Speaker 1Jason Calacanis, J-Cal, he posted on X predicting that Bitcoin will go to zero. He pointed to the ETF outflows as a signal of further weakness and predicted that Bitcoin would revisit $57,000 per Bitcoin within the next 12 months.
Speaker 2I think this is probably a pretty good sign to buy Bitcoin, right? When you have notable Silicon Valley people openly funding Bitcoin, boy, does that seem like a good time.
Speaker 1Bitwise, for example, has raised its 10-year price target for Bitcoin to $1.6 million per BTC, a forecast of, yeah, $1.6 million by 2036. Welcome back to another episode of Token Narratives. I'm Graham Stone, joined again by Alex Richardson and David Sensel. If you haven't already joined, 1.5 million subscribers of our weekly newsletter available completely for free at bitcoin.com slash newsletter. All right, let's get into the market update with a slightly hawkish tone. Kevin Warsh and the Fed have held rates steady in a 10 to 2 decision. And other than a spike in yields, markets haven't reacted in any noticeable way, at least yet. The major stock indices are basically sideways on the day so far, while gold and Bitcoin are printing modest rallies. Warsh said in his speech that, quote, job gains have kept pace with the workforce and the unemployment rate has changed little, but inflation remains elevated. And he later reiterated that inflation, he later reiterated the inflation issue, saying, quote, inflation is too high. Warsh also announced that the Fed will be reducing the number of interest rate changes it makes each year from eight times to six times by 2028 and reducing the number of meetings. All right, so some movement at the Fed, I guess. Question, does this even matter at this point, right? Because there's a growing argument that fiscal policy, particularly government spending, deficits, and treasury issuance has become a bigger driver of markets than the Fed's interest rate decisions. On the other hand, there's also the argument that as treasury yields rise, eventually you reach a point where investors can earn an attractive enough return just holding government debt that it starts pulling away money from risk assets like stocks and Bitcoin. So which is it? Is the Fed becoming increasingly relevant? Irrelevant? Or are interest rates still one of the biggest potential threats to this bull market?
Speaker 2Before you go into that, though, you also need to separate out, does this matter if it matches the predictions, right? And so I think it was 80% plus that rates were going to remain the same. And so in that sense, it doesn't matter because they did exactly what the market thought. So it was already priced in. And in that respect. It doesn't matter whatsoever. But I'll let Alex tackle your question.
Speaker 3I think rates could theoretically threaten the bull market, but I just don't think they're ever going to get to that point. So the reason that they want to reduce the amount of meetings from eight to six is they want to spend two of those meetings, like deeply studying their monetary strategy. But I find that really hard to believe. I think deeply studying their monetary strategy is probably code for doing Zoom calls in their pajamas. Talking about sports, making fun of poor people, because I think the cat's like kind of out of the bag now. Like, Walsh was supposed to be this new hawkish paradigm shift for the Fed. He said that QE was reverse Robin Hood and inflation needs to come down. But here we are. We're, I don't know how many years into missing the alleged 2% target. And instead of raising rates, he bedazzles the media with jargon. And I was watching the press conference and one of the journalists actually asked him, like, you said inflation is too high. So why not just raise rates today? And he responded by saying, like, that's an interesting question. And then just continued to not answer the question, just like a bunch of complicated words and things that you can't really answer to. And I just think, like, the U.S. is a twin deficit country with a fast growing debt. And the only way to manage that is having somewhat high inflation, preferably to the point of negative real rates. I think so. So the Fed fund rate is 3.75 to 4%. And CPI was most recently. 3.77%. So basically, real rates are zero. If you measure inflation by the stock market or assets that the rich allocate to, which I think is smarter, then we effectively already have negative real rates. And the PSYOP has been completed. I just remember, like, last year, everyone was saying that we're going to have this new regime under Warsh. And it's failing to materialize because I think they can't. They need to have real rates at zero or negative to manage their debt. And that's why they're not raising. He probably has, like, a target of where he thinks he can get to. I don't know if it's, like, whatever, 4.55. And he's just, like, buying time and spreading it out as much as possible so that inflation can catch up. So in that regard, yeah, I don't think that these Fed meetings matter because they're never going to do anything different than what they've done in the past 20 years, which is just keep inflation running hot to manage their debt.
