I'm just going to issue billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of securities and buy billions and billions and billions of dollars in Bitcoin.
And, uh, right? I mean, that's the engineering. I give you the upside. You have no downside and I pay you a dividend while you wait to get rich.
Okay?
Which is Bitcoin goes to a million, two million, as Bitcoin goes up, if I own Bitcoin and Cuba or North Korea, I'm getting rich.
Now, the interesting thing is, where is all the money in the world? There's a hundred trillion dollars of money in the equity capital markets.
There's 300, two, three hundred trillion dollars of money in the credit markets.
But the long-term, durable business is to issue BTC back credit instruments and issue billions and then tens of billions and then hundreds of billions.
And you're not competing against other Bitcoin Treasury companies.
And it almost is meant to compete with IBIT. They can't invest in something for a hundred years.
And so, the Bitcoin superpower is...
You go first. You would be in the middle of the year.
We'll figure it out.
All right.
So, I'll go with money.
The privilege to spend time and get the old knowledge of Michael and Adam altogether.
But first, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to BTC Prague.
I think they have put together an amazing event.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Matthias, Martin.
I think we can all say, every time there is no second best, but then you meet Matthias.
You say there might be no second best and then you meet Martin.
And then there is maybe.
And so, thank you so much for all of this.
And I would like also to thank very much Michael and Adam, I think, on a personal level.
You have changed my life and my family.
And I think that's the case for a lot of people here.
I think that you are an example of ethics, of courage and of success over the years.
And that's provided a lot of hope for everyone.
Well, I guess everyone agrees.
So, thank you very much.
I guess a key topic here today will be the financialization of Bitcoin.
And maybe you will get into how this is also positive for Bitcoin, what are also potentially some risks and trade-offs to always take in mind.
But first, I would like to start with Michael.
And to ask how is it possible that the simplest, the clear model for business is actually the most effective.
I asked just before entering the stage to the community on X, what is the number one question I should ask.
And the question raised I get is, what is the next business model for Bitcoin Treasury company?
Well, the business model, you already have it.
And so, I will leave the floor to Michael to explain how the model is so robust due to its simplicity and how you can achieve amazing results by focusing on executing it as laser eyes focused on the market.
So, I focused as possible and to deliver the best results for shareholders.
Thanks.
You know, I said in Vegas, you know, a corporation is the most effective wealth creation machine that we have yet devised.
And if we think about the spread of Bitcoin as a monetary virus and as an idea, the super spreaders, the amplifiers of the virus are corporations.
When Bitcoin hits an individual, if Bitcoin arrives, you know, at my proverbial dentist and the dentist clocks a couple hundred thousand dollars a year or whatever, they're buying a few hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin.
And as I said, in the in the war to determine the future of money, right, it's going to be fought with money, right, the future money is going to be fought with and won with money.
So, the dentist is, he's generating a few hundred thousand or she's generating a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
And so, over 20 years, you're going to buy four million dollars of Bitcoin.
When the dentist incorporates and becomes a company, the dentist is going to sell a million dollars of stock and they're going to buy a million dollars of Bitcoin in a month.
And when the company recapitalizes on Bitcoin, then your real opportunity is to any operating company can sell equity or sell credit issue credit.
And public companies are the best. So, say you're a public company, the superpower you have is a public company is you can sell equity, you can issue warrants, you can issue bonds, convertible bonds, junk bonds or preferred stock.
And the preferred stock and have any rights, they can look like equity, it can look like convertible equity, it can look like a bond, it can have dividends or not.
So, when a company adopts the Bitcoin standard, that dentist that becomes a company doesn't buy a million dollars of Bitcoin in five years, doesn't buy a million dollars of Bitcoin in one year.
So, the company issues a million dollars of equity and buys a million dollars of Bitcoin in one month.
But it's immediately profitable, which means in the next month the company can issue another million.
And so, a company may very well start to issue a million dollars a month of security of equity and then all of a sudden it's bought ten million dollars of Bitcoin.
Now, the interesting thing is, where is all the money in the world? There's a hundred trillion dollars of money in the equity capital markets.
