they want or set up their future generations the way they want. And if you really want to build wealth, then you have to build a system around the Bitcoin to grow it faster.

Forget the hustle culture. and instead you have this asset base, the cheat code, it is the most liquid, best compounding returning asset that we have. Your income can't outrun the inflation that's coming. You cannot increase your income fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation that's coming. Wages have not kept up and they won't keep up. The only way that it will is with your assets.

man your uh your video with sailor is is uh getting some heat my twitter has been blowing up it seems it seems like did you watch it i didn't get to see the whole thing i saw so i saw people blowing up on it yeah i saw it rudimentary guess but 20 25 of the people were like danny why would you ask such stupid questions and 75 of the people were like danny you blew sailor up he got so you know, whatever, more for you, obviously. Uh, I didn't even think it was that controversial

question. I watched the, uh, I watched the intro and I watched how you set it up and I could see how that could make him antagonistic right off the bat. Why? What do you think I did wrong on that? So what happens is the, in communication, if I ask you, if, if I make a statement and then I ask you a question and you answer the question, then you automatically agree to the frame I set. Okay. So that's like a communication rule. I can't even remember exactly how I asked the question.

So you said 2025 was sort of a bad year, a disappointing year for Bitcoin. That's how you started it. So that started the conversation, but he didn't blow up on me at that point. No, I know. But it automatically kind of put this like negative tone where it's like 2025 was a pretty bad year for, I think you said called it a disappointing year for Bitcoin. I think I said Bitcoin price. I don't think you said price. I think you just said- Maybe not. Anyway, but so he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It was anything but disappointing. He went on this rant. Like we made a new all-time high in Q4. Yeah. And so then it kind of threw him on his heels. But it seemed like I ran it through AI to figure it out. And it seemed like the crux of the matter, the argument back and forth with you guys was if a company drops below one times MNAV, how does it recover? It was kind of that. So I think- You were trying to get him to answer that and he wouldn't answer it. That was actually a little later.

I think I've actually, I've not listened back. But I think the first question that set him off was me basically saying, how many treasury companies can the market sustain? Because if you look at it right now, it doesn't seem like it can sustain 200 companies. Almost all of them are trading below 1x MNAV. And it was really like, who do you think, how many people are going to be real winners out of this? He got a bit offended by that question. He's so smart. You know.

I mean, I've been to his house multiple times. I've had dinner with him three or four times. We're not friends. You know how he's very difficult to talk to? Yeah, yeah. Because his mind is like here, right? But I think maybe he's so smart and analytical that maybe you guys were like talking past each other. Yeah. I could give you a layman's version as to why there could be 10,000 of them. But if you'd like.

It was basically a thing I was most shocked about is that it was that question that set him off on me. Yeah. And I've had a few people being like, he wasn't shouting at you. it was more of like a broader audience that is like skeptical on treasury companies. I don't know. I took it like he was shouting at me during the interview.

And I was just like, I had far harder questions I wanted to ask him, but I was like, well, if that's caused a blow up, maybe I kind of wish I'd asked harder questions now. Yeah. But hindsight. How did it end? Well, so we probably, he probably shouted at me for about half an hour. And then I just tried to move it on and we got into like other stuff. Yeah, but how did it end? Like at the end? At the end of like the heated part of it.

No, like you wrapped up the interview oh you mean like after the interview it was pretty awkward that was awkward like he i got like nothing against say there's loads of people being like he shouldn't have talked to like that i don't care i've got thick skin like i don't care that he spoke to me like that it's absolutely fine like that's kind of what you expect when you go and talk to a billionaire running an incredibly

successful company like i don't mind being yelled at a bit yeah um and so at the end i was just like hey thank you like that got a little bit spicy there um and he was just like yeah kind of and then you know he's got a lot to do he was just off um and he's like a tricky person to speak to at the best of times like i don't i don't think it was i don't think there was any animosity there but i don't know maybe there was yeah i i wasn't like personally offended you would never know

there's there's always to me it always seems like it's edgy every i mean again i've had dinner with him i've had like spoken to all these times but it's like never like a friendly yeah yeah it's always like uh his brain's going like a thousand miles an hour totally if you even try to have a a piece of friendly conversation like that ain't gonna work yeah no 100 and like he's got shit to do yeah like i get it yeah um i thought it was great content though yeah people seem to really

like it's blown up controversy sells so so it was good but um i i if i can let me just answer

the question for you. So I think Bitcoiners, they take a Bitcoin view into the treasury companies and without realizing that your sound money thesis and anti-fiat and Jeff Booth don't feed the system and perpetuate it and all that, that is ideology and that's correct. And as a Bitcoin maxi, that's the view I have, but that's not the world that we live in today. So what percentage of people would you say have taken a 5% allocation to Bitcoin? What percentage of people? Yeah. 1%?

Tiny, yeah. Less than 1%. Less than 1%, maybe. And so that would be hardcore. They'd take a 5%. But even those people would have a 95% allocation to other things besides Bitcoin. So when you start asking, why would I buy a treasuring company and not Bitcoin? As a Bitcoiner, that's what we ask because Bitcoin is our hurdle rate. But 99.9% of the world doesn't ask that question. They're trying to beat CPI inflation or they're trying to beat the S&P 500. So they buy a basket of stuff, right?

So right off the bat, a Bitcoin treasury stock is not competing against Bitcoin. And Saylor told me in Prague, we had dinner. He's like, I've never targeted Bitcoiners. He's like, I've never brought a Bitcoiner in. It's not a replacement for Bitcoiners. It's not a replacement for Bitcoin and cold storage. So the question that is most commonly asked in the Bitcoin space is, why should I buy a treasure company, not Bitcoin? And the answer is you shouldn't. The answer is you shouldn't.

But they're not competing for Bitcoiners. Even the hardcore 1%ers still have 95% allocated to other stuff. So most people are not asking, will it be Bitcoin, number one? Number two, I think this is just an a priori truth. If you buy a Bitcoin and I buy a Bitcoin and Bitcoin 10Xs, who makes more money? Same. Same. If I borrow 30% LTV against my Bitcoin and buy more Bitcoin, and you don't, and it goes up 10x, who makes more money? You. Why? Because you've leveraged it. Leveraged, right?

So that's just basic math, right? So why would a Bitcoin treasury company trade for more than one times? Because they're applying operational excellence, management, and leverage, right? So when you have like a fund, a closed fund, right? And there's, by the way, why would there be more than one treasury company? There's 1,000. closed funds in the US alone. Why is there a thousand? Why isn't there just one fund?

There's a thousand. Each one has a different risk return profile. So with a closed-end fund, a lot of times we'll trade a one-time, sometimes a discount, sometimes a positive, a positive multiple. Why? Because there's a market and people trade it. But when you look at what a treasury company is more analog to would be a bank. So a bank take customer deposits, They pay a yield on the deposits and they invest the money and they make the arbitrage.

It's also very comparable to a gold mining company, a silver mining company. So I'm asset heavy, right? So I have the gold in the ground, but I don't trade at one times my gold value, my book value, because I'm an operating company. And so I'm going to get a multiple on top of my asset. So the banks are going to trade a two to three times book value, price to book.

An operating company like an oil company or a gold company would trade two to three times that because it's not just the gold in the ground. It's also the potential future value of the gold. Yep. Right. Oil is a little bit different because oil is so volatile, but like gold companies are priced a little bit different. And so if you look at a Barrett gold or a Newmont gold, for example, you'll see them like a two or three times book value because the gold will be worth more in the future.

