Speaker 1Thank you. Hey guys, welcome back to the Bitcoin Fortress podcast, episode 238 for Sunday, October 25th, 2026. We are coming to you at Bitcoin Block Height 973096. Moscow time is 1242 sats per dollar and transaction fees are sitting at one sat per view. We bite across the board. Another week, another 1066 blocks added to the Bitcoin blockchain since our last episode. The network keeps doing what it does. No emergency meetings, no monetary policy announcements, no committee deciding whether the supply of Bitcoin should be increased to stimulate economic activity. Just blocks roughly every 10 minutes according to a set of rules that anyone can verify. Meanwhile, the rest of the financial system is having a considerably more complicated time. I've been thinking a lot lately about the bond market. I know, not exactly the most exciting subject in the world, but increasingly, I believe that's what's happening in government bonds, maybe one of the most consequential economic developments of our lifetimes. For roughly 40 years, declining interest rates provided a powerful tailwind to financial assets. Stocks benefited, real estate benefited, private equity benefited, and government bonds themselves benefited as their prices rose when yields declined. An entire generation of investors came to regard this environment as normal. But what if it wasn't normal? What if those 40 years were an extraordinary period that we're unlikely to repeat anytime soon? And what happens when the asset that sits at the foundation of virtually every financial business, the supposedly risk-free government bond, starts behaving like a source of risk, rather than a refuge from it? That's the subject of this week's featured Bitcoin Fortress Substack essay, The End of the Risk-Free Asset. And it also connects directly to a recent Lynn Alden interview that I've been listening to. And you know me, I see Lynn, I click. We'll spend some time on those ideas today, because I think they provide a useful framework for understanding almost everything else. Bitcoin continues to struggle around the low $80,000 range. Institutional investors are moving substantial amounts of capital into and out of Bitcoin ETFs. Governments are developing regulatory frameworks for stablecoins. And the largest technology companies in the world are spending staggering amounts of money building artificial intelligence infrastructure. These may look like separate stories, but I don't think they are. They're all connected by the changing price. The price of capital, the growing importance of scarcity, and the question of where investors can find genuine safety in an increasingly uncertain world. So we've got a lot to cover. As always, we're going to focus on the signal rather than the noise. We're not interested in predicting what Bitcoin will do next Tuesday or whether the stock market will rally after the next Federal Reserve meeting. We're interested in understanding the larger forces shaping our financial future. And so with that, let's go. Let's get into it. Let's start with Bitcoin, which has once again been doing an excellent job of frustrating just about everybody. I'm looking at you. October, uptober, or is it red October? I guess we'll find out at the end of next week. We entered the week with Bitcoin trading around $82,000 following several weeks of consolidation in the low $80,000 range. The macroeconomic. The macroeconomic environment hasn't exactly been supportive. Interest rates remain elevated. Inflation has been stubborn. And investors are increasingly concerned about the amount of capital being committed to the artificial intelligence boom. By Saturday, Bitcoin briefly slipped below $80,000, triggering another wave of leverage liquidations. The block reported approximately $404 million in crypto-long liquidations over a four-day period. Traders getting rekt again. Now, I've mentioned before, I think that the $80,000 to $81,000 area has been an interesting level to watch. But I also think we need to be careful about turning a price level into a thesis. Bitcoin doesn't know where you bought it. It doesn't know what your technical indicators are saying. And it certainly doesn't care about your year-end price target. What interests me is whether the market is going to be able to buy it. The market is gradually absorbing supply. Bottoming is often a process. Sometimes you get a dramatic capitulation event, followed by a powerful recovery. Other times, the market simply wears everyone out. The sellers become exhausted. The buyers become more patient. And eventually, the balance shifts. I don't know whether that's what we're watching now, but the price action is worth paying attention to. I also think it's important to separate Bitcoin's short-term trading behavior from its long-term monetary properties. When investors become concerned about liquidity, they often sell assets that can be sold quickly. Bitcoin is one of those assets. That doesn't mean its supply schedule has changed or that the monetary thesis has been invalidated. It means the marginal buyer or seller is responding to the broader financial environment. And that brings us to institutional flows. Earlier this week, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted more than a billion dollars in net inflows across three trading sessions. BlackRock's iBit was a major contributor with substantial buying on Monday. Wednesday brought another strong session. And then the market reversed. Thursday saw approximately $635 million in net outflows, with