I do.
I just want to get your thoughts about the recent run up that we've seen in
Bitcoin. I think last time I checked were around
52,000, a far cry from 69, but it looks like we're headed in that direction.
But a but a big move from 16, 17, 18,000 towards the end of 2022 which was the
end of as horrible as for crypto. So yeah, but I think the one thing I
would just add on the Coinbase situation, everything's up, it's going
to improve the staking on the altcoins and there's huge margins in that.
So even if they lose a little on the exchange traded funds, meaning some of
their customers buy the ETF as opposed to just buying Bitcoin natively on the
exchange and they're picking up revenues from the whole lift in the overall
market capitalization. Do you think that so you think this is
going to spread beyond just Bitcoin itself?
I know it's already done that to a certain extent, but the narrative has
always been spot Bitcoin ETF, so you don't really need Coinbase, but we
forget that there's a whole other ecosystem.
Yeah. So I so I think what is typically
happening is as you see a swelling in bitcoin, the grandfather of cryptos, it
sort of spills over into the other assets.
And so just, just what happens is you making profits in Bitcoin, you start to
redeploy them into riskier assets and some of those assets are really not that
risky relative to Bitcoin. As an example, a theorem in Solana or
probably now in that big boys club. And so but listen, you know, you could
you, you stick with a place like Coinbase because it's safe.
It's good, you know high, highly good regulatory process inside.
There's probably one of the best run cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
So you feel the safety there. And they do take a reasonable size of
the profits as a result of that. And I don't think we should
underestimate that. So Gary Gensler made pretty clear that
the SEC was holding its nose as it approved those spot Bitcoin ETFs.
What does that mean for the prospect of ETFs backed by other cryptocurrencies
like ether? Like like anything else, You are so nice
because I, you know, say that he was holding his nose is such a you know, he
had like a vomit bag under his desk, like when he was like, you know, so you
were just such a nice person but had to be polite.
You know, what I would say is that he's up against it because he's lost several
cases. He will take another lawsuit to get
there. I think he will.
I think he will. I think he's decided that the powers
that be politically in the elite don't like crypto.
They don't like the energy around Bitcoin.
And I don't think they want an ETF for Etherium.
And so that may decision I think gets pushed.
I think it causes another lawsuit. He'll likely lose that lawsuit and then
you're coming up against the election. And so then the real question is will
Mr. Gensler, in a new Joe Biden
administration, will he be the FCC chairman?
My my guess is he probably won't be at that point.
I want to go back to Bitcoin for a moment because, of course, you've made a
lot of headlines when you gave a Bitcoin price forecast of $170,000 about 18
months after the having in April. Given the rally that we've seen, 52,000
above that level. What's your latest price forecast?
You sticking with that? I am sticking with that.
But the typical thing, what I was trying to say in that podcast was there's a
technical analysis that you can do over the past 14 years.
The price at the time of the having if you multiply that by four, that's
typically where Bitcoin has run to in that cycle.
And so I was just using a $50,000 number for April.
So this could run up because there's a lot of momentum right now.
You guys are seeing that the network is only producing 900 coins a day and you
know, you've got 12 times the demand of that right now, which is why you're
seeing a price squeeze to the upside. So so I'm going to stick with that price
prediction only because I think it's conservative based on where we are right
now. And I think people need to understand
look at what happened in a video, look at what happened to Apple over the last
decade in video, over the last 18 months.
It's not impossible now that this asset has been regulated and has this
regulatory ETF wrapper around it. Yeah.
And remember, you know, I've been on Wall Street in my 36 year on Wall
Street. Wall Street sells product.
Yeah. And, you know, these products are sold
and not bought. And you have armies of people now that
are putting these products in people's portfolios.
So it's very limited demand for an asset like Bitcoin.
You actually look great for a guy who's been on Wall Street for 36 years, by the
way. So a lot a lot of a lot of Botox on my
forehead. And I guess I can give you a referral to
my dermatologist if you have an interest, I might need it one day.
I am curious. So, I mean, who is kind of in this space
right now? Because you talk about how okay, we may
maybe we see a repeat of Nvidia in Apple and some of these big run ups here.
But you know, that takes a lot of retail interest.
Some of that that really got shook out when we saw that big drop last year
around in 2022. Excuse me, whatever it was, are we going
to see more of those people come back into it?
Meaning this isn't just going to be the whales and some of the institutional and
crypto faithful, so. So it's a really good question.
And so the skeptics are saying it's the whales.
Gensler himself is trying to make the argument that it's a few people that
control Bitcoin. We really don't see that over 70% of the
holders of Bitcoin own less than one Bitcoin.
But what I do see is continued adoption and I see people like BlackRock and
Fidelity adding it to their omnibus portfolios over time.
And so I think this thing squeezes up and the skeptics, particularly people
that are on the short side, are going to have to get out of the way.
You talked about how Wall Street sells products, and we've seen obviously, Wall
Street leaders like Larry Fink, like Howard Lutnick talk up crypto following
the launch of the spot Bitcoin ETF. What portion of Wall Street leaders do
you think really understands the dynamics and the inner workings of the
asset class? Would you say it's a quarter of a half
of them? It's probably a handful of them.
I think it's a great question, and I think the answer is it's a handful of
them. But here's what I would say to my Wall
Street contemporaries. It's a one way ticket towards Bitcoin,
meaning the more research you do and you go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin to
understand the network, the decentralized properties of the network,
the immutability of the network, it becomes a very, very compelling thing.
So if you look at a Paul Tudor Jones or a Stanley Druckenmiller, a Larry Fink is
an example who is negative on Bitcoin. 2436 short months ago.
Understood better what it was and then green lighted the ETF.
And so my prediction is as people understand it better, when I hear Wall
Street executives railing against Bitcoin.
My secondary question is how much homework have they actually done?
Or are they saying that because they are under the gun with regulators?
