Bitcoin in a Decade: Worth $1,000,000 or $0?

Sina Nader, Avichal Garg, Raoul Pal, Clark Moody, and Claire Lovell debate Bitcoin's price in ten years. They compare it to gold's $8 trillion market to estimate $380k-$450k valuations, weigh institutional adoption and regulatory risks, and ask whether Bitcoin becomes global collateral or worthless.
Chapters
What will be the price of Bitcoin in 10 years from now?
I can guarantee it won't go to zero because there's only 20 million bitcoin and if it gets to a dollar, I'll just buy them all.
How important is price for the future of the crypto industry?
When you ramp the price way, way up, it takes more money to move it around. You get more stability.
What are the factors that may drive Bitcoin to $1,000,000? All the smart guys in technology are all getting sucked in. The smart guys in finance are getting sucked in. Never have I seen a black hole like this. Explore the future Scen awaiting Bitcoin and.
The Crypto Industry with Raoul Paul Clark.
Moody, Claire Lovell Avish Al Ghar Sina Nader. These are the highlights of cointelegraph Crypto Traders Live.
So why don't we dive into the first question and just to sort of start with the conclusion. I mean, what are people's predictions for the price of Bitcoin in 10 years? Let us start off with Avishal. You want to kick it off for us.
So I can't get price predictions. I generally don't, other than I think it'll be higher than it is today and likely much higher. It's not investment advice, so don't go do your own research and so on. Standard disclaimers apply. But the way I think about it is I think the standard analogy people use is digital gold. And if you just kind of do the back of the envelope math, gold at about 8 trillion dollar market cap. If bitcoin gets anywhere close to that, if it's about the same, each bitcoin would be worth about $380,000. You know, if you kind of eliminate the roughly 15 or so percent of Bitcoin that has been lost, you know, for lost keys or satoshi's coins, you get closer to like 450. And of course, you know, there's no reason to think that bitcoin couldn't be bigger than gold. Like, coming from a technology background, the way I always think about it is when new markets emerge, we often underestimate the size of them. So like the knock against Uber at the Series A was, well, if the entire taxi industry is worth $10 billion, how could you possibly be worth more than $10 billion? And of course, in retrospect, we realized when you put something on a mobile phone and 2 billion people can access it at the push of a button, market sizes all of a sudden become 10x bigger than you thought. And so Actually several hundred thousand or million actually to the point of the panel, if you start looking at it through that lens is potentially not out of the question. Now when that happens or if that happens, people should do their own research. But I think actually there is some math to back up that we could potentially get there.
Makes a lot of sense. Let's see. Claire, do you want to give us some views just in general on where you think the future price action might be many years out?
Yeah, I mean I want to say zero just because I'm convinced no one on this panel will, but I don't actually believe that. Obviously I don't want to be a specific prediction either, but obviously I'm long term bullish on it. I think the thing that is very likely to happen is that there'll be less volatility and so I think it just will be a very different environment. I do definitely agree that I think the price will be a lot higher and I think even in the short term the price probably will be a lot higher ten years from now. I think it still has the potential to be a life changing investment. Even if you got into it today, never had bought any before today. I still think there's huge potential for people to as an investment. Hopefully a lot more than now makes sense to me.
Clark, would you like to offer some views?
Yeah. So I recently wrote an article about the 10th anniversary of the first Mt. Gox trade which was July 17, 2010 and Bitcoin traded at 4.95 cents per coin. A few weeks later, let's see, on October 8, 2010 it was a penny. So it's come five, six orders of magnitude price increase so far. I mean the other side of the coin is what's the US dollar's purchasing power at that point? When a gallon of milk is a million dollars, then we're all millionaires, but it doesn't mean anything. I don't know, I think the bullish case for bitcoin in terms of ever printed, ever devaluing fiat currencies is pretty strong. We've come a long way so far. I don't see. It's easy to say current price action, it's easy to say oh, it'll never go 10x from where we are, but you just zoom out a little bit and we've already come a lot more than 10x.