further selling pressure reported afterward. I find the changing narrative around these flows almost amusing. When institutions are buying, we're told it's evidence that Bitcoin is becoming an established asset. When they're selling, suddenly everyone starts questioning whether institutional adoption was real in the first place. But both things can be true. Institutional adoption can be expanding while individual funds and investors adjust their positions in response to market conditions. An ETF is simply a financial wrapper. It doesn't tell us anything about the conviction of the person holding it. Some investors may be building positions they intend to hold for decades. Others may be trading Bitcoin as a tactical outlet. Still others may be using the funds to hedge exposures elsewhere. The more important development is that Bitcoin now has a substantial institutional distribution network. That's a structural change, and it isn't going away because of a few days of negative flows. But it also means Bitcoin is increasingly connected to the behavior of traditional financial markets. Institutional adoption brings new buyers, but it also brings new forms of volatility. BlackRock introduces a Bitcoin product now with downside protection. BlackRock filed for another Bitcoin investment product this week, this time one designed to offer a degree of downside protection in exchange for limiting potential upside. The proposed iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF would use options to create a defined risk and return profile over a specified period. From the perspective of someone who believes in Bitcoin's long-term potential, this might seem like a strange proposition. Why would you voluntarily give up part of the upside? But BlackRock isn't necessarily designing this product for people like us. It's designing products for financial advisors, retirement accounts, institutions, and investors operating within defined risk budgets. There are plenty of people who may believe Bitcoin deserves a place in their portfolios, but simply cannot tolerate its full potential. A structured product might allow them to participate. I think that's a reasonable objective, although there's something rather ironic about taking one of the simplest monetary assets ever created and surrounding it with increasingly complicated financial engineering. Bitcoin itself has no management team, no quarterly earnings calls, and no monetary policy committee. 21 million coins, transparent rules, a globally distributed settlement network, Of course, Wall Street can make just about anything complicated, and I'm sure they'll continue finding creative ways to do exactly that. JPMorgan Asset Management published its first long-term Bitcoin return forecast this week, projecting approximately 10% annualized returns over the next decade. The firm also estimated substantial volatility and acknowledged the challenges of incorporating Bitcoin into conventions. portfolio. models. Now, I'm not particularly interested in whether that 10% forecast proves accurate. I have no idea what Bitcoin will return over the next 10 years, and I don't think anyone else does either. But I do find the institutional development significant. One of the largest financial institutions in the world is now incorporating Bitcoin into its long-term capital market assumptions. Think about how much has changed. Not that long ago, Bitcoin was routinely dismissed as worthless, fraudulent, or irrelevant to serious investors. Today, major asset managers are building products around it, financial advisors are allocating to it, and institutions are publishing 10-year return assumptions. That doesn't guarantee higher prices, but it does suggest that Bitcoin is becoming increasingly difficult for mainstream finance to ignore. The irony, of course, is that Bitcoin may be one of the hardest assets in the world to model using traditional financial assumptions. Its adoption curve is still evolving. Its monetary role is still developing. Its market structure continues to change, and its supply is completely independent of the price. That's an unusual combination. I keep coming back to something we explored in a recent Substack essay. All your models are broken. Maybe not literally all of them, but the assumptions built into our financial models deserve a lot more scrutiny than they're getting. Michael Saylor's strategy added another 267 Bitcoin during the previous reporting week, bringing its total holdings to approximately 848,517 Bitcoin. The company has now accumulated an extraordinary amount of Bitcoin through a combination of operating resources, equity issuance, and specialized financing instruments. And I think strategy remains one of the most interesting financial experiments that we've seen in the past. And I think it's a great way to show that Bitcoin is a company of its own. It's no longer simply a software company that happens to own Bitcoin. It's increasingly a financial institution built around Bitcoin accumulation. Saylor has created multiple ways for investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin's economics through traditional securities with different combinations of income, volatility, and risk. But I think investors need to be careful here. Bitcoin being an excellent long-term asset doesn't automatically mean that Bitcoin is a good asset. It's a good asset. It's a good asset. It's a good asset. Bitcoin is an excellent investment. Financing costs matter. Dilution matters. Market premiums matter. And