“Nobody Understands What’s About To Happen To Bitcoin” | Mark Moss

This year Wall street finally caught up. JP Morgan, Ken Griffin from Citadel and even Paul Tudor Jones are all calling Bitcoin the ultimate hedge against dollar debasement. But according to Mark Moss, that's just the surface. What's really happening is the birth of an entirely new financial system. One built on Bitcoin treasury companies and digital credit where yield debt and money itself get rewritten on chain. In this conversation, Mark breaks down how Michael Saylor's latest play can show us how to replace bond.

What strategy is doing is something completely different. They're not agreeing to pay you off of future cash flows. They have the asset it's coming off of an asset. They have over a hundred years of capital to pay you right now. So based off of the obligations they have to pay, if they never took in another penny, no cash flow, they could pay out a hundred years. That's not how the traditional financial world works.

Why?

Thousands of new Bitcoin based firms could emerge worldwide.

So the potential for at least a thousand or potentially thousands of these are there now. That's just in fix income now. What about insurance products? You're collecting premiums forever. Maybe you pay it out and you could let that sit in. Bitcoin automobile or life or health or sports. Like how many insurance companies are there and why?

He believes Bitcoin isn't entering a new cycle, it's entering a new era.

Let's do.

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Up loan with Figure today. So I saw you in Vegas. It was the birth of the treasury companies.

Yeah, right.

And obviously as I think many new might happen, there's been A bit of a speculative bubble there. I will not say that it's a bubble as a space, but obviously we had a whole lot go up and go way down. And now I think people are trying to figure out which phoenixes are going to rise from the ashes.

Yeah, you know, I know you were a bit skeptical. We've had a lot of messages kind of going back and forth privately and to a lot of people who are skeptical right now, seems like a lot of people want to take the victory lap and think that these things have sort of crashed. I'm not saying you are doing that, but, you know, I see it on Twitter. A lot of people are like, oh, I, you know, I told you so and things like that. But I just think, like, if that's what you think, you have no idea what's really going on, in my opinion. And actually I spent some time at the gym talking about this was somebody else this morning. In my opinion, almost nobody has any real idea of what's actually going on. And it is going to be so much bigger than most people can even think and fathom. And I was kind of going through. In 1999, I started this Internet company. I'm in California. So the dot com bubble was blowing up. We went, we raised some money and then unfortunately the bubble popped and we got kind of caught that. In 2001, right after the recovery, I built this e commerce site and I had to spend like 25 grand to get like the most basic e comm site up because there was like no shopify back then. And I went to these companies and I said, hey, I want to sell your products on my website. And they laughed at me and they told me nobody would ever buy anything online. And I said, well, I beg to differ and I'll just give you the money and I'll take the risk. And they said, we don't even want our stuff sold on the Internet because it was kind of like this stupid scam thing that just blew up. Right. I've been there when I got into crypto people and let me just go back. When I started that company in 2001, there was nobody online. I was selling sporting goods. I was specifically selling action sports stuff. I was the only. I had to advertise in magazines because there was nobody online. I was the only.com in the magazine at the time. It was mail order still at that time. And so. And the point that I want to make on that is when I started that it wasn't like, I'm going to get Rich. This year it was, I'm going to be the first mover. And when this takes off years from now, I'll be one of the biggest. And I was. And I had a big exit that worked good. When I got into crypto in 20, 20, 15, 2016, they told me the same thing. It's never going to work. And I didn't buy it, thinking I was going to get really rich right away. But I knew that in five years from now bitcoin would be so big. And it is. And now with bitcoin treasury companies, most people have complete, completely missed what's actually going on. And I believe it's the most transformative thing that we've ever seen. And I'd love to, I'll break it down for you, but it's not that I'm going to get so rich today. You, it's five or ten years from now, the entire financial system will be completely changed and most people will be completely caught off guard, just like E Comp, just like crypto. And this is the next thing.

You have to have exceptionally high conviction to have that much vision and belief a few years ahead because inevitably you're going to have people laughing at you, as you said, dunking on you, saying, look, I told you so. And maybe you don't get the chance to dunk back because they're gone from the Internet four or five years later. But I tend to agree with you. I think we've discussed this at length privately. As you mentioned, my issue was always how much leverage will Treasury Company 75 take on? Not should bitcoin be on the balance sheet? Because I believe that instead of cash, every company should take the money that they make and convert it to bitcoin on their balance sheet. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah, yeah. And so a couple things, like number one, I think it's really the difference of I would almost break people into two categories. And I think we have creators and we have consumers and creators build, we create value. And so you have to take a long term approach. Most business builders will typically give you like a 10 year frame. It's why venture capital funds typically have a 10 year lockup. Right. So you have a 10 year lockup.

Because we know private equity too, and private equity years. Yeah, yeah.

