Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset.

We are spending like drunken sailors.

Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand.

If you want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert.

That currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable.

Welcome back to scarce Assets from on Ramp Institutional.

I just sat down with Ovik Roy, Chairman of Free OP, senior advisor to BPI and now on the Board of Strife, to answer a simple question with trillion dollar consequences.

What happens to Bitcoin when the US math stops working?

We dig into why the fiscal clock likely runs out in the next 10 to 20 years.

Why then they fight you is a policy risk phase, not a meme.

And the two defenses that actually matter, broad ownership across voters and institutions, and resilient on ramps in custody that cannot be switched off.

In the latter part of the conversation, we dug into the ETFs and Bitcoin treasury companies, how he thinks about those versus direct ownership of the asset, and why he's excited about the opportunity to join Strive.

At On Ramp Institutional we help serious Bitcoin investors such as family offices, institutions and corporates get it right the first time.

Our multi institution custody removes single points of failure with independent key holders in multi jurisdiction coverage, then layers in inheritance planning, insurance and white glove onboarding.

So security does not come at the expense of simplicity.

If your current exposure is only via spot ETFs and you want a more direct and conservative foundation or you're starting from zero and need an investment committee ready framework, we can help through direct solutions to Bitcoin or through the On Ramp Bitcoin Trust.

If your organization is evaluating Bitcoin or ready to scale or reevaluate an allocation, let's talk.

You can e-mail me Jackson at on rampbitcoin.com or you can book a consultation on rampbitcoin.com.

Welcome back to scarce assets.

This week we have ovic Roy Ovic.

It's great to have you on the show.

Looking forward to this conversation.

Just for those who are not familiar with your background, you're the Co founder and chairman at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity or Free OP.

You're also a senior advisor at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and more recently a board member at Strive, among many other things.

But Ovic, great to have you on the show.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing great Jax and it's been it's been a lively couple of days here.

We're recording this the the day after Strive listed or it's for traded.

It had its first trading day as a combined company.

So, but it's been exciting times to strive.

We're looking forward to building the next Grape Bitcoin Treasure company.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about that and congratulations to you and the team.

Thanks.

I think a nice place to start just to level set is on the fiscal situation here in the United States.

I think listeners of the show are certainly familiar that there are a lot of problems.

And as you stated back in 2021, there is a reckoning coming.

And then more recently you published a piece in the Satoshi papers titled And then They Fight Us.

And really the thesis, I'll, I'll let you let you share more.

But the thesis behind that is that we're kind of on a path, it seems to be over the next two decades or so, right, is kind of your analysis.

But if we don't get our house in order, we have a pretty dire situation on our hands in the United States in particular, let alone other countries as well, are all kind of facing these mounting levels of sovereign debt.

So if you could just paint a picture in terms of when you first started to get concerned or paying more attention to the fiscal situation here in the United States.

And I'd be curious before jumping into those reports you've more recently published, just when you first started paying attention, got concerned and you know, over the years how things progressed.

Was it kind of in line with your expectations?

Was it worse, better than you know, when you initially sort of peeling back layers of the onion here?

Well, I've been concerned about the federal debt for, gosh, probably my entire life.

I mean, I, I remember in the 80s hearing lectures about how terrible the federal debt was back when it was, you know, like $100 billion or a couple $100 billion or something like that.

So we're now at 37 trillion or so and it's, things are only getting worse.

So I think that that's certainly problematic.

And in fact, that my concern about the federal debt is really what has driven a lot of my post Wall Street professional life.

So I I was an institutional investor from 2001 to 2012 or so and didn't mean to drop out of that career.

I was having a good time in on Wall Street, but I got asked to to be Mitt Romney's healthcare advisor when he ran for president 2012.

And that was my first kind of entree into being very actively involved in trying to solve these problems, not just complain about them, but say, OK, like, how would we actually reduce the federal deficit?

Well, in the US context, this isn't necessarily true in other countries.

But in the US, the big driver of our federal deficit is federal health care spending because we have an extremely poorly designed healthcare system, particularly the government run parts of it, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and the like.

And we're just spending more and more on on those programs every year.

And we can't seem to fix them because everybody gets mad if you try to do anything to change healthcare.

So it's been a hard problem with.

So that's what got me into public policy was trying to fix that.

It was around the same time that I got into Bitcoin because, you know, at first, actually I looked at Bitcoin as, hey, it's a more efficient form of payment.

That's what, you know, intrigued me.

But it was very clear to me very quickly that it was, you know, digital gold and something I'd paid attention to from the beginning.

I was fortunate that from the launch of the white paper, I had friends who were in the Austrian econ ecosystem who had alerted me to Bitcoin.

But I just thought, you know, boy, this is too complicated.

I have to code a wallet and I don't have time to deal with any of this stuff.

But then Mal Cox blew up and, and there was a, there was an opportunity to get in a low price and I thought, OK, this is, I got to figure this out now.

Otherwise shame on me.

So that's when I started get involved Bitcoin and the two things kind of went in parallel.

I, I got more and more involved in trying to solve the federal deficit at the, at the presidential campaign level and also in terms of working with members of Congress in the White House.

And I got more involved in, in Bitcoin as well.

And so that that culminated in 2021.

I wrote this paper that you alluded to called Bitcoin in the Fiscal Reckoning, which was published in National affairs, which is a major quarterly policy journalist published in Washington.

And I believe it was the first major treatment of Bitcoin in a mainstream public policy journal.

And my argument at that time in 2021 was, look, you in Washington who think that Bitcoin is a passing fad.

It's not a passing fad For these reasons related to the federal debt getting worse and worse and the the break in 1971 that really freed the dollar from any connection to gold.

And on the flip side, I was trying to share with Bitcoiners that actually the government can make your life hard.

There was an attitude at the time which may seem, you know, quaint or antiquated now, but at the time the typical Bitcoin would be like, who cares what the government has to say about Bitcoin?

They can't touch us.

We're a censorship resistant, permissionless network.

And that's true.

But if you want Bitcoin to be useful to everyone, especially in the context of payments, then actually the government can do a lot to make Bitcoin harder to use because the Bitcoin, the government controls the rails between the US dollar and Bitcoin, Fiat currencies in general in Bitcoin.

And so people can't buy Bitcoin with their U.S.

dollars if the government shuts that down, for example.

And so in that article in 21, I argued that, and this was, I think one of the first arguments around this are proposing a Bitcoin reserve, number one, banning CBDC, central bank digital currencies, which are a way for the government to block that dollar to Bitcoin rail.

And then also legalizing exchange traded funds, which at the time were not legal.

So we got two out of three.

We haven't banned CBDC's, but we have this executive order on the Bitcoin reserve and we've legalized the ETFs And obviously we've seen a lot of growth and demand for Bitcoin as a result of that over the last 12/12/18 months.

So that's been great.

But the second paper, the Satoshi paper article that you mentioned that that I that's the chapter of this book called then they Fight you.