the ability to access capital markets matters. The underlying asset may be simple, but the corporate capital structure certainly isn't. Still, I think strategy is demonstrating something important about Bitcoin's growing role in the financial system. It's becoming an asset around which entirely new financing structures can be built. And that's why I think it's a great development for something that began as a nine-page white paper. Let's turn to stablecoins, where one of the more important regulatory developments of the week came from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC issued a final rule implementing major portions of the Genius Act, establishing standards for payment stablecoin issuers under its jurisdiction. The rules address reserve assets, redemption rates, and rights, custody, operational risk, and regulatory supervision. I think this is important because stablecoins are becoming part of the infrastructure of the global dollar system. And that's an interesting development when you think about where cryptocurrency started. Many early cryptocurrency enthusiasts imagined digital assets as a way to operate outside traditional banking and monetary systems. But stablecoins are increasingly becoming a way to extend those systems into new technological rails. The technology may be innovative, but the monetary asset is still the dollar. A dollar stablecoin can move across borders, settle transactions around the clock, and potentially reduce payment friction. Those are meaningful improvements. But it remains a claim on an issuer and its reserves, and it remains subject to the purchasing power characteristics of the underlying currency. That's quite different from Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't represent a claim on someone else's balance sheet, it doesn't promise to redeem for dollars, and it doesn't depend on an issuer maintaining sufficient reserves. Of course, that comes with its own risks, including volatility and custody. I think stablecoins and Bitcoin can both be successful, but for different reasons. Stablecoins may become the preferred mechanism for moving dollars across digital networks. Bitcoin may become an increasingly important asset for preserving monetary independence. And there's another angle here. If stablecoin issuers hold large amounts of treasury bills as reserves, the growth of stablecoins creates additional demand for U.S. government debt. So, a technology associated with the cryptocurrency revolution could ultimately help finance the U.S. treasury. You have to appreciate the irony there. The American Bankers Association criticized the OCC's stablecoin framework this week, arguing that the agency's approach to stablecoin rewards could undermine congressional intent. And this gets to the heart of the economic competition. Traditional banks benefit from customer deposits. Those deposits provide a relatively stable source of funding, often at interest rates below what customers might earn elsewhere. If stablecoins or related platforms make it easier for customers to hold digital dollars and earn competitive returns, that could create pressure on traditional bank funding models. Now, banks provide important services. They extend credit, facilitate payments, manage risk, and support economic activity. But they also operate within a heavily regulated system that has historically protected certain business models. Digital assets are challenging some of those assumptions. And whenever a new technology threatens an established source of revenue, we should expect the incumbents to respond. Sometimes they're concerned about what's going to happen. Sometimes they're concerned about what's going to be legitimate. Sometimes they'll be defending their economic interests. Usually, it's a little of both. The important question is whether regulation protects consumers and the stability of the financial system, or whether it primarily protects existing institutions from competition. I suspect we'll be debating that question for quite some time. Central banks and financial institutions in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand are expanding cross-border stablecoin initiatives involving companies such as Ripple, Visa, and MasterCard. This is another example of how quickly the payments landscape is changing. International payments remain surprisingly complicated. Money can move around the internet in seconds, but transferring funds between traditional banking systems can still involve intermediaries, settlement delays, foreign exchange spreads, and significant compliance requirements. Digital payment networks have the potential to reduce some of that friction. But I think we should distinguish between making the existing financial system more efficient and creating a genuinely open monetary network. Those are different objectives. A central bank-backed payment system might be faster and cheaper while remaining fully permissioned. A private stablecoin network might improve settlement while retaining the ability to freeze funds. A bitcoin offers a different set of trade-offs. And I suspect the future will involve multiple competing systems rather than a single universal solution. HSBC reportedly launched a Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin for retail users this week. This is another sign that stablecoins are moving beyond their original cryptocurrency trading use cases. We're increasingly seeing established financial institutions explore digital currencies as payment and