Are Bitcoin’s 4 year cycles over?

Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by swan dot com. Are Bitcoin's four-year cycles over? My friend and regular guest Vijay Boyapati rejoins me on the show, and he has a great way of thinking about these questions and explaining his thoughts on where we are in the economy today. Are we in a recession? What's happening with that eighteen-month lag? Is Bitcoin becoming a macro asset, and what does this mean for four-year cycles? So here's my discussion with Vijay.

Vijay,

welcome back

to

the show.

Hey Stefan, it's always great to chat with you. It's been a while.

Yeah, it has, it has been You know, it's just, there's all these updates happening broader in the world of macro, there's all this stuff happening in the world of Bitcoin, but I think, yeah, look, I think it'll be interesting mostly to start with what's happening in the economics, finance, macro sort of world. I think, I think the big question for a lot of people is, are we in a recession now or are we going into one? Do you have any views on that?

It's an interesting question because I think a lot of people would have assumed that i-if the Federal Reserve was gonna increase interest rates as quickly as they did and as much as that, as much as they did, we would-- it's like hitting the brakes on an economy, really slamming on the brakes, we would, would be in a recession. We, we're kind of in this bifurcated world where some of the economy, and I, I should start by saying I'm, I'm coming from a very US-centric perspective, but a lot of what I say will apply to the rest of the world as well. But, we have this bifurcated economy in the US where some parts of the economy are already in a very deep recession or the beginnings of a very deep recession, and you look at the real estate market, it's completely frozen. It's the lowest level of housing transactions, I think, in recorded history. A-and part of that is where, when the, the Federal Reserve incre-increases interest rates as much as it has, the, the cost of buying is much, much higher. The interest rate that you're gonna pay on a house has gone from somewhere around three percent to above seven percent, heading towards eight percent. This is a dramatic change, and this means that if you're going to a bank and you're getting a loan to buy a house, it's gonna cost you more than double, your, you know, monthly mortgage payment. And so for a lot of people, they're just not able to service that debt, like you, the, their, their salary hasn't more than doubled, their salary may have increased a little bit, and so on the demand side, you have a massive shrinkage in demand, but also on the supply side, nat-naturally, when you have a shrinkage in demand, what, what, what will happen is that prices will come down so that supply- Supply and demand could come into an equilibrium. But you have this problem in the housing market where you have a lot of people who borrowed on their houses before the Fed dramatically increased its interest rates, and so they're sitting on mortgage rates of three, three and a half percent. They just don't wanna sell. Why would you sell? If you sell, then, you know, you want somewhere to live, you're gonna sell your house, and then you're gonna go out into the mortgage market again and get another mortgage for a new house, but it's gonna be dramatically more expensive to do that. So you have a, a freezing of supply. People who'd normally might wanna move are thinking twice about that. They're saying, "Uh, do I really wanna sell my house? I have this three percent mortgage. It's really, really cheap to live in this house, whereas if I move to a new house, the, the cost of, servicing that mortgage is gonna be much, much higher." So you have this Sort of stasis in the mortgage market that I have not seen in my lifetime. It's, it's a really strange market because it doesn't-- normal markets adjust very quickly and, and, and price moves to get supply and demand into equilibrium, but you don't have the price moving because the market itself is frozen. People don't, people aren't much- You know, more reluctant to buy and sellers are much more reluctant to sell, so the volume of transactions has really dried up completely. So, so that's, that's, that, that's one part, my, I guess, getting back to your question, that's one part of the economy that's really, y-y, I think would be fair to say is in a deep recession. but then there are other parts of the economy like the service sector which is still booming, like you go to, you know, cities across the United States. And there are help wanted signs everywhere, every restaurant wants help, they can't find enough people to work. So if you're working in the service sector, you get your, to, to pick and choose your job and your salary is going up quite rapidly. And this is, this is a combination of factors. This is a combination of the massive stimulus that the US government pumped into the economy and also, you know, governments across the world did this during COVID. They, they were really worried it would go into this cataclysmic depression and so- They did something which is a much more direct stimulus, and it's very different. I like to contrast this to the, the monetary stimulus of the fina-- Great Financial Crisis in two thousand eight, two thousand nine, when the Federal Reserve intervened, by using quantitative easing. The, the stimulus during COVID was fiscal stimulus. They basically dropped helicopter dropped money onto the economy. They gave people checks. They literally gave you a check. So people getting checks in the mail. Like, oh Wow, I've got two thousand more dollars, and that money gets straight into the economy. It's like injecting it directly into the veins of the economy. And the combination of that money being available in the hands of, you know, the middle class, lower middle class, who tend to wanna spend money when they get money in their hand The combination of that and the fact that people had so much pent-up demand from these ridiculous COVID lockdowns, which prevented them-- they stripped away people's lives, right? They took, you're taking away two years of people's lives where they would normally do things that were important. We're social animals, we like to visit people, we like to travel, we like to have experiences. that was taken away, and so, you know, you end the, end the COVID lockdowns, and now you have this massive pent-up demand of people wanting- wanting to travel and, go to restaurants and just live like humans. plus they've been given all this money, and so that, that really, quickly f- flowed into the economy and, and put a lot of demand on the service sector. So that, that's actually where a lot of the inflation came from, the price inflation, is that people had the money in their hand, there was extra money that was printed and directly given to people, plus the pent-up demand of not- Being able to do anything, dur-- during the, the lockdowns. So we have this very interesting, contrast in the economy. You have parts of the economy which are very interest rate sensitive, which is the housing market, for instance, which is just in a complete depression, and, and also, I should mention one other part of the real estate market, which is commercial real estate, which is a really, really big part of the economy, that is also in what I would call a great depression, in, in parts of the uni- United States, like San Francisco, Seattle, some of the, the major cities, you'll go to the downtown areas which, you know, have these office buildings, and they're completely empty. They're like ghost towns. a-and part of that has-is related to the COVID shift as well. It's the fact that, you know, governments locked down entire countries and people had to find alternative ways of working, which forced people into this new culture of work from home. And what they realized was, hey, wow, actually we can work from home. Companies shifted their internal policies and said, okay, yep, this is possible, people can still be productive, maybe not as productive, but- They can still be productive, and it's caused a really big shift in the economy where you, you just don't need as much commercial real estate. So the commercial real estate market has been hit with this double whammy, which is The, this shift towards work from home culture and the higher interest rates, the commercial real estate market, it, it has this same kind of problem of being completely frozen, where, the people who own the commercial real estate and have taken lots of loans are just kind of sitting on it because they don't wanna sell. If you sell into a market that's this distressed, you're gonna take a massive, massive write down, and what they're doing is they're hoping, oh Maybe we can wait this out, maybe this will change, maybe in a year or two the market will pick up. If it doesn't, you're gonna see massive liquidation on the debt in commercial real estate, and that's gonna flow through the economy, and then, then you're gonna start seeing more of the kind of financial crisis recession that, that you would expect in a typical recession. So, so this is a very weird situation. You have parts of the economy which look like they're booming, which is the service sector, and then you have parts of the economy like the real estate market which are Depression territory. so one extra comment I wanna make is it's one of the dirty secrets of monetary policy that, mo-monetary policy is mainly transmitted through the real estate market. That's how it's traditionally been transmitted. You mo- you increase or decrease interest rates and The way that that stimulates the economy and cr-creates more money is that banks lend that, money. They have an incentive to lend money into the economy, and the, the, the primary mechanism is through the real estate market. Most regular people like you and I, our interactions with the bank, the major interaction is to get a mortgage, and that's, that's the, the, the mechanism that the, the Fed uses. there are now the economy is becoming less, interest rate sensitive Which makes the Fed's problem more difficult. There are big parts of the economy where, the Fed moving rates up isn't really changing much at all. there are companies, corporations which have taken out very long-term debt prior to COVID, like twenty-year debt, thirty-year debt, at very, very low interest rates. So the Fed increasing interest rates doesn't do anything to those corporations, it doesn't affect them, it doesn't necessarily throw them into a tailspin. So how this resolves is a really interesting question because you have this lopsided economy, and it's a question of, is this the, the part of the economy that's in the depression, is it gonna pull everything else down eventually, or is the other part gonna be strong enough that we're not go- gonna go into a, a traditional, typical recession where you see major unemployment increases and, shifts from one sector to another as the economy rebalances? So it's, it's an open question that, I'm, I'm not int-entirely sure how this is gonna play out, but it's a very different situation, to two thousand eight, two

