#1292 Mitchell Askew | Will Bitcoin ETF or Bitcoin Halving Be More Impactful?

Mitchell Askew is the head analyst at Blockware Solutions. In this conversation, we talk about volatility, bitcoin ETFs, institutions, inscriptions, miners, bitcoin halving, and more. ======================= Auradine, a leader in web infrastructure solutions including blockchain, AI, and privacy, has unveiled the world's first 4nm Bitcoin mining systems, featuring breakthrough EnergyTune™ technology, setting new standards in performance and energy efficiency. The Teraflux™ product line from Auradine offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO), positioning it as the optimal choice for Bitcoin mining needs. With EnergyTune™, a patent-pending technology, Auradine's Teraflux™ systems enable rapid demand response and optimal energy usage, fostering a symbiotic relationship with electrical grids, and contributing to sustainable energy practices. Designed and manufactured in the US, Auradine's Teraflux™ product line not only ensures cutting-edge technology but also mitigates supply chain risks and provides increased supply chain resiliency. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.auradine.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information the Teraflux bitcoin mining systems. ======================= Cal.com is leading the charge of scheduling platforms in the open-source sphere, offering you the chance to harness the efficiency previously reserved for elite corporations and tech gurus. That's right, Cal.com is transforming sophisticated calendar management into an accessible tool for all via a user-friendly interface. Discover how countless users are optimizing their time in unprecedented ways. Use code “POMP” for $500 off when you set your team up with Cal.com. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Mitchell Askew is the head analyst at Blockware Solutions. In this conversation, we talk about why he believes the massive 50% plus bear market drawdowns are over, how ETFs are going to create easy access for institutions, why they will remove unit

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  bias, and the competition between ETFs and what it should lead to. We also go through inscriptions and high on-chain fee environments, what that's going to do for miners and for users, how you can use UTXO management to trade off between fees and privacy, and what the Bitcoin halving, along with new mining hardware, is going to do to help these miners make up more revenue once the halving occurs. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mitchell. I think that he is one of the best analysts in all of Bitcoin, and I think that his audience is only going to grow over the coming months. So please tune into this conversation. Let me know what you think about it. And here is my conversation with Mitchell Askew.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:45Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Aradine. They are a brand new startup led by a number of Silicon Valley legends who just raised $81 million to build the future of internet infrastructure. You're probably wondering what that means. Let me explain. There are numerous new disruptive technologies that are being adopted simultaneously, from blockchain to artificial intelligence to zero knowledge technologies. In order to ensure that these technologies thrive in this new world... We need new infrastructure and that is where Auradine comes in. They just launched their first product line called Terraflux, which is a Bitcoin miner powered by the world's first 4-nanometer silicon chip technology. These air-cooled, single-phase and dual-phase immersion cooling miners have unrivaled speed and efficiency.

• 2:28Anthony Pompliano?

  They have superior uptime and they leverage a brand-new innovation called Energy Tune that allows miners to dynamically adjust the energy consumption and Bitcoin hash rate based on demand-response needs of the electrical grids. Auradine is an ambitious company working on hard problems. I'm really impressed with them. And if you want to check out more, you can go to Auradine.com. That's A-U-R-A-D-I-N-E.com. Go check them out at Auradine.com today. This episode is brought to you by Cal.com. What do I have in common with Chad Hurley from YouTube, Toby from Shopify, and Alexis from 776 and the co-founder of Reddit? We all use Cal.com instead of Calimly and we are all early investors as well.

