BREAKING: TESLA BUYS $1.5B IN BITCOIN | BTC BREAKS ALL-TIME HIGH

What's up everyone? I'm Giovanni. Welcome to another cointelegraph livestream. Today I have the pleasure to be joined by Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, and Scott Melker, veteran trader. We are here today to celebrate very important news, a very important event which is Tesla buying $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. And bitcoin breaking its all time highs reaching about 44,000 the benchmark. So Mike and Scott, how are you doing today?

Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

Doing great. Any day that I get to talk to Mike is a good day.

That's mutual.

I didn't know that you were already acquainted, but that's great. So I want to know first, what was your first reaction when you got to know that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin? First you, Scott, what was your reaction?

I've been bouncing off the walls all day. Honestly, I don't usually get particularly emotional about trading or assets, but I was really legitimately excited. And not as a trader, just more as an investor. And as I've already hinted to on Twitter, it's not really about the price. It's just one more step in, I guess being vindicated from calling a, being called a crazy person for all these years. And it's nice to see confirmations like a company like Tesla putting bitcoin into their treasury as a reserve asset. It's just one more confirmation that we're not nuts and our belief in this thing is justified and real. So honestly, I've been in a great mood. I think that this is potentially one of the biggest events in history for bitcoin. So very excited.

Actually, I saw a video of you in the car listening to some rap. It sounded like pretty exciting.

I was very excited. I was very excited.

And I know that Mike, you are like an analyst at Bloomberg. You have a more balanced, neutral stance in the industry, but still, I want to know what was your take of today's big news?

I think the best thing, I can echo what Scott said to me, this is just the next iteration. So I put on my trading hat. As a trader and a market person, you're always looking for catalysts. To me, this is the catalyst to break bitcoin out of that 30, $40,000 range, which is only in for a little bit over a month, and to convert what was 40,000 resistance into support and move it up to 50,000. So Tesla's the biggest name. I mean, MicroStrategy wasn't as big of a name, but Tesla is. Then it's also. What's the next iteration? We all know it's probably not just a one off. And there's also a unique concept about this. I've been writing about how Bitcoin is going to get the upper hand over Tesla. One thing to note is they both are right now about just over an $800 billion market cap. I see. My quote is I fully expect Bitcoin to resume outperforming Tesla despite the fact it pulled back a little bit last year. And one of the key things is supply. So here's the unique thing about what Tesla just did. They can issue unlimited number of shares, they can issue an unlimited amount of debt until the market pushes back. And with that they can buy Bitcoin. Yet there's a limited supply of Bitcoin. So you see where the dominoes are falling to higher prices for bitcoin.

Yeah. And actually Tesla said in the security filing today that, that they made this investment in bitcoin, but they also considered the idea to invest in other digital assets as well as gold bullion and gold exchange rate traded funds. So they open up their investment policy to these other assets. So what do you think, guys? Can we expect Tesla to discover apart from Bitcoin, also other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum? So Scott, what do you think?

I don't really want to speculate on that, to be quite honest. At the end of the day, I think the statement that they're making is that they view the dollar as an inflationary asset, that you can't hold dollars in your cash reserve or at least you need to limit your exposure to the dollar. So Bitcoin is a great first step. Gold would be a reasonable treasury asset, but far less exciting, obviously. And perhaps down the road they find Ethereum or something else, but I have no idea. So I don't want to speak to it. I mean, for me, bitcoin's enough. I don't really need all that. I don't think they'll be investing in Doge, if that's the next question, just because we find it to be a funny meme and Elon Musk talks about it all the time, but at the end of the day, I think it's just a very firm statement, much like we've seen from MicroStrategy and other companies, that you don't want to hold dollars and you need to limit the exposure.

I think that's the key point. But to me it makes a lot of sense. Diversify your holdings in A basket of precious metals that includes bitcoin. And to me, that's really the narrative shifted towards the end of last year. Is the world, the history of the world that has been allocated in a certain group that is allocated to gold and precious metals over time to preserve and store value, is now realizing that if they don't have some of that portion of that basket in bitcoin, they might be missing out. So here's a simple narrative. Let's say bitcoin goes up. Who knows how many X's from here over the next 10, 20, 30 years, if that happens, which I fully, I think the market's coming to conclusion that it's gaining a higher probability. What does that do for gold and precious metals? So to me, that's what's happening. The whole world's realizing, okay, I have to diversify my holdings in things that have limited supply and might become a reserve asset, store value. Bitcoin's a key one. The rest of the space dogecoin, they're speculative digital assets. You know, some of those are going to go away. There's 8,000 of them. So you can go ahead, pick which one you want. Last year was 4000. And where I sit, I get the questions mostly about Bitcoin, certainly, you know, I hear economics departments of major banks and institutions, they might look at the other ones, but to me, that's what's happening. Is that major. This is a paradigm shift. And I think our key point is, okay, so Tesla's jumping on board who and what next. And the way I see is the next potentially iteration in this space is central banks, because why they hold a huge amount of gold. I know virtually anybody in the planet who's been holding gold knows they need to have some bitcoin in that bucket. There's a sore thumb there, and that's central banks.

