What I Would Do

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:36Quote

   What I knew before is that I was a fucking idiot, and if I know I'm an idiot then I should expect me to not know what I should know.

2. 00:36Claim · condensed

   The ability to uncover how wrong I was in the past, against the new information I now have, means I should expect these realizations all the time. That should be the standard, not the exception.

3. 01:07Idea

   The goal of that information, the goal of processing that information, is to filter it and then compress it to see what puts me in the best position in the future possible. I narrow all of that stuff down, I do all the computation necessary, I am parsing at every turn, leaving off everything that is making me less efficient.

4. 01:07Claim · condensed

   If I were to realize that I'm an absolute space cadet, that would give me an edge in the market. All I have to do is keep digging to find where I was completely wrong, and the faster I can pivot and go all in on the next opportunity, the better off I'm going to be.

5. 03:35Quote

   I don't want more Bitcoin for you. I want more Bitcoin for me.

6. 04:41Claim · condensed

   Let's invert it, in sort of a trolley monger way, and ask what's the easiest way to generate the most Bitcoin possible. That would be a fund, because finance has exploded for a reason: it's significantly easier to up your energy reserves by using other people's money and their lack of information.

7. 06:16Claim

   I don't claim to be the smartest person in the world, but I do know a trick with a very high hit ratio: if I'm going to make the most of the opportunities in front of me, I should look at what others have done to be successful before me and just repeat it, if the opportunity is still available.

8. 06:47Reference

   If you've read the book, written in the 1940s, you already know where this ends up: if you have access to inside information, the easiest path is to get people who have money to give you money, then use your access to information and computation to decide what to do with it.

9. 06:47Reference

   If you follow Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett at all, if you've read the book Where Are All the Customers' Yachts...

10. 07:28Reference · condensed

    That's the case if you are Berkshire Hathaway: you let other people do the work for you, and that's what you're doing with the US economy, providing the flow of order from the entity with the most order to those that are more disordered.

11. 07:28Claim

    If you make the right call you get the most return for doing absolutely nothing. All you have to do is provide the information exchange, the flow of order from the one that has the most order to those that are more disordered, and if you do that consistently over time you get all the money.

12. 07:28Quote

    You just sit back and you let others do the work for you.

13. 08:44Reference

    It mirrors almost step for step what Michael's journey at MicroStrategy has looked like.

14. 08:44Claim · condensed

    MicroStrategy started defensive: a 500 million dollar melting ice cube, thirty years trying to overcome the moat that Microsoft and other companies with cheaper access to the fiat debt market had built, unable to climb that hill.

15. 09:25Claim · condensed

    Once you realize you've tapped into an idea whose time has come, that we've dematerialized money, the question becomes what that means for everything else, and the solution is to find holes where this new tool might be beneficial. That's how MicroStrategy became a Bitcoin development company.

16. 10:05Reference · condensed

    They had their DIDs, the orange check model, where you could deposit a small amount of sats to prove you'd put in real world proof of work, so you were a physical entity, and there'd be much less spam online.

17. 10:05Reference · condensed

    They even went through the period of incentivizing their staff with sats per meeting or per task completed, trying to figure out what makes the extended order more efficient.

18. 10:38Claim

    That turns out to be a giant waste of time, super inefficient, given how much meat is left on the bone of simple acquisition and leverage in the traditional markets. The absolute scarcity side of the equation is so underdeveloped, and has never been seen before, that you don't recognize the opportunity in front of you.

19. 11:11Open question

    You don't know how big it gets. It might sound crazy now, depending on where you are in your Bitcoin journey, but there will come a time where you simply cannot stack more than you can generate by not diminishing your stack.

20. 11:11Prediction · condensed

    As Bitcoin starts to run away for most people, it will become paramount not to diminish your stack, because the amount of transformation needed in the physical world to earn those sats back can't keep pace with how fast efficiency is increasing in the extended order. You cannot compete with that no matter how good your ideas are.