There's a three hundred two three hundred trillion dollars of money in the credit markets.
All of the equity capital in the world is valued based upon future expectations of the cash flows.
Every company in Nigeria is valued based upon the expectation of Nigerian cash flows.
Every company in Brazil is based on Brazilian cash flows, every company in the US, US cash flows.
Okay, and we know that those, the value of that cash is falling, but we also know it's very competitive.
So, you have a long heterogeneous uncertain, like, credit risk there or an equity risk will call it.
And then with credit, all of the creditors, they're valued based upon the future expectations of cash flows.
I borrow money, I don't have the money, I promise you I'll pay it back, I'm going to get the money over ten years, right?
So, the existing markets are based upon these future expectations of business operation, we're valuing real world assets, we're valuing future cash flows, we're valuing equity or opportunities.
And the Bitcoin Treasury Company idea and the most elegant business model is, I have a stack of Bitcoin, ten million dollars of Bitcoin, I start issuing equity based upon my ability to acquire a more Bitcoin.
Then I issue credit, you know, fixed credit, convertible credit, some other credit.
And then I use it to buy Bitcoin. And of course, the point is, when MetaPlanet was a hotel, they might be able to buy a million dollars of Bitcoin a year.
But when MetaPlanet started issuing equity, it's able to issue a billion dollars of equity in a year.
And then I think that's another buying, not a million, but a billion a year.
But the rate at which a company can issue equity or credit is exponential, but it's not like annual, you know, you might be doubling every month.
Or you might go into something like on October 30th, we announced the $21 billion ATM, we thought, well, if we do that in three years, that will be the most successful equity program in the history of the capital markets.
If we did it in three years, and we did it in like three months, because all you're doing is you're swapping equity for Bitcoin and you're swapping, swapping credit for Bitcoin.
Companies can do that. Individuals can't do that, but when you put three individuals together and they cooperate, they become a company.
So really, I wouldn't be afraid of a company. I would just say a company is when, you know, one dude that knows finance got together with one lawyer and got together with one, with one leader, a CEO, a CFO, a general counsel.
Now you have a Bitcoin treasury company. If you put Bitcoin, digital capital behind it.
And now you can grow literally as fast as you can issue the security and buy the Bitcoin, and that is, that is an investment cycle, which is 1000 times faster than, you know, a physical real estate cycle or a business cycle.
It's faster, it's homogenous. And primarily the friction point is the issuance of securities. So it's a legal and it's a regulatory friction point and it's different if you're Japanese, then if you're French, you need Bitcoin treasury companies in the UK that understand UK law and one in France and one in Norway and Sweden and Germany.
And they're all going to have local advantages because they're, you know, if you're a Japanese company, it's easier to issue Japanese securities than American company going to Japan.
I know this. I called Simon. I said, Simon, the good news is you'll probably beat me to issue preferred stock in the Japanese market. You know, go for it. Right.
And so I think that that's the simplicity in the business model is I'm just going to issue billions and billions and billions of dollars of securities and buy billions and billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
And I'm going to digitally transform the equity and the credit capital markets from 20th century analog physical cash cash based to 21st century digital Bitcoin based and that's I think what we see right now in the market.
That we're going to be sitting in the United World that $200 trillion opportunity in today's dollars and the future of as well the accretion and the Bitcoin purchase and the MNA and the premiums and so on.
Many of these makers have been pioneering the BTC-dynaminated capital markets with the KPIs, the BTC KPIs, the BTC-Y, the BTC gain and the torque and you have been putting together a lot of metrics for the financial industry where to be able to value Bitcoin treasury companies.
And you are also aggressively now tapping into credit markets and you are issuing new products that allow to maybe challenge this form of consensus view that the premium should go to one over time or something like this.
And effectively with the instruments that you are leveraging potentially you are enabling the premium to continue to stabilize or even go up.
So how are you able to provide financial engineering in a best in class manner to tap into those capital markets and have the best performing preference and have the ability to make an announcement of 10,000 Bitcoin in a week.