thousand nine. Right. A-and so if one were to just copy the pattern from before, you might be tempted to just think, "Well, it's like that moment when, you know, Wile E. Coyote's run off the cliff, but he hasn't fallen down yet. " And so, you know, you might think, "Hey, actually, the economy is like that. We've haven't hit the results yet because maybe, you know, the, the interest rates have risen so dramatically, and as you said, there's a lot of people who haven't moved homes because of this, because they don't wanna move into a high, Higher interest rate mortgage or debt. so I, I wonder if that's, you know, maybe that's part of the situation we're in that, you know, that, The shoe is yet to drop. I'm curious if you, if you're seeing it that way or you see it's like, actually it's not like that.

I know, I think that's actually a really good analogy, maybe for a slightly different reason, because monetary policy has these lag effects. When you increase interest rates, it doesn't immediately change the economy. Things sort of keep going for a while until, like, for instance, if you, you have some debt which, you, you got at three percent at a much lower rate, and you have, if you're a Five-year debt at, at a lower interest rate. The higher interest rate will only affect you when you have to go and get more debt or you have to service your debt. That's when it affects you. And so you have these lag effects, and they're typically seen to be about eighteen months. So the full impact of the Fed's increase in rates is probably not gonna be seen until somewhere at the end of this year, maybe mid next year, and, and then we'll start feeling, so feeling them. So, so what you said is ex-is exactly right. It's, Wiley Coyote sort of spinning his legs, waiting for that eighteen month lag effect, and then I expect that there will be some impact. I do expect that we're gonna go into a recession. It, it, it, it seems almost inconceivable to me that you can go from zero interest rates to changing the, the risk-free interest rate, which is the rate that you get paid on cash, to five percent and not have a dramatic impact on, on the economy in general. It also really sucks money out of A whole bunch of different sectors because all of a sudden you have, return, real return on cash, and, and this affects the stock market because people see, "Oh, there's a comparative advantage now to keeping money in cash. I don't need to invest as much in the stock market because I'm getting a real return on cash, and it's zero risk." and also interestingly, you know, getting back to our, you know, our favorite topic, it has an effect on monetary goods. It has an effect on- An effect on Bitcoin, it has an effect on gold, because those things do really well when you have negative real interest rates, because then you're punished for holding cash. and when you're punished for holding cash, you look for alternatives to cash, like what can I hold where I'm not being punished? And you look for things like Bitcoin or gold to keep your savings in. When you get a real rate of return on cash in the bank, it's almost like this great sucking of capital out from those monetary goods back Back into cash. This is why, you know, gold after, nineteen eighty did quite poorly for a really long time because Paul Volcker increased the interest rate dramatically up to almost twenty percent, and so you were getting really a significant amount of yield on your cash, and so the, the, the punishment of negative real interest rate that people had in the seventies that pushed people into gold was completely reversed. So that's what we, we have now. The, the real question though is how long- How long can the Fed maintain, the interest rate at, at this level without, without breaking something? Is it possible that the system as a whole, the financial system as a whole, can survive with interest rates this high? My view is it's probably not possible And, and, and the reason is because in the background you have this massive debt problem, nations around the world have, Debt levels that are the highest they've been in, you know, seventy or eighty years. They're like wartime levels of debt, the same kind of levels of debt that the US had when it was in World War Two and it, you know, went into massive debt to pay for, armaments and, you know, sending, Munitions and stuff to Europe, we have that same debt level in peacetime, so we have to service that debt, the United States has to service that debt, and it now has to service that debt at five percent interest rate rather than zero percent interest rate, Which makes it much, much harder to service, and that starts showing up in the budget of the US, government, where there's a chunk of the budget, you know, there's a chunk of the budget is for defense, a chunk is for social security, a chunk is for education, and you can look at all these different chunks, a chunk is just for paying the interest on the debt, and that chunk is getting big, it's getting really big, and as the debt starts ballooning, eventually what you have is that chunk becomes so big that you, you're crow Any other spending, a-and then the government has to think about defaulting on its obligations, like can we pay Social Security, can we pay Medicare? we're not quite there yet in the United States, we're not quite at that crisis moment, there are other nations like Japan which are closer to that crisis moment, but that i-is a big concern as one of the key questions, can the Federal Reserve maintain interest rates at this level for a prolonged period of time? I don't think they believe that they can. In terms- Internally, if I was a fly on the wall and I was listening to them, I think internally they, they, they're probably saying stuff like, "We need to get inflation back in the bottle. We need to convince the market that we're credible, that when we say we want two percent inflation, we're credible about that. And once it's back in the bottle, we need to bring interest rates back down, because long term, the United States government, which the Federal Reserve is really a part of, will not be able to survive with interest rates this, this high.