Speaker 2I disagree with some of that, especially on the short-term inflation rate. From the people that I follow, there seems to be consensus that the current inflation we have right now is mostly due to exogenous things in oil and the capex spend in AI. So that's where the inflation is coming from right now. Maybe, I don't know if Warsh can say that directly. Hey, this is, like, short-term inflation. I think Powell tried to say that, right, when inflation was running crazy and it really came back to haunt him. And so maybe there's a lesson learned there where you don't say the obvious, which is that this, in Powell's case, it was also kind of short-term inflation, short-term being like one or two years, not necessarily to do with anything he could impact. So maybe in that sense, Graham, it doesn't matter what the Fed does right now because the cause of inflation has nothing to do with him, and he can't really have an effect on this. Right? Whatever he does with rates is not going to increase the supply of oil. It's also not really going to affect, at least right now, it's not going to really affect the borrowing ability of these hyperscalers and all this kind of stuff to raise money. So I don't think that matters. Michael Green, though, formerly of Simplify, I don't know if he's still there with him. He was saying, though, that underneath all this, it does matter. Right? Because he has a bit of a contrarian view. Some people share it, but it's basically that when you have higher inflation due to supply squeezes, so demand outstrips supply, like we have in this case in oil, but you also have it in homes and things of that nature, what you need is you need lower rates, and the lower rates allow small businesses or existing businesses. To go out and make new supply come on in a couple years. And these hikes right now, things of that nature, or keeping it at a higher rate, will impede that. And so he's a strong believer that this is exactly the wrong thing to do right now, because it's where the inflation is coming from is not necessarily asset inflation, things of that nature. But you agree
Speaker 3that they're probably. They're probably not going to ever become truly hawkish, right?
Speaker 2Well, so what's the historical context? Are we talking about hawkish in terms of the Zerp era? Is that what you consider hawkish? Because 5% in historical context is relatively dovish, not hawkish at all. So I don't know. What exactly, what window of rates are you talking about there, Mr. Richardson? I guess having
Speaker 3real rates above. 4%, 5%, 6% or something instead of zero. I think that's the main thing from an investment or market perspective that everyone actually cares about, because that's the effective thing that would actually move markets. But if rates are still at zero and there's no point, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1There's another factor here, right? The Bank of Japan is going to be meeting tonight, and there's growing chatter that they're going to be raising again. And that you're going to get a reverse yen carry trade as interest rate in japan are high enough to actually warrant pulling out or no sorry i'm confused about how the reverse yen does anyone know how this actually works have you heard have you guys heard about
Speaker 2this one the reverse carry trade no so the people are going to take out loans in for example america to put it yeah to put into japan to get to get to get off of that interest rate i find that hard to believe when the yen is getting absolutely battered and japan unlike america has no has zero uh natural resources right that's the inflation in japan the weakness of the yen is pretty much based completely based off of the fact that they're getting rinsed on oil but maybe maybe i haven't heard about this uh who was who was talking about this gram i don't know the specifics i've just seen chatter yeah um so the that was the other thing i was going to bring up though alex's long very very predictable at this point you know doomerist p doom tirade on on central bankers specifically the u.s compared to who right so you're you're trashing the the fed and what america is doing compared to what other country is is the u.s it's all they're all worse i get it yeah yeah no they're not
Speaker 3so but it doesn't change like the theses that everyone's had for the last 20 years that's that's my main point is like nothing is really changing we're still going to
Speaker 2inflationary gold gold's the way to go potentially they start printing it in a fusion fusion facilities no i'm joking
Speaker 1well i listened to michael howell interview earlier this week he's bullish gold he said that what's happening right now with bitcoin it might be might actually be a harbinger of uh his of like the liquidity shifting like it's early signs he needs to he might he says he might need to re-evaluate his his thesis that michael howell is saying that liquidity global liquidity has rolled over and it'll be another year or two until it starts ramping up again but uh what he's seen in what's what bitcoin has done in the last few months might be a harbinger that actually that could that could be invalidated