And how are you able to do that and how this is shaping the new wave of adoption for financial markets with the instruments of Bitcoin treasury companies.
And you know, I think our first challenge was the developer set of metrics that you could use to value BTC backed equity.
And because you're on a Bitcoin standard simple USD USD dollar accounting doesn't really work because US dollar accounting is geared toward companies that generate their earnings via operations.
And so, you know, we created BTC yield, which is basically the accretion of Bitcoin per share and a percentage and the idea of that is if you've got a 20% BTC yield, you could put a multiple of it on it like 10 and you could you could come to a 200% premium to nav.
It's a very simple way to get to what should the premium to nav be. Well, it comes down to whether the whether the company generates 220% yield or 10 or 200% yield, right. And a bond that pays 200% interest after tax is worth a lot more than a bond that pays 5% interest after tax. Right.
So the yield metric was an equity metric BTC gain or dollar gain is an equity metric BTC dollar gain is basically the earnings equivalent for Bitcoin.
It's on a Bitcoin standard basis if you generated a hundred million dollars of BTC dollar gain is like a hundred million dollars of after tax earnings.
It goes direct to the shareholder equity it bypasses the PNL but a company that can generate a billion dollars of BTC dollar gain is like a company that generates a billion dollars of earnings.
Right. And you could use a P to E on that and say, well, I'll assign a P to E of 10 or 20 or 30 or whatever times that gain and that gives me an enterprise value for the operation and they're going to do it.
Now the question becomes how do you generate BTC yield and how do you generate BTC dollar gain or BTC gain.
And there's three obvious ways to do it. One way is operating cash flows. I take my operating profit and I sweep it into BTC and that becomes a yield and that becomes a gain.
That is a 100 million dollars of operating cash flow and I buy Bitcoin with it. Then I have a hundred million dollars of BTC dollar gain without any shareholder delusion. Right. And so that's, you know, that's one way to do it.
You need an operating company that generates a lot of cash to do it. The second way to do it is is if you sell equity at a premium to nav, you know, when you're selling a hundred million dollars of equity at a two M knob, then you capture a 50 million dollar BTC dollar gain.
And of course, if you sell equity at a discount to M knob, you're actually diluting the shareholders. So you would have a negative yield, a negative gain. I think the reason that BTC yield and BTC gains matter is it's a very simple transparent instantaneous way for an investor to see whether the management team took an creative transaction or a dilutive transaction.
And on any given day, any public company can raise almost any amount of money if they're willing to dilute their shareholders. And the real trick is to do it creatively.
So those two metrics, you know, are important. But now we've moved through this issue. I've run out of cash flow. What do you do if the BTC, if the M knob is 10 or 5 or 8?
This is not a complicated question. When you're on fire with an M knob of eight, you sell the equity, you buy the Bitcoin, you know, at an M knob of 10, you've got like a 90% spread. Right. So, you know, generating 900 million dollars of gains for every billion dollars of equity or selling. It's risk free instant earnings in essence.
That's not complicated. The question is, what if M knob goes to one or goes below one? How do you get it? What if you don't have any cash flow and M knob goes to one, but you have a billion dollars of Bitcoin on the ballot sheet?
Well, if you're a closed-in trust, like, grayscale, right, or if you're an ETF, but especially a closed-in trust, you can't do anything. So you're traded to discount to M knob. And that's always the thing people wanted to avoid.
The special power that an operating company has is to issue credit instruments, though. And so the way that you actually pull yourself out of a hole if you traded a discount or you trade down to normal M knob is you start to sell credit instruments, you collateralized on the assets of the company.
So that takes us to the idea of a BTC credit models. If I have a billion dollars of Bitcoin, I can sell a hundred million dollars of bond or a hundred billion, let's say a hundred million dollars of preferred stock that yields 10% dividend yield.
It's 10 times over collateralized. So therefore the BTC rating is 10. You can now calculate the risk. The risk would be the risk that your billion dollars of Bitcoin trades to less than a hundred million by the time of maturity of the instrument.
You can calculate that statistically, the same way you calculate black sholes models, you plug in the volatility, you plug in the BTC rating, a risk pops out.
