# Building Conviction Through Technical Understanding

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-16

## Transcript

When people start to disassociate from their conviction from their understanding, price will change everything.
I don't care about price.
Why?
Because I didn't build conviction on somebody else's opinion.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that wants to know if people are gonna buy crypto again once they can't afford their gasoline.
That doesn't even make any sense.
Today is Monday, March 16th.
We're actually up a little bit from the lows.
Bitcoin broke 74k earlier.
We'll see if it has legs.
My guest today started mining ETH way back in 2017, almost 10 years ago.
But in the last great bull cycle, he actually pivoted and sold it all and bought a ton of Bitcoin.
Now he's deep on the technical side of Bitcoin and actually daylights as the head of ops at one of the biggest financial media platforms in the space and in finance in general.
Wolf Financial.
Charles Menke is on with us today.
Today's episode is brought to you by Shareland, trade real estate like stocks.
Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto, and Fortis X, your idle crypto's worst nightmare.
Charles, what's up, man?
What's up, dude?
Thank you so much for having me.
People are crying right now because I told them that you sold your ETH five years ago.
But ETH is half the price it was.
Yeah, I I I think I I think candidly, I don't I don't think ETH I I I like when I when I got into ETH, originally I was just looking for something that I could do passive passive income on.
It had nothing to do with having an ethos or a thesis on whether ETH will do well.
I candidly am hyper bearish on ETH.
I I I really don't think it's that great of a platform.
Oh, why?
What what I mean, like we have so many permitts for ETH on our side.
Sure.
And and you have so many people saying, like, this is these are the rails of the new financial system, and yet we have somebody from a big finance media company telling me the opposite.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so I spent some time with a a lot of the original Bitcoin devs and going to these conferences, talking to them at length about like how Bitcoin works, how ETH's code works.
I think ETH originally moving from, and it's not about a POW versus POS, like proof of work versus proof of stake.
I think fundamentally ETH has first mover advantage, but technically it's actually not necessarily in the best spot compared to other chains.
Like it has this huge labyrinth and this huge molehill.
And like when I talk to a lot of these developers, so basically I don't know how much you know about, I'm sure, I'm sure with a lot.
I'm sure you know a lot, but um, like landscape typically how it works is this.
If a developer wants to develop a platform, he always follows liquidity.
And liquidity almost always follows innovation.
And this is like the the the cat and mouse game that happens between two people that are building on top of a blockchain.
Well, ETH having all the liquidity in the beginning, what ends up happening is innovation leads towards the liquidity, and vice versa.
And ETH has been in this really weird place where it has pivoted a thousand times.
If you look at the code base, it's a labyrinth of code and all the stuff that we've seen issues on.
I mean, look at the NFT cycle craze.
Like I I think I paid 12, I think I paid $1250 for a transaction one time to to mint a Karafuku an NFT man.
It was it was bad.
And um no, and there's something fundamentally wrong with the platform.
And candidly, like the the amount of uh I I I don't know, dementia it takes for people to pay 1250 is insane that I even got to that place.
And so, you know, I I think fundamentally the platform is trying its hardest to make this thing work and candidly I think a lot of the traditional finance people that are coming in are looking at the liquidity they're looking at the innovation they're thinking like this is going to be the rails for the new financial landscape and I'm not opposed to that being the case but I'd love for it to be instead of a Frankenstein where it's like yeah this is our Frankenstein chain where it's got this dude's face they've changed 17 times the lines of code are so fat at this point and they still haven't fixed a lot of the issues that comes around gas fees you've layer two'd everything and layer two and layer three is just a fancy word for a database that that it's literally all that's happening because the truth is is all they're doing is they're going back to like pre-on-chain everything and they're saying hey what we'll do is we'll do all of our typical transactions on a regular database and then we will put them down to the base chain after it all the benefits that you had from being on chain are completely lost and now you're going back to a trusted system which is a layer two and layer three system.
And obviously there's a lot of details in that that you know I I think I'm probably pretty green on, like ZK sync and some of the security stuff that you get into it, but most of the time you're losing a lot of the benefits of being on chain.