Plus, they have the operating leverage. They can use credit equity. They can expand. They can do all types of things. So when you look at a treasury company, you go, well, they're more like that. They have an asset like gold. I believe Bitcoin is better than gold. So do you. I believe it's more explosive. So just right off the bat, they should have an increased premium than a gold company because their asset is better than oil or gold, in my opinion.

Then we have the operating efficiency. Now, some treasury companies have terrible management and they should be discounted. Some are really good and they should get a benefit. So then the operating company itself, the management, et cetera, is going to get a premium or a discount based off of that.

Okay, so that's why it would trade more than one times. This type of company should never trade one times. It's not a fund, like an ETF, right? They apply no leverage, right? It's just there's arbitrage against it, which is why the price fluctuates. But really, it's negative. Really, it should trade at a discount to NAV because they're charging fees every month. With fiat money constantly debasing, wealth preservation isn't optional.

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But isn't the difference here though, let's forget like preferreds because they changed the game a little bit. But before we had preferreds, like the way that people were going out and buying Bitcoin was just diluting the shareholders. So like there's always, there's that gravity to one, because like once it goes above one, there's more incentive for them to then dilute and buy more Bitcoin. Yeah. So I'd say one, you can't ignore the prefs because the prefs is how we get the

leverage. Yeah. No, but like there's out of the 200 plus treasury companies, there's probably only, is there only two doing preferreds so far? Three, I think. I think Strive, the Metaplanet, and MSTR, right? But that's the goal. So, well, okay. So the goal, if we just bring it back down to first principles, the goal is to have an asset and then use intelligent leverage against the asset, right? Because as we've already previously discovered, if you apply leverage, you're

going to outperform Bitcoin. So an operating company that has management, has access to credit and equity markets, and what can they do creatively to apply leverage in a safe, intelligent way? Now, PREFs are one way to do that. Convertible debt's another way. Selling stock is another way. Raising money is another way. So while there's only three companies that have gotten what I call stage two, stage one is start buying the Bitcoin. Stage two is get to that PREF leverage.

While there's only three that have gotten there so far, that's the path that everyone's hoping to be on. But there's other ways that they can lever up the Bitcoin besides PREFs. But so that's one of the questions that I think annoyed Saylor as well, is that I was basically trying to ask if preferred to change the game and what happens to the other companies. So let me explain that for you. So what happens is, again, from a Bitcoin or lens, it doesn't

really make sense. So we have to sort of get rid of that and think about it from a traditional financial market lens. What Bitcoin treasury companies are doing is they're soaking up the demand for yield. Think about that for a second. The demand for yield, that's the fixed income market. The fixed income market dwarfs the equity market, dwarfs the commodity market. The fixed income market is the biggest market in the world. Why? Because there's always a demand

for yield. Some people have assets that they want yield on, and some people need to borrow. Google will drop a bond because they need to build a new data center. So there's always a borrower, and there's always somebody that wants the yield. That's never going to change. Bitcoin is not going to change that. That doesn't change the way humans work. We have consumers and creators. Creators create more than they consume. They have savings and they're going to loan that savings out for

yield. That's the way, whether it's Bitcoin, gold, or fiat, that's how it works. So the fixed income market is the largest market in the world. Right now, the bond market has built the fixed income market on a dollar standard. What can happen now is we can build the fixed income market on a Bitcoin standard. So there's an insatiable, unquenchable desire for yield. And so we need to build the yield products. Now, to your point about microstrategy, why would there be more than

one? Microstrategy has got to cover. They got four prefs out there. That's all we need. Then why do we have 10,000 bonds in the United States? Every bond is different. Every bond is a different risk and reward profile. Every bond is a different company. Every bond is a different term. Every bond has a different yield. There's 10,000, not one. Even just US treasuries alone, there's whatever, 10 or 15 of them, right? From months to 30 years, right? So there's 10,000 bonds.

Why is there not just one bond? So when it comes to the preferreds on Bitcoin, like what strategy you've done, they've come out, let's say they're offering, is it 11% on stretch right now? And then they think they have their model where they think Bitcoin is going to go up 21% a year. So they're basically paying out 11% and they're hoping to get 21% return on the Bitcoin. So they catch capture that difference, right? Over a two decade period. Yeah. So, but that

doesn't give that much space for other companies to come out and offer preferreds. Like they can maybe offer it 12, 13, 14%. But think about what you're saying for a second. Are you going to take that risk when you could just buy strategy, which is, has the most Bitcoin by an order of magnitude and is also like fairly low leverage. Think about what you're saying. Hang on, but think, I understand. Think about what you're saying for a second though. So what you're saying is

stretch is such a good preferred. Why would anybody else like they're, they're so secure. They're so stable. They have such a good track record. Why would you buy anybody else's preferred is what you're asking, right? You know, a preferred is an equity. Most of the world can only buy commodities or I'm sorry, can buy bonds. They can't buy equities. A preferred is a stock. at equity. But most of these fixed income funds can only buy bonds. MicroStrategy doesn't have

bonds, nor is he going to create bonds. But we were talking about people coming out and competing in the preferred market. Right. Well, I think what we're talking about is treasury companies competing for the yield market, not necessarily the preferred market. Okay. So you think basically they're just going to come out with new products? There's 10,000 products that can come out. Now, why would I buy a bond from Apple instead of a bond from Google?

Why would I buy a bond from LA County versus LA County? Why would I buy a bond from LA County versus LA Department of Water? Different risk profile. But why didn't he just say this to me?

Because he's here. So that's why I want to give you a layman's view of this. So think about insurance, Danny. How many types of insurance are there? Two knows. Just types. Health home whole life term life travel disability There hundreds of types Why isn there just one type of insurance Why does there have to be hundreds Okay, of the hundreds of types of insurance, how many insurance companies? Thousands, tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. Why isn't there just one insurance company?

Why do I need more than one insurance company? That doesn't make any sense. Why not just one insurance? AIM is the biggest insurance company. They've been around for 100 years. They have the best policies. Why is there room for any other insurance provider in the marketplace? So why do you think that basically all the treasury companies are now trading at a discount? Yeah, so a couple things.

So obviously, number one, the volatility of the nature of the company, which is a multiple of the volatility of Bitcoin. So I had dinner with Michael Saylor when I was in Prague last year. And he gave us this story. And he said, imagine that God came to me in the middle of the night. and God told me that the market was gonna crash tomorrow. So I woke up in the morning and I went and hedged MicroStrategy. And sure enough, the markets crashed, but MicroStrategy didn't. That'd be great, right?

The shareholders would be stoked, right? No, because they expect MSTR to trade two times volatile to Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin goes up 5X, MSTR should go up 10X. But if Bitcoin goes down, we should also go down 2X. How far did Bitcoin drop? 30, 35%. What's microstrategy down? 60%. Exactly two times. Exactly what the market is expecting it to do, a two times volatility. Now, some of these are 80, 90% down, whatever. So we could

look at Nakamoto, for example. So if you look at Nakamoto, the company I'm working with, Satsuma in London, we're also sort of the same victim. But you have to peel back and look at the nuance of that, right? So again, if we just look at like traditional market finance, the way, let's just use Uber as an example, first of all, right? So Uber started as raising money from friends and family and then angel rounds and then VC rounds. And eventually they do a pre-IPO, right? Which is

the last investors come in privately before it goes public. So now after six, seven, eight years, it finally goes public. What happens? All the insiders sell because they bought it and they were hoping for liquidity and the pre-IPO investors got in because they wanted to sell as soon as it public. And it's not necessarily like mean or malicious, but they dump on retail. Not because they're mean or malicious trying to rug pull retail. It's just like they've been waiting for

six, seven years for liquidity. They finally got it, right? So what happens is naturally, as soon as we hit the public market, all those insiders dump. And then unfortunately, retail bought it and whatever. Okay. Well, a lot of these treasury companies did something similar where they took an already existing trading company, like a public company. And then they did an RTO, like a reverse takeover, and then they raised a pipe to raise the money.