Yeah, really interesting. There's lots of things that come to me there, because if interest rates remain high and the government wants to repay that debt, it's over time, it's going to necessitate a few things. One, big spending cuts, and two, big tax hikes, and that's gonna be extremely unpopular unless they, maybe they find a way to, let's say, eat the rich or tax the rich, but even then, it won't be enough because they're already-- the rich, you know, the top one percent or, or, you know, even higher, they're paying disproportionate share of the governmental tax burden. So that's gonna be really difficult, and so, but, you know, there are other ways that they might try to, let's say, kick the can, and, and maybe another way is to hide the inflation. And so that's another way where, as an example, they can just say, "Oh, look," CPI is low, therefore don't, you know, you shouldn't be complaining, and, you know, they, they can sort of, have, have their cake and eat it too, a little bit, not all the way, but they can sort of have it a little bit because they can have this view of, "Oh, look, CPI's gone down, and, you know, now we can, lower the rates a little bit." What do you think?

I, I think that's their hope. I think certainly the Federal Reserve wants to get CPI down below two percent. I, I do wanna have-- I, I just thought of one comment I wanted to make about that. There's been a lot of talk recently about why doesn't the Federal Reserve just change its target? Why don't they change it from two percent to three percent or four percent or something like that? and I, I think there's actually a really important reason that they're not doing that. The Federal Reserve has one asset That's incredibly important to it, and that's its credibility. If they lose their credibility, then they lose the, the ability to transmit their monetary policy into the economy, because if people don't believe them, w-when the Federal Reserve says we're gonna get inflation under control, that actually has a real impact on inflation. this is, this is kind of one of those things which is an interesting feedback loop, but it, it affects people's expectations in the economy. So if you believe that inflation, the Federal Reserve is Credible and that they, they say they're gonna get inflation back down to two percent. You're not gonna go to your employer and say, "Look, you have to give me a five percent raise." You really, you have to give me that raise because I think inflation's gonna be high. I don't trust the Federal Reserve anymore. And then you get this, this kind of wage spiral where people are asking for more salary, and then companies are like, "Oh, w- you know, we have this new cost, which is we have to pay employees more, so we have to increase Our employees and then the costs go up, and then people are like, "Well, costs are going up at five or six percent, the Federal Reserve can't-- doesn't seem to be able to stop that. I want more of an increase in my salary. And this is one of the effects that you saw during the inflation of the 1970s, is that people were demanding higher salaries, and that was feeding through into other prices as well. So the Federal Reserve's credibility is increasing-- sorry, is incredibly important. And That, that's why I think they, they are actually quite focused on getting CPI. They want CPI to come down, to maintain their credibility and then do, what I think, you, you know, said that they want to do, which is to then bring interest rates back down, because ultimately they have to make it possible for the US government to continue to exist and to service its debt. And it's just, I just don't see that it's possible in the long term. Debt, the debt to GDP ratio in the United States now is like a hundred and thirty percent, and that's not even, that's not even counting the massive Medicare and, and Social Security obligations, so, you, you can't maintain that kind of debt at, at five percent interest rates, so it's like, how, how are they gonna thread this needle? It's a really, really difficult problem, and I think in, internally they're probably talking about this question, how are we gonna get through this in the long term? the- The real solution is exactly what you said, that you have to take the pain of, higher taxes, and lower spending, but that's politically almost impossible in the United States. In a country as divided and polarized as the United States, how do you do the economically prudent, responsible thing, when everyone kind of hates each other? the easiest thing to do is promise everyone everything that they want, like we're gonna- To have Social Security forever and Medicare as soon as you get to sixty years old and, all of the benefits that you're promised, they're, they're not gonna go away, and we're gonna con-continue financing, being the policeman of the world. It's just, it's not sustainable. Something eventually has to crack. And, Probably the way it's gonna crack is through inflation, because governments just tend to want to avoid democratic governments especially, because they're, they're so short term oriented and they just wanna please their voters. the path of least resistance is to solve the problem through inflation. When you have this much debt, eventually you can't service it. What do you do? Do you default on the debt? Do you, do the politically difficult thing, which is to, reduce spending and increase taxes, or do you do the thing which people don't really understand is happening and it kind of is insidious and, do you inflate? That's what governments have always done long term. So I think my view is long term, that is what's gonna happen. This is- Is gonna be resolved, the debt problem, the global debt problem is gonna be resolved through inflation.

Back to the show in a moment. The lead sponsor of this show is Swan dot com, and Swan is putting on Pacific Bitcoin Festival. It's coming up again this year in LA, October 5th and 6th. And speaking of, Vijay is one of the guests who has been announced as a speaker, alongside other top notch speakers such as Max Kaiser and Stacey Herbert, Lynn Alden, Corey Klipstein, Alex Gladstein, Greg Foss, Jimmy Song, and So many more. I'm gonna be there of course, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there. There will be a main stage for dedicated talks, panels, fireside chats, as well as a swan dome with deep dive sessions and advanced topics and deeper discussions, as well as all other kinds of activities going on. There'll be a general ticket available and also a VIP ticket for those of you who want preferred seating, viewing our areas for the main stage, a private lounge for networking and connection, you'll get open VIP bar access and complimentary lunch. So whether you are getting the general admission ticket or A VIP ticket, bring some friends and family along, this is an unmissable event, I hope to see you all there. Go get your tickets at pacificbitcoin dot com, use code livera for a discount. Are you still using a plain old block explorer? Bitcoin has grown beyond a single layer, it's a multi-layer ecosystem, and mempool dot space is the leading Bitcoin explorer that allows you to see the mempool, the blockchain, second layer networks like the Lightning Network, and you don't even have to trust a third party, you can host it yourself, it's available on some of Distro's like Umbrel, Raspiblitz, and so on. With Mempool.Space, they are continually innovating, so they have new features all the time. They have added Mempool version three point o recently, and so they've got Mempool blocks that are scrollable, they forked Electrums, you can visualize full RBF, and they've got a Mempool accelerator integration coming. So you can find out more over at Mempool.Space. Now back to the episode. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that's the most likely long term scenario. So then How do you play that cycle, whether if you're an investor or as an individual, how do you survive, right? How do you stay solvent, to make it through to that other side? and I think the other aspect that I think is interesting, and as I'm sure you can appreciate, is when we're in a fiat fractional reserve system, they need continual expansion to sort of keep the party going. They need this continual expansion because people have it in their minds that, oh, property doubles every Seven to ten years, right? They don't, they don't think of that in real terms, they just think, "Oh, property just-- you know, I bought this property, whatever, ten years ago, and it's already doubled, and look at me, I'm two-- I'm twice as rich now." Obviously, they're not thinking about, you know, maintenance cost, inflation, and all these other aspects of it, but it just-- the system requires that and- What happens when the system doesn't get what it needs to s-survive?

