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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-10-02-steven-lubka-let-the-super-cycle-begin-bitcoin-for-corporations-ep-17",
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"episode_slug": "2025-10-02-steven-lubka-let-the-super-cycle-begin-bitcoin-for-corporations-ep-17",
"episode_title": "Steven Lubka: Let the Super Cycle Begin | Bitcoin for Corporations Ep. 17",
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"published_at": "2025-10-02T23:45:36Z",
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"caption": "This is always an enormous intellectual risk to be on camera and say it's different this time, but you know what? I'm going to do it. I do think it's different this time. We hit an all-time high of 108K in January, shortly after inauguration. Where are we today? 109. Did we get a little above it? Sure, we hit that 10% above it. It leads me to think like new all-time highs are ahead of us. I think we're an incredibly beneficial macroeconomic environment, a very unique one that I think the market doesn't even fully understand yet. I think part of that is evidenced by gold. Gold has been completely ripping. It is responding to a new fiscal regime, and I fully expect Bitcoin to follow that. Is Bitcoin going to drop 70% from here? I simply can't see it. It doesn't make any sense to me. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. I'm your host, Pierre Ortega. Today, joined by Stephen Lubka from Nakamoto. First, disclosure, I'm an independent director for Strive. Obviously, being a Bitcoin treasury company, I might discuss some things adjacent to it, but really speaking in my own personal capacity. I invite skepticism anyway. If you want to send skeptical questions, my DMs are open. So are Stephen's, I bet. Stephen, welcome to the show. I think that a lot of our... I think our audience might already know you. But for those that don't, I want to kind of give a brief rundown of your orange pilling story and your Bitcoin journey up to this point. Yeah, no, great to be here, man. I'm thinking back to the first time we met at a dinner in Los Angeles. And I mean, you know, I know it was a dream of both of us to produce shareholder value ever since then. So it's just really exciting that, you know, we got here. No, all jokes aside, my name is Stephen Lubka. I'm the VP of Investor Relations for Nakamoto. We are a Bitcoin treasury company, also that invests in Bitcoin treasury companies and a few other angles that I'm sure we'll get into. I've been in Bitcoin for almost a decade now, which is crazy because time really flies. I got in in the early part of 2017 and fell in love with it, was completely captivated by it. And after kind of the first year, I remember just thinking like, you know, I don't I don't know, I don't really know how you work in the Bitcoin industry. I don't know how much there is a Bitcoin industry, but if there is one, that's where I'd like to be. And so that kind of took a couple different stages. I think most notably and most recently, I ran, I built and ran the private wealth team for Swan Bitcoin. I did that for five years. This was a concierge kind of almost financial advisor-esque wealth platform. I did that for five years. This was a concierge kind of platform, very personalized, helping high net worth individuals get into Bitcoin, answer their questions, store Bitcoin. And, you know, we helped almost five billion dollars of allocations for high net worth individuals and ran that until recently joining Nakamoto, becoming very interested in the treasury company landscape and very excited by, you know, what David and Tyler had been doing. Yeah, well, likewise, on my end, very, very huge admirer of what Nakamoto is building. And I think that, yeah, well, let's get into kind of the Nakamoto journey so far and kind of what the thesis is for the team at Nakamoto. Yeah. So I think the thesis for Nakamoto starts prior to Nakamoto i
This is always an enormous intellectual risk to be on camera and say it's different this time, but you know what? I'm going to do it. I do think it's different this time. We hit an all-time high of 108K in January, shortly after inauguration. Where are we today? 109. Did we get a little above it? Sure, we hit that 10% above it. It leads me to think like new all-time highs are ahead of us. I think we're an incredibly beneficial macroeconomic environment, a very unique one that I think the market doesn't even fully understand yet. I think part of that is evidenced by gold. Gold has been completely ripping. It is responding to a new fiscal regime, and I fully expect Bitcoin to follow that. Is Bitcoin going to drop 70% from here? I simply can't see it. It doesn't make any sense to me. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. I'm your host, Pierre Ortega. Today, joined by Stephen Lubka from Nakamoto. First, disclosure, I'm an independent director for Strive. Obviously, being a Bitcoin treasury company, I might discuss some things adjacent to it, but really speaking in my own personal capacity. I invite skepticism anyway. If you want to send skeptical questions, my DMs are open. So are Stephen's, I bet. Stephen, welcome to the show. I think that a lot of our... I think our audience might already know you. But for those that don't, I want to kind of give a brief rundown of your orange pilling story and your Bitcoin journey up to this point. Yeah, no, great to be here, man. I'm thinking back to the first time we met at a dinner in Los Angeles. And I mean, you know, I know it was a dream of both of us to produce shareholder value ever since then. So it's just really exciting that, you know, we got here. No, all jokes aside, my name is Stephen Lubka. I'm the VP of Investor Relations for Nakamoto. We are a Bitcoin treasury company, also that invests in Bitcoin treasury companies and a few other angles that I'm sure we'll get into. I've been in Bitcoin for almost a decade now, which is crazy because time really flies. I got in in the early part of 2017 and fell in love with it, was completely captivated by it. And after kind of the first year, I remember just thinking like, you know, I don't I don't know, I don't really know how you work in the Bitcoin industry. I don't know how much there is a Bitcoin industry, but if there is one, that's where I'd like to be. And so that kind of took a couple different stages. I think most notably and most recently, I ran, I built and ran the private wealth team for Swan Bitcoin. I did that for five years. This was a concierge kind of almost financial advisor-esque wealth platform. I did that for five years. This was a concierge kind of platform, very personalized, helping high net worth individuals get into Bitcoin, answer their questions, store Bitcoin. And, you know, we helped almost five billion dollars of allocations for high net worth individuals and ran that until recently joining Nakamoto, becoming very interested in the treasury company landscape and very excited by, you know, what David and Tyler had been doing. Yeah, well, likewise, on my end, very, very huge admirer of what Nakamoto is building. And I think that, yeah, well, let's get into kind of the Nakamoto journey so far and kind of what the thesis is for the team at Nakamoto. Yeah. So I think the thesis for Nakamoto starts prior to Nakamoto itself. And so I'm going to talk about the roles that two of our executives played in a previous, in a different company. And so just for listeners being clear that, like, we're describing kind of pre-Nakamoto actions. And so David and Tyler, on top of Bitcoin Inc., which a lot of people know, Bitcoin Conference, Bitcoin Magazine, they launched a hedge fund called UTXO. And this had a couple different focuses throughout its history. But in the last two years, they started on a new kind of investment strategy that's probably well known to all of our listeners. And they were back, they backed the
2
000000001
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-12-18-peter-mccormack-bitcoin-maximalism-is-dead-long-live-bitcoin-maximalism",
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"episode_slug": "2025-12-18-peter-mccormack-bitcoin-maximalism-is-dead-long-live-bitcoin-maximalism",
"episode_title": "Peter McCormack: Bitcoin Maximalism is Dead (Long Live Bitcoin Maximalism)",
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"published_at": "2025-12-18T22:48:57Z",
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"caption": "Like if we need everyone to run a node, understand an XPUB, understand the technical side of Bitcoin, be experts in macroeconomics for Bitcoin to win, we're going to fail. We have people now who are Bitcoiners without knowing. They're holding Bitcoin in their portfolio and they don't know. And that's a good thing. It just means like our tentacles are everywhere. We're in everything, which is a good thing. All right. Brandon. Peter. Peter, thank you for coming to Bitcoin Magazine, our flagship show. We're bringing it back. And, you know, I'm honored to talk to you as really the legend of Bitcoin media in a lot of ways. I mean, you were the face of the Bitcoin conversation. Yeah, I'm not sure that was always a good thing. But it was real. I mean, you know, you really guided for a better part of what? Five years? Eight years. Eight years? Eight years. 2017 was the first episode. 2017, yeah. And then when did you go off of what Bitcoin did? That was... That was... Probably it's more like seven years. So it was September 24. I did the first episode of my personal show. Yeah. The Pete McCormack show. But I'd kind of known... I'd known for about three... For a couple of years, I'd known I was done. Yeah. Like I really knew I was done a few months beforehand. We ended up moving it forward. I'd said to Danny, we were going to finish in the January and I was going to start the new show in the February and I pulled it forward. I took a trip out to, I think it was Nashville. I was on the plane. I was like, I don't want to do this. Yeah. I don't do this anymore. So I just got off the plane. Me and Danny went for a beer. I said, I'm done. I'm going to announce it. This is going to be my last trip. And whatever we record, these are the last shows. I think we recorded the final show at Bitcoin Park. And that was it. It was done. It was over. It was like... Yeah. How did it feel? When you wrapped the final recording, how did it feel to kind of not close that chapter obviously? I mean, you're still a Bitcoiner doing media interviews and layering in a Bitcoin narrative throughout it. But how did it feel to do that transition? Mainly relieved because I wanted to do the next thing. Obviously, we'll talk about the football club that takes up a lot of time. Mainly relieved. But also, that kind of like, there was that underlying anxiety is like, is this a bad decision? Am I going to regret this? And the Bitcoin world moves so quick. You can go from being like a central player, doing all these incredible interviews with people to suddenly, like people just forget you and it moves on and it carries on doing this thing. Which is great. But like, would I end up regretting it? No, I don't regret it. Like Danny's done an incredible job carrying the show on and the new show is doing really well. I miss it. Your new show's big. Like it's massive, right? Bigger than what Bitcoin did. Yeah. But I do miss it. Like, I'm glad to come here and just like see you and see David and like Jack and bump into people because when you're making the show, it was such a bubble and it was the most incredible life. I was so fortunate just to fall into it. But me and Danny would get on a flight. We would pick a city in the US, Nashville, Austin, whatever, book a nice Airbnb, set up a studio. And for two weeks, we
Like if we need everyone to run a node, understand an XPUB, understand the technical side of Bitcoin, be experts in macroeconomics for Bitcoin to win, we're going to fail. We have people now who are Bitcoiners without knowing. They're holding Bitcoin in their portfolio and they don't know. And that's a good thing. It just means like our tentacles are everywhere. We're in everything, which is a good thing. All right. Brandon. Peter. Peter, thank you for coming to Bitcoin Magazine, our flagship show. We're bringing it back. And, you know, I'm honored to talk to you as really the legend of Bitcoin media in a lot of ways. I mean, you were the face of the Bitcoin conversation. Yeah, I'm not sure that was always a good thing. But it was real. I mean, you know, you really guided for a better part of what? Five years? Eight years. Eight years? Eight years. 2017 was the first episode. 2017, yeah. And then when did you go off of what Bitcoin did? That was... That was... Probably it's more like seven years. So it was September 24. I did the first episode of my personal show. Yeah. The Pete McCormack show. But I'd kind of known... I'd known for about three... For a couple of years, I'd known I was done. Yeah. Like I really knew I was done a few months beforehand. We ended up moving it forward. I'd said to Danny, we were going to finish in the January and I was going to start the new show in the February and I pulled it forward. I took a trip out to, I think it was Nashville. I was on the plane. I was like, I don't want to do this. Yeah. I don't do this anymore. So I just got off the plane. Me and Danny went for a beer. I said, I'm done. I'm going to announce it. This is going to be my last trip. And whatever we record, these are the last shows. I think we recorded the final show at Bitcoin Park. And that was it. It was done. It was over. It was like... Yeah. How did it feel? When you wrapped the final recording, how did it feel to kind of not close that chapter obviously? I mean, you're still a Bitcoiner doing media interviews and layering in a Bitcoin narrative throughout it. But how did it feel to do that transition? Mainly relieved because I wanted to do the next thing. Obviously, we'll talk about the football club that takes up a lot of time. Mainly relieved. But also, that kind of like, there was that underlying anxiety is like, is this a bad decision? Am I going to regret this? And the Bitcoin world moves so quick. You can go from being like a central player, doing all these incredible interviews with people to suddenly, like people just forget you and it moves on and it carries on doing this thing. Which is great. But like, would I end up regretting it? No, I don't regret it. Like Danny's done an incredible job carrying the show on and the new show is doing really well. I miss it. Your new show's big. Like it's massive, right? Bigger than what Bitcoin did. Yeah. But I do miss it. Like, I'm glad to come here and just like see you and see David and like Jack and bump into people because when you're making the show, it was such a bubble and it was the most incredible life. I was so fortunate just to fall into it. But me and Danny would get on a flight. We would pick a city in the US, Nashville, Austin, whatever, book a nice Airbnb, set up a studio. And for two weeks, we would hang out with our friends. Make 20 shows, go and eat a steak, have a beer, watch football and go home. And then I'd get home and we would publish the shows and get on with life. It was a complete bubble. And then when I ended it, I came out of that bubble and I was like, oh, I actually miss it a bit. I miss seeing my friends. Yeah. Yeah. What aspect of the Bitcoin conversation do you miss the least? What do I miss the least? Justifying asking difficult questions. Yeah. Yeah. Justifying saying things. Like I think I said some things that people thought were controversial and made them think I'm an idiot that were really important questions or points. Like when I c
3
000000002
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-08-19-anaise-kanimba-from-hotel-rwanda-to-bitcoin-bitcoin-politics-ep-6",
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"episode_slug": "2025-08-19-anaise-kanimba-from-hotel-rwanda-to-bitcoin-bitcoin-politics-ep-6",
"episode_title": "Ana\u00efse Kanimba: From Hotel Rwanda to Bitcoin | Bitcoin Politics Ep. 6",
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"published_at": "2025-08-19T15:00:00Z",
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"caption": "So when I arrived at the Photo Film Forum and saw the Bitcoin area, I was very, very confused. My mind is like, I need to get my father out of prison, you know, like, why are these people here? And once you talk a little bit more, you understand really what Satoshi was thinking about, the application of Bitcoin, and you see where in communities that they're doing that. It's just really amazing. Welcome, everybody. Frank Corva, White House and political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine. Here with another episode of Bitcoin Politics. Today, we have a very, very special guest, Anais Kanimba. Anais is a Rwandan activist. She's done incredible work around the world. Most notably, some of her most recent work has actually been freeing her father from a very dire situation in Rwanda, where he was kidnapped and in prison. And since then, or maybe even a little bit of an overlap, she's sort of joined the Bitcoin community. She's joined forces with HRF and some other organizations that I'm going to let her sort of talk about. And it might sound sort of like an unlikely match. We have this Rwandan activist who's freeing her father from the government's clutches, now sort of embracing Bitcoin as well. And also, just to kind of provide the big umbrella of what we'll touch on here, also starting the African Bitcoin Institute, a policy institute for Africa for Bitcoin. So let me stop there. Anais, if you could please introduce yourself a bit, I'd greatly appreciate it. Of course. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be able to have this conversation with you and to join your community. So I'm from Rwanda, originally from Rwanda, but I've spent my time in Europe and in the United States. I did my education, mostly higher education in the United States. And I previously, before even everything began with my father, who was kidnapped and then illegally detained in Rwanda in 2020, I was working in development, doing mostly global health work, specifically on HIV AIDS. But a big part of our work was to produce data. And that was what I was doing for most six, seven years until I switched things up to advocate for my father, who was in Rwanda. And then I'll kind of go into more details how I got into Bitcoin, but I wanted to give that background because a big part of what I'm doing today kind of stems from my time in doing development work and having a lot of questions about how the system actually works. Is it really benefiting people? Are we seeing real growth? And how much do people have? When I say people who are the beneficiary of our work, mostly I work mostly in Africa, how much are they actually taking ownership of these projects in their own lives? And are we supporting that? So I've always been very interested in all aspects of human rights and personal liberties and the work to be able to get to that is long, but this is something I've been able to express this. How was it? I've been able to talk about this and work on this in different aspects. I come from the health perspective, which I believe has arrived, from owning your own bank account and the basics of everyday life and also being a free person and being able to express your opinion. 100%. I don't know if you want to touch on it a little bit, what happened to your dad while he was there, what that process
So when I arrived at the Photo Film Forum and saw the Bitcoin area, I was very, very confused. My mind is like, I need to get my father out of prison, you know, like, why are these people here? And once you talk a little bit more, you understand really what Satoshi was thinking about, the application of Bitcoin, and you see where in communities that they're doing that. It's just really amazing. Welcome, everybody. Frank Corva, White House and political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine. Here with another episode of Bitcoin Politics. Today, we have a very, very special guest, Anais Kanimba. Anais is a Rwandan activist. She's done incredible work around the world. Most notably, some of her most recent work has actually been freeing her father from a very dire situation in Rwanda, where he was kidnapped and in prison. And since then, or maybe even a little bit of an overlap, she's sort of joined the Bitcoin community. She's joined forces with HRF and some other organizations that I'm going to let her sort of talk about. And it might sound sort of like an unlikely match. We have this Rwandan activist who's freeing her father from the government's clutches, now sort of embracing Bitcoin as well. And also, just to kind of provide the big umbrella of what we'll touch on here, also starting the African Bitcoin Institute, a policy institute for Africa for Bitcoin. So let me stop there. Anais, if you could please introduce yourself a bit, I'd greatly appreciate it. Of course. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be able to have this conversation with you and to join your community. So I'm from Rwanda, originally from Rwanda, but I've spent my time in Europe and in the United States. I did my education, mostly higher education in the United States. And I previously, before even everything began with my father, who was kidnapped and then illegally detained in Rwanda in 2020, I was working in development, doing mostly global health work, specifically on HIV AIDS. But a big part of our work was to produce data. And that was what I was doing for most six, seven years until I switched things up to advocate for my father, who was in Rwanda. And then I'll kind of go into more details how I got into Bitcoin, but I wanted to give that background because a big part of what I'm doing today kind of stems from my time in doing development work and having a lot of questions about how the system actually works. Is it really benefiting people? Are we seeing real growth? And how much do people have? When I say people who are the beneficiary of our work, mostly I work mostly in Africa, how much are they actually taking ownership of these projects in their own lives? And are we supporting that? So I've always been very interested in all aspects of human rights and personal liberties and the work to be able to get to that is long, but this is something I've been able to express this. How was it? I've been able to talk about this and work on this in different aspects. I come from the health perspective, which I believe has arrived, from owning your own bank account and the basics of everyday life and also being a free person and being able to express your opinion. 100%. I don't know if you want to touch on it a little bit, what happened to your dad while he was there, what that process was like. And I don't want to get too into that, I do want to focus, obviously, this is for Bitcoin magazine, but I do think it provides a really interesting context for the audience who might not be familiar with yours and his story. Absolutely. So my father had an idea. father, his name is Paul Rusesabagina. And for those who don't know, in 1994, we had a genocide in Rwanda, where one, we have two big ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Tutsis and the Hutu. But what's very different from the other words people may have heard about is that in Rwanda, we all speak one language, have the same religion, mostly celebrate the same culture. So it's just that one i
4
000000003
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-07-19-bitcoin-stablecoins-and-americas-debt-endgame-w-avik-roy-bitcoin-politics-ep-1",
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"caption": "We're right now basically almost at World War II levels of the debt to GDP ratio, and there is no World War II happening right now. This is really bad. And basically, if you look at the math, we have no more than 20 years before there's a bond market failure. So it's pretty bad. Don't sell your Bitcoin because this problem is only getting worse. Welcome, everybody. I am Frank Korver, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, and we are here with, I think this is really technically our first episode of what is officially the Bitcoin Politics Show. So I'm super, super pumped to have an incredible guest to kick things off with me, Ovik Roy, co-founder and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Ovik, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Hey, Frank, it's good to be with you. And we have to also mention that I'm the senior advisor of the Bitcoin Policy Institute since you've got the BPI logo behind you there. This is a fact. We would be remiss not to mention that. Yes. So we have, as I said, a perfect guest to kick off this show here. We have done a few episodes of Bitcoin Politics, but I think this is our sort of first shot at a weekly show. So again, great guest to start things off with. Speaking of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, they also published this book, the Satoshi Papers, for which you wrote one of the chapters. And that chapter is called And Then They Fight You. But I'm here in Washington, D.C. today, and the Genius Act just passed through the Senate and the House and now it's going to be heading over to Trump's desk to be signed. I have to say the vibe here in Washington, D.C. is not Then They Fight You. It kind of seems like in some ways when we're looking at maybe the broader crypto landscape, it seems like we're winning. We'll get into who we are today and maybe the bifurcation between broader crypto space and Bitcoin. But your thoughts on what just happened today? Yeah, look, it's a big milestone to get the Genius Act through and also some of some progress with some of the other companion legislation. The market structure legislation, some some potential banning of CBDCs by, you know, at least at the Federal Reserve level. There's we can get into all the details of what those those bills do that's promising, what those bills do that are not promising or that are maybe things for concern or gaps to fill. But let's start with the big macro point, which is I think the Bitcoin community has matured a lot. I wrote a piece that you know about, Frank, called Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning four years ago was published in 2021, where where I proposed actually a Bitcoin reserve, not thinking that we can make so much progress in in all in this short period of time. But the main point of that article in 2021 was to say, look, the at the time, the conventional wisdom in the Bitcoin community was, look, we are a permissionless, censorship resistant network. It doesn't matter what governments do, who cares whether Washington hates us or loves us. We are a permissionless, censorship resistant network. It doesn't matter what governments do, who cares whether Washington hates us or loves us. Bitcoin will soldier on. And while that's technically true, what I argued in the piece was that actually Washington can do a lot to make Bitcoin less useful in the world we live in toda
We're right now basically almost at World War II levels of the debt to GDP ratio, and there is no World War II happening right now. This is really bad. And basically, if you look at the math, we have no more than 20 years before there's a bond market failure. So it's pretty bad. Don't sell your Bitcoin because this problem is only getting worse. Welcome, everybody. I am Frank Korver, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, and we are here with, I think this is really technically our first episode of what is officially the Bitcoin Politics Show. So I'm super, super pumped to have an incredible guest to kick things off with me, Ovik Roy, co-founder and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Ovik, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Hey, Frank, it's good to be with you. And we have to also mention that I'm the senior advisor of the Bitcoin Policy Institute since you've got the BPI logo behind you there. This is a fact. We would be remiss not to mention that. Yes. So we have, as I said, a perfect guest to kick off this show here. We have done a few episodes of Bitcoin Politics, but I think this is our sort of first shot at a weekly show. So again, great guest to start things off with. Speaking of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, they also published this book, the Satoshi Papers, for which you wrote one of the chapters. And that chapter is called And Then They Fight You. But I'm here in Washington, D.C. today, and the Genius Act just passed through the Senate and the House and now it's going to be heading over to Trump's desk to be signed. I have to say the vibe here in Washington, D.C. is not Then They Fight You. It kind of seems like in some ways when we're looking at maybe the broader crypto landscape, it seems like we're winning. We'll get into who we are today and maybe the bifurcation between broader crypto space and Bitcoin. But your thoughts on what just happened today? Yeah, look, it's a big milestone to get the Genius Act through and also some of some progress with some of the other companion legislation. The market structure legislation, some some potential banning of CBDCs by, you know, at least at the Federal Reserve level. There's we can get into all the details of what those those bills do that's promising, what those bills do that are not promising or that are maybe things for concern or gaps to fill. But let's start with the big macro point, which is I think the Bitcoin community has matured a lot. I wrote a piece that you know about, Frank, called Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning four years ago was published in 2021, where where I proposed actually a Bitcoin reserve, not thinking that we can make so much progress in in all in this short period of time. But the main point of that article in 2021 was to say, look, the at the time, the conventional wisdom in the Bitcoin community was, look, we are a permissionless, censorship resistant network. It doesn't matter what governments do, who cares whether Washington hates us or loves us. We are a permissionless, censorship resistant network. It doesn't matter what governments do, who cares whether Washington hates us or loves us. Bitcoin will soldier on. And while that's technically true, what I argued in the piece was that actually Washington can do a lot to make Bitcoin less useful in the world we live in today. It can make it impossible for you to exchange U.S. dollars for Bitcoin. It can make it very hard for Bitcoin to be used for everyday payments. There are lots and lots of things that the U.S. government can do to make Bitcoin less useful for a lot of the things that Bitcoiners want it to be useful for. In particular, the government can basically squash the ability of Bitcoin to interact with traditional financial instruments. So my argument at the time was Bitcoiners, we do need to pay attention to what's going on in Washington. We need to do a better job of having a presence in Washington advocating for some of th