Okay. So what happens is, and I can tell you firsthand, because through my fund, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, we've invested in dozens of these, and I've helped launch a couple now. So what happens is, with Satsuma, for example, we announced, because it's already a publicly trading company that you could already buy the stock, we're required by law to make a press release that we're going to raise money. So a press release went out in July and said, we're going to raise a hundred.

Our goal is to raise a hundred million dollars into this company at the price of one pence. And that was the, that was the public price at that day. So today it's one pence. We're going to raise a hundred million at one pence. And we put the press release out. As soon as we put the press release out, the speculator started driving the price. And what we did as a company is we were like, no PR. It was like, it was a policy. David Bailey, he didn't really follow that.

And so there's nuances to all this, but this generally applies to asset like Strives Company or Mauler's Company or Nakamoto or Satsuma. David Bailey did talk it up quite a bit. So that was a problem. What we tried to do is not talk it up at all. But we had to put the press release out. So we tried to let it go quiet. But they drove the price up 10x. They drove from one pence to 10x, right? And then we're still raising money. So that went on for a couple months. Then the haters come out.

How dare you raise money for the insiders at one when the public price is 10? It's like, yeah, that's just the market. There's not a lot you can do about it. So now, so then, uh, then, then we got delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed. And then, uh, it finally just got approved right before New Year's. And now the price is down 90%, but 90% from what the company wasn't even an operating company. We just got approved two weeks ago.

So all that price action in the stock isn't really reflective of what we're doing. And so same with Nakamoto, right? So Nakamoto did this. Now, again, David Bailey was very loud about what he was doing and how much money he was raising. And so that's a whole nother topic that's above my pay grade. And when Elon Musk tweeted about Tesla stock, he got in trouble. And so maybe there's some wrongdoing there. I'm not alleging there is. But my point is, is it drove much more attention.

Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin Inc, obviously, right? And so the speculators really drove that price up big time. They got delayed, delayed, delayed. And then same thing, it dropped 90%. And so it's just a function of what happens when you take a private raise and you go public. It's amplified in that type of a market because you already have a publicly traded company. And so then the speculators start driving the price up. And so it's a function of how it works.

But I don't think it's reflective of the operating company because they haven't really been up and operating yet. Yeah. Do you think there's a limit to how much Bitcoin these treasury companies should own, like the public companies? Because I think Sale is at just over 3% now. I think we can agree if he owned 100% of Bitcoin, that's a problem. Bitcoin is not interesting at that point. Where do you draw the line?

So we understand as Bitcoiners that Bitcoin is a system of rules, not rulers. So unlike crypto, Ethereum, et cetera, those run on proof of stake, which means that the more tokens I have, the more tokens I stake, the more votes I get on the protocol and the consensus, right? So then people who have more tokens get to basically run the network and change the rules as they see fit, sort of like our fiat system we have today. But Bitcoin doesn't do that, right?

So I could own more Bitcoin, but I get no more votes in the system. So as far as like how much Bitcoin, is it good or proper? I mean, that's for the free market to decide. What is safe? I mean, we've seen where like in 2008, the banks were too big to fail. So we've seen, you know, potentially where maybe one institution gets so big that if something happens, it could destabilize the market temporarily. So we could argue like a safety thing. I don't think it's a control issue.

I don't see a problem on the control issue. We could argue like a safety thing. But like, if MicroStrategy got in trouble and dumped 650,000 Bitcoin into the market today, the market would barely shrug. Do you think? We saw 900,000 Bitcoin get dumped twice this year. Well, in 2025, right? Wasn't that like nine, it was $9 billion. So there was the big like whale sold that sold through Galaxy. I think that was 80,000 coins. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. 80,000. Yeah. Not, not 600. That's a big, big

difference. Cause that's like a, what 40 billion, I think is what he has 40, 50 billion. Yeah. I think it's about 50 billion, 50 billion. So it's a big difference from 9 billion. You're right. But obviously anybody would know, like nobody would dump 50 billion in a day. Yeah. Because if I want to sell 50 billion, I don't want to have the slippage. So I'm going to, of course,

roll that out. So even if something were to have hypothetically, which I don't see this, So I'm certainly not saying this is the case. Michael Saylor has built like an impenetrable fortress. So there really is no forced liquidation there. But even if, you know, went through bankruptcy, changed hands, they wanted to liquidate the stock, unwind the company, they're not going to dump $50 billion in a day. So I just don't see a lot of risk there.

But what I would say, again, sort of drawing parallels to other markets, when you look at the gold market, how concentrated is the gold market? How concentrated is the equity market? You know, three companies own like 85% of all the stock. Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock own like 85%. So when you talk about 3% position by one company, it seems like inconsequential. And again, sailors only do in equities. There's a whole market of bonds.

The other thing is that, again, trying to understand the financial market, most of the financial market and things we can talk about that was in my outline is matching liquidity, risk, and duration. So most of the liabilities, so assets and liabilities are tried to be matched over duration. So like when the banks collapsed in 2023, they had a mismatch in durations. They had 30-year debt, but they had cash that was due now, right?

So most of the debt is typically over 5, 10, like your auto loan, your house loan, right? It's termed. Say that's doing perpetual. Mark doesn't really know what to do with perpetual. So when I sat down with him, he's like, hey, you could have $100 billion business just with 30-year bonds alone.

you should do that i'm not you could have a hundred billion dollar business with 10-year bonds i'm not going to do it you should do it you could have a hundred billion dollar business with just five-year bonds i'm not going to do it you so it's like there's like a million flavors of ice cream that could be done and he's just going to do stretch right and so and then you have all the different districts so like for example he just was on your show he said like he's not going to

go to japan he's not going to go to the uk so then you have all the different currencies all the different markets. Like, dude, all of a sudden you could see how there could be 10,000 of these. But really, I think if we just take the lens and we'll put a pin on this, the pin, the plug is that it's soaking up the demand for yield, which is the single largest market in the world. You know, we're talking, I mean, 300 trillion. Yeah.

145 trillion of that is tradable securitized. So like actual trading stocks, a lot of it is not. So $145 trillion alone. In the US alone, $28 trillion of just cash and cash equivalents. So it's like, bro, you can have 10,000 companies all make a trillion dollars each. One of the things he said after it calmed down a little bit was that he had no interest in strategy becoming a bank, which is something I'd always assumed was sort of the end goal for him, which is interesting.

He's laser focused on these products that he's doing right now. Laser focused, 100%. But you think there's a lot in the sort of treasury company playbook that just normal Bitcoiners can take from and actually use their Bitcoin in a far better way.

Well, what I think is that if we want to talk, and I talked about this with you before, like the game of money. And if we think about how to build wealth and what wealth tools do we have available to us, we understand that Bitcoin is the cheat code for us to do that. And Bitcoin allows us to use all these tools that the 1% typically had. So Bitcoin allows us, but we have to build a system around a system for building wealth around Bitcoin.