Speaker 2yeah yeah i i saw that it was manna from heaven i really respect michael howell i said this over and over again on token narratives but he's one of the few people in the past seven years that i've been following him have pretty much nailed it every time so the fact that he is now maybe becoming bullish on bitcoin is an amazing sign an amazing thing he was one of the few he was one of the few counter indicators that made me worried that we might not be in a bull market yet but the fact that he's even softening his stance is to me a big sign that the good times are are are going to be here soon if not already
Speaker 1all right uh let's move on to let's move on to our main topic today which is about um i don't know let's call it coordinated bitcoin fud but first before we get to that a quick plug for our latest bitcoin.com original cue the trailer
Speaker 4i'm here in hong kong and while i'm here i want to find out if hong kong has lost the crown as crypto hub of asia and what's its future will it be hong kong will it be singapore korea japan let's find out i wouldn't start a business right
Speaker 5now in crypto in hong kong it's not what it was back in 2014. lost its once primary status in asia as being the main crypto hub in the region so at that
Speaker 4moment in 2021-22 the people the company start to moving out but there was a very important turning point for hong kong
Speaker 6which is october of 2022 it matters in hong kong
Speaker 5because this is one of the most important financial centers in the world as well i think at this
Speaker 2point i will probably be on hong kong and that is coming out this saturday october 31st happy halloween please enjoy it all right
Speaker 1jason calacanis jcal host of the all-in podcast him and his besties with the besties we're gonna get into the besties predicting he posted on x predicting that bitcoin will go to zero and uh yeah the supposedly dead bitcoin community that he called out in his post brutally ratioed him in the replies the crux of it is he warned okay so he said a brutal year for bitcoin is is how it opened and it's only beginning he pointed to the etf outflows as a signal of further weakness and predicted that bitcoin would revisit 57 000 dollars per bitcoin within the next 12 months his central argument is that investors have more compelling places to allocate capital he described bitcoin as a network offering little beyond a store of value while arguing that ai is creating substantially greater economic and social value jcal also said bitcoin has lost the viral enthusiasm that previously drove adoption he noted that there was a period when people were mocked for not owning it and he contrasted that with an environment where he believes ignoring bitcoin and pursuing other investments is increasingly acceptable he argued that the promotional culture surrounding crypto including memes and nft has faded and he argued that the promotional culture surrounding crypto will continue to grow and he also dismissed bitcoin's promise of changing the world saying ai has already delivered a transformative change now as mentioned the replies to this post were pretty much universally critical and they featured kind of a who's who of bitcoin kols with michael saylor right at the top pointing out that bitcoin and ai are complementary basically him saying that yes ai creates value but also that yes bitcoin is needed to store that value then you have uh people pointing out in the replies the many previous occasions that jason calacanis has predicted bitcoin's demise for example in 2018 he said there's a 33 chance bitcoin goes to zero in 2019 he said quote bitcoin to 500 zero or to be replaced and then yeah notably in 2022 he invested four million dollars in a failed nft ticketing startup and he is also i think a paid influencer for bit tensor which by the way he shilled in the replies to his bitcoin hate post question how do you think about kols in general coming out against bitcoin and also yeah this particular question is a question that i'm going to ask you today comment alex i'll let
Speaker 2you go first on this i know you are a bit tensor supporter so maybe this is hard for you yeah
Speaker 3it's been emotionally stressful for me indeed i think if you're a supporter of any cryptocurrency like bit tensor you don't want bitcoin to fail i think he thinks he's pumping his bag by by calling bitcoin obsolete and tau the next the next big thing but if bitcoin does go to zero i don't think he's going to be able to do that i think he's going to be able to do that that would be very good for tau or any of the other crypto assets at least for a really long time so that's an odd strategy on his part i don't i don't think his criticisms are that wild i think some of them are legitimate it is it is true that uh what do you say okay yeah outflows from etfs are kind of going down i don't know if that's a signal i don't think it'd be completely out of the ordinary or the most shocking thing in the universe if the bear market extended and we do test 57k again in the next year yeah it is true it's not like as viral as it was before it's not as religious as it was but uh like there's other assets that also aren't viral and have a cult to it and they do very well i don't think there's a cult to whatever like a lot of these good performing stocks i thought the