5
000000004
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"caption": "Once the government ever announces a net incremental buy of Bitcoin for the SBR, even if it's like a million dollars or some sort of trivial amount, I think it's hard to underestimate the like watershed moment that would be. Just the fact that they have decided as a matter of national policy, they're going to buy more Bitcoin as a quote reserve asset, which is what this report says it is. That's kind of a nonlinear jump. All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Bitcoin Policy Hour, a weekly show hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute. I'm Zach Cohen, an associate with BPI, and I'm joined here each week by my colleagues, Matthew Pines, BPI's executive director, and Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. We're going to jump off the deep end quickly here today, but we'll do just a quick summary of what we'll discuss here. So obviously, we are recording today on Wednesday, July 30th. The White House Digital Asset Report was released today. Matthew Pines was at the White House for that. So we're going to dig into that. There's obviously also been some pretty significant developments in the cases in the Southern District of New York. So that is the Tornado Cash case, which has now gone to the jury for deliberation. And then there was some news around the Samurai Wallet case with the developers of Samurai Wallet entering into plea deals with the U.S. government. So we'll cover all of that. But Zach, kick us off here. We got into... First, the most important question is, are we Feds? Right. So, Pines? I mean, what would a Fed say? You know, it's one of those... It's one of those logical paradoxes. Like, you know, like, how do you get a liar to prove that he's a liar right now? I mean, it was very clear that BPI's front operation for the CIA is ripping success. I mean, I got the White House to blow my cover and shout me out on their Twitter accounts, which is a really poor tradecraft by any intelligence operation to just blow your assets cover there. So, you know, we're just got to, you know, roll with the punches here, I guess. You know, I'm waiting for the CIA paycheck to clear. And they don't. They're paying sats. Yeah. In all seriousness, we're a 501c3 independent think tank. You know, we have points of view on different policy issues. I think directionally speaking, the things that we agree on is that Bitcoin is an important topic for policy. Bitcoin is good for the world. It's broadly good for freedom. I think we tend to be broadly pro-civil liberties and individual freedoms at BPI. And we also think that the United States, broadly speaking, is a force for good. And we want the United States... To have good policy outcomes with Bitcoin, both for the sake of Bitcoiners and for the sake of the country. But we do not actually in any way work for the government other than providing our views to them and trying to help folks in the government, you know, including in the intelligence community and including in the Defense Department, understand what Bitcoin is, how it works, and our view as Bitcoiners who thought about this a lot, how they should think about this and approach these issues, again, from our point of view. So in the service of that, we definitely work with some folks who have government backgrounds. We find that that is effective in being able to be persuasive to government officials to get the meetings we want. And those
Once the government ever announces a net incremental buy of Bitcoin for the SBR, even if it's like a million dollars or some sort of trivial amount, I think it's hard to underestimate the like watershed moment that would be. Just the fact that they have decided as a matter of national policy, they're going to buy more Bitcoin as a quote reserve asset, which is what this report says it is. That's kind of a nonlinear jump. All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this week's Bitcoin Policy Hour, a weekly show hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute. I'm Zach Cohen, an associate with BPI, and I'm joined here each week by my colleagues, Matthew Pines, BPI's executive director, and Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. We're going to jump off the deep end quickly here today, but we'll do just a quick summary of what we'll discuss here. So obviously, we are recording today on Wednesday, July 30th. The White House Digital Asset Report was released today. Matthew Pines was at the White House for that. So we're going to dig into that. There's obviously also been some pretty significant developments in the cases in the Southern District of New York. So that is the Tornado Cash case, which has now gone to the jury for deliberation. And then there was some news around the Samurai Wallet case with the developers of Samurai Wallet entering into plea deals with the U.S. government. So we'll cover all of that. But Zach, kick us off here. We got into... First, the most important question is, are we Feds? Right. So, Pines? I mean, what would a Fed say? You know, it's one of those... It's one of those logical paradoxes. Like, you know, like, how do you get a liar to prove that he's a liar right now? I mean, it was very clear that BPI's front operation for the CIA is ripping success. I mean, I got the White House to blow my cover and shout me out on their Twitter accounts, which is a really poor tradecraft by any intelligence operation to just blow your assets cover there. So, you know, we're just got to, you know, roll with the punches here, I guess. You know, I'm waiting for the CIA paycheck to clear. And they don't. They're paying sats. Yeah. In all seriousness, we're a 501c3 independent think tank. You know, we have points of view on different policy issues. I think directionally speaking, the things that we agree on is that Bitcoin is an important topic for policy. Bitcoin is good for the world. It's broadly good for freedom. I think we tend to be broadly pro-civil liberties and individual freedoms at BPI. And we also think that the United States, broadly speaking, is a force for good. And we want the United States... To have good policy outcomes with Bitcoin, both for the sake of Bitcoiners and for the sake of the country. But we do not actually in any way work for the government other than providing our views to them and trying to help folks in the government, you know, including in the intelligence community and including in the Defense Department, understand what Bitcoin is, how it works, and our view as Bitcoiners who thought about this a lot, how they should think about this and approach these issues, again, from our point of view. So in the service of that, we definitely work with some folks who have government backgrounds. We find that that is effective in being able to be persuasive to government officials to get the meetings we want. And those are oftentimes the people who understand DC the best, and especially shout out to our head of government affairs, Egan, who's been a whole trooper through all the Twitter questions about us. And we'll have some interesting, I think, announcements about a program he's involved in soon. Not an affairs program, but look, we're not here to speak for him. We're not here to speak for Bitcoin, but we're just here to, you know, give our views as people who've thought a lot about it to the government. Yeah, I think that was a very sincere message. I mean, like, I'm a Bitcoiner first, but I wear a
6
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"caption": "What's going on with Bitcoin is Bitcoin is evolving faster than society can digest it. After 30, 40, 50 years, you look back and you say, well, of course, we should have embraced the fire, the electricity, the wheel, the crude oil, the nuclear. I would say 95% of the decision makers in the finance world still don't really embrace or understand the idea of digital energy. I think when the administration says they want to be a global Bitcoin superpower, they mean they want the finance companies in the United States to lead the way. For every company in the world in any capital market, they're always better off to buy Bitcoin as their capital asset. You know, I think the end game is we accumulate a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin and then we grow that capital by issuing more credit. All right. Well, we are here with Michael Saylor. Thanks so much for having us in your home. I'm really excited for this conversation. You've said that Bitcoin is hope. You own hope.com. You've made that a resource hub for Bitcoin education. Can you cast the vision of what hope what is the hopeful part of Bitcoin? What's the world you want to live in? What kind of things change for the average person in a Bitcoin standard? Well, if we look at the history of humanity. What? What has improved the human condition is technology and the most formative technology that everybody's familiar with this fire and fire once upon a time was hope. If you didn't have fire, you're going to freeze to death or starve to death. And then over time, other important technologies evolved after fire. We mastered metals and there was the bronze age, the iron age, the steel age, you know, the wheel was a pretty important technology. No wheel, no, no cars. Rockefeller commercialized chemical energy in the form of of oil and standardized oil and called this company Standard Oil. And and the real significance of oil was humans got a tenth of a horsepower. And now the little dinky engine on the back of your small trawler boat is 70 horsepower, which is 700 human beings and a typical tender could have a thousand horsepower. And so think about ten thousand people rowing as hard as they can behind a 30 foot boat. And that's what we got when we got oil and when we got internal combustion engines. And and so the hope for humanity has always been technology and a new and a new sphere of influence, whether it's automobiles or airplanes, or whatever. And that's what we got, when we got oil and when we got internal combustion engines. And so the hope for humanity has always been technology in a new in a new sphere of influence, whether it's automobiles or airplanes or something like that. planes, or electricity, or oil, or fire. Bitcoin is hope because Bitcoin represents digital energy. It represents energy in cyberspace. It represents digital property, digital capital, digital gold. But in its most profound setting, it means digital energy, a way to convey energy through time, through space, that is life-affirming for 8 billion people, for 400 million corporations, for millions and millions of institutions, for hundreds of countries, for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of municipalities. And if I were to say, fire is hope, and you are shivering and freezing to death, you would get it. And if I were to say, electricity is hope, and you were in New York City trapped on the 98th floor of a skyscraper, or trying to get
What's going on with Bitcoin is Bitcoin is evolving faster than society can digest it. After 30, 40, 50 years, you look back and you say, well, of course, we should have embraced the fire, the electricity, the wheel, the crude oil, the nuclear. I would say 95% of the decision makers in the finance world still don't really embrace or understand the idea of digital energy. I think when the administration says they want to be a global Bitcoin superpower, they mean they want the finance companies in the United States to lead the way. For every company in the world in any capital market, they're always better off to buy Bitcoin as their capital asset. You know, I think the end game is we accumulate a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin and then we grow that capital by issuing more credit. All right. Well, we are here with Michael Saylor. Thanks so much for having us in your home. I'm really excited for this conversation. You've said that Bitcoin is hope. You own hope.com. You've made that a resource hub for Bitcoin education. Can you cast the vision of what hope what is the hopeful part of Bitcoin? What's the world you want to live in? What kind of things change for the average person in a Bitcoin standard? Well, if we look at the history of humanity. What? What has improved the human condition is technology and the most formative technology that everybody's familiar with this fire and fire once upon a time was hope. If you didn't have fire, you're going to freeze to death or starve to death. And then over time, other important technologies evolved after fire. We mastered metals and there was the bronze age, the iron age, the steel age, you know, the wheel was a pretty important technology. No wheel, no, no cars. Rockefeller commercialized chemical energy in the form of of oil and standardized oil and called this company Standard Oil. And and the real significance of oil was humans got a tenth of a horsepower. And now the little dinky engine on the back of your small trawler boat is 70 horsepower, which is 700 human beings and a typical tender could have a thousand horsepower. And so think about ten thousand people rowing as hard as they can behind a 30 foot boat. And that's what we got when we got oil and when we got internal combustion engines. And and so the hope for humanity has always been technology and a new and a new sphere of influence, whether it's automobiles or airplanes, or whatever. And that's what we got, when we got oil and when we got internal combustion engines. And so the hope for humanity has always been technology in a new in a new sphere of influence, whether it's automobiles or airplanes or something like that. planes, or electricity, or oil, or fire. Bitcoin is hope because Bitcoin represents digital energy. It represents energy in cyberspace. It represents digital property, digital capital, digital gold. But in its most profound setting, it means digital energy, a way to convey energy through time, through space, that is life-affirming for 8 billion people, for 400 million corporations, for millions and millions of institutions, for hundreds of countries, for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of municipalities. And if I were to say, fire is hope, and you are shivering and freezing to death, you would get it. And if I were to say, electricity is hope, and you were in New York City trapped on the 98th floor of a skyscraper, or trying to get up to the 98th floor of a skyscraper, you would get it. And now when I say Bitcoin is hope, I mean, Bitcoin is digital energy. And if you want to send energy at the speed of light from here to halfway around the earth to save the life or solve the problem of another human being or corporation, you're going to need digital energy. And so it represents the next paradigm shift, the next manifestation in the story of energy and the story of human beings harnessing energy in order to improve the quality of their lives. And so as that transition sort of takes place,
7
000000006
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"caption": "In a way, that conversion from gold being the main store of value to Bitcoin becoming digital gold, and therefore the main store of value, I think it's unmistakable, right? And I think with gold, there will be continuing supply. It's also interesting that gold has some sort of use case, right? Which actually makes it a lot less pure as a store of value. People mention it as a positive, like at least gold you can use for something. In my view, it's much better for it to be pure as opposed to having that sort of use case. We are seeing just increasing adoption of Bitcoin. So, you know, ask me where is this financial system going to go 5, 10, 15, 50 years from now? It's only one way for Bitcoin. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. Today, I'm joined by King Wee from Treasury in Amsterdam. King, how are you? I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. Of course. We're also joined by our producers. Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Doing swell as well. Thanks for having me. So first, I want to start with a congratulations for King completing the phase one of Treasury. I'd love to dig into that before we really get into your background. But yeah, that was a really great announcement you had. Yeah, thank you. We're super excited. We basically announced a couple of things. We announced our investment round, which was founder-led, backed by the Winklevoss twins and David Bailey Nakamoto. And also all three are on our advisory board. Then we announced a reverse takeover of a Amsterdam Euronext list company. And then we announced also the acquisition of the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference. So, yeah, I was super excited to be launching our European Bitcoin Treasury company. I had the pleasure of speaking at the Amsterdam conference last year, and it was definitely one of my favorite conferences and my first time visiting Amsterdam. So, wonderful acquisition. So, I'm curious kind of to get your, before we go further on learning about Treasury's kind of roadmap and vision going forward. What your background is, I found it very impressive in capital markets. And obviously, you've been a Bitcoin fan for a while. So, I'd love to hear about your bio. Sure, absolutely. So, I grew up in Amsterdam, right around here. Studied econometrics, a master's, and then moved to London. London afterwards. Started working at Goldman Sachs, where I spent time in a couple of divisions on the equities floor, but also most time in the special situations group, which invests in distressed assets. And basically, I spent most of my career in distressed assets at Goldman, then at Fortress, then at Halcyon, where I set up the European securitization platform. And then I ran my own fund for a while. And basically, during the time I ran my own fund, that was post-financial crisis. That's also when, obviously, the central bank. The central banks were printing money like there was no tomorrow. So, I really saw firsthand that the basement and the inflationary environment we're in with zero interest rates, essentially. And that's also the time when I got into Bitcoin. So, the last seven years or so, I've been in a variety of, you know, called digital and traditional roles. The last few years, I was at a large London-based hedge fund where we became the largest cre
In a way, that conversion from gold being the main store of value to Bitcoin becoming digital gold, and therefore the main store of value, I think it's unmistakable, right? And I think with gold, there will be continuing supply. It's also interesting that gold has some sort of use case, right? Which actually makes it a lot less pure as a store of value. People mention it as a positive, like at least gold you can use for something. In my view, it's much better for it to be pure as opposed to having that sort of use case. We are seeing just increasing adoption of Bitcoin. So, you know, ask me where is this financial system going to go 5, 10, 15, 50 years from now? It's only one way for Bitcoin. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. Today, I'm joined by King Wee from Treasury in Amsterdam. King, how are you? I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. Of course. We're also joined by our producers. Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Doing swell as well. Thanks for having me. So first, I want to start with a congratulations for King completing the phase one of Treasury. I'd love to dig into that before we really get into your background. But yeah, that was a really great announcement you had. Yeah, thank you. We're super excited. We basically announced a couple of things. We announced our investment round, which was founder-led, backed by the Winklevoss twins and David Bailey Nakamoto. And also all three are on our advisory board. Then we announced a reverse takeover of a Amsterdam Euronext list company. And then we announced also the acquisition of the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference. So, yeah, I was super excited to be launching our European Bitcoin Treasury company. I had the pleasure of speaking at the Amsterdam conference last year, and it was definitely one of my favorite conferences and my first time visiting Amsterdam. So, wonderful acquisition. So, I'm curious kind of to get your, before we go further on learning about Treasury's kind of roadmap and vision going forward. What your background is, I found it very impressive in capital markets. And obviously, you've been a Bitcoin fan for a while. So, I'd love to hear about your bio. Sure, absolutely. So, I grew up in Amsterdam, right around here. Studied econometrics, a master's, and then moved to London. London afterwards. Started working at Goldman Sachs, where I spent time in a couple of divisions on the equities floor, but also most time in the special situations group, which invests in distressed assets. And basically, I spent most of my career in distressed assets at Goldman, then at Fortress, then at Halcyon, where I set up the European securitization platform. And then I ran my own fund for a while. And basically, during the time I ran my own fund, that was post-financial crisis. That's also when, obviously, the central bank. The central banks were printing money like there was no tomorrow. So, I really saw firsthand that the basement and the inflationary environment we're in with zero interest rates, essentially. And that's also the time when I got into Bitcoin. So, the last seven years or so, I've been in a variety of, you know, called digital and traditional roles. The last few years, I was at a large London-based hedge fund where we became the largest creditor in FTX and one of the largest in Genesis as well. And then earlier this year, I saw, obviously, Bitcoin. Big opportunity in the Bitcoin treasury space with the success of the, called the MicroStrategy spinoffs like MetaPlan, etc. And I decided it was a great, great time to really be launching one in AppStamp at sort of, you know, where the first stock exchange was and the first joint stock company. So, that's where we are. That's sort of how my background led into where we are now. Given kind of your extensive experience in financial markets, a question I've heard that is really interesting is, why are there Bitcoin treasury companies? But not, for example, gold treasury companies or other
8
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"caption": "Over the next 10 years, if they are growing their capital base, not just by issuing more common stock, but also by proportionately issuing far more preferreds, and that there's lots of demand for these, and that the interest that they're paying on the preferreds goes down, and the Federal Reserve signaling that they could be lowering interest rates. That's where we enter into a scenario where strategy could go from having 4% of the Bitcoin out there to 8% of the Bitcoin, which is an astronomical number. I think that's where we really get into the moon map. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Oshard. I'm your host today. And today we're doing a special episode with our producer, Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Happy. Doing great. As always, how are you doing? Doing very well. Yesterday, we had the Q2 earnings call for MicroStrategy, or now Strategy, which covered a lot of very interesting material at the intersection of Bitcoin and corporate adoption. So Strategy's earnings call yesterday, I think, was relatively monumental. And I don't think that was really reflected by Strategy's stock price or the Bitcoin price. Not surprisingly, I suppose. But really what Strategy was doing was laying out... A case for what the Bitcoin banking model looks like in the future. I think the word credit was thrown out about 100 times. And in addition for this earnings call, I thought it was nice that there was this analyst Q&A portion that included Bitcoin analysts. I think a voice that we have not heard much in the earnings call space within TradFi. So I think that added some great color to you and was a big step in educating TradFi just about Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of folks that are now involved in the strategy trade and strike, stride, strife, and stretch. That really are not... Not Bitcoiners per se, but are really coming to understand Bitcoin through the words of Michael Saylor, which I think gives me a bit of a kick just knowing that that's going on out there. Yeah, and also just doing it via YouTube Live and on X, where they really are changing the way that companies interact with their investors. Before it was, you know, you do like a webinar on some strange website. So I think that it's a huge improvement in terms of communicating what the vision is for a company. Yeah, absolutely. And I think before the earnings call went live, Strategy released their earnings report. And one of the biggest things that stood out was Strategy's earnings per share. And this had kind of been something that had been long foretold. People were excited to see the number go up when it comes to that, when Strategy is able to account for the value of their Bitcoin holdings under FASB's guidance. And Pierre, maybe you could just explain a little bit more for the audience what that means. And do you think this is a material change to how Strategy is valued or is it more just a clerical function? Yeah. Historically, what would happen is that if the Bitcoin price went down, then they had to write down the value of the Bitcoin in their financial statements. And so they would recognize a loss. But if the price went up, they actually could not write up the value of the Bitcoin. And so there would be no flow through into the income statement. The good analysts, they would go
Over the next 10 years, if they are growing their capital base, not just by issuing more common stock, but also by proportionately issuing far more preferreds, and that there's lots of demand for these, and that the interest that they're paying on the preferreds goes down, and the Federal Reserve signaling that they could be lowering interest rates. That's where we enter into a scenario where strategy could go from having 4% of the Bitcoin out there to 8% of the Bitcoin, which is an astronomical number. I think that's where we really get into the moon map. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Oshard. I'm your host today. And today we're doing a special episode with our producer, Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Happy. Doing great. As always, how are you doing? Doing very well. Yesterday, we had the Q2 earnings call for MicroStrategy, or now Strategy, which covered a lot of very interesting material at the intersection of Bitcoin and corporate adoption. So Strategy's earnings call yesterday, I think, was relatively monumental. And I don't think that was really reflected by Strategy's stock price or the Bitcoin price. Not surprisingly, I suppose. But really what Strategy was doing was laying out... A case for what the Bitcoin banking model looks like in the future. I think the word credit was thrown out about 100 times. And in addition for this earnings call, I thought it was nice that there was this analyst Q&A portion that included Bitcoin analysts. I think a voice that we have not heard much in the earnings call space within TradFi. So I think that added some great color to you and was a big step in educating TradFi just about Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of folks that are now involved in the strategy trade and strike, stride, strife, and stretch. That really are not... Not Bitcoiners per se, but are really coming to understand Bitcoin through the words of Michael Saylor, which I think gives me a bit of a kick just knowing that that's going on out there. Yeah, and also just doing it via YouTube Live and on X, where they really are changing the way that companies interact with their investors. Before it was, you know, you do like a webinar on some strange website. So I think that it's a huge improvement in terms of communicating what the vision is for a company. Yeah, absolutely. And I think before the earnings call went live, Strategy released their earnings report. And one of the biggest things that stood out was Strategy's earnings per share. And this had kind of been something that had been long foretold. People were excited to see the number go up when it comes to that, when Strategy is able to account for the value of their Bitcoin holdings under FASB's guidance. And Pierre, maybe you could just explain a little bit more for the audience what that means. And do you think this is a material change to how Strategy is valued or is it more just a clerical function? Yeah. Historically, what would happen is that if the Bitcoin price went down, then they had to write down the value of the Bitcoin in their financial statements. And so they would recognize a loss. But if the price went up, they actually could not write up the value of the Bitcoin. And so there would be no flow through into the income statement. The good analysts, they would go in and manually adjust that so that they are writing up the Bitcoin. But the reality is that there's a lot of systems that are basically automated, right, where that kind of manual fix doesn't happen. And so it was really good that FASB came out and recognized that, look, if you have an asset like Bitcoin that's traded 24-7, that is very liquid, it does make sense to mark to market to take a look at, OK, what's the value of it on December 31st? And let's recognize that as an unrealized gain on the financial statements. And so that way it flows through into the earnings per share so that you can actually show to the shareholders, here's the economic value g