21. 12:22Analogy · condensed

    Somebody bought a house in 2018 for 40 Bitcoin, thinking they'd hit the jackpot out of a thousand Bitcoin stack. They sell the same house in 2024, plug the proceeds back into Bitcoin, and it now costs six Bitcoin. From 40 to 6 in six years, that's a colossal fuckup for a normie, and you're not recovering those 34 Bitcoin.

22. 13:37Idea · condensed

    You could fiat mine, but eventually you're losing real Bitcoin if you're not concentrated on keeping Bitcoin.

23. 13:37Idea

    I don't want to reach that peak. I want to push sat peak that day off as far as possible, because I know what the winning strategy is.

24. 13:37Claim · condensed

    I don't need a second good idea. I just need the first, and then I need to focus on the first to make the most out of it. I know something others don't: look around you, it's not more than 1 percent of the people you know who have Bitcoin.

25. 16:28Prediction

    There can't be many people in this situation right now. This window of opportunity is only open for a select period, basically until Saylor goes in and buys the entire market out, which could happen any day. But even if you have a single Bitcoin now, eventually, as Bitcoin runs, you will be in the same position, as long as the fiat system exists side by side with it.

26. 17:09Reference · condensed

    MicroStrategy, ETFs, the SBR, there's a lot of normies my age with a modest interest in finance who are finding it harder and harder to shield themselves from Bitcoin news.

27. 18:31Idea

    That's why you orange pill people, at least that's why I did. Why am I trying to orange pill people? Maybe if I went to the smartest people that I know, who are the most successful in the fiat sense, maybe they would show me where I was wrong.

28. 19:02Quote

    You do that enough and you realize, hold on, everyone's fucking clueless.

29. 20:40Claim · condensed

    The elevator pitch that explains all of Bitcoin's upside without ever saying the word Bitcoin is: I want to short the dollar, any way that I can. The more efficient my short, the more I can short the dollar, the more I like the trade.

30. 21:22Claim · condensed

    People are much more able to agree that something is wrong with the dollar, that it doesn't work like it did four or eight or twelve years ago, than they are to agree with a direct Bitcoin pitch. Bitcoin just happens to be the best expression of that thesis, the best way to short the dollar.

31. 21:52Reference

    It's a little bit like Paul Tudor Jones, I think it was 2020, talking about everything that's going to go up post the covid stimulation: you want to be on the fastest horse.

32. 21:52Analogy

    Everything is going up, so being up is no longer a sign of being successful. Up the most is the real game, and if being up the most is in something absolutely scarce, that's doubling up on the leverage that comes from acting on that information.

33. 22:57Quote

    If you have a thought on the dollar that isn't that the thing is going to fucking zero, you're wrong, and I know that because we've been right for 15 years, and before that you've been right longer.

34. 22:57Claim · condensed

    If you knew the trick, that how you win the fiat game was to get as levered up as humanly possible while still being able to pay the coupon, with the longest possible expiration date on those notes, you're going to win. Nobody ever tells you that, because you keep it to yourself once you're super successful.

35. 24:26Reference · condensed

    I saw a thread on X that brought a few ideas together, along the lines of the sophomore thesis, the Jason Lowery thesis: offense doesn't look like offense anymore, defense doesn't look like defense, in a world dematerializing everything super fast.

36. 25:07Claim

    A large nation state has zero incentive to come out and announce Bitcoin adoption. That's the dumbest idea you could possibly do.

37. 25:07Claim

    Where we are in the cycle of Bitcoin, you couldn't even do the active mining strategy anymore. You cannot build a sizable position with what's left in the block rewards versus how much Bitcoin is already out there.

38. 25:48Event

    A recent example: with all the publicly traded miners going to the debt markets issuing convertible debt, rather than mining Bitcoin, Marathon did a convertible offering a couple of weeks ago that was oversubscribed, and they bought something like 11,000 Bitcoin in a day. At current block rewards, that's what, 30 plus years of mining, if they are 6 percent of the network hash rate.

39. 26:25Reference

    As Michael himself has said, the first country to print money to buy Bitcoin wins.