And we also have it as a standalone article on the free OP web page.

And the title of that is 3 scenarios of how AUS fiscal crisis could harm ordinary Americans.

But if you Google free OP, then they fight you if it comes up.

And and the point of this article was in a sense to be a sequel to that first one and and it was to think through.

OK, so the 2021 article was about seeing around the corner of and trying to get Bitcoiners to understand that actually there are Washington does matter to us If we want Bitcoin to be as useful as we believe it to be and also if we want to make Bitcoin resilient to government intervention in the future.

There are a couple things we need to do, and I listed those earlier.

This, the second article takes the next step, which is OK.

That article is more about the present day, but what about in the future?

So we all think federal debts getting worse.

I think if you're a typical Bitcoiner, you, you are convinced that this problem is, is going to get worse and worse and not better.

And at some point it all comes crashing down.

And, and a lot of times Bitcoiners like, hey, this is going to be great.

You know, the dollar will collapse and my Bitcoin will be worth millions and you know, of dollars and that, and that's going to be great.

I'm going to retire with my umbrella, umbrella cocktail drink, pink cocktail drink on a beach somewhere, and everything's going to be great.

And the point I'm trying to make in this article is be careful what you wish for.

Because when that fiscal crisis really does happen and there's a failure in the bond market and the US government is flailing around, try to figure out how do we stop the bleeding away from the US dollar?

Who do you think they're going to go after?

They're going to go after Bitcoin and Bitcoiners specifically.

One of the charts I have in the article is that if you look at wealth inequality in Fiat terms, something like, and I'll pull it up so I don't misquote the actual numbers.

But if you actually say, OK, what's the distribution of of wealth?

You know, like the old Occupy Wall Street people used to say, hey, we are the 99% and we hate the 1%.

Well, actually the top 1% of households own about 27% of the US dollar denominated wealth in America, which you know is it's been, it's increased a little bit over the last 10-15 years, but that's pretty much where it's been.

Now if you look at Bitcoin, the top 1% of holders own something like 99.9% of all Bitcoin.

And so that creates a target for crackdown and democracy.

The 99.9% have votes and the 1% of Bitcoiners have votes too, but not very many, right?

So what's going to happen in that crackdown?

And how do we make Bitcoin resilient to that crackdown in the future?

That's the topic of the second.

Article, I love it.

Thank you for that introduction.

That was excellent.

If we go back before going forward, you mentioned that really your entire life you've been paying attention to the federal debt and you mentioned at that time a couple $100 billion of federal debt compared to 37 trillion today.

And so I'm really curious to hear because you said it in your piece, it may be another 20 years or so before this fiscal reckoning happens.

And so why do these things tend to play out so much longer than maybe people expect?

Because where I'm coming from in this question is post great financial crisis and all the intervention from the Federal Reserve and global central banks, as I understand it, there was a lot of concern about runaway inflation because of all this, the liquidity that was going to be injected.

But we saw that NASA price is not the real economy.

Then comes COVID and considerable amount of coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities and we've seen a lot of inflation post 2020, but we still haven't really hit that reckoning point yet that you have described.

So I'd be curious to hear just over your career, why, what have you learned that informs why this actually takes longer to play out than many expect?

And why is it 20 years in terms of your your look forward period?

Yeah, it's a really important question, Jackson.

And, and this is something that I do talk about in the the first article, the Bitcoin US fiscal reckoning piece, because it's really important.

A lot of people have been out there because it would be Cassandra's predicting doom and gloom about the deficit and the debt.

And it hasn't exactly happened yet.

We haven't seen some complete collapse.

And so that means a lot of people, a lot of ordinary Americans and most mainstream economists say, well, is the debt really that big of a deal, especially in a country like the US that can borrow in its own currency?

That's the argument you hear from the modern modern monetary theorist, for example.

Well, we can borrow in our own currency, and so what's the big deal?

And in the article, I, I make several arguments as to why that crisis has not yet occurred.

1 is that the US dollar, as expressed through Treasury securities, is the most liquid securities market in the world.

And people like that, people like to hold treasuries because I know that if I buy literally like I could buy a, you know, ten, $10 billion of treasuries and not really move the market because it's such a big market, because there's so much debt.

In fact, in the brief period in the late 90s when we had a budget surplus, that was the big concern that, oh gosh, if we're going to retire all this debt, then the treasury markets won't be as liquid.

What are we going to do then, right?

I wish we had that problem again, but unfortunately we don't.

But but that's one, one big thing is that like compared to other countries, like if you want to buy German sovereign debt or French sovereign debt or British sovereign debt, those are relatively much smaller economies.

And so there's just not as much of that debt circulating.

So if you need to own a cash like instrument, if you're a hedge fund or a bank or some other large institution or a government, Treasuries are a great instrument to hold because they're so liquid.

So that creates A bias towards holding if there's an artificially increased demand for U.S.

Treasuries because of that, which means the US can borrow more cheaply and the same thing.

There's another piece of it which is really important, which is that there are actually international and domestic financial regulations which actually say to banks that if you want us to consider you a less risky bank from regulatory standpoint, the way you're going to convince us that you're less risky is by holding a quote UN quote risk free asset, which is Treasury securities.

So a lot of banking regulations are basically designed to say if you own U.S.

Treasuries, we'll consider you less risky.

If you own other kinds of bonds or particularly if you own equities, we're going to consider you more risky.

And so banks say, OK, if I can make 4 or 5% on my treasuries, I'll do that because that's considered a risk free asset, allows me to lend out more of my assets and make more money.

So the regulations both again, domestically and internationally, the the most important international banking regulations called the Basel 3 Accord.

These regulations basically pressure banks, give them an EC powerful economic and incentive to own a lot of treasuries.

And there are a bunch of other reasons too, but those are the two most important as to why why institutions own treasuries.

The third most important arguably is that just there's this perception.

Hey, US is the biggest kid on the block.

Treasuries have been a safe investment for decades upon decades and particularly since World War 2.

So surely the US will never Welch on its deaths.

Surely the US is, you know, the the best country in terms of being the most reliable borrower.

But is that going to be true in the future?

And that's where a lot of the stuff around the federal debt starts to play out.

And one of the one of the charts I have actually, I think it's the first chart in the new paper, Then They Fight you is about this.

It's that actually one thing you'll often hear quoted in in commentary in in reports is, well, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the federal debt will reach such and such percentage of GDP by such and such a year.

So those are the official government projections that you'll see most people quote in their in their articles.

But what people don't do is they don't dig into those CBO estimates, because if you dig into the CBO estimates, they're actually wildly optimistic.

The CBO projects that in in 20 years, the debt to GDP ratio will be about 200%, but it'll actually be more likely to be around 600% if you actually just have a more realistic view of how much the debt is going to get worse over time.

How much economic growth there will be?

So the CBO projects a really robust amount of economic growth forever, 3.6% GDP growth forever, which is basically crazy.

That's like 1980s, nineteen 90s level economic growth we have.