9
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"caption": "Downloads of ProtonVPN alone had soared by 1,800% on the day that the act became law. They also put out a statement which said this kind of spike in usage in percentage terms is what they would normally expect to see in a society that is undergoing a civil collapse. And as to actual VPN use, it emerged that various politicians, including ministers of the state, were not only buying VPNs for their own use, but they were getting me to pay for them. They were charting the expenses for their VPNs back to the taxpayer, which is just horrifically hypocritical. Welcome, everybody, to Bitcoin Politics. I am your host, Frank Corva, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine. And I'm joined today by none other than Freddie New, Head of Policy at Bitcoin Policy UK, our first international guest. I say that as someone who's based here in the United States. Not only is it exciting that Freddie is coming to us from the United Kingdom, but he's actually coming to us having gone back in time to the year 1984, as he's currently living in a dystopian reality in the United Kingdom, which we'll be touching on today. Freddie, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Thank you very much, Frank, for that intro and also for having me. And sadly, I'm not living in the 1984 of my dreams, which is James Cameron's LA just after the T-800 arrived. I'm living in George Orwell's version. We're going to get into that a little bit today. It's been pretty wild to watch. There's been this deep feeling at least seeing this and seeing feeds like yourselves on your own, what you're posting on Twitter and what Susie's been posting, Susie being your co-founder at Bitcoin Policy UK. And for those who don't know, Bitcoin Policy UK is like the UK's version of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. I'm saying this, again, from an American-centric lens, of course, and my apologies to the international audience for that. But Freddie and Susie do really incredible work trying to educate policymakers in the UK about the importance of Bitcoin. Right now, it does not seem to be of the utmost importance to them, nor does privacy and freedom of the internet. But we will dive into that. But let's start with what seems to have spurred or what has spurred this crackdown on the ability to use the internet, which I believe is called the UK or the Online Safety Act. So could you give us a little bit of an overview of what this act is, Freddie, and then what it's done to the internet in the UK? Absolutely. So the first thing to note is this is actually quite a bit of legislation in that it's been in the pipeline for a long time. So this is not the creation of the Labour government or the preceding government. It's really a brainchild of a lot of people in government from many different political parties. And as such, they are all equally to blame. And at the same time, no one is solely to blame. It's unfortunately a real demonstration of the ways in which politicians and regulators fail to understand the internet and human nature. So it's quite a significant one-two punch of, you know, I don't understand people and I don't understand computers. Normally people misunderstand one or both. And it's one of those, but it's quite rare to misunderstand both quite so badly. By way of example, there is a story of Nadine
Downloads of ProtonVPN alone had soared by 1,800% on the day that the act became law. They also put out a statement which said this kind of spike in usage in percentage terms is what they would normally expect to see in a society that is undergoing a civil collapse. And as to actual VPN use, it emerged that various politicians, including ministers of the state, were not only buying VPNs for their own use, but they were getting me to pay for them. They were charting the expenses for their VPNs back to the taxpayer, which is just horrifically hypocritical. Welcome, everybody, to Bitcoin Politics. I am your host, Frank Corva, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine. And I'm joined today by none other than Freddie New, Head of Policy at Bitcoin Policy UK, our first international guest. I say that as someone who's based here in the United States. Not only is it exciting that Freddie is coming to us from the United Kingdom, but he's actually coming to us having gone back in time to the year 1984, as he's currently living in a dystopian reality in the United Kingdom, which we'll be touching on today. Freddie, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Thank you very much, Frank, for that intro and also for having me. And sadly, I'm not living in the 1984 of my dreams, which is James Cameron's LA just after the T-800 arrived. I'm living in George Orwell's version. We're going to get into that a little bit today. It's been pretty wild to watch. There's been this deep feeling at least seeing this and seeing feeds like yourselves on your own, what you're posting on Twitter and what Susie's been posting, Susie being your co-founder at Bitcoin Policy UK. And for those who don't know, Bitcoin Policy UK is like the UK's version of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. I'm saying this, again, from an American-centric lens, of course, and my apologies to the international audience for that. But Freddie and Susie do really incredible work trying to educate policymakers in the UK about the importance of Bitcoin. Right now, it does not seem to be of the utmost importance to them, nor does privacy and freedom of the internet. But we will dive into that. But let's start with what seems to have spurred or what has spurred this crackdown on the ability to use the internet, which I believe is called the UK or the Online Safety Act. So could you give us a little bit of an overview of what this act is, Freddie, and then what it's done to the internet in the UK? Absolutely. So the first thing to note is this is actually quite a bit of legislation in that it's been in the pipeline for a long time. So this is not the creation of the Labour government or the preceding government. It's really a brainchild of a lot of people in government from many different political parties. And as such, they are all equally to blame. And at the same time, no one is solely to blame. It's unfortunately a real demonstration of the ways in which politicians and regulators fail to understand the internet and human nature. So it's quite a significant one-two punch of, you know, I don't understand people and I don't understand computers. Normally people misunderstand one or both. And it's one of those, but it's quite rare to misunderstand both quite so badly. By way of example, there is a story of Nadine Dorris, who was the minister at the time, apparently went into a meeting with Microsoft's executives. And the first thing she said to them is, right, when are you guys going to get rid of the algorithms? And if I were a Microsoft executive, I would not really know where to begin answering that question. That's like saying to someone who drives a car, when are you going to get rid of the roads? It displays such an extraordinary failure of understanding. So the first thing to say, I think, is that this piece of legislation has been in process for a long time. The second thing to say is that it obviously, like most pieces of legislation of this kind, it has ostensibly very
10
000000009
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"caption": "In 2020, we ended up becoming the first startup to IPO on the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Eight months after the IPO, we ended up raising more cash. But after the world changed, interest rates in Brazil just spiked up. Our stock lost 95% of its value. The customers were still growing, but we became like basically a zombie company in Brazil. I started to go deep for the first time. In what Saylor was doing, we have what it needs to become a Bitcoin treasury company, right? I called a shareholder meeting. We got like 99.3% of yeses. We raised 160 million reais. We bought more Bitcoin with it. So it was our first operation. So I think we have like the perfect environment to succeed as a Bitcoin treasury company. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Richard, joined here today with the team from Melieus, Mason, Israel. How are y'all? Thanks for asking. It's good to talk to you again. Doing well, Pierre. Great to be here. Yeah, awesome. So really interested in hearing what y'all are up to with Melieus and kind of what the thesis is and digging into kind of the Bitcoin treasury space. Amazing. Amazing. So I'm the founder of the company, Pierre. I founded the company in 2011. But my background, basically, I used to develop websites since I was like a teenager. So I learned how to code. I started like my first business when I was like 15 years old. Then I ended up like studying economics on the university in Brazil. And by the end of the economics course, I ended up like founding Melieus and my main idea with my co-founder was basically to disrupt the loyalty programs that already existed. So we were already like using several different loyalty programs, getting points or miles to exchange for some product. And we saw a lot of people doing the same. But the thing is, like those loyalty programs were not like 100% of the time the best. So we were like, you know, it was a really nice thing to do because we were like accumulating a lot of points, a lot of miles, and we couldn't exchange for the products that we really wanted, you know, so we wanted the iPhone, but we couldn't have the iPhone, we went about like exchanging the points for a pencil or a pen, and then we decided to create something better. So this name Melieus or Melieus came from the Latin and means better. So we wanted to create something better. So we wanted to create something better or a better loyalty program or a better reward program. So this is what Melieus does. We became like the first cashback platform in Brazil. So we basically created the website in 2011, somehow copying what Ebates.com was doing in the US. Now Ebates in the US is called Rakuten.com, right? You guys probably know the company. So we basically created Rakuten for Brazil, having partnership with major Brazilian retailers, and every time a customer of Melieus make a transaction or buy something at those retailers, we get paid a commission. Part of the commission, we pay as cashback to the user. So this is the new kind of loyalty program that we brought to Brazil. No loyalty points, no miles. It's just like straight cash. And after you get your cashback, you can withdraw your cashback to your bank account. So pretty simple. But it wasn't a simple journey. So it's hard to build a product that is good, that have good retention rates, that could like
In 2020, we ended up becoming the first startup to IPO on the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Eight months after the IPO, we ended up raising more cash. But after the world changed, interest rates in Brazil just spiked up. Our stock lost 95% of its value. The customers were still growing, but we became like basically a zombie company in Brazil. I started to go deep for the first time. In what Saylor was doing, we have what it needs to become a Bitcoin treasury company, right? I called a shareholder meeting. We got like 99.3% of yeses. We raised 160 million reais. We bought more Bitcoin with it. So it was our first operation. So I think we have like the perfect environment to succeed as a Bitcoin treasury company. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Richard, joined here today with the team from Melieus, Mason, Israel. How are y'all? Thanks for asking. It's good to talk to you again. Doing well, Pierre. Great to be here. Yeah, awesome. So really interested in hearing what y'all are up to with Melieus and kind of what the thesis is and digging into kind of the Bitcoin treasury space. Amazing. Amazing. So I'm the founder of the company, Pierre. I founded the company in 2011. But my background, basically, I used to develop websites since I was like a teenager. So I learned how to code. I started like my first business when I was like 15 years old. Then I ended up like studying economics on the university in Brazil. And by the end of the economics course, I ended up like founding Melieus and my main idea with my co-founder was basically to disrupt the loyalty programs that already existed. So we were already like using several different loyalty programs, getting points or miles to exchange for some product. And we saw a lot of people doing the same. But the thing is, like those loyalty programs were not like 100% of the time the best. So we were like, you know, it was a really nice thing to do because we were like accumulating a lot of points, a lot of miles, and we couldn't exchange for the products that we really wanted, you know, so we wanted the iPhone, but we couldn't have the iPhone, we went about like exchanging the points for a pencil or a pen, and then we decided to create something better. So this name Melieus or Melieus came from the Latin and means better. So we wanted to create something better. So we wanted to create something better or a better loyalty program or a better reward program. So this is what Melieus does. We became like the first cashback platform in Brazil. So we basically created the website in 2011, somehow copying what Ebates.com was doing in the US. Now Ebates in the US is called Rakuten.com, right? You guys probably know the company. So we basically created Rakuten for Brazil, having partnership with major Brazilian retailers, and every time a customer of Melieus make a transaction or buy something at those retailers, we get paid a commission. Part of the commission, we pay as cashback to the user. So this is the new kind of loyalty program that we brought to Brazil. No loyalty points, no miles. It's just like straight cash. And after you get your cashback, you can withdraw your cashback to your bank account. So pretty simple. But it wasn't a simple journey. So it's hard to build a product that is good, that have good retention rates, that could like grow and do not have like high churn rates. So we learned a lot in Brazil. We spent more than two or three years trying to figure it out the best product to have, to have good retentions and to grow the company. Eventually, we ended up like finding the best way to build and to sell this product to the user. And we ended up growing to more than 40 million users nowadays. In 2020, we ended up becoming the first startup to IPO on the Brazilian Stock Exchange. We had that amazing moment in the market with low interest rates in Brazil, which is pretty rare. And we were like a small company. We were still a small company, but we were 25%
11
000000010
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-07-23-rep-warren-davidson-the-clarity-act-digital-cash-as-an-american-value-bitcoin-politics-ep-2",
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"episode_title": "Rep. Warren Davidson: The Clarity Act, Digital Cash as an American Value | Bitcoin Politics Ep. 2",
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"caption": "Every administration, it seems like, wants to come in, except this one, and take away your right to have your own custody of your own digital assets, which is essentially trying to ban cash. It's trying to ban the digital equivalent of cash. Think if James Madison had settled for, shall not prohibit on the right to keep and bear arms instead of shall not infringe. Welcome, everybody. We are here for episode two of Bitcoin Politics. I am Frank Korva, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, joined by a very special guest today, Congressman Warren Davidson. Congressman Davidson, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to speak with us. Frank, it's an honor. Thank you. Pleasure is all ours. Super excited to have you here. I want to dive right in just because I know we have to be mindful of time. So you became a bit of the main character last week during the Genius Act and some of the discussion around it. You were unhappy with some of the language around CBDCs and how the bill treated that. Could you talk a little bit about what happened? And then we'll get to that. If you're happy with the way that the final version, the signed bill turned out. Well, the Genius Act regulated stable coins. And frankly, the House had a different version that we passed. We called it the Stable Act. And in the normal course of events, the House would go to conference with the Senate and reconcile our differences because both products would matter. Ultimately, the White House chose, hey, we just want genius. Don't change it. Just get it done. And they got a lot of good things done in the Genius Act. But there were concerns and the House made amendments. And instead of putting them straight on the Genius Act, we added them to something called the Clarity Act, which is the market structure bill. So if you think about the market, stable coins are currently about 7% of the market by market capitalization. And then the rest of the structure is the other 93%. So Clarity is the bill that deals with market structure. So amending that inherently doesn't necessarily mean that the Senate is even going to take up the things that we care about because they didn't. They didn't accidentally ignore them when they passed the Genius Act. So because of some of that dialogue, look, I think every member of financial services voted for the rule and the rule sets the terms of debate. And the rule initially failed. And that's where there were lots of meetings. And I became kind of a technical advisor in those meetings. Here's what's true and here's what's not true. Bill Hagerty sat through a lot of those meetings. And I think initially he would explain what he was saying. And I think that's what he was saying. And I think that's what he was saying. And that's true. They did ban the front end direct-to-consumer part of central bank digital currency. But that's exactly the answer. Chairman Hill, the House Chair of Financial Services, highlighted this a couple of years ago in a Q&A with Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, who said, yeah, we would need congressional approval to go with a retail CBDC, which is direct to consumer. But we are working to build a wholesale central bank digital currency or a back-end framework. That is essentially a central bank digital currency.
Every administration, it seems like, wants to come in, except this one, and take away your right to have your own custody of your own digital assets, which is essentially trying to ban cash. It's trying to ban the digital equivalent of cash. Think if James Madison had settled for, shall not prohibit on the right to keep and bear arms instead of shall not infringe. Welcome, everybody. We are here for episode two of Bitcoin Politics. I am Frank Korva, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, joined by a very special guest today, Congressman Warren Davidson. Congressman Davidson, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to speak with us. Frank, it's an honor. Thank you. Pleasure is all ours. Super excited to have you here. I want to dive right in just because I know we have to be mindful of time. So you became a bit of the main character last week during the Genius Act and some of the discussion around it. You were unhappy with some of the language around CBDCs and how the bill treated that. Could you talk a little bit about what happened? And then we'll get to that. If you're happy with the way that the final version, the signed bill turned out. Well, the Genius Act regulated stable coins. And frankly, the House had a different version that we passed. We called it the Stable Act. And in the normal course of events, the House would go to conference with the Senate and reconcile our differences because both products would matter. Ultimately, the White House chose, hey, we just want genius. Don't change it. Just get it done. And they got a lot of good things done in the Genius Act. But there were concerns and the House made amendments. And instead of putting them straight on the Genius Act, we added them to something called the Clarity Act, which is the market structure bill. So if you think about the market, stable coins are currently about 7% of the market by market capitalization. And then the rest of the structure is the other 93%. So Clarity is the bill that deals with market structure. So amending that inherently doesn't necessarily mean that the Senate is even going to take up the things that we care about because they didn't. They didn't accidentally ignore them when they passed the Genius Act. So because of some of that dialogue, look, I think every member of financial services voted for the rule and the rule sets the terms of debate. And the rule initially failed. And that's where there were lots of meetings. And I became kind of a technical advisor in those meetings. Here's what's true and here's what's not true. Bill Hagerty sat through a lot of those meetings. And I think initially he would explain what he was saying. And I think that's what he was saying. And I think that's what he was saying. And that's true. They did ban the front end direct-to-consumer part of central bank digital currency. But that's exactly the answer. Chairman Hill, the House Chair of Financial Services, highlighted this a couple of years ago in a Q&A with Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, who said, yeah, we would need congressional approval to go with a retail CBDC, which is direct to consumer. But we are working to build a wholesale central bank digital currency or a back-end framework. That is essentially a central bank digital currency. And Chairman Hill highlighted that in a dialogue, I think, in March of 2023. This leaves that framework intact. And part of the goal has been to turn it off. We had five other amendments, though, that really get into self-custody, commodity-backed stablecoins, state regulatory frameworks where Genius puts caps. So those differences matter. And because of that, we didn't really agree on what are the terms of this debate. And we didn't really agree on what are the terms of this debate. And we didn't really agree on what are the terms of this debate. And we didn't really agree on what are the terms of this debate until the president got involved. And, you know, I sat through
12
000000011
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"caption": "Bitcoin creates sovereignty and freedom in a way that no other technology does. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long fight to get the government to give themselves an audit trail like that because we're up against all the trillions of dollars of dark money in this world that will literally kill to keep the system in place. But even if you just get regular citizens, the ability to hold Bitcoin, the ability to understand Bitcoin, and the popularity for Bitcoin to spread to businesses, that gives us all the options, the choice, right? We're here with Ian Carroll. Ian, how has Bitcoin changed the way that you think about money? I would say that I'm a Bitcoiner now. I actually got into cryptocurrency through first getting involved in GameStop and wanting to learn more about the financial markets. Then, as they were developing crypto products in the video game world, they were working with some protocol Gemini and stuff like that. Then I started to learn about Ethereum and other coins and other projects. And then, eventually, I met people like you guys. I met people that just sort of started to orange-pill me, little by little by little. And the more you learn, the more you realize that Bitcoin is the thing you want to have. And so now I save. Basically, my savings are in Bitcoin, and my spending money is in cash. And I kind of keep a little bit of both, but I don't save or hold other coins. I don't shill any coins intentionally because I have to stay independent, and I certainly don't launch coins. But I do collect my own Bitcoin from my own personal little bank account. And I do that. And I'm up significantly since I started buying because that's how Bitcoin works. And I'm new to the cycle, and I'm still up. And I'm down to be down, too. It's like bring on the downs, bring on the ups. Who cares? Because when you have that long view and you understand the most basic fundamentals about Bitcoin, it's a real no-brainer. And speaking of up, congratulations. You just hit a million followers on TikTok. And you released this really cool video about mega. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, it's four companies that run the whole world. And there's one that it all leads to one in particular. You've got to tell me, who is that one? So this is where I started on accident. I started just looking at who owns everything that we use in our day-to-day lives. Like who owns the cereals in our cereal aisle? Who owns the shampoo in our shampoo aisle? Because we all kind of know there's this illusion of choice in the grocery store. We have a million choices. We have a million choices in every grocery aisle. But actually, it's just four companies, five companies, six companies that are selling you all these products. And there's a few family-owned companies. And when you follow the ownership structure up, when you look at who owns Procter & Gamble, it's all the financial institutions. And the top of the list is always Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. And that sort of is like layer one of a conspiracy theory. And the debunk that everyone does to it is like, well, Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock, they manage our investments. They manage our retirement funds. They allow us to invest in ETFs. They're managing our money for us. BlackRock doesn't own the shares of Procter & Gamble and of Raytheon and General Dynamics. BlackRock just manages our shares. So they don't
Bitcoin creates sovereignty and freedom in a way that no other technology does. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long fight to get the government to give themselves an audit trail like that because we're up against all the trillions of dollars of dark money in this world that will literally kill to keep the system in place. But even if you just get regular citizens, the ability to hold Bitcoin, the ability to understand Bitcoin, and the popularity for Bitcoin to spread to businesses, that gives us all the options, the choice, right? We're here with Ian Carroll. Ian, how has Bitcoin changed the way that you think about money? I would say that I'm a Bitcoiner now. I actually got into cryptocurrency through first getting involved in GameStop and wanting to learn more about the financial markets. Then, as they were developing crypto products in the video game world, they were working with some protocol Gemini and stuff like that. Then I started to learn about Ethereum and other coins and other projects. And then, eventually, I met people like you guys. I met people that just sort of started to orange-pill me, little by little by little. And the more you learn, the more you realize that Bitcoin is the thing you want to have. And so now I save. Basically, my savings are in Bitcoin, and my spending money is in cash. And I kind of keep a little bit of both, but I don't save or hold other coins. I don't shill any coins intentionally because I have to stay independent, and I certainly don't launch coins. But I do collect my own Bitcoin from my own personal little bank account. And I do that. And I'm up significantly since I started buying because that's how Bitcoin works. And I'm new to the cycle, and I'm still up. And I'm down to be down, too. It's like bring on the downs, bring on the ups. Who cares? Because when you have that long view and you understand the most basic fundamentals about Bitcoin, it's a real no-brainer. And speaking of up, congratulations. You just hit a million followers on TikTok. And you released this really cool video about mega. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, it's four companies that run the whole world. And there's one that it all leads to one in particular. You've got to tell me, who is that one? So this is where I started on accident. I started just looking at who owns everything that we use in our day-to-day lives. Like who owns the cereals in our cereal aisle? Who owns the shampoo in our shampoo aisle? Because we all kind of know there's this illusion of choice in the grocery store. We have a million choices. We have a million choices in every grocery aisle. But actually, it's just four companies, five companies, six companies that are selling you all these products. And there's a few family-owned companies. And when you follow the ownership structure up, when you look at who owns Procter & Gamble, it's all the financial institutions. And the top of the list is always Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. And that sort of is like layer one of a conspiracy theory. And the debunk that everyone does to it is like, well, Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock, they manage our investments. They manage our retirement funds. They allow us to invest in ETFs. They're managing our money for us. BlackRock doesn't own the shares of Procter & Gamble and of Raytheon and General Dynamics. BlackRock just manages our shares. So they don't really own everything. And that's true to a certain degree. BlackRock is custodian of our shares for us. But when you actually start to dig into the technicals of how that works, if it's an ETF, we're just a beneficial owner. There's all sorts of funds that actually give BlackRock and these investment management firms, they have the true ownership. We are beneficial owners, which is a serious concern in the first place. But the bigger layer there is that they control the voting rights of every single one of those shares. And I think a lot of, like, in many ways, I think the PSYOP is that we