weirdest thing was when he said that it offers nothing more than a store of value isn't that like the only thing that anyone really cares about isn't that the most important thing of any financial asset is that it collectibles have been doing so well is that people are just concerned about how to store value so that's an odd criticism i mean it's been said before that vcs are often confused about bitcoin because it's extremely rare that the first technical iteration of something actually ends up being the best uh we're in this age of like extremely fast moving tech and extremely efficient blockchains that keep getting faster and more versatile and interesting and yeah yeah bitcoin which is almost 20 years old now and slow and made up of spaghetti code not really scalable no discernible quote utility a large portion of the people that own it are kind of mentally ill yeah it's worth over a trillion so i can imagine that that would be very perplexing for for people like jason i think so i i understand why he's confused
Speaker 1yeah it's not spaghetti code bitcoin is not spaghetti code i would push back on that and the kind of thing that vcs promote is spaghetti code not bitcoin bitcoin is a very simple code and that they don't like that it's too simple yeah but
Speaker 2the the history of bitcoin's code is there's there's some pretty interesting yeah because because satoshi was not a programmer at least not a good one um so there's i i would also say it's probably not spaghetti code now but in the early days it probably it certainly was until nakamoto got some help from other people but i think this is just the yeah similar to what what alex said i would i would echo a lot of that it's just a it's a guy don't they call don't they call j cal the he's the poor one of the besties of the besties right they call them they call them asset light or something like that so all the other guys on the on the all-in podcast always make fun of them for being poor so you hear you know the poor one of the of the of the all-in podcast is kind of unabashedly with with no shame pumping his bags jumping from bag pump to bag pump i think anyone in crypto should be familiar with this just on a different scale i guess so that's that's what i would chalk this up to like you said alex none of these latest indictments are that damning right 57 000 seems quite fine to me yeah especially if we if we have like a market dump let's say the ai trade really gets people get spooked on the ai trade that could pull down the whole market and bitcoin would i think reflexively go down to 57 seems like the very bottom of a of a v bounce so yeah and then yeah the other stuff is is kind of known these are these are known issues or features of bitcoin it just seems obvious that he is overly invested in z cash and bit tensor i guess do you believe isn't it isn't it also in the past month or two this this fella talked about how most of the exponential gains for bitcoin have already been made and so it doesn't really make sense for him or anyone uh especially with a vc background to put a significant amount of their investable capital into bitcoin for that reason i think he said that right so this is just this is just that right um he also
Speaker 3turned 25k into 600 million or something like that investing in uber so maybe he's he's used to the ridiculous gains and he won't sell for anything
Speaker 2less yeah so he's fighting he's fighting the thing that won't give him a 10 or a hundred x from here for things he's put money in that could still do that like z cash or bit tensor subnets or or this kind of thing so i don't
Speaker 1know in in his post he noted that uh there was a period when people were mocked for not owning it and i think that reveals his actual motivation here he's he's just trying to get revenge for that horrible fomo feeling he had in previous cycles and i don't know something tells me that that feeling is gonna be back for jcal in the not too distant
Speaker 2future yeah i also i also think though that i think i think this is probably a pretty good sign to buy bitcoin right when when you have notable silicon valley people openly funding bitcoin and there's a bunch we'll go into some more that are on the all-in podcast but even outside of that you have you've you have people like balaji sirnavasan who has kind of said that he's said to very directly openly bitcoin is not that interesting to me now because it is a asset of the state this is like and he was like a huge supporter of bitcoin oh by the way he loves z cash big surprise yeah so you have these like notable kind of luminaries who are all bashing bitcoin boy does that seem like a good time for just in terms of like i don't know sentiment among the elite that it's probably a good time to to have bitcoin and we've talked all about this before but like people like like calcunus and apology will say things like ai and other industries make bitcoin much less interesting look look much less interesting but what happens if and when that kind of exponential growth that you've seen in like for example ai doesn't it doesn't uh it doesn't stop but maybe you start to get to a little bit of to the s curve so it's starting to slow down and becomes i don't know logarithmic or something like that that all of that uh value is going to flow to other places and i still think some of it a decent amount of it will go to crypto which has languished for the past couple years and when it does it'll it'll be pretty it'll be really really exciting again right and why will it be exciting because the price will go up a bunch right just like with these