Yeah. And of course, we need to point out that now, not long ago, Elon Musk became the world's richest man because Tesla had a huge success. Last year, the Tesla stocks skyrocketed, many folds. And so it's one of the most successful and innovative companies in the world. And for sure, such a company buying into bitcoin cannot but have a huge impact on the perception of bitcoin from other major players. I want to explore a little bit more the consequences of these events. So, Mike, in your latest analysis, you said that Tesla's move could propel the bitcoin market cap to $1 trillion. Can you just guide us through this prediction of yours?

Well, that's My initial iteration for this year, which by the way is a very modest prediction for bitcoins, that it gets to near 50,000 this year. That's initial to me. The initial target Resistance Just about 50,000, about $1 trillion market cap. Tesla's very close, so I love the battle. They're both battling to get there. The key point about that is Tesla's doing it on rapidly increasing supply. Shares outstanding on a 12 month basis are increasing around 5% on average. And we all know what happens there. As long as the market will justify they will keep adding shares and keep adding debt. It's just the way it is. But bitcoins do it on one thing, price and it's more organic and it's global. So to me that's, it's becoming a global reserve asset. So to me we have potentially the most expensive stock ever that's been added to the S&P 500, has tons of competition. That was the key thing that struck me at the Super bowl was GM had this ad for EVs. I have a GM EV. I love it. That's something you wouldn't have heard of 20 years ago. So we're replacing demand for petroleum with electric cars and Tesla has tons of competitors, every carmaker on the planet does. But there's only one bitcoin, it's limited supply in. I think the key point you made about Elon Musk being one of the richest men in the world. Just like we hear from Mexican billionaires, they know they have to diversify that asset. Obviously there's a major responsibility and bitcoin's just a classic target of diversification. If you look forward it's potential to become a reserve asset, volatility will probably decline below that. And gold wide because supply is fixed. Gold, supply and demand are both uncertain and precious metals are in that and equities are very expensive. He knows, I mean everybody knows that Tesla's one of the most expensive stocks on the planet and it's got tons of competition. So to me what's happening is very prudent. Makes sense. The key question I ask myself, what can this trip it up? What's going to make it stop? And I don't see that at the moment. So that's why I see getting a trillion hanging out there for a while. And it's a good bridge to have to worry about. I should say if, but I think it's more of a win.

Scott, what do you think? Do you agree with Mike's forecasts?

Yeah, and I think as he said it's conservative and I mean, rationally, 50,000, 60,000, these sound like massively huge numbers. But relative percentage gain, it's nothing for bitcoin. In fact, from here, $50,000 Bitcoin is within a day of volatility on some of bitcoin's most volatile days. So I don't think that that's crazy at all. And I would expect it to happen. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't have been surprised if Bitcoin hits 50,000 today. I'm not saying it will. It's certainly not a prediction, but nobody would think you were crazy for saying it. And you'll be pushing a trillion dollar market cap already if that happens. So I think 50k is squarely in the sights. 1 trillion market cap squarely in the sights. In that likely we'll be seeing much, much higher. I mean, this is the first day of this. The world's going to need time to process this. But there's no single individual on the planet who could probably influence the bias about this asset more than Elon Musk. As you said, he's the richest man in the world and he's kind of, I think a lot of people certainly feel like he's one of us to a degree. He's the guy who you can somewhat relate to and he's out there shooting off memes and he's a part of the community, bitcoin and otherwise. And I think it just can't be understated how important this is. If Tesla does it, everyone's watching. We're going to just see, I think the floodgates open. Way more companies, way more billionaires gaining exposure, or more likely telling us that they've already gained exposure and we're just afraid to talk about it, which I think is far more likely.

