Mark Moss: "Bitcoin is a Cheat Code" | Bitcoin Backstage

Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the world. Buy bitcoin. Ray Dalio, largest fund manager in the world. Buy bitcoin. President Trump, President of the United States. Buy bitcoin. Your cousin. Oh, bitcoin's a scam.

It's so true.

And it's like, look, guys, like, things change. Like, Michael Saylor was against Bitcoin in 2013, right? He changed his mind. And so intelligence really is the signal of you being able to change your mind and take action.

We're here with Mark Moss. How are the vibes? How are you feeling?

There's a lot of excitement here because there's a lot of new things happening, and it's been coming for a long time. But what am I talking about specifically is the big move of these bitcoin treasury company plays. And so we're seeing a brand new financial asset, the first new financial asset in 500 years, being used in ways to build new financial products and a new financial system that we've just never seen before. And it's happening super fast. It's very explosive. A lot of money's being made. It's given us new terms, new words, new metrics to measure things that we've never learned about or heard about before. And there's a whole new group of people that are here to learn about that.

I like that you say that, because I was listening to an interview with Michael Saylor, and he was mentioning how we have sort of like the traditional finance guys coming in as the new bitcoin class. What are your thoughts on that new bitcoin class and what can we expect from them? Is it going to be sort of like the 2015 version of Bitcoin or.

Yeah. So let me just say I'm not as OG as some people. I started buying Bitcoin in 2015. It's about 300 bucks at the time when I learned about it and really learned how it was a tool for freedom and really a tool how we could win as a freedom maximalist. I'm all in. I got to go tell everybody about it. I've never shut up since when you talk about the new class coming in, a lot of the OG class is like, oh, they don't have the bitcoin values. They're not the cypherpunks. They're not here for the right reasons. They're here for ngu number go up. What I've often said is that you come for the Nguyen, but you stay for the freedom. And so I believe the best way to orange pill Somebody is to let them use a little bit of bitcoin and once their interest is there, they'll start learning more about it. And so yes, they're coming for the ngu. These are corporate types, these are Wall street types. They're here because they think it's the best chance to make money. And it is. I'm very hopeful that they'll stay for the cypherpunk values of what bitcoin stands for.

You're like the goat of simplifying things and having people like understand them super easily and like easy to digest. I've heard that many of like this new wave of bitcoiners that's coming in, especially seeing them be in, you know, D.C. for political reasons, I've heard that some are trying to like centralize bitcoin mine. Is that possible?

Yeah. So one of the things that everybody seems to be afraid of is that this corporatization of bitcoin, the financialization of bitcoin creates that centralization. And so of course bitcoin, its main attribute is it's decentralized. And so it was really a bottom up movement of individuals that started buying it. And now as corporations are coming, you know, Michael Saylor. Michael, strategy now holds over 550,000, over 2% of the entire supply. And a lot of people are like that, that's centralization. Now he's going to manipulate the price or he's going to control the network or all these things. And there's a big misunderstanding. First thing I would say is 80% of gold is centralized with central banks. 90% of equities are centralized between like Vanguard, State street and Blackrock. We're talking 80, 90%, 2%, like come on. Right. We're a long way. But, but more importantly, owning more of the bitcoin supply doesn't give you control of the network. Because to the question you've asked, we have the miners and then we have the nodes. So the nodes run the database, right? That's the code and the databases the nodes have to achieve consensus. The miners are the ones processing transactions. So the question that you asked, is there some centralization of the miners that's going under? So these bitcoin miners, the public ones, are getting very big and they control a lot of the hash power, the power of the network. But it's all over the world. And what happens is bitcoin is built off of economic game theory. So we're all in it for economic interest to make money. And so what happens is if some of these public bitcoin miners, for example, Mara tried this. They tried to censor blocks. They said they were going to only mine OFAC compliant blocks. So these are blocks that the government deemed are not blacklisted, they're not under sanctions, things like that. They quickly gave that up because they found if they're censoring blocks, they can't be as financially competitive as other ones that are open. And so certainly people will try. I think it's sort of like human nature to try to control things. Ultimately, I think it fails because of the open source nature and because of the incentives that are built in.