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Cal.com, an open-source tool that allows you to take back control of your calendar, be efficient when scheduling, and make sure that no one can steal your time.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mitchell here. Mitchell, I thought a great place to start the conversation is you believe that the 50% plus drawdowns made them an 80% multiple times in the past for Bitcoin. Those were over. Those days are long, long gone. Why do you believe that?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Right. So a lot of the capital that's waiting for the ETFs to come into Bitcoin, this is very sticky capital. These are pension funds, 401ks, retirement accounts. These are the types of investors that they buy assets for the long term and they do not sell. It's not the sort of retail crowd that came in in 2021, just speculating, looking to make fiat and get in and out of the Bitcoin market. These guys, they don't sell. They have a really long time horizon. And I would put a caveat there. If we get sort of a massive, like FOMO induced blow off top, sort of like in 2021, we could get a drawdown. But really, that would have to happen after a massive swing up. But generally speaking, I think the types of investors that are going to come into Bitcoin through the ETF, they don't plan on selling anytime soon.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And that sell pressure is what really causes the massive bear markets.

• 5:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you see those people holding, how many of them are just holding until we get back to kind of an all time high? And how many of them you think are holding for the next 10 years? Is there a way for us to unpack that?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a lot of them are holding for the long term. When you look at the hodl wave, so it basically measures each Bitcoin on the network, how long since they last moved? And typically what you see when the price starts to run back up, you see the hodl waves go down. You see some of those longly held coins get distributed back in the market. But in 2023, we saw the exact opposite. Bitcoin ripped 160% off the lows and the long term holders continued to just accumulate more and hold more coins. And we've kind of seen some resistance right here around like the 45, 44,000 price level. And funnily enough, that's like the aggregate cost basis of coins bought during the bull market. So coins that last moved two to three years ago, their cost basis is around 44k.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  So I think you are kind of seeing some of that, like people just wanting to get in and get out at their break even cost. But a lot of the people that are left holding, right? They held through FTX, they've held through the massive bull market of 2023. These are ideological Bitcoiners. They fundamentally do not want to sell to BlackRock, Fidelity and the other institutions. So it's going to be interesting to see how much the price has to get bid up for some of these coins to start going back into the market.

• 6:34Anthony Pompliano?

  The ETF is coming. Everyone is speculating that it's going to get approved in the next couple of days. One of the ideas is around this unit bias. Why do you think the ETF could really help bring more capital into the market through unit bias?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Right. So, unit bias, as silly as it may sound to you and I, some people, they don't think they can buy Bitcoin because it's $44,000 a coin. They think they have to pay $44,000. And so that leads a lot of that capital to either not go into Bitcoin, period, or to go into some of the altcoins. But the way the ETFs are going to be priced, it's going to be a share, right? So it's not going to be $44,000 for the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. It might be 20 bucks. And that 20 bucks represents 0.0005 Bitcoin or something like that. So, a lot of investors, psychologically, they're going to be more inclined to buy 100 shares of a BlackRock ETF versus, you know, a third of a Bitcoin or whatever the math breaks out to be. So, a lot of that hesitation that we saw in 2021 and in the previous bull markets, I think that

• 7:34Speaker 02

  subsides with the ETFs. And there's also sort of a game theory component, too, right? Maybe if you're Fidelity, you want to have your share price less than the BlackRock ETF share price. So it'll be interesting to see how all the different ETFs shake out in that regard.

• 7:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a reason for the ETFs to do everything they can to keep the unit price as low as possible, like doing stock splits and things like that, to continue to press down that unit price?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I think so. I think more than likely, though, what we'll see is competition for transparency, right? Because why would you want to buy one ETF over the other? Well, first, it'll be low fees. I think there's going to be a race for fees to get to zero. But second, it's going to be transparency. You want to know that the Bitcoin that your share of the ETF is backed by is actually there. You want to make sure they're not rehypothecating it out, lending it to other people. And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is it's a transparent ledger, right? So, if I'm Kathy Wood, running the Arc Spot Bitcoin ETF, I'm publishing my addresses on-chain and showing like, hey, this is the Bitcoin that backs it. And maybe some of them even offer redemption, right? So you can redeem

• 8:41Speaker 02

  your shares and take self-custody of the Bitcoin if you so choose. Now, granted, I don't think a lot of the people buying the Spot Bitcoin ETFs would be ready for that, at least not in the short term, maybe in the long term, and they get more comfortable. But I think the real battle is going to be for transparency.