13
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"caption": "With that incredibly broad legal theory of what transmission is, there's really not much left for a jury to decide as far as whether you were guilty of unlicensed transmission or not, because basically everyone in crypto, everyone in DeFi is effectively doing money transmission and most of them don't have licenses because the regulator told them they didn't need to get one. Welcome everybody to Bitcoin Politics. I'm Frank Korver, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, and I'm joined today by none other than the executive director for Coin Center, Peter von Valkenberg, an absolute legend in this space. Thank you for joining us, Peter. And also just a quick disclaimer to the audience, I'm recording from across the street from the courthouse where the verdict in the Tornado Cash trial was just read aloud. So there's a little bit of background noise. I'm at a cafe just asking you to bear with us. I will mute myself as Peter's talking to keep that background noise to a minimum. But again, just a little sort of patience. Bear with us here. We're trying to kind of get you the most timely information and analysis possible. And again, with Peter here. So, Peter, to you. There's just not that many places in lower Manhattan where a man can record a podcast, even at an important moment. So I'm glad you're there covering this, Frank. Appreciate that. Yeah, there are not many places. It's kind of surprising. And Starbucks is even louder, so I couldn't go there either. So anyway, Peter, thank you for doing this. I think you're the perfect person for us to speak to about what just happened. So let's just dive in from where we're at. Within the last hour, we just had the verdict read aloud in the Tornado Cash case. Roman Storm found guilty of count two conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business jury not unanimous on counts one and three count one being the conspiracy to launder funds and then count three being the conspiracy to evade sanctions that there's more detailed language there that I'm skipping over your thoughts on where you're at. What were you expecting? What is your reaction to what just happened? Yeah, so some just a little bit of extra legal color on what all that means. The unlicensed money transmission charge is the. One guilty charge from the jury, the two other charges, they failed to reach a verdict, which means that he's, you know, he's he's not going to be guilty of those charges unless the government comes and retries or re prosecutes those two charges, which I think we'll find out in the next hours or days whether they're going to decide to to re prosecute those charges. But the, you know, Roman himself, I think, actually said it best. I just saw a tweet reaction. Somebody caught from him. Where he said, not feeling too bad. The 18 USC 1960 charge, the unlicensed money charge was bullshit from the beginning. And so we can fight this one and we should appeal. And, you know, I agree with that colorful but accurate summary. A hundred percent. The unlicensed money transmission charge is that charge that you've probably seen. Coin Center, my organization, the DEF, the Blockchain Association, a bunch of orgs. In D.C., yelling and complaining about because it just doesn't make any sense legally as as to how we woul
With that incredibly broad legal theory of what transmission is, there's really not much left for a jury to decide as far as whether you were guilty of unlicensed transmission or not, because basically everyone in crypto, everyone in DeFi is effectively doing money transmission and most of them don't have licenses because the regulator told them they didn't need to get one. Welcome everybody to Bitcoin Politics. I'm Frank Korver, the political correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine, and I'm joined today by none other than the executive director for Coin Center, Peter von Valkenberg, an absolute legend in this space. Thank you for joining us, Peter. And also just a quick disclaimer to the audience, I'm recording from across the street from the courthouse where the verdict in the Tornado Cash trial was just read aloud. So there's a little bit of background noise. I'm at a cafe just asking you to bear with us. I will mute myself as Peter's talking to keep that background noise to a minimum. But again, just a little sort of patience. Bear with us here. We're trying to kind of get you the most timely information and analysis possible. And again, with Peter here. So, Peter, to you. There's just not that many places in lower Manhattan where a man can record a podcast, even at an important moment. So I'm glad you're there covering this, Frank. Appreciate that. Yeah, there are not many places. It's kind of surprising. And Starbucks is even louder, so I couldn't go there either. So anyway, Peter, thank you for doing this. I think you're the perfect person for us to speak to about what just happened. So let's just dive in from where we're at. Within the last hour, we just had the verdict read aloud in the Tornado Cash case. Roman Storm found guilty of count two conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business jury not unanimous on counts one and three count one being the conspiracy to launder funds and then count three being the conspiracy to evade sanctions that there's more detailed language there that I'm skipping over your thoughts on where you're at. What were you expecting? What is your reaction to what just happened? Yeah, so some just a little bit of extra legal color on what all that means. The unlicensed money transmission charge is the. One guilty charge from the jury, the two other charges, they failed to reach a verdict, which means that he's, you know, he's he's not going to be guilty of those charges unless the government comes and retries or re prosecutes those two charges, which I think we'll find out in the next hours or days whether they're going to decide to to re prosecute those charges. But the, you know, Roman himself, I think, actually said it best. I just saw a tweet reaction. Somebody caught from him. Where he said, not feeling too bad. The 18 USC 1960 charge, the unlicensed money charge was bullshit from the beginning. And so we can fight this one and we should appeal. And, you know, I agree with that colorful but accurate summary. A hundred percent. The unlicensed money transmission charge is that charge that you've probably seen. Coin Center, my organization, the DEF, the Blockchain Association, a bunch of orgs. In D.C., yelling and complaining about because it just doesn't make any sense legally as as to how we would sanely regulate crypto in this space. That charge says that you are transmitting funds without a license and you knowingly transmit criminal funds. Now, the question is, who needs a license? That's really a legal question, not a factual question for a jury and the legal question in Coin Center's opinion. And I think anybody who's reasonable. Reasonable on the law here is that that question got answered in 2019 when FinCEN, the federal regulator for money transmission, registration and anti-money laundering controls, said you're only a money transmitter in crypto if you have total independent control over customer funds. That was the 2019 FinCEN guidance. I think they were incredibly c
14
000000013
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"caption": "Ross Ulbricht proved that this thing works. The U.S. government shut down Silk Road, but they did not do it by shutting down Bitcoin. And that meant they could not, for the life of them, get in the way and stop and control Bitcoin. And they tried. They cannot stop it now. They're not going to be able to stop it later. That means there's only going to be 21 million, and this thing works. We're live here at the Bitcoin conference with the one and only Jack Mallers. What up? Hey, how are you? How's the vibes here? You just made a huge announcement. Yes. How does it feel? Vibes are immaculate. Thank you guys for having me. Thanks for putting on the conference. Shout out Bitcoin Magazine. I mean, someone handed me a cup of whiskey as I walked off. So the vibes are great. I feel good. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. You know, good to have you in the orange seat. You've made some crazy announcements recently. You know, 21 is aiming to outperform Bitcoin in BTC terms. Yep. I kind of want to touch up on that, because what does that mean practically, and how do you actually build a company that earns Bitcoin native yields? So we invented two new KPIs for the public markets, the capital markets in the United States. There's Bitcoin per share and Bitcoin return rate. Bitcoin return rate, BRRRR. It's a joke on Money Printer. Go BRRRR. But they're powerful metrics, because what they measure is, you know, if you were to invest in 21, buy a share, hypothetically, right? Shout out my lawyers. But if you were to hypothetically buy a share at 21, what we want to measure is how much Bitcoin on our balance sheet does that one share represent, right? And then can we as a business grow our Bitcoin per share? So can we be faster at buying Bitcoin than we are at issuing shares? That's what we call accretive growth. And so in that way, if you're a shareholder, let's say it was 0.05 Bitcoin per share, if we do our job well, we can actually grow that number to 0.6 to 0.7 to 0.8. And so then in that way, we are accretive and performant in Bitcoin terms, because BPS, you know, it's traditionally EPS. It's earnings per share in Wall Street, in the fiat world. We think earnings per share is a stupid metric, because measuring yourself and growing against fiat pieces of paper, anyone can do that, right? Like this hoodie is going to grow in fiat terms. This microphone, right? My jeans are going to be more expensive next year in fiat. That's not impressive. What's impressive is if you can go on Wall Street and grow your Bitcoin per share, that means you're a powerful company. So that's the goal of the business. That's our intent to do it. And we're going to do it in a plethora of ways. We're going to do what Strategy has done and use financial engineering. We intend to build a lot of products. There's a lot of relationships we're excited to talk about. So we're just getting started. But that's the goal, the mission and the metrics we're going to use to measure. Yeah, and that's super cool. And I recently heard in a podcast that you mentioned how 21 will also offer education and other services. Can you expand on the services that 21 will offer? Kind of. And I know Bitcoiners are going to be like, you know, screw that. He's saying a lot of word salad. And you guys are right. I am saying a lot of word salad, but it's because I kind of have to. So I want to set the stage. What
Ross Ulbricht proved that this thing works. The U.S. government shut down Silk Road, but they did not do it by shutting down Bitcoin. And that meant they could not, for the life of them, get in the way and stop and control Bitcoin. And they tried. They cannot stop it now. They're not going to be able to stop it later. That means there's only going to be 21 million, and this thing works. We're live here at the Bitcoin conference with the one and only Jack Mallers. What up? Hey, how are you? How's the vibes here? You just made a huge announcement. Yes. How does it feel? Vibes are immaculate. Thank you guys for having me. Thanks for putting on the conference. Shout out Bitcoin Magazine. I mean, someone handed me a cup of whiskey as I walked off. So the vibes are great. I feel good. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. You know, good to have you in the orange seat. You've made some crazy announcements recently. You know, 21 is aiming to outperform Bitcoin in BTC terms. Yep. I kind of want to touch up on that, because what does that mean practically, and how do you actually build a company that earns Bitcoin native yields? So we invented two new KPIs for the public markets, the capital markets in the United States. There's Bitcoin per share and Bitcoin return rate. Bitcoin return rate, BRRRR. It's a joke on Money Printer. Go BRRRR. But they're powerful metrics, because what they measure is, you know, if you were to invest in 21, buy a share, hypothetically, right? Shout out my lawyers. But if you were to hypothetically buy a share at 21, what we want to measure is how much Bitcoin on our balance sheet does that one share represent, right? And then can we as a business grow our Bitcoin per share? So can we be faster at buying Bitcoin than we are at issuing shares? That's what we call accretive growth. And so in that way, if you're a shareholder, let's say it was 0.05 Bitcoin per share, if we do our job well, we can actually grow that number to 0.6 to 0.7 to 0.8. And so then in that way, we are accretive and performant in Bitcoin terms, because BPS, you know, it's traditionally EPS. It's earnings per share in Wall Street, in the fiat world. We think earnings per share is a stupid metric, because measuring yourself and growing against fiat pieces of paper, anyone can do that, right? Like this hoodie is going to grow in fiat terms. This microphone, right? My jeans are going to be more expensive next year in fiat. That's not impressive. What's impressive is if you can go on Wall Street and grow your Bitcoin per share, that means you're a powerful company. So that's the goal of the business. That's our intent to do it. And we're going to do it in a plethora of ways. We're going to do what Strategy has done and use financial engineering. We intend to build a lot of products. There's a lot of relationships we're excited to talk about. So we're just getting started. But that's the goal, the mission and the metrics we're going to use to measure. Yeah, and that's super cool. And I recently heard in a podcast that you mentioned how 21 will also offer education and other services. Can you expand on the services that 21 will offer? Kind of. And I know Bitcoiners are going to be like, you know, screw that. He's saying a lot of word salad. And you guys are right. I am saying a lot of word salad, but it's because I kind of have to. So I want to set the stage. What we announced with 21 is an intent to go public by a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners. But that has not been approved yet. And so the reason I'm kind of. Restricted to what we filed publicly, that's the reason is we're in what's called the pre-approved process. So what I can't talk about is what's publicly filed. So, yes, we plan on doing a lot of education and a lot of content. We believe that one of the biggest barriers to Bitcoin being adopted around the world, and I know you believe this as well as education, is trying to get people to wrap their minds around not only what is
15
000000014
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"caption": "From a TradFi perspective, like, you know, the core metrics you can look at are like ETF flows. Bitcoin's got $54 billion since launch, and that's up. That's the top. It's basically all-time highs in net flows. You've got people quite excited. The treasury companies are doing a lot of the work here. There are 50-something Bitcoin treasury companies that we know of, maybe more. There are still people who are saying, because the government has changed its mind, I kind of like it now. Welcome, everybody, to a very special edition of the Bitcoin Policy Hour. This is the out-of-office edition. Zach Cohen and Matt Pines are traveling and going to some conferences, as they do. So I'm Stephen Pollack. I'm the SVP of Development at BPI, joined today by Zach Shapiro. And Alex Thorne with Galaxy has decided to drop by for the Bitcoin Policy Hour podcast. So thank you guys for joining. We've got a lot to go over today. Today, a number of things are happening. We had a couple of executive orders come through this week. We're going to talk a little bit about TradFi Bitcoin adoption, and it's a new day at the SEC, according to the SEC. And so we're going to hit on that a little bit, Project Crypto. But first, we don't want to bury the lead here. Zach, I know something near and dear to your heart, especially in all of us. We have a verdict in the Roman Storm case. Fill us in on everything we need to know about that, and let's camp out there for a little while. We're at the very top. Yeah, we did, in fact, get a verdict in Roman Storm's case about the Tornado Cash privacy tool. This had gone to trial after Judge Fela, who's the judge in the Southern District of New York, had denied the motion to dismiss, in this case, on the legal issue about whether or not non-custodial tools could constitute money transmission under the Bank Secrecy Act in Section 1960. And this was always going to be a little bit of an uphill battle in front of a jury. In the American legal system, juries decide questions of fact, and judges decide questions of law. And so this was an opportunity for the jury to look at each of the three crimes that Roman was charged with and decide if, based on the facts that the government presents as evidence, that beyond a reasonable doubt, he was guilty. So there were three charges in this case. There was a conspiracy to commit money laundering. There was a sanctions evasion charge. And then there was a unlicensed money transmission charge. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. As to the money laundering charge or the sanctions evasion charge. And so the government could retry each of those crimes in a future trial, but probably not super likely to do so. And they got a unanimous conviction on the unlicensed money transmission charge. Now, despite the fact that the unlicensed money transmission charge has the word unlicensed in it, the specific conduct that the government is alleging here has nothing to do with having a license. There is a subpart or an object. Of the conspiracy that Storm was charged with that requires transmitting funds that Storm knew were the proceeds or derived from the proceeds of criminal activities. So this is something you could be charged with, even if you actually had a valid license. And so the jury necessarily found
From a TradFi perspective, like, you know, the core metrics you can look at are like ETF flows. Bitcoin's got $54 billion since launch, and that's up. That's the top. It's basically all-time highs in net flows. You've got people quite excited. The treasury companies are doing a lot of the work here. There are 50-something Bitcoin treasury companies that we know of, maybe more. There are still people who are saying, because the government has changed its mind, I kind of like it now. Welcome, everybody, to a very special edition of the Bitcoin Policy Hour. This is the out-of-office edition. Zach Cohen and Matt Pines are traveling and going to some conferences, as they do. So I'm Stephen Pollack. I'm the SVP of Development at BPI, joined today by Zach Shapiro. And Alex Thorne with Galaxy has decided to drop by for the Bitcoin Policy Hour podcast. So thank you guys for joining. We've got a lot to go over today. Today, a number of things are happening. We had a couple of executive orders come through this week. We're going to talk a little bit about TradFi Bitcoin adoption, and it's a new day at the SEC, according to the SEC. And so we're going to hit on that a little bit, Project Crypto. But first, we don't want to bury the lead here. Zach, I know something near and dear to your heart, especially in all of us. We have a verdict in the Roman Storm case. Fill us in on everything we need to know about that, and let's camp out there for a little while. We're at the very top. Yeah, we did, in fact, get a verdict in Roman Storm's case about the Tornado Cash privacy tool. This had gone to trial after Judge Fela, who's the judge in the Southern District of New York, had denied the motion to dismiss, in this case, on the legal issue about whether or not non-custodial tools could constitute money transmission under the Bank Secrecy Act in Section 1960. And this was always going to be a little bit of an uphill battle in front of a jury. In the American legal system, juries decide questions of fact, and judges decide questions of law. And so this was an opportunity for the jury to look at each of the three crimes that Roman was charged with and decide if, based on the facts that the government presents as evidence, that beyond a reasonable doubt, he was guilty. So there were three charges in this case. There was a conspiracy to commit money laundering. There was a sanctions evasion charge. And then there was a unlicensed money transmission charge. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. As to the money laundering charge or the sanctions evasion charge. And so the government could retry each of those crimes in a future trial, but probably not super likely to do so. And they got a unanimous conviction on the unlicensed money transmission charge. Now, despite the fact that the unlicensed money transmission charge has the word unlicensed in it, the specific conduct that the government is alleging here has nothing to do with having a license. There is a subpart or an object. Of the conspiracy that Storm was charged with that requires transmitting funds that Storm knew were the proceeds or derived from the proceeds of criminal activities. So this is something you could be charged with, even if you actually had a valid license. And so the jury necessarily found that Tornado Cash transmitted funds and that Storm knew that those funds derived from crime. And again, knowledge here is different than intent, which Storm was charged with in the money laundering. So it's not that Storm intended to help criminals. It's just that he knew criminals were using the tool. So the part of this that's a real awful from a precedential perspective is the idea that a non-custodial tool like Tornado Cash, as opposed to the users of that tool, transmitted funds to begin with. Based on the 2019 FinCEN guidance, which maybe we should come back to and talk about a little bit. And based on the sort of just plain English meaning of, accepting and then transmitting
16
000000015
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"caption": "What Sailor's talking about when he wants to create a monster and to do it in a way that is kind of intentional is to take the short-term pain of being under-levered and continue to deleverage the balance sheet in order to make room for amplification. Once they get the flywheel going, that would be the monster, right? That if they get to 50% leverage, if they're paying a higher rate than the competition, that's a whole lot of value created for a lot of people who might be on a fixed income and be retired. And I think that he's actually using Bitcoin in order to help the widest number of people that would otherwise not have any way to buy Bitcoin because it's too volatile for them. They've been telling us this for years now, and Sailor's created a monster that is going to solve their problem. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is... I'll be your host today, and I'm joined by our producer, Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Hey, Pierre. I'm doing great. Happy to be here, and happy Bitcoin White Paper Day and Halloween as well. Indeed. Thank you. And to you as well, because obviously Bitcoin White Paper Day is the day that Satoshi Nakamoto sent the Bitcoin White Paper out to the public for the first time to a cryptography mailing list and kicked off this whole experiment 17 years ago now. So Bitcoin is... Almost, you know, 18 years old, adult, ready to move out. It certainly feels that way with the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. And I think that's really kind of the purpose of today's episode is to dig into the latest earnings report from MSTR, the largest institutional holder of Bitcoin, and the earnings call they had yesterday that I had the honor to join. And I got to ask my question, which we can talk about. But yeah, do you want to give us kind of the high-level highlights for Q3 for MSTR? Yeah, absolutely. So in Q3, their operating income was reported as $3.9 billion with a net income of $2.8 billion. Overall, they saw year-to-date BTC yield of 26%. And they're targeting a 30% fiscal year 2025 BTC yield. And I think one of the biggest takeaways from this call was the increase in their dividend rate on stretch, and this is something we'll get into, to 10.5%. Despite the Federal Reserve cutting rates very recently, I think to see the rate on stretch go up was quite interesting and, you know, should make it more attractive for people looking for yield. But I think also kind of raised my eyebrow a little bit where I was wondering, you know, as rates go down, you would expect stretch rates to... Do you follow those and kind of maintain a constant spread? But curious if you had any reaction on that last point in particular, Pierre. Yeah, I mean, I think that it raises kind of a sensitive topic for the common stock, which is how these are getting paid for, right? That Saylor MicroStrategy or now Strategy is going to have to go out and issue more MSTR shares in the future to pay for these higher dividend yields. So while obviously it's a... It sweetens the pot for the kind of fixed income side and on the preferred side, I do think that for the common stock, which frankly, you know, I think this earnings call came at a really important time because the common stock has been underperforming Bitcoin, which, you know, is the hurdle rate. It's been underperforming it this year, year to date. And it's down 30% over th
What Sailor's talking about when he wants to create a monster and to do it in a way that is kind of intentional is to take the short-term pain of being under-levered and continue to deleverage the balance sheet in order to make room for amplification. Once they get the flywheel going, that would be the monster, right? That if they get to 50% leverage, if they're paying a higher rate than the competition, that's a whole lot of value created for a lot of people who might be on a fixed income and be retired. And I think that he's actually using Bitcoin in order to help the widest number of people that would otherwise not have any way to buy Bitcoin because it's too volatile for them. They've been telling us this for years now, and Sailor's created a monster that is going to solve their problem. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is... I'll be your host today, and I'm joined by our producer, Spencer Nichols. Spencer, how are you? Hey, Pierre. I'm doing great. Happy to be here, and happy Bitcoin White Paper Day and Halloween as well. Indeed. Thank you. And to you as well, because obviously Bitcoin White Paper Day is the day that Satoshi Nakamoto sent the Bitcoin White Paper out to the public for the first time to a cryptography mailing list and kicked off this whole experiment 17 years ago now. So Bitcoin is... Almost, you know, 18 years old, adult, ready to move out. It certainly feels that way with the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. And I think that's really kind of the purpose of today's episode is to dig into the latest earnings report from MSTR, the largest institutional holder of Bitcoin, and the earnings call they had yesterday that I had the honor to join. And I got to ask my question, which we can talk about. But yeah, do you want to give us kind of the high-level highlights for Q3 for MSTR? Yeah, absolutely. So in Q3, their operating income was reported as $3.9 billion with a net income of $2.8 billion. Overall, they saw year-to-date BTC yield of 26%. And they're targeting a 30% fiscal year 2025 BTC yield. And I think one of the biggest takeaways from this call was the increase in their dividend rate on stretch, and this is something we'll get into, to 10.5%. Despite the Federal Reserve cutting rates very recently, I think to see the rate on stretch go up was quite interesting and, you know, should make it more attractive for people looking for yield. But I think also kind of raised my eyebrow a little bit where I was wondering, you know, as rates go down, you would expect stretch rates to... Do you follow those and kind of maintain a constant spread? But curious if you had any reaction on that last point in particular, Pierre. Yeah, I mean, I think that it raises kind of a sensitive topic for the common stock, which is how these are getting paid for, right? That Saylor MicroStrategy or now Strategy is going to have to go out and issue more MSTR shares in the future to pay for these higher dividend yields. So while obviously it's a... It sweetens the pot for the kind of fixed income side and on the preferred side, I do think that for the common stock, which frankly, you know, I think this earnings call came at a really important time because the common stock has been underperforming Bitcoin, which, you know, is the hurdle rate. It's been underperforming it this year, year to date. And it's down 30% over the past six months. And so I think that there's a lot of sensitivity from the common stock shareholders around creating obligations to issue more equity going forward. And so, you know, you could also look at it from a monetary policy perspective. You know, when the Federal Reserve changes interest rates, it has a lagging effect. It's estimated to be about 18 months before it actually affects the economy. When they lower or raise interest rates. And so when you put it in that context, I think that the same could be true for STRC, where really it could take, you know, 18 months for that to really sti