40. 26:25Claim

    There is one giant pot of Bitcoin left: all the Bitcoin available for sale on exchanges, at some fiat price. It costs a sovereign nation zero to print the fiat, so why not print as much as possible and hand it over to a few Bitcoiners rather than let another country do it. You can't announce that kind of thing though, because everyone else would start printing, and the race gets crowded, diminishing your chances at the largest possible stack.

41. 28:07Prediction · condensed

    We already have a vessel that people don't suspect is actually us: send in some crazy sounding chairman everyone thinks is reckless, get him on your side, give him any amount of liquidity he asks for, and tell him to just keep buying, as fast as he can, as much as he can, without letting it look like a nation state is behind it.

42. 29:08Quote

    If I was in charge, if the US wanted Bitcoin, I'd go to Michael and I'd say: any amount you ask for we will give you, we will find a way to get you those dollars. Just outbid everyone, now do it more, faster. We never even have to confiscate it during this part of the attack.

43. 29:39Claim

    MicroStrategy is a domestic corporation, it has to play by the rules as long as it's here, and Michael understands he is the strategic reserve. We already own those Bitcoin. Definitely don't fight him, use him.

44. 30:18Claim · condensed

    If the US comes out and says it's going to buy billions every Monday, that fucks the entire plan. If Michael comes out and says MicroStrategy is going to issue 10 billion new shares and buy all the Bitcoin in the world, no alarm bells ring, because the market is already conditioned to expect MicroStrategy to buy. It maximizes Bitcoin per dollar created for nothing.

45. 30:18Analogy

    He sacrificed for his country by mounting the largest energy attack of all time on every single entity in the world besides America. He rubbed nation states out of possible Bitcoin gains, because you attack through him rather than announce it yourself.

46. 31:00Open question

    There's no rule that says the US has to do it this way. What about the ETFs, that's a pretty smart play too. How about let's do both.

47. 31:31Prediction · condensed

    One day, maybe not while Michael is alive, but once the leadership team gets a little fragmented, they cash everybody out at eleven million dollars per coin based on holdings when they got in, in the year 2045, a million dollars above spot. Everyone thinks they got a great deal because they've forgotten what Bitcoin actually is. They wake up the next morning and the black market price is a hundred million dollars per Bitcoin, and everybody got hosed by this insider attack.

48. 32:20Analogy · condensed

    It's a little bit like the lure of Satoshi's wallet. You've developed this system on your own, you cover your tracks so well nobody can ever figure out it was you, you keep the network going almost single handedly the first year, and then you realize you can't spend any of those coins, because then it looks like you had a head start and gamed the system, and nobody will buy in. So you just leave that wallet there, untouched, as the sacrifice to the system, and that becomes the lure.

49. 32:20Reference

    the lure of Satoshi's wallet.

50. 33:22Claim · condensed

    The real move: I'm smart enough to know I can't move those coins, but if I also have this insider information back in 2010, when nobody knows who I am, I don't move those coins. I just become the fifth miner.

51. 34:06Idea

    Nobody talks about the fifth miner. Who was the fifth miner on the network? I don't know any of those people, when those coins moved, anything about it. I could just leave those first coins and then join up as the fifth miner. I could spend and ball out at my leisure. That's a hundred percent what I would do.

52. 34:51Prediction

    I think Saylor gets the green light and just buys it all, no matter how long it takes. I think we wake up one day and all of the Bitcoin is off exchanges, because he's been given the green light to pay no matter what the cost. They're now in MicroStrategy's hands, and everyone else has to fish for scraps and won't be able to climb out fast enough. Bitcoin goes to the moon overnight, everybody wins. The world resets, governments find a way to print dollars based off of Bitcoin, the stablecoins take over, Tether comes back to the US, Circle explodes, US dollar dominance continues to rise until there's no other fiat currency. Bitcoin backs the dollar, until eventually everyone figures out they don't want the dollars either, and Bitcoin dominates the world.

53. 35:38Quote

    Congratulations, there you go. There's my twenty twenty five prediction. We're going to the fucking moon.

54. 35:38Quote

    Sailor ends up as a national hero. The country's far better off because of his service, he gets statues and street names and schools all across America named after him. And that's how you win.