I think that to your point, that now Elon Musk is probably one of the protagonists that influence bitcoin more, especially on Twitter. We saw that Donald Trump was banned not long ago out of Twitter and he was also influencing things with his tweets a lot. But now that he's not there anymore, Elon Musk is probably taking the lead in terms of one of the most loud and influential people on Twitter, even though fortunately in a different kind of way than Trump. But let's move on with questions from the audience. So we have Isham Sada who is asking, how long do you think alts will keep going along with BTC on this kind of search? So we saw that Elon is super bullish on bitcoin. But what about alts? Will they follow along all the way or they will not keep up with bitcoin? What do you think? What do you think, Scott?

Yet again, I hate to make predictions that are going to come back and bite me in the ass. I think that it depends as usual, on whether you're watching the dollar pair or the bitcoin pair. If you're a trader who trades the dollar pair, you probably looked at your altcoins today and said, hey, I'm about even today. It's great. Bitcoin went up. My portfolio is good. I haven't lost any dollars. Then you flip over to the bitcoin value of your portfolio and you're down 12%, 14%. I think it just depends on your perspective. If you're stack sats, as many people are in this industry, I would expect that if bitcoin continues to rage upward without taking a breath, that alts will suffer. But one thing that we've always seen is that eventually bitcoin breathes in alts catch up. So I would hate for anyone to take that prediction or view that as actionable information because each and every person trades or invests in something for a very different reason with a very different timeframe in mind. So you could tell, hey, you see guys on Twitter, hey, get out of your alts. Bitcoin's moving. Well, that works if you're a day trader, but if you've invested in altcoin that you're planning on holding for two years, you don't react to every little move. So I think it just really depends as far as dollar value. I think that they would trail but continue to rise if bitcoin continues to rise. But I think that if in bitcoin value they're likely to drop if we see continued movement.

I'd like to echo on that a little bit. I think that's one thing where Scott and I have a lot in common is we'll think like traders. And I like to really focus more on investment standpoint. So I completely agree that everything in the whole space is tied to bitcoin. If bitcoin is going down, all the alts will probably go down with a higher gamma. And the same thing, bitcoin's going up. So some of them are going up with a higher gamma. And let's point out one key fact and they should continue. But one key fact is the number two, number three cryptocurrency on the planet is tether and it's running. It has AUM of almost $29 billion. Okay, so that's simply organic demand. Remember this Tether has been under the microscope of the USDA since April 2019, but they don't speculate in Tether. Although the volume of tether for 24 hours right now is $150 billion. That's almost double the volume of Bitcoin. So that's something people need to point out that I like to focus on a lot is to me this is indicative of the organic demand in the whole space. The whole thing, the rising tide moving higher. But let's not mince words here. Virtually everything else are speculative digital assets with a little bit less extent. Ethereum. And Tether is not. Tether's focused on being a stable. It's a stable dollar. I mean it's a digital dollar. Rest of the CBDCs are just trying to catch up. And then there's Bitcoin store value. I don't, you know, it's great. You have to have traders to create volume and open interest. But I look at Bitcoin as the thing that the whole planet starting to realize. There's going to be a potential difference between the haves and have nots in the future of Bitcoin and you might as well just have get some to alleviate that risk. Everything else, purely speculative. Good luck. It's great for traders, but as an ex trader, traders in the long term lose money and buy and hold people are typically the ones who make the most. Let's look at Elon Musk's example. Most of the old there's potential Satoshi Nakamoto might become the richest man in the world.

Yeah. And actually I was pretty curious to follow up on one main thing that Scott said before regarding Elon Musk. Being perceived as someone of us, someone like it has this kind of mood of feeling of being one of us that kind of connects with all this story regarding GameStop. So we, I'm sure that everybody heard about this story about the fact that this company's stocks were pushed very high by this group on Reddit in order to. In order to. How do you say, to harm these hedge funds that were short selling very heavily the stocks of Gamestops. And so this group of traders decided to join to come together and push against these hedge funds. So it became a sort of David versus Goliath situation. And we saw that many people in the crypto space have been also joining this kind of narrative saying short the hedge funds. Some sort of calling for the democratization of finance and also criticizing Robinhood for having restricted trading on their platform because they apparently, at a certain point, they restricted trading on their platform and many people were accusing them to, to be aligned with these hedge funds. So Elon Musk seemed to be sympathetic towards this whole movement of traders that were moving against the big giants of finance. So do you see any connection between Elon Musk moving into Bitcoin and this whole wave of kind of democratization of finance and this whole movement around GameStop? What do you think, Scott?