17
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"caption": "So I've been all around the region this week I started in Dubai and went to Bahrain and went to Kuwait and of course I'm ending in Abu Dhabi the big end this is the big end of the tour and I have a chance to meet with hundreds of hundred investors, regulators, sovereigns, banks, crypto enthusiasts, Bitcoin enthusiasts and I thought I would share with you what I'm showing them and what I'm speaking about with them and give you a sense of of what we're proposing to the sovereign wealth fund, the hedge funds, the investment funds, the family offices, the banks, the traders and those running the government and very exciting so without further ado let's put my presentation up on screen on stage I'll start with the title right my topic today is digital capital, credit, money and banking and so let's let's start with the first topic digital capital what is digital capital? Bitcoin is digital capital. Gold is metallic capital, real estate is property capital, S&P is equity capital. Why is Bitcoin digital capital? First of all because Donald Trump is a was painted that way before. Why is Bitcoin digital capital? That's the ones Dedicated to him. Donald J Trump is the Bitcoin president Donald J. Trump says he is intent on making America the Bitcoin superpower the crypto capital of the world the leader in digital assets and. David Sacks, who works for him in March of 2025, this year said, important is special, Bitcoin is an asset without an issuor, it is the dominant digital commodity in the world this administration designated, this year, signing of Bitcoin as the most time-serving enterprise in the world. Bitcoin as digital gold. And of course, it's not just the president. It's the vice president, who I've met, who said that. It's the secretary of treasury, who I've met, who has said that. It is the head of the SEC, who I've met, who has said that. It is the head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who I've met, who said that. It's the head of commerce, a small business administration, Kelly Loeffler, who I've met, who said that. It's Bill Pulte, who runs the federal housing administration and regulates $5 trillion or $6 trillion of home mortgages, who I've met, who said that. It's RFK, who not that long ago wanted the U.S. government to buy 4 million Bitcoin, who I've met, who believes it. It's the incoming head of the CFTC, Mike Selig. It's David Sachs himself, the crypto-currency expert. It's the head of the SEC, who has said that. It's the Bitcoin czar. It's Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. And it's Kash Patel, the head of the FBI. So you have a profound consensus amongst everyone running the United States. And the most important thing is that the United States is the most influential financial regulator in the world. And whatever the U.S. banking system does and the U.S. security market does ripples through South America. It ripples through Africa. It ripples through Europe. It ripples through the Middle East. It goes to Canada. It goes to Australia. It even goes to Hong Kong. Even the Chinese will copy what the U.S. is doing. So it's very, very profound inflection. The other major inflection point is all of the large banks in the United States have gone from not banking Bitcoin 12 months ago to in the past six months. I have noted and been approached by BNY Mellon, by Wells Fargo, by Bank of America, by Charles Schwab, by J.P. Morgan, by Citi. They are all starting to issue credit against eith
So I've been all around the region this week I started in Dubai and went to Bahrain and went to Kuwait and of course I'm ending in Abu Dhabi the big end this is the big end of the tour and I have a chance to meet with hundreds of hundred investors, regulators, sovereigns, banks, crypto enthusiasts, Bitcoin enthusiasts and I thought I would share with you what I'm showing them and what I'm speaking about with them and give you a sense of of what we're proposing to the sovereign wealth fund, the hedge funds, the investment funds, the family offices, the banks, the traders and those running the government and very exciting so without further ado let's put my presentation up on screen on stage I'll start with the title right my topic today is digital capital, credit, money and banking and so let's let's start with the first topic digital capital what is digital capital? Bitcoin is digital capital. Gold is metallic capital, real estate is property capital, S&P is equity capital. Why is Bitcoin digital capital? First of all because Donald Trump is a was painted that way before. Why is Bitcoin digital capital? That's the ones Dedicated to him. Donald J Trump is the Bitcoin president Donald J. Trump says he is intent on making America the Bitcoin superpower the crypto capital of the world the leader in digital assets and. David Sacks, who works for him in March of 2025, this year said, important is special, Bitcoin is an asset without an issuor, it is the dominant digital commodity in the world this administration designated, this year, signing of Bitcoin as the most time-serving enterprise in the world. Bitcoin as digital gold. And of course, it's not just the president. It's the vice president, who I've met, who said that. It's the secretary of treasury, who I've met, who has said that. It is the head of the SEC, who I've met, who has said that. It is the head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who I've met, who said that. It's the head of commerce, a small business administration, Kelly Loeffler, who I've met, who said that. It's Bill Pulte, who runs the federal housing administration and regulates $5 trillion or $6 trillion of home mortgages, who I've met, who said that. It's RFK, who not that long ago wanted the U.S. government to buy 4 million Bitcoin, who I've met, who believes it. It's the incoming head of the CFTC, Mike Selig. It's David Sachs himself, the crypto-currency expert. It's the head of the SEC, who has said that. It's the Bitcoin czar. It's Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. And it's Kash Patel, the head of the FBI. So you have a profound consensus amongst everyone running the United States. And the most important thing is that the United States is the most influential financial regulator in the world. And whatever the U.S. banking system does and the U.S. security market does ripples through South America. It ripples through Africa. It ripples through Europe. It ripples through the Middle East. It goes to Canada. It goes to Australia. It even goes to Hong Kong. Even the Chinese will copy what the U.S. is doing. So it's very, very profound inflection. The other major inflection point is all of the large banks in the United States have gone from not banking Bitcoin 12 months ago to in the past six months. I have noted and been approached by BNY Mellon, by Wells Fargo, by Bank of America, by Charles Schwab, by J.P. Morgan, by Citi. They are all starting to issue credit against either Bitcoin or against Bitcoin derivatives like iBit. And so there's a sea change here. Wells Fargo and Citi have both publicly announced intent to allow the customers to use Bitcoin. So here's another big example. So they have a diversity of Bitcoin within the banks and the year 2026 they'll start to extend credit. And so Wall Street, the banking establishment and the regulators of all endorsed Bitcoin is digital capital. Where does that take us? Well, my company's strategy is the world's first digital treasury company. and becau
18
000000017
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"caption": "When you have U.S.-China basically trying to carve up the world into separate competing tech blocks, when it's a matter of national policy to dominate these respective strategic industries, there are just inevitably going to be state prerogatives at play in how capital is allocated. And I think we're just seeing it's such a blunt force application. They all go to the White House and they announce these multi-hundred billion dollar investment pledges, you know, from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg. They're all kind of trying to kiss the ring. And I think that's an exertion of national strategic power and interest over multinational global companies. That's kind of like a progressive talking point for, like, you know, not too long ago, right? It's like these big tech companies, they have too much power. They're not accountable to democracy. And to a certain extent, like, I would want Trump to be doing more on the, like, liberty side. Like, if he's got the power, the solution to that isn't to just be like, all right, like the government basically whacks you on the head and says, give me 15% of your sales, NVIDIA. All right. We're back with the Bitcoin policy. Now we're after a long hiatus here. We've got a lot to catch up on. But just as usual, joined each week here by Matt Pines, BPI's executive director, and Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. And we're going to dig into some of the most recent kind of updates around Bitcoin policy, maybe emerging tech more broadly here to foreshadow our conversation. Yeah, let's jump into it here. I think first topic for the day, as we've been away for a bit, is to sort of reassess where we are at on the policy front. So major priorities being market structure bill, and then maybe talk a little bit about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. I know there's a couple of updates on that as well. But yeah, Pines, let's jump off here. What's kind of the lay of the land on market structure? I know there's been a new draft bill from the Senate Banking Committee. And then we've also seen a framework from Senate Democrats, about kind of what they're looking for here in that bill. But yeah, just kind of curious where we're at and how long you see that taking to really come to a conclusion. Yeah, I guess maybe I'll signpost kind of the structural progression we've been on. And then I'll tag Zach in and kind of zoom in to clarity. The signpost I would draw is like, Trump gets elected, executive orders, established the Bitcoin reserve. They have presidents working. Group on digital assets, they start cramming on genius. They get genius past bipartisan vote. They then release the president's working group of digital assets sort of synoptic report, which was in just before it was like end of July. And that was kind of the milestone book report, essentially covering the waterfront. We've talked about that before and kind of teed up additional priorities to kind of drive action. But the Implement Genius Act, you know, refocus Congressional. Attention on market structure and then, you know, potentially make make make good on this, you know, left left hanging promise to identify budget neutral ways of adding additional Bitcoin to the strategic Bitcoin reserve. And so we're kind of in the middle of that arc and it's not clear like when or if different threads are going to ar
When you have U.S.-China basically trying to carve up the world into separate competing tech blocks, when it's a matter of national policy to dominate these respective strategic industries, there are just inevitably going to be state prerogatives at play in how capital is allocated. And I think we're just seeing it's such a blunt force application. They all go to the White House and they announce these multi-hundred billion dollar investment pledges, you know, from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg. They're all kind of trying to kiss the ring. And I think that's an exertion of national strategic power and interest over multinational global companies. That's kind of like a progressive talking point for, like, you know, not too long ago, right? It's like these big tech companies, they have too much power. They're not accountable to democracy. And to a certain extent, like, I would want Trump to be doing more on the, like, liberty side. Like, if he's got the power, the solution to that isn't to just be like, all right, like the government basically whacks you on the head and says, give me 15% of your sales, NVIDIA. All right. We're back with the Bitcoin policy. Now we're after a long hiatus here. We've got a lot to catch up on. But just as usual, joined each week here by Matt Pines, BPI's executive director, and Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. And we're going to dig into some of the most recent kind of updates around Bitcoin policy, maybe emerging tech more broadly here to foreshadow our conversation. Yeah, let's jump into it here. I think first topic for the day, as we've been away for a bit, is to sort of reassess where we are at on the policy front. So major priorities being market structure bill, and then maybe talk a little bit about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. I know there's a couple of updates on that as well. But yeah, Pines, let's jump off here. What's kind of the lay of the land on market structure? I know there's been a new draft bill from the Senate Banking Committee. And then we've also seen a framework from Senate Democrats, about kind of what they're looking for here in that bill. But yeah, just kind of curious where we're at and how long you see that taking to really come to a conclusion. Yeah, I guess maybe I'll signpost kind of the structural progression we've been on. And then I'll tag Zach in and kind of zoom in to clarity. The signpost I would draw is like, Trump gets elected, executive orders, established the Bitcoin reserve. They have presidents working. Group on digital assets, they start cramming on genius. They get genius past bipartisan vote. They then release the president's working group of digital assets sort of synoptic report, which was in just before it was like end of July. And that was kind of the milestone book report, essentially covering the waterfront. We've talked about that before and kind of teed up additional priorities to kind of drive action. But the Implement Genius Act, you know, refocus Congressional. Attention on market structure and then, you know, potentially make make make good on this, you know, left left hanging promise to identify budget neutral ways of adding additional Bitcoin to the strategic Bitcoin reserve. And so we're kind of in the middle of that arc and it's not clear like when or if different threads are going to are going to get tied together. Right. I'd say like my top level macro view is that market structure is not a done deal, although more likely than not, but not as I think people were. We're expecting in some optimistic corners like rapid action, September, October, I think it's more likely to take a lot longer. At the same time, I think the prevailing mood is that action on the SBR essentially is dependent on progress on market structure first. And so, you know, SBR in terms of taking up action from the White House's perspective publicly and then legislatively is kind of a an if than right relative to market structure. That's not to say there isn't furth
19
000000018
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"caption": "The biggest win, the biggest change of this year is acceptance. I still think that a year ago, there were still elements of the political class that thought that they could either contain or restrict or put this industry in a bottle or in some kind of corner. You can't, as you know, you can't put Bitcoin in a corner. I mean, imagine a year ago, the idea of sitting in a U.S. senator's office with their staff and talking about the nature of consensus, about soft forks. That's amazing. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Policy Hour. We've got our last Bitcoin Policy Hour of the year. So we've got a good couple of topics to cover. Do a little looking back at 2025 and looking ahead to 2026. But before we jump into it, I'm going to introduce the guys as usual. We've got Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. Ken Egan, BPI's director of government affairs. And Stephen Pollack, the senior vice president of advancement. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. As always. And a quick note for everybody. If you have not already hit subscribe, we do ask that you do so. It really helps us out trying to grow the channel, making sure you all get the content as it comes out. So, yeah, let's jump into this. I guess we'll just go through each of you. You know, I guess first question for the day is, what do you think the single most important advancement that happened in 2025 was? Thinking particularly about the work that we're doing, BPI, you know, what's going on in D.C., all that good stuff. Stephen, you want to kick us off here? Sure, sure. I don't know that it's... Okay, I'll start with... I get to go first, so I get to take the easy one, I guess. And I was thinking about this. We were talking about this the other day. And it seems like this was like two or three years ago. But the SBR, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, that was 2025. That seems like so much has happened since then. And we've come so far. But I think the executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is the biggest win of 2025. And I think a lot of everything else we're going to talk about, a lot of the other wins, a lot of the other things that have happened, not just with BPI, but like inside of Bitcoin and politics and the entire arena, the entire universe there is all flowing from that moment when a president signed an executive order. So, I'll take that one. Sorry, guys. You know, I got to go first. And yeah, I think... I just think it's... I think it's a historic win. Ken, you want to go for it? Yeah. For me, it's more sort of big picture. I think the biggest win, the biggest change of this year is acceptance. I still think that a year ago, there were still elements of the political class that thought that they could either contain or restrict or put this industry in a bottle. Or in some kind of corner. But you can't, as you know, you can't put Bitcoin in a corner. Nobody puts Bitcoin in a corner, I think. I'm a Gen X-er. You know who puts Bitcoin in a corner. But I think that is the not putting Bitcoin in a corner is actually the fundamental shift in perspective. So, on the policy side and even the financial system side. So, I mean, we can look back to a slew of sort of legislative wins that were sort of digital asset friendly. Genius Act, even market structure, which sort of plods its way through sort of the swamp of
The biggest win, the biggest change of this year is acceptance. I still think that a year ago, there were still elements of the political class that thought that they could either contain or restrict or put this industry in a bottle or in some kind of corner. You can't, as you know, you can't put Bitcoin in a corner. I mean, imagine a year ago, the idea of sitting in a U.S. senator's office with their staff and talking about the nature of consensus, about soft forks. That's amazing. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Policy Hour. We've got our last Bitcoin Policy Hour of the year. So we've got a good couple of topics to cover. Do a little looking back at 2025 and looking ahead to 2026. But before we jump into it, I'm going to introduce the guys as usual. We've got Zach Shapiro, BPI's head of policy. Ken Egan, BPI's director of government affairs. And Stephen Pollack, the senior vice president of advancement. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. As always. And a quick note for everybody. If you have not already hit subscribe, we do ask that you do so. It really helps us out trying to grow the channel, making sure you all get the content as it comes out. So, yeah, let's jump into this. I guess we'll just go through each of you. You know, I guess first question for the day is, what do you think the single most important advancement that happened in 2025 was? Thinking particularly about the work that we're doing, BPI, you know, what's going on in D.C., all that good stuff. Stephen, you want to kick us off here? Sure, sure. I don't know that it's... Okay, I'll start with... I get to go first, so I get to take the easy one, I guess. And I was thinking about this. We were talking about this the other day. And it seems like this was like two or three years ago. But the SBR, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, that was 2025. That seems like so much has happened since then. And we've come so far. But I think the executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is the biggest win of 2025. And I think a lot of everything else we're going to talk about, a lot of the other wins, a lot of the other things that have happened, not just with BPI, but like inside of Bitcoin and politics and the entire arena, the entire universe there is all flowing from that moment when a president signed an executive order. So, I'll take that one. Sorry, guys. You know, I got to go first. And yeah, I think... I just think it's... I think it's a historic win. Ken, you want to go for it? Yeah. For me, it's more sort of big picture. I think the biggest win, the biggest change of this year is acceptance. I still think that a year ago, there were still elements of the political class that thought that they could either contain or restrict or put this industry in a bottle. Or in some kind of corner. But you can't, as you know, you can't put Bitcoin in a corner. Nobody puts Bitcoin in a corner, I think. I'm a Gen X-er. You know who puts Bitcoin in a corner. But I think that is the not putting Bitcoin in a corner is actually the fundamental shift in perspective. So, on the policy side and even the financial system side. So, I mean, we can look back to a slew of sort of legislative wins that were sort of digital asset friendly. Genius Act, even market structure, which sort of plods its way through sort of the swamp of like congressional negotiation, there's no real debate about whether it passes or not. It's the function of what it looks like. So, I think the political class has accepted that this industry is here to stay and it has a role to play in the future of our economy. But you've been also, but I think the bigger shift is, it's not, yes, I said this a couple of months ago and it drives me to the corner. I think it's crazy that Larry Fink was like the big corner of 24 because he was like the first like TradFi guy to jump in and say, this asset matters. But here we go to the last quarter of 2025 and you've got Morgan Stanley, which next year will be
20
000000019
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"caption": "Welcome everybody to day two of Bitcoin Mina, the biggest Bitcoin conference in the Middle East. Today, we are going to hear from none other than Simon Garavich, the head of MetaPlanet, CZ, Chengpeng Bao from Binance, as well as the one and only Michael Saylor. He'll be headlining the day. But first, we have an all-star panel here. I'm Frank Corva, Bitcoin journalist, joined to my left by Sean Owen, founder and CEO of Salt Lending, as well as Stafford Massey Chairman. I get this wrong each time. Executive Chairman of the Africa Bitcoin Corporation. Gentlemen, super excited to be kicking off the day with both of you. I want to start by talking a little bit about one of the big themes from yesterday, especially. We had the Bitcoin for Corporations Conference, this kind of intersection of Bitcoin and finance, traditional financial products. So Stafford, we had you on the desk yesterday talking a little bit about what you're doing. Maybe you could recap that a little bit for the audience, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So we approached, we're the first Bitcoin treasury company listed on the Johannesburg. Stock Exchange. When we approached the Bitcoin strategy play, it was from what I always call a humanistic perspective. The business was three years old, listed on the JSC, and it was a private capital business, a business that provides funding to SMMEs in Africa. And not just SMMEs, we slanted more towards black female SMMEs. So a great impact story. When I became chairman, I looked at this and I orange pulled most of the board and the CEO. And I said, hey, what if we took Bitcoin and we put this thermonuclear weapon into the core of a private credit engine? Could we scale out this impact story more so than we previously ever imagined was possible? And we did it. So what we've established is we've changed our name. So we went from Outface Capital to the Africa Bitcoin Corporation. And we were very intentional about putting Bitcoin in our name. Most of the Bitcoin treasury companies, you won't find that they put Bitcoin in their name. It's a little play on it, but not exactly. Exactly. And we wanted to make sure that this was Bitcoin. We're not a debt. We're not some altcoin. I like that. That was the first thing. And we wanted to make a statement with that, being the first to do that. So we did that. And now we're raising Bitcoin to go off and find fiat capital, bring fiat capital to its knees. So go to Switzerland, go to Japan, lend at 4% to 6%, go to the East Coast, 9% to 10% of the USA, and deploy that capital in Africa through our private credit engine at 20% to 25%, which is actually cheap in Africa. Lending rates are so high. So our analysts, our team in the private credit engine that we have are really loving this because the capital inflow. And we've already raised, I think we've announced a couple of days ago, 50 million rand. And we've got another 100 million rand in the pipeline. We don't have a lot of Bitcoin yet. We're still engaging with investors at BioStory. But the model, the story, the playbook, fixed income loves it. And we're already getting fiat capital coming in at very low rates, which we can deploy. And then again, we're going to take the profits from that and kind of in a creative, in a budget-neutral way, federate that back up into the trade. And we're very excited about doing things like BitBonds. We
Welcome everybody to day two of Bitcoin Mina, the biggest Bitcoin conference in the Middle East. Today, we are going to hear from none other than Simon Garavich, the head of MetaPlanet, CZ, Chengpeng Bao from Binance, as well as the one and only Michael Saylor. He'll be headlining the day. But first, we have an all-star panel here. I'm Frank Corva, Bitcoin journalist, joined to my left by Sean Owen, founder and CEO of Salt Lending, as well as Stafford Massey Chairman. I get this wrong each time. Executive Chairman of the Africa Bitcoin Corporation. Gentlemen, super excited to be kicking off the day with both of you. I want to start by talking a little bit about one of the big themes from yesterday, especially. We had the Bitcoin for Corporations Conference, this kind of intersection of Bitcoin and finance, traditional financial products. So Stafford, we had you on the desk yesterday talking a little bit about what you're doing. Maybe you could recap that a little bit for the audience, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So we approached, we're the first Bitcoin treasury company listed on the Johannesburg. Stock Exchange. When we approached the Bitcoin strategy play, it was from what I always call a humanistic perspective. The business was three years old, listed on the JSC, and it was a private capital business, a business that provides funding to SMMEs in Africa. And not just SMMEs, we slanted more towards black female SMMEs. So a great impact story. When I became chairman, I looked at this and I orange pulled most of the board and the CEO. And I said, hey, what if we took Bitcoin and we put this thermonuclear weapon into the core of a private credit engine? Could we scale out this impact story more so than we previously ever imagined was possible? And we did it. So what we've established is we've changed our name. So we went from Outface Capital to the Africa Bitcoin Corporation. And we were very intentional about putting Bitcoin in our name. Most of the Bitcoin treasury companies, you won't find that they put Bitcoin in their name. It's a little play on it, but not exactly. Exactly. And we wanted to make sure that this was Bitcoin. We're not a debt. We're not some altcoin. I like that. That was the first thing. And we wanted to make a statement with that, being the first to do that. So we did that. And now we're raising Bitcoin to go off and find fiat capital, bring fiat capital to its knees. So go to Switzerland, go to Japan, lend at 4% to 6%, go to the East Coast, 9% to 10% of the USA, and deploy that capital in Africa through our private credit engine at 20% to 25%, which is actually cheap in Africa. Lending rates are so high. So our analysts, our team in the private credit engine that we have are really loving this because the capital inflow. And we've already raised, I think we've announced a couple of days ago, 50 million rand. And we've got another 100 million rand in the pipeline. We don't have a lot of Bitcoin yet. We're still engaging with investors at BioStory. But the model, the story, the playbook, fixed income loves it. And we're already getting fiat capital coming in at very low rates, which we can deploy. And then again, we're going to take the profits from that and kind of in a creative, in a budget-neutral way, federate that back up into the trade. And we're very excited about doing things like BitBonds. We will give a loan out to an SMME, say 5 million rand. We'll take 20%. We'll take 1 million rand and we'll put that into Bitcoin. And if you do that as an SMME, we lower the rate of your lend. And we hold on to that Bitcoin. And over the period of time, if that grows beyond what you owe, we can settle. Or at the end, we split that 50-50. Offering Bitcoin life insurance. Offering Bitcoin insurance. So we're very excited about this. Highly, you know, novel flywheel that we've built between traditional finance and Bitcoin powering it. So what Michael Saylor is doing with, you know, digital capital and digit