It's funny you mentioned about centralization and I want to kind of steer it to the US dollar. You recently just had one of your recent videos blow up and it was about the US dollar being like devalued, devalued. And you talk about the reset, that it's not a crash, that it's a reset. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Yeah. So you know, I'm an optimist. I believe that the future is so abundant we are about to see the greatest era of prosperity in front of us. But there's a lot of doomers. And they're going to warn you about the market crash coming and the end of the dollar like it's some imminent event. Like any day now the dollar is going to crash. The world's going to be over, the financial market is going to crash like any day. And it's this doomer narrative that really came from the gold space. The only way to sell gold is to tell you that everything is going to fall apart. And there's this doomsday scenario where you need gold. But bitcoin is technology. Bitcoin is about hope. And so what I was talking about is yes, the dollar is crashing. It's a process, it's not an event. It's not like in 12 months or 24 months, it's going to happen. It, it's happening. The dollar continues to lose purchasing power. And in that video specifically I was talking about how the US government actually wants the dollar to continue to devalue. They want it to get weaker. And when you look at the dollar strength as measured as the Dixie measured to other currencies, we can see that we're pretty high historically. The dollar is very strong compared to historical median right now. And so we want to bring that down to a more historical level which might be a 15 to 20% devaluation from here. And so when that devalues, then the converse of that is Asset prices go up. Now, not all asset prices go up at the same rate. Bitcoin is the most sensitive to that global liquidity. So as the dollar goes down and the global liquidity goes up, then Bitcoin will go up at a faster rate.

Can you talk about that process? Obviously it's not going to be in 12 months or 24 months. Do you think it happened because of the Trump administration or it's been something that's been happening and people are just now waking up to it.

It's a function of the monetary system. So it started long before Trump. It started. I mean, Richard Nixon took us off the dollar standard and we went from sort of a Bretton woods system, a Goldback system, to a pure fiat system. And so in a pure fiat system, money is created through debt issuance. And in that system, the debt becomes the asset in the system. So then the debt becomes an asset to get more debt and more debt. Right. And so that system always has to continue to grow. That's why we need inflation. Deflation is the worst thing that can happen in that system. So it's a function of the system. And so each president has spent more, added more to the debt than the last, to the kind of point you asked about the Trump administration. They came in sort of fired up. They're going to balance the budget. Elon Musk and Doge, they're going to get rid of fraud and abuse and they're going to balance the budget. And everyone's thrown in the towel. Elon Musk has now stepped aside. He said, hey, look, we did great work, we uncovered great things, but there's zero appetite to cut the spending in the government. And so our only hope is to grow our way out of this. Scott Bessant, head of the treasury, said the same thing about two weeks ago. He said, look, our best bet is to grow our way out of this. And so that means two things. So what do they mean, grow our way out of that? So we have debt and we have gdp. So there's a ratio. And so right now we're at, you know, roughly almost 120% debt to GDP ratio. But that's a ratio. So we could either lower the debt or we could raise the gdp. So that's what they're talking about, growing our way out of it. And there's two ways that they do that. Number one, unleashing productivity, so bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. in order for the U.S. to be competitive with manufacturing, we need AI, we need automation. So there's A lot of wealth that'll be created, there's a lot of efficiency gains, but number two, inflation. So when they inflate the money supply, it pushes the cost of goods up. And by making things more expensive, the GDP also goes up. And so that's what they mean by growing our way out of this. It means a lot more inflation coming on top of the prosperity as well.

And I want to go back to that video. You talk about the Mar a Lago Accord and how it's very similar to the Plaza Accord. So how is the dollar being deliberately weakened?

