00:00 Speaker A

What are the catalysts, what are the tailwinds that you think drives bitcoin higher?

00:05 Ben

There’s some significant tailwinds that are coming. We’re seeing the regulations easing, you’ve got the Clarity Act coming out, which is going to put definitive clarity around bitcoin as a digital commodity versus several others that are digital securities. So we’re seeing some help from the regulations, but really the big trend that you’re seeing is the adoption from corporations and you’re seeing the emergence of these bitcoin treasury companies that are utilizing the scarcity of bitcoin, the fixed supply, and they’re arbitraging that against the lack of scarcity in the US dollar, but they’re providing products through different types of securities that institutional capital can buy. And the institutional capital pools are very deep and they’re coming for bitcoin.

00:58 Speaker A

About the proliferation of bit bitcoin treasury companies, you have seen Jim Chanos, by the way, beefing with Michael Saylor of strategy about this, right? And I’ll read you what Chanos had some strong thoughts about this. They were kind of talking about the the value of the company. Chanos told Bloomberg this. He said there’s a wonderful sales job that’s being done about the fact that this is an economic engine in and of itself. He says, therefore, terms like bitcoin yield, this is Chanos are used, and I’ve called them financial gibberish because they are. What do you say to that, Ben?

01:43 Ben

I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there still around this industry. People are still trying to get up to speed with what it means to be a bitcoin treasury company. And what that means is you’re trying to acquire bitcoin on behalf of your shareholders. And when you’re doing that, your primary metric with every transaction you undertake is how much more bitcoin is backing each share of common stock. So bitcoin yield represents the pace at which you’re accumulating that bitcoin. So these are different concepts for the traditional financial markets to grasp, but what he thinks he’s doing is the same trade as Michael Saylor, and historically this type of a short position hasn’t worked out all too well.