that's a great question. And, you know, there's two sides to the coin, to the fractional reserve system. Mo-new money is created by banks lending it out into the economy. They take the base money supply and they multiply it out, and it creates this kind of broader money supply, which is really the, the primary driver of inflation. that's the kind of push, the pushing money out into the economy, but you also have to understand that there's a pull as well. Money is created by the issuance of debt. So a bank gives, a loan to someone to buy a mortgage, and suddenly there's that extra money that's in the economy. The person, who receives the, the, the payment, puts it into a bank, and, then they have more money to spend. But eventually, the person who has the loan has to pay down the- Alone, right? So that's a, that's a, a dragging force that, that, that brings money back, out of the economy. And eventually, if you have so much debt, and you can't service it, you get a, a much more powerful pulling force. You need the pushing force of pushing money through new loans to be, more powerful than the pulling force. But you can only have that if you have underlying real growth, because if you don't have underlying real growth, you're gonna get Bad loans, and you're gonna get people can't service their, their debt because there's no underlying wealth creation. And when you have that, that's when the loan starts drying up because it's almost like banks are drug dealers giving, giving out hits of drugs to druggies, right? And they're like, "Oh, yeah, this feels great, this feels great," and, and they're taking more and more drugs, and it looks like the market is booming, but eventually the, the drug addict taps out, their body can't handle anymore. especially if they're, you know healthy. If the economy's not healthy and doesn't have underlying real growth, the banks are gonna have to stop just because there's not gonna be demand for loans, and that's when the system goes in reverse and you start seeing, seeing debt deflation. the question is, where is that level? Where is the level where we just have too much debt and, and the drug addict is completely tapped out and you can't, you can't push more drugs onto them 'cause they'll just die? that's an open question. It's not clear what that level is. Is it a GDP, is it two hundred percent of GDP? that's an open question and, and when that moment happens, the problem is when it happens, it happens very quickly and everything unwinds very quickly and it's completely, completely chaotic. so one thing I think is really important to think about is will we have some amount of underlying growth that can save us, or- Have we seen the end of this big cycle of productivity that we've been in for the last forty years, and we're tapped out? We, we saw two very powerful factors that contributed to, to global growth in the last forty years. One was Moore's Law, which was the, the, the constant, doubling of computational power every eighteen months, had a massive impact on global productivity, because every time your computer gets more powerful, you can do new things. That you weren't able to do, like with your iPhone today, you can do stuff that people would, could not have even dreamed of forty years ago, just with a little device in your hand. The other factor was the bringing into the global economy the workforce of China and India. those two workforces were kind of detached from the global economy. So globalization, which dramatically lowered labor rates, you have China producing everything with cheap labor, plus you have- We have Moore's Law. Those two forces are largely tapped out. China isn't no longer, you know, a very, very cheap place to manufacture. It's sort of catching up to the West. They have a middle class now, and Moore's Law as well is kind of tapped out as well. So the two main drivers of productivity, I think, are tapped out. The question is, is there gonna be something that's gonna replace that that gives us the underlying wealth creation that makes this debt level serviceable? That's a really tough- Tough question. Could it be AI? Could it be something else in biotech that gives us a new, boom in, in growth? Not clear. I, I'm not sure. those two things that we had in the last forty years were so powerful, it's gonna be really hard to replace them.

Yeah, I think you're right that, it's not quite clear where the next leg up of growth is going to come. I think there is going to need to be some pain, sadly, right? I think there's gonna have to be a bit of pain, but there's also opportunities too. But bringing it to Bitcoin as well, this is something where people have been arguing about this for years. They have been saying, "Well, is Bitcoin a risk-on asset and it's something that likes low interest rates?" And then in the other camp, and maybe the long-term view is, " Actually, what people should be running to for safety. So how do you sort of disentangle those ideas in your mind? Do you see it like it's a risk-on asset, or are you seeing it more like, you know, find safety in Sats?

Yeah, I tweeted about this a couple of years ago, and the way I summarize it is that Bitcoin is a risk-on asset that's becoming a risk-off asset. That's the process of monetization. You have something which has very little value ten years ago, didn't have, no, a bit more than that now, I guess it's- Bitcoin's been around for a while now, fo- let's say fourteen years ago, it didn't have a market price, and, and now it's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. so it's certainly a risk-on asset in that early stage of monetization because, who knows if it's gonna be monetized? There's tremendous risk about around regulation, the technology, the risk of, you know, copycats, forks, all of these risks were there, so it was definitely risk-on. Eventually, when it gets to significant- enough size where enough people own it, let's say twenty, thirty percent of the global population owns it, then it's a risk off asset. It's become like a de facto, means of savings of keeping your, your savings that in times of stress, people will move their, their money to Bitcoin. I do think though that Bitcoin has achieved enough scale that one of the risks to Bitcoin that I wrote about in my book, is that it's now- Sensitive to interest rate policy. I, I, I don't think that would have been true in, say, two thousand thirteen or two thousand fourteen, because it was small enough, it was almost like a, you know, a penny stock, that the dominant factor was just the number of people who were jumping into Bitcoin, who were excited about it, libertarians and cypherpunks and, and just that crowd of people jumping in, could dramatically increase regardless of what- What interest rates are when it's something that small. It's like, you know, a high growth, very small company can do really well even if the economy is in a major recession. Actually, I started my career at a company like that. It was called Google, and we're in the dot, we're in the dot com bust, and Google was just growing like crazy, and all the other companies in Silicon Valley were firing their employees, and Google was gobbling them up, like, "Oh, you know, great engineers, we want more and more great engineers, because it Google gets big enough that it's a, you know, a big part of the economy and it's really affected by the economy, that if the economy goes into recession now, there's no way Google can escape it, it's gonna be affected. But when it's really tiny, it's going through that growth phase, i-i-it can still do that without being affected. And I think the same is true for Bitcoin, it's now achieved a scale where, macro factors do affect Bitcoin and, and interest rate policy does, does affect Bitcoin. That's why I think- This bull market, sorry, the, the to-- last bull market cycle was kind of cut off, a little unnaturally. It didn't look like-- I think a lot of us expected that Bitcoin would get to a hundred thousand, and I actually believe it would have if the Federal Reserve hadn't, made such a dramatic change to its policy. After over a decade of easy money, they just went crazy and went up to five percent very, very quickly. If that hadn't happened, I think the Bitcoin bull market would have reached, A level that we most people would have expected. So Bitcoin is now big enough that macro factors, it is a macro asset, and it will be affected by macro factors.