And then you can calculate a credit spread, what we call BTC credit. What is the theoretical credit spread above the risk-free rate that you need to offset the risk?
And of course the credit spread if the BTC rating is 2 is higher than if it's 10 and if Bitcoin volatility is forecast at 50, then the credit spread has to be higher than if the Bitcoin volatility is 30.
So if you plug into your model, your expectation of Bitcoin return or ARR over a decade, and you plug in your expectation of volatility of Bitcoin, and you plug in the price of Bitcoin, you get a BTC rating, the risk pops out, the BTC credit model pops out.
What we have done is used that in order to start to issue Bitcoin back credit instruments.
Our idea is we want to sell securities into a market that's orthogonal to the equity market into the Bitcoin market or an unchlorinated market.
So the market for US dollar yield amongst retirees, there are a lot of people that don't know what Bitcoin is, don't know what strategy is, they don't know anything about our business model.
But if we offer them, like we offered a preferred stock that yields 10% dividend at par, we offer you 10% dividend yield in a qualified income distribution, a QID or QDI-qualified type instrument.
If you make less than $48,000 a year, you can buy the instrument and collect 10% dividend yield tax-free in the US.
Okay, well that's interesting. A lot of people want 10%. Now the issue is is it risky? Well if it's 5X or 10X over collateralized, then it doesn't look that risky if you think Bitcoin is a real thing.
So the idea of giving someone extremely low risk but high yield fixed income is a simple idea.
I think it's kind of a killer application for Bitcoin as collateral. What we did at strategy is we created a convertible preferred called strike which gives you 40% of the upside of the stock and an 8% dividend at par.
Then we created a senior preferred called strike that gives you 10% at par that is cumulative means the dividends have you ever missed them, they accumulate and there are penalties.
And so it's and it's senior to all the other prefers. And those two were the two most successful preferred stocks in the century.
That is the most liquid the highest performing they all traded up 25% when the other preferers were trading down 5%.
And of course they're the most successful because anything any security back by pure Bitcoin is always better.
Right, the options are more valuable. The equity is more valuable. The convertible bonds are more valuable.
These preferers are more valuable because you're plugging in an asset which is going up 55% a year with 55 vol.
And so if you plug in something which is spinning at 55 RPM that's caught that's going 55 miles an hour, there's a lot of energy in it.
So we just plug that into those instruments. They were very successful.
We we floated them in the public market on NASDAQ and we attached a shelf registration to them.
And the idea is now we can just we can sell people we can sell people 40% of the upside of the stock and that might be 80% of the upside of Bitcoin but with downside protection and a guaranteed dividend.
So we call strike it's like a it's like a Bitcoin fellowship. It's like you get a living stipend.
You get protection and you get to ride the upside and you can hold it forever.
And that's for the Bitcoin curious that are afraid to get on the roller coaster which is Bitcoin or the hyper roller coaster which is the equity the turbocharged Bitcoin and MSTR.
But then there's a lot of people that don't want Bitcoin exposure. They just want US dollar yield or euro yield or JPY yield and so you know how is that how many people is that well that's like every retiree in the world.
That's like that's like everybody that there's no one that doesn't want eight or 10% dividend yield at extremely low risk.
That's why the credit markets fixed income markets are bigger than the equity markets.
So what we did there is we're just using Bitcoin to generate that.
And if Bitcoin is going up it's been going up 55%. So you can pretty much slice any amount of yield out of 50 less than 55% and you can give it to an investor.
And you know I think a Bitcoin maximalist long term forecast is 30%.
But I figure Bitcoin's got a yield between 20 and 60% a year forever.
And as long as Bitcoin is returning 20% or more, you can always sell these instruments offering 678910% and swap it into 20 3040%.
Capture the difference for the equity investors and that way the equity outperforms Bitcoin.
The convertible you can probably and here's our engineering.
We're basically engineering the company for the equity to outperform Bitcoin by 50 to 100%.
Then you've got Bitcoin if you want straight Bitcoin you buy it from I bet or you buy the BTC and you hold it yourself.