Fair enough. I can see the wheels turning in Raoul's head. Raoul, I would love to know your views on this ten years from now. Where are we?
Look, I agree with the view that you can back on that versus gold and you get reasonably large numbers. But let's look at it from a different perspective because I think we're all familiar with that. It's the adoption curve that I think is really interesting to me is understanding having been in that institutional investment world and hedge fund world for the last 30 years, I know how they act. The point being is at $200 billion, which is what it is now as just bitcoin, it's not even an asset class. It's noise. But people know that it is serious. They know the players involved, they understand how much work is going on in this and they understand that it has to be on the radar screens. Now, if bitcoin goes up 100%, which it could do over the next two months, it's well within the realms of normal volatility. Well, it's suddenly a $400 billion asset class, then a $500 billion asset class, and then it matters, and then everybody is essentially short. The upside, and we've seen this before, is they all have to pile in. Now, if you have an understanding of the issues that are embedded within the pension system globally, the pension system is dramatically underfunded. We've now essentially just lost bonds as an asset class because as they trend towards zero or negative rates. Forget the negative rates. Red Heron, everybody screaming, oh, my God. It's not that, it's that they don't work in a portfolio. There's no offsetting ability. So people are looking at gold. But gold is not so liquid. It's a bit more complicated. It will fit in with portfolios, but bitcoin has that thing, so everybody's eyeing it. The endowments are there, so that's coming. You've got to think of it that everybody's short to the upside. So if it rises, it rises and more people adopt it and it gets bigger. Then obviously, as we go over the next 10 years, I don't think we fully get to the 21 million Bitcoin, but what happens is we stabilize in price because the stock to flow has changed dramatically at this point. So you end up with a stability. And I think this is where it's all going in the end. Whatever that price is, it becomes the global benchmark collateral for a new digital system. Could that be $1 million? Could it be $10 million? Could it be $500,000? Sure. But the point being is we will unlikely think of it in the terms we think about it today. If you think about the digital currencies are coming for central Banks. Now we know the world is about to change dramatically. We know this is everything we're all working on is a dramatic change. So it will be a different way. But I have a feeling that there's a good probability that it's the independent collateral for the new system.
I couldn't agree with you more. And especially here in the States with the OCC just approving federally chartered banks to custody crypto, I think that portends a lot to come in a lot of similar veins to what you just said. That's also a great segue to the next question, which is people are inherently interested in the price, but why is the price so important? Raoul, you started to talk about it, so maybe you can start us off and then if anybody else has any thoughts, what is it about?
Because the price is a manifestation of Metcalfe's Law, essentially. So what it's showing us is the adoption and the value of the adoption as it's becoming adopted, whether it's by the network effects of money transfer, which I don't think is what Bitcoin's core application is, but as a store of wealth, it's clearly going on. I mean, the proliferation of exchanges, the number of people involved, the rapid growth. So I think the price is a reflection of that. I've always called it a call option on the future of the financial system. It's another way of thinking of it, because if Bitcoin goes up, well, the whole ecosystem, from blockchain to Ethereum to Cardano to whatever, all grows out from this. And so if those things are going to succeed, Bitcoin will succeed. And therefore the Bitcoin price is a call option from the whole lot.
In tech parlance, I think it's. We talk about metrics and goals and I think you have to be careful not to conflate the metric with the goal. And the price is one of the metrics that we should look at. But really the goal is adoption. And the goal is that there are new and better ways of building these systems. So much of the legacy financial system was built and architected from a computer science and software perspective in like the 70s and the 80s. And just the state of the art of technology has evolved so much in the last 40 to 50 years. But the inertia and sort of the lock in and the network effects keep us locked into these legacy systems. And so, you know, to me, when we start seeing these large numbers on price, what it hopefully signifies actually is that there's real adoption, that there's real value being created underneath it. And that's actually ultimately the goal. And the price is just a metric to pay attention to as a proxy.
I think often you see a lot of people come into the retail space because they see the price move and they get excited. And then after they realize what an amazing technology this is and all the potential for the future applications. And so I think that when the price is high, there's a long tail of adoption that comes from that, and that's why it's so important now. But I don't think that will always be the case.