I think it's a fun narrative, but likely incorrect. And I don't think that that's necessarily what is happening or what did happen. I think that that would be a very, very slow wave to fundamentally change the market or democratize finance or have defi replace banks and all these things. As more information has come out, it seems very likely, as you would expect, that the Redditors and your average person who was buy and hold no matter what on gamestop were the pawns in a much bigger chess game being played by the same hedge funds that they believed that was the machine they were raging against, so to speak. So I think the big money was still who was profiting largely on those moves and manipulating those moves. So even if it was David and Goliath, for a moment, it's like David won the battle and then Goliath got called in his 30 more Goliath friends and won the war. I don't really think it's going to change much. I think it's fun, like I said, to talk about. I think that bitcoiners have been pounding that narrative for years and it's something that could come true, but I don't think it's happening in the short term. I think that sadly, I think that the GameStop saga will be forgotten soon. I don't think they'll have the power to do it again because I think the regulators and hedge funds are aware of what they're trying now. I think that if there is any regulation that comes out of it, it will be in the guise of protecting the consumers and the little guy, but will actually hurt them and help the hedge funds again.

You don't see this, these events surrounding GameStops somehow pushing the crypto narrative forward and like as a sort of catalyst for people joining the crypto space.

Well, that, that it is. So there's the, there's the overwhelming narrative and what we believe will happen with institutions and all of this. And then there's the fact that people literally left Robinhood and tried to sign up to crypto exchanges so fast that crypto exchanges couldn't onboard them. There's no question that the metrics support the fact that a lot of those retail traders were fed up with what happened at Robinhood. I was talking to Steve Ehrlich, the CEO of Voyager and there was a point where they were getting 100 signups a minute to Voyager on those days. There's no question that the demand is there and maybe it's a grand awakening. But if we're talking about something actually changing on a grand scale right now, I think that's going to take a lot of time.

Time.

Mike, what's your take on all this narrative?

I think Scott nailed that very well. For a lot of us traders it's a great story for the media and the press in the big picture, it means nothing from a trading standpoint. I mean I look back to Long Term Capital Management when they failed and that was actually one of my best trading with customers positions ever. Because we're long a lot of things they were short because it looked like they were short the wrong stuff and they were wrong. But this case the narrative plays well. But I think one thing I always have to point out is a lot of these people are buying calls. Most calls expire worthless. Certainly me as an ex option trader, I guarantee if I'm longer call out of the money, the market will go there, the call will expire and then the market will go up. That's just the way it works. So a lot of them lost money. But here's a famous market analyst, his name was John Liscio. I used to read his reports every day. He died a few years ago. He called a lot of the traders in the pits when they used to have them as dope sniffing dogs. That's what hedge funds are. They are professional dope sniffing dogs. You might win once in a while, but they will crush you. It's a lesson I learned. You might as well just not fight them, just get long and let them beat each other up. Because I guarantee, as Scott said, there was a lot of other hedge funds who found out who was short and just tweaked that short. We used to call it running stops in the trading pit. You'd find it where the stops are and you run them just the way life is in trading. But I think I want to bring back to the narrative that's plain, that's speculation, that's pure, pure, just speculative. Get back to fundamentals and that is where you're going to see more and more buying and allocating to bitcoin. And I Think the small person needs to realize there's a risk of the haves and have nots in the future. And now the institutions are getting involved. Might take the risk of being a have not and allocate to bitcoin. Don't trade it. And to me, that's what's happening. Kicked in. Last year was more the volatility. This year the narrative is going to be, did you or didn't you own bitcoin by the end of the year?

Yeah.

And actually, you're right, Mike. Probably it's better to look at numbers instead of narratives, which can be easily manipulated or blown out of proportion. We received not long ago a statement from Kraken that says that they had a 1,000% increase in signups in the weekend of the GameStop rally. And so, yeah, that's pretty significant. I would say that's more than the whole of 2019 combined. So that's pretty impressive. I would say that's amazing. And actually, I would like to move to more of a maybe psychological kind of topic. So Elon Musk's behavior has been quite enigmatic on Twitter. It looked a little bit like trolling. Sometimes he put bitcoin on his Twitter profile, then he took it down. Then he started shilling dogecoin. Then it came out that he actually bought bitcoin. So what do you make of Musk behavior on Twitter? Some people say that shilling dogecoin or this kind of products is reckless and irresponsible because actually, people might get financially hurt because of the tweet. What's your take on Musk's behavior? Should he be blamed for this behavior, or is it just, like, innocent fun? What do you think, Scott?