Speaker 1ai stocks yeah so co-host of the all-in podcast chamath paliapatiya he also has been critical of bitcoin coming at it from i think a a different angle i mean he's saying that powerful ai systems target bitcoin's cryptography and steal coins attributed to satoshi nakamoto he's he's pointing out that he thinks that's going to happen an attacker could then bet against bitcoin before publicly revealing the breach profiting from both the stolen holdings and the resulting price decline he said you know the cryptocurrency networks need to migrate to quantum resistance security but for bitcoin he described that transition as basically impossible arguing that it's decentralized community struggles to agree on collective action he said it's capped and it's basically gonna get hacked and go to zero right let's let's but let's play a clip here of some of the statements chamath paliapatiya has said about bitcoin over the years
Speaker 6it's a huge huge huge deal because what you're talking about right now is for the next three to five years an unbelievably better store value it is gold 2.0 right today i think this thing is a hundred thousand dollars a coin probably in the next three to four years and i think it is in the next 20 years a million dollars ago but everybody should probably have one percent of their assets in bitcoin specifically later and i called my family office and said you know buy a million bitcoin that's how i started and uh it was you know 80 bucks or something at the time and it just sounded kind of really interesting um where is it going it's probably going to a hundred then a hundred and fifty then two hundred thousand in what period i don't know five years ten years but it's going there um but i can pretty confidently say that bitcoin i think has effectively replaced gold and if you look at what this price chart could indicate is that if this thing starts to get to these levels of appreciation it is going to completely replace gold and start to become something that has transactional utility for hard assets do you
Speaker 1think uh bitcoin is cooked uh i just think
Speaker 6it's capped and then i think eventually it gets hacked and then it goes to
Speaker 2zero uh first of all can i just say that i think it's disgusting to see people my age or older wearing a suit on a tv show using the word cooked as in is bitcoin cooked you're an adult uh you're not a broccoli-haired child with a a meme coin account don't use the word okay
Speaker 1move on okay
Speaker 2jesus god
Speaker 1so paul chamath polyapatia consistently bullish on bitcoin from 2017 until yesterday or last week or whatever when he's yeah now it's done and i don't know i mean people have pointed out could it be that chamath and others in the in the ai trade are kind of over leveraged to this thing and and they they just need to like get every last investor in the world out of useless things like bitcoin and into their bags
Speaker 2yeah i i think i think tamath's comments are considerably worse than jason's uh in my opinion because i think they're just wrong and disingenuous they misrepresent the truth of things whereas jason's kind of makes sense based in reality like uh so we've again we've talked a lot about quantum um as it pertains to bitcoin and i do think it's an issue but to say that bitcoin is somehow is set apart from other assets in terms of like a quantum risk is insane to me and none of this really i think makes any sense whatsoever uh these these these problems so i think it's an issue but i think it's an issue but i think it's an issue but i think it's an issue but i think it's an issue like i said before if you were to say this like i said before if you were to say this like i said before if you were to say this a year ago maybe you'd have some kind of basis in reality because the bitcoin community wasn't moving as quickly and it was maybe it wasn't as a complete consensus in terms of what we should do but i think that's changed now and um others have pointed out i think tay on another podcast she's a security analyst crypto analyst she's amazing she had a post saying basically like if if if bitcoin is hacked via some quantum computer that will mean it's it's in the these kinds of quantum computing things are in the hands of like i don't know low-level hacking groups right and not and not like state-sponsored actors right and that means the world is falling apart and everything is doomed if if that's where technology is basically if the american government or even the north korean government doesn't have this technology first and instead it's like some little ramshackle hacking group that then goes after bitcoin the world is pardon my french fucked right because it means that the governments all over the world are so far behind really we'd be in an unraveling place now if indeed state-sponsored actors do have this technology first they're not gonna hack bitcoin right they're not they have bigger bigger fish to fry and as nick carter and others pointed out maybe they would benevolently hack bitcoin and then hold the coins for you know for the community or something like that but again using quantum computers to hack bitcoin is going to be way down on the list of state-sponsored companies or just states that get this technology first so i don't know this seems ridiculous i think that is the