That's a really good point, and I think an another corollary might well be that this idea of four year cycles needs to be thrown out the window, perhaps. I'm curious to get your view on that, because now, like, let me set the scene a little bit. I think over time, of course, Bitcoin has been super volatile, but at the same time, people can't help but look back and see, " Wow, okay, hang on. There's like this kind of four-year pattern of like crazy bull run and then bear market, then kind of a bit of a middle, boring middle part, and then another bull run. And if you look at twenty thirteen, twenty seventeen, twenty twenty-one, it sort of, it seems to play out. And it, it's, it's so seductive to just think, "Oh, well, it's, you know, it's just gonna be the same thing." Well, obviously twenty twenty-one, add another four years, it's gonna be twenty twenty-five, Bitcoin is now sensitive, more sensitive to the broader macro environment. Does that mean maybe the four-year cycle thing is the wrong idea to have in our minds? What do you think?

I think the four-year cycle is a legitimate, construct and we've observed it to be true, and I think the reason is because of the halving. The halving is kind of something which forces,

sort of disequilibrium in supply and demand that happens every four years where you get this bull run and then people get excited and it gets to this, you know, climax, and then, there aren't enough people to feed it because, one of my observations is each cycle has a cohort of people who are reachable in that cycle, and the first cycle it was cypherpunks, and then it was like libertarians and early investors, and then it's the broader public, and then it's the laggards It's the people who are just really late to everything. And so the number of people reachable in the first cycle is actually pretty small, right? There aren't that many cypherpunks on Earth who, who were there to, in two thousand eleven, to feed that cycle. So the cycle ends, and then you get a crash because people got ahead of themselves, and eventually you get this price plateau, this boring level where people are like, "Well, the price is low enough that I wanna buy it at this level," and you have these people who are steady accumulators. And so supply and- Demand find this equilibrium, and then the, you know, after four years, the, the equilibrium's broken because of the halving. So the amount of supply that's being brought onto the market gets halved, and so now demand is above supply, and that starts pulling the price up slowly but surely, and then people recognize that, oh, the price is moving up, and then they start jumping in, and then you get this, you know, madness of crowds phenomenon where it goes parabolic again. So I don't think that part is gone. I think that part is still- But you now have to blend that with the fact that Bitcoin is big enough that it'll be affected by macro factors as well. So it's not gonna be a perfect, you know, fractal like it was in the past where you could, you know, superimpose two thousand and seventeen on two thousand and thirteen and be like, "Wow, these look really similar just at a different scale." you could have things that cut a bull market short or maybe even extend it. Like, imagine that we have the halving in twenty twenty-four and then suddenly something breaks in the financial system system and the Federal Reserve is like, we need to dramatically, decrease interest rates. Those two things combined could, accelerate the bull market and perhaps make it bigger than we expect. So I think that the four-year cycle is intact because Bitcoin has this natural thing which triggers the cycle, which is the halving. but now we have to also in the back of our heads think about what's happening in the, the broader macro picture and how might that affect a monetary good like Bitcoin.

Yeah. So when it comes to the four-year cycle, and as you, as you rightly say, of course, every four years the halving happens, and so, you know, the new block subsidy is halved. And so certainly, I certainly agree with you there, and there's some dynamics there for miners. but then I'm also curious, do you believe that that effect might be diminishing over time too? Because what happens now is a lot of the coins have already been issued, right? Or, you know, have been created, let's say ninety percent Roughly in that range. And so there's now a lot of the coins that are already with existing hodlers as opposed to new coins being mined. So do you believe then that the four-year cycle and this, the halving? The halving point specifically still is a big factor, or do you think it could also just be that, well, it's about how many hodlers there are as opposed to the halving changing things?

There's two ways to think about this. Certainly, it's true that the percentage of bitcoins as a, as a fraction of the total supply coming onto the market is much smaller, but at the same time, you have this other factor that the price level of Bitcoin, the total market capitalization, is much, much bigger as well. So e-even though it represents a small fraction, the amount of money that has to come into the Bitcoin market every day to maintain the price level is much, much higher. I, I can do a calculation. But it's, millions of dollars need to come into the Bitcoin market. You just need to multiply the, the subsidy by, you know, the number of blocks, per hour times the current Bitcoin price, and then you get like how much, how much dollars need to come into the market to maintain the price level. So even if it's a smaller fraction of the total, you still need that, you know, new financial energy coming into the market. And when you have the halving, the amount of financial- Energy that needs to be, that needs to come into the market to maintain the current price level of twenty-six thousand dollars isn't as much, and that's gonna push, push the price up. So, I, I think it still has an effect, and it, it has an effect because Bitcoin finds a new price level where the halving still has an impact just by the fact that the total market cap has increased significantly.

Yeah, that's a good answer. I can't, I can't, fault you there. So when it comes to trust And building trust over time, this is something you recently commented as well, where you were pointing out the level of trust that people have in gold and the level of trust people have in Bitcoin. So can you elaborate on that idea of building trust over time in Bitcoin?