We don't actually have that now, but they're projecting we'll have that forever.

And they also project that we'll be able to borrow money at 4 1/2 to 5% basically forever.

And that's not going to happen when the federal debts at 60-70 a $100 trillion, we're not going to be able to borrow money at 4 1/2% and the economy is not going to grow at 3.6%.

So if you just say the economy is growing at 3% and you have a more realistic view, a slightly more realistic view on interest rates, the debt to GDP ratio explodes.

And so my analysis in this paper is that we have no more than 20 years before the the real debt crisis will happen again.

And that makes me may make me sound like the Cassandra's of the past, but we are literally running out of other people's money.

Well, I do think it makes you sound very balanced and measured, especially when you compare to the number of people who have been kind of in that doom and gloom camp for a number of years now.

I feel like going on Twitter or X or many different circles where there's a lot of thought around Bitcoin and just the broader macro fiscal implications of the US economy.

There's a lot of people who are telling you are saying that the the crisis is around the corner.

So I think by having a horizon of about 20 years, you're probably in the more conservative camp.

And I think that's, you know, very reasonable and it's refreshing to hear a perspective that isn't telling, you know, the, the dollar collapses tomorrow, right?

Or the dollar collapses in this next cycle, whatever it may be.

And I would love to hear, you know, going back into some of the predictions or not even predictions, but prerequisites you, you had mentioned around the Bitcoin or the strategic Bitcoin reserve, the ETFs being approved and we haven't seen yet the CBDC's being banned outright.

But on the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, would love to hear your thoughts, particularly this year, the Trump administration, their embrace of Bitcoin and crypto.

I think there is.

Some positive and some negative, but I would love to hear what your perspective is on the current standing Bitcoin strategic reserve compared to the digital digital asset stockpile.

What does that tell us about the administration's view on Bitcoin versus the rest of the space?

And then the second part of that question would be if we actually did see the Bitcoin Act passed at some point and we could talk about when that may happen.

Does accumulation of Bitcoin by the US government signal strength to the rest of the world, or does it signal desperation and weakness and potentially accelerate the fiscal reckoning that you've mentioned?

So first, just on this 20 year point, let me just say that it could be sooner, right?

I, I, I, it's, I think we have at most 20 years.

It's probably somewhere between 10 and 20.

You just never know when, when, when these things are going to happen.

It's the old gradually then suddenly added.

But the, but the, the likelihood that we get past 20 years is just very, very low because you literally do run out of other people's money.

There's about $400 trillion of wealth in the world and only so much of that's going to be parked in Treasury security.

So at a certain point, you just literally run out of available money to borrow from the rest of the world.

And, and, and 20 years may seem like a long time, but you know, I have young children.

You're about to have a kid.

You know, let's say, let's take your example like you're about to have a kid.

We're talking about your child's entire adult life is going to be the experience of living in a country that's bankrupt.

And I don't mean just like technically bankrupt in the sense you could say we're bankrupt today, but I mean in the sense that if people won't lend you money, you really are bankrupt, right?

That's going to be your your child's entire adult life, if I'm right.

And so that's kind of a terrifying, terrifying thing to think about.

And, and it's why I've, I've spent so much of my career trying to trying to solve these problems on the policy level.

And it's really hard now to your, to your most more recent question about about the Bitcoin strategic reserve.

The reason why I proposed it in 2021 was was not so much because I, I, I wanted that to be a positive engine of Bitcoin demand to drive up the price.

I mean, that's obviously it wouldn't hurt, but it was more that it's more the signalling of if, if the government thinks that this is an asset that it can hold to protect its long term balance sheet, then that's a signal to ordinary people that they can feel the same way.

It also creates a, a great deal of policy, like it creates an interest for the federal government, right?

So like if, if the, if the government owns Bitcoin and that Bitcoin goes up and becomes a, a meaningful part of the, of the government's balance sheet over time.

And the government's less likely to blow Bitcoin up because it knows that that would be hurting.

It's it would be cutting up its nose to spite its face.

And so those were though that was my thought process in 2021.

Now what, how does that proposal or that idea square with what's happened since?

So what I proposed was actually something I thought I thought was pretty crazy at the time, but also modest, which was what if the US government just took 10% of its gold holdings and converted them to Bitcoin?

So that way all the people who think Bitcoin is stupid, they wouldn't be offended because the people who think Bitcoin is stupid tend to think gold is stupid too.

So, you know, if I'm taking 10% of my gold and turning into Bitcoin, who really cares?

It's not that big of a deal.

But it starts that ball rolling downhill.

What the Trump administration proposed and has tried to execute on was, first of all, let's take the Bitcoin we already hold and stop selling it.

And then secondly, let's in a fiscally neutral way, think about ways to acquire more Bitcoin.

Now, as your, many of your listeners will know, as, as the US government has tried to figure out how much Bitcoin it actually holds, the number that they've come up with is a lot lower than what people thought it was.

And so the government doesn't actually own a lot of Bitcoin.

It's, it's great that they're not going to sell it.

It's possible that the Biden administration in its last few months dumped a lot of the Bitcoin.

There were certainly rumors to that effect, excuse me, in late 2020 that that's what the Biden administration was doing.

So that may be why the US government doesn't hold as much Bitcoin as it it may once have.

And in terms of acquiring new Bitcoin, they still haven't figured out exactly how they're going to do that.

As far as I know, though there's they're considering various strategies.

So we don't really know where where things stand though again, I think it's certainly an amazing encouraging sign that the US government wants to hold Bitcoin.

And that certainly drove the big rally in Bitcoin in 2020, the possibility that there would be a Bitcoin strategic reserve in in in 2021 thereafter.

So I think it's encouraging.

But to go back to what we started with a little bit, I would argue that the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies from a standpoint of the accumulation of Bitcoin is going to be much more significant in the long term, right?

The government will own a certain amount of Bitcoin and that's great, but the private sector has a lot more capital to deploy for that purpose.

And so if, if Bitcoin treasury companies continue to to proliferate and have some success, then that's going to be the biggest driver of demand for institutional demand for Bitcoin, not governments, though we are seeing again, other governments, not just the US acquire Bitcoin.

Yeah.

There are a lot of points in there that we could certainly go deeper on.

One thing that you rightfully pointed out back in 2021 and you just mentioned in this conversation is it's really at the end of the day for Bitcoin to succeed is ultimately you want the most amount of incentives to be aligned for Bitcoin in favor of Bitcoin for the long term.

And So what I think is happening both in the public and private sector is we are seeing a favorability shift toward Bitcoin and ultimately that is a good thing.

Not to say we put our guard down as an industry and put ourselves in a very vulnerable position when that reckoning happens.

But I do think there are encouraging points, particularly, you know, you mentioned the Bitcoin treasury companies.

If you just take a more broader scope on Wall Street and the general interest in Bitcoin and digital assets today versus five years ago, that's incredibly encouraging.

And I think there is a recognition, Larry Fink being an obvious one.