And then we're engineering but you're getting you're getting all the upside in the downside of Bitcoin all the volatility.
Then strike the convertible instrument is engineered to give you 80 to 100% of the performance of Bitcoin but with 10% of the downside.
So we want 80% of the upside 10% of the downside and a guaranteed dividend.
So that's for people that kind of want to have their cake and eat it too and they don't want the roller coaster.
And it almost is meant to compete with I bet you know if you think about it is like instead of 100% of the upside 100% the downside and no dividend.
What if I gave you 80 to 100% of the upside.
I don't know if it'll be exactly 100% but the more we lever the equity then the more likely the convertible equity becomes equal to Bitcoin performance.
So we're shooting to get the convert to perform the same as Bitcoin over the long term but with principal protection or liquidation preference and with the guaranteed dividend stream.
And that's that thing and it seems like there's a market for people that want the upside without the downside right.
And right I mean that's the engineering I give you the upside you have no downside and I pay you a dividend while you wait to get rich.
Okay.
Which is.
The smart financial engineers in my opinion agree with me they're like oh wow this is a good idea but a lot of people haven't quite the haven't quite figured it out yet because.
Because nobody's ever issued a perpetual convertible preferred stock there the last ten preferred stocks issued last four years the top three of the ten were ours.
And they're all perpetual and all the other seven aren't people don't normally sell a perpetual dividend or perpetual call option because they don't have a perpetual use of proceeds.
They can't invest in something for a hundred years and so the Bitcoin superpower is if you believe if you're a Bitcoin believer you think Bitcoin is going to outperform the S&P index forever.
And a Bitcoin outperforms the S&P index forever you can sell a dividend that's less than the S&P forever.
And then you can also sell a convertible preferred that outperforms right that's good forever so.
So we engineered that and then the idea with the fixed is is we're going to give someone an infinite duration dividend yielding and and the conventional thinking is you're crazy you should have a call option and so you can retire it and interest rates fall.
And that's a way a conventional conventional bankers like they all that you should put a call option and then you call it if if the interest rates fall 200 basis points you'll call it and you'll refinance it.
But that's the way you think if you sell one forty four a over the counter instruments with a three year duration to trade in that over the counter mark but those are all crippled 20th century instruments.
The way you think in the 21st century is I'm going to put strife into the market and I don't care how much I sell in the first week.
I'm I'm creating the instrument so that I will maximize the amount of capital I raise over the next decade or 20 years.
So we wanted to create the instrument so that if if Jerome Powell drops the answer straight 200 basis points strife trades up to 150 or and when it trades up to 150 the cost of the yield falls to 6% and when the you know so instead of 10 it falls to 6 and then we're we're able to then sell it.
I'm not buying it back.
I'm selling it right the whole idea is when the interest rates fall I will be selling billions and billions of dollars of that instrument via the ATM at 150 or 200.
And the small thinker thinks oh I have to buy it back refinance it go back and do a one forty four a deal with the investment bank with a huge huge commission or refinance it and then that'll be a liquid and cripple and so I don't want to issue a series of crippled a liquid securities and by the way what I'm describing.
The entire preferred stock market all of the preferred stocks in my opinion or garbage right all this you're buying these garbage instruments that are illiquid the trade 400 thousand dollars a day that yield 6% that have the credit of a mid size regional bank in a state you've never been to with mortgage portfolio you don't understand and you're supposed to accept 6% illiquid over the counter.
That nobody can buy you know instead of something which yields more which is a hundred X's liquid that everybody can buy and of course the problem is all that corporate credit all of that preferred it's all 20th century ideas on 20th century credit models so what we did is we concluded the killer app for a Bitcoin treasury company.
Is to issue credit Bitcoin you know Bitcoin back to equity that's the first app and yeah you can do that for a while but the long term durable business is to issue BTC back credit instruments and issue billions and then tens of billions and then hundreds of billions.