So in the Mar a Lago Accord, that was in 1985, when I think it was the G7 got together and basically agreed to re pick back to the dollar and to allow the dollar to devalue, to get weaker. And so now there's these Mar a Lago accords. And it was Trump's economic advisor, Steve Moran, who published a paper before Trump became president on exact. And he's the one that came up with that term, the Mar a Lago Accord. It's basically a play on the Plaza Accord, which is allowing sort of the US trade to recenter around the US that's part of what the tariffs are about. So it's realigning global trade around the US and then sort of repegging back to the dollar. So balancing trade, which would then allow the US to weaken the dollar. And how do we do that? Specifically? By printing lots and lots of it, by increasing the debt, by increasing the money supply.

But my question is we were talking about how the dollar is already weakened, you know what I mean? So how can they weaken it more if its value has gone down since 1971?

That's a great question. So when we say weak. Weak compared to what? That's the key piece. So when we say weak. So when, as I said earlier, the dollar measured against the Dixie, the dollar index, so that's measured against other currencies. So when you measure the dollar against the euro, which is the main component of that basket, or the yuan or the, you know, whatever, the peso, the boulevard, whatever, when you compare the dollar to other currencies, it's very strong. When you compare the dollar to gold or to Bitcoin or to real estate, it's very weak. So when you look at charts and you see the dollar's devalue. 90%. 90% compared to what? Compared to hard assets like gold. But it's strong compared to other currencies. And the reason why that matters is because we're talking about resetting global trade. And so when you're trading, when the US is trading with China, if the dollar's too strong, it makes our exports too expensive. So nobody wants to buy our exports. If the dollar gets weaker, it's easier for us to trade. Right. And that's why we get these currency wars happening between these nations, because each nation is trying to make their own trade balance their own goods more competitive on the global stage. So yeah, so they're trying to make it weaker to other currencies. And when I said it's already weaker when you look at it compared to other currencies, it's historically high right now. And they want to weaken it compared to other currencies, which will also weaken it to gold and bitcoin and houses, et cetera.

So does that mean that the US is printing less money compared to the other currencies?

We have been, yes.

Really?

We have been. Right. So the Fed has been in a tightening cycle since 2022.

I thought they were just like printing like there's no tomorrow.

Well, we have fiscal policy and we have monetary policy. So fiscal policy is how much the government spends. Then we have monetary policy is what the central bank sets as the money supply. And so the Fed monetary policy has been tightening. Quantitative easing is when they're easing the monetary supply, they're increasing it. And they've been in tightening, so they've been letting the bonds expire and roll off of their books, which has been shrinking the money supply. At the meantime, what the Biden administration did with Janet Yellen at the treasury, they were trying to offset that. And so the treasury, the fiscal policy was spending like crazy. So what Janet Yellen was doing was issuing a lot of treasuries on the short end, like less than six month term to raise that money. And they were spending that money into the economy. So we sort of had competing odds here. You had the government fiscal policy fighting against like the Fed's monetary policy. At the same time, if you're stuck.

Split spending dollars, at least stop earning fiat rewards. Use fold and earn bitcoin on everyday spending, groceries, travel, even paying bills. And take advantage of bitcoin rewards with merchants you might already shop with. It's the easiest way to stack sats. So if you're in the United States and you don't have fold yet, what are you doing? Buy, earn and save in bitcoin all in one app. Fold is the ultimate toolkit for making bitcoin savings A d really have it.

Foreign.

You've mapped out how Bitcoin responds to dollar devaluation. If this reset plan plays out, what's your price target for bitcoin?