But when you have the ETF product being live for 18 months and that's the that surpassed their S&P 500 ETF in terms of revenue for the firm, still one product and you know a firm that offers likely thousands of products.

But I think you and I both agree, when you look at the success of the Bitcoin ETFs relative to any ETF ever launched, it's undeniable that there's a lot of appetite there from institutional investors like hedge funds to registered investment advisors who, you know, their clients are asking them questions about Bitcoin and they need to be educated on it.

Now to then, of course, retail investors that maybe didn't feel comfortable opening a Coinbase or a River account or holding their own keys, but they feel comfortable with, you know, purchasing 1 to 5 to 10% of their portfolio and Bitcoin ETFs.

And so I do think what's encouraging is on the private side with the financialization of Bitcoin, you're getting a lot more Bitcoin in people's portfolios and you're getting firms that are well aligned to Bitcoin success because it's increasing the revenue that they're, you know, it's increasing their top of line revenue as a business.

On the flip side, in the public public sector, I think as well just by having the Trump administration, of course, the Trump family is very involved in a number of different initiatives within Bitcoin.

And I think as that broadens out with policy makers in all different States and, you know, in Congress, I ultimately think that maybe we will be in.

I don't want again to put our guard down.

But I think we may be in a little bit more of a favorable position in the sense that if we get the hands of Bitcoin into enough people and they have it in their business or they have it in their personal life in some way, they may be less inclined to attack it when that reckoning comes.

What are your thoughts there?

Completely agree and this is one of the takeaways of of my paper is that we have to do 2 things in order to protect Bitcoin from the potential crackdown to come when the debt crisis really happens in 20 years or whatever that is.

The first is ideally as many Americans as possible have to have an economic stake in Bitcoin, whether that's owning Bitcoin directly through self custody, something like on ramp, something like an ETF, something like a Bitcoin treasury company or just in the S&P 500.

Having enough of Bitcoin related companies in the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ 100 or whatever index you have in your 401K that cracking down on Bitcoin will will be unpopular.

So that's, you know, the most important thing we can do to protect Bitcoin.

Also, I suppose the more politicians hold Bitcoin, the more they'll be sensitive to that as well.

Hit them where it hurts.

Out of self-interest standpoint.

That's one bucket.

I'd say the other bucket is can we make the exchange of U.S.

dollars to Bitcoin resilient from crackdown?

Like again right now we depend on government permission rails for U.S.

dollars to be exchanged for Bitcoin.

What if there was a way to, in a decentralized peer-to-peer way, exchange USD for Bitcoin?

There are lots of people working on this, but there is no robust, time tested, proven solution to that problem today.

And one of the things I, I really talk about in my piece and certainly have emphasized in my interviews about the piece, is that if you're a Bitcoin technologist, a developer, work on that problem.

Because if you can solve the problem of how to exchange U.S.

dollars or stable coins for Bitcoin in a decentralized, peer-to-peer censorship resistant way, then the crackdown won't happen because the government will know the crackdown is not possible.

If you make the crackdown impossible or infeasible because dollars can flow to Bitcoin online, then the crackdown is unlikely to happen.

And the government realize, well, we can't just engage in capital controls Venezuela style to prevent people from fleeing to Bitcoin.

We're going to have to get our own house in order.

And that is the the policy that will or the the technological advance that will do the most to encourage the US to get its fiscal house in order.

That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

That seems to be one of the bigger gaps this industry currently has is there is a lot of depending on the existing financial rails to access the asset, which ultimately the Bitcoin ethos is you don't trust, you verify, it's permissionless.

But if we take a pragmatic and realistic view at the industry, pretty much everyone outside of maybe people who you know, get cash and bring it to a Bitcoin ATM and buy non KYC Bitcoin, Everyone is pretty much accessing the legacy there, the traditional financial U.S.

dollar based financial system to purchase their Bitcoin.

And that's only exacerbated by that there's even more layers of counterparty involvement if you're purchasing a Bitcoin ETF or you're purchasing Bitcoin treasury companies.

Not to say there's anything wrong with that.

I think that's all great for adoption, but it just kind of there's a gradient here in terms of the level of Bitcoin ownership and also counterparty exposure that you're taking on the other thing too, going back 100 years to Executive Order 61-O2, I don't know how I haven't totally validated or verified the number, but I did see something before about 25% of private, privately owned gold was actually confiscated by the US government.

So about 3/4 of people were able to protect their gold that they held privately.

And the 25% that was confiscated were really kind of already in the coffers of of the government.

They were very close to the political apparatus, maybe held in certain banks that were able to easily turn over the asset.

Whereas one of the benefits, of course, of Bitcoin is you can manage it yourself in self custody.

But there's also to talk about like where I approach this as in our businesses, there's really a spectrum, right?

Because you have the people who hold Bitcoin self custody today, but then you have everyone who wants access to Bitcoin.

And if you take about 100 people who want access to Bitcoin, probably 99 of them are going to end up in the ETFs and one of them ends up in self custody or some sort of, you know, sovereign way of owning Bitcoin.

And so I do think that there's, there's kind of a call in my, a call to action in my mind, if people who want to continue to go down the path of education, just understanding the level of counterparty risk involved.

And ultimately Bitcoin ownership is always about assessing trade-offs, right?

Because if you, if you ascribe a higher risk or higher likelihood of a 61-O2 attack, then you certainly want to have Bitcoin in self custody.

But if you're more worried about your own ability to manage your own keys or your, you passing away and your wife not being able to figure this out for your family, then for in a lot of cases, something like what we do at on Ramp or Bitcoin ETFs really fill that void.

I mean, I've heard a number of stories of people who've owned Bitcoin for a decade, they've cashed out part of their position just because they don't want to be subject of physical violence and threats to their family or they don't want to have that risk of an inheritance gap.

And so it's easier to cash out part of a position and own an ETF.

And so I share this just because I, I 100% agree with you as an industry, there's, there are these different types of risks we need to be thinking about.

There's the the dependency in terms of accessing Bitcoin from a a purchasing perspective, but then also from a custodial perspective, thinking through different ways to manage the asset long term that may mitigate some of these risks.

Yeah, you know, look there as, as you know, there are purists in the Bitcoin community who would argue that anything short of self custody is is is evil or contrary to the the ethos of Bitcoin.

And it's easier for maybe a 27 year old childless guy to say that than somebody with kids, somebody who's getting up there in age, you know, you're like, how am I going to make all this work?

And collaborative custody is obviously a great Ave.

for addressing some of those concerns because you, you have ways of, of making sure that, you know, if you get hit, if I get hit by a bus or you get hit by a bus, there's somebody who can walk somebody through how to, how to retrieve the Bitcoin.

But and, and ETFs and other instruments like Bitcoin treasury companies are another source of in a sense, you know, that those aren't self custody or collaborative custody.

Those are full custodial instruments, but they have their use and they have their use, especially in the case of ETF's is a gateway drug, right?