We know that it's going to take 10 years for Uber or Airbnb to get big enough to a point where they can go public and have a liquidity event. And so you can't trade it in between that time frame. Give us 10 years to build it. And so a creator has that timeframe. Michael Saylor, when he wrote his books decades ago about, you know, the rise of these digital monopolies, he talked about 10 year timeframes. If you hear him talk today, he's always talking about 10 years. He says, I can't tell you past 20, but I think in 10 years I got my start in real estate and I was flipping homes. Those were like year projects. Then I started building, those were like five year projects. So for me it's, I typically think in like five year time frames, but five or ten years. So you said like the conviction. Yeah, like if you're gonna build a company and think 10 years out, you have to have the conviction. So I'd say that. But going back to the point that you made about companies putting bitcoin on the balance sheet. So let's just start with that right now. So what Saylor calls digital capital. Right. And so, you know, I mentioned I started some tech companies. I started a high tech medical equipment company that I sold off to the largest company in the medical space. And we created these things called digital X rays at the time when nobody knew what those were. And we helped push like paperless offices, which was crazy back then. And so what happens is whenever we have a technological revolution, the new piece of technology gives us this new building block. And that new building block allows us to build things that we could never have imagined. And so people typically think of things like in a vacuum. And so. And we also try to. Our brains are comparing mechanisms. So it's like, oh, what is this electricity? Well, it's sort of like a way we can have a digital candle. Well, I guess it's like a digital candle, but of course it's so much more. So when we think about bitcoin, we think like, well, what is it? Well, I don't know. It's kind of like a digital gold and it's kind of like. Right. So it's kind of like a lot of things, but it's, but so much more. And when we have that new set of building block, we can build things we couldn't imagine. So, for example, back to the Internet days, there was all types of magazines and newspapers that were saying like, you know, it'd be like a virtual town hall one day and, you know, maybe, maybe we'd buy things online one day. And so what we were taking is things we already knew and imagining we could do those things in a new way on the new technology. But what we didn't Imagine was that our cars would be hooked to something called a cloud, using something called social media to navigate us and drive autonomously, because we didn't have a social media or a cloud. Right. And so bitcoin is like that. It's like a lot of things, but it's so much more. And one thing that we see that it is is digital capital. And because it has, you know, fixed supply, it allows us to store wealth, you know, as Saylor would call like digital energy in a battery that doesn't leak, it can hold that energy for thousands of years. So, well, what does that do? What could we do with something like that that could hold energy for thousands of years? Well, it transforms businesses. So right now we see all these corporations that don't know what to do with their cash. Warren Buffett's got, you know, whatever, $300 billion of cash, doesn't know what to do with it. But more specifically, we look at a lot of operating businesses, and so they don't know what to do other than destroy their capital, which is, I guess we'll either just give the cash back to our shareholders or we'll just buy our own stock back, or we may try to go do M and A on some companies that we don't know what we're doing and put that cash at risk versus if they could just store that. And so that fundamentally transforms a company and extends the timeframe. So I think that's number one. And to your point, you said that, you know, every company should put bitcoin on their balance sheet. So I think just that right there is fundamental and that's important, but that isn't really what a bitcoin treasury strategy, like, what strategy is doing and like what all these other copycat companies really are trying to do.

Okay, so let's break that down and why what they're doing is important and how there's going to be demand for an infinite amount of those.

Yeah, I. Thousands of them. I don't know about infinite amount, but. But thousands of them for sure. And so really, this is where I think almost everybody has missed what's actually going on. I mean, a few of us, you deep in the weeds, you understand this. But when I see articles on FT or BBC and I just like, man, they don't know what they're doing. We're talking about. So now that we have this new building block of. You laugh.

I'm laughing because I only know because you explained it to me, like, you know, privately and a few other people. So.

And I. And I saw you, I saw your recent interview with Saylor on stage. That was, that was pretty good. So you've, you've, and, you know, you and I have hung out at his house together. So I know you're getting the inside, but most people don't. Right? So you have this digital capital and now what can we do with it? Well, one of the things, as I said, is I could extend the life expectancy of a corporation, but what else could we do with it? What we're seeing now is the creation, the invention and the creation now of what's called digital credit. And so the analogy is sort of like a power station or a refinery where I would bring in a raw base asset like oil. But what do I do with the oil? Well, we create things from the oil, right? So it could be different types of fuel, like kerosene or jet fuel or diesel fuel or regular gasoline, for example. Pick which one you want. But it could also be other products like acrylics or plastics or petrochemicals. So we take in a base asset and then we create new products from it. Or think about like a digital power plant. So it takes in raw energy, it could be coal or gas, and then it could create different types of energy at different frequencies, different hertz, different ratios, things like that. So that's what we're starting to see now when we think about digital credit, we think about how do we take this asset that's now highly volatile, but also. Well, it's highly volatile, which is good and bad, right? So it goes up, it's highly volatile to the upside, but it's also highly volatile in the short term. And how do we create this digital credit? And so Saylor has given us the model that all these other companies, 100 of them now are trying to follow. I'm involved in a couple of them. Satsuma, we're launching in the UK right now. And so we have, we have four products. Strike, Strive, Stride and Stretch. Let's just talk about stretch for a second because this is so revolutionary that most people can't grasp this. So the, the biggest market in the world is fixed income. Over $300 trillion, 145 trillion of that is tradable securitized fixed income instruments. Who needs that? Well, 250 million retirees just in the developed world alone, they need it, businesses need it, right? We need liabilities that can match that. And so we need fixed income to pay bills, to pay expenses. We invest money and we need the income, right? And so typically that would be paid I wouldn't. I would invest in fixed income through debt. It's credit, right? So I buy a bond. So I'm loaning you money, you agree to pay me back a coupon. It could also be I'm buying a dividend stock like AT&T. Now, the entire stock market is based off of discounted future cash flows, right? Companies are valued based off of P E ratios, the price to earnings. What will their earnings be in the future? So we're buying companies based off of how much earnings or cash flow we think they'll have in the future. Or I'm buying a bond or a debt, loaning you money based off of your future cash flow and your future ability to pay me. That's how the market works. You have to understand that so you can understand how revolutionary this is. Now, the one question I'd have is, what if you can't pay me? What if you don't have those future cash flows? And with AI right now disrupting everything, the probability of you not having those cash flows to pay me back, either on the debt or from the dividend in the future is, Is going higher every day. So maybe you pay me back the, the cash flow. Maybe I don't know what kind of business you're in, how. What's the probability it'll be disrupted? What MicroStrategy is doing, strategy is doing is something completely different. They're not agreeing to pay you off of future cash flows. They have the asset. It's coming off of an asset. So as they did, they just did their quarterly meeting yesterday, the Q3 meeting. They have over 100 years of capital to pay you right now. So based off of the obligation obligations they have to pay, if they never took in another penny, no cash flow, they could pay out a hundred years. That's not how the traditional financial world works. But here's where it gets even more interesting than that. Because they're not paying you off of cash flow, future cash flows, it takes the risk away, number one. But number two, with Stretch, for example, they're giving you those dividends and they're essentially tax free. We can get into the semantics of that tax deferred. But the reason why is because they're not paying you from cash flow. It's technically a return of capital. So Now I'm getting 10 and a half percent, which is more than double what I can get in the safest fixed income instruments like US treasuries and bonds, etc. It's even safer because it's way over.

Collateralized with 5, 5x on stretch, which is the least. Right, right.

5X on assets. The other ones don't have the backing. It's hopefully maybe you'll have the money in the future, I don't know. And then it's tax free. So instead of 10 and a half percent, the yield just, they just increased it. Instead of 10 and a half percent.