And so Bitcoin treasuries can be one piece of that system that we can build. See, I think this is for me, like when I go into Bitcoin, I'd never done any like investing before. I was pretty young still. Like Bitcoin was the first thing I found, like changed my life. Like the only thing I've ever been focused on since that day. And I don't think I think about Bitcoin necessarily in the right way when it comes to like building wealth and like setting myself up for the future.

Because like the thing that I just never want to do is sell Bitcoin. So I really want to get a family home. We've just been renting. And it's like, do I want to sell a Bitcoin to do it? But you think I need to adjust the framework that I'm thinking in. 100%. And one, I never want you to sell Bitcoin. I don't want your great grandkids to sell your Bitcoin.

So we want to build a wealth engine around Bitcoin that allows you to grow your wealth faster, utilize all that capital, and even feed your great, great, great grandkids without ever selling the Bitcoins. We have to build an engine around that. And so let's just take traditional finance. So you have maybe the champion of that would be like a Dave Ramsey. And Dave Ramsey would say, save percent of your paycheck and put into mutual funds and never use debt. He's the bold guy there.

See, like people call him up and say, I mean, yeah, okay. Right. And so, you know, he makes hundreds of millions a year. He's not just some old, you know, country folk guy. He's really smart. But his advice to everyone is don't use debt. Work hard. Save. put it into mutual funds, let it sit there for 40 years and compound. And then what happens is traditional finance says, at some point in 40 years from now, you can sell 4% of your assets

per year. And if you time it just right, hopefully you'll die before you run out of money. And you'll die with zero. There's a whole book, a whole movement around die with zero, which as a Bitcoiner seems like the worst idea. That's a fiat idea. If we think about our life as like a blockchain, like my life, I should have a proof of work that I was here. What is the stamp I'm leaving on the world. What is the proof of my life? And then my kids should start on the next

block. Totally. And then they should add to that block. And why should my kids start from zero? So I think the Dave Ramsey traditional financial advice is a fiat mindset. Save for 40 years, spend it down to zero. Hopefully I die before I have zero and my kids start from zero. Whereas we're Bitcoiners, we want to push value into the future. So right off the bat, that system is broken. But again, yes, I never want you to sell your Bitcoin. I want you to set up a system where

your great grandkids don't sell your Bitcoin and they don't need to. But what it really comes down to, and we can come back to this, but passing down the Bitcoin is the asset, but that's not the inheritance. What we want to pass down is a system that allows my great grandkids to continue to grow the wealth and use the wealth without selling the Bitcoin. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets, complex setups, clumsy interfaces,

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Like, what are the first steps to doing this? So if we reframe it, we want to understand a couple things. And I'm going to use Michael Saylor as an example for this. But we want to understand that what traditional people do is they work for money. And what most people try and do is make more money. So they're going to go back to school. They're going to get new skills. They're going to work harder, longer. They're going to get a side hustle, start a new, whatever, right? They're

going to try to make more money. Then they're going to pay taxes. They're going to live on whatever's left. And then hopefully they have a little bit left to save and they'll follow Dave Ramsey's advice. But what the wealthy do is they use income to buy assets. And then those assets compound and the assets pay for their life and they never run out. Okay. Now let me give you an example. We'll talk about Michael Saylor. So I'm sure like you and I, we both watched hundreds of

his interviews. There was one he did with Jordan Peterson. Did you watch that one? I did. Yeah. Right. So he talked about how he spent, he spent, he did 10 trips around the world and he couldn't get MicroStrategy to grow. Remember he's like, I tried everything. I hired this person. I tried that. I merged with this company. I bought this company. I was competing against Microsoft. I couldn't win. I couldn't increase revenue. So just like you and I, but at some point we can only work

so hard. He couldn't increase the revenue of micro strategy. He tried everything. So he had assets. He had 500 million of assets, but it was melting. And he's like, what do I do? I could try to buy another company. I could try to hire more people, but I've proven now for 10 years, I can't grow the revenue. Right? So like most of us as a mom and pop, a homeowner, we have a little bit of assets. We have equity in our home. We have some Bitcoin, but we can't work harder. I've got a side hustle.

I can't increase revenue that much. Okay. So that's Michael Saylor. So what he decided to do was change the business from micro strategy to strategy, drop the micro. And instead of trying to grow revenue and sell more software, I'm going to just build the asset base that I have. I'm going to run my treasury, right? Within five years, he took micro strategy from 3 billion to 50 billion. So he spent a decade and couldn't grow it. And within five years of the new strategy,

he went from three to 50. So you and I, what can we learn from that? Well, we understand that the rich don't work for revenue, the work, the rich work for assets and the assets built. So what we want to do is instead of trying to make more money, how can we leverage the assets that we have today to build wealth faster? That's what he did. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes total sense. Now, then we would ask, well, how did he do it? Now, look, he didn't invent this.

He sort of invented this category for businesses. The Bitcoin treasury company is that, but this is what the wealthy, this is what Donald Trump, before he set out to become the president, he was known as the king of debt. He built the Manhattan skyline. This is how Robert Kiyosaki, this is how these guys become billionaires. So what Saylor did is he used credit, debt, and equity.

So I had assets and I used debt and credit or credit and equity. And you and I have credit and equity So we have assets you have Bitcoin and you have credit and equity Yep Right So how do we do the same thing So what we wanna do and this is the end goal depends on how much income you have today how much assets you have if you have 50 a year

or 5 million a year of income. But the goal is again, to go from earning income, paying taxes, let's just use in the United States, a 40% tax margin rate, you know, depends on what country you're in. But if I make a hundred grand a year, 40,000 goes to taxes, I have 60,000 to live on. Yep. Good luck. Maybe I have 5,000 left. I buy some Bitcoin. Okay. But what we want to do is I want all hundred thousand to pay no tax and go all into Bitcoin. So how do you do that? Yeah. So I'm

going to show you that. And then I want the Bitcoin to pay for all my living expenses without selling it. So that's the goal. That's where we're going to walk everybody to. But how do we do that? So it starts with, and again, depends on your income level, what assets you have, but it starts with, let's say you're a hundred thousand dollar a year person. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start with credit. What did the sailor do? Start with credit. He did converts. So I'm going to go to

the credit market. Most people should have credit. If you don't go get it, clean up your credit, whatever you got to do. Like that's, that's one-on-one we're in a debt-based system. And I, I recognize that a lot of Bitcoiners are going to hate this message because Jeff Booth says we're perpetuating the system and that's fine. But like, I also want to build wealth for my family. So we're in a debt-based system. You're really exploiting the system. We're in a debt-based system.

And I'm going to do a speculative attack against the system like everybody else should do a speculative attack against the system. And I cannot. I can be a Dave Ramsey and not do that. But half of baby boomers today have zero savings, half of them. That's wild. And the half that do have savings, the median is $240,000. What is $240,000 going to do? You're going to live for 10 years, 20 years, you're going to get $12,000 a year? Like, how is that going to work?

So anyway, this is not for the different. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, everyone that just heard that has said, Mark, what you're proposing is very dangerous. It's very risky. And we don't like it. And I'm going to tell you how to de-risk it. So we'll get there. And I guess one of the points in there is like, what kind of credit are you going out and getting? So first of all, what credit do you have available to you?