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the biggest advantages that gold has over Bitcoin is it had, it's an ancient money that people have been using for thousands of years, and so people just assume that gold is gonna be around for the next thousand years because it was the last five or six thousand years of human civilization. The question is, how quickly can Bitcoin achieve a similar level of trust? And I, one of my, the arguments I make is that it's asymptotic, that it happens very quickly, that people's perception that something is- Permanent is has it existed during my lifetime. So think about people, kids who were born when Bitcoin was created, they're fourteen years old now. you know, five years from now, these kids are gonna enter the workforce and their entire life, they don't know a world without Bitcoin. It, it's kind of like, a lot of kids today who are in the workforce don't know a world without the internet. You know, I, I'm old enough and I have, you know, the gray hairs to prove it that, I remember well. Why to the internet and what that was like, and how different that world was. But kids today don't, to them, the internet is a permanent fixture of the world, right? It's never going away 'cause they don't, they can't even imagine a world where the internet didn't exist. That's gonna be true for a whole generation of people entering the workforce in the next five, six, five or six years. And for them, I think their perception of Bitcoin's permanence will be very close to gold. you know, they, they'll hear- The story is about gold's been around forever, but their experience, their personal experiences, well, Bitcoin's been around forever. I don't remember a world without Bitcoin, and I think that really flips people's, thinking on, is this an asset that I can invest in? Is this something that I can put my savings in and have, have a sense that it's still gonna be around in ten years from now? for people who are older, you know, people who are in their sixties or seventies, they might look at Bitcoin and be like, "Oh, this thing's Come around the last decade, I don't know if I can trust this to be around. But as, as people age and young people become old people, that per- that perception's gonna change. And my view is it takes about two decades for, that's, that's for, you know, an entire generation to grow up. It takes about two decades for those people to have a completely changed perception of a new technology and to accept it as, "This is permanent, this has always been around." and that- That starts filtering out into the economy because those people are now earning money and they're gonna treat Bitcoin as an asset which is gonna exist forever, and it's gonna be part of their portfolio and they're gonna think about it as a very normal part of their portfolio. I think actually people who are growing up today, who will be in their twenties in the next five or six years, they're gonna be much more likely to have Bitcoin as a part of their portfolio than gold.

Excellent. And how do you think then about the idea that a lot of the wealth is held by older- The people, so let's say the Boomer generation, maybe it's the Gen X, Gen X generation. So even though there are a lot of young people coming up through the ranks, they don't currently hold the wealth. But I, I guess, you, you would say that, you know, over time, it'll, it'll just flow down, right? Obviously, as people age, they pass away and then they pass wealth down to their children, and so then maybe that's, another, pathway that, you know, Bitcoin just over time replaces other Assets as our savings asset.

Yeah, definitely. It's just a natural cycle of human life that eventually that wealth is gonna pass down to people. I, I will say though that, millennials are definitely lagging in, in terms of the, the wealth that they've accumulated compared to, to the boomers, and, and part of that is just structural. They're, they're growing up in a time where their, s- their, their nations are saddled with so much debt and their opportunities are, are less. They're really the first generation who can't really expect expect to have a higher standard of living than their parents, which is really sad. You know, every generation for the last hundred years or so has thought, "I, I'm gonna have a better standard of living than my parents." The, the millennials are the first to, to not, not have that the case. They do have one advantage though, that advantage is Bitcoin. They are so much more intimately familiar with Bitcoin and much more comfortable with owning it. The monetization of Bitcoin could be the big wealth transformation that helps Helps millennials catch up to the boomers as, as wealth moves, from all these traditional assets which aren't really ideal forms of saving to Bitcoin, which is an ideal form of saving, that will help millennials catch up, and the fact that they are comfortable with it, that they've grown up with it, gives them a big advantage over people who are in their 70s who still have that hesitancy, you know, except, you know, a few, few instances like Uncle Bill in Canberra, who is- Is, who is in his 70s and, is just as, as familiar with Bitcoin as any millennial.

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received Sats, like I received, I received the money, like, you know, I guess it's mind-blowing for, you know, obviously for people like you and I and probably for listeners of this show, it's not a new thing, right? But, everyday there's new people. It's a beautiful thing though,

seeing that experience, because I think most of us have had that experience earlier on in our introduction to Bitcoin, where it's just, it's so magical. The, you, you really feel what the innovation to Bitcoin is, to be able to transmit intermediary, which is the innovation that Satoshi made possible, and this is the first time in history that this has been possible. When you first experience that, it's, it's re- really is a magical moment. so it's cool that you're still finding people, who, who, who haven't experienced that in, in Orange Pilling them. That's really awesome.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the other thing is, i-it's the battle of trying to get people off of custodial exchanges in a way. So this, some coins on a custodial exchange, and I was basically telling them, "Hey, well, you've got it, you know, do you have it in your own wallet or do you have it on the exchange?" And they're like, "Oh, okay, I'd--" 'cause they didn't know, right? Right? And I think that's just, again, that's just how-- that's how early we are, that, we think of it as like it's totally standard to just have all your coins off the exchange, but there's all these people out there

That is by making a personal connection, I think. So I think that's maybe another angle. but I'm, I'm curious your thoughts as well on, in terms of orange, you know, orange peeling people, although I kind of cringe at that term sometimes, I sort of think of it like You know, I, let me put it this way, okay? I, I know you're laughing, but it's like, sometimes maybe it's the use of the term, right? People might say, "Oh, look, I just orange-pilled my Uber driver, just got him on a wallet," and, it's kind of like, well, if you got them on, like, for example, if you got them on a custodial wallet How much learning did they really do? You know, it's sort of, maybe I'm, maybe I'm being a little cynical, but I think orange peeling really, it needs time. You need an ongoing relationship with that person to make it happen. What do you think?

Yeah, no, I think that's a, that's a really good observation. I will say though, the, the term orange peel originally came from The Matrix, the movie The Matrix, yeah, yeah, yeah. The red peel, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it, yeah, the red peel. If any of I think about something like that, and I remember watching that and thinking this is one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. But that's almost a quarter of a century ago, and maybe there are some listeners of yours who haven't seen it. You, everyone should, should watch that movie. but I, I will say, you know, Neo does take the red pill in, in the movie, and he does go down the rabbit hole, but that's not the beginning, sorry, that's not the end of his journey. Like he, he's in the Matrix, and he

You know, so I, I think you can all-- Yeah, exactly. Now I know lightning, now I know how to self-custody, now I know multisig. so I think you can also have a charitable interpretation of orange pilling, which is, it's just the beginning, it's not the

end. That's a good point, that's a good way to put it. when it comes to Bitcoin technology, right? Of course, you know, you're a, you're, you're a software engineer, developer yourself, and of course, So you've been following what's happening in the Bitcoin space. Do you see it like Bitcoin technology needs to be improved so that more people can be onboarded into this thing, or do you see it more like that's kind of orthogonal, like it's not the most important thing? Like, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. If it was easy to, let's say, have, you know, a Lightning address, and you had like your Bitcoin Lightning wallet with a contacts, contacts in it, and it was easy, you know, for people to fling SATs around to each What it will take to sort of get that next wave, or do you think it's just independent, that people will just come into it, you know, you'll see these waves up and down, just independent of the technology?