I think that price also, you get the liquidity volume corresponding to the price. So at 10x, the same quantity of bitcoin on the order book is 10 times as liquid. It takes 10 times as much money to move the market. So that's kind of this Claire said earlier, the stability aspect, when you ramp the price way, way up, it takes more money to move it around. You get more stability.
All of that makes a lot of sense. I've got a corollary question to all this is how important are price predictions in the crypto space generally? And I guess maybe for bitcoin in particular. I think we've all talked here about how price can be a proxy for adoption. Price can be a proxy for a lot of other things. I guess in that context is are price predictions per se important for people or is that sort of beside the point? Maybe we can start off with Raoul and then maybe Claire would have some thoughts.
Look, I think it is important and it's important for the simple fact to go back to what we were talking about before is these kind of larger price predictions and the structure of price movements in the past are basically showing people not how much money I can make from it. Sure, we're all in markets and we all want to make money, but it's also the magnitude of the opportunity, how big the adoption is, as we talked about, what it means. Because as Claire said, once you get your head around, the first thing you get your head around is, oh, this is a great asset, classic and make some money. And then you realize you've only just started your journey and everything you thought you knew is wrong. Everybody goes through that and that is. And the price future target. I think Plan B's work is incredibly useful regardless if he's right or wrong. But it gives you an understanding of the magnitude. That is what keeps VCs in business because it brings entrepreneurs to build businesses around it. All of that, if we all said, well, the price is going to be stayed about $10,000 for the next 20 years, we would change in what the kind of stuff we did.
Personally, I honestly don't put any stock in price predictions. Again, like, I don't think it's going to be zero. You know, I think it's going to be higher. So I guess that's a prediction of some kind. But you know, you know, there's no day to day, month to month, year to year price predictions that I think really have been turned out to be super accurate over time. It's very hard for people to predict. We, you know, so many conditions are changing, plus we're in a, you know, once in a century point in history in several different aspects right now that I think can greatly affect where the price goes. So for me, it's about fundamentals. Do I believe that this technology, whether it's bitcoin or something else, has the power to change the world? Is this an amazing technology? And that's why I got into Ethereum when it first came out, because I thought, okay, this is introducing something really new that's really important. Bitcoin cash. At the time of the fork, I didn't really believe in it for the same in that same way, because how is this really different from bitcoin? And to me at that time, it really wasn't. So I think people, I'm kind of more like Warren Buffett values fundamentals type investor, I think would be my style. And I think a lot of people in retail feel that way as well. These aren't professional traders and neither am I obviously. So that's kind of where I'm coming.
From with it makes a lot of sense. Avishal, I'm wondering as a VC in this space, I hear two different things from Raoul and Chloe about, yeah, there is some value in the predictions. And then, well, maybe for other types of lenses it's not as germane or relevant. How do you think about this? And maybe some of the entrepreneurs that come to you in the space. How does this all play out for you?