Speaker 3most likely scenario is that a big american company will be able to hack bitcoin and then probably be able to get satoshi's coins and they'll either let him claim them or it'll become part of some strategic reserve of the states i think it's in the united states best interest to to do that and they're probably looking at it so it's not as binary or simple as as chamath is saying like this bitcoin gets hacked it goes to zero uh it's kind of like annoying it's ignoring a lot of the details and a lot of the infinite amount of paths that this scenario could be taken play out it's not inherently wrong or dishonest to change your opinion on something when new information comes on it comes out i think that's like what you have to do with investing but it is it does seem like a rather extreme pivot after 10 years like what what is the dates on that video may 2024 he's saying it's replacing gold and then october 2026 he's saying it's hacked and getting to zero so you can't help but wonder if there's a little bit of ulterior motives there from from chamath and uh yeah
Speaker 1quantum fud the quantum threat hacking bitcoin that's fud but chamath also argues that he says it bitcoin is capped right he says because the the limited fungibility constrains its potential buyer base particularly among central banks while information revealing who owns substantial holdings creates personal security risks that what do you guys think about this argument again none of this you can buy a portion of this makes sense though
Speaker 2like what what if bitcoin is going to go to a million dollars a coin kind of thing who who's going to own this it's not going to be most of it's not going to be owned by you and me right normal people right like you might own a small fraction of that but it's the same with gold yeah you could say gold is like very fungible if you have a bar of gold if you have 200 million dollars of gold that's not fungible everyone in the world knows where it is and who has it and and how it how and and how it moves same for cash if you have actual cash sure fifty dollars perfectly private fungible if you have 500 million dollars on like you know what's it called in like these big bails that's not really fungible because it's just too much money right so i don't i just find this to be either i mean he's a very smart guy so i don't buy it i don't buy it at all and also central banks are not fungible because they're not fungible banks want they they they want the transparency of this because you you want to be able to tell if something bad or something wrong happens and they don't care right so they they don't necessarily want they probably want it to be a little more private but if you if you're a central bank what would you care more about knowing uh for a verifiable fact that it hasn't been hacked and there hasn't been a mistake or having having some kind of modicum of privacy i think it's quite clear what they would prefer right if we're talking about a digital asset you want yeah you know it doesn't for for smaller transactions a million dollars and less in this thing of course big proponent of z cash and monero and stuff like that but bitcoin is going after a very different market and that he's even admitting central central banks it's a different kind of game very very different
Speaker 1yeah no i i i'm sympathetic to the view that this is a coordinated effort to try to suppress adoption of these like inert stores of value like bitcoin and gold because they threaten the profits of like like these kind of super rich vcs who need like growth it's growth and speculation in their industries exactly they they view any money going into bitcoin as money that's not going into bitcoin and they're not going into bitcoin as money that's not going into bitcoin into the ai trade and that's a threat to them
Speaker 2or their new shiny crypto project like z cash right or they've they've they've pivoted out of bitcoin into z cash which is fine it's just that it seems again if they're doing it knowingly that's where i have issue with it it and i would put chamath in a different bucket maybe than like apology because i think he is a true believer and his his his arguments again against bitcoin are internally consistent and they're not going to i think with with everything else he said he said bitcoin is not interesting to him because it's now an asset of governments i think that's a reasonable take i agree disagree a bit but yeah that's that's what it's going to be i think right it's a giant store of value ultra transparent ledger to store wealth on a massive scale that sounds kind of institutional to me basically right doesn't mean that people can't own a piece of that but the vast majority of it if it's going to be moving people off of gold it has to be that right it has to store in just a metric ton of of value and when you get to that level it's it's uh it doesn't really operate in the way that like venmo or cash or even bars of gold single bars of gold operate if it is an