He called it like 17 and a half in our conversation. I think it depends on what your.

Tax rate is and your income and all that.

So it's 6, 6 blended. Yeah.

16 to 20. Right. Let's just call it 16 to 20. So, so then you have that. So like this is a completely different system. Completely different system. And we're just starting to see this surface of this being scratched. Like this is going to transform everything that we know about finance.

Yeah. He broke it down for me in a 30 minute conversation before we did our conversation with all of the slides and showing the volatility. And what I found the most interesting in our conversation was that he effectively admitted it took me three tries before I knew exactly what the market wanted and the best way to do it. So it's not that he's saying you shouldn't buy the other three when it comes to Stretch being the last. He's just saying that there's a different risk profile, a different volatility and we've got a product for every person. But this is the perfect one. He views Stretch, which you just described as the perfect instrument for almost anyone because it threads the needle basically on a yield that is exciting but doesn't feel like a scam. Right. If you say 25% yield, even if it's safe, people are going to go, that's crazy, it can't be real. I really feel like at 10 it's a very well balanced number. You could say 5x collateralized and he's good to go. And I think even the take that a step further shows an incredible confidence of Bitcoin because you're effectively saying your cost of capital is higher than that. Yeah.

Now, of course none of this makes any sense if you don't believe in bitcoin. So we can, we can just start with that. Like if you don't believe in bitcoin's long term value appreciation, then of course none of this matters. And so we can get into that if you want. I'm sure most of your listeners already have jumped that hurdle. But I'd say just back to what you said about the four products that he has. First, of course, I Agree with him. I mean he's a genius. Who am I to disagree? But I would say actually a little bit, maybe I might just add nuance to that is that those four products are different products. So when somebody says, hey Mark, what tool should I use to fix my car? A wrench or a screwdriver? I'm like, I don't know, what are you trying to do? Because those are different tools. And so strike, which is at the top of the stack, is way different than Stretch. They're for different people, for different use cases trying to achieve different things. They're not the same. So Strike gives me the, it's a call option. It gives me the ability to have capital gains and I get income at the same time. It's like a dividend paying stock. I buy at and T, I get a coupon, but it also goes up in value hopefully maybe. So Strike gives me the upside and I get cash flow while I'm waiting. But I have to deal with the volatility. So if I'm. If so the way that most people should think about this in their money and portfolio allocation is timeframe. So you know, most people shouldn't be buying bitcoin unless they're planning to hold at least four years. Of course forever is the better time frame but, but at least four years. But what do you do with money that you need in shorter timeframes so you need less volatility. So the shorter timeframe you need the money, the less volatility you can stomach. So I might say, well okay, so bitcoin for four years, for two or three years I'll take a strike because I want that upside potential, but I'll take the 9% instead of the 10 and a half percent. But then I have short term money, like 6 months or 12 month money that I keep in my business that I can't stomach volatility with. So I'll put that into Stretch.

That's like a short term treasury. It's like buying a 30 year bond versus three month or one year or whatever.

That's exactly, that's exactly right. So you think about it in time frame. So I think that's number one. And the other thing that I'm just super impressed with Saylor in New York. I went to the UN conference about a month ago and I was on stage with him and the host asked a question, they said it was Brian Dixon and myself and Saylor. And they said, hey Brian and Mark, why don't you tell us what I think three things that you Think Saylor could have done better with or should have done different question. And I was like, he's right there.

Yeah, sitting right there. Can we do this later?

But it's funny because somebody was taking pictures and they sent them to me. And when I started talking, Sailor, like looks over and he has like this frown on his face. And as soon as I started talking, there's another picture with like a big smile on his face. Because I said, rather than say the three things he could have done better, let me say the three things he's done really well with.

Well done.

And so then he smiled, you know. But one of which, he has extreme laser focus. He has extreme laser focus. So to your point, Stretch is the perfect product and that's what he wants to take to market. And the reason why I bring this up is now let's talk about the potential for thousands of other companies.

Yeah, that's what I want to talk about. Because a lot of people are going to say just by, by these products from strategy, right?

So I saw a lot of that chatter online. Some people that I kind of, I don't follow, but for some reason they keep popping up in my feed and they're extremely, they're extreme. They're really into treasury companies, but they, they're very vocal. I don't agree with their viewpoints. But anyway, several of them were like, well, Saylor said that he's going to go into other markets now. Now he's going to offer Stretch in euros and in Canadian dollars. And that puts the. There's no more. No one else can do it. If he's going to go to those markets, no one else will go there. But here's exactly why that's wrong. And I did Bitcoin in dc. There was an event there a couple weeks ago and I did a two hour rip with Saylor. It's on my channel right now. It's worth a watch. And I asked him this specific question. You see, he's extremely laser focused. With Stretch, he found the perfect product to the point you said he tried four times and this is it. And what I love about Saylor and what I said he did, right, is that extreme focus. So he's like, look, Stretch is simple. Everyone has a bank account, everyone wishes to pay 10%.

Sure.

There's, there's a trillion dollars. There's, well, there's 30 trillion just in the U.S. alone for that product. Just 30 trillion in the U.S. alone. That is potential for that product. 300 trillion globally, right? So he's like, look, I can create a 30 trillion dollar company. I can just do this one product. And the reason why he only wants to do the one product, as he told me, is because it's simple and everyone understands it. He said, as soon as I introduce another product, my shareholders don't know what I'm doing anymore. And so it's very confusing to the market. So he wants it to be super simple, one thing. So how do we get thousands of these companies? Not everybody wants perpetual. Well, okay, first, let me break it down first. First of all, not everybody wants a security, an equity. Some people need it to be a bond. So right off the bat, you have a huge segment of the markets around the world that can't buy equities. It needs to be in bonds or credit or debt. So what about them? So he's like, look, he's like, you could create a, you could create a hundred billion dollar business doing bonds. I'm not going to do it. You should go do it then. Some people want duration, not everybody wants it to be perpetual. Some people want to be 30 years or 10 years or 5 years. And you could create a hundred billion dollar company just off of doing 10 year bonds. I'm not gonna do it. You should go do it. So if you think about in the United States alone, we have over 4,000 ETFs. Each one of those is just a little bit of a different profile of a little bit of a different mixture. I think there's over 5,000 different bonds from institutional grade. So from sovereign institutional grade all the way down to junk 5,000 bonds.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone has a different risk return profile. Why so many? There's not one, there's that many. So that means that there is potential for 5,000 products to replace the existing 5,000 or now 10,000 products. And that's just in one country. Now we can do it in every single jurisdiction, every single currency, right? And so the potential for at least a thousand or potentially thousands of these are there. Now that's just in fixed income. Now what about insurance products, right? So think about like an insurance company that's like the, maybe the best model for a Treasury company, right? So Warren Buffett proved that, right? The power of the float. You're collecting, you're collecting premiums forever. Maybe you pay it out and you could let that sit in Bitcoin, right? So now you think about how many different insurance companies are there? How many different types of insurance, how many different types of automobile or life or health or sports. Like how many insurance companies are there? So like all of a sudden you start going, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, yeah. We could easily see thousands of these different jurisdictions, one in every jurisdiction, number one, equities and bonds, number two, then all the different durations of bonds, all the different risk return profiles, then the different types of companies, insurance companies, etc. And you could easily get to thousands.