Yeah, so a couple thoughts on that, but I would like to riff on something Claire just said, which is it probably isn't going to zero. I can guarantee it won't go to zero because there's only 20 million Bitcoin and if it gets to a dollar, I'll just buy them all. So you heard it here first, folks. Bitcoin below a dollar. So bitcoin will never go below a dollar, I guarantee you. So it can't get to zero. Okay, so to your question, how do I think about it? You know, our core thesis at Electric is this is software eating money. And kind of the breakthrough here, which, you know, it took me, honestly probably about two years to get my head around that for the first time ever, the bits inside your computer are money. And it's a very important difference from the bits in the computer represent money, which is how it is in the legacy system, right? There's some database and there's your bank account and it says you have a certain amount of money and then you can go to the bank and get some US Dollars. But the bits in the computer being money is a pretty fundamental shift because what that means is that you secure that money through a private key, which is another set of bits. But for the first time ever, computers can own money, they can take custody of money and value, and they can do value exchange. And so that opens up this whole new universe of people being able to transact with machines or machines being able to transact with machines. And anytime we've seen that happen, anytime we've seen the digitization of something that used to be atoms and it turns into bits, the market explosion and the way that people deal with that, you tend to get trillion dollar sorts of disruptions. Just think about literally any communications technology or any sort of digitization that happened and kind of the unlocking of value that happens. So our core thesis really is around programmable money. What could you do once you can program money? And if you think about it, a lot of the world is basically, here's a pile of money and here are some rules around who has access to that money and under what conditions that money can move around. And on some future time horizon. I want you to do XYZ things with this money. And today we codify that in what we call legal code. And we just think all of that gets codified in computer code instead. Like literally it's called code. Right? And that's strictly. If you think about it, the one thing computers are better than humans at is deterministically executing instructions on some future time horizon. And so literally anything that is REITs, equities, bonds, derivatives, wills, trusts, escrow, any of these things that are fundamentally, here's a pile of money and some rules around that money. This just eats up and it'll take many years to happen. We think it's a 20 to 30 year time horizon. But when you start adding up those numbers, that's at least as big as the Internet, if not bigger in terms of the net impact that it has on society. Because it turns out a lot of the world is just here's a pile of money with some rules around the money. And for the first time ever, we have infrastructure that is a perfect fit to solve those kinds of problems.
That's actually a perfect segue to the next question, which is, what are the factors that will drive us toward a million dollars per Bitcoin? If we assume that's true, and I think it's looking more and more true as every day goes on, that banks are realizing that digital currencies, digital assets, are a thing that they need to be embracing. What other factors, or basically what does that do to the price of Bitcoin? Maybe we can start with Clark, who's. I know you've been in the space for a while, having seen a lot of sort of developments. What do you think all this does? And what other factors will contribute to Bitcoin going to a million?
So the value of any money is determined by the aggregate reserve demand that each individual has. So it just involves more and more people deciding, I want to hold a positive balance of this thing. And so what precipitates that mindset change? There are other places on earth that switch to dollars after their currencies collapsed. And that happens pretty quick. Money's a huge network effect. And if you're looking around and more and more people each day are using a different money, you may tell your employer, hey, I need to get paid in this other thing that people are using. And so I think it's the process, while it happens, could be it's one of those exponential processes where once you start turning the corner on an S curve, then it happened so much faster than you think it would have. And I think it could have. But the underlying factors are the fiat money system being a disaster. It's kind of the short answer, I guess.
I'm curious, kind of like Raoul was saying earlier about why hasn't happened quicker, why haven't people yet realized that there's this sort of sound money element? And a lot of the critiques that people could have of the fiat system.
You can't have 100 volatility sound money. The concept is sound money. The reality is the opposite. We have to be about what this is, right? You don't tell your grandmother, who's 90 years old, you need to stick it in bitcoin. It's sound money. That's madness. What we're trying to build is a system that is a future sound money. We believe it has inherent value more than it has now because of this particularly key attribute, but it clearly is not sound money now because it goes up and down 90% in every cycle. It's kind of a weird old world. We need to decide whether we actually believe that bitcoin will be the money of the system or the collateral of the system or a sideshow within the system. None of us know any of these answers yet. How do the central banks deal with the fiat currency issue themselves? I don't think they're going to walk away and go, well, let's go back to a gold standard. Let's go to a bitcoin standard. I think it becomes a personal reserve. Like gold has remained a personal reserve for anybody for as long as the fiat currency system has been operation. You can always use gold and step out of it.
I want to come back around to that in terms of we're talking about the bull case and then the bear case would be maybe if something were to replace bitcoin. But before we dive into that, I wonder if Claire or Avishal, if you have any other thoughts on what factors might drive bitcoin up into the right from here.
Yeah, I think I agree with Clark. For the most part, mainstream use cases and adoption right now for the average retail investor, or not even investor, average retail person, I don't understand. How do I use this? How do I get into it? It's still just way too complicated for people. And so when it's as easy as using a credit card, I think we're well on our way. But we're not there yet. And there's a lot of people trying to figure that out. Bitcoin may not be the one that gets us there because of all of the issues with the technology being too slow to really scale in that way. And I don't know which one it will be or if it would be something else. I think having it as a collateral is an interesting idea, but I firmly believe that money will go digital just like everything else. I don't know which one it will be, though.