• 8:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you see the competition among all of these different ETFs, you talked about, you know, fees and stuff like that, are they competing for capital from retail? Or are they competing for capital from institutions? Like, who do you think is the buyer of these ETFs?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  The buyer is definitely institutions on behalf of their clients. So I think the big deal with the ETF, whatever happens in the short term, price action wise, is anybody's guess, but it is kind of a fundamental shift. Part of it's because, one, the ETF, it's easy access to Bitcoin exposure, right? You can go through your traditional broker. But two, it's the validity that Wall Street is giving it, right? The narrative from Wall Street that Bitcoin is a bubble, it's a Ponzi scheme, it's going to die, the government's going to shut it down. All of those are kind of put to the side now because now Wall Street has a way to profit off of Bitcoin. And so they're giving it the thumbs up. And I think you're going to see a shift from the traditional 6040 portfolio to maybe 60391, 1% into Bitcoin.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  What the exact number is, we will have to find out, but even just a sliver, right? Even if it's a fraction of 1% of the, you know, hundreds of trillions of dollars that are into stocks and equities going into Bitcoin, that's going to push the market cap up tremendously. And another thing too, kind of tying back into this idea that bear markets won't go away, is a lot of these institutions, they're not going to immediately allocate like a massive spot buy. It's going to be the passive inflows, right? When people get their, their 401k and every, they get their paycheck every two weeks or whatever, and they put some percent into assets. So it's going to be passive inflows into Bitcoin. So I think we sort of see this steady climb up and not, you know, a sell the news event or a god candle, you know, either side of the spectrum.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I think we see something in the middle where we just sort of slowly grind up.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about ordinals, inscriptions and transaction fees. Right now, transaction fees have spiked recently. You all put out a report recently that said, after the halving, you expect transaction fees to be larger than the block subsidy. Is that something that you think will persistently stick?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Correct. So we know long term that that will happen, right? Because Bitcoin has programmatic monetary policy. So the block subsidy gets cut in half every four years. It's trending towards zero. So at some point, transaction fees will make up a larger chunk. And I think that's going to happen consistently during the next epoch. One, because the subsidy is dropping to 3.125 Bitcoin. And over the past few months, we've already seen periods in which fees are higher than that 3.125. Now, we've even seen fees in certain individual blocks be higher than the 6.25 current block subsidy. That hasn't lasted long enough to manifest in when you're looking at any sort of moving averages. But it's been one or two blocks here or there. And the inscriptions and ordinal stuff, it could be argued that it's just a craze and it's going away.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  But I think it points to a more broader idea, which is what happens when demand for block space increases, even just on the margin? Because there's only four megabytes worth of data that can be squeezed into each Bitcoin block. So if we get this massive wave of adoption that we're all sort of expecting to happen in the next cycle, then block space isn't getting any bigger and transaction fees function like an auction, right? So if you want your transaction in the next block, you have to bid a higher transaction fee than everybody else on the network to incentivize miners to include your transaction over the others. And so I think we see fees really make a powerful move up. And another point on that is layer twos like Lightning are not in the position right now to really service the demand that's going to come in.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  So layer one is still going to be the dominant method of transacting Bitcoin in the sort of short to medium term. And so as a result, fees are going to skyrocket. And I think that's really a dark horse when you're looking at Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin mining profitability. Because a lot of people, they anticipate, you know, as the block subsidy goes down, it's going to be less profitable to mine Bitcoin. But I actually think we're still entering the golden years, especially given the surge of demand that's going to push up transaction fees.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned the Lightning Network. A lot of critics would say that the Lightning Network doesn't work and it never reached its full potential or kind of the promise of Lightning. How do you evaluate it?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  I would say just lower your time horizon, right? Today, as we're recording this, it's Bitcoin's 15th birthday. And we've already seen nation state adoption. We've seen the network process, trillions and trillions of transactions. We've seen, you know, the market cap go over 1 trillion at one point. It's done a lot in 15 years, but that's only 15 years. Bitcoin wouldn't even be old enough to have a driver's license. So if we sort of extrapolate out over the next 15 years, a lot can change. And Lightning is still pretty young, right? I would, I wouldn't say it doesn't work. It works if I'm going to send you, you know, a few bucks. If I was trying to send you $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, that's going to be a challenge for it. But you just have to lower your time horizon, right? There's going to be other layers, other layer twos besides Lightning, right? Things that we can't even comprehend.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  And as Bitcoin's market cap grows, the financial incentive for developers to put all their focus into Bitcoin scaling solutions is going to increase. So if Bitcoin's a $100 trillion asset, all the brightest minds in the world, especially from a developer and coding standpoint, they're going to be working on fixing these problems.