That makes perfect sense. Do you think that the biggest opportunity then is what you articulated is effectively going to different jurisdictions? I think Nakamoto articulated that first and said that that was effectively their plan. They wanted to go Meta Planet every place on Earth. Right. Metaplanet obviously has tax arbitrage. There's no ETFs available. It's really difficult to buy Bitcoin there versus just buying their stock. So it existed in this perfect vacuum for creating a Treasury company. So go do that in Brazil, go do that in Argentina, go to that in Sweden.

Right, sure. But that's actually phase one. So really you mentioned Saylor's tried four times. He's actually tried more than that. And so really there was MicroStrategy, which was like 1.0. And what he did with the MicroStrategy 1.0 was he built up the common stock MSTR and he levered it up using convertible bonds to buy Bitcoin. Phase two, he changed the name from MicroStrategy to Strategy 2.0. And now it's all about preferred instruments. So when you. When you mention Meta Planet and you know, the closed system that they have and the tax treatments and things like that, that's really about the common st. And this is actually another really great point. Right? So you have the common stock, then you have for press. So MicroStrategy is a proxy for Bitcoin. So. And Meta Planet is a proxy for Bitcoin. So in that jurisdiction, if you're a company that can't buy Bitcoin for whatever reason, I can't buy a commodity. I'm banned from Bitcoin. I can only buy securities or equities. Then I could buy Meta Planet. And that's a proxy. It's a levered play against Bitcoin. Right. The prefs are something totally different. Now. Saylor can't just go do a prep in Japan, because he's not set up in Japan. He can't pay in that currency or whatever. So that's a really good point. And the reason why that's a really good point is because what he told me at another dinner, we were in Prague, and he's like, what the market wants is MicroStrategy the common stock, to be more volatile than Bitcoin. So they're buying it as like a proxy. But they want it to be more volatile. But what that means is that they want me. They want it to be tied to Bitcoin. So he gave this example. He said, what if God came to me tonight and told me the market was going to crash tomorrow? So I woke up and I hedged the position and sure enough, the whole market crashed. But MicroStrategy didn't crash. It held up. That'd be great, right? No, that'd be wrong. The market wants me to crash. If the market wants me to be two times volatile, then I can't hedge my position to be one times. They need to adjust their position. They need to know what to expect. And this. And the reason why I bring this up as a good point is now you talk about Nakamoto. You talk about all these other treasury companies. Each one of them is doing a little bit different as a company with the common first. So Nakamoto wants to roll in the conferences and the magazine and the media into that. We saw similar scientific, which was like a medical company and a Treasury company. But then how does a medical company stock work in relation to Bitcoin's price? Or how does a media companies. So these are more like conglomerates. Right.

People forget that there is an underlying company and the SEC probably wants you to do something with.

Right. But there's a lot of what we would call, what we call in the space now, pure play companies.

Yep.

And so the pure play is really where the stock is just tied to Bitcoin's price and it sort of moves up and down. So. So then that's another variation. So you can start to see very quickly that there could be all different types of risk return profiles in these companies.

But it's interesting because what Saylor said makes a lot of sense in context of what you're seeing with MicroStrategy stock. People are freaking out, but it's only because Bitcoin hasn't really moved. A massive reduction in Bitcoin volatility in these pay periods of consolidation is bad for them. They want the volatility. He thrives on the volatility, whether it's up or whether it's down.

Yeah.

And whether it's. When it's up, they can, you know, issue some more shares. Buy bitcoin at effectively 50 off and, you know, laugh all the way to the bank.

He said something at the very end of the call last night yesterday, and it was at the end of the Q and A session and it was something that I've been saying and he said it, so we'll talk about that. I was in anyway, I was in New York, I was talking to some kind of people in the space and one of the guys is like, he loves to trade options against MicroStrategy. And he's full advice and I need to tell Saylor what he should be doing. And him liquidating stock at the market is crushing. And I lost a lot of money in options and this and that. Right. And I said, listen, like, you understand Bitcoin is like this like long term asset, like a four year time frame. That's how you should be looking at. But it's, but it's highly volatile. These companies are even longer term and even more volatile. And Saylor's playing a ten year game. I, I, who, who's the single largest shareholder of MicroStrategy, who has control? Saylor. You don't, you don't think he wants the price of the stock to go up? Of course he does. But he's looking at it over 10 years. You're looking at a quarter by quarter. That's the problem. And that's exactly what he said yesterday. So he said, Bitcoin is four years. We should look at these companies over 10 years. And a lot of people this morning were heard that and they were sort of ripping on that. Oh yeah, sure. Just give me 10 years. Yeah, just take all my money for 10 years. Yeah, yeah. That's how investors do it. Right. If you look at real investors, like Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett said, I don't buy stocks, I buy companies. They just happen to be traded publicly. He's owned Coca Cola for like 75 years. Bezos, Musk, Gates, they didn't become the richest people in the world because they traded stocks, they bought or they owned the companies and they just never sold those companies. So a 10 year timeframe, like why wouldn't I own that forever? Just like Buffett's own Coke for 75 years. Right. And so yeah, yeah, 10 years, that's the time frame you should be looking at these.