I think the core technology, the core network, I, I think it's actually incredibly valuable that it's not that exciting, that it's boring in a way, that it's stable. You want that, you know, core technology to be stable because it's the base for a new form of money, and money isn't something you want to be constantly- Changing, you know, gold wouldn't have been money if it constantly morphed into copper or something like that. You want it to, you want to be able to r-rely on it. I think with something like Lightning, it, it's certainly exciting for, innovators a- and enthusiasts, but I have a kind of controversial opinion on this, which I know we've talked about many times, is that I, I don't think merchant adoption, is gonna happen for a while. I really think the most important thing with Bitcoin is providing easy on-ramps for people to get into Bitcoin, and then getting them, you know, going the down, down the rabbit hole to get them, More interested in self-sovereignty and holding their own Bitcoin and then multisig, I, I think there is value in those things becoming more user-friendly. I, I still think there's a lot of work that needs to be done Both in the ease of the on ramps, and this, you know, may be another controversial opinion, I think an ETF is a good thing for Bitcoin, because I think that we need people to be exposed to Bitcoin and have more financial energy come into Bitcoin, and then I think we can focus on the other stuff. We need to make it easier for people to, to, to self-custody. Some people, though, unfortunately, I just don't- I don't think it's ever gonna do that. I, I, I just think they're not capable of that. We may be able to get to a better halfway solution, say, where they use a multi-sig solution, something like, that unchain as a collaborative custody, yeah. A collaborative custody, and then you have wealth managers who will work with them and help them along that process. I think that is a really happy middle ground that I hope that we can get many more people into eventually. Yeah. But really for me, I still think we're at the point where we need to focus on the on-ramps, making the on-ramps as easy as possible, making sure they're, safe, secure, and making sure that a-as we're getting people from those on-ramps to self-sovereignty, that that is easy and, you know, beautiful user interfaces, a-and ways of helping users not shoot themselves in the foot. A lot more work needs to go into that. I, I think we're still many, many years away from something where I can, you know, give it to my mom and say, "Here, put, put your Bitcoin on, on this and, you know, go, go to, Swan or River and buy a Bitcoin and then, and put it on your wallet." I, I still feel that, like, that process, that experience isn't there for the laggards in our population, the people who are so far behind on technology adoption because everything seems scary to them.

I hope that the Bitcoin community focuses on that. I, I don't wanna criticize the people who work on Lightning because it's so cool and so exciting, and eventually it will be important, but I, I don't think it's gonna be massive. It's not gonna be a massive driver for adoption just yet.

I see, yeah. So I'm curious what you think. I've got two comments. One comment would just be, certainly I agree with you about on-ramps. That's probably the most important thing. The most important thing is to get more new hodlers, and I think But nevertheless, I think that's the economically important step. But I'll just point out though that there may be some people who might use Lightning as their way of onboarding. There may be some people who earn, you know, on Lightning, but I guess in fairness, you could say that a lot of people will buy coins over Lightning, as opposed to, or buying coins just, you know, on chain, let's say, as opposed to earning on Lightning. but I think the other point I'm curious, yeah, go on.

I was just gonna say there is some magic to telling someone, hey, just, you know, download a wallet and I'll shoot some Sats to you, and, and it happens instantly, like the, you can see the power of Bitcoin. But I don't think that's quite as powerful. Being given Bitcoin isn't quite as powerful as buying it yourself. There are so many people who are given Bitcoin who just weren't that interested in it. When you have your own, Psychological stake in, in putting your own money into it and getting over the hump, then you're more in, invested emotionally, and I find tho- those people are the ones who really become Bitcoiners and start to understand why Bitcoin is a superior form of saving. So Lightning does have advantages in that you can do these cool things and show people like the potential of Bitcoin, but I, I still think it ultimately you need people to say, "I just want to buy Bitcoin, I want to save in Bitcoin," and making it easy for them to do that, I think is It's really important.

Yeah, that's totally fair. one other comment on the ETF aspect, because while I agree it's good to bring people in and oftentimes you need, you, you can't, you can't expect zero to one hundred perfection. I am curious your thoughts on whether you think, let's say a lot of people get into an ETF and they don't even bother, if those people never self-custody, does that present some kind of systemic risk to the system of Bitcoin? Does it compromise Bitcoin in some way? Or do you think that basically Bitcoin would survive

I do worry about that, I really honestly do, because, you know, I cut my teeth, I really became interested in participating in the Bitcoin community during two thousand and seventeen w-with the, the, the block size wars, and that was a really scary time because all of these very powerful interests inside the Bitcoin community lo-looked like they wanted to increase the block size, which would have been a huge disaster for Bitcoin. You know, the major companies involved, many of the large- Largest ho-holders at the time, people like Roger Ver, were arguing for this, and, and the miners as well, the mi- you know, the most powerful miner was like, "We need to do this," a-and they were threatening starving the, the, the main chain of hash power. so I do worry about the concentration of power if some-someone like a BlackRock suddenly has like ten percent of the supply of Bitcoin under an ETF, and if, if you ever have a, a fork that they could use that economic power to, to push the market in a particular direction, I, I do worry about that. I, I would say though that, people who run their own nodes are self-sovereign and they can always ditch, whatever the majority will do. I think, you know, a company like Black, BlackRock w-would be ideologically neutral, and they wouldn't have a strong position in this. They might lean kind of the wrong direction. But ultimately, people follow whoever has the strongest conviction. And, and I wrote this in two thousand and seventeen. One of the reasons I knew that, the, the S2X fork would fail was they had no conviction at all. I said, "Look, guys, you do your fork, we'll do our fork, and, I will sell all of my tokens to you. You give me your Bitcoin and, you take my new S2X tokens." And none of them would- Take that. No, no, they didn't have any internal conviction, whereas the hardcore people, the people who really believe in Bitcoin, believe in an ideology, they have conviction in their heart about what is, what is valuable about Bitcoin and what makes it special. Those people, I think, will drive the direction of Bitcoin, not the kind of big behemoths that don't really have any view or not have any ideology about Bitcoin. And ultimately, if they try and go the wrong direction, we'll just say You know, fuck you, we're going the other way, and we'll, and, and we'll see, see who lost your kind of shit coin that you created, which doesn't have any of the properties that make Bitcoin unique, its immutability, and its censorship resistance, and, and we'll go our own way, and, and, and that's fine. Eventually, people will find that the value will move to the, the platform which has the strongest monetary characteristics, and immutability is, is, is that really big one. So it doesn't- It does worry me, I'm not gonna deny that, that, that there's no world in which they could have a, a, a negative impact, but I think they're not gonna be so ideologically driven that they're gonna move the market. It's people like you and me who really believe in Bitcoin for a particular reason that are gonna push the market in a particular direction. And if it doesn't go in our direction, we'll just do our own thing and we'll do our own real legacy Bitcoin thing, and they can have their shitcoin.