It's a gateway drug to say, OK, if I want exposure to Bitcoin, but I want, so I want that exposure in a familiar wrapper that I'm used to dealing with.

I'm used to dealing with my Fidelity or my Schwab brokerage account.

I, there's a legal infrastructure around those assets to your point where the $5 wrench attack can't take my, my securities away from me.

That's helpful.

And, and, and to the degree that, as you said, as you rightly noted, that allows people to then get comfortable with the asset of Bitcoin and then iterate from there into these into, into something that's more the raw spot asset, then that's great.

I think I think that's really, really important.

I think a lot of us did, which is why we, we advocated for the ETFETF legalization in the 1st place.

And I think it's been, it's been great.

You've seen the efficiencies you compared to the European ETFs which have been around for much longer because ETS were legal in places like Switzerland and Scandinavia much earlier.

They were in the US.

But the, but the fee structure of the USETS, because it's so robustly competitive has made the cost of those ETFs so low that a lot of the ETF companies or issuers are complaining.

They're not making enough money on the ETFs to really to really justify their involvement in it.

But they're doing it anyway because they're making it enough, I guess.

But but that's been, but that's good for consumers, right?

It's good for investors to that these products are so competitive that, that the fees are low.

But totally agree that ETFs can be the ETF's can be shut down, they can be D legalized in a crisis.

Even a Bitcoin treasury companies could be theoretically blown up in a crisis.

They, you know, the government could say we're going to custody your Bitcoin or something like that, right?

They there or they could do other things or they could do like what what Roosevelt didn't say.

We are going to confiscate your Bitcoin at a certain exchange rate, which is favorable to us and not to you, which is what, you know.

When the government confiscated the gold, it wasn't that they confiscated the gold that was the problem.

It was that they confiscated the gold and then immediately devalued the relationship between the dollar and gold.

And the confiscation was the mechanism for the devaluation.

And that's what it would be here as well.

And so the more we can create that escape hatch, or you can move your Bitcoin into self custody, or you can move your Bitcoin into offline censorship resistant tools, then the government is less likely to try to confiscate it because they know they won't be able to.

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Yeah, absolutely.

I'd be curious your thoughts before we shift into your recent involvement with Strive and talk more on the institutional space.

I'd be curious just to hear your thoughts because at Onramp we're focused on multi institution custody and I'm speaking with investors on a daily basis.

And some are more concerned than others about some sort of caesarship of assets by the government.

And I think at least right now there's a little bit more comfortability with the Trump administration than there was with the Biden administration and what there would have been if Trump didn't win in the most recent election.

And so right now, I think that there's a little bit less of concern about a more immediate type of confiscation of Bitcoin, but not to say that doesn't happen in the future.

And So what a lot of people are interested in with our solution is.

Out-of-the-box today we have we're using multi sig and three independent businesses are participating in management of the keys and you have two US based companies, our company and then Bitco trust, Bitco's Trust Company in South Dakota and then you have a third company coin cover in the UK.

But part of this road map as a company is continuously expanding into other jurisdictions that would provide, let's say more a more neutral exposure to in terms of key management and protecting against maybe the United States or Western countries attacking Bitcoin in a more coordinated manner.

So I'd be curious to hear just your thoughts.

Definitely don't want to make it about what we do here.

But like do you see multi institution as a potential, not to say on ramp only, but I think this is where the industry goes where you have keys distributed in many different jurisdictions to ultimately not allow for any single institution to be coerced by an individual government at any given time.

I'm so glad you brought this up, Jackson, because I literally have expressed to every collaborative custody company that, that, that I've spoken with the importance of this very thing that the collaborative custody only becomes truly resilient if you are internationalized, meaning you're not you're, you know, like right now, if your collaborative custody setup is all US entities, then the US government has the jurisdiction to crack down on that and basically call up all the US entities and say, hand over the keys.

Now, if you have an international set up, you mentioned the UK, but think of countries like Switzerland or Liechtenstein that have robust privacy and security laws around handing over that data.

And there are other countries like that too.

The more that collaborative custody can become resilient and hardened on an international basis, then the US government has a lot less ability to say, OK, I'm going to call up, you know, the local domestic custodian and say hand over the keys.

They might be able to get that 1/3 of the two of the two out of three set up.

But if they can't get the 2, the other two keys or one of the other two keys, then you're OK as a, as the owner of those assets.

To me, that's that's what's going to take collaborative custody to the next level is having that international robustness where no single government can can cause problem.

Now still in theory, the US could call Switzerland and say, hey, hand it over.

But that's a lot harder to do logistically for for the US, especially if Switzerland isn't in the same situation that the US is fiscally and says why should we agree with you?

Because that's going to harm our domestic financial sector, and we don't want that.

So it won't be in our interest to to agree to whatever the US is doing.

And by the way, if the US is collapsing, they're not going to be really in a position to tell anyone else what to do.

So I do think that the international piece of it is really, really important.

And I'd say it's a product that I'm most anxiously awaiting.

Interesting, Yeah.

It's exciting because I really think we're in an interesting time as an industry because, but at least for right now we have, we are, we have bought ourselves more time where there's good and bad in terms of policy.

A little bit we discussed today, we didn't discuss stable coins.

We might not be able to get to it today, but ultimately the industry has some breathing room to be building out solutions that will ultimately protect the end investor.

Now what we just talked about, I don't know if I have the conviction to say it strongly, but I think the United States would not allow the ETFs to have keys outside of the United States as part of a multi say quorum.

But you have companies like on Ramp or you have other companies that have built around multi sig like Unchained and Casa.

Like I ultimately do think even though we're really the firm that's pioneered multi institution custody, I think the industry has to go this way for individuals, for for institutional investors, whether they recognize it or not just yet, and even for corporate treasuries.

Because at some point, if Bitcoin does appreciate to the level that we all expect, you can imagine, you're right, you mentioned in that reckoning, you can imagine people going after the individuals who own a lot of Bitcoin.

Well, what about the entities that own a lot of Bitcoin?

And so I could even see this.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I could even see this happening, you know, where you're based in Texas.

I could see this happening with states as well, where they're going to want to have keys held within their jurisdiction and have a little bit more autonomy, maybe similar to what we kind of saw with COVID where you had states react differently with their their policies around Bitcoin.

I, I think the most important point, the thing that we should have all learned from COVID, from the financial crisis, from 911, these three big crises we've had in the 21st century is that in every case, things that we never thought were possible from a policy standpoint, that people would never accept from a policy standpoint suddenly became acceptable in terms of restrictions on economic or individual freedom.

And we've got to believe based on that history that if there are real debt crisis, the US would not hesitate.

They might be temporary measures.

They might say, oh, the temporarily we're going to halt the exchange of U.S.

dollars for Bitcoin temporarily we're going to confiscate or, or hold the keys or, you know, kind of nationalize a coin base custody or the other big, you know, Bitco or whatever it is, you know, we'll nationalize the domestic custodians temporarily just to make sure that we could secure everything.

And of course temporary becomes permanent.