• 14:04Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the block subsidy going to get cut down here, you talk also about mining hash rate will continue to rise. Difficulty will continue to rise and you're going to get that block subsidy cut in half. So are miners screwed? Like, will they not get enough transaction revenue to make up for the lost mining revenue? Or how are you all thinking about miner revenue over the next, you know, three to four years?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  I would say quite the opposite, right? So first and foremost, the biggest determinant of miner revenue is the Bitcoin price. So all of these sort of models and projections can get thrown out the window if Bitcoin rips and goes well into the six figures. But let's imagine that Bitcoin's still at the same price it's at now going into the halving. A bulk of the hash rate comes from these publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies with the most efficient machines and low power costs. So even the subsidy getting cut in half, they're not necessarily going to have to unplug their machines. And in the 2020 halving, we saw a slight drop in difficulty. We saw two consecutive negative adjustments, but they were fairly insignificant and difficulty recovered quite quickly after that.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  And especially given the bull run we've had in hash price over the last year due to the transaction fees and the Bitcoin price going up, I think the golden years for mining is definitely in front of us. And a key point to make as well is that I don't think hash rate will grow at the same rate it did in 2023, right? So we saw hash rate more than double in 2023. And the reason for that is a lot of the investment that was made into Bitcoin mining during the bull market, it takes time to get online, right? Because these ASICs have to get manufactured, they have to get sent over to the United States, energy sources have to be created, physical infrastructure has to get built. So there's a lag. And during 2023, since the price was low for much of the year, not as much investment was made into mining. So we're not going to see that lagged growth in hash rate. And

• 15:54Speaker 02

  a second point there is that the new generation ASICs are about to hit the market, right? You've got the Bitmain, their S21, and then what's miner, the M60. But infrastructure kind of remains the scarcity, right? There's a premium for rack space, physical spots to plug in these machines. So it's not going to be like a net increase in hash rate. A lot of the mid-generation machines are going to have to get unplugged to make room for these new generation machines. So I still think hash rate goes up, but I don't think it goes up quite as significantly as the, as it did in 2023. And I certainly don't think it'll be able to keep up with the, the way price will increase because if you think about it, you know, price can go up 50% in a couple of days. For hash rate to

• 16:36Speaker 02

  make the same sort of move, that takes months because it literally, it's, it's in the physical world, right? It can't go up at quite the same rate. And that's really what bodes well for miners. So the miners that are already plugged in right now, they'll get to benefit from the increase in price before hash rate sort of catches up there.