And you're not competing against other Bitcoin treasury companies you're competing against every junk bonds sold by every company with no money every corporate bond sold by an investment grade company and guess what we're more collateralized than the best investment grade companies issuing corporate bonds we have better collateral so we're competing against corporate bonds investment grade bonds junk bonds private bond.
Credit and then against preferred stock in that market and the ideas we're just going to sell something that is more credit worthy less risky better collateralized the yields more that's more liquid that everybody understands and ultimately the goal is we're you know instead of a market of a thousand preferred stocks with 500 million in the float each that are liquid that are garbage.
How about one preferred stock with 50 billion dollars in the float the trades two billion dollars a day the yields more that everybody's heard of that's backed by Bitcoin right and and to do that you just kind of adopt those metrics and what I just described every Bitcoin treasury company can copy I invite you to copy it you know I encourage you to copy it because just like 20 BTC companies issuing equity legitimize.
This is Bitcoin and Bitcoin equity 20 companies issuing Bitcoin back credit instruments will legitimize Bitcoin back credit will accelerate the digital transformation of all the credit markets and create a stampede of capital out of the 20th century defective crippled credit instruments into the digital credit instruments of the 21st century and S&P and Moody's and Fitch they'll all just start to cover that.
Everybody's view of credit risk will evolve the retirees get 200 basis points more yield on something which is an order of magnitude less risky Bitcoin goes to a million two million as Bitcoin goes up the collateral goes up the markets all evolve and what you're what I'm describing is the way that I see the digital transformation of the capital markets driven by these BTCs.
Quickly to end the panel and open for maybe one or two questions is Bitcoin investment and as much make your mention many times the right reason for Bitcoin is at least four years and the best one is forever and so we talk about a lot about Bitcoin the country's
and the opportunity is enormous but we are here for the long term and I think that the opportunity should be looked in the long term and to be careful as well in the market so is there any questions?
Financial engineering for top of Bitcoin grows but at the same time we see more and more centralization on the technical side of things.
I would like to ask if you see this concern and what can be I'm not social economic or maybe financial race to fight with but the minus tax centralization of pools and the amount of notes is a diagonal over and things like that.
Do you see the threat and if yes what will be the thing we could do to fight with?
I don't think it's a threat I think the network is decentralizing and I'm concerned about the pools.
I think that the Bitcoin mining network is decentralizing everywhere in the world. It's far more decentralized today than it was during the China lockdowns when China shut down the Bitcoin mining.
China was mining half of it that was sort of centralized and then it migrated the US in the past year or two it's migrating out of the US and spreading everywhere in the world.
At the end of the day I don't think the pools have that much power. I think that the power rests with the economic actors at rest with the economic nodes at rest with political actors at rest with the Bitcoin miners at rest with a bunch of tech providers.
There's a lot more parties that are engaged in consensus today than there were five years ago and I think the mining pools are much weaker and again largely irrelevant.
Any mining pool that wanted to drive any particular policy could be wood and could be fairly quickly overridden by all the other economic actors or technical actors in the space right now.
I actually think Bitcoin is its most robust. It's ever been in my opinion.
I think we're good. There's going to be people concerned about everything under the sun all the time and I think that's healthy.
It's healthy that everyone's worried about this protocol change or Bitcoin core, this mining pool.
That's a healthy degree of skepticism but I wouldn't interpret that healthy immune response for the network being weaker today.
The network is far stronger today than at any point that I can remember or point to.
I think I've already had a very good answer on the BTC of the North River North so if you have more questions I'll be available later on maybe.
There is another question to close the discussion.
Hello.
I've prepared it because I'm really not a bit.
We've discovered that there is a global trust law fraud connected to the legal names worldwide affecting even all KYC processes on the exchanges.
My friend Rico here has a little gift for you about this.
My question is, he often suggests also before you talk that you are using company structures to protect yourself.
It also connected to the names but what happens if large private or institutional actors continue operating directly under their personal names?
What would you recommend to avoid long term legal risk as the global structure becomes more exposed?
I'm not sure I understand the question can be said again.
The question is, so on all the KYC exchanges there is a problem that they use the long names.
They change it and it's not the legal names as if you have it in the past works.