I think he can do whatever he wants. And if we've learned anything from Twitter in the past few years, I mean, we had our president shilling things on Twitter that were potentially damaging financially to the American people. So to take the jump and blame Elon Musk because he's posting pictures of the Lion King with his face on it, I think it's a vast jump. The guy's kidding, right? And there's traders who will be able to use his tweets and things like that to make money, and there will be people who lose money. And yes, perhaps he should be more responsible, but the fact is it's a social media platform, and he's generally behaved like this for a very long time. Right. I mean, he's expressing his personality on a social media platform, and he's having a good time doing it. If you believe that Doge is a good investment because Elon Musk tweeted it, then you probably have bigger problems financially than you want to admit already and shouldn't be following the tweets of someone. You're probably the same person who buys something that some crypto influencer tweets or whatever, right? I mean, people are responsible for their own behavior. I don't have any problem with Elon Musk being Elon Musk on Twitter. And in fact, I quite enjoy it.

I gotta echo that because Scott, again, I mean, you just nailed just exactly what I'm thinking as an ex trader. It's the number one lesson you learn as a trader. No one forced you to take that position. When you hear about someone losing a position they take, it's completely. If they're not responsible for it, then they're lying and then they're not a trader. So that's where you have to look at is if you're trading off of tweets, good luck. There's some people who can do that well, but. And if you're not a complete professional with a massive amount of quants and computer power behind, behind you, in the long term, you'll lose money. I've just seen it happen. I mean, I was a broker for 20, 30 years and 90% of our clients lost money. The goal is to keep them alive. But I think the key thing to focus on is what's the next iteration we're in this bit of, I would say it's nothing but the biggest bubble ever in stocks. When you look at. And this is part of it, I look at what's the next iteration we saw today with Tesla. Tesla's the biggest name in the space, is probably the most. Elon Musk is one of, probably the most widely respected young people amongst millennials, certainly among my kids. We're all millennials on the planet. And to me, the next potential iteration is going. We see Tesla, there's a lot to look forward to in crypto and there's a lot of risk. But the next risk I think I would see potential to look forward to as a big headline at some point is getting an ETF in the U.S. canada is getting close. I didn't say ETP, maybe an ETF. We already have a lot of exchange traded products. But the reason I say that also it's brought me up to let's look at and I'll finish on this. To me, that's the next iteration to potentially look for amongst others. And an ETF would Really solidify a bottom below the market. Just like we saw this year with institutions getting that held 30,000 support, Elon Musk might hold 40,000 support in Bitcoin. So if you look at average volume on bitcoin futures right now, let's get some facts here. 30 day average is like 2.5 billion. When the wheat ETF was launched in 2011, the, the average volume the year before was right about where it is now for Bitcoin etf. So the point is that case that the SEC is making that there's not liquid enough, it's not liquid enough on a regulated exchange is no longer true. Now it is a fact. It is just as liquid as the wheat ETF was when it was launched and that one still trades.

Do you think that we are about to see this bitcoin ETF coming up soon because of this Elon Musk story?

I want to. It's not because it's just the next potential iteration.

I was just going to say the question was whether Elon Musk was manipulating bitcoin or putting the hashtag in all those things. Anyone who's a trader and believes in technical analysis, which I have my own feelings on, you believe that the news is in the chart, right? And I was posting charts literally for a week the last week showing a massive bull flag. Price was retesting it, it was coming back to retest support and, and then Elon Musk, of course they announced the Tesla and bitcoin goes up. But if you were simply looking at the chart, you also saw that in the chart as building up some pressure to break through this level. So that was the catalyst. But I think that it was going to happen with or without Tesla, first of all. So I agree that maybe Tesla becomes the 40k floor and the ETF is the next big thing. I've actually, I mean, full transparency. I invested in a company that has filed for an ETF called Valkyrie. So I'm pretty intimately involved in what that process looks like. I can tell you that the people I work with believe it'll be within three years. As usual, I'm a bit hyperbolic and excited. So I think we could see that within a year. And I think that we're going to see very, very interesting products. But as Mike most importantly said, the arguments that they have against an ETF are failing one by one. The dominoes are just falling down. The only reason not to approve it at this point would be some bias or, I don't know, some regulation coming that we're unaware of that would be prohibitive to it or something. But I think the ETF is inevitable. And what's important now you take Tesla as the floor. Tesla found a way, but it's not that easy to buy 1.5 billion. We've seen Michael Saylor break down the playbook of tens of thousands of small transactions to be able to do it. A, there's a lot of companies that don't want to do that, and B, there's a lot of companies that still can't really get past compliance to buy bitcoin. Even with grayscale, even obviously the underlying asset ETF opens the gates to everyone. There's no company that can't justify buying an ETF and can't legally do it. So anyone who's sitting on the sidelines and waiting, anyone who's waiting for market cap to be higher, anyone who's waiting for or a vehicle that allows them to do it legally without the friction, will be able to do it when the ETF comes.