That's in fact what happened in 1971.

So when we broke from the peg from the US, the US dollar and gold, which was at that point $35 a Troy oz.

Now it's 3500 a Troy oz.

When we, when we made that break, the, the, the decision makers in the Nixon administration saw it as a temporary move.

They closed the gold window for foreign governments.

And so we're just going to do this for a short period of time in hopes that we can kind of not go broke because they were running out of gold literally, and then figure out what to do next later.

But they never figured out what to do next later.

They just permanently went off the gold bag.

And that was the end of that.

And we've been living with the consequences for the last 54 years.

So crises, we've seen that in crises, the government will do extraordinary things and justify it because it's an emergency situation.

And this article, then They Fight You article is really contemplating a lot of what those emergency measures could be.

Yeah, everyone should certainly check it out.

Just yeah, we we have to think a little bit adversarial adverse seriously as an industry, but I want to be respectful of time.

And now we've been recording for about 45 minutes or so.

More recently, you joined Strive on the board of directors.

I saw your LinkedIn post where you said after a dozen years or so working in the nonprofit sector, you're going back to your original line of work, which is asset management.

So could you share a little bit more about your decision to join the Strive team on the board?

You know, what excites you about it?

And then maybe we can go into a little bit more detail on some of the news more recently and maybe institutional portfolios of the future involving Bitcoin.

Well, it's, it's, it's one of those crazy stories.

You know, I, I worked on, on Wall Street as a hedge fund investor in biotech and healthcare companies for a dozen years before I got into public policy.

And during that phase of my life, which was the 2000s and 20 tens, you know, Vivek Ramaswami and I were counterparts.

We were biotech investors at, you could say competing funds.

So we knew each other through that and, and we're friends.

And then obviously we went off on our different tax tracks.

He I started a billion dollar company and I went into the nonprofit space, but we stayed in touch over the years.

He joined the board of free OP actually, and was a supporter of our work for many years and then ran for president, of course, and, and started strive.

And, and so he had had seen that I'd, I'd stepped down as the CEO of a free OP that the think tank that I'd started in 2016.

I'm now chairman of the board there, but I'm no longer the CEO.

And so he literally called me the next day and was like, Hey, I, I have an idea for how you can spend your free time and, and mentioned what that Strive was pivoting from being that this historically Strive would been founded to be an ETF issuer that was competing against the black rocks the world as a way of saying, hey, if BlackRock is not going to invest in energy companies because of an ESG mandate, we're going to, we're going to have an ETF for energy companies.

We'll call it drill and we'll we'll we'll take all the the investors appetite for energy.

So started doing that for a while, but then Larry Fink and BlackRock responded in the way that capitalists ought to I suppose, and said, OK, Viveka and his team have identified this gap in the market.

We shouldn't let them have that gap because they're getting some traction with it.

So let's calm down on our anti or ESG campaign.

And, and they started to win back some of that market share that that Strive took.

Strive still is doing pretty well.

They raised a considerable amount of money, I think it's over 2 billion for their ETS.

But it was clear that that was, you know, that the competitors had woken up to what Strive had identified as a gap in the market and the growth trajectory was going to slow going forward.

And around this time also, Vivek became a Bitcoiner.

He had not been a Bitcoiner, you know, 10 years ago, but he became a Bitcoiner.

And the CEO of Strive, Matt Cole, also was a Bitcoiner.

And so the two of them got together and said, hey, let's look at what Michael Saylor is doing.

We can come up with a, an iteration of that strategy where we can later in our own expertise and our own knowledge.

Vivek in the context of being a biotech hedge fund guy and Matt Cole being a guy who ran a $70 billion bond portfolio at CalPERS, the California Public Employee Retirement System pension fund, which is one of the largest investment funds in the world.

And the two of them were like, Hey, we, we've got some ideas on how to take the state, the core sailor idea and iterate on it in a way that could build the next great Bitcoin treasury company.

And, and so Vivek called, said, Hey, we'd love for you to, to get involved in what we're doing here.

And it was, it was, you know, I said, I said, well, you know, I'm busy, but I'd love to, I'd love to be helpful.

And the more time I spent with Matt, the more time I spent with Vivek, the more it was clear that this is going to be the most exciting thing that I could possibly do with my time.

Is someone who's long thought of how to go full time in Bitcoin, but also had all these efforts in, you know, the public policy world and things like that, that I didn't want to completely abandoned.

This turned out to be the perfect way to get more involved how to how to build a great Bitcoin treasury company that that can deliver a lot of value to investors.

Now I know that there are in the within, of course, outside the Bitcoin community, there are people who don't like anything about Bitcoin, let alone Bitcoin treasury companies.

But even within the Bitcoin committee, there are people who argue, well, these Bitcoin treasury companies, they're they're it's not real Bitcoin.

You should just hold your own Bitcoin and self custody or if at worst, hold the ETF and not worry about these additional these kinds of these other strategies.

And we can get into that if you want.

But, but that's something I, I'm, I'm, I feel very, I feel very comfortable and confident that there are a lot of opportunities to deliver value through a treasury company because there's so many subtleties about the way people can invest in Bitcoin in, in the various, in, in their funds, in their retirement accounts, governments, there's so many mandates and barriers to how institutions can hold Bitcoin that treasury companies being publicly listed equity companies, But you know, being listed in the stock market can create a lot of utility.

And compared to an ETF, they can do a lot more to create value to shareholders compared to an ETF.

And ETF has the same amount of Bitcoin per share forever in theory, other than the, the fees they charge investors.

But the beauty of of a Bitcoin treasury company is that the Bitcoin per share can increase, and that's what makes the Bitcoin treasury company more attractive than ETF if you can get at the right price.

I think, well, that's a fascinating story and thanks for sharing that.

Just in terms of how you ended up getting involved with Strive, we should certainly talk about that with the remaining time that we have.

How do you think personally about owning Bitcoin versus investing in Bitcoin treasury companies or other types of public or private market allocations to Bitcoin adjacent exposure?

How do you think about that personally?

And then how you mentioned, just like I see this too all the time, it's unrealistic to think that everyone, especially, you know, public companies going to be holding their own keys.

And so there needs to be ways that not only just the ETS, but there should be other ways for investors to access Bitcoin, whether it's through the fixed income markets or through the equity market.

So can you shed a little bit light how you think about this personally and how that kind of informed, you know, your involvement with Strive and their strategy?

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly on a personal level, I mean, I would say a self custody or collaborative custody should be the core of 1's bitcoins holding.

Because you know, the whole point of holding Bitcoin is that you want it to be resilient in times of crisis.

And so any, you know, listed security is subject to the regulations and the permission of the US government.

So to the degree you want to have your savings protected from that, you know, you want that core core of your savings to be in spot Bitcoin self custody or collaborative custody.

And again, in a way that's censorship resistant.

So I think that's important.

I think anyone in a Bitcoin treasury company would tell you the same thing.