I think the big unlock for me was my conversations with you when you effectively explained that no matter what happens, they own a lot of bitcoin and you can just wait.

Yeah.

Which I didn't get at first when I was feeling a bit more critical. Obviously my bigger concern as we discussed, like why would something be trading at a 20x premium and it doesn't even own Bitcoin?

Yet.

Right. It was just sort of the complete insane price action and FOMO that was happening around them. But at the core what you said to me is even if you're trading at a discount, you own bitcoin. Just wait, you know what's going to happen?

Yeah, I mean, let's think about that just as a thought experiment, for example. Right. So Meta planet was a 8 times m nav. So 8 times a multiple of 8 times its net asset value of the bitcoin it held, for example. Right. And today it's down in the ones. So theoretically, or not theoretically actually in price, the stock price has gotten crushed because I bought it at eight times and today it's at a one times or whatever. Right. And so it was, it was certainly overhyped for sure. There was a irrational exuberance in the market at those values. Right. But let's say that I bought it at the eight and today the price of the equity is way down. However, if I look at it from a Warren Buffett lens, I didn't buy the stock, I bought the company. Is it a better company today than it was when I bought it at 8? It is. So they've added way more Bitcoin. Number one, the Bitcoin per share went up. Number two, they've now got to the second stage which is now doing the preferreds. So any company that gets to that, that's like the escape velocity. Okay, so the next one, okay, so it is a way better company today than it was back then. But that doesn't really help me Mark, because my stock price is down and I bought some at those levels. So I'm down on those positions too. So I feel you. But when I say like they own the bitcoin, it's a better company today. And so if I take the long term timeframe when they have 20,000 Bitcoin or MicroStrategy with whatever it has now, 640,000 Bitcoin. If I believe in the long term vision of bitcoin like I do, I believe bitcoin will be a million dollars in the next five or six years. That's times 640,000 Bitcoin now, they'll probably have, you know, who knows, 7, 750,000 by then, we're talking hundreds of billions. We're talking, you know, $700 billion of valuation of net asset value. Put a two times multiple on that, you're talking one and a half trillion dollars. Like it, give it some time. Right. If you take that long term timeframe and that's why I think what I told you in that private conversation is these might be some of the safest companies that you could buy. And I hate to use the word safe, but when you think about how Tradfi works, we mentioned venture companies before. So, you know, typically people would invest in the venture stage. You'd wait whatever, six, seven, eight, ten years for it to go public and go through a pre IPO and it would go public. Those insiders, they want to get out, they dump so retail can finally buy publicly and they get dumped on by public and, and there's a good chance those companies never come back. And so that's, that's risky. But what happened here, for example, is let's say that the pipe unlocked and a lot of insiders sold and it crushed the share price, right? And so now a lot of people got holding the bag, quote is what we'd say in the crypto space. They got left holding the bag. I bought at these high multiples now, you know, I bought it 6, 7, 8, 10 times. Now it's at 1 times. Oh my gosh. Yeah, but they have the bitcoin and so they bought a thousand bitcoin, they bought 2,000 bitcoin. Okay? So in five or six years from now that's a, they have $2 billion of net assets. And even if they traded at one times, it's a $2 billion company they called. Any company that reaches a billion dollar valuation is called a unicorn. It's so rare because it's.002% of businesses ever achieve that. And we're going to in five or six years. A lot of these treasury companies today, that people are down on their stock price today will be unic. So I think if they just wait and zoom out, they're going to be okay.

All of this, as you said, depends on a fundamental belief in bitcoin. And obviously that means a fundamental belief that bitcoin will rise. Right. And you kind of mentioned it's a four year view. Does that mean that you still view the four year cycle as the proper timeframe for looking at this or is that just looking back, if you ever held bitcoin for four years, you did great.

Well, I think, I think both. Right, so number one to your point, looking backwards, if you've ever hold Bitcoin for more than four years, no matter what point you bought it in, you'd always be up. So you could have bought it at any of the peaks like in 2017 or 2021 and you would have been okay. If you would have held it that long, number one. But as far as like, do I think the four year cycle is over? It's sort of like a meme today, the view that I have on that. And maybe about a year, year and a half ago, I kind of came onto this realization that I don't think it was really the halving cycle that was driving bitcoin's price in this four year cycle, it was the global liquidity cycle that was driving it. And what happened is, you know, we talk about all these bonds, so we have all this debt, we're in a debt based monetary system. So the whole world's driven by debt. And you have debt from months all the way up to 30 years at all different durations. And if your bank called you and said, hey, we're going to lower interest rate to zero, do you want to refinance? You're. Yeah, of course. So what happened is in 2008 when we had the great financial crash, the entire financial system collapsed and all of the world coordinated together, dropped rates to zerp, right? Zero interest rates. And so of course everybody refinanced. And what it did is it brought all those durations to one point in 2008. And we saw over the last now, you know, however long that's been, 15 years or so, we've seen the, the average duration of global debt, 75% of it has been within a three to five year range, which means about four years. And so what happens is about every four years that debt has to be refinanced. And if you, if you just put that in a time frame, so 2008, four years, 2012, 2016, 20, 2024, which just so happens to be the four year time having cycle, which also just so happens to be the four year presidential cycle. So I think that's really what's, that's the dog that was wagging the tail of the bitcoin halving cycle. And I think if we look back, so a lot of people, number one, if enough people believe it to be true, they could make it true. So you know, if a lot of people are going to start selling bitcoin today, I guess that could push the price down. But I think there's enough sustained bid to hold that up. But I'd say if you people that are looking back and going saying, well, it's exactly four years from November of 2021 and now here we are, November of, you know, Almost November of 2025, we should probably be selling, we're at the top of the cycle. But anyone that has half a brain and sort of looks at it realizes we're in a completely different environment. Right. Like in November 2021, Jerome Powell announced to go onto the fastest hiking cycle in Fed history. And right now he's cutting rates, like the fastest time in history.

Right.

Trump has openly said over and over he wants rates to be at 1%.

Yep.

And he gets what he wants. My guess is before he leaves, office rates are there.

I mean, Powell's gone in May. Whether you believe Powell's going to do it or not, you know exactly what kind of person's coming in.