So if you ask as a company you don't have the problem but when you have big investor like institutional investor they use their personal data.
So there are normal names and then you have the problem with the tax institution that you have tax companies because they have changed it.
But yes, some information about the devils.
Anyway, I think that Bitcoin is spreading everywhere in the world and you can choose to engage with it peer to peer with self-custody and bypass the exchanges.
I think you can look at Bitcoin as one world of Bitcoin where it's all individuals working with each other and there are a lot of different ways you can do that.
They are various individual strategies or techniques where you are not working with an exchange and you are not working with a company.
I think there is a second way to view Bitcoin which is what a 400,000 companies all trade peer to peer with each other and bypass the exchanges in the banks.
I think there is a third way to view it which is what happens if 50,000 banks start to hold it and trade with each other peer to peer.
I think there is a certain way that people are dealing with crypto exchanges today but that's dynamically evolving.
I think that as the digital assets environment becomes more flexible, I think you'll see an explosion of innovation.
The innovation is taking place at the country level and it's taking place at the individual level and whatever is the status quo today probably won't be the same in five years and there will be some countries that will air on the side of more liberty and freedom and privacy.
We will develop very good technologies and those will probably spread everywhere else in the world.
There will be other countries that air on the side of KYC and censorship and not privacy and I think it's not a Bitcoin problem.
It's a nation state or citizenship problem.
If you find yourself in a particularly hostile nation state where they deprive you of your privacy or your economic liberties then of course the answer is you're either going to use technology that came from another place like VPNs and firewalls and the like or you're going to move.
I think Bitcoin because it's global is it's allowing every nation every actor everywhere in the world to develop technology for layer two, layer three, layer four protocols as fast as they can.
There are things that are being done in countries that you don't live in that would be illegal in your country or not culturally acceptable and you will probably as a Bitcoin holder you're the beneficiary of someone doing something in another place that might you know if I own Bitcoin and Cuba or North Korea I'm getting rich even though it's illegal to own Bitcoin and Korea and North and Cuba.
Likewise, a lot of good technology will flow from the US into countries that that wouldn't allow it and there'll be technology that flows from other countries into Europe where it may not be allowable and I think this dynamic equilibrium there's no one answer except for the fact that it's pretty clear that if you're looking for the best answer the best answer is going to be a decentralized network like Bitcoin and then decentralized layer two protocols like light.
And they are most likely to provide the most sovereign resistance and sound money properties that you could get.
There's no second best idea.
So I you know a friend of mine says you know things aren't necessarily perfect here that's why we call it earth and not heaven and I would say with regard to this there's always going to be imperfections and people's implementations of Bitcoin that's why it's earth that's not heaven.
But the second best idea is much much worse than that and what Bitcoin gives us is it gives us hope that if you are stuck in a place where you have an imperfect capability or imperfect execution somebody somewhere else in the world is probably working on something better and once they roll it out it will start to either directly or indirectly improve your condition.
As a network participant and so I take that incremental approach and I don't get demoralized or depressed if I see there's a sub optimal thing if there's some exchange or some wall at the did something I didn't like I just accept the fact that that we move forward sometimes and perfectly two steps forward one step back and that's all all human progress takes place.
And if you're too much of an idealist and you and you demand that everything be perfect everywhere at all the time you know throughout the journey you never get started on the journey and you'll never get to a better place and I think we're moving to a pretty good place right now and on the margin.
You have two trillion dollars of economic energy in the network today that is imperfectly distributed to some actors.
But 10 years ago you had a few billion dollars of economic energy in the network and it's not like the network was more functional then or all the applications were better so I think we're better off today and now that everybody sees the excitement.
You're about to see the best and brightest minds everywhere in the world start to spend orders of magnitude more money on programming and innovation and layer two and layer three is in order to cure all the problems that you identify and I I agree there's lots of problems in the world.
I think that Bitcoin is a movement and a technology and a protocol that provides us with a hopeful path to get to solutions that are better than anybody else has proposed with any other protocol that I am currently aware of.
Right well thank you very much all before closing I'd like to say we organize at the one forty.