Do you think it makes sense?

Well, no, absolutely.

Look, yes.

Here's the thing.

Digital technology, blockchain technology, stablecoins, it's better.

It's better, right? So if you read the Bitcoin white paper, which many people have, in the back, there are footnotes.

And in the footnotes, three of them list Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber, who were professors out of Stanford.

Same

But, um, to have a look into our future maybe, what do you think how might Bitcoin influence our society, our freedom, or our approach to freedom, our options to live more freely?

Okay, now I remember where I was going 'cause you asked that question before, and, and it's perfect.

So education and Bitcoin are inextricably linked in this regard, right? The way it works now, the education system prepares kids to be debt slaves.

You go to work, you're paid in money that then is devalued, okay, through inflation, this thing that's supposed to be good for you.

Why would a system that takes half of my purchasing power over a 30-year period be good for me? There's, there's in no planet is that a good idea.

But that's what they've sold us, and, and it was an ingenious invention, right? And so from the, the Knights Templar and the Order of Christ through the Medicis to the Rothschilds The big change was in 1607 with the formation of the Netherlands Central Bank by the Rothschild clan.

And so here's a crazy stat.

Yeah.

And you said that to me six years ago.

Well, and again, because it's one of my favorite things to tweet.

It's just math.

I mean, it's literally just math.

And the mathematics of networks are super easy.

And you should have Tim Peterson come on the show and talk about the Metcalfe's Law model that he built.

And look, the guy who wrote it down the very first time back in 2013 and has never touched it, and that chart's been going around this week, it's amazing.

That's the most beautiful song economically that's ever been Oh, my God.

I appreciate that.

And so I, I think the, um, the issue is where do we go from here, or, or, or quo vadis, right? Um, to use the little Latin that no one does.

And if you think about adoption of any technology, it always starts on the fringe, right? Who were the first user of pagers? Drug dealers.

Who were the first users of the internet? Porn.

How about Bitcoin? Drug dealers.

And it, it makes sense.

Why? Because the fringe is excluded from using the good stuff, right? If you sell cannabis, you can't get a normal banking account, so you have to find a better way to, to, uh, do business.

Can Bitcoin, in your opinion, continue to see normative appreciation throughout its bull cycles, uh, where the 10-year Treasury yields stay above 5%? Or do you think that rallies look a little bit different until that situation gets figured out?

When you look at this chart, How do you feel? Have we bottomed? Are we now in the beginning of the new cycle? How do you feel about the

charts? Look, it's so funny.

This debate on four-year cycle, not four-year cycle.

I just saw this morning one of my faves.

He was ranting about how the four-year cycle guys are all wrong.

like are you joking i mean we peaked exactly on the day of the four-year cycle and we went down now yes we went down less because there's less leverage in the system and his point was well we've already bottomed michael but you don't know that we've already bottomed i mean maybe we already bottomed the problem i have generally speaking i look at the charts i look at the the volume data it looks pretty good except for one thing.

We got super, super overbought, like really overbought a week ago in that big short squeeze, maybe it was two weeks ago.

What does that actually mean? What's actually going on?

It went down to like 97 cents.

I mean, look, here's...

Provably false, whatever, and [scoffs] "I named it after myself, the Genius Act." Um, look, yes, the Genius Act is, uh, is a, is a way to preserve the Ponzi for a while longer, right? In fact, this goes back to, you know, you and I have talked about this before, that, and, you know, maybe the lights will go off, 'cause last time I talked about this, you know, my lights went off.

People thought I got, you know, abducted by the black hats.

I mean, it's a non-zero probability.

I'm not saying it's true, but it's a non-zero probability that Bitcoin was created by the NSA and the CIA as a means to perpetuate the Ponzi.

Like, think about it.

Opposite

But before doing that, I think since everyone is talking about these, notably SpaceX most recently, but everything being sucked into semiconductors, AI, I just wanna get your read on, like, what do you perceive is happening there? Um, uh, and-

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's two things.