Yeah, so. So I think there's that. So I'm guessing before Trump leaves, we're close to that. And so that's three years of acceleration. And then you look at even the bigger macro picture, which is, I believe that we are going into the greatest industrial industrialization that we've seen since World War II. US and China are literally in a nuclear or space race to build out AI and capture that future. You know, Trump is trying to re industrialize the US and bring the chips and all of that back. We're trying to, you know, push nuclear reactors and energy through. And so what. What happens in those events is that both China and the US and other people will benefit from that, will spend whatever it takes. Not price conscious buyers. Whatever it takes. And so you add all those couple factors in, and I think it looks a lot different than it was in 2021 or 2017.

Easy not to be price conscious when you can print the money that you're using to pay for something. Exactly.

But China does too.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. No, it applies to everybody, obviously. Right. So, interestingly, that narrative is catching fire right now. Bitcoiners have been screaming about the debasement trade since the beginning of bitcoin. Now all of a sudden, it's Ken Griffin and Paul Tudor Jones and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley screaming about the debasement trade. I mean, you're talking about the largest financial entities in the world. Every single one of them included bitcoin in the thing. You should buy some said bitcoin. Silver, gold, bitcoin gold, bitcoin, silver, nasdaq. I think it was Paul Tudor Jones. Bitcoin was on every single list. How crazy is that to you to hear from them now? And what was the tipping point?

I would say not crazy for me. Maybe more. Surreal might be the better word. Going back to what I said when people told me no one would buy anything online, and crypto was kind of all those things, like, it's like I kind of knew it. I put my money where my mouth was. And so it's more like validation, hearing them come around. But I do remember, you know, shoot. I mean, it wasn't that long ago with 2017, 2018, Jamie Dimon's like, I'll fire anybody at JP Morgan if I even hear they're buying bitcoin. Right.

I think that might have been 21, 22 and 23.

Yeah.

I mean, it's crazy.

Oh, maybe not long ago. Yeah, maybe it wasn't even that long ago.

And by the way, they just announced that you can collab that they'll take Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral.

Yeah. So, you know, Paul Tudor Jones came around several years ago, but he's consistently increased the percentage that he thinks that you should hold Bitcoin in your balance sheet. So, you know, I think one thing I think as a bitcoiner is like, of course it was always coming for everything. Of course this is the future that we thought was always inevitable. It's not that like we're begging tradfi to come in and we're begging governments for permission. It was always going to come for tradfi and governments. So it's certainly validation, it's certainly surreal. It's almost maybe like that gradually, then suddenly where it seems like it's been coming for a long time. Right. I mean, if you think about it like futures were launched in 2017.

Yeah. Right at the top.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, we've been seeing the institutions coming for a long time, but it does seem suddenly, all.

Of a sudden, it does seem suddenly. So going back to treasury companies a bit, we had this trend where they raised money and bought everything in one clip.

Yeah. Right.

So you've seen the sailors of the world. And whether you like Ethereum or not, you can see what Tom Lee's doing, Right. At bitmine, which is that they've been consistently able to raise more capital to continue to buy dips.

Right.

A lot of these companies just kind of bought at an arbitrary price and have no more cash or really ability at this moment to raise it to buy more dips. Are you supposed to just buy it all at once or you're supposed to be dollar cost averaging like you would tell any individual?

I mean, that's always the million dollar question that everybody wants to understand. And only with the benefit of hindsight can you find out the true answer for that. Because it just depends on the timing. I would say, though, that as a person, if as an individual, let me break it down individually, and then how I think about it as an, as a bitcoin treasury company, which I'm a. The strategic bitcoin strategist or the chief bitcoin strategist. So we have to think about as a company as well. But from a personal level, the way I think about it is that I think about it in probabilities. So a lot of people think too rigid and they don't understand the nuance. Everything is possible, but really what's probable. And so what we want to do is we're, you know, we're making bets on, on future prices, and so we have to think in terms of probability. If I was like a sports bettor, what's the handicap kind of a thing, right. So the way I typically think about it is do I think that bitcoin's price will be higher or lower in the future? So if, if, for example, I, I think that if I wait, I could potentially get bitcoin cheaper. I think bitcoin's gonna have a 50% crash, so I'm gonna wait. Okay, it could, I mean, but, but that's probable. Yeah. So then what, what do I think? What's my best guess? What is my percentage? I would assign to that. Do I think there's a 25% chance? It drops 50% and you also have.

To sign that percentage to it because how many times are you. Right. But it goes, it doubles and then goes back 50. You're right back where you started. Yeah, good luck.

So many times, Scott, over the years, I was right.

It drew back 50% to where I was now. Yeah, great.

Yeah, man. I, I remember a couple years ago, I think coming in 20 out of the 22 bottoms into 20, 23, I think it was in the 50 range. And I had, it was running and I was making some buys, and then I thought I was going to pull back, so I put, I put 50% in and then I put a, put a buy order in at a lower level and it never filled and it just ran away, you know, and it's like, ah, why did.

I didn't mean to interrupt your thought, though. Yeah, you were kind of breaking it down.

But the point I was going to make is that I have to make an educated guess and I should do my own research and I should think hard about this. But I would assign a probability. I think there's a 20% chance I can get it at a discount or a 50% chance or whatever that number is to me and then I would allocate my position accordingly. So if I think there's a 25% chance I can get it for cheaper, then I would maybe allocate 75% of my money today and I would hold the 25% for that chance. I could get it cheaper or it's 50, 50 or whatever. So that's, that's how I would think about it personally. Now that's if I have a lump sum, most people are sort of allocating as they get paid. And so if that's the case, then just DCA dollar cost average in that's.

The best way, sailor. Yep.

So those are the two things. If I have a lump sum, I came into some money for some reason or whatever, then that's how I would think about the allocation. Should I buy now or wait? If I'm just earning off my paychecks and putting in, then I would just DCA in. Now as a bitcoin treasury company, the way that we think about it is that we're getting paid to buy bitcoin, not dollars. And so what we want to do, and actually Saylor talks about this quite often, but we want to do is convert that dollars into bitcoin as quickly as possible. And Saylor talks about this when you think about traditional companies. If I were to invest into a real estate deal, for example, so I'm going to buy into one of Grant Cardone's multifamily projects or whatever, right. Like it could take five years for that money to actually get put into work. Right. If I'm going to invest into, you know, Tesla's new, you know, plant, like how long does it take to get that plant built or whatever, but where a Sailor can take 50 billion in today and within one hour have it placed. And so really I think it's about the speed and the time. And so treasury company, we're not trying to time the market. We believe in that long term appreciation. Our goal is to take whatever money we can get converted over immediately. And so those are two different ways we'd look at it.