Speaker 3asset of the state wouldn't that just be a reason to be bullish on it as well like seems like an odd way to dismiss something like oh yeah i'm not bullish on this thing because all the world's most important people are going to powerful governments uh want to own it exactly
Speaker 2yeah yeah i mean the problem the issue is that that i think apology i know for a fact he's talked about this before which is a real issue is that you you'd start to worry that if it's it's i think he said it's an asset of institutions but what you would worry about is then the the confiscate the confiscation of it does start to become an issue right because it stops being self-sovereign on that level really because because the the state controls so or institutions control so much of it and it is ultra transparent so let's say i don't know socialists take over a democratic country america mundami then conceivably they could start to confiscate the bitcoin right things of that nature and for these wildly sovereign individuals network state people like biology that is a that would be a legitimate concern right they have a lot of money um there's like wealth taxes going on now and all this kind of stuff this should make you concerned if you're those if you're those people with that with that type of thing so i understand that yeah
Speaker 3philosophically i understand it as well as number go up wise i don't know how people can really make a case against that right
Speaker 1now all right so you've got some big kol's fighting bitcoin left right and center on the other hand institutions doing the opposite bitwise for example has raised its 10-year price target for bitcoin to 1.6 million dollars per btc in a memo that came out yesterday the chief investment officer and friend of the pod matt hogan outlined a forecast of yeah 1.6 million by 2036 and that compares with last year's prediction of 1.3 million by 2035 so the projected annualized growth rate is 34.3 percent which is over a rise from the previous one of 28.3 significantly higher than most other asset classes out there so the argument rests on the growing size of the markets bitcoin could capture it increased bitwise bitwise increased its projected global store of value market from 1.6 million to 1.6 million dollars per btc in a memo that $91 trillion to $110 trillion citing concerns about inflation and currency debasement it's forecast for the institutional investment market rose from 216 trillion to 303 trillion there's just more money sloshing around the system every year what do you guys think about this one
Speaker 2what's the market cap of that if it gets one to 1.6 million i am ai in it i'm ai 10 years 10 years 1.6 million yeah that doesn't sound that doesn't sound to 33 33.6 trillion so 37 trillion gold is what 33 trillion 30 trillion something like that so
Speaker 1reaching the market cap of gold in about 10 years yeah i don't
Speaker 2know that that i mean it sounds crazy i guess that seems relatively conservative i would say this how about this if if bitcoin doesn't reach the 2026 market cap of gold uh in 10 years 10 years from now then i think bitcoin has failed how about that so yeah 1.6 million seems a reasonable target for bitcoin if it's successful because i just don't think gold you is that interesting and i don't think it works that well as a store of value in a society more and more online and if you and i am of the opinion that as we move forward in time more of our life and more of everything will be online digital so i i don't i don't see gold having keeping its it's like venerated status and so it could gold could maybe stay at like 30 trillion but it wouldn't grow i don't i would imagine there's you know something something of that nature because i i do think bitcoin is just a better version of that for an online mediated world i don't know what you guys think about that yeah yeah i agree go and this is not
Speaker 3to say sorry one
Speaker 2one last thing this is not to say bitcoin will succeed but if it does succeed it's around in 10 years and it's successful then it should be i guess at least 1.6 million a coin i don't know it
Speaker 3seems reasonable to me and i i think one of the major catalysts will be like capital flight out of out of countries with unstable governments as the wealth bifurcation intensifies it's it's going to be hard to you know buy gold coins and real estate and have it not be seized by out of control governments so i think that you're already seeing a lot of this in western europe and in canada if if the political situation remains the same for the next 10 years then bitcoin just seems like the most liquid and frictionless way of making your capital mobile which is probably the most underrated aspect of bitcoin is that it's mobile and digital and can exist anywhere in the world with your with your seed phrase in your head so that that would and just demographically young people i think are more interested in things that are that are digital you can buy it with by tapping stuff on your phone you don't need to store it it just seems like like a logical extrapolation of like demographic