So I would like to take a chance to ask our audience if you have any questions regarding this big news regarding Tesla buying wine. $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin skyrocketing almost to around $44,000. Write your questions in the chat and I will ask our guests to answer. So moving on to the following question. I was pretty curious to know your opinion about this because Elon Musk just got into bitcoin. We don't know what price level he bought these bitcoins for. We don't know for how much he bought those bitcoins, but we can assume it was around perhaps $35,000 price. So what do you think? Was Elon a bit late in jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon? Why did it take him so long to join? Mike, maybe you can go first with this.

Well, that's always relative. As we know everybody who's bought bitcoin, most people said they bought and held it, felt that they were late at the time, starting around 10, then 100, then 1,000 and then 10,000. And to me, that's where we've been going with zeros. Last year, lock in was really 10,000. I think the next lock in is really going to be 100,000. So it's only late if it fails, it's early by many measures. If it does continue to do what it's been doing, which has been accelerating, become a global reserve asset store of value. That's no one else's liability and no one else's project. And to me, that's what's happening on a global scale. Elon Musk is the biggest name to jump into space. So that's why as a trader and strategist, I'm always looking at kids. What's this next iteration? Something can go wrong. I don't know. That's why I had to bring in tether a little bit because people have been bringing that up and I said tether. That whole narrative of tether was. So we got past that in April 20, 2019. I can go there if we want. It's been the space is just rising, so something has to go wrong with the technology. Otherwise it's potentially very early. And I don't see why what should stop Bitcoin from to me, the next iteration is 50,000. A normal year like this, unless something goes wrong with the history of bitcoin is it would get to near 100,000. But you add in the macro, you add in the institutions, you add in the volume of the open interest is declining and was, I'm saying, not open interest, but volatility was less than gold and was less than the NASDAQ on basically 180 day, 260 day basis ever, the lowest ever versus the stock market. And to me it's like I don't see what should stop Bitcoin from continuing to do what it's been doing. And I was saying before at a slower pace, but why not the same pace as simply as 2017 was a 15x. Okay, let's just take bring that down to 4 or 5x gets us well over 200,000. The key question I always ask is what can go wrong? And obviously, Mr. Mr. Musk thinks there's less risk on the downside than the upside.

Scott, what do you think about this? Do you also think that Elon went into at the right time? There's no delay in his moving into bitcoin.

First, I think it's important to differentiate. Tesla came in at this price. We have no idea what Elon Musk did. And I would be very, very, very, very surprised if Elon Musk doesn't already own bitcoin personally and very surprised if he didn't do it earlier. The question, because the only fact we have is that Tesla bought bitcoin as a Treasury asset is whether Tesla is early or late, because we have no idea. I think that's an important differentiation. But no, like you said, late is relative and it depends on your narrative. If Bitcoin, you know, barely rose but the dollar continues to inflate. It's still a good investment. Right. So I, like Mike, don't see a reason that this won't continue up. But the biggest companies need a higher market cap to invest in bitcoin. So it has to get bigger. It had to be at this price. Tesla couldn't buy $10,000 Bitcoin, frankly, it was too small. It just couldn't have happened. So I think that this is really the right moment, the moment that it makes sense. And I think they'll be buying a lot more. I think it's important also to discuss the fact that Tesla's market cap, as much as 800 something 800 odd billion, they bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin is nothing. MicroStrategy is an $8 billion company that has just as much bitcoin. Michael Saylor is the one who's making this insanely bold bet on bitcoin with a huge percentage of the company's market cap. To me, Tesla's testing the waters here. I think that they'll be buying. They would be more inclined to buy more as it goes up than to buy more if it went down.

Yeah, for sure. Elon Musk seemed to be a little bit more cautious than Michael Saylor in this respect. But of course, we'll see how it goes in the future. Also, I want to point out that it's not just that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of billions bitcoin, but also it announced that they are going to accept Bitcoin for purchases of their products. So probably in the future we're going to be able to buy Tesla cars using Bitcoin. What do you think about the significance of this side of the news?