settlement instruments. fit neatly into that structure. And this is where Bitcoin coin's lightning network becomes particularly interesting. Lightning enables small rapid payments that can be integrated directly into software workflows. A machine doesn't need to understand the philosophical arguments for monetary sovereignty to benefit from a payment network that operates continuously and supports very small transactions. It simply needs a reliable way to exchange value. Now, I'm not suggesting lightning has already won this market. It hasn't. Stablecoins and traditional payment networks have substantial advantages, including existing distribution and developer relationships. But I think we're witnessing the early stages of a potentially enormous new market. And it brings us back to something Jordi Visser has been discussing, the ghost rails. We spent years building digital financial infrastructure without always having compelling economic use cases for it. But perhaps autonomous agents will finally become the messengers. Let's move from payments to the infrastructure required to support artificial intelligence. Meta reported strong operating results this week, but investors focused on its extraordinary capital spending commitments. The company raised the lower end of its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $135 billion, with the upper end remaining at $145 billion. That's just an astonishing amount of money. And it raises a question I've been thinking about quite a bit lately. Can artificial intelligence be genuinely transformative while many of the companies financing the revolution earn disappointing investment returns? I think the answer is absolutely yes. We've seen this movie before. During the dot-com boom, enormous amounts of capital flowed into internet infrastructure, telecommunications networks, and speculative technology businesses. Much of that capital was poorly allocated. Some companies disappeared entirely. Others survived but delivered terrible returns to their early investors. And yet, the internet went on to transform almost every aspect of modern life. The technology was real. The valuations and financing assumptions were often not. I think there's a meaningful possibility that something similar happens with AI. The productivity improvements could be extraordinary. Intelligence may become dramatically cheaper. Businesses may be able to produce more with fewer resources. But the infrastructure required to achieve those improvements is incredibly capital intensive. Data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, electrical generation, transmission infrastructure, and cooling systems all require enormous investment. And unlike software, whose assets are subject to the physical constraints of the real world, energy isn't free, land isn't free, capital isn't free, which brings us right back to the bond market. As concerns about AI spending intensified, technology stocks declined sharply and treasury bonds rallied. That's an interesting development given the theme of today's episode. I've been arguing that the bond market may be experiencing a structural repricing, but that doesn't mean treasury prices can't rally during periods of market stress. They absolutely can. The question is whether those rallies represent temporary flights to safety or the beginning of another multi-decade decline in interest rates, and I think investors need to be careful about assuming the future will resemble the past. For 40 years, declining interest rates provided a powerful tailwind to long-duration bonds. If that environment has changed, then the traditional playbook may no longer work as reliably. There's a meaningful difference between holding short-term treasury bills for income and liquidity and holding long-duration bonds in anticipation of capital appreciation. Those are very different investment decisions, and I think that is going to become increasingly important as we move forward. Energy markets also reminded investors this week that the physical economy hasn't disappeared, oil prices surged amid geopolitical tensions, and concerns about supply disruptions. Reuters also reported that the Japanese yen and European bond markets were responding to the combination of energy pressures, fiscal concerns, and uncertainties surrounding AI investment. I find the interaction between energy and technology particularly interesting. Artificial intelligence may dramatically reduce the cost of producing certain forms of intellectual work, but it doesn't eliminate the need for electricity. In fact, it may substantially increase it, and that creates an interesting tension. Technology can be deflationary in some areas, while simultaneously increasing demand for scarce physical resources. Energy, copper, electrical infrastructure, and suitable locations for data centers may all become more valuable, even as the cost of intelligence declines. It's another reminder that technological progress doesn't necessarily produce a simple, uniform economic outcome. Some things become abundant, other things become more scarce, and capital flows toward the bottlenecks. Now we arrive at what I think is the central story of the week. Investors are increasingly focused on how the US Treasury will finance its enormous debt burden in an environment of elevated interest rates. The Treasury faces difficult choices about how much debt to issue, which maturities to emphasize, and how to balance near-term borrowing costs against longer-term refinancing risks. And I think