Yeah, I think the question then is if you buy as quickly as you get it, shouldn't you also be handicapping that you have a mechanism to buy more?

Well, I mean that's a great question, Scott, and really that's a very important question that anybody buying into a Treasury company should be asking themselves. And there was a lot of metrics being thrown around about looking at. A lot of people were using the bitcoin yield. So the percentage at which the company is growing their Bitcoin stack. So if I went from one bitcoin to two bitcoin, that's 100% yield. And I thought that was a pretty ridiculous metric because that doesn't tell me what their ability to sustain that is. It's like a lagging indicator. Right? And so really the question we have to ask ourselves, and this is a much tougher question, and it's very difficult to understand this, but what do I think this company's probability of continuing to raise money is in the future? So how good is their team? Right. How good is the company set up? What does their capital structure look like? What markets are they in? And so what's that ability to continue to raise money? So there's some companies that are, that are pretty small companies and when I look at them, I'm just like, man, they're stuck. Like, there's just. I don't see how they're going to raise any money. They're on some small exchange. They're not even on a main listing. They have no institutional backing. They don't have anybody on their board or their team that has that experience. They're probably kind of stuck versus, I look at another company, I mean, using Asset as an example, right? So that's like Vivek Ramaswamy's company. They got Colt, you know, Matt Cole over there, he's got deep, deep, deep experience in pension markets. Vivek is like a. He's a superstar that's been able to raise all kinds of money. Like, they have deep capital market connections, deep experience, and like, they're going to keep raising money, they're going to do really good. So that'd be like two different examples. I don't want to call anybody out on the bottom end, but I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples. But really it does come down to their ability to continue to raise money in those markets for them to do that. And to your point, you know, can you do that in the bear market? When. Yeah, that's when.

Right.

When sentiment is low, a 15% drawdown.

And people haven't been able to do it. Imagine a real bear market.

Yeah. What I would say to that though, is that there's. There's two tools that a company hopes to achieve. There's two phases, as I said. Number one, you have the common stock, and then two, you hopefully have get to the preferreds. That's like the next level. And so you are able to sell the common stock at the market. The ATM and then two, hopefully you can sell preferreds because then it's not as dilutive to the common stock. But even if you can be at a 1.5 times m nav, crush it. That's, that's highly accretive. Like you can just sell that friggin common stock at the market all the time at 1.5 times. So you don't have to get Back to a 6 or 8 times M nav to, to make this model work. And is 1.5 times realistic? Well, I was gonna say when you look at asset heavy companies, so those would traditionally be like insurance companies or banks or oil companies, they typically trade in a one to two times. That's, that's what they typically trade it. Now I think having Bitcoin is much more explosive than oil. So I would say that, you know, issuing digital credit is better than traditional bank credit. So maybe 1 to 2 is a little low. Maybe it should be 2 to 3. Saylor thinks that 3 should be the floor and I'm happy to break the math down as to why that is, but he thinks three should be the floor. So I think 1.5 times is very low. But even at 1.5 times it works really well.

Yeah. And I think maybe the launching at 6 to 8 to 10 to 20 and 25 days are over anyways. Yeah, it was, I think it was highly speculative. Yeah, I would say that maybe that was a moment in time and we don't have to worry about that anymore anymore. So now we can actually get down to the business of valuing them each individually and deciding what the M Nav should be based on their business activities and their holdings.

I think M Nav is a useful number, but it's a little bit too, it's, it's. Some people put too much importance on that because most businesses aren't trading on a price to book.

Right.

They're trading on a few a potential of a future valuation. And, and, and Scott, you've been in this space for a really long time. How one of maybe one of the most commonly asked questions for people who really aren't are in it. They're not really convinced on Bitcoin is that they say but it's too late, it's too expensive. I missed it. Right. I mean that's like most people. Right.

I heard that yesterday.

Yeah, yeah, right. But I think it's really interesting to hear that because Tradfi, anybody who owns stocks, which most people working today have some sort of stocks in their 401k or whatever most people tradfi, when they invest, they think about what is the potential future of Tesla or Apple or Google. So you're buying something Mag seven or whatever because you think it's going to be worth more in the future. But when you think about bitcoin, for some reason, you think about the past price.

That's weird.

It makes no sense. It makes no sense. Right. But I would, I'd go back to these companies and I would say if we look at just what their value, you know, what is their net asset value, it doesn't make sense that you're looking at that more as like a fund versus like thinking about a company that can actually create value and be more valuable in the future. And the other thing I'd say about this is back to tradfi. You know, it sort of got bootstrapped off of the back of bitcoiners because you have to sort of believe in bitcoin for this to work. However, only bitcoiners ask if it can beat bitcoin and only really bitcoin maximalists. You know, Scott, even most crypto bros are still trying to get more dollars. They're really fiat maxis. Right. And only bitcoin maximalists really think about like, bitcoin is my hurdle rate. That's my base asset. If it doesn't beat bitcoin, I don't want to do it. And so that's a real small percentage. Most people are just trying to beat inflation or beat The S&P 500.

Want.

To do anything to not lose value in their cash. Yeah. And most people don't even know that they are. But I think that there is a more general awareness now with that debasement trade narrative that we talked about. So I know we only got a couple more minutes. Looking forward, do you still think that bitcoin has the infinite upside? I don't want to say infinite again, has massive upside from this point because you're obviously joking that it's. A lot of people think it's too expensive. Is seller being hyperbolic when he says $14 million or $30 million or 50? I don't know how high they've gone. I can't keep up with people's predictions. And I guess as a corollary to that, to end what kind of what does a million dollars buy you if bitcoin is a million dollars?

Well, those are, those are two really good questions. You corrected yourself and say, well, I don't mean infinite upside. I do believe it's infinite.

Okay.