Having said that, just like when you put money in your bank account, you'd, you'd love to collect kind of an interest payment on your, on your savings instead of it just sitting there collecting dust in it.

In case of the US dollar declining in value, real value over time, the same is true with Bitcoin.

Ideally we'd like our savings to to increase over time on a Bitcoin denominated basis, right?

So if you believe that one BTC equals one BTC, and that the way you should measure the value you've you've saved is in is denominating Bitcoin rather than dollars, well, how do you outperform Bitcoin?

And the the simplest way I'd I'd put it is one way to outperform Bitcoin if you believe that the US dollar will decline in value over time is to pair your long Bitcoin position with a short USD position.

Short the dollar and long the Bitcoin.

And just as an ETF is basically a way of longing Bitcoin because that's all it is, a Bitcoin treasury company can be thought of as an ETF that's short the dollar and long Bitcoin at the same time.

And that's what drives the outperformance.

The outperformance comes from selling the US dollar in the and what I mean by selling the US dollar is by borrowing in U.S.

dollars.

That's effectively a way of selling the US dollar as anyone, any institutional investor who's listening knows that's what what it means to sell something short is You're actually borrowing the shares to sell short.

So similarly, if you're taking on debt, you're effectively selling that instrument, betting on its value going down and you're taking that dollar that you're selling short and investing in Bitcoin.

And there are different ways to do it.

And the, and what's going to be really fun about this next 12 to 24 months is you're going to start to see that emergence of different strategies for how to execute on the Bitcoin treasury playbook.

So obviously Sailor has been the innovator.

He's developed his behemoth and you know, he's experimenting with a lot of different things.

He started with secondary offerings at the at the market, the ATM.

He also experimented with convertible debt at a time when interest rates were zero.

So that was great.

Good move, Mike.

But now he's shifting to issuing preferred securities so that it's less dilutive to the common shareholders.

A really smart idea and he's been iterating on that.

So that's all great, but I'd say that, you know, the rest of us can learn from that.

What can we learn from that One that that if you want to serve the common shareholders, the way to do that is to really not use convertible debt and use preferred instruments instead, because the preferred instruments don't dilute the common shareholders the way convertible debt does if the converts convert into shares.

And so some people have a lot of the Bitcoin treasury companies that have come come around, particularly the US based ones that will last 12 months.

They've they've used the convertible debt strategy and, and and I think that could work for some of them.

But it's going to be interesting to see.

I think one thing that Strive is really emphasized and and you'll see this in our SEC filings that our emphasis at least for the time being is not so much on convertible debt.

We are not offering any convertible debt at the moment, but we are planning to issue preferred preferred shares, preferred equity as a way of raising more money, our version of shorting the dollar to invest in big.

We actually have no debt on the balance sheet today, zero debt as of today.

It's fascinating, yeah.

It's great to be able to leverage the learnings from Sailor over the past four or five years and really put together a rock star team and strive between the people involved to the employee basis, but then also on the board of directors.

I'm curious if we could just zoom out really quick outside of Strive and the more than less the mechanics and more so portfolio construction.

I did a little bit of stocking of your ex profile ahead of recording and I saw that you had reposted something that caught my attention a few weeks back as well with Luke Roman.

He posted a really fascinating chart where the S&P 500 denominated in dollars and what you know, we all know what that chart looks like up and to the right versus the S&P 500 denominated in goal.

And so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts just in terms of let's say portfolios of the future, how do you think institutional investors thinking around portfolio construction may evolve over the next decade?

Do you think that I think we're still on the fringes by denominating returns in gold, let alone Bitcoin, but do you think that there's going to be more of a focus on real returns and less nominal returns?

And before you answer that, I just want to tie this into the the reckoning thesis as well, because you have, we talked about the federal government, but then you also have pension plans, right, as an obvious place to point as well.

There's a lot of pension plans at the state level that are.

Very underfunded as well.

And so I think there are a lot of pools of capital that are going to need to reconfigure rejig how they're allocating capital.

I'm curious how you kind of think about this given your background over the past three decades.

It's a good question.

I think the way the way I certainly looked at it as an institutional investor and when I raised money from other institutions, how those institutions looked at it typically and I think still look at it today is what's your hurdle rate?

And you know, commonly you'll hear people say their hurdle rate might be, you know, the so-called risk free treasury, 10 year treasury or the funds rate or something like that.

But typically 10 year treasuries would be one form of hurdle rate that people would look at.

Another hurdle rate that you'd hear people look at is the S&P, what are the returns of the S&P if the S&P is averaging 8% a year?

And maybe that's my hurdle rate for what I expect if I'm going to invest with you now in the Bitcoin era or the gold era, whichever it ends up being the hurdle rate, maybe a based on gold or Bitcoin, we'll have to see.

But I think what this, this, the way this may evolve is not so much to, you know, which instrument are you picking as your hurdle rate, but the actual percentage return that standard may increase.

And that may all be also be determined by inflation, as you said, right?

So it could be what's the real rate of return for the S&P 500 or the treasuries relative to some of these other assets like Bitcoin or or gold.

And it's going to be a slow, slow process because we're still at a point where big companies with a lot of Bitcoin on their balance sheet, whether they're specifically Bitcoin treasury companies or it's more like a a GameStop or Tesla that has some Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

But as a portfolio, part of a portfolio, you know, it's going to be a really long time before Bitcoin is such a mainstream asset that every company in the S&P 500 has it in their portfolio the way they might have gold or treasury bonds today.

So we still are a ways from that.

Again, maybe that's the 10 year time frame or the 20 year time frame.

But but to me, that's what makes me very relaxed about Bitcoins long term trajectory is that no matter how much the price has gone up over the last 10 years, it's still very, very, very early.

It's that the real milestone of progress over the last couple of years has really been that the government now basically has allows us to, to make A to use Bitcoin in, in various ways that we didn't have the ability to do before.

And that's great, but what the government gives up, give us, give us it can take it away.

And and so the real question is, can we get to a point where the adoption is so wide, so broad, so deep that it becomes that much harder to take it?

Well, we were still very far from that.

But the success, I would argue of the Bitcoin treasury model is going to help drive that, right.

So if if Bitcoin treasury companies are successful at driving value to their shareholders, then more and more companies are going to do it.

And that's what we've seen, right?

Like Michael Saylor turned what we used to call MicroStrategy now strategy from A $1 billion company to $100 billion company, literally the best performing stock in the S&P 500.

It's not even in the S&P 500.

And that's what's LED other companies to look around and say, hey, let's learn from that and let's let's let's do that.

And it's often companies that, you know, the, a cynic might say are finding that their core operating business is not growing like gang investors.

That's why they're relying on these strategies.

But that's understandable.

Like NVIDIA doesn't have to own Bitcoin.

They have their core operating businesses going so crazy that they can put all their focus on that.

But if you are a more conventional company in terms of your growth, Bitcoin is going to be an asset that's going to help drive your growth.

It's going to beat your hurdle rate.

And that will be true for more and more companies over time.