this is where the implications of higher interest rates become much more interesting. For decades, declining rates allowed governments, corporations, and households to refinance obligations at progressively lower costs. That created a powerful financial tailwind. But when rates rise, the process works in reverse. Debt that was originally financed at $2 or $3 million will now be financed at $3 million, or at least $3 million. The impact doesn't necessarily arrive all at once. It works its way through the system gradually. That's why I think Lynn Alden's recent comments about the bond market are so important. Much of the damage to long-duration bonds has already occurred over the past several years. But even if yields move sideways from here, the secular capital appreciation tailwind may be gone. That changes the economics of a wide range of investments. Real estate is an obvious example. I've spent much of my career working with real estate investments, and the relationship between interest rates and property values is impossible to ignore. When investors can earn an attractive return on relatively liquid government securities, they demand greater compensation for taking on the operating risk, leverage, and illiquidity associated with real estate. That tends to put upward pressure on capitalization rates and downward pressure on property values. And we've been watching that pricing unfold. And the process can take years because real estate markets don't adjust as quickly as publicly traded securities. Owners may resist selling, lenders may extend maturities, appraisals may lag market conditions, but eventually, financing realities tend to assert themselves. The cure for higher rates is higher rates, as the saying goes. Eventually, prices adjust enough to attract buyers. France also came under pressure this week as investors reacted to political uncertainty and deteriorating fiscal conditions. The spread between French and German government bond yields widened significantly, reflecting growing concerns about the relative risks of French sovereign debt. And this illustrates an important point. The sovereign debt problem isn't uniquely American. Many developed economies face large debt burdens, aging populations, substantial entitlement commitments, and political systems that make spending reductions difficult. The United States has the extraordinary advantage of issuing debt in the world's primary reserve currency. But that doesn't mean there are no economic consequences to persistent deficits and monetary expansion. A government can have a very low probability of increasing debt with a nominal default, while still exposing creditors to substantial purchasing power risk. And that's the perfect transition to this week's featured Substack essay. This week's featured Bitcoin Fortress Substack is called "The End of the Risk-Free Asset, Part 4 of our Ongoing Series: The Great Repricing," which was published on October 21st. And I think this essay gets to the heart of something that has been bothering me for quite some time. I've spent most of my career working with numbers, financial statements, investments, and valuation models. And one thing I've learned is that the most dangerous assumptions are often the ones nobody thinks to question. In finance, we have a particularly interesting one. We call government bonds risk-free. Not low risk, not relatively safe. Risk-free. That's an extraordinary description for a promise to deliver a fixed number of dollars sometime in the future. And it's especially interesting when the institution making that promise operates within a monetary system capable of creating more of those dollars. Now, there's a legitimate reason Treasury securities have earned their reputation. The United States borrows in its own currency, it has enormous taxing authority, and it operates one of the deepest and liquid government bond markets in the world. The risk of the treasury being unable to produce the dollars necessary to repay its obligations is very different from the risk faced by a household or corporation. But receiving your dollars and preserving their purchasing power are two very different things. Imagine lending the government $100,000 for 10 years. You may have considerable confidence that you'll receive the promised interest in principle, but what will those dollars buy when you get them back? That's a completely different question. A bond yielding 5% might look attractive until inflation consumes much of the return, taxes can take another bite, and suddenly the nominal return printed on your account statement may bear very little resemblance to the improvement in your actual purchasing power. I've become increasingly interested in the difference between preserving a number and preserving wealth, and I think that's particularly relevant to the current bond market. Treasury yields sit at the foundation of virtually every financial valuation model. Stocks, real estate, private businesses, infrastructure projects, and pension obligations all reference the cost of government debt in one way or another. But the benchmark itself carries risks. Inflation risk, interest rate risk, reinvestment risk, and increasingly, questions about the fiscal and monetary policies supporting it. A long-duration treasury bond could be extremely safe in terms of contractual repayment, while still producing substantial capital losses if interest rates rise. Just look at TLT over the past five years. That's not a hypothetical risk. It's already happened. And