Mike, you could tell I wanted to respond to that one. I'm glad you mentioned that one, Giovanni, because I look at bitcoin as it's a great thing you want to accept for payment, but I don't see why anybody would ever want to use it for payment unless they really have to because there's limited supply. We all know what's happening. At some point it's going to get too expensive. It might correct 50%, but using dollars, using fiat currency, using stable coins to buy something, sure. But just like the history of buying anything with bitcoin and going for adding five years to that, 10,000 bitcoins worth of pizza and stuff. I think it's really smart to accept it for payment. I think it's really smart for people to get credit cards where you earn it for cash back but why spend it? It's a collectible. Spend dollars. Certainly our country, that's the key thing I want to bring in and we can move on to this one is Tesla is an American based company and their Treasuries, US dollars, US reserve countries, think of the rest of the world that doesn't have that reserve currency status. And this is a thing that Michael Saylor brought up in some of his other companies where they have much more incentive for their Treasuries to use. Add a little maybe gold, silver, not so much silver, but bitcoin because they don't have that dollar, they don't have and many places have a currency. Let's look at Mexico, it's declined 50% versus the dollar in the last 10 years. If you're a Mexican company and you need to pay dollars for certain inputs, they're double the price almost just from 10 years ago. You need to protect yourself from that. To me that's what's happening. This is prudent protection on a global scale to protect the bumps. What's happening in fiat currencies, typically in historically it was precious metals and gold, but now, like I said, you cannot hold gold, I don't think without having some allocation to Bitcoin or you're potentially naked.

What about you, Scott, what do you make of this, of the significance of Tesla accepting Bitcoin for payments? Do you see it as a coherent move with allocating Bitcoin in terms of reserve assets for their company?

Yeah, I think it's an amazing move for the company and a terrible move for the consumer who considers doing it. Sort of as Mike touched on for a few reasons especially I only speak as an American, but if you buy a Tesla with Bitcoin, you've just sold 85, $90,000 worth of Bitcoin and have a taxable transaction to do so. So it's really prohibitive in this country to buy things in general with bitcoin. It's fun to talk about running around and buying cups of coffee and lunch with bitcoin, but you have to record every single one of those transactions and calc your taxable gain on every single one of those. So until they change that law, I can say at least here it's very difficult. But what I do think is important is that I think this will put pressure on every car manufacturer to accept Bitcoin. Just like them, holding it as a reserve asset will make other people consider it. I think that if people start buying Teslas because they can do it with Bitcoin, if they choose to do so, other car companies will do the same. So I think if you want to talk about Bitcoin as a method of paying payment, whether it's smart to use Bitcoin as a method of payment, I think that this is yet again the biggest news that we've seen because it's going to force the hand of a lot of other people to accept Bitcoin as payment.

Yeah, and actually it's surprising because usually these two narratives, bitcoin as a means of payment and as a store of value, are pointed as somehow contradictory for many people. But it seems that Tesla is like opening up both paths to a mainstream audience. Now I would like to talk about bitcoin naysayers. So this news about Tesla seem to be quite a strong piece of news for also many bitcoin naysayers who are being made fun of now on Twitter. And I saw that you also, Scott, took a little bit part in this fun. Especially Peter Schiff, who is a very well known bitcoin critic, has been a favorite target. So what do you think Bitcoin ACRs are going to concede defeat after this event?

Scott, the minute that he does, we should probably sell because that's usually the top. When the people who are the biggest and fiercest critics finally capitulating come onto your side. Let's hope that Peter remains extremely emotional and angry. Listen, Peter Schiff is a brilliant, brilliant person, I think, and I think he has a long history of great ideas and calls. He's just wrong on this one and he's not willing to admit it. Every human being has experienced being wrong and not willing to admit it. It just happens that he does it in spectacular fashion on a major public forum within a aggressive audience against him in the face of our whole community. I mean, he literally tweeted @cz from Binance that Elon Musk would never be stupid enough to purchase Bitcoin as a Treasury asset a month ago. Of course you're going to get pushback when you have it so publicly out there. And you're completely wrong. But I think the most important point is I would prefer that Peter still be talking about how stupid bitcoin is when it's $300,000.