And so I would love to see another chain come up and beat Ethereum.
I just don't think it's gonna be the case.
I think we'll Ethereum will infinitely pivot until fixing all of its core issues.
And that liquidity is too much of a finger licking good time for developers.
And they're gonna keep building innovative stuff on top of ETH because that's where all the money is.
It just doesn't make sense.
I mean, think about it.
Like a developer is like, yeah, I'm gonna go build a bunch of innovative tools on a chain that has no money.
It basically is a death sentence.
And so no matter what, people are kind of lean towards ETH, even if it's not that easy to work with, even if the foundation's tough, even if the code sucks, even if they've pivoted a thousand times because that's where the money is.
So that's why I'm not like uh uh super excited about ETH overall as a chain.
Um it's but you're you know but you're telling me that it's but you're also but you're kind of painting a bullish reason though, that it's like despite all those issues, the liquidity stays there, and as a result of it attracts it attracts the developers.
So, what would what would change that?
And you're saying that there's not going to be a competitor.
So, what would change that current trend?
I think it's just stuck, it's just always gonna be that.
It's just always gonna be this clunky thing that all these devs want to use like crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
I uh yeah, I mean it's a it's a good point.
Uh I guess I guess my bearish case is the bullish case, is that people are just gonna keep following the liquidity.
I just wish it wasn't the case.
I wish we had a chain that was a little bit more, and I think maybe it takes another two to X years to get a chain that's top to bottom exactly what we needed.
It's it's really hard off first rip to get something right when it comes to technological innovations.
That's one thing that's interesting about Bitcoin for me.
Usually the first, the first innovation that you get in a tech becomes archaic.
Like I've been in tech since I was 15 years old.
Bitcoin is not really having that moment.
And so usually when you look at all these chains, like in 10 to 15 years, I imagine we'll probably think that some of this tech is archaic and not the right way to go.
But that might not end up happening with Bitcoin and ETH.
I hope so, at least some like 99% Bitcoin.
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So tell me more.
So give me give me the give me your bull case for Bitcoin from the technical side.
Because I feel like this is a take that we don't hear very often.
So what and to start from the beginning, because you were you were mining your ETH 2021.
I guess you came to this realization going to conferences, talking to devs, all that kind of stuff.
What was that turning point into Bitcoin then at the time?
Yeah.
So Bitcoin kind of it was two-folded.
I I think some things that that people get wrong in Bitcoin.
And um, I went to the Bitcoin conference, I don't know, 2021, 2022, something like that.
And I had been doing a bunch of research into how the chain works, into um basically how blocks are mined and difficulties increase when difficulty is increased you uh it you you sum it down into this like very simple measure.
There's basically a certain amount of zeros that has to happen in front of a stringed character or a hash that like all of the chain ends up having to look for.
And if they need if the chains or the blocks are timed too short or if they're timed too long, they add or take out a zero.
And so basically they just take probability and they're like okay so we're gonna X the probability by a certain amount of X so that all of the hash rate that's happening towards this right now has a harder time finding a string of characters with this many zeros in the beginning like this is a very dumbed down version there's a bunch of concatenation and stuff that's going on the technical side and and you know I encourage anybody go on chat GPT actually understand the tech you're investing in.
And I went to the Bitcoin conference I started talking about how cool the tech was and I was like oh man it's so exciting because like this and this concatenation and you can see the tree and it all goes down into a hash and get pushed in pushed into the next block and people were like yeah dude trustless and I was like what yeah I mean like but what don't you think that's cool like dude they're using cryptography to create like a safety between layers and it's trustless and nobody understands.
And I I mean almost I I would say one to two percent of people probably understand so far and obviously I haven't met everybody actually understand the depths of Bitcoin and I went to like some private meetups with like all these Bitcoin related people, most of the time people trust the keywords.
They don't actually trust the technology.
And so we were like, oh yeah, I believe in trustless.
Oh, yeah, I believe in this.
And if you start drilling down into the psyche of why they believe in this, most of it is adjacent belief from another person.
They had some some key figure that was like, it's this, it's that, it's whatever it may be.