21
000000020
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"caption": "Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us this afternoon or morning, whatever time it is where you're at. My name is Isaiah Austin, and I am the social media coordinator here at Bitcoin Magazine. And today we have two very special guests. Starting off, we have Hunter Albright from Salt Lending. So Hunter, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Great to be here. Awesome. Glad to have you. And then we also have our very own Vivian Chang. Vivian, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you for having me. Of course. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Hunter, Salt's been around since about 2016 as one of the first Bitcoin-backed lenders. For listeners who might not be familiar, can you walk us through what makes Salt unique and how your borrowing and lending options work? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So as you said, Salt was really the originator and one of the first in the market to create the flexibility to borrow against your Bitcoin and not have to sell it. That's been a journey. And a sort of process the company has been on to really create the most flexible and secure and sort of protective features in the market. So from a Salt perspective, really what sets us apart, we think about it in three things. One is around the support that you can get through Salt. We have just fantastic customer support and service. You can talk to people if you don't understand what the steps are you need to go through. And we've got sort of the best in class web app and mobile app to really sort of facilitate that. We have great sort of safety features that are built into the platform. And then I think one of the key things is really control, right? We have the view, it's your Bitcoin. We want to make sure it stays your Bitcoin. I have built in a lot of features and functionality to help do that and put you in control about how you borrow and how you manage your Bitcoin in particularly. That's amazing. I saw that you've introduced some new features like stabilization and the Salt Shield. Would you mind breaking these down for me so that we can help our listeners and myself understand those a little bit better? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So stabilization was the technology that the company innovated several years ago to really help ensure people don't get liquidated. And it was built so that when you reach a margin call point, and for us, it's just under 91% LTV, your collateral gets converted into stablecoin. So that in the event of a large and fast market drop, you, again, have some protection to ensure that you don't get liquidated and you don't lose all the value of your assets. And so on the Salt platform, it gets moved into stablecoin, and then you have the ability to move it back into Bitcoin when you want to, both in terms of being able to top up additional collateral, but also converting the stablecoin back into Bitcoin. And then the Salt Shield was a new innovation that we launched at BTC 2025 in Las Vegas this year. It's a fee-based program where people can enroll into the protection where you just avoid liquidation altogether. You are basically buying sort of no liquidation events occurring during the term of your loan. Amazing. Thanks for that, Hunter. I'm going to pass it over to you, Vivian. I'm curious, from your perspective in covering the industry, how do you see lending tool
Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us this afternoon or morning, whatever time it is where you're at. My name is Isaiah Austin, and I am the social media coordinator here at Bitcoin Magazine. And today we have two very special guests. Starting off, we have Hunter Albright from Salt Lending. So Hunter, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Great to be here. Awesome. Glad to have you. And then we also have our very own Vivian Chang. Vivian, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you for having me. Of course. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Hunter, Salt's been around since about 2016 as one of the first Bitcoin-backed lenders. For listeners who might not be familiar, can you walk us through what makes Salt unique and how your borrowing and lending options work? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So as you said, Salt was really the originator and one of the first in the market to create the flexibility to borrow against your Bitcoin and not have to sell it. That's been a journey. And a sort of process the company has been on to really create the most flexible and secure and sort of protective features in the market. So from a Salt perspective, really what sets us apart, we think about it in three things. One is around the support that you can get through Salt. We have just fantastic customer support and service. You can talk to people if you don't understand what the steps are you need to go through. And we've got sort of the best in class web app and mobile app to really sort of facilitate that. We have great sort of safety features that are built into the platform. And then I think one of the key things is really control, right? We have the view, it's your Bitcoin. We want to make sure it stays your Bitcoin. I have built in a lot of features and functionality to help do that and put you in control about how you borrow and how you manage your Bitcoin in particularly. That's amazing. I saw that you've introduced some new features like stabilization and the Salt Shield. Would you mind breaking these down for me so that we can help our listeners and myself understand those a little bit better? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So stabilization was the technology that the company innovated several years ago to really help ensure people don't get liquidated. And it was built so that when you reach a margin call point, and for us, it's just under 91% LTV, your collateral gets converted into stablecoin. So that in the event of a large and fast market drop, you, again, have some protection to ensure that you don't get liquidated and you don't lose all the value of your assets. And so on the Salt platform, it gets moved into stablecoin, and then you have the ability to move it back into Bitcoin when you want to, both in terms of being able to top up additional collateral, but also converting the stablecoin back into Bitcoin. And then the Salt Shield was a new innovation that we launched at BTC 2025 in Las Vegas this year. It's a fee-based program where people can enroll into the protection where you just avoid liquidation altogether. You are basically buying sort of no liquidation events occurring during the term of your loan. Amazing. Thanks for that, Hunter. I'm going to pass it over to you, Vivian. I'm curious, from your perspective in covering the industry, how do you see lending tools like Salts fitting into a broader adoption of Bitcoin in regions like Asia? Yeah, for sure. Happy to chime in. And for some context, I'm Vivian. Most people might know me as BTCViv. I host Live with Bitcoin. It's a podcast to explore the live culture and transformative power in Bitcoin. And I'm also leading the charge on Bitcoin Asia happening next week in Hong Kong. And it's shaping up to be the biggest Bitcoin conference yet. Really excited to be here with Hunter from Salt. And from my view, how lending tools like Salt are really relevant, it comes in a lot of different ways. It comes in a lot of different ways. It comes in a lot of different ways. It's a diff
22
000000021
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"episode_title": "How to Value a Bitcoin Treasury Company w/ MSTR CEO Phong Le | Bitcoin for Corporations Ep. 8",
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"caption": "I think one of the most more interesting announcements in the last week was Figma puts out there in their S1 as they're filing for an IPO that lo and behold, they have about 5% of their balance sheet in Bitcoin. And here's a private company, not trying to be a Bitcoin treasury company, right, but realizes the thing that we realized in 2020, that Bitcoin on your balance sheet is better than cash on your balance sheet. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Rochard. I'm your host today. And today we're joined with Fong Le from MicroStrategy or Strategy Now, rebranded. So welcome, Fong. Thanks for coming on. Pierre, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks for having us. Great to see you again. We had a good conversation in Las Vegas up on stage. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. No, that was nice to have David Bailey up there. A lot of big announcements with new Bitcoin treasury companies a month ago or so. And the most recent announcement for Strategy is with regards to STRD, Stride, the perpetual preferred that now is the third one, I believe, that has an ATM. So I'm excited to dig into that. But first, I want to start with a little bit of history for those listeners who. Are not familiar with strategy and not familiar with the Bitcoin journey that the company has gone through over the past five years now. So congratulations on that landmark of five years. That's a long time in Bitcoin. So I really want to start with, you know, what MicroStrategy was in 2020, where it was from a corporate perspective and kind of just briefly. What led to the decision to acquire those first Bitcoin? Yeah, it's it's a it's a long story. And you're right. It was four years and probably 10 months and 29 days ago that we embarked on the Bitcoin treasury company journey. And, you know, I've been with strategy since 2015. I became CEO in 2022. And Michael Saylor, our founder and now executive chairman, founded the company in 1989. And so when I joined and certainly when he founded, the idea was not to start a Bitcoin treasury company. The idea was to run a great enterprise analytics software company. And we did that for the course of, you know, 30 years or so. And in 2020, after running a business that was. Profitable, that was, you know, revenue growing $500 million in revenue about, you know, given, you know, any given year, 15, 20, 25% operating margins, which were also our EBITDA margins, which were also our cash flow margins, because it's not a very capital intensive business to your $500 million a year generating $100 million in cash flow. It was a good business, but it wasn't growing at the pace we wanted. And we're competing in the enterprise software world with the Microsoft and the Amazons and the Googles and on the startup side, some of those most smartest, most brilliant people in the world. And the great thing about enterprise software is once you once you're able to convince a customer that you have something that's created their business, they stay with you for 20, 25, 30 years. So it's a very it's economically a very sound business. It's a very competitive business. And it attracts some of the smartest people in the world. And as a result, it's extremely competitive and difficult to grow in. And so that's what we're doing. We're stagnating a bit in 2020.
I think one of the most more interesting announcements in the last week was Figma puts out there in their S1 as they're filing for an IPO that lo and behold, they have about 5% of their balance sheet in Bitcoin. And here's a private company, not trying to be a Bitcoin treasury company, right, but realizes the thing that we realized in 2020, that Bitcoin on your balance sheet is better than cash on your balance sheet. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Rochard. I'm your host today. And today we're joined with Fong Le from MicroStrategy or Strategy Now, rebranded. So welcome, Fong. Thanks for coming on. Pierre, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks for having us. Great to see you again. We had a good conversation in Las Vegas up on stage. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. No, that was nice to have David Bailey up there. A lot of big announcements with new Bitcoin treasury companies a month ago or so. And the most recent announcement for Strategy is with regards to STRD, Stride, the perpetual preferred that now is the third one, I believe, that has an ATM. So I'm excited to dig into that. But first, I want to start with a little bit of history for those listeners who. Are not familiar with strategy and not familiar with the Bitcoin journey that the company has gone through over the past five years now. So congratulations on that landmark of five years. That's a long time in Bitcoin. So I really want to start with, you know, what MicroStrategy was in 2020, where it was from a corporate perspective and kind of just briefly. What led to the decision to acquire those first Bitcoin? Yeah, it's it's a it's a long story. And you're right. It was four years and probably 10 months and 29 days ago that we embarked on the Bitcoin treasury company journey. And, you know, I've been with strategy since 2015. I became CEO in 2022. And Michael Saylor, our founder and now executive chairman, founded the company in 1989. And so when I joined and certainly when he founded, the idea was not to start a Bitcoin treasury company. The idea was to run a great enterprise analytics software company. And we did that for the course of, you know, 30 years or so. And in 2020, after running a business that was. Profitable, that was, you know, revenue growing $500 million in revenue about, you know, given, you know, any given year, 15, 20, 25% operating margins, which were also our EBITDA margins, which were also our cash flow margins, because it's not a very capital intensive business to your $500 million a year generating $100 million in cash flow. It was a good business, but it wasn't growing at the pace we wanted. And we're competing in the enterprise software world with the Microsoft and the Amazons and the Googles and on the startup side, some of those most smartest, most brilliant people in the world. And the great thing about enterprise software is once you once you're able to convince a customer that you have something that's created their business, they stay with you for 20, 25, 30 years. So it's a very it's economically a very sound business. It's a very competitive business. And it attracts some of the smartest people in the world. And as a result, it's extremely competitive and difficult to grow in. And so that's what we're doing. We're stagnating a bit in 2020. We still had great customers. We serve about 50% of the Fortune 500, as an example. And COVID hit and we had $500 million of cash on our balance sheet, $500 million in revenue, which is very conservative balance sheet management. We had previously bought back stock with our balance sheet. We previously acquired small niche companies with our balance sheet. We funded growth. We did all the things that you see companies doing today to try to grow their business in highly competitive environments. And COVID comes around and we were earning at that point in time about 225 basis points. Right. We were basically invested in short term Treasury bills and the overnight rate was a
23
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"caption": "Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the world, buy Bitcoin. Ray Dalio, largest fund manager in the world, buy Bitcoin. President Trump, president of the United States, buy Bitcoin. Your cousin, oh, Bitcoin's a scam. It's so true. And it's like, look, guys, like, things change. Like, Michael Saylor was against Bitcoin in 2013, right? He changed his mind. And so intelligence really is the signal of you being able to change your mind and take action. We're here with Mark Moss. How are the vibes? How are you feeling? There's a lot of excitement here because there's a lot of new things happening. And it's been coming for a long time, but what am I talking about specifically is the big move of these Bitcoin treasury company plays. And so we're seeing a brand-new financial asset, the first new financial asset in 500 years, being used in ways to build new financial products and a new financial system that we've just never seen before. And it's happening super fast. It's very explosive. A lot of money's being made. It's given us new terms, new words, new metrics to measure things that we've never learned about or heard about before. And there's a whole new group of people that are here to learn about that. I like that you say that because I was listening to an interview with Michael Saylor and he was mentioning how we have sort of like the traditional finance guys coming in as the new Bitcoin class. What are your thoughts on that new Bitcoin class and what can we expect from them? Is it going to be sort of like the 2015 version of Bitcoin? Yeah, so let me just say I'm not as OG as some people. I started buying Bitcoin in 2015. It was about 300 bucks at the time. Yeah. I learned about it and really learned how it was a tool for freedom and really a tool how we could win. As a freedom maximalist, I'm all in. I got to go tell everybody about it. I've never shut up since. When you talk about the new class coming in, a lot of the OG class is like, oh, they don't have the Bitcoin values. They're not the cypherpunks. They're not here for the right reasons. They're here for NGU, number go up. What I've often said is that you come for the NGU, but you stay for the freedom. And so I believe the best way to orange pill somebody is to let them use a little bit of Bitcoin. And once their interest is there, they'll start learning more about it. And so, yes, they're coming for the NGU. These are corporate types. These are Wall Street types. They're here because they think it's the best chance to make money and it is. I'm very hopeful that they'll stay for the cypherpunk values of what Bitcoin stands for. You're like the GOAT of simplifying things and having people like understand them super easily and like easy to digest. I've heard that many of like this new wave of Bitcoiners that's coming in, especially seeing them be in, you know, DC for political reasons. I've heard that some are trying to like centralized Bitcoin mine. Is that possible? Yeah. So one of the things that everybody seems to be afraid of is that this corporatization of Bitcoin, the financialization of Bitcoin creates that centralization. And so of course, Bitcoin, its main attribute is decentralized. And so, yeah. So it was really a bottom-up movement of individuals that started buying it. And now as corporations are coming, you know, Michael Saylor, Michael Stratton, he now holds over 550,000, over 2% of the entire
Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the world, buy Bitcoin. Ray Dalio, largest fund manager in the world, buy Bitcoin. President Trump, president of the United States, buy Bitcoin. Your cousin, oh, Bitcoin's a scam. It's so true. And it's like, look, guys, like, things change. Like, Michael Saylor was against Bitcoin in 2013, right? He changed his mind. And so intelligence really is the signal of you being able to change your mind and take action. We're here with Mark Moss. How are the vibes? How are you feeling? There's a lot of excitement here because there's a lot of new things happening. And it's been coming for a long time, but what am I talking about specifically is the big move of these Bitcoin treasury company plays. And so we're seeing a brand-new financial asset, the first new financial asset in 500 years, being used in ways to build new financial products and a new financial system that we've just never seen before. And it's happening super fast. It's very explosive. A lot of money's being made. It's given us new terms, new words, new metrics to measure things that we've never learned about or heard about before. And there's a whole new group of people that are here to learn about that. I like that you say that because I was listening to an interview with Michael Saylor and he was mentioning how we have sort of like the traditional finance guys coming in as the new Bitcoin class. What are your thoughts on that new Bitcoin class and what can we expect from them? Is it going to be sort of like the 2015 version of Bitcoin? Yeah, so let me just say I'm not as OG as some people. I started buying Bitcoin in 2015. It was about 300 bucks at the time. Yeah. I learned about it and really learned how it was a tool for freedom and really a tool how we could win. As a freedom maximalist, I'm all in. I got to go tell everybody about it. I've never shut up since. When you talk about the new class coming in, a lot of the OG class is like, oh, they don't have the Bitcoin values. They're not the cypherpunks. They're not here for the right reasons. They're here for NGU, number go up. What I've often said is that you come for the NGU, but you stay for the freedom. And so I believe the best way to orange pill somebody is to let them use a little bit of Bitcoin. And once their interest is there, they'll start learning more about it. And so, yes, they're coming for the NGU. These are corporate types. These are Wall Street types. They're here because they think it's the best chance to make money and it is. I'm very hopeful that they'll stay for the cypherpunk values of what Bitcoin stands for. You're like the GOAT of simplifying things and having people like understand them super easily and like easy to digest. I've heard that many of like this new wave of Bitcoiners that's coming in, especially seeing them be in, you know, DC for political reasons. I've heard that some are trying to like centralized Bitcoin mine. Is that possible? Yeah. So one of the things that everybody seems to be afraid of is that this corporatization of Bitcoin, the financialization of Bitcoin creates that centralization. And so of course, Bitcoin, its main attribute is decentralized. And so, yeah. So it was really a bottom-up movement of individuals that started buying it. And now as corporations are coming, you know, Michael Saylor, Michael Stratton, he now holds over 550,000, over 2% of the entire supply. And a lot of people are like that, that's centralization. Now he's going to manipulate the price or he's going to control the network or all these things. And there's a big misunderstanding. First thing I would say is 80% of gold is centralized with central banks. 90% of equities are centralized between like Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock. And 80, 90%, 2%, like, come on, right? We're a long way. But more importantly, owning more of the Bitcoin supply doesn't give you control of the network because to the question you've asked, we have the miners and th
24
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"caption": "I do think that ultimately we will see a world where there is no such thing as a Bitcoin treasury company because everybody should own Bitcoin. Holding fiat currency, you're losing, you know, 5 to 10 percent per year on inflation. If you're doing the responsible thing for shareholders, you have to then look at yourself in the mirror and say, well, what other assets can I hold on my balance sheet? And not putting at least a portion of your treasury in Bitcoin is becoming irresponsible as a corporate treasury. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Richard. I'm your host today. We're joined by Christian Lopez from Cohen and Company. Christian, welcome to the show. Excited to have you on. Cohen and Company has been a really key player in the corporate adoption. Of Bitcoin. So maybe we start out with kind of what your background is and what Cohen and Company does. Yeah. Well, thanks, guys, for having us on. We're big fans of your show. And then, of course, big supporters of the Nakamoto BTC Inc. ecosystem. So so happy to be here. Yeah. Quick, quick background on on myself. You know, started my career in investment banking, finance at UBS. Spent some time at a pension fund called GM Asset Management, which was the pension fund of General Motors, and then spent a few years at Guggenheim Investment Bank, focused on their fintech platform. Cohen and Company, our background, we started the firm really with the thesis around frontier technology. Our founders come from the bulge bracket world. So JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bear Stearns, UBS. And so we wanted to bring that bulge bracket execution expertise with kind of a focus on the ability to be nimble and fast in terms of adoption of new technology, particularly around the adoption of covering new technologies. I've personally been a Bitcoiner since 2016. And so I've been following the space for a while. And when I came over to help launch the digital asset practice at Cohen, I took the opportunity to really dig in, right? Like, because I'd been around the ecosystem, I've known that Wall Street had turned its back on crypto and Bitcoin in particular. You know, you mentioned that word Bitcoin. And most of the most of the street would say, like, you know, that's for money laundering. That's for drugs. That's for whatever. Really falling in line with Operation 12.2.0. But we knew. I knew that there's real people building in the space and understood the revolutionary technology of Bitcoin and the folks who are building the entrepreneurs, developers who are building the space. They're smart people, real people that also saw that and they need access to the capital markets and strategic advice, just like somebody building, you know, a factory or somebody starting a software company. So we we we dug our heels in into the space. Built out the digital asset coverage team since 21. It was a tough and cold winter. But, you know, on the back of the election and some of the, you know, a lot of the political support around around Bitcoin and crypto, we've been fortunate enough to have a very successful practice. And I think one of the leading, you know, leading firms in crypto and capital markets. So, yeah, that's a really interesting background. And from your vantage po
I do think that ultimately we will see a world where there is no such thing as a Bitcoin treasury company because everybody should own Bitcoin. Holding fiat currency, you're losing, you know, 5 to 10 percent per year on inflation. If you're doing the responsible thing for shareholders, you have to then look at yourself in the mirror and say, well, what other assets can I hold on my balance sheet? And not putting at least a portion of your treasury in Bitcoin is becoming irresponsible as a corporate treasury. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. My name is Pierre Richard. I'm your host today. We're joined by Christian Lopez from Cohen and Company. Christian, welcome to the show. Excited to have you on. Cohen and Company has been a really key player in the corporate adoption. Of Bitcoin. So maybe we start out with kind of what your background is and what Cohen and Company does. Yeah. Well, thanks, guys, for having us on. We're big fans of your show. And then, of course, big supporters of the Nakamoto BTC Inc. ecosystem. So so happy to be here. Yeah. Quick, quick background on on myself. You know, started my career in investment banking, finance at UBS. Spent some time at a pension fund called GM Asset Management, which was the pension fund of General Motors, and then spent a few years at Guggenheim Investment Bank, focused on their fintech platform. Cohen and Company, our background, we started the firm really with the thesis around frontier technology. Our founders come from the bulge bracket world. So JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bear Stearns, UBS. And so we wanted to bring that bulge bracket execution expertise with kind of a focus on the ability to be nimble and fast in terms of adoption of new technology, particularly around the adoption of covering new technologies. I've personally been a Bitcoiner since 2016. And so I've been following the space for a while. And when I came over to help launch the digital asset practice at Cohen, I took the opportunity to really dig in, right? Like, because I'd been around the ecosystem, I've known that Wall Street had turned its back on crypto and Bitcoin in particular. You know, you mentioned that word Bitcoin. And most of the most of the street would say, like, you know, that's for money laundering. That's for drugs. That's for whatever. Really falling in line with Operation 12.2.0. But we knew. I knew that there's real people building in the space and understood the revolutionary technology of Bitcoin and the folks who are building the entrepreneurs, developers who are building the space. They're smart people, real people that also saw that and they need access to the capital markets and strategic advice, just like somebody building, you know, a factory or somebody starting a software company. So we we we dug our heels in into the space. Built out the digital asset coverage team since 21. It was a tough and cold winter. But, you know, on the back of the election and some of the, you know, a lot of the political support around around Bitcoin and crypto, we've been fortunate enough to have a very successful practice. And I think one of the leading, you know, leading firms in crypto and capital markets. So, yeah, that's a really interesting background. And from your vantage point, we really went from people saying blockchain. Not Bitcoin. I think that was a common saying in the institutional world that they really wanted to focus on the underlying technology. And so now today, where would you say we are on the S curve of Bitcoin corporate adoption and institutional adoption on Wall Street? Is it still very early or are we kind of reaching full adoption? I just saw today there was a Dogecoin treasury company. That was announced, which seems like that. That's kind of the terminal point in adoption. Where would you say we are? I think it really depends on where you look in terms of like the corners of the crypto and capital markets world. If you look at where the big boy