this brings us to Lynn Alden's recent interview with Wealthion, which I highly recommend. We discussed this interview recently, and one of Lynn's observations really stuck with me. The damage to long-duration bonds has already been substantial, but the larger issue is that the 40-year secular tailwind of declining interest rates may be over. Even if yields simply move sideways, investors no longer have the same structural source of capital appreciation they enjoyed for decades, and that has enormous implications for asset allocation. It also affects the real economy. Higher borrowing costs gradually pressure leveraged businesses, real estate investments, and governments that need to refinance their obligations. The process doesn't necessarily produce one dramatic financial crisis. It may instead unfold through years of smaller adjustments. Loans mature, financing costs increase, asset values decline, businesses reconsider investments, governments face difficult fiscal choices, and eventually policymakers may find themselves confronting what Lynn calls fiscal dominance. That's the situation where the government's financing requirements increasingly undervalued. That's the situation when the government's financing requirements are undervalued. We should not automatically assume that means some spectacular money printing event is just around the corner. The more likely outcome may be a series of smaller interventions. Liquidity facilities, regulatory adjustments, changes in debt issuance, targeted purchases, incremental policies designed for the benefit of investors, and the long-term future is the question of the essay. What does SAFE actually mean? Cash protects against short-term market volatility but loses purchasing power to inflation. Long-duration bonds offer contractual payments but expose investors to interest rate risk. Stocks provide ownership in productive businesses but fluctuate in value. Real estate offers income and utility but introduces operating risk, leverage, and illiquidity. Gold has no issuer or default risk, but it doesn't generate cash flow. Bitcoin removes certain risks associated with monetary discretion and financial intermediaries, particularly when held in self-custody. Its supply schedule is transparent and extraordinarily difficult to change. But Bitcoin introduces other risks: volatility, custody, regulation, technology, adoption. Pretending those risks don't exist would be just as foolish as pretending government bonds are universally safe. Every asset protects against certain risks while exposing us to others. And that's why I've become less interested in finding the perfect investment and more interested in building resilience. Cash for liquidity and optionality. Productive assets for long-term growth. Bitcoin for exposure to a monetary system with fundamentally different rules. And perhaps most importantly, a willingness to accept that no single asset can protect against every possible future. I don't need to know exactly what happens next to recognize that different outcomes reward different kinds of preparation. That's really the message of the essay. The great repricing isn't simply about asset prices moving higher or lower. It's about reconsidering the assumptions we use to determine value in the first place. And perhaps no assumption deserves more scrutiny than the idea that safety can be defined by a promise to return a fixed number of currency units. Because the number isn't the point. What matters is what the number can buy. And we'll include a link in the show notes to the essay if you want to get into it. I did want to very quickly talk about the Bitcoin podcast universe this week. There was a few interesting items that popped up in some of the podcasts. I did talk a little bit here about the Wealthion, and I will include a link in the show notes to that. The Wealthion interview with Lynn Alden, that was quite interesting. And I've actually listened to several of her podcasts lately, and they're just amazing. She goes into a lot of different things, but very, very similar themes that come across. So I highly recommend that. And again, I'll put a link in the show notes to that. But truly, one of the things I enjoy about following the Bitcoin podcast community is just seeing how different conversations connect to the same larger themes. This week, I want to highlight three discussions, including two recent episodes of the Stefan Levera podcast and the broader macroeconomic framework that I've been exploring. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the Bitcoin podcast, with Lynn Alden. First, Stefan Levera's episode 782, featuring Prashanth Chandra Shekhar, focused on debanking and the challenges Bitcoin businesses face accessing financial services in Europe. I think this is an important reminder that financial sovereignty isn't simply about owning an asset. It's about maintaining access to the financial tools necessary to participate in economic life. Banks can close accounts, payment processors can restrict transactions, and businesses can find themselves excluded from essential financial services. Bitcoin offers an alternative settlement network, but operating in the real economy still requires navigating traditional institutions. That's why I tend to think about sovereignty as a spectrum rather than an absolute condition. You don't necessarily need to eliminate every relationship with the banking system, but having alternatives can make you considerably more resilient. Episode 783 of the Stefan Levera