So I have a friend, Jack. He helps people get credit lines, like credit cards. And typically he gets the average person, a hundred to $200,000 of credit cards with like a 0% APR for 12 months. So you could do that. Maybe you can get a small business loan. Maybe you can get a home equity line. Maybe you can get a personal credit line from the bank. Maybe you have like, maybe you have Bitcoin you can borrow. Like, so there's a bunch of ways that you can get credit.

And we can explore that if you want. But I think most people in a debt-based system know they can get credit. Go to your bank, call your credit card company. Like when you're on the airplane, you know, they offer you credit cards on the airplane. Like you can figure it out. But what kind of percentage should you be trying to take credit out at? And what's too risky? Yeah. So I want to get to the risk management because that's a key piece, not getting blown up.

But maybe we can come back to that in a second. So the first step that we would want to do is I can't, I don't want to work harder. I don't want to try to travel around the world like Saylor did 10 times. I want to build my treasury. So the first step I would do is I would, I'm making a hundred grand a year. I'm already working 50 hours a week. I'm maxed out. Right. So I'm going to use some credit and I'm going to buy an asset that gives me tax depreciation.

So the way this works is if I have $1 of income that's taxable, I owe tax on that money. There's no getting out of it. There's no loopholes for that. But I can buy in almost any country in the world, I can buy certain things that the government will give me credits or depreciation for. So if I get $1 of income, I have $1 of depreciation and I cancel each other out. So in the United States, I can buy real estate.

Even if I'm a full-time employee, I could buy like a short-term rental, which has an exclusion. Trump's one big, beautiful bill that went into effect here January 1st allows us to take bonus depreciation or all the depreciation in year one. But even in China- Buy Bitcoin miners. You can buy Bitcoin miners, right? So I built a product called Tax Shield, partnership with Arch Lending and Blockware. It's called Tax Shield. And we have a turnkey product just for this.

But even in China, you can get tax credits for investing in tech, R&D, things like that. Even in China, you can get them in any country. Okay. So I'm going to borrow some money to get depreciation. And right off the bat, I'm going to get some of my tax money back. So let's say that I only get $20,000 in tax depreciation. So instead of giving $60,000 to the government, I only get $40,000. Now I have an extra $20,000 to go into Bitcoin that I didn't have. I didn't work harder.

I didn't work longer. No extra hours. And I have $20,000 a year going in there. Okay. Now, let's say again, I'm barely scraping by. I'm only 100 grand a year. After five years, that's 500 grand, not even accounting for any Bitcoin appreciation. Okay, now, obviously, if you're making more money, you have some assets, you can get there faster. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna continue doing that until my asset base is built up and I can borrow against my assets. I can borrow against my Bitcoin.

I can borrow against it from Strike. I can borrow with Arch Lending, whatever. I can get more credit cards. I can borrow against my home, whatever. And I'm gonna keep getting more depreciation and keep building my asset base. And then I'm going to borrow against my asset base to start offsetting my income or my spending, my lifestyle spending. So, but there is inherently risk in doing this. Yeah, and I'm going to tell you how to mitigate that.

But let's start with you saying borrow against your Bitcoin. Like what percentage of your Bitcoin stack do you think you should actually be borrowing against?

So, okay. So I'm going to answer that question next, but let me just finish this. So then what I want to do is I'm going to continue borrowing against my credit lines, whatever credit lines I have available to me or tapping into my equity, just like sailor use equity. I'm going to continue using that until I build up my asset base. I'm going to keep borrowing

against that until my income is 100% offset. And then until I can continue to bargains to offset my lifestyle income, then I get to the point where 100% of my earned income goes into the assets and the assets are now paying for my life. Now, when I'm borrowing against my assets to pay for my life, I'm not paying tax on that money because it's debt. And so now the fly, imagine if you could put a hundred percent of your earned income into Bitcoin a hundred percent and pay zero tax. Yeah.

How much faster could you grow your wealth? A lot. A lot now, but it's inherently dangerous. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that danger. So the danger is liquidation. You're a surfer, by the way, man, I didn't get as, we were going to surf Slater's pool in Abu Dhabi. It was so much fun. I paid for a spot. I didn't even get a go. I'm so disappointed. But thank you for that.

Cause we all got extra ways because you weren't there. Yeah. Okay. It's like when I die with my bitcoin i donated to that exactly i donated to everybody so i'm glad you got it okay but let's talk in surfing so danny we're both surfers so um if you're from the inland you've never seen the ocean before but you want to surf um could i take you to pipeline in hawaii and throw you in the water of course not why because you might die but there's 100 people out there surfing every day

that don't die so what you would say is the risk isn't in the water necessarily it's in the person that goes in the water. So what you could say is that it's dangerous to go in the water if you don't know how to swim, but you could learn how to swim. You couldn't put a life jacket on. You could take a float with you. You could make sure there's a jet ski. You could make sure there's a life. So what we can do is we can de-risk it. So we don't pretend there's no risk. What we do is

we can de-risk it. So just like we wouldn't take a beginner to pipeline, you and I would, well, I have served pipeline, but I probably wouldn't today, but we could work our way up there, But we'd have to increase our skills. Yeah. Okay. So how do we do that? So what we want to think about is the real risk is the, not the volatility, it's the liquidation that could happen. Right. Okay. We want to set a list of rules, treasury doctrine. So I want to build a treasury operating system.

So my treasury doctrine. So for example, these are rules. I will never borrow more than X percent LTV. I will never borrow. I will never pay cash for a depreciating asset. I will never borrow at a higher rate and pay a less rate, a negative carry. So we'd set a set of rules. So for example, with Bitcoin, Bitcoin is volatile.

So if I borrowed at the top of the market, so based off of four-year cycles or looking at on-chain data, if I borrowed like 80% at the peak, there's a chance it could drop 50%. I'm going to be up 160% LTV, and I'm going to get either liquidated or margin called. So I had two things. either one, I have the income or cash reserves to cover a margin call if that comes, or I borrow less LTV. Right? So let's say that I understand market cycles and we're at the 200 day moving

average, which is historic low. I could borrow 60, 70%, probably pretty safe. We're at the peak. I'm probably only going to borrow 30, 40%. And when you're borrowing that, you think people should be looking to borrow against the Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin? Or should they should be No, the first thing I want to do is I want to get rid of my taxable income. Okay. I want to buy an asset that will wipe out my taxable income because that's instant money. Right? So we talked about Bitcoin miners.

So I could borrow against some of my Bitcoin. I could buy Bitcoin miners. The Bitcoin miners wipe out my tax debt and they give me more Bitcoin. Then next year, I take some of the newly mined Bitcoin and I borrow against that and I buy more miners and I wipe out my taxes again. And it becomes a perpetual Bitcoin machine. The government is buying my Bitcoin for me. And do you think this is the sort of thing that just like your average Bitcoin and people like me out there should be doing?

Dave Ramsey is wrong, in my opinion, if you want to build wealth. But he's right for 90% of the people. 90% of the people should never go in the surf. Most people should never go in the surf, Danny. But you like to go in the surf. And so if you like to go in the surf, then you'll learn how to surf. Most people should not. where I have a house down in Cabo and down in Mexico. And a lot of the resorts, they don't allow tourists to go in the ocean. And I'm a surfer and I would go in the ocean.