And I'm going to tell you why, and then I'm going to tell you what, what prices are when it's a million. So number one, why I think it's infinite. So we have to sort of understand this core basic truth that you and I don't nobody people. We don't want money. Money is not wealth. What we want is goods and services. That's the wealth. But we use the money to get the goods and services, right? So that's why it's a medium of exchange, right? So we, we hold money until we decide we want the goods and services. So really, if goods and services are wealth, money is just the medium that we use to exchange for that. Really, what we have is all the wealth of the world divided by all the money of the world, which is why when the government prints more money, it goes down in value and it takes more money to buy the goods and services. Right? Okay, so if you understand that, then what you would realize is that.

If.

I, if I had a company that was worth a million dollars, you invested 10%, you gave me 100 grand and you owed, you had 10% of that company. When I grew it from a million dollars to 10 million or 10 billion, your value of that 10% would go up. Unless I diluted you. Right? Unless I diluted your stock ownership. So that's what happens when they print more money as the wealth of the world goes up, which it always does. Right. 300 years ago, before the industrial revolution, we basically lived in dirt. We didn't build more than two stories. We didn't have steel. We had no mechanized machines. So in the last 300 years, all this wealth has been created. And it will continue because humans have creativity and ingenuity. And so the wealth will continue to go up. We'll continue to invent new things and build new things, but as the wealth goes up, they keep printing more money. So we get diluted, but with bitcoin, because it has a fixed supply. If we own one bitcoin, we will own one 21 millionth of that. Now I project I have a whole video breaking this down. It was a keynote I gave in Abu Dhabi last year. And I project out where I think Bitcoin is in 2030, 2040 and 2050. The government, the CBO office projects out the government budgets through 2054. So we have like 30 years of time frame. And then I overlaid S curve, I overlaid a 50 year tech cycle, the four phases of this blueprint. And I overlaid a bunch of things. And basically the, the spoiler alert is that I believe sometime after 2050, maybe 2055, Bitcoin becomes the unit of account. And that means things are now priced in bitcoin. And I recently built this house down in Mexico, and it was. It was. It was different living through it than studying in a book, trying to build there. In Mexico, stuff is. Well, because stuff is coming from the US and stuff is coming from Canada and some stuff is sourced in Mexico and nobody could give me a quote. I don't know what the price will be in two weeks. I can't quote you on that. Like, I'm like, what? Like, how can I build a house and plan this when I can't get a quote? But they couldn't quote me because prices are changing all the time. It's like. It's like the world can't operate like that. And so we could spend a lot of time talking about why it's inevitable that we have a decentralized unit of account that nobody can control. But I believe that will happen sometime after 2050, 2055. So. So if bitcoin becomes the unit of account now, one bitcoin equals 1/21 millionth of all the wealth of the world. And as the wealth of the world continues to go up, I never get diluted, which is why it goes up infinitely.

I love that. What a way to end. Now, we could talk about this for hours. Oh, if you have time, keep going, because I've got time.

Yeah, well, I was going to ask answer the second part of the question, which is, when bitcoin is a million dollars, does that mean that it's $500 for a cheeseburger or whatever? That's what a lot of people think. And the answer is, I don't think so. I think the answer is no. And here's why. If you look at what's going on from a macro lens right now, it looks like the Trump administration, Scott Bessant, etc, they want gold and bitcoin to go up a lot.

Yep.

And part of the reason why I believe they want gold and bitcoin to go up a lot is it works as this liquidity sponge for what the Trump administration needs to do for this, you know, operation warp speed of re industrializing the U.S. we need a lot of money a lot. We need interest rates at 0 or 1%. Like, we need to let those money printers go. When. When Elon Musk left Doge, Scott Bessant said the same thing. They both said, well, we have to grow our way out, grow our way. Yep. So what happens is when they bring interest rates down and they turn those money printers on so we can grow our way out, that causes infl and inflation makes people unhappy. And then we have all types of societal problems and people get all mad.

Right.

So what if we do that? But what we do is we let gold and bitcoin absorb all that liquidity. So home prices don't go up that much, stock prices don't go up that much. It goes all to bitcoin and gold. So that could theoretically keep the prices down. So like, if you think about like, like Uber captured 10% of the rideshare taxi industry and became worth billions of dollars, but it didn't make taxis more expensive. It just took a little value from taxis. Airbnb, same thing, took some of the money from hotels, but didn't make hotels more expensive and they made it cheaper. So we could see bitcoin go to a million or 10 million and Fiat still survive in prices. I mean, sure, maybe gas goes from four bucks to six bucks, but it doesn't mean it goes to five. Bitcoin absorbs that liquidity and it takes it from real estate and it takes it from bonds and it takes it from stocks, but it doesn't mean that the dollar goes to zero.

Good thing that the United States government is quietly stacking bitcoin by, you know, taking it from127,000 and Bitcoin over in Cambodia. Keep some from the Silk Road, we can go get some from Bitfinex. But yeah, I mean, that's the best case for the strategic bitcoin reserve that I've heard.

Yeah, I think when you look at the Trump family, right? So the Trump family, everyone knows they built their billions off of real estate, which has been the best vehicle for building wealth long term. Well, tech companies since 2008, but, you know, long term real estate. And you look at Trump himself, which is owns control and interest of DJT Media, right? He bought two and a half billion dollars of bitcoin like a month ago. And his sons are now like, involved in all these bitcoin companies, right? Ownership, equity, advising, etc. Not in real estate. And so when you see, and they.

Arguably have more wealth in crypto and bitcoin, we have to include crypto than they do in real estate at this point. Certainly the suns do. Yeah.

And then you see like Howard Lutnick, who's the Secretary of Commerce, who's, you know, OG Wall Street, Cantor Fitzgerald, he kind of got billions in bitcoin, his son now, you know, is spreading his tentacles through this. He's got probably 10 billion placed. And so when you look at the people at the highest level that know what's going on, not just with building wealth, but in the government, and they're placing their bets this way, like, I think we should take notice of that. Right? We should be paying attention. Yeah.

This thing might catch on. Mark, thank you, man, so much. Always a pleasure. I appreciate you sitting down and taking, you know, an hour to hash a lot of these thoughts out. You always make me feel a hell of a lot better about everything that's going on. Calm me down.

Thanks, Scott. Always a pleasure. Love hanging out with you.

Have a good one, man.