• 16:52Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about mining hardware at the moment? And it seems like there's a bunch of different kind of optimizations. There's new hardware coming out. There's a company called Aradine that we've worked with before that does a lot around like software management. What do you see there from an innovation standpoint?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a ton of interesting innovations going on. So the strategy sort of during the bear market, you want to maximize energy efficiency. So when you look at Bitcoin mining hardware, there's two metrics to measure their performance. There's terahash per second. So how many hashes is this machine producing? And then there's joules or watts per terahash. So how much energy is it consuming to produce those hashes? So the second one there is the most important because that measures your cost. And what we've sort of seen the trend is each new generation ASIC, it's more efficient, right? It has better watts per terahash than the previous machine, but only by a marginal amount. So in the early days of ASICs, when we were just sort of figuring

• 17:47Speaker 02

  these out, and they're very brand new, each new machine basically made the previous one obsolete because it would be orders of magnitude more energy efficient. But we're seeing the trend diminish there, right? So the Antminer S21 is seventeen and a half joules per terahash. Well, the XP was twenty one, twenty one and a half joules per terahash. So it's better, right? But it's not so much better that the XP is just going to be completely obsolete. And so what the net effect of that is, is these machines are having a much longer usable lifespan. And then moreover, the sort of older and mid generation machines, they can get resold onto the secondary market. And what you tend to see is they get sort of migrated to the lowest energy cost, right? So if you have, if you're paying, you know, 10 cents per kilowatt hour, you need the

• 18:32Speaker 02

  most energy efficient machine. But if you have one cent per kilowatt hour, or if you have free energy that's getting, you know, would otherwise get wasted, even there's negative price energy, then you can mine with an S9, right? And it almost makes more sense, right? Because you can have a lower capital expense. And because on the margin, you're making bigger profit margins, you can get away with using those lower efficiency machines.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, as we see mining, and a lot of public companies there continue to invest and build out all types of infrastructure. In this report that you guys recently released, you also talked about the ETF is going to send Bitcoin to a new all time high. I disagree with that. Why do you think that the ETF is enough to get it to an all time high versus probably what my belief would be is you're going to get the ETF plus the halving, plus interest rate cuts. And it's like that the culmination of those three things gets us there, not just the ETF alone.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  I would agree with that. I think there's a storm of factors and a lot of people, they say, so you got some, one camp, you know, people argue that Bitcoin halving is a bullish catalyst. Other people say it's monetary liquidity cycles, and I would agree, it's the combination of all of them. I would say the number one catalyst, though, is the hodl waves that we've mentioned earlier. So the supply getting held by extremely convicted Bitcoiners who are unwilling to sell, and then all the other factors just sort of multiply on top of that, right? So when 72% of the Bitcoin hasn't moved in at least one year, and that number continues to rise, then you throw in the halving, then you throw in the likely quantitative easing and stimulus that we're going to get in 2024, rate cuts, and then you throw in the marginal new demand from the ETF. I think that's what pushes us to an all-time high.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Now, granted, it really, the dark horse is how much demand truly comes in from the ETF, because when you look at the market cap of Bitcoin, it's less than $1 trillion, but the global bond market and the global stock market, that's hundreds of trillions of dollars. So it really only takes a sliver of that to send Bitcoin soaring, because even if you break down Bitcoin, you know, the 30% that has moved in a year, what's the market cap of that? It's a lot lower than the 850 billion of the total market cap, right? So it really only takes a sliver of global assets redirecting from equities and bonds to Bitcoin for price to just absolutely go parabolic.

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about UTXO management.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Right, so as Bitcoin transitions from a low-fee environment to structurally higher fees, you have to optimize for UTXOs. And if you've been sort of doing the right thing, you know, people are telling you to dollar-cost average into Bitcoin and take self-custody off the exchange. If you've been doing that regularly, you're going to have a bunch of UTXOs. So UTXOs, it stands for unspent transaction output, and it's essentially a chunk of Bitcoin. A good way to think about it is if you have $100 in your wallet, you could have one $100 bill, or you could have a combination of fives, tens, twenties, et cetera. And how Bitcoin works is the fee you pay is not based on the amount of Bitcoin that you send, but rather the amount of data in that transaction.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So if you have a bunch of UTXOs as an input, it's going to cost more to get your transaction into the block, right? So it's like if you spend the $100 bill, that costs less than if you spend 10 $10 bills. So what you can do... So you can basically send your Bitcoin to yourself and it does what's called a UTXO consolidation. You take all those inputs and you convert them into a single output. Now, the caveat there is you lose a little bit of privacy, right? So for example, if you were going to the grocery store and instead of paying just with a $20 bill, you gave them a check for like $20,000 and then they sent cash back. Like you don't necessarily want the other side of that transaction, knowing how much Bitcoin you have, right?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  So if I was going to send you a fraction of a Bitcoin and I used a 10 Bitcoin UTXO, you can look on chain and see that I have that 10 Bitcoin and I might not want you to be privy to that information. And any sort of analyst can go through the Bitcoin blockchain and, and see the history of UTXOs and all that. So it's a balance between fee optimization and privacy.