podcast is a series of episodes that I'm going to talk about today. The second episode of the Stefan Levera podcast, featuring Alex Rucuzo, explored second passports and geographic optionality. And I think that fits beautifully with the broader Bitcoin fortress philosophy. A second passport isn't necessarily about leaving your country. It's about having choices. The same principle applies to custody arrangements, investment allocations, professional skills, and personal relationships. You don't have to predict exactly what might go wrong to appreciate the value of having alternatives. Optionality is valuable precisely because the future is uncertain. And finally, I want to mention an earlier Stefan Levera episode, episode 779, featuring Ben Carman, which explored lightning payments and autonomous AI agents. That discussion has become increasingly relevant as companies like MasterCard expand their efforts to support agent-driven commerce. I think we're going to hear a lot more about this intersection between Bitcoin, lightning, and artificial intelligence. Not because every AI agent will necessarily use Bitcoin, but because autonomous software creates entirely new requirements for how value moves across the internet. And that may turn out to be one of the most important use cases for digital payment networks. Before we wrap up, I want to take a moment to mention my five Bitcoin Fortress books. The newest is The Sovereign Life, which I published recently. It's my fifth book in the Bitcoin Fortress series, and probably one of the most personal ones I've written. It's really about the relationship between money, freedom, and the choices we make about how to live. After spending decades thinking about investments and financial markets, I've increasingly come to believe that the real objective isn't simply a way of accumulating the largest possible number on a screen. It's creating optionality. The freedom to spend your time doing things that matter, the ability to navigate unexpected events without constantly worrying about money, and the resilience that comes from having alternatives. Bitcoin is an important part of that philosophy, but it isn't the entire philosophy. My other four books, Bitcoin Fortress, A Simple Guide to Bitcoin for Beginners, Bitcoin Retirement and Estate Planning, The Bitcoin Lifestyle, and The Architecture of Money. Together, they explore everything from the fundamentals of Bitcoin to retirement planning, estate planning, monetary history, and the broader philosophy of financial sovereignty. You can find all five on Amazon, including The Sovereign Life in Kindle, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook. And thank you to everyone who has supported the books thus far, the newsletter, and the podcast over the years. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I actually went back to Fountain last week, and I haven't been really following the shout-outs, and there are some pretty good ones in there. Somebody said that I'm their favorite weekly dose of confirmation bias, which I love. So thank you again for all your support. It means a lot to me. I appreciate it. Well, folks, that is going to do it for Episode 238 of the Bitcoin Fortress podcast. I think the central takeaway this week is that we're living through a period when some of the most fundamental assumptions in finance are being reconsidered. For decades, government bonds were treated as the foundation of safety. Declining interest rates supported asset valuations. Governments could refinance debt at progressively lower costs. And investors became accustomed to a financial environment where capital was relatively cheap. That world may be changing. At the same time, artificial intelligence is creating extraordinary opportunities while demanding enormous amounts of capital and energy. Bitcoin continues to develop as an alternative monetary asset. And new payment networks are emerging that may fundamentally change how people, businesses, and eventually machines exchange value. I don't think any of us can predict exactly how these developments unfold. Maybe AI delivers an extraordinary productivity. Maybe governments gradually accommodate their debt burdens through monetary expansion and financial repression. Maybe we experience some combination of technological abundance and financial instability. My guess is that the future will surprise us. It usually does. But I also think we can prepare without needing to predict every outcome. Maintain liquidity. Avoid unnecessary leverage. Develop useful skills. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Build relationships. Stay curious. And hold assets you understand and believe in. For me, Bitcoin remains an important part of that strategy. Not because I know what the price will be next month or next year. I certainly don't. But because I value having a portion of my savings in an asset whose supply cannot be manipulated by politicians, central bankers, or corporate executives. And I value the freedom that comes from having alternatives. As always, if you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast, sharing it with someone who might find it interesting, and checking out the Bitcoin Fortress sub-stack. You can also find me on Noster and YouTube. Links in the show notes to everything. Until next time, stay curious, stay sovereign, and keep building your fortress. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. I'll see you next time. Thank you.
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