25
000000024
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"caption": "The bedrock number for survival in 2024 is close to $140,000 for a family of four. And that, you know, the sort of median income is around $80,000 and that $60,000 divergence is why we're seeing and experiencing such pain right now. I, you know, I think this like explains why we saw Sauron Madami become the mayor of New York City specifically. I think it explains a lot of the discontent and malaise in our politics and our national mood. Bitcoin is aimed at solving some of these same problems, right? That the money is broken, the system is broken. And the sort of immediate consequences is that the bar, the hurdle rate for sort of every strata of society is raising faster, except at the very top, than wages are. All right, everyone, welcome back to this week's Bitcoin Policy Hour. As usual, joined by BPI's head of policy, Zach Shapiro, BPI's director of government affairs, Ken Egan. And Zach Cohen here, associate with the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Going to switch up our intro a little bit this week. As a reminder, if you aren't already subscribed, be sure to subscribe to both the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Bitcoin Magazine just below the video here. Trying to grow our channel. I got some help from Bitcoin Magazine and it would mean a lot. So please go ahead and do that. We got a great list of topics for today. Last week, we announced that we are endorsing the Bitcoin for America Act from Representative Warren Davidson. Alongside that announcement, we released a quantitative model to basically model the tax implications and the total gain that America would have if a certain percent of Americans were to pay their taxes in Bitcoin. We'll get a little bit more into that, but got some fun numbers there to go through. Hopefully you saw on Twitter, but PubKey DC had its sort of soft opening. We had a very special guest who we'll mention later in the podcast. So stay tuned. We had some institutional movers, so the Harvard Endowment upped their stake as well as Abu Dhabi and a couple of other great things. We got a Bitbon talk if Ken wants to dig into that. And then obviously, price is a little bit lower than it has been, although we're up now as we're recording on Monday the 24th. So we'll talk a little bit about that too. But let's kick it off here. Ken, can you talk a little bit about Bitcoin? Can you describe in relative detail what the Bitcoin for America Act is and what it is intending to achieve? So if anyone out there is not following Representative Warren Davidson from Ohio, you need to follow him. He is not only a great legislator, he actually is just a great person. He's been a leader in the Bitcoin space for a long time. He had some some heterodox ideas about how Bitcoin should be incorporated into the larger larger fiscal policy. And we saw the result of that this week with the release of the Bitcoin for America Act. But the act does two things. It would allow Americans to pay their taxes in Bitcoin. The interesting thing there is it gives the option of actually having those taxes paid in Bitcoin feed into the strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is the budget neutral way to accumulate Bitcoin that we've been asked to research by policymakers. It's great. It's a it's a great it not only does that make perfect sense, but it's a great way to attract Bitcoin businesse
The bedrock number for survival in 2024 is close to $140,000 for a family of four. And that, you know, the sort of median income is around $80,000 and that $60,000 divergence is why we're seeing and experiencing such pain right now. I, you know, I think this like explains why we saw Sauron Madami become the mayor of New York City specifically. I think it explains a lot of the discontent and malaise in our politics and our national mood. Bitcoin is aimed at solving some of these same problems, right? That the money is broken, the system is broken. And the sort of immediate consequences is that the bar, the hurdle rate for sort of every strata of society is raising faster, except at the very top, than wages are. All right, everyone, welcome back to this week's Bitcoin Policy Hour. As usual, joined by BPI's head of policy, Zach Shapiro, BPI's director of government affairs, Ken Egan. And Zach Cohen here, associate with the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Going to switch up our intro a little bit this week. As a reminder, if you aren't already subscribed, be sure to subscribe to both the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Bitcoin Magazine just below the video here. Trying to grow our channel. I got some help from Bitcoin Magazine and it would mean a lot. So please go ahead and do that. We got a great list of topics for today. Last week, we announced that we are endorsing the Bitcoin for America Act from Representative Warren Davidson. Alongside that announcement, we released a quantitative model to basically model the tax implications and the total gain that America would have if a certain percent of Americans were to pay their taxes in Bitcoin. We'll get a little bit more into that, but got some fun numbers there to go through. Hopefully you saw on Twitter, but PubKey DC had its sort of soft opening. We had a very special guest who we'll mention later in the podcast. So stay tuned. We had some institutional movers, so the Harvard Endowment upped their stake as well as Abu Dhabi and a couple of other great things. We got a Bitbon talk if Ken wants to dig into that. And then obviously, price is a little bit lower than it has been, although we're up now as we're recording on Monday the 24th. So we'll talk a little bit about that too. But let's kick it off here. Ken, can you talk a little bit about Bitcoin? Can you describe in relative detail what the Bitcoin for America Act is and what it is intending to achieve? So if anyone out there is not following Representative Warren Davidson from Ohio, you need to follow him. He is not only a great legislator, he actually is just a great person. He's been a leader in the Bitcoin space for a long time. He had some some heterodox ideas about how Bitcoin should be incorporated into the larger larger fiscal policy. And we saw the result of that this week with the release of the Bitcoin for America Act. But the act does two things. It would allow Americans to pay their taxes in Bitcoin. The interesting thing there is it gives the option of actually having those taxes paid in Bitcoin feed into the strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is the budget neutral way to accumulate Bitcoin that we've been asked to research by policymakers. It's great. It's a it's a great it not only does that make perfect sense, but it's a great way to attract Bitcoin businesses. If Bitcoiners, there's a lot of capital, a lot of money sitting on the sidelines, a lot of it locked up in in in hardware wallets because nobody wants to pay their capital gains tax that they use. If they want to use this, why not let people pay their taxes in Bitcoin, get that capital circulating and at the same time build the build the build the SPR. So all all over, I think that that is that is the sort of that's the new the new provision in the bill. The second revision, of course, would be codifying the Bitcoin Reserve, codifying Treasury's ability to hold it, outlining a outlining regulations for accounting for it. Custody. All things are important if we're
26
000000025
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"caption": "Hope everybody's having a great day. My name is Isaiah Austin with Bitcoin Magazine, and today we have two very special guests. Firstly, we have Hunter Albright, the CRO of Salt Lending. Hunter, how are you doing this morning? I'm doing wonderfully. It's great to be here. Yeah, great to have you. And we also have Mark Mason with Bitcoin Magazine. Mark, how's it going? Amazing. Excited to be here. It's great to connect with you and Hunter again. I believe in the last conversation that you had on the X-Space, you explored some of the how Bitcoin adoption was evolving across Asia, and that was from institutional interest to grassroots use. What have you seen change globally since then? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things I would say that from a retail perspective as well as a corporate perspective. I think on the retail perspective, I've been surprised and very interested to learn more about how globally the average age for first-timers. Homebuyers is starting to be more equivalent, and challengingly, it's above 35, and someplace it's even higher globally. So there's a consistency in terms of people really struggling to find assets that they can invest their money on early in their careers, where they can both learn about financial literacy. They can also start building up assets that will allow them to have greater leverage and greater appreciation. Over time, and I think I'm seeing more and more people express interest about how they can start to leverage Bitcoin as an alternative vehicle to owning real estate, owning a home to start building wealth. And then on the corporate side, having more conversations really with small and medium sized businesses who are looking at converting some of their revenue into Bitcoin as a strategic reserve. Within the company, so that one, it helps draw, increase the value, but I would even say more importantly, that it's creating some opportunity for faster liquidity when they need to bridge operating expenses and an asset that they can borrow against for greater strategic investment without having to go to regional banks and go through a traditional credit process. I agree with that. I think what's really striking to me is how the Bitcoin adoption. Story is, is quickly broadening. You know, we're, we're no longer just talking about a pocket of retail investors or a few institutional corporations. We're really seeing a mature global layer building. And I noticed that there was a recent research report from chain analysis on the global crypto adoption index. And that shows countries and regions are moving beyond the early adopter retail into infrastructure, institutional access and regulatory framework. So, you know, we're, we're really going beyond something that was fringe into something more mainstream. So I guess for me, you know, globally, the changes more of a can Bitcoin be adopted to how is Bitcoin being adopted? And more importantly, where is the next wave? So that I totally agree with you, Isaiah, I don't know if you're back in the fold. I can continue as is. But I don't know if you want to take it from here. Yeah. So just to continue on, you know, we obviously have Bitcoin Amsterdam coming up next week. I'm really excited about that. But for those of us who are still kind of just understanding the way Bitcoin is being used in Europe and the European landscape as a whole. What do you think sets you what do you guys think sets
Hope everybody's having a great day. My name is Isaiah Austin with Bitcoin Magazine, and today we have two very special guests. Firstly, we have Hunter Albright, the CRO of Salt Lending. Hunter, how are you doing this morning? I'm doing wonderfully. It's great to be here. Yeah, great to have you. And we also have Mark Mason with Bitcoin Magazine. Mark, how's it going? Amazing. Excited to be here. It's great to connect with you and Hunter again. I believe in the last conversation that you had on the X-Space, you explored some of the how Bitcoin adoption was evolving across Asia, and that was from institutional interest to grassroots use. What have you seen change globally since then? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things I would say that from a retail perspective as well as a corporate perspective. I think on the retail perspective, I've been surprised and very interested to learn more about how globally the average age for first-timers. Homebuyers is starting to be more equivalent, and challengingly, it's above 35, and someplace it's even higher globally. So there's a consistency in terms of people really struggling to find assets that they can invest their money on early in their careers, where they can both learn about financial literacy. They can also start building up assets that will allow them to have greater leverage and greater appreciation. Over time, and I think I'm seeing more and more people express interest about how they can start to leverage Bitcoin as an alternative vehicle to owning real estate, owning a home to start building wealth. And then on the corporate side, having more conversations really with small and medium sized businesses who are looking at converting some of their revenue into Bitcoin as a strategic reserve. Within the company, so that one, it helps draw, increase the value, but I would even say more importantly, that it's creating some opportunity for faster liquidity when they need to bridge operating expenses and an asset that they can borrow against for greater strategic investment without having to go to regional banks and go through a traditional credit process. I agree with that. I think what's really striking to me is how the Bitcoin adoption. Story is, is quickly broadening. You know, we're, we're no longer just talking about a pocket of retail investors or a few institutional corporations. We're really seeing a mature global layer building. And I noticed that there was a recent research report from chain analysis on the global crypto adoption index. And that shows countries and regions are moving beyond the early adopter retail into infrastructure, institutional access and regulatory framework. So, you know, we're, we're really going beyond something that was fringe into something more mainstream. So I guess for me, you know, globally, the changes more of a can Bitcoin be adopted to how is Bitcoin being adopted? And more importantly, where is the next wave? So that I totally agree with you, Isaiah, I don't know if you're back in the fold. I can continue as is. But I don't know if you want to take it from here. Yeah. So just to continue on, you know, we obviously have Bitcoin Amsterdam coming up next week. I'm really excited about that. But for those of us who are still kind of just understanding the way Bitcoin is being used in Europe and the European landscape as a whole. What do you think sets you what do you guys think sets Europe apart, whether in regulation, culture, innovation, from what we see throughout the rest of the world when it comes to Bitcoin? I know that we are in Asia and we had a space is actually a couple of months ago talking about a similar topic where, you know, the Asian markets, Bitcoin is used very differently than it is here. What differences do you see in the European markets as opposed to where we see throughout the rest of the world? Yeah, I can I can get us kicked off and then Mark can add to it. I think, you know, when we in the conversations I was ha
27
000000026
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"caption": "what's up everybody hope everyone's having a great tuesday i'm isaiah austin with bitcoin magazine and today i have two very special guests we're going to be talking about what's happening with bitcoin in the mina region uh getting hyped for our conference next week at bitcoin mina in abu dhabi next week so i'll go ahead and introduce our guests and then we'll go ahead and kick it off so first of all we have hunter albright the cr cro of salt lending on stage hunter how are you doing today i'm doing fantastic great to be here awesome great to have you you know as we're looking forward to bitcoin mina what excites you the most about the region's position in the overall bitcoin landscape and how is it different than other regions so i you know i'm really excited to go go to abu dhabi in the coming week and participate in the conference i know that you know there's 10 to 20 000 people you know going to be in attendance which i think is a fantastic growth in terms of just the level of interest uh in bitcoin and sort of the ecosystem in the area and really excited to have the conversations and you know i've been sort of traveling around the world talking with people around how they're looking at bitcoin how they're using it and so it's going to be exciting to see how it differs from what we saw in hong kong and the asia pacific region uh and then also europe and and the thing that really stands out for me is that mania i think has a couple things that really make it a natural fit for bitcoin adoption first of all the population really sort of skews 35 and younger uh in many respects there's a they have strong cross-border financial needs people are looking to move money between countries send it back to family members so there's a means of exchange that has an important use case but it's also culturally i think people are looking into really understanding asset-based savings and looking about how they can acquire assets that will help help drive financial freedom and financial flexibility yeah really interesting stuff maritia are you are you with us now yeah i'm sorry of course i have to my phone has to crash when you introduce me it's all it's all good am i pronouncing your name correctly it was perfect thank you so much okay sounds good yeah forgive my forgive my super sexy voice i actually bad super sick but i didn't want to miss this so i'll try my best to wake my brain as much as i can awesome well well thanks for joining us um i don't know if you caught the question on the front end i just asked hunter uh but we're just talking about you know we got bitcoin mina coming up next week and i know you're actually located in the uae if i have that correct um so i'd be curious to hear your perspective on like what excites you most about this region in particular's position in the global bitcoin landscape and how is it different well first of all thank you for having me i haven't done the space in a while so really glad to be here like hunter said by the way super was said the region is interesting i moved here five years ago i live here for the first time in dubai which is not too far from abu dhabi it's like an hour motorcycle kind of with a couple of fines or two hours by car so take the car take it easy but it's not too far from from dubai it's very different landscape like hunter said a lot of young people i think i read the stats last week i think 60 percent o
what's up everybody hope everyone's having a great tuesday i'm isaiah austin with bitcoin magazine and today i have two very special guests we're going to be talking about what's happening with bitcoin in the mina region uh getting hyped for our conference next week at bitcoin mina in abu dhabi next week so i'll go ahead and introduce our guests and then we'll go ahead and kick it off so first of all we have hunter albright the cr cro of salt lending on stage hunter how are you doing today i'm doing fantastic great to be here awesome great to have you you know as we're looking forward to bitcoin mina what excites you the most about the region's position in the overall bitcoin landscape and how is it different than other regions so i you know i'm really excited to go go to abu dhabi in the coming week and participate in the conference i know that you know there's 10 to 20 000 people you know going to be in attendance which i think is a fantastic growth in terms of just the level of interest uh in bitcoin and sort of the ecosystem in the area and really excited to have the conversations and you know i've been sort of traveling around the world talking with people around how they're looking at bitcoin how they're using it and so it's going to be exciting to see how it differs from what we saw in hong kong and the asia pacific region uh and then also europe and and the thing that really stands out for me is that mania i think has a couple things that really make it a natural fit for bitcoin adoption first of all the population really sort of skews 35 and younger uh in many respects there's a they have strong cross-border financial needs people are looking to move money between countries send it back to family members so there's a means of exchange that has an important use case but it's also culturally i think people are looking into really understanding asset-based savings and looking about how they can acquire assets that will help help drive financial freedom and financial flexibility yeah really interesting stuff maritia are you are you with us now yeah i'm sorry of course i have to my phone has to crash when you introduce me it's all it's all good am i pronouncing your name correctly it was perfect thank you so much okay sounds good yeah forgive my forgive my super sexy voice i actually bad super sick but i didn't want to miss this so i'll try my best to wake my brain as much as i can awesome well well thanks for joining us um i don't know if you caught the question on the front end i just asked hunter uh but we're just talking about you know we got bitcoin mina coming up next week and i know you're actually located in the uae if i have that correct um so i'd be curious to hear your perspective on like what excites you most about this region in particular's position in the global bitcoin landscape and how is it different well first of all thank you for having me i haven't done the space in a while so really glad to be here like hunter said by the way super was said the region is interesting i moved here five years ago i live here for the first time in dubai which is not too far from abu dhabi it's like an hour motorcycle kind of with a couple of fines or two hours by car so take the car take it easy but it's not too far from from dubai it's very different landscape like hunter said a lot of young people i think i read the stats last week i think 60 percent of the population has crypto i mean of course for me and for most of us bitcoin is not crypto but still it's signaling that there is an interest in the region right there are a lot of corporations that accept because i actually pay my dentist in bitcoin so it's an interesting place to be you can purchase certain things like homes cars expensive things so there is a lot of corporations open to bitcoin and like hunter said maybe because of the population is much younger than other places and if i'm not mistaken again another stats here 98 of the people they live in dubai are
28
000000027
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"episode_title": "The Tornado Cash Trial: Legal Outlook and Precedent w/ Amanda Tuminelli | Bitcoin Politics Ep. 3",
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"caption": "The developer of a neutral tool is not responsible for how a third party, an unrelated person over whom they have no control, uses that tool, which is the basis, I think, for each of the charges that are relevant to Tornado. That being said, we have an opportunity right now in this country to create a nationwide law that actually does protect developers. Welcome, everybody, to Episode 3 of Bitcoin Politics. We are joined by a very special guest today, Amanda Tuminelli, the Executive Director and Chief Legal Officer, CLO of the DeFi Education Fund. Amanda, welcome. Thanks for having me. The pleasure is all ours. So I've had this distinct pleasure, we were just talking off camera a little bit, in sitting in this Tornado Cash courtroom with a member of your team, Amanda Tuminelli. And I'm sure you've all heard her name. She's the CEO of the DeFi Education Jennifer Rosenthal. We've been following along closely in person, the Tornado Cash trial. And I had some questions maybe around some of the laws, like money transmitting laws and other things regarding that trial, but also things that are currently being considered with legislation like clarity right now and what sorts of businesses and developers constitute people who would be subject to money transmission laws. And I want to touch on this today, if you don't mind. So I just want to give a little introduction as well. So I know that your background, you were a former criminal prosecutor. And I know the wrong side, defense, defense. Oh, my Lord, said the wrong word. You're a former criminal defense attorney, which is really important. And also just one caveat for those listening. I know this is Bitcoin magazine, and I don't want to be dragged on the internet. So just to clarify, the term DeFi, decentralized finance includes Bitcoin in Amanda's mind. So we're going to be talking about Bitcoin. And we will be talking about some broader crypto stuff today, because some of the things happening in that broader crypto space are going to be going to have an impact on Bitcoin. So that's, that's how we're coming at this today. So Amanda, maybe you could give us a little bit more background about yourself, if you don't mind. Sure, happy to. So as you mentioned, I was in private practice in the past, I was a criminal defense lawyer. So a lot of the stuff I really enjoy nerding out on. And I care deeply about it. And I'm very passionate about anyone who's accused of a crime that really does not fit the actual facts of what happened. So happy to get into that. The DeFi Education Fund is a nonpartisan nonprofit. We advocate for sound DeFi policy everywhere we can. DeFi users and developers, we file amicus briefs, which I'm sure we'll get into today. On behalf of developers, we do that also just to educate the judge when there's technical issues that we think we can be helpful on. And of course, we redraft legislation and try to protect DeFi and developers wherever we can in draft legislation. So that's been very relevant recently. The passage of genius. And now we're working on market structure. So we really are looking out for the community as much as we can. And as you said, I do think that you cannot have decentralized finance without decentralized money. And Bitcoin is the best and earliest example of that. So
The developer of a neutral tool is not responsible for how a third party, an unrelated person over whom they have no control, uses that tool, which is the basis, I think, for each of the charges that are relevant to Tornado. That being said, we have an opportunity right now in this country to create a nationwide law that actually does protect developers. Welcome, everybody, to Episode 3 of Bitcoin Politics. We are joined by a very special guest today, Amanda Tuminelli, the Executive Director and Chief Legal Officer, CLO of the DeFi Education Fund. Amanda, welcome. Thanks for having me. The pleasure is all ours. So I've had this distinct pleasure, we were just talking off camera a little bit, in sitting in this Tornado Cash courtroom with a member of your team, Amanda Tuminelli. And I'm sure you've all heard her name. She's the CEO of the DeFi Education Jennifer Rosenthal. We've been following along closely in person, the Tornado Cash trial. And I had some questions maybe around some of the laws, like money transmitting laws and other things regarding that trial, but also things that are currently being considered with legislation like clarity right now and what sorts of businesses and developers constitute people who would be subject to money transmission laws. And I want to touch on this today, if you don't mind. So I just want to give a little introduction as well. So I know that your background, you were a former criminal prosecutor. And I know the wrong side, defense, defense. Oh, my Lord, said the wrong word. You're a former criminal defense attorney, which is really important. And also just one caveat for those listening. I know this is Bitcoin magazine, and I don't want to be dragged on the internet. So just to clarify, the term DeFi, decentralized finance includes Bitcoin in Amanda's mind. So we're going to be talking about Bitcoin. And we will be talking about some broader crypto stuff today, because some of the things happening in that broader crypto space are going to be going to have an impact on Bitcoin. So that's, that's how we're coming at this today. So Amanda, maybe you could give us a little bit more background about yourself, if you don't mind. Sure, happy to. So as you mentioned, I was in private practice in the past, I was a criminal defense lawyer. So a lot of the stuff I really enjoy nerding out on. And I care deeply about it. And I'm very passionate about anyone who's accused of a crime that really does not fit the actual facts of what happened. So happy to get into that. The DeFi Education Fund is a nonpartisan nonprofit. We advocate for sound DeFi policy everywhere we can. DeFi users and developers, we file amicus briefs, which I'm sure we'll get into today. On behalf of developers, we do that also just to educate the judge when there's technical issues that we think we can be helpful on. And of course, we redraft legislation and try to protect DeFi and developers wherever we can in draft legislation. So that's been very relevant recently. The passage of genius. And now we're working on market structure. So we really are looking out for the community as much as we can. And as you said, I do think that you cannot have decentralized finance without decentralized money. And Bitcoin is the best and earliest example of that. So I do think that Bitcoin is part of DeFi and people can yell at me if they want to. No yelling, please, ladies and gentlemen, let's be civil here. I want to dive in straight away to your knowledge of, I think it's 18 US Code 1960. And I think the letters A, B, and C are also attached to that. Could you explain what this code is and why it's pertinent to what we're seeing in both the Tornado Cash and Samurai cases? And then I don't know if you want to do this all in one breath, but maybe also how this is something that's being looked at. I think it's, I don't know if it's still section 110, but it's being looked at for something to be included in the, I'm sorry, it was included in the
29
000000028