• 22:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think people will end up choosing?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  I think a good mix of different sized UTXOs is optimal. So I, a good rule of thumb is don't have any UTXOs smaller than 1 million sat, so 1% of a Bitcoin. And it all sort of depends on your unique position and, and where you are, how much Bitcoin you have. And I think, yeah, keep, keep a minimum of, of 1 million sat UTXOs, but then just have a, a different mixture, right? So maybe have one really large, maybe have half your stash in one UTXO, maybe have some medium sized UTXOs and then some smaller ones. And if up to this point, you haven't done any UTXO management, you don't label your addresses. You have no idea who sent you Bitcoin, where your UTXOs are all scattered. I don't think it's a terrible idea to just send them all to one.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  And then you can sort of deal with the privacy aspect at a later date. And then just going forward, your future dollar cost averages, definitely keep track of those UTXOs and manage them. And this might get me crucified for, from some of the Bitcoin maximus. But if you send all your UTXOs to one, and let's say you want to do a transaction, you want to be private, just send a little bit to an exchange and then send it back to yourself. Because they're not going to be able to track through the exchange addresses because there's so many different inputs and outputs, and then see your original stash. So yeah, the exchange, they'll know how much Bitcoin you have, but is that really a nightmare? You know, Coinbase knows about your, your 0.4 Bitcoin or whatever, if you're some retail guy, like that's, doesn't matter on their, on their radar, right? Cause they're dealing with, with really big whales. So that's a good way to do that.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  If you want to just consolidate to one, send a little bit to the exchange and then withdraw, and then you'll have a smaller chunk that you could send to someone else.

• 24:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So we've seen the miners outperform Bitcoin. We've seen Coinbase outperform Bitcoin. We've even seen GBTC outperform Bitcoin. Microstrategies outperform Bitcoin, all in 2023. Do you anticipate the underlying asset of Bitcoin to lag the performance of some of these other public companies or kind of public exposure? Or do you actually expect maybe Bitcoin will be the outperformer? How do you look at the comparison?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question. I think it has the potential to outperform, right? If these spot ETFs are the main driver, I think that'll push spot Bitcoin up much higher. But then again, the market caps of these other assets don't need as much capital to send them soaring. I think fundamentally, what you want is you want Bitcoin in cold storage, right? Number go up is cool and Bitcoin increasing and purchasing power is cool. But the true revelation here is having an asset that nobody can seize from you. So when you hold your own private keys to Bitcoin, you can take that wealth with you anywhere in the world. And that's truly the innovation here. And if you hold MicroStrategy stock, if you hold public miner stocks, if you hold GBTC, you don't have that benefit. And I think fundamentally, I'm a little tinfoil hatty.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  So I think government could, you know, do some shady stuff, take people's assets, whatever. It's not unreasonable to think that. In the 1930s, we saw executive order 6102, gold got seized that was in vaults. I don't think it's unreasonable if we went down sort of a more totalitarian route, which I don't think it's likely, but it could happen. You're going to want spot Bitcoin in cold storage. You're not going to want these other assets. And on the flip side of that, you're sort of gambling in a sense when you buy those other assets because, yeah, they may outperform Bitcoin in the short term, but over the long term, you see everything trends to zero against Bitcoin, even Bitcoin exposed assets.