I'd be curious to know, Michelle, what do you think about that in terms of, I guess what would be some signs that there are other assets coming up to challenge Bitcoin and what would make it less appealing to be the asset that kind of drives a conversation from here, if any?
Yeah, I mean, there's still, when we think about risks in some sense, I think the question you're asking is like, what are the systemic risks here? And I think there are technology risks, I think there are market risks, and I think There are regulatory risks. You know, technology risk for example, is perhaps the CPU based proof of work approach just doesn't continue to scale for some reason. You know, maybe we've hit diminishing returns on Asics or Power or you know, whatever. There could be edge cases here and you know, I think there are ways to mitigate that. People are experimenting with proof of stake systems. There are things like proof of space time, which is still a form of proof of work but uses hard drives instead of cpu. And people are bringing that research to market companies like Chia or projects like Chia and Space Mesh. So there's an entire category there. And the second category around market risk I think is really does it turn out that the path to success and effect, the go to market strategy is one of digital gold or it actually does something like Ethereum, which allows you to have decentralized finance or generate yield in a zero interest rate world, turn out to be the killer go to market. And then on the regulatory, I think there's some significant open questions and actually Bitcoin has a pretty significant advantage here. Only Bitcoin and Ethereum have really gotten the regulatory thumbs up as being not a security at the very least. And so some degree of okay from at least US regulators, though other countries are less or more OK with it when you look at those risks. The way we think about it is how do you mitigate across those risks. And so there are ways to mitigate across those by investing in other approaches. But when we look at our investments, it's still far and away. Our largest position is still Bitcoin, even on a risk adjusted basis. That's where it just has such a lead in so many ways, it's hard to imagine something in the short term replacing it. But again, if you take a 15 or 20 year time horizon and you believe we're in the very early days of this 15 to 20 years of compounding from something starting from a very small base to compete with. Bitcoin is still. There's a long Runway here. It's also worth mentioning perhaps that it's not necessarily winner take all. If you look at even the existing fiat system, there is a winner takes most dynamic. And so it is not necessarily the case that if Bitcoin wins, everything else must fail. Or you look at something like social networking, which is a highly liquid network effect business. And Facebook of course won big. But if you were in the seed round of LinkedIn or Twitter and you ended up with a $25 billion company, you still did quite well. And so as investors, we sort of risk mitigate, but we also take into mind that we don't think there's going to be a power law here. There are more than one way to win.
Speaking of the regulatory side of things, just briefly here, and also to Raoul's point, about how just massive of an opportunity and how big of a sea change we're all getting to live and work through, which is just phenomenal and amazing. I'm kind of reminded of sort of the separation of church and state. And I wonder if the separation of state and money is a thing that governments will allow, quite frankly, or is it something that will have to be sort of forcefully resolved, for lack of a better word?
I think it exists already, Right. Rich people buy art and cars and they're outside the state, and we can all buy gold and it's outside the state. So to have Bitcoin or whatever, any digital currency outside the state is fine. But if you want to live in a state, you'll end up somehow having to transact with the state, and that means taxes. And that's okay too, unless you live in the Cayman Islands, where I live.
The established church served an important function as well in partnership with the state. So the church, or the local witch doctor or whoever is the chosen, appointed by the state to be the one way. And they in turn preach that obedience to the king or the chief or whatever is godliness, or maybe the chief is God himself, you know, so that disobedience is now heresy and you can be thrown into the volcano or whatever it is. So I think that that role has been replaced by the intelligentsia. The economists at the Fed, the blue ribbon panels, they serve the same function as putting a scientific spin on what the state wants to do. Like Keynesian economics, right? Oh, print. It's the solution to every problem. Oh, well, that sounds great to us too. Right. So it's kind of this. We fund academia, you rubber stamp all of the things we want to do with a scientific stamp, and that's replaced kind of the role of the church in compliance with the king or whatever is.
Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say before, I think, kind of riffing on what we were talking about the previous question as well. There is a global reserve currency though, right? And it's the US dollar. So, yes, we have pounds, we have euros, we have dollars, but if I go to most countries, that US dollar is going to have a lot of power. Bitcoin or whatever it is might be that same thing. And I think about this idea of separation of church and state. Similarly, I also think that there may not be as many governments as there are long term. We may not have 270 countries, we may have 20 or 100, who knows? But I think there can be consolidation as well, especially for countries that aren't able to financially support themselves. So I think in those scenarios this cryptocurrency may become that reserve currency for a lot of these states, in which case the state actually has a vested interest in allowing that to go forward. Just like in a lot of states that have trouble with their money volatility and so on, they are happy to have US dollars in this system, or if they're not happy, they risk a lot of disruption if they don't go along with it. So I think there's some potential for that as well. But I do want to hear the rant.
Okay, I'm going to two thoughts actually. I mean, I think the points around reserve currency are spot on. And you look at the numbers, the US dollar is something like 65% of global reserves and the euro is 15 to 20%. And so you do have a very interesting power law, even with global currencies, the yen and Canadian dollar and so on. But I think what that touches on even is kind of the game theory of this all. And so put on your. I think there are a couple of different actors here. There's the US government, there's the Chinese government, there are the European governments, the eu, and then there's this sort of decentralized crypto universe, Bitcoin included. And I think the interesting game theory here if you're the Chinese government, is you have your digital RMB initiative happening and you are potentially cut off from doing a lot of what you want to do because of the US dollar system. And so you have an incentive to try to push your digital RMB system. And if your R and B system works great, you win, you win big. And so they're going to invest in it, they're going to push through belt and road and it's really smart. I mean, to their credit, the Chinese government is phenomenal at investing in technology and embracing it and using it. But what is the next best alternative? Well, the next best alternative is likely not to continue to exist in a US dominated system. The next best alternative might actually be to support the decentralized ecosystem and allow that to flourish, such that it actually serves as a counterbalance to the US system in some form and continue to sort of diminish that percentage of country reserves. The US dollar used to be 75% of country reserves, and so it's losing share. And so can you get something in there that is another 10% of country reserves and gets the US dollar to 50? And so the Chinese government actually has a very strong incentive in my opinion, to support the bitcoin ecosystem. And the way they'll do it is they will likely support the infrastructure behind it without letting their citizens own too much of it, because they care about civil unrest. So they don't want their citizens to own a ton of bitcoin, but they're very happy to have ASICS designed there and have miners there because that allows them to continue to support this ecosystem. Okay, so if you take that and you play that one step forward, you say, okay, well then what does that mean for the U.S. government? And I actually think what that means for the US government is obviously they have to try to invest in some sort of digital dollar as a counterbalance digital RMB and to support the existence of this US dollar based system. But they also have to acknowledge, I mean, you look at something like healthcare.gov it's not like the US government executed well on that. And so they don't have a great track record of building high quality software and shipping it on time and making it usable. And so what is your next best alternative? Is your next best alternative to let the digital RMB system win? No, probably not. Your next best alternative actually is to embrace the decentralized cryptosystem because so many of those VCs are already here in Silicon Valley, so many of those companies, the biggest companies in the world, are already in the US and so actually what you really want to do is embrace the crypto system and allow the US dollar to be the fiat on ramp and off ramp into that system so that you can continue to use the tools that you have to do AML and KYC and so on. So actually I think if you play this out, the separation of church and state, I actually think there's a natural equilibrium where governments, by virtue of having to compete against each other, actually all end up having to support a decentralized system because it's like the second best alternative to the existing system or the alternative of the other government winning. So I'm actually pretty bullish. I don't think it ends up being a total separation of church and state. But I think you actually end up in a system that like the crypto ecosystem ends up coexisting with the existing fiat system because the governments kind of have to support it because of the game theory of it all.