Well, that's a key one problem with me and Scott. We agree too much. And that's a lesson to learn as a strategist and a day trader. And a trader as a strategist is the more naysayers the better. Here's an example. I remember being in the trading pits And I'd have seven people. I'd be on the phones all over the world. I'd say, this is a position I really agree with. You should do strategy. And if everybody liked it, it was almost virtually guaranteed it was wrong. If everybody said, mike, you're an idiot, it was guaranteed, almost it was going to be right. So the thing is, we need naysayers. In fact, by the way, Peter Schiff is a neighbor. We used to live. Right. Because by each other in western Connecticut before he moved. We've seen each other around town and been at different events. But this is one of the key parts of the narrative. We need the naysayers. They're falling like flies. But one of the key things that was out this weekend was that I remember I listened to so many podcasts, including them, including yours, Scott. And one of them was a narrative about when Jamie Dimon was quoted as saying it was just stupid for his employees to hold Bitcoin. And there's also a fact he said, I would fire them. So there's a liability there. What if people sold their Bitcoin because they want to work for him and then later realized they had a multimillion dollar asset? Could they come back and say, you know, I wanted my job with, but you've ruined my potential future to get ahead here. That's a bit of a liability. So I think this is what people are realizing is the people, the naysayers and the professionals are learning the risks are greater to not say things like he said, because if you're an employee and you sold because you're at risk of getting fired, to me, that's something a judge and a jury might say, oh, well, you were probably unduly pressured to get out of this reserve asset because your manager. I think the professionals are getting it. There's a greater risks now of being in NA or being in Mr. Roubini and telling people, if you're professional and your job is to help people make money and things that are new and different and you're wrong, you should be fired. I mean, that's what happens. That's the way life is. That's why I said, if I don't help people on the terminal make money, I'm not going to last here very long. That's just the way it is. I've been wrong in some things and hopefully stay right in others. But to me, that's what the naysayers are now at greater risk of being wrong that this becomes a global reserve asset.

Awesome. I think that you, Scott, might Need to drop out from the conversation. Right, yeah.

I've got about two or three more minutes.

Okay, so maybe just in time for one last question, then we can wrap up. A lot of bitcoin critics are pointing out a contradiction, but probably you can respond to them. So they are saying that Elon Musk's buying bitcoin, like Tesla buying bitcoins is contradictory in some way because Tesla is a green company that produces electric cars, while bitcoin is, is often blamed for consuming energy and impacting negatively the environment. So what do you think about this critic regarding Tesla's decision? Is it not betraying the spirit of the company?

Scott, I'm sure that Elon Musk could find some creative ways to use his Tesla roofs, gigafactory and all of the things that he's done to help improve the electric implications of mining bitcoin. But no, I don't think that that's the case. I think that there's a separation of church and state with the assets that you invest in and what your company does. Maybe that's a cop out, I don't know. But I think that the benefits of bitcoin far outweigh that argument in my opinion. But it's not something I've even thought about before or that I've seen as a critique. I've seen the, obviously the environmental critique of bitcoin in general, but I've never really considered it as counter to the Tesla ethos. But personally I don't see that as a very significant argument.

I'd like to turn that around a little bit the opposite. One thing about if you buy and run and operate an EV in China, your power source is basically coal. So that's probably not so good. I mean, let's look at the facts. Any major accomplishment in human history has used an additional or more advanced form of energy. Looks like horses going to, you know, the number one, the fastest form of transportation went to steam engines and then to automobiles and airplanes. And then we went from, to telephones and telegraph. Everything uses energy. The big significance about bitcoin's use of energy is it's decentralized. You can, it goes to where it's a power source is cheapest. That is a hydroelectric plant that's very far away from population. We'd have to run cables and lose 12, 15% cost of fortune. But you can generate that revenue locally and then use it to enhance society. So I look at it as the opposite. This is just one of those major jumps and leaps in human technology akin to the Internet. And I basically was a convert before I didn't believe it. Now I see. Basically mining can solve the problem of gas flaring in Texas and the US where you have that massive amount of flared natural gas from coal, from crude oil and natural gas production that needs to be burned off or utilized in some form of efficient generator that can generate electricity locally and mine some coins or Bitcoin. To me, that's a major step up in advancement in human society. And of course, the dirtiest commodity on the planet is gold. And everybody see the movie blood diamond. Yeah. I mean, come on. I mean, just study the history of commodities. They are certainly gold is the most dirtiest commodity on the planet to produce or one of the most.

Okay, cool. I think it's time to wrap up this discussion, guys. It was very cool to comment on these all epic events of today with you guys. So thanks a lot, Scott, and thanks a lot, Mike for joining the discussion. Thanks for having me and thanks a lot for watching you all. I'm Giovanni, your host. Next time I see you next time.