And so I, I, I look at it as the more and more companies, the beauty of, of, of Bitcoin.

I think the hardest thing for a lot of my old friends in the, in that the equities hedge fund business or the equity investing business to appreciate is, you know, when you buy a stock, you're used to thinking about the stock in terms, OK, what's my price target?

And my price target is based on what I think, you know, at least the true fundamental investor would say my price target is based on the discounted cash flows or the discounted future earnings of the company.

If I think over time the company will earn this over, you know, a 20 year period, then I'm.

The stock price should theoretically reflect all those future cash flows.

And so the, it is the, it is possible for a stock to be fully valued, right?

Like if, if Tesla is at, I don't know, 1500 bucks, it implies that Tesla is selling literally every car in the world.

And that's probably not happening, right?

So there's a point in which Tesla's stock does become price to perfection or even exceeding the price of perfection, right?

And so you can say, well, at that point I might sell the Tesla stock and, and do something else with my money.

Bitcoin doesn't really have a price target in that same way.

Because in a, in something that I think I find it's really hard for my equity stock friends to, to understand.

Bitcoin actually becomes more valuable the more people use it.

The more people are involved in the Bitcoin network, the more valuable Bitcoin is.

And so there is no real price target.

We can all say, Oh well, my price target is when Bitcoin market cap is equal to gold or whatever, but that's not really a price target in the same way.

And that we all know that Bitcoin is more useful than gold because it can be transmitted over the Internet in gigantic quantities.

I can't take my Brinks truck of gold bars and take it with me to Mexico.

I'll get stopped at the border, but I can send a billion dollars of Bitcoin as quickly as I can send an e-mail.

That's not possible with gold.

And so what's your price target for Bitcoin, Right.

And I think, I think my argument is that I'm going to hold Bitcoin as long as as I'm able because there is no real price target.

The value will only increase as the network of people who use Bitcoin increases.

I know we have to wrap up here in just a few minutes.

I'd be curious on that same thread, are you able to share it all, just reactions from your network or even the people in the institutional space that used to work with on the equity side?

I'm sure they've known about your personal involvement in Bitcoin for a while.

What what do they think about your professional involvement now joining Shriver?

A lot of your peers, are they, have they come around to Bitcoin over that time?

Are they still very skeptical of it as an asset?

I think it's a mix.

I think that a lot of I would say that my friend, the more successful my friend has been a particular friend has been, the more skeptical they are at Bitcoin.

I think if you've had a lot of success as an investor investing in a more traditional way, you're just more likely to see Bitcoin as something I don't need to think about.

Whereas I think if you are perhaps a more, and I think also just people who are focused on stocks and they're just so used to looking at, OK, what's the income statement of this company?

What's the discounted cash flows.

They just can't get their heads around the fact that Bitcoin is not a stock.

It doesn't have cash flows in the same way that a corporate conventional corporation does.

So it's really hard for them.

I think where you see a lot more interest in Bitcoin is among the macro investors.

So the macro investors who are used to thinking about the federal debt, the bond market, particularly the sovereign debt market, the Ray Dalio types, those are the ones who tend to be much more interested in Bitcoin, less hostile to it, more understanding of the thesis behind Bitcoin, whether they're directly involved or not.

A lot of those people tend to be more gold buggy if they're particularly if they're older.

But but I think that's where you're starting to see the real, the real driver of Bitcoin adoption institutionally is that sort of more macro oriented investor, the more sector specific or stock based investors, there's, there's still a bit a bit off, especially if they're in a sector where they can make money like biotech, you know, it's had its ups and downs over the years.

It's, it's volatile like Bitcoin is, but you can make a lot of money as a biotech investor if you if you, if you have a good investment process.

And so I think the people who are in a sector like that, they tend to be the ones who are least interested in thinking about something different.

Understood.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Well over now, Yeah, that's right for now, right, Because on a long enough time frame, I, I think we both believe that all businesses, all individuals will likely own Bitcoin or maybe not all, but you know, we'll see.

I feel confident that majority of people over the next decade or two will have some exposure to Bitcoin, whether it's through direct ownership, through ETFs, through treasury companies.

But you know, to your point, it's still very early innings with just Bitcoin being a $2 trillion asset among what you cited about you said $400 trillion of, of wealth US denominated.

Is that right?

Yeah, that that comes from a Credit Suisse report there now UBS that comes out every year.

They they act, they calculate the amount of wealth and willingness, 450 trillion is their most recent estimate.

There are different estimates that are out there, but Bitcoin is obviously it's only 2 trillion is a very small percentage of that today.

And look, any investor, any professional investor knows that your biggest winners as an investor are the ideas where you're both contrarian and right.

But if if everybody agrees with you, the likelihood that you're going to make a lot of money on that trade is a very low.

It's only when a lot of people disagree with you that you make money on a trade or an investment strategy.

And that's why I'm relaxed about Bitcoin.

I'm very aware that a lot of people disagree with me about and you about about Bitcoins long term trajectory.

But that's what means that it's going to be successful if we're right.

That's right.

Yeah.

I, I natively thought that at $100,000 per Bitcoin at the end of last year, there would be a little bit more interest from the mainstream, but certainly haven't seen that on my side.

A lot of the conversations we have as a business are with the sophisticated individuals that already own Bitcoin and are thinking about, you know, one step ahead of the risks.

And on the institutional side, I shared a little bit before we hit record.

Typically you need to have an internal advocate or champion that's really understands Bitcoin very deeply as an individual.

And they're the ones that are pushing for Bitcoin as part of a firm strategy.

But outside of that, like call it .1% or 1% of fields of the United States population, 99% still think we're a little bit out there, but maybe that changes over the next decade.

Yeah.

You know, there was a, there was a really nice profile over the weekend that we're recording this of Mark Casey, who's the portfolio manager at Capital Group, one of the largest funds in the world based in the LA area.

They have, you know, they're the largest holder of micro strategy or strategy and it's it's a great, it's a great profile because they they talk about this contradiction of like, you know, Mark Casey sees himself as a Warren Buffett style investor.

Capital Group is, you know, one of those kind of traditional places that has a traditional approach to investing.

And here they are doing this pretty non consensus thing of loading up on on MSTR and, and he walks through, you know, how that how that happened at Capital Group and capital groups a bit of an outlier in terms of their their stance.

It's made them a lot of money.

I think they made something like 5 or $6 billion from it.

So congratulations to them.

But I think that article really describes the process that will have to happen at all these other funds to get similar update.

I'll.

Have to check that out.

Well Ovic, really enjoyed the conversation.

Appreciative of your time.

For anyone who wants to get in touch with you or learn more about what you're currently focused on.

Where should we send them?

Well, my Twitter X handle is just my first name, AVIK.

That's the best way to find me.

And also check out free op.org, FREOP p.org.

That's my think tank where we do a lot of work on Big Point and some of the stuff we've mentioned and of course Strive as well.

Thanks again over.

Thanks, Jackson.

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