The price target for bitcoin. So at bitcoin, Mina, we were both there. I gave a. I gave the closing keynote, and I projected where it'd be 2030, 2040, 2050. So you can go watch that whole video for the full math. But basically, if we look at, as the world continues to increase the money supply, that money goes somewhere. We don't want money. We want the goods and services it buys us. So as they increase the money, the basket of goods, it appreciates. So right now we look at store value assets, and they're about a quadrillion one thousand trillion dollars. So that's gold, art, real estate, equities, bonds, cash, et cetera. If we continue on the path of increasing the money supply that we've been on at about 10% a year, so we go, okay, so the money supply expands by about 10% a year. That basket expands about 10% a year. But not each asset goes up at the same rate. So bitcoin is the most sensitive to global liquidity. It's going up at about 8.9 times sensitivity compared to gold's about 1.4% times something like that. I project that bitcoin will continue to go up faster than fine art or collectibles or gold or real estate. And so that basket by 2030 should be about 1.3 quadrillion. By 2040 should be about 3.5 quadrillion. So the question then becomes like a venture capital perspective, if that's the total addressable market, what percentage could bitcoin capture of that market? So if bitcoin can get 1.25% of that basket, 1% by 2030, that would put it on par with gold at about $21 trillion. Or it'd be $1 million per bitcoin by 2040, which is about 15 years from now. If bitcoin could get 8% of that basket, it would put it on pace to be about $14 million per Bitcoin. Now, is 8% realistic, or does that seem too big? Well, if we look at it from that lens, we know that Uber and Airbnb both captured 10% of their market in less than 10 years. So we're talking about Bitcoin getting only 8% in decades. And so to me, it seems sort of bearish, sort of conservative. But those would be some projections that I'm looking at.

It's like playing it on the safe side and you mentioned about gold and bitcoin. Do you think since the US dollar is going to weaken a lot, are we ever going to be seeing bitcoin being priced in, I don't know, gold?

I don't think we'll see bitcoin priced in gold. No. I do think that bitcoin eventually becomes the unit of account that we start to price things in. I'm predicting that happens somewhere around 2050, maybe a little bit past. So about 25 years from now. Already a lot of bitcoiners that we know already price things in sats already. I was talking maybe a little spoiler alert, but I was talking with Marty Bent earlier, and he's working on a product that everything that you look at on the website instantly converts dollars into sats. So we can start to be seeing it that way. But I think that we'll eventually price everything in SATS, and I think that's about 25 years, but no reason to price that in gold.

What does your portfolio look like right now? Can you give us a little, like, insight?

Yeah, we'll break down my total portfolio and then we'll break down the bitcoin side of it. Okay. First thing I would say is that there's levels to this game. So you see a lot of people on Twitter or X talking about, you know, sell your chairs, go all in on bitcoin. And that's cool when you got a couple thousand bucks, right? If you have a couple hundred million, obviously you own different things. For me personally, it's my businesses. So multiple businesses I have, that's one real estate is another piece of it. And then the third is my bitcoin sort of tech plays. The bitcoin, I'm sorry, the business side is where we make the money. That's where we create the wealth. And then I buy real estate for tax efficiency. So I buy. I buy real estate so I don't have to pay tax on the money that I make. And then the after tax dollars, which are more money, then those goes into some of these bitcoin tech plays. So on that side, it's specifically bitcoin, pretty much all bitcoin. And then I have a fund, so the bitcoin Opportunity Fund. So we're investing into businesses that are building on and around the bitcoin ecosystem. So the majority of that in bitcoin, some of that in the fund where we're investing into these businesses that are building on and around bitcoin, and then a smaller piece that's in some of the more speculative plays. So a lot of these bitcoin treasury plays. So we're getting into all of those both in the fund and personally. I'm investing into these companies as well. There's some convergence of AI and Bitcoin coming together where AI agents are working with Bitcoin directly. So I'm investing into some of that as well. And those are small percentage of my portfolio. But the majority of that would just be bitcoin.

And what can we expect of AI and bitcoin working together? Can you tell us a little bit?

