Bitcoin

Person on the street to go out and ask people two questions.

Number one: What is AI? Not, "What do those letters stand for?" What is artificial intelligence? And number two: What is Bitcoin? [laughs] Ask those, ask those two questions, and then watch people go, "Ooh." You know that little circle when, you know, your internet pauses for a moment? Now, you just threw the Bitcoin in there- Yeah ...

as extra confusion, right? Well, it's because it's one of those where people just jump on it and it's like they don't even know what it is.

You know what I mean? They're just, "Oh, we gotta be in the, we gotta be on that." And, and that's what Capitol Hill has been doing.

It complied.

What they sent out the door was their whole customer file, passports and licenses, and verification selfies you take when you open an account, statements with the account numbers, and full transaction history right down to their Bitcoin.

Revolut promises that their systems were never touched and your money is fine, but it won't say how many customers and it won't say the agency.

Honestly, this is the oldest trick in the book.

So this podcast was, um, they asked 40 millionaires what they regret most, and it was really interesting.

So it, it actually became less about, like, a lot of it for that demographic was, like, selling their Bitcoin or pulling their money out of an investment or something, right? And I think what's quite interesting about specifically investing is that it's very easy to regret because of one thing, which is that you can see what would've happened.

So with most things you're like, "You know what? If I started that business, maybe it would've been successful, but maybe I would've failed." So it's kind of...

Like, you know, you can sit with that regret slightly easier.

Or, like, if you're like, "Oh, I wish I'd started commit six at the start of the year," but you can always convince yourself that would've been another thing that I started and didn't work anyway, right? So you don't, you don't know the outcome.

Whereas with investing, if you're like, "Oh, if I'd only bought Bitcoin 10, 10 years ago when I said I was gonna do it and held it instead of selling it, the- I know exactly how much money I'd have right now." So there's, like, a different level of regret to that.

But what it came onto, and one thing that I thought was, like, a really interesting frame for this, is if you do feel regret, which is one of the worst feelings that you can feel, you need to identify whether you can still do something about it, in which case do something about it, right? If you're like, "Do you know what? I really regret getting out of shape and s- quitting that gym membership and giving up on my diet," cool.

You can still do something about that.

It's absolutely impossible.

But I can really confidently say that if somebody buys Bitcoin today, within the next 18 months, you're gonna be able to sell that for three times as much money.

I agree.

Why are we still here? Just to suffer?

It's still incredibly helpful and definitely something people should strive to do, but it's not a miracle worker.

It can only work with what you put into it.

Even still, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin or crypto is the answer to getting rich.

It's really fallacy to use the historical growth rates of stuff like crypto and Bitcoin, uh, when they've gone from obscurity to more mainstream adoption, that that, to some degree, is going to repeat itself into the future to a point where it's going to elevate an entire middle class to, uh, the kind of wealth that these people are probably alluding to.

And then, look, I think the final piece of the puzzle, and I'd be interested in your views here, but it feels like we're coming up to the final boss in the macro level as well.

If we start to see noises, it sounds a little bit like yield curve control, which probably plays into Bitcoin's hands as well.

So I think if you look across the sector from a DeFi perspective, across to AI functionality and the role crypto can play there, and even to the head of the table, Bitcoin, I think things look pretty good.

Yeah, and just the layer ones in general is the infrastructure layer to this whole thing, if you don't overthink it again.

It's like a pretty straightforward bet.

And you see massive inflows across, you know, across risk assets.

The other thing I do to head check that is I look at the log channel of

Bitcoin versus NASDAQ.

Very excited to have this conversation because we've got a ton to get into.

There's clarity in Bitcoin policy, as well as what's happened with the cold card and some of the recovered funds and what that means kind of going forward.

But before any of that, I actually wanted to start off talking a little bit about AI because you've been spending a lot of time in the space.

Over the weekend, we had Dario Amodei from Anthropic, Elon Musk, Sam Altman all came out saying, hey, we need to slow down.

It's funny.

One thing that just immediately jumped out at me was one shot as a species.

And it's fascinating how much I feel like there's this overlap between Bitcoin and AI, particularly even the people that are interested in it.

I don't know if we're just people that are always going to be kind of innovators and willing to take on new technologies, but I just see that parallel.

"'I've been in this very situation where I had the chance to do something and we avoided doing it.

That thing later cost me in the end.'" I'll share my Bitcoin experience once again.

I was invited to an event called Bitcoin Day.

They had expert speakers all day talking about this new thing everybody was excited about.

Now, it was not brand new.

I heard what happened.

If he wasn't personally dunking the guy's head in water asking for his Bitcoin codes, then he was outside of it or he used to hang out there.

It's like, I don't know.

I mean, I felt like I...

Yeah.

Bring us the tea, Brooks, please.

At one point he goes, did you even ever sell a Bitcoin? He goes, show us your Coinbase.

And Charlie goes, you want to see Coinbase and see how many transactions? He goes, what are you on the Bitcoin? I forget what he said.

Hey, a lot of dealers are talking about AI like it's new, and it's not.

And the fact that you're just jumping in right now, perhaps in this moment, is like me saying, you know what? I think I'm going to jump into this whole Bitcoin thing.

10 years too late.

So I'm saying if you don't jump into it now, if you don't take the time to understand it, to have a thoughtful approach, to build it intelligently, to have experts around you help you do this, and you just start throwing together, Disparate systems with AI.