It's, it's the greatest bubble in the history of markets, and that's saying something 'cause we've, we've had some big bubbles back to South Sea Comp- I mean, uh, um, East whatever it was called, the, the, the, the big, uh, trading company in, in the UK.

Um, South Sea Trading.

Anyway, I can't remember the name of it.

Anyway, but we had, we had that.

We had, um, uh, you know, the, the Nifty Fifty in the six- in the late '60s.

And so I'm, I'm curious if you kind of find Bitcoin and digital assets in competition with the AI, with the space, with the frontier type of technologies from a capital allocation perspective? Or do you s- do you think that people-

My god

And I almost replied, "Well, no, no you're not," 'cause we're not g- But here's the thing.

I don't, I don't claim to have any particular knowledge, but here's the thing.

We are in crypto winter.

We're about halfway through.

I think it ends in September, October.

But I actually am willing to say that absent an unraveling of margin, which I'll come back to in a second, we have seen the bottom.

... what you're talking about too, I think, you know-

We'll say 60, right?

Because it's 71K, right? Oh my God, it's going to zero.

Like, what do you mean it's going to zero? And based on, well, it was 126 and now it's 71.

Like, right.

But a year ago, it was 75.

And two years ago, it was 45.

And so if, and again, we've talked about this, is the difference between an accumulation pattern and a distribution pattern.

Like you get the, first you get the price capitulation, then you shake everyone out, not by price going lower, but by making them think it's never going to go up again because it's been a long time.

I mean, I don't think that that has anything to do with people actually adopting Circle or using stablecoins.

I think if you looked at the actual data, I don't know if it was yesterday or the day before, or even the day before that, but we set a new record for USDC transactions.

I mean, it was an unbelievable number.

And look, once you use a stable coin, I would say, you know, once you use it on a Sunday morning in your pajamas, You're like, oh my God, this is so much better than cash.

I mean, I'm trying to send a wire, again, old school, a wire to a Cayman-based fund, right? Hedge funds have Cayman funds.

And first of all, they said, well, I need the SWIFT code.

Like, oh my God.

As a VC, obviously, who's focused in this space, what's actually interesting to you right now?

What would you say that you saw that surprised you? What would you say that you saw that you were expecting and anything in between?

Yeah, so I love the fact that you use the word cycle.

I still believe in the cycle.

There's a whole bunch of people out there that are like, no, the cycle's dead.

I'm like, okay.

I mean, for me personally, There's all these people arguing kind of past each other.

They're not really listening to what the other one is saying.

It's it's how do you how do you represent yourself in terms of the greater network of value that's being transacted and stored and recorded over time? And, you know, and that is that is the value,

So yes, the you're right.

Yeah.

And, and so I'm super excited and we're participating in this and, and it's, and, and I'm, you know, Mike, is one of the best CEOs I've ever met, ever backed.

I'm super lucky, right? I have the greatest job in the world.

I talk to the smartest people in the world and give them money.

It's like super fun.

And I don't have to be smart.

and they got their

Yeah, look, I mean,

there is not a human...

Well, actually, there's one other.

She's the second worst face of evil on the planet.

Augustine Carstens or whatever his name is, is the worst.

But Christine has always been the face of evil.

I mean, she's been doing bad stuff for a long time.

Yeah.

Sure.

And it doesn't mean gold is bad, but just like gold beats silver.

Remember in the early days, 1900s, 1920s, you had things called silver certificates.

Like if you had a piece of paper money, it wasn't like today where it says in God we trust and it's worth nothing.

Like if you gave that to the government, they give you nothing, right? You don't get gold.

You don't get silver.

You don't get tax receipts.

We aren't in everything bubble.

Right.

We have a really great year up 140%.

Yeah.

People got a lot of taxes.

So we're seeing that couple.

So we got all of these things and we do this.

So if you go back to the 21 cycle, this happened.

fantastic