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"caption": "the biggest opportunities are very often in front of your eyes. The narrative is literally that today, even if you take three to five companies, they completely obliterate the offer of Bitcoin in the market. Now, the way to outperform the bull market is to potentially look at Bitcoin treasury companies. Even if there are still monetary four-year cycles and liquidity global cycles, there is a structural demand for Bitcoin from corporations. The level of demand that there is only with a few Bitcoin treasury companies. Imagine what this is at full scale when there is hundreds of them and when there is more sovereign type player involved. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. I'm your host, David. I'm your host, Pierre Rochard. Joined today by our producer, Spencer Nichols, and our special guest, Alexandre L\u00e9z\u00e9 from Capital B. Welcome, Alexandre. How are you? Thank you, Pierre, for the invite. Doing great, and you? Doing very well. So, I wanted to have you on because Capital B is one of the leading Bitcoin treasury companies in Europe, if not the leading. And I want to understand kind of what your background is with Bitcoin and how you really got very interested in Bitcoin and how you got into Bitcoin. How that evolved into a professional role and leading Capital B in its transformation and scaling that business up because it's been very fast growing. So, first, yeah, my question is, how did you go down the rabbit hole and get Orangeville? Yeah, well, Bitcoin is freedom. Bitcoin is sovereignty. And I learned about Bitcoin during COVID. And that was very much liberating for me. I discovered that, yes, you can have hope in an economic sense if you have an asset that allows you to keep and transform the value of your work over time and space. And that dramatically changed my life. And I, very fast, I wanted to allocate all of my time and energy to the most decentralized and secure network in the world, bonded by energy. And so, in Bitcoin, the time works for you. And if, on top of this, you work for Bitcoin, then you double work for you. And so, that is, in the first sense, a form of levered effect in your life because you work for Bitcoin and Bitcoin works for you. And that's a very powerful thing for you, your family, and, of course, further down the line, your company and the investors of your company and society and the world. And so, I started back in the day to apply what I know, knew how to do, which was to provide strategic advice and implementation of strategies for large corporates and large banks. And I became digital assets lead at Accenture. Fun fact, before that, I was a fan of on-chain analysis and I applied machine learning, coding with Python, to the Bitcoin blockchain data. And so, that was the first data analytics aspect where I discovered the power of Bitcoin transactions overall and, as well, how the store of value was the key part for Bitcoin, together with global accessibility and transferability, of course. And then I worked with a lot of banks to adopt Bitcoin. And to make it a whole part of their traditional offerings. And there, when you have to explain Bitcoin and Bitcoin capital markets to newcomers and financial institutions, you have to really come down to what it is really and to understand it very dee
the biggest opportunities are very often in front of your eyes. The narrative is literally that today, even if you take three to five companies, they completely obliterate the offer of Bitcoin in the market. Now, the way to outperform the bull market is to potentially look at Bitcoin treasury companies. Even if there are still monetary four-year cycles and liquidity global cycles, there is a structural demand for Bitcoin from corporations. The level of demand that there is only with a few Bitcoin treasury companies. Imagine what this is at full scale when there is hundreds of them and when there is more sovereign type player involved. Welcome to the Bitcoin for Corporations show. I'm your host, David. I'm your host, Pierre Rochard. Joined today by our producer, Spencer Nichols, and our special guest, Alexandre Lézé from Capital B. Welcome, Alexandre. How are you? Thank you, Pierre, for the invite. Doing great, and you? Doing very well. So, I wanted to have you on because Capital B is one of the leading Bitcoin treasury companies in Europe, if not the leading. And I want to understand kind of what your background is with Bitcoin and how you really got very interested in Bitcoin and how you got into Bitcoin. How that evolved into a professional role and leading Capital B in its transformation and scaling that business up because it's been very fast growing. So, first, yeah, my question is, how did you go down the rabbit hole and get Orangeville? Yeah, well, Bitcoin is freedom. Bitcoin is sovereignty. And I learned about Bitcoin during COVID. And that was very much liberating for me. I discovered that, yes, you can have hope in an economic sense if you have an asset that allows you to keep and transform the value of your work over time and space. And that dramatically changed my life. And I, very fast, I wanted to allocate all of my time and energy to the most decentralized and secure network in the world, bonded by energy. And so, in Bitcoin, the time works for you. And if, on top of this, you work for Bitcoin, then you double work for you. And so, that is, in the first sense, a form of levered effect in your life because you work for Bitcoin and Bitcoin works for you. And that's a very powerful thing for you, your family, and, of course, further down the line, your company and the investors of your company and society and the world. And so, I started back in the day to apply what I know, knew how to do, which was to provide strategic advice and implementation of strategies for large corporates and large banks. And I became digital assets lead at Accenture. Fun fact, before that, I was a fan of on-chain analysis and I applied machine learning, coding with Python, to the Bitcoin blockchain data. And so, that was the first data analytics aspect where I discovered the power of Bitcoin transactions overall and, as well, how the store of value was the key part for Bitcoin, together with global accessibility and transferability, of course. And then I worked with a lot of banks to adopt Bitcoin. And to make it a whole part of their traditional offerings. And there, when you have to explain Bitcoin and Bitcoin capital markets to newcomers and financial institutions, you have to really come down to what it is really and to understand it very deeply. And so, a lot of learning. And after that, at the same time, I was discovering what Michael Saylor was doing, who is a financial analyst, who is a financial analyst, and so, the next logical steps for me were to launch the first Bitcoin treasury company over in Europe. And that was back in November 2024, where it was not yet a full trend. We were the third in the world to adopt a Bitcoin treasury company strategy focused on maximizing BTC yield. And that was followed by, of course, a massive initial, but quite impressive trend of new Bitcoin treasury companies. So, from COVID, discovering the sovereignty aspect and the freedom aspect to unleashing all of your energy to Bitcoin and doing so wi
30
000000029
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-08-18-how-the-company-securing-100b-in-bitcoin-protects-it-bitcoin-for-corporations-ep-12",
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"episode_slug": "2025-08-18-how-the-company-securing-100b-in-bitcoin-protects-it-bitcoin-for-corporations-ep-12",
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"caption": "for those of us that have been in bitcoin for a long time it's really key that we remain decentralized and of course there's going to be a swing towards custody businesses have a an obligation to their shareholders to provide business continuity that means that like no single person can hold all of the money inside the corporation i mean imagine if apple one day said sorry we're going out of business we handed the keys to our i.t guys and we lost all the money it's not non-viable right so we're going to go in a swing that's pretty heavy towards custody if we ended up with all just like three or four players in our owning holding all of the digital assets that's a problem space we're back into the same problems we had which is why we created bitcoin welcome to the bitcoin for corporations show my name is pierre richard i'll be your host today and we're joined by mike belshie ceo of bitco this week mike thanks for joining us today you're a legend in this space you've been uh working here for a long time and i'm sure you have been here for more than a decade now on uh bitcoin custody so thanks for joining us hey thanks for having me um appreciate the kind words a lot of people are fighting for bitcoin yeah and so uh you know what stands out in my mind uh throughout that history is that bitco has really been at the forefront from a technological perspective um but also from an institutional adoption perspective that uh your approach has really uh given comfort to large players to hold an asset that is really very different from any other asset out there in the world uh and has its benefits but also has tremendous risks and i think that uh gives people a lot of pause on the custody side so uh we really want to dig into uh how you think about custody at bitco and kind of how you see the the history of bitcoin custody over the long arc of the past decade uh and where you see it going so um first i really want to dig into the history of the past decade uh and where you see it going to your personal story because Bitcoin was not the beginning of your career. You've had a long career in technology before Bitcoin. So I'd love to hear how you came across Bitcoin and kind of what your background was at the time. Sure. Okay. Well, I'm a technologist. I am not a financial services attracted person generally. I was much more interested in systems programming and engineering problems when I started my career. Early on, I was a Hewlett Packard, but I was fortunate enough to discover this company called Netscape before it was public. And I jumped over there in the mid-90s. And that just opened my eyes to startups. By the way, Ben Horowitz, if you know Ben, he was my product manager on Netscape Enterprise Server. And just a pleasure to be able to work with such amazing, great people that have done such a great job. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. But then I did startups for a number of years, never in financial services. I've always felt financial services companies where folks just leeched off of others that did building and then tried to take 30% kind of when you're going, you know, various fundraising events. And so anyway, I'm a technologist by background and mostly spent
for those of us that have been in bitcoin for a long time it's really key that we remain decentralized and of course there's going to be a swing towards custody businesses have a an obligation to their shareholders to provide business continuity that means that like no single person can hold all of the money inside the corporation i mean imagine if apple one day said sorry we're going out of business we handed the keys to our i.t guys and we lost all the money it's not non-viable right so we're going to go in a swing that's pretty heavy towards custody if we ended up with all just like three or four players in our owning holding all of the digital assets that's a problem space we're back into the same problems we had which is why we created bitcoin welcome to the bitcoin for corporations show my name is pierre richard i'll be your host today and we're joined by mike belshie ceo of bitco this week mike thanks for joining us today you're a legend in this space you've been uh working here for a long time and i'm sure you have been here for more than a decade now on uh bitcoin custody so thanks for joining us hey thanks for having me um appreciate the kind words a lot of people are fighting for bitcoin yeah and so uh you know what stands out in my mind uh throughout that history is that bitco has really been at the forefront from a technological perspective um but also from an institutional adoption perspective that uh your approach has really uh given comfort to large players to hold an asset that is really very different from any other asset out there in the world uh and has its benefits but also has tremendous risks and i think that uh gives people a lot of pause on the custody side so uh we really want to dig into uh how you think about custody at bitco and kind of how you see the the history of bitcoin custody over the long arc of the past decade uh and where you see it going so um first i really want to dig into the history of the past decade uh and where you see it going to your personal story because Bitcoin was not the beginning of your career. You've had a long career in technology before Bitcoin. So I'd love to hear how you came across Bitcoin and kind of what your background was at the time. Sure. Okay. Well, I'm a technologist. I am not a financial services attracted person generally. I was much more interested in systems programming and engineering problems when I started my career. Early on, I was a Hewlett Packard, but I was fortunate enough to discover this company called Netscape before it was public. And I jumped over there in the mid-90s. And that just opened my eyes to startups. By the way, Ben Horowitz, if you know Ben, he was my product manager on Netscape Enterprise Server. And just a pleasure to be able to work with such amazing, great people that have done such a great job. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here. But then I did startups for a number of years, never in financial services. I've always felt financial services companies where folks just leeched off of others that did building and then tried to take 30% kind of when you're going, you know, various fundraising events. And so anyway, I'm a technologist by background and mostly spent my time on web-related problems. I founded a company called Lookout, which did email search back in the early 2000s, sold that to Microsoft, did a little stint there. I'm a technologist by background and mostly spent my time on web-related problems. I founded a joined Google after that, got in just as they were starting this project, which would eventually be called Chrome, which completely outpaced any expectations we had for you. You might think Google, of course, they wanted to have a dominant browser. But remember, at the time, like, you know, we had just gotten through the horrible browser wars with, you know, Netscape and then Mo
31
000000030
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-07-17-crypto-week-cbdc-drama-120k-btc-institutional-adoption-tailwinds-bitcoin-policy-hour-ep-12",
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"published_at": "2025-07-17T00:31:41Z",
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"caption": "So to me, you know, the price action doesn't start being unexpected until we're north of a million dollars a coin. We haven't hit an all time high again in euros. So I think part of this move was certainly just the dollar falling relative to other currencies. To me, it's just kind of the thesis playing out that more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin is one of the best, if not the best risk reward, sort of risk adjusted bet that you could make. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Policy Hour, a weekly podcast hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute. We've got a little change of guests this week. Usually we've got our executive director, Matthew Pines, here, but he couldn't make it this week. So we're subbing in David Zell, our co-president. David, how's it going? Yeah, you know, excited to represent the JV, the B team here. I cannot riff about aliens and geopolitics like Matt, but excited to be on the show. Excited to have you. And as always, BPI's head of policy, Zach Shapiro, joining us. Zach, how are you feeling about Matt Pines not being able to join us today? I'm feeling a little lost, to be honest, but I think we'll make do with the JV team. Love it. All right. It's obviously crypto week. I don't know how many of y'all are kind of keeping up with that. So we're going to dig into that. But before that, we had some exciting price action this weekend. And if there's one thing David Zell likes to talk about, it's the price action. So David, any hot takes on what we're seeing here? I heard some mentions that maybe it had to do with the Bitcoin treasury companies buying, but I'm not sure if you have any color to add here. I think that they're selling dollars for 11 to 12 cents, and I suspect they'll probably continue to sell dollars between nine and 12 cents for the next few months. I mean, for me, the price action is not unexpected. Like my sort of view on Bitcoin is that, you know, we're there are like tail risks, like nothing in life is certain. But I think, I don't see why Bitcoin doesn't reach a gold parity in relatively short order. So to me, you know, the price action doesn't start being unexpected until we're north of a million dollars a coin, both one on account of, you know, the dollar weakening. Like, I think it's notable that we haven't hit an all time high again in euros. So I think part of this move was certainly just the dollar falling relative to other currencies. But yeah, this to me is just kind of the thesis playing out that more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin, if not the best risk reward, sort of risk adjusted bet that you can make. I think one thing that's that is sort of different in this cycle is that I don't think this is very retail driven. You know, you can look at Google sort of search history and volume, and it's nowhere near what it was like in 2021. And I mean, for listeners who were sort of talking about Bitcoin in 2021, you know, this is around the time when, you know, everyone from your life starts texting you asking if now is the time to buy Bitcoin. And I think that's kind of the basis for this. And I think maybe that circle of kind of friends or friends of friends has exhausted for me personally. But anecdotally, it doesn't seem like retail really cares. You know, I think part of that is just a unit bias. Pe
So to me, you know, the price action doesn't start being unexpected until we're north of a million dollars a coin. We haven't hit an all time high again in euros. So I think part of this move was certainly just the dollar falling relative to other currencies. To me, it's just kind of the thesis playing out that more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin is one of the best, if not the best risk reward, sort of risk adjusted bet that you could make. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Policy Hour, a weekly podcast hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute. We've got a little change of guests this week. Usually we've got our executive director, Matthew Pines, here, but he couldn't make it this week. So we're subbing in David Zell, our co-president. David, how's it going? Yeah, you know, excited to represent the JV, the B team here. I cannot riff about aliens and geopolitics like Matt, but excited to be on the show. Excited to have you. And as always, BPI's head of policy, Zach Shapiro, joining us. Zach, how are you feeling about Matt Pines not being able to join us today? I'm feeling a little lost, to be honest, but I think we'll make do with the JV team. Love it. All right. It's obviously crypto week. I don't know how many of y'all are kind of keeping up with that. So we're going to dig into that. But before that, we had some exciting price action this weekend. And if there's one thing David Zell likes to talk about, it's the price action. So David, any hot takes on what we're seeing here? I heard some mentions that maybe it had to do with the Bitcoin treasury companies buying, but I'm not sure if you have any color to add here. I think that they're selling dollars for 11 to 12 cents, and I suspect they'll probably continue to sell dollars between nine and 12 cents for the next few months. I mean, for me, the price action is not unexpected. Like my sort of view on Bitcoin is that, you know, we're there are like tail risks, like nothing in life is certain. But I think, I don't see why Bitcoin doesn't reach a gold parity in relatively short order. So to me, you know, the price action doesn't start being unexpected until we're north of a million dollars a coin, both one on account of, you know, the dollar weakening. Like, I think it's notable that we haven't hit an all time high again in euros. So I think part of this move was certainly just the dollar falling relative to other currencies. But yeah, this to me is just kind of the thesis playing out that more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin, if not the best risk reward, sort of risk adjusted bet that you can make. I think one thing that's that is sort of different in this cycle is that I don't think this is very retail driven. You know, you can look at Google sort of search history and volume, and it's nowhere near what it was like in 2021. And I mean, for listeners who were sort of talking about Bitcoin in 2021, you know, this is around the time when, you know, everyone from your life starts texting you asking if now is the time to buy Bitcoin. And I think that's kind of the basis for this. And I think maybe that circle of kind of friends or friends of friends has exhausted for me personally. But anecdotally, it doesn't seem like retail really cares. You know, I think part of that is just a unit bias. People still don't quite understand that you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin and that there are 100 million Satoshis constituting one BTC. But I also think that the profile of, you know, the retail investor, Bitcoin is just sort of increasingly not, you know, a get rich quick, you know, moon math investment, right? Like even if you believe that Bitcoin is going to reach, you know, $500,000, or say a million dollars, you know, people aren't interested, like retail investors don't want to 10x their money or 9x their money in five to 10 years. They're trying to double their money in a matter of days or weeks. I think the craziest thing about this cycle has just been the institutiona
32
000000031
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"episode_id": "bitcoin-magazine-podcast:2025-10-14-real-estate-mogul-grant-cardone-bitcoin-is-the-money-multiplier-bitcoin-backstage",
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"caption": "Money's a very, very simple game. Money and attention are almost identical formulas. I have to get attention. You gave me the opportunity to sit down with you, so I get attention. Now I have to keep the audience's attention. And then when you post it on and you distribute it, it needs to multiply itself. Money's the same thing. I've got to get money. I've got to keep it stored someplace. Saving it doesn't keep it, but it's going down in value. And then I have to figure out how to multiply the money, because if I don't multiply it, I can't keep it. We're live here with Grant Cardone. Grant, you just made this huge amount announcement. You kind of wanted to do like the micro strategy, strategy to real day investors. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so we're using real estate, which is a very adopted, very well-accepted, 2,000-year-old asset that everybody would like to be invested in, but nobody wants to manage. Everybody has a use for real estate. Most people understand real estate. You'd be, a lot of these Bitcoin people would love to have exposure to the real estate, the depreciation, the appreciation, and the tax write-offs. So what we're doing is we're using a vehicle, real estate, that's adopted, that is accepted. And then we basically add Bitcoin to the purchase. So we would take, this is our real estate, right? And we're going to add, this is our real estate, and this is our Bitcoin. So let's say this is $100 million of real estate. We're going to take it, cap it off with $15 million of Bitcoin. We're going to close them together in a fund. It will still cash flow. And each month, out of the cash flow, we'll add Bitcoin. We'll use the cash flow to buy more Bitcoin. So at the point, in four or five years, the cap, Bitcoin, should be as big as the real estate. But we didn't buy the Bitcoin. So it's going to be like real estate backed by Bitcoin. No, it's going to be real estate. No. Merged with Bitcoin, OK? So basically, our real estate's having a baby, cash flow. OK. And the cash flow, rather than keeping cash or paying back our investors, we take and redistribute that to purchase Bitcoin. We dollar cost average every month. Basically, our renters are buying the investors in the building Bitcoin. So what's better than Bitcoin? You know, Michael Saylor says, there's no second best. I said, Michael, the best Bitcoin, is Bitcoin I didn't have to buy and somebody else gave it to me. That is very true. You see him, he's purchasing it with the bonds. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we're doing here. We're basically, I'm not a public company. I'm reversing Michael Saylor's model. I'm using real estate, institutional quality real estate in unbelievable locations to purchase the Bitcoin. Still cash flows. We have no debt on either one of them. And then over long periods of time, we started with an 85-15. And then four years, it'll be at 70-30. And then by year five, it should be at 50-50. 50% real estate, 50% Bitcoin. We can borrow against both of them. Both of them are going to go up over long periods of time. So we think we get the best of both worlds. But most importantly, I am going to onboard people into Bitcoin that don't know anything about Bitcoin, don't want to learn about Bitcoin, don't want to read the book. Don't want to. Don't want to know anything. Don't want to know what co
Money's a very, very simple game. Money and attention are almost identical formulas. I have to get attention. You gave me the opportunity to sit down with you, so I get attention. Now I have to keep the audience's attention. And then when you post it on and you distribute it, it needs to multiply itself. Money's the same thing. I've got to get money. I've got to keep it stored someplace. Saving it doesn't keep it, but it's going down in value. And then I have to figure out how to multiply the money, because if I don't multiply it, I can't keep it. We're live here with Grant Cardone. Grant, you just made this huge amount announcement. You kind of wanted to do like the micro strategy, strategy to real day investors. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so we're using real estate, which is a very adopted, very well-accepted, 2,000-year-old asset that everybody would like to be invested in, but nobody wants to manage. Everybody has a use for real estate. Most people understand real estate. You'd be, a lot of these Bitcoin people would love to have exposure to the real estate, the depreciation, the appreciation, and the tax write-offs. So what we're doing is we're using a vehicle, real estate, that's adopted, that is accepted. And then we basically add Bitcoin to the purchase. So we would take, this is our real estate, right? And we're going to add, this is our real estate, and this is our Bitcoin. So let's say this is $100 million of real estate. We're going to take it, cap it off with $15 million of Bitcoin. We're going to close them together in a fund. It will still cash flow. And each month, out of the cash flow, we'll add Bitcoin. We'll use the cash flow to buy more Bitcoin. So at the point, in four or five years, the cap, Bitcoin, should be as big as the real estate. But we didn't buy the Bitcoin. So it's going to be like real estate backed by Bitcoin. No, it's going to be real estate. No. Merged with Bitcoin, OK? So basically, our real estate's having a baby, cash flow. OK. And the cash flow, rather than keeping cash or paying back our investors, we take and redistribute that to purchase Bitcoin. We dollar cost average every month. Basically, our renters are buying the investors in the building Bitcoin. So what's better than Bitcoin? You know, Michael Saylor says, there's no second best. I said, Michael, the best Bitcoin, is Bitcoin I didn't have to buy and somebody else gave it to me. That is very true. You see him, he's purchasing it with the bonds. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we're doing here. We're basically, I'm not a public company. I'm reversing Michael Saylor's model. I'm using real estate, institutional quality real estate in unbelievable locations to purchase the Bitcoin. Still cash flows. We have no debt on either one of them. And then over long periods of time, we started with an 85-15. And then four years, it'll be at 70-30. And then by year five, it should be at 50-50. 50% real estate, 50% Bitcoin. We can borrow against both of them. Both of them are going to go up over long periods of time. So we think we get the best of both worlds. But most importantly, I am going to onboard people into Bitcoin that don't know anything about Bitcoin, don't want to learn about Bitcoin, don't want to read the book. Don't want to. Don't want to know anything. Don't want to know what cold storage or self-custody or. They don't want to know any of that. They just want to know I have real estate and I can't lose my money. And you added this other thing I don't understand. And maybe I win, maybe I don't. But this is not the first time that you actually mix real estate with Bitcoin. You actually sold the house with Bitcoin back in Miami. Yeah, we didn't sell the house. But we did advertise the house, OK? I actually put it back on and ran another ad this week. I'll take 450 Bitcoin for my house in Golden Beach, right? It's a great drag. Like, Bitcoin is a shiny, shiny. It's why there's so many people here, right? It's an