So this kind of drums back into it.
I realized at one point that I was the same as everybody else, and I was borrowing conviction.
I didn't really have any of my own conviction.
Because the truth is real conviction is built on understanding, not adjacent understanding, not somebody else's.
And how downstream this conviction had been, I wasn't even sure.
It could have been from this guy that actually understood the tech, told this guy that it's amazing, it's trustless, you it's permissionless, it's all these things that make benefit Bitcoin a benefit.
That person told that person, then that person, that person, and you end up with like 15 trees all the way down where nobody actually understands what they're they're talking about.
And I realized at one point I was I was this pleb.
I was this giant voice for something that I truly didn't understand.
I didn't know why it was a technical um feat.
I didn't understand why trustless and permissionless was truly great.
I didn't understand a lot of this stuff, and so I started really digging in.
I spent uh a long time, maybe maybe two to three weeks of sitting behind ChatGPT and understanding cryptography.
I'm at I mean, I dug into SHA 256, how it works, how it actually moves things.
It's super simple.
You stick one string of characters in, it blends it up in the exact same blend quality, and then you get an output on the other end, which is like the private and public key.
And a lot of this stuff never made sense to me.
And the thing that's crazy too is like um, I know I'm like building this sort of bitter dietribe, and I'm not trying to, but the the core point here is like when people start to disassociate from disassociate their conviction from their understanding, price will change everything.
I don't care about price.
Why?
Because I didn't build conviction on somebody else's opinion.
Whether Bitcoin goes to 25 or 55, the reason that I think it's fundamentally worth it is because I understand what the tech gives capacity and ability to do.
And there's something extremely powerful for somebody in some foreign country with an uh a looming regime for them to take a hundred thousand dollars and stick it in their wallet and they can memorize a song that has 24 characters in it and then go to another country.
We have no touch point in the US, and so like the things that make Bitcoin in inherently valuable, like a US minded person will look at Bitcoin and think thoughts like this.
It's a financial asset that I can two and three X my money.
But if you take anybody that has any type of harsh regime, tough political pressure, Bitcoin becomes this freedom lever that they can instantly push, and there's a massive value in that.
And when you've only had it good, it's really hard to understand the key value around Bitcoin.
And so I say that to say, um, once I really understood what trustless meant, digging into like anybody can participate, like freedom of commerce is back.
Like if go go try to commerce at a gas station in your own way where you have a chicken or you have some type of thing, it's like totally impossible.
You have to use Visa, you have to use MasterCard, you have to use the United States system.
It doesn't exist anymore.
But commerce is now directly from person to person, and it's brought back.
And I hate to be that I'm probably the Bitcoin every Bitcoin maxi that's ever existed right now.
But um, yeah, I didn't, I main thing is I didn't borrow conviction.
And I think it happens pretty much.
Anybody who's listening, I'm sure you've borrowed some conviction at times.
And when price goes down, you get a little uneasy.
You're like, oh man, that feels bad.
Like, what's going wrong?
Like, where did you get your fundamental thesis from?
Because it was never about price for Bitcoin.
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I just want to tell you that we actually trade our pears every year for some food from a farm.
I'm just gonna tell you that in rural Canada, this does exist.
Okay.
We have like three three giant pear trees and make like 300 pounds a year, okay?
There's way too much to eat.
And we just go trade it to some farm for some of their eggs.
You know what?
Anyways, you know, cars commerce exists in my in my world, but I I'd not take it away from a you said obviously.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
In the United States, if I want to go get milk from a farm, I cannot buy it.
It is illegal.
If I buy unpasturized uh a farm cannot sell me unpasteurized milk, it is a crime.
I I literally cannot pay for it.
The only way that I can go get unpasteurized real raw milk that hasn't been shipped through 35 people and then suck onto a shelf is I have to literally just trade for it.
I have to barter.
There cannot be any exchange of money because they've totally made it a crime.
It's insane.
Yeah.
Sorry to hear that.
Sorry, you can't you can't drink your unpasteurized.
Um, okay, so sorry.
Charles needs his real proteins.
Um, and his all his bacteria.
He needs to be needs it.