Right. And I think it's also- Also good to point out that BlackRock and other entities will look back at what happened in twenty seventeen and say, "Well, there's a, there's a chance here that you could really split things off and see, well, if you look at what the price of Bcash is now or the price of BSV is now, I mean, it's, it's, it's tiny, it's like well below one percent of what BTC is. And so I think it sort of becomes more and more clear that, if you play those sort of games, you're, you're, you're We'll, we'll, we'll see what happens with that, but I think at the end of the day, it comes down to how many people are coming into this system, and ideally, how many of those people are self-custodying their Bitcoin, of course. And so I think it really does just come back to the on-ramp question, like you said. So, yeah, so I guess, do you have any other, thoughts around Bitcoin, well, I guess, I guess you kind of answered that. I was gonna ask a little bit around some of the, you know, technology stuff like the soft forks and things like this, but at the end of the day, happens or not, I mean, it's more about the monetary qualities of Bitcoin, and so, you know, if there's like a soft fork every, you know, in a long time, that's not a big deal. It And so rapidly, and I, and I think I agree with you on that.

As long as it has, you know, very strong consensus, I think eventually, you, you have ossification in terms of hard forks. I don't think we're gonna see any more hard forks. We might see soft forks for Bitcoin, but I think eventually even those are gonna go away and Bitcoin will just be what it is and it won't change at that base layer. I am interested though, in one of the attributes of mo- of money that I think Bitcoin isn't absolutely ideal, which is Privacy, which sort of goes, you know, hand in hand with fungibility, and I, I'm really interested, I'm not an expert on this, and I know you have your head in the details more than I do, but, whether Taproot eventually is gonna make it possible to have, better, more private Bitcoin, because you'll, you know, be able to have addresses where you have multiple signatures and you don't actually know who's signing for it, and that, that ability, will it make it possible for people to own Bitcoin in a- In a way that's more private and, and gives stronger fungibility properties to Bitcoin. I'm really interested to see how that plays out over the next few years, 'cause I know Taproot was, a-adopted not too long ago, but I don't-- it takes many, many years for us to sort of see the benefit with the adoption of, a new technology like that. Just like SegWit, it took, you know, years before people were really comfortable using SegWit addresses. I think the same thing will be true with Taproot, the benefits Take some time, but that, that's something I'm, I'm very curious about. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, well, I mean, the quick answer, at least as I understand it, is that there are some ways in which Taproot allows some of the privacy heuristics to be undermined, but there are other privacy heuristics that still remain that are still possible to analyze, and that's where some of these blockchain surveillance or Bitcoin surveillance firms will, they will use that. Now, of course, there isn't a big argument about whether it Are they not even that confident about the ability of their, their algorithms to detect exactly what's happening? but I think the short answer is that Taproot will enable some things that are gonna give us some more privacy. So for example, you could imagine in the future with Lightning, if they get pTLCs, that may enable some more privacy there. You-- we may start to see more of these, protocols that allow multiple people to have a threshold multi-signature, but it looks on chain like a single signature. So a good example of that is Music2 and Frost. Music2 just recently went, is in production at BitGo, a big custodian. I did an episode recently with Brandon Black talking about the process they, they went through for that. and I think, hopefully in the future, as long as obviously there's consensus and, you know, people are on board with it, I think some of these soft fork ideas like APO or CTV or that, that functionality may enable more other privacy, in other ways too. So as an example, there may- Maybe people who use things like coin pools or payment pools and get some privacy in that way. And, you know, so there are, there, there's work being done in this area, but like you said, it all takes time. And so even though Taproot came in, was it twenty twenty or late-- I can't remember now, maybe early twenty twenty-one, I'm, I can't remember. it, there's still, you know, development that's just recently hitting. So for example, Lightning Labs and LND recently enabled, Taproot channels. So they So there's all these things that it takes time for development to happen. So, you know, I think focusing out on the long term, getting some of these improvements, as long as people agree on them and are, are bought into the idea, then, you know, that could really help. and of course, I think in the future there's this idea of cross-input aggregation, which would also be a soft fork idea. so there are ideas around that, that if we aggregate across inputs, then maybe there's privacy wins that we could gain, as well as scalability wins. So yeah, some of that is kind of in the future, but I, optimistic that there'll be further development on these things and that enough people can come to consensus that they'll say, "Look, we think this has been tested, we think it's safe, it's not gonna harm Bitcoin, it's not gonna-- and, and crucially, it's not gonna harm people who don't wanna opt into it." So for example, things like APO, if you don't wanna use, you know, APO, you don't have to, and it doesn't harm the non-A Hopefully, we'll see improvements in the technology there, but, you know, it, it continues regardless, even if we don't have any soft forks, there's still a lot of technology and improvements coming. So, I guess that's, that's kind of my, that's my take on it. Yeah.

Oh, that's great. I mean, it's, it definitely sounds like there's potential for improvements to privacy in Bitcoin's future, even if that's a few years down the road, that the potential the Taproot has made possible is there.

Yeah, for Yeah, well, I guess, I'm looking forward to seeing you at Pacific Bitcoin as well. So, I know you've been, announced for that, and, I, yeah, looking forward to seeing you there.

I'm really excited to go. It's gonna be my first time. I guess it's the second conference. I wasn't there the first time. I he-heard amazing things about Pacific Bitcoin. I love Bitcoin only events. and I, I get to, for the first time ever, present the bullish case for Bitcoin, which is,

No one's ever asked me to, to present the bullish case for Bitcoin, so I'm excited to be able to do that.

Yeah, I think it's great, and I, I think one really cool thing with Pacific Bitcoin is you actually do get a chance to, just, it's a really great vibe, so you really get a great chance to actually connect with speakers and people and just meet really cool Bitcoin people. So I'm looking forward to that. but I think that's probably, you know, it's probably a good spot to finish up there. So Vijay, I'm looking

I hope you enjoyed the discussion about Bitcoin as a macro asset and the four-year cycles. I will look forward to seeing you at Pacific Bitcoin as we discussed, and you can find my show notes at stephanlivera dot com. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels.