00:00So let's start broad here and just what is going on with the price of Bitcoin right now?
00:04Because it seems like a few weeks ago, the debasement narrative had really taken off,
00:09especially when you paired that with the twin rally that we were seeing with gold.
00:13It seems like some of the shine is coming off of gold now, crypto continuing to regain some momentum here.
00:19And I just wonder what you think currently is the driver.
00:22Well, for years now, I always look at gold. Gold's the foldback.
00:25It goes through the hole, it blocks somebody and allows the running back to go score the touchdown.
00:29And Bitcoin is going to do exactly that, which is what it always does.
00:32It's about 100 days or so after gold runs. Usually you see Bitcoin take off.
00:36And this rotation from gold into Bitcoin really is whenever investors feel like, hey, there's some uncertainty,
00:42there's some sort of issue that I need to pay attention to, they run to gold.
00:46That's what they've been trained to do for a very long period of time.
00:48But then once they realize, hey, wait a second, the world is not going to end.
00:51I actually want to drive outperformance. I want to drive a return.
00:54They rotate from gold into digital gold and Bitcoin usually tends to outperform.
00:58And so gold's had a great year this year. The gold bug should get a lot of credit for investing in gold, holding gold.
01:04But I think that Bitcoin's still going to do what Bitcoin does, best performing asset over the last year or so.
01:08And I don't think that's going to slow down anytime soon.
01:09Well, that gets kind of just something I wonder about when you take a look at these twin rallies,
01:13the fact that you have gold and Bitcoin, not only the price appreciation, but you take a look at the ETF flows as well.
01:19There are billions of dollars that have flown into both types of vehicles.
01:22And I just wonder if those two assets can live in harmony or if Bitcoin really continues this rally,
01:29whether it's going to take some of that demand that would have been going into gold.
01:33Well, I definitely think that gold has probably had its run for this year.
01:36My expectation is gold will probably go sideways or sell off into the end of the year.
01:39And Bitcoin will likely take some of those flows and kind of go up.
01:42You know, one of the things I've changed my mind over the years is I used to think that Bitcoin was going to surpass gold,
01:47but it was going to do it somewhere sub $10 trillion market cap.
01:50And a big reason was it was going to demonetize gold.
01:53Instead, the exact opposite has happened.
01:54Gold has thrived, as has Bitcoin.
01:56And I think that we're going to continue to see that.
01:58I still think the digital version of these sound money principles will be a bigger market cap than the analog version.
02:04It'll just take some time to get there.
02:05I am curious, too.
02:06I mean, going back to this idea of the debasement trade,
02:08and I know there's a lot of sort of speculation for why Bitcoin goes higher,
02:13but sort of the genesis of really the crypto industry overall was obviously a lot of concerns
02:17about our fiscal situation here in the United States and really around the world.
02:21Have you seen any potential that that changes, meaning the fiscal situation gets better,
02:25or you think it's going to continue to get worse, and does that benefit crypto?
02:29Well, you know, what's interesting is people will say that Bitcoin has no ceiling because the dollar has no bottom, right?
02:35And I think that there's kind of this belief that they're never going to stop printing money.
02:38Now, when Donald Trump came into office, I think there was a lot of talk,
02:41and people got very excited, including myself, about, hey, could we actually get to a balanced budget?
02:45You know, it's been two decades since we had one of those, and could we get there?
02:48Doge was kind of a valiant effort.
02:50I think there's a lot of other things.
02:51What you start to realize is, one, we're addicted to the cheap money, we're addicted to the money printing,
02:55but also there are a lot of incentives at play that are not actually trying to get to a balanced budget.
03:00And so I think that people now kind of pivoted in their viewpoint.
03:04They believe that we're going to run the economy hot, we're going to try to grow our way out of it,
03:07and therefore the dollar is going to continue to have this accelerated debasement.
03:10And that's why you see gold and Bitcoin both doing pretty well.
03:13You've been really involved in this industry for a while and really seen it grow from nothing to what it is today,
03:18which is sort of an identifiable asset class that's on par with anything else.
03:22There's also a lot of companies that have gone public and taken advantage of that.
03:26You obviously have your own company.
03:27You're not public.
03:29When do you plan to go public, if at all?
03:31Yeah, so we raised just over $750 million earlier this year.
03:35We've announced a business combination with Columbus Circle, which is a SPAC,
03:40and we believe will be public later this year.
03:42That leaves us the hope.
03:44And our goal is really to go and try to build a financial services firm that leverages Bitcoin as a foundation,
03:50kind of think of it as a Bitcoin-native financial services firm.
03:52You know, one of the things that's really interesting about traditional finance is,
03:55people have not really innovated in terms of the structure of these financial services firms.
03:59They still build products and services.
04:00They give them out to customers and they drive profits.
04:04Well, their balance sheet is dollars and the profits are in dollars.
04:07Well, what if you start to build financial services and still serve a certain customer and solve their problem,
04:12but instead you think about it in terms of beating Bitcoin as a rate of return or a benchmark there?
04:18And so we think that, you know, Bitcoin as a rate of return is a really interesting way to think about investing your corporate kind of balance sheet.
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