And one time I was at this hotel and they pulled me out of the water so many times. They said, if you go in the ocean one more time, we're going to kick you out of the hotel. Really? Because people drowned all the time, right? So most people, Danny, should not go into the surf. You would agree with that. Yeah. Especially without some practice. Without some practice. So if you ask me the question, should people like you learn this?

I mean, do you want to learn how to surf? Yeah. Because the fear that I have with stuff like this is that people can work a long time to just stay humble, stack sats, keep doing their job, and then try and like go out on the risk curve here and end up blowing themselves up. Yeah. Just like they would jump on a jet ski and get dropped off a pipeline and they'd end up drowning. So they should not do that. So, so imagine, so like even think about like with surfing

to even get on a board and try to paddle off to the waves is very difficult. Yep. And to even paddle the board out the pipeline, you would have to be pretty good to even get out there. But imagine if you could jump on a jet ski and they could just drop you off out there. So people should not do that. Don't do that. Start on little ways and work your way up. I'm never going to borrow more than 10%. If I never borrowed more than 10% LTV against my Bitcoin,

the chance of me getting liquidated is essentially zero. Now, what if I make a high income and I could just cover the margin requirement. If I borrowed 40% against my Bitcoin and it dropped 50%, I'm at an 80% LTV. There's no margin call at 80% LTV. So when you say people- So people can choose how aggressive they want to be. Do you want to go surf one foot waves or 50 foot waves? You get to choose that. Yeah. Let's start from like the credit part. What percentage is too high to be borrowing?

Like, I don't think anyone should be going out and getting a credit card at 18% APR. So here's how I would do this. So first, we would need to understand liquidity. You've done plenty of shows talking about Michael Howell and global liquidity. So you understand liquidity. Liquidity is not cash. Liquidity is the ability to get cash, right? So when you look at like Michael Howell's index, or you look at like Nick Badi at the Bitcoin layer, they have a really good one.

They take the available credit because they're trying to look at how fast could the liquidity expand, right? So the first thing we want to understand to set to answer this question is, what does my liquidity look like? I have to answer that question first. What are my skills? Yeah. Right. So there's four ways we want to gauge this. Is the reason there being that if things go sideways, how quickly can get

out of the debt? Well, how safe can I be? So going in the water is dangerous. Let me do a safety check. Do I know how to swim? Check. Do I have a life jacket? Check. Do I have a lifeguard? Check. Right. So there's four liquidity measures that we want to know. And once we know those, then we can understand how much risk we can take. Okay. Right. So do I have a life jacket? Do I have a jet ski? okay, I can go surf 30 foot waves. I don't have a jet ski. Okay. I'm going to go 15 waves.

Right. Okay. So there's four liquidity. So number one, liquidity layer, number one is my operating capital. So like, what is my operating expenses? That's my monthly expenses. That's includes my debt service, my business, my payroll, my household, whatever. If I'm doing this for a personal business, same thing, but how much do I need to spend every month? And then how many months of that operating capital should I keep? Three months, six months, depends on what your income

looks like. If I'm a sales rep working off commission, my income's lumpy. So I probably want to keep more. If I, if I'm a government job, then it's maybe less, right? So that depends. Then level two liquidity is cash equivalents. So this is money market accounts. This could be stretch making 11%. It's relatively stable. It's actually freaking crushing right now, right? So I could put money into there and that's not cash, but it's a cash equivalent. I mean,

I can get it in less than seven days. I can sell the stretch. I can have the money wired to my account and I have it. Okay. Level three is assets that are collateral assets that I can borrow against. I could get a loan against my Bitcoin in a couple of days. I have a home equity line already standing on my house. My bank has given me a business credit line. So these are assets that I could take collateral against, but they're going to take longer. It could take me a couple

weeks to get a, you know, refinance my house, to get equity line. Right. So now I know my liquidity and then level four are assets that are really not going to borrow against its land somewhere on a beach that I can't really refinance or whatever. It's like a, it's a private equity deal or venture capital deal. Right. So it's an asset, but it's not a collateral asset. Right. So once I understand

how much I have in each of those buckets, the goal is, is how much can I build up? So for example, if I want to borrow 60% LTV against my Bitcoin, if it drops 50%, it's going to go to 120. I'm going to either get margin called or I have to add collateral. Okay. Well, do I have the income to cover that? No. Okay. Do I have liquidity number two to cover that? I do. I have a hundred thousand in stretch. Cool. So I could easily just grab 75,000 from stretch and cover that. No

problem. Right. Or, uh, shoot, I only had 50,000 in stretch. I need 70. No worries. I'll just go to layer three and pull 25 there. So it's an asset that's, that's compounding and it's, it's a house, it's a rental property, it's whatever. But if I needed, I could get the liquidity to cover that temporarily. That makes sense. That makes total sense. Yeah. I can't hold my breath forever,

but you know, I could come up in the jet ski could grab me. Right. So now once I've established layer one, layer two, layer three of liquidity, then it tells me how long I can stay alive for my layer four, my asset. Okay. So it's different for everybody. Now, if I have, you know, a ton of money in layer two and three, then I can be much more risky. I'm a big believer that Bitcoin will probably change the way that the real estate market works over the long term. I think it's

further out than when people sort of suggest. But do you think owning property is still like a reasonable financial decision, especially if it's one of those second home rental properties? So again, I started my career in real estate. I fixed and flipped over 100 properties here in LA. I've built dozens and dozens of multimillion dollar projects. I think at one point I owned over 200 doors, like rental doors, we call them. I think it was 2021 I sold my last apartment to put into Bitcoin.

So I don't own any rental properties, but I still own properties. So I got a beach house. I got my house here in California. I got a beautiful ranch property. So I still own properties, but they're not like rental income properties. I'll just put it all into Bitcoin. Yeah, makes sense.

Because Bitcoin has a better return profile than what the real estate does. The real estate is going to go up, you know, it's going up at 10% a year. And, you know, I can use leverage on that. So maybe my IRR is 20%, if I'm lucky, 15, 18%. But I think Bitcoin will perform that. And then I'll have to deal with maintenance and taxes and tenants and all that. And so I'm all in on Bitcoin, not rental properties. But there is a case for owning real estate. So again, at some point, you have enough assets, what are you going to do with them?

Well, I buy the ranch property in Texas. I get the tax depreciation from it. I get to use it whenever I want to go to Austin. And it's a rental property. It's Airbnb. So it makes income. So I have income. I get tax depreciation. I get to use it. It's not going to outperform Bitcoin. Of course not, no. Do you think Bitcoin does demonetize the housing market? Because I was looking, right, this place we're in now, we're in Manhattan Beach, which is a nice area of LA. This place is like, it's okay.

It's a fine house. It's probably one of the worst houses on the block. It's like $3.5 million. I had to look on Zillow. Yeah. I don't think it demonetizes real estate the way people think it does. Okay. So as I said, and I'm a real estate guy, I sold all my rental properties and bought Bitcoin. So that means there's less demand for sticking money into investment properties, right? Because there's other places to invest that are better.

But a lot of the premium in real estate is supply and demand. You're like two houses from the beach in Manhattan. And it is absolutely gorgeous out there right now. And so it's supply and demand here. And so there's only so many homes in downtown Manhattan or on the lake in Austin or on the beach here in California. And so I think the supply and demand are for the bread and butter homes in Kansas City or Indianapolis or San Antonio, Texas. But when you talk about scarce, what I call trophy real

estate, let me give you an example. Austin was the best performing real estate market in the for two decades, for 20 years. Now it's like the worst performing, but for two decades, it was the best performing market. Okay And it was a little bit above the median average It did about 40 from like 2020 to like 2024 But in Austin there a lake called Lake Travis and there only so many homes that are on the

lake. And when you had all the big tech companies, Tesla and Facebook moving to Austin, those guys make 30, 40, 50 million a year. What do they care if the house is three or 4 million? I want a house on the lake, and I don't care if it's six, like whatever. Those homes went up 250%. So Austin went

up 40, but the lakes went up 200 over 200%, right? Because of the supply and demand. So I think it, I think it demonetizes it from like a, I'm buying three bedroom, two bath houses across the country for rental income, but it doesn't demonetize it for like high demand areas like this. That makes sense. Cause I was walking back from, we went out for dinner last night, walking back and there's like one in five houses probably has lights on. Like,

I don't think anyone actually lives around it. Yeah. It's a, I'm sure it's all just investment properties. And I doubt it's even all investment from people within America. Yeah, probably a good chance of that. So what is the key takeaway that you want Bitcoiners to take from this? The key takeaway that I want Bitcoiners to take away from this is that Bitcoin is the cheat code.

And if all you want to do is buy Bitcoin, it's the cheat code because you can outperform Wall Street and you can outperform private equity and venture capital and all those things just buying Bitcoin. But not everybody is able to buy enough Bitcoin to really get the life that they want or set up their future generations the way they want. And if you really want to build wealth, then you have to build a system around the Bitcoin to grow it faster, just like Michael Saylor did.

And so instead of trying to follow hustle culture and Alex Hormozzi is telling you just to work harder and grind harder and don't stop and work your weekends, you're wasting. Forget the hustle culture. And instead, you have this asset base that is the cheat code. It is the most liquid, best compounding, returning asset that we have. And if we use it properly and smartly, we can grow our wealth much faster. We can achieve our goals.

Most people could achieve, we'll call it retirement income, meaning replacing their income from working to asset-based in like five years. How much do you think people need to retire? Like, obviously it depends on how old you are, but like- Oh yeah, that's a good question. So I think retirement's a scam. That's another fiat mindset. What do you mean?

So what I mean is that most people are dreaming of 40 years, I'll have enough money where I can quit, I can live a life of leisure and my money will pay for me. Yeah. And I think that's a scam. That's a fiat system. And I can prove that in a sense by saying, or just asking a rhetorical question, why do all billionaires still work? I mean, I think there's probably a multiple answers to that. I think a lot of them get addicted to work. It's because there's two types of people in the world.

I talked about this when we opened. There's two types of people in the world. There's creators and there's consumers. Warren Buffett retired. Well, he stepped down from the head of the board at 93, right? I think it was 93 because he's just a creator. That's what he does. He just creates and he just creates more than he consumes.

The fiat mindset has turned us into consumers, right? But we're meant to be creators. I believe we were made in God's image. God is the creator, we're creators, we're meant to be creating. So what I think that what we should retire from, what we really want is not the freedom to not work. We want the freedom to work on what we wanna work on. Yeah, I agree with that. Like my idea would be spend as much time with the family as I want and then pick and choose what work I do want to do.

That's the perfect scenario. Pick and choose what you want to work on. And what happens, as you know, as you've come up in life, as you've made more money, you start to want to solve bigger problems. I'm sure 10 years ago, you were living hand to mouth, and you were just thinking about how do I make a buck. But today, you're like, how can I help the country of El Salvador? You're thinking about bigger things.

And so that's really the point that we should all get to and really push that value into the world. So you don't think, will you never retire? I feel like I'm retired now, you know? I mean, like I get to fly to a conference. I mean, I, unfortunately I missed Abu Dhabi, but we could have been there surfing in Slater's pool together. We would have been having dinner. I'm going to parties with Michael. Say like,

that's like people pay for that. Right. So, uh, that's why I say this never feels like a job. Yeah. And so like, and that's like freedom from, from doing things I don't want to do to freedom. I do want to do, uh, I'm going to go speak in, uh, Vancouver at a conference I go to every year here in a couple of weeks. And then I'm going to dip up into the back country and spend a few days in the snowboarding in the back country. Heli skiing again, heli skiing and snow biking. And so

like, you know, I'm doing it right. I have daughter, my daughter's in high school. I am starting to think maybe when she's done with high school, maybe I'll slow down a little bit and add a little bit more travel for my wife and I, but like I took her, I spoke at Bitcoin Prague and her and I went to Budapest for a few days and I took her to Bitcoin Asia. And then we went to China for a few days. So it's like, I don't know, I'm kind of doing it. Yeah. I feel the same thing.

Like my wife and daughter just chilling on the beach right now while we record this. Yeah. All right. Before we close out, can we talk a little bit about macro? Cause I know you're following this pretty closely. 2026 is set up to be a pretty interesting year, I think. Did you see the recent Jerome Powell hostage video? Yeah. What do you think is going on? What are you expecting

this year? What, what my base case is, what I'm expecting, what is my above average probability is that Trump gets what he wants. Trump says he wants 1% rates. I'm guessing before he- Is that what he said? Has he said 1%? He said it multiple times. Okay. I think before he leaves office, we'll get close to that. Not this year, but I think before he leaves office, we got what, three more years? I think we'll get close to that. Yeah. He wants Jerome Powell out.

That's no secret, obviously, based off of what you just brought up. But even if you look at his first term, he was fighting with Powell. Powell raised rates on him in 2018 and 2019. and he thought that was like a personal attack back then. Trump's a real estate guy. He wants low rates. And now he called them all kinds of names back then. And now he's calling them names again, calls them too late. And he's always buying the curve and all these things. So there's no

mistake. He wants Powell out. He wants rates at 1%. So what I think my base case for this year is he gets what he wants. Powell's out. A dove is installed. Rates start coming down. and we get a big liquidity boom, we see that other central banks, Japan, China, they're waiting on the US to sort of move. And I think the liquidity spigots really come on strong in 2026. That's my base case. So you think it's going to be a good year for Bitcoin? I think it's going to be a good year for Bitcoin.

So that kind of blows out the idea of a four-year cycle. That's over then. Isn't the four-year cycle already over? I think so. I mean, technically, no. Because per four-year cycles, the peak should have been in November. and our peak was in November. It was in October. October, yeah. But I do think like if we even get close to it again in the next few months, like there's no way the four-year cycle is real at that point.

I think the four-year cycle is over in my opinion because I think it was never about the four-year supply demand shock. It was always about the global liquidity cycle. Yeah. And now there's, you know, I've been hearing about this from Michael Howe. I've been hearing about this from Ralph Paul. He does really great work.