• 26:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What are areas that you're most excited about that other people aren't talking about going into 2024?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Definitely mining. I mean, I think if Bitcoin really goes from, what's it at $44,000 now to a million dollar asset, there's just a huge opportunity there because you can produce Bitcoin for an electricity bill rather than having to buy it on the spot market. And a good framework to think about it is if you want to lock in a certain price that you're acquiring Bitcoin, right? So if it costs you $20,000 worth of electricity to buy Bitcoin and it costs $40,000 to buy it on exchange, that's a pretty big opportunity right there. Now, let's say it costs $20,000 to produce a Bitcoin, but it costs $100,000 to buy it on an exchange. The, that miner you have is also going to appreciate in value alongside Bitcoin, right? So it's not

• 27:02Speaker 02

  just about consistently mining to pay off your capital expense. The capital you put into the ASIC is likely going to increase as well. And that's what we've seen during past bull markets.

• 27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then what are the areas that maybe you think are overhyped areas that people are really excited about, but you think people they shouldn't be paying as much attention to?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  I would definitely say like ordinals and inscriptions. I think that's more of kind of a craze, but it is telling to what can happen to the fee market. If you're buying a one sat for multiple sats, I think that's likely a bad trade and you're sort of speculating. I will caveat that, like if you could buy the original inscription, what was it, the, you know, times chancellors on the brink of bailouts for banks, like that would be pretty cool. But, and that would likely actually retain value in the future, right? Because when you think about art in general, you want the Mona Lisa. You don't want my five-year-old niece's handwritten copy of the Mona Lisa. It's the true scarce art that maintains value. And you could sort of, I would think of UTXOs in the same way. So truly special UTXOs like

• 28:05Speaker 02

  that one from the Genesis, Genesis block, you're still speculating when you buy it, but I think it's a more wise speculation than just sort of, you know, buying some random picture of a monkey that happens to be inscribed on the blockchain.

• 28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes sense. When you look at the sentiment online, it was really bad at the end of 2022, going into 2023. It seems like now maybe we've almost completely reversed it and people are like ultra bullish. And I even see, you know, leverage picking up in the system and people are just like up only. What is your thought process around kind of maybe the crypto community and Bitcoin specifically being able to actually understand like, are we in an up or a down cycle?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Right. I think it's important to remember that we do kind of exist in a bubble on the internet. I try to gauge sentiment based on people that aren't fully immersed into the Bitcoin world, right? So I talk to my cousins or my friends and gauge where they see Bitcoin. Because at the end of 2021, they're all coming to me, calling me, asking me, you know, what's this NFT thing? What is this? Like, that's when I I know the market's getting a bit overheated. And right now, I've barely received any sort of input or inquiries from people outside the Bitcoin community. I've had one person reach out to me, but he already, he works in traditional finance. So it's not necessarily surprise. He's sort of looking at these things. But the broader landscape of people who just head down, focused on their job. They're not really interested in Bitcoin or markets in general.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Bitcoin's still not on their radar. I don't think many of them even realize how well Bitcoin performed in 2023. They've still got a sour taste in their mouth from from 2022 and what happened throughout that year. So I think that's a better way to gauge sentiment because Bitcoin is kind of always going to be bullish. There was peak fear at the bottom of the bear market, but generally speaking, Bitcoiners are pretty optimistic and bullish about the future. And yeah, so I just try to look at at sort of the normie landscape when gauging sentiment.

• 30:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That that makes sense. Where can people find you online or find out more about Blockware?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Mitchell Hoddle. And I have a podcast and a newsletter through my company, Blockware Solutions. If you want to find more about Blockware, go to Blockware's website. We we have a cool marketplace where you can buy Bitcoin ASICs through the Bitcoin network and its turnkey. So as soon as your transaction's confirmed on chain, you're hashing right away.

• 30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I appreciate it. I learn something every time we talk. And we definitely do this again in the future in the bull market, my friend.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Thank you, Pop.