Speaker 1trends okay so long-term bitcoin the thesis is intact uh then the question is right now what what is is it actually a good time to buy right now and alex thorn from galaxy has written up a piece on that saying yes and he outlined four reasons for his bullish view to buying bitcoin right now first of all improving technical signals reduced selling pressure the growing currency debasement risks and widespread investor neglect right so bitcoin you know we've got people like these dc's hating it it's been you know dropped by everyone over the last year as the ai trade has has heated up so there's that's the widespread neglect investor neglect angle he noted that bought bitcoin etfs have accumulated another 87 000 btc since the june low and on that note it was pointed out to me that the etf engine has kind of barely run at all this year it's basically flat on the year like the net inflows yet btc is down just seven percent year over year so i mean you could you could argue that that's quite bullish if and when the etf engine turns back on we'll see reflexivity in the positive direction for bitcoin yeah also
Speaker 2when people like michael howell who he's been talking about liquidity draining from the system for 12 to 18 months right he said we've been in a down down cycle of liquidity bitcoin being probably the most liquidity sensitive asset and if we're getting near the bottom of that i as in liquidity is going to start entering re-entering liquidity is going to start re-entering so any price appreciation we've seen thus far in his framework has happened while liquidity has been draining right i think we're like what 100 off the lows where we 50 off the lows i can't remember anyway but we're up we're up while liquidity has been going down pretty good sign that we probably haven't even really seen bitcoin make major moves yet right so it does does feel like we are in the kind of meme meme area thing of like still early so there's that i i also think just from talking with lots of people who still i mean this is the other thing is we're at least the three of us are in such a bubble because we're in the bitcoin and crypto industry everyone we interact with on a daily basis knows about bitcoin has it and thinks it thinks it thinks it's good but still most people don't most people know the word bitcoin but they don't really have it they're still skeptical pretty much everyone i know who's like gen x and higher doesn't have any actually every single person who's gen x and higher doesn't have any bitcoin exposure at all and then a lot of millennials my age i'm a late millennial they don't have it either it's pretty wild so this is this is to say that i'm not a big fan of bitcoin i'm not a big fan of bitcoin i'm not to say that i i think there is a lot of capital that could move into bitcoin on the retail side and this cycle as we've discussed i think the one of the biggest narratives is the institutions are here they're finally here and they will be deploying they are are slowly deploying but it takes them years to kind of move like move the machinery into a sustained phase so i don't know it's it seems very very bullish and i'm not as doomerish as like alex is but i do think that we're in for some money printing in the next couple years i don't see how we don't have that it just doesn't seem possible that we won't have money printing that will be very bullish for bitcoin and it hasn't started yet that's the
Speaker 3thing so yeah not like zimbabwe inflation like a lot of the maxis like to talk about but like a sustained i don't know five six seven percent for a few years here and also like long term uh those gonna say the the wealth transfer from the older generations to the the millennials and gen x's that inherit it i think that's that's another sort of long-term catalyst cooking under under the surface yeah short term i guess i i would be cautious like with with midterms and just i think there's a chance the four-year cycle prophecy plays out here maybe not in terms of a new low but just some kind of scam wick at the end of the year but yeah the the thesis is still intact i think like three years from now we're gonna be a lot higher and thorn made makes really elegant points in that in that post i recommend everyone
Speaker 1read it yeah one other point he made is uh he's he noted that like the sort of renewed enthusiasm some of you might have noticed for the blockchain not bitcoin theme people have been pointing this out more and more like oh yeah like blockchain actually is revolutionary but not bitcoin he pointed out that's i mean that's for anybody who's been in the space long enough that's a familiar sentiment pattern that has accompanied previous market lows so you could take that as a signal
Speaker 2yeah joel weisenthal i think is the one who revitalized that odd lots co-host uh had a newsletter where he talked about that yeah very very interesting yeah all right buy bitcoin not financial there
Speaker 1you go let's wrap it up there gentlemen thank you for another very interesting podcast and i'll see you in the next one bye bye interesting discussion we'll see you next week to on token narratives have a great week everyone you
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