Kind of last question for me here is kind of if you could each sort of provide just either your or your company's perspective on the industry overall, if you've got sort of a long term vision for BTC and crypto and the blockchain and sort of how that all plays together. So just sort of big picture views either for yourselves personally or for your companies or both. So Claire, maybe you want to get us started there?
Sure, yeah. So I mean, obviously both myself and Jim and I are long term bullish here. I think short term I expect to see a lot of professional trading still dominating, you know, like we were talking about before. I think the retail audience, you know, they're coming, but they're not there in the numbers that, you know, I would like to see. But trading is just one small aspect of what I think, you know, will be part of this ecosystem. So one thing that happened to be really successful at Gemini is we launched a digital art platform which was nft, we call it Nifty Gateway, you know, back in March. So at the timing we thought would be horrible, but it ended up being amazing because everyone was suddenly not able to go view any art in person and they've broken some records for the price of their nifty sold and they've just been very successful in just a very short amount of time. And I think all of these amazing use cases we probably haven't even thought of. This panel represents several people who have spent basically their entire careers on this and we haven't figured it out. It's such early days, which I think probably you all feel so, you know, I think trading is going to dominate the conversation in the industry today. And then I think the next applications of money, right, will have decentralized banking, decentralized finance, you know, earning interest, staking, all these things. But I think long term there's going to be a lot of applications outside of just money and payments. And I don't know what those are, but I think those will easily be, you know, million trillion dollar industries, you know, couple decades from now.
Makes a lot of sense. Clark, you want to share some thoughts in terms of the big picture here too?
I would say that from my experience, I would say that this is a retail led phenomenon so far, so kind of the other side of the coin. And we haven't really seen real institutional interest, sovereign wealth funds, gigantic pension funds, things like that. So I may just throw, you know, throw that in there. The other thing is, you know, we're getting A lot of, a lot of this legitimacy stuff, you know, the custody rules and things like that, making it easier to deal with this and you know, legal for large, large players to hold on to it. So that, that's a big ball that takes a long time to get rolling, but I think that it's tipped over the precipice of the mountain.
Here, here, let it, here's to it, continuing to roll. In the meantime, Raoul, any kind of big picture thoughts for us?
Yeah.
My involvement in this space came from understanding what happened in 2008, but really from being on the ground in Europe in 2012 when we almost lost the banking system. When that goes through your head, that here I was living in Spain and we were about to lose the banks and eventually the ECB had to force Spain to borrow money over a weekend to say the banking system was going to collapse on the Monday. And realizing that the whole thing was a mess, the collateral at the heart of the system was rehypothecated when it claimed it wasn't. So in the middle of the DTCC and Euroclear and all of these things that most people don't know anything about, I got stuck into all of them and it's a mess. It's a mess on who owns what, it's a mess in leverage, it's a mess at every level. And at that point I realized that we need something different. So I was trying to set up a bank at the time, back in maybe 2013, which was trying to be the world's safest bank that had no leverage, that had that if you deposit capital, it's held in US government bonds and a bunch of stuff like this. And it just was complicated trying to buy a bank in various countries. I tried Singapore, we tried in Europe, we tried all over the place really hard. Anyway, a friend of mine introduced me to Bitcoin. Obviously we'd seen the headlines and stuff like that. So around the 2012 period, and then I realized that this was coming. Now what is interesting about this space, here's me, I come in from this angle. People come in from different angles. But what is incredibly interesting, never have I seen a black hole like this. So where all the smart guys in technology are all getting sucked in, the smart guys in finance are getting sucked in. The kind of philosophical thinkers, the kind of non mainstream economics people. Everybody's being sucked into a space which is like a super black hole of talent of. I've not seen anything of this magnitude before in terms of the sheer number of people and the size of the outcomes, because when you started in the Internet, we didn't know the outcomes, but we know how big money is. Money is one of the oldest things on earth and we know the size of it. And as Claire says, it's not just about money. Everything is going to be tokenized, literally everything. The whole digitalization, digitization of assets none of us can get our heads around. Maybe an 11 year old today who operates online has a better idea than we do of what digitization and the value of digital assets is. But everything is about to change. It's a platform change of money and value, and that's extraordinary.
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