Yeah. So again, in that Bitcoin Mina talk I Talked about around 2030 is where I think this will really start to take off. And so already we're seeing. So for example, a big area that we invest in is bitcoin mining. And in the bitcoin mining space we have data centers and a lot of them are now bringing on AI data centers. High compute is what we call it. So we're already starting to see sort of these bitcoin miners be bitcoin and AI data centers, if you will. So some convergence there. But specifically what I'm thinking is that Bitcoin is open, borderless, permissionless, all of these things. It's also personless, so you don't have to be a person to have a bank account. And so now we have the rise of autonomous AI agents. So I can basically program an AI agent to go hire other AI agents to go do tasks for me, research, write, build websites, run marketing campaigns, things like that.

And you would pay them in Bitcoin?

Well, yes. So I would give my agent the ability to go do all these transactions on my behalf and they can have a wallet and it can have Bitcoin and it can go do these things and it can spend the bitcoin. It could hire other agents to go do these things for me. And we've already started to see this. So for example, one agent, this has already been done, can go do research and find the best online business, then it can go write the business plan, then it can go find domain names to match. And it went and it bought the domain name using lightning to do that. So we're already starting to see this happen. Part of the reason why is it can't use the fiat system for this. An AI agent can't have a bank account. But more specifically you can't do microtransactions at high frequency with the fiat system. And so in order for these AI agents to do these high frequency transactions, microtransactions, it's going to need something like bitcoin to do that. So I think that's going to be a. Over the next probably 12 to 24 months is going to be an area that's going to rapidly grow.

And also one of the things that you also talk about is how we're experiencing one of the biggest wealth transfers in the last 50 years. What's the biggest mistake you think that this generation or people are going to make?

What I'd say probably the biggest mistake that people are making in this generation is most people have lost their ability to think critically or with an open mind. And I see this like crazy. I make videos and we get thousands of comments. And I read the comments on these videos and I just think to myself that these people are just, they're never going to make it. People bring these biases in and these assumptions in, and they can't even have an open enough mind to even ask if it could be true. To even go do research to even see if it could be true. They instantly believe it's not. Of that's the school system that we have, that we have this industrial era school system that's trained people up with these old tools for a world that we're no longer in. But I'd say that's the number one thing. The world has changed just in the last 10 years. Most people were taught for an industrial system. And so they're not able to see the new world that we're in. They're not able to have an open enough mind to go explore it and to even think that it's possible. And that's what's going to hold people back, because it's as simple as just buying bitcoin. I put out an ex post a few weeks ago and it was like, Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the world, buy bitcoin. Ray Dalio largest fund manager in the world Buy bitcoin. President Trump President of the United States Buy bitcoin. Your cousin. Oh, bitcoin's a scam.

It's so true.

And it's like, look, guys, like, things change and like, you need to change your mind. Like Michael Saylor was against Bitcoin in 2013. Right. He changed his mind. And so intelligence really is the signal of you being able to change your mind and take action. And so I think that's the single biggest thing that's going to hold people back.

People say the ones that survive the longest are the ones that are willing to adapt.

Yeah.

Speaking of adaptability, what generation do you think understands bitcoin?

The most well understands it's the most, I would say 30 to 50 year old range because they're old enough to have seen the damage done by the great financial crash, understand the dangers of the fiat system, but still young enough to grasp technology and how it's reshaping things. And so there's sort of this middle generation. They saw the world before the Internet and they understand the dangers of fiat. They still understand gold a little bit, but then they understand the tech. Obviously the younger generation, the 16 year olds, they were just raised on it. They don't know any different, but they don't know any different but doesn't mean they understand it. They don't understand the need for it, the mechanism of it. So I'd say probably the 30 to 50 year old generation, the straddle, the straddle generation, not even the baby boomers.

I think they're like the skip generation.

The baby boomers are a little on the other, on the other side, they're a little too far.

My last question is what is your hottest bitcoin take?

My hottest bitcoin take is that bitcoin is a cheat code. All you have to do is buy one asset and you can outperform everybody else. And for most people you can buy bitcoin, probably have tax free income for the rest of your life within five years to retire off of. But debt is your friend, leverage is your friend. But you have to grow up and mature to learn how to use it properly. Awesome.

Thank you so much Mark.