I know Bitcoiners don't like Ralph Paul, but real vision does a lot of really good he's got terrible like quote unquote crypto takes but good macro takes really good macro takes and i know a lot of people want to throw the baby out the bath water but i can not agree with his sui or whatever his nfts but i could also appreciate he's got good macro takes and uh real vision has some really good global equity charts they were

the first one that really opened my eyes to the ism business cycle which you see a lot of bitcoin is running with right now yeah and so um i think uh the macro is always in the driver's seat so from that perspective, I expect it to be a good year. What I'm watching for, what the gray swan is, what I'm cautious of is that it's a political reason. And that is that

Trump is really kicking the hornet's nest, let's just say. He's certainly trying to disrupt the deep state from taking down the NGOs with USAID to blocking fraud in Minnesota to maybe Venezuela being part of taking out some CIA deep state stuff. There's a lot of hornets nests that are being kicked up. And they, the deep state, the powers that be, have never wanted Trump in office. So when he took office the first term, they came up with the Steele dossier,

the Russia collusion hoax, all of that. They tried to impeach him multiple times. They piled in a, you know, whatever, 100 lawsuits against him. They shot him. And so they, whoever those people are that are doing that, don't want him there. And one really good way to make sure that they get out in 2026 being a midterm year is to not let the markets rip. And he needs those markets firing out. He needs the markets firing or that the Republicans could lose the midterms this year in 2026. And so,

it could happen. And this is what I'm paying attention to, potentially using the markets, the Fed, the interest rates, the banks to bring the markets down into the midterms so that they could change the power. And do you think if Trump does instill some person who's basically like a stooge in the Fed, that that kind of loss of whatever independence is there might spook the markets and make things a bit wonky? Well, so first of all, it's sort of like a misnomer.

Like Trump can't just elect whoever he wants. But he will get what he wants. Well, what happens is the Fed governors give you, they give him the options to choose from. Yeah. So they're going to say, hey, freedom to choose, but here's a few people to choose from. So he doesn't just get to bring whoever he wants in. So they're not going to say, hey, you can choose a stooge. Like they're going to have a curated selection. But to answer the independence question.

I don't think the Fed has been independent, nor do I think the Fed should be independent. Okay, let's do that one at a time then. Because even if it hasn't been fully independent, which I probably agree with, it can get less independent. And I think it probably will do. Well, you and I would agree that we should not even have a Fed. Yeah, for sure. But like the world we live in, we do.

And like Powell, as much as I think he's got things wrong over the last few years, like he has done a relatively good job of not taking too much influence from Trump, I think. And like, if someone steps in, like it's clearly not getting more independent at that point, if someone steps in who just wants to do whatever Trump says. So do you think the Fed should just be totally independent? I think it's better being independent than an arm of the government. Do you not? I don't. Why?

Because the government is supposed to be we, the people. But it's not. But it's supposed to be. Yeah. And so anything that we can do to get it closer to that is good. Anything that goes further from that is bad. So I understand that nothing is black and white. Things can be good and bad at the same time. Things are spectrums. So things that get us closer to freedom, I'm for those. Things that get me away from freedom, I'm against those.

And so Trump has done many things that are anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, like taking equity and NVIDIA, for example. That's a terrible idea. I'm not for that at all. But he's also been repealing regulations left and right. And I'm totally for that. So we have to understand there's a lot of nuance here. So I don't think the Fed should be independent. I think that, well, one, we shouldn't have a Fed.

Number two, it shouldn't be independent because we, the people, should have more control over that. I think the other thing is, and this is sort of a newer view that I've developed, and it was listening to Scott Bessent.

But when you understand the economy and you understand where we're at right now, and you understand the shift in global energy and the race to get AI, for example, you might agree that the country that comes out ahead with energy and AI is going to have a head start to the rest of the world. Yep. Right. So you might agree that that's it should be an imperative of most countries to try to keep up at least. Right. And it's certainly between the U.S. and China right now.

But you would also then understand that we're going to have to build that capacity for that future world. In order to do that, we need energy. We need mining. We need refineries. We need data centers like we need we need to bring chip manufacturing. We need a lot. Yep. OK. But that's a long term vision. And maybe we need the central bank and the monetary policy to help accommodate that.

So maybe the monetary policy should help achieve the goals of the country for we, the people, as opposed to be like, no, we just protect the private interests of the private bankers. And we're just trying to extract as much liquidity as we can and screw what the country does. But do you not think there's an issue with if the Fed was not independent, it consolidates even more power in the president? And it kind of, I don't think we have free markets in the world apart from Bitcoin.

But it makes the markets even less free if that's the case. Because then it gets to really picking winners and losers. The central bank should fall under executive action. And the president is the executive. Now, the reason why the creasers from Jekyll Island sold us on an independent bank is so that it wouldn't be swayed by four-year presidential cycles and they could take the longer view. Yeah. Right?

But in a wartime effort like World War II or in a time of reindustrialization like right now, maybe the monetary policy should help accommodate what the government needs to get done. But nothing so permanent as temporary measures. Yeah. I mean, obviously, we both agree that it should just be disbanded. And we could argue at the end of the day that how much power does the Fed really even have? Because they can set Fed

funds rate, but the bond vigilantes are going to set the price of the bonds. So what the Fed is going to do is they're going to use the banking system that they've created to manipulate the price and they'll buy the bonds down and they'll try to control that yield. That's anything but a free market. Yeah. And so if we have a boom of liquidity, whatever happens with the Fed happens with the Fed, this is going to be a pretty good year for Bitcoin. I think, I mean, that's my base

case. My base case is it's a good year for Bitcoin. I think we end the year higher than we started. I think we make new all-time highs. That's my above average base case. I think that as you've had many conversations, the Fed has been in between a rock and a hard place for a long time, but the space keeps getting tighter. The interest on the national debt has gone to levels that are just, they don't work any

longer. And so we're at a situation where if they lower rates, potentially we have more inflation. And if they don't, then the banking system plumbing blows out. But the problem is that we started, I think before we started recording, we were talking about the fixed income markets and the fixed income markets are the largest markets in the world. And you have I want to say 65 million retirees in the just the developed in the West alone.

We have 10,000 a day in the United States, and they need fixed income, they need income to pay for their medicine, their rent, etc. But the problem is that what the government is forced to do right now is run an IMF white paper playbook called the liquidation of government debt, which is to liquidate the bondholders. And so we're in this situation where the government is forced to liquidate that debt. It's the only way out.

And inflation on one side, destruction of the financial system on the other. You pick inflation. I think if people were given a choice, would you rather your income gets cut in half, all the assets, your home, your stock account, everything gets cut in half, but gas prices come down 10 or 20%? or your income goes up and all your assets go by 50% and gas goes up by 10%. Of course, easy question. It's an easy question. Yeah, but it's easy for us. It's not so easy for people that have no assets.

Yeah, but even them, like their job and their income is on the line because when deflation happens, businesses don't have as much income. Businesses shut down. You're a sales rep. You're not making as many sales as you were before. So it's like, even for the savers, it hits them because their income takes a hit. Yeah. So if we are like, if the four-year cycle's over- Which is why, Danny, everyone needs to get off their income and run off their treasury.

Because you can't outrun, your income can't outrun the inflation that's coming. You cannot increase your income fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation that's coming. Wages have not kept up and they won't keep up. The only way that it will is with your assets. So back to that hypothetical choice that people could be given. if I stop living off my revenue that will never run fast enough to keep up and start working off of. So like, for example, maybe the cost of living goes up 10%.

My weight is going up 5%, but my assets went up 20%. You're winning. If you stop trying to live off your revenue and start living off your assets. I did have another question, but that feels like the perfect place to end. Okay. Mark, thank you, John. Thank you for coming down to do this. Pleasure. I'm sure we'll do it again at some point soon. Yeah. This has all been about the Bitcoin cheat code. are you going to finally come to cheat code this year? I would love to. You got to come.

Whisper in Peter's ear for me. I mean, you can just come. Let's sort it. It's the end of March in Bedford. We'd love to have you there, man. Yeah. Be good. Yeah. I want to come. Awesome. Thank you for this, mate. That's been great. Thank you. Thank you.