He needs it to stay strong.
Um, okay, hold on.
There's there's a term you use that I think is fantastic that we never really hear on the show, um, sure, which is downstream conviction.
I love that.
I and I think uh how much, you know, you you also you run a massive financial platform, man.
You guys talk about everything, same as we do, uh, and you have a massive audience on X.
What is so you have a lot of experience here?
You know, you know how people react to financial news and how they they latch on to narratives.
How much of how many people's opinions are actually just downstream convictions?
I mean, I don't want to be bearish on humanity, but 99%.
It's dude, it's crazy.
Like, uh, think about it like this.
Cre massive creator posts that he's entering a trade.
Trade goes sideways, everybody's angry at him.
Why?
Why would you be angry if you understood the thesis?
Didn't didn't if if you accepted the thesis of the creator and you understood exactly the selling point, he wasn't giving you a buy signal.
He was giving you a thesis and you agreed with the thesis, which means that you it's your buy signal.
See, you you you only fundamentally get mad at the creator that posts a buy because you never tried to understand why he was buying it at that entry.
Because if understanding was the prerequisite for your purchase, you can't get mad at anybody because you made a full decision around that purchase.
Look at how much anger there is on the timeline.
Somebody posts and it's positive and they're super happy.
Somebody posts and it's negative.
We work in the creator ecosystem.
So, like most of these creators, a lot of times have a huge difficulty around backlash and just having a thesis around trading because nobody's gonna do the fundamental analysis, nor are they interested.
I mean, yeah, I can take this another step.
Look at the copy trading platform.
So if you look at eToro, it's based around copy trading.
Um, like that's been a lot of their big thing for a long period of time.
All of the wealth when you look at copy trading goes to the top one and two portfolios.
It doesn't go anywhere else.
What is that telling you?
People go onto the platform, they go, X percentage up, most green copy.
The truth is is people fundamentally want to make money, but I don't think that they actually have a desire to seek to understand the tech.
And that's why the people that deeply understand the things this goes back to Warren Buffett too.
Um, I have a friend from Pakistan, he says Warren Buffet.
Um, this goes back to Mr.
Buffet.
And he said, I don't invest in anything I can't understand.
He goes, Tech is great, it's awesome.
I have no idea how it works.
He goes, but I can understand a burger.
And I feel like a lot of times we've lost this fundamental thesis for retail, which is I only I only invest in things that I can understand.
And most of the time, people are just looking at the gains of other people on social media.
They're borrowing the conviction for a short period of time, when the price goes negative, they start to lose trust in that person, and then the creator gets attrition around the followers.
And unfortunately, like, dude, I think the truth is is people just flat don't have time to invest in single stocks.
They probably have enough time to stick it in QQQ or VU.
Um, but they're trying to act like a single stock trader.
And um, it's just not gonna work.
That's why Bitcoin for me, like I bought at 125, it hurt a little bit more than buying at 68.
Um, but I bought at 125, I bought at 68, I bought at 52.
Like, all of it is the same to me.
It doesn't matter.
It's a 10 to a 20 year hold.
Like, I fundamentally believe whether even the United States is gonna be successful as a country, that even stuff, crazy stuff like that.
And I'm for the United States, I love my country.
Um, but even if the United States doesn't do super well, I feel like I have a really good asset.
I wouldn't want to hold in US dollars if that's the case that it goes negative.
So for me, I'm hedging the bets.
I've got five percent of a doomer in the back end.
And I think most of the time people are are fundamentally investing into other people.
One, it's just a time thing, too.
So what is five percent of a doomer?
What did you say?
Yeah, I mean, like, I feel like you gotta be a little bit like the things that make Bitcoin inherently really, really valuable, you have to be a little bit of a doomer to uh to hold to that value.
So, okay, this is a good perspective.
So we were doing shows for a long time, and when we talk about Bitcoin from a United States perspective, and the people speaking from the United States perspective, they don't really understand inflation.
It's just a number on a piece of paper.
They've never really gone to the store and bred increases in price 5x overnight.
We've had some.
It's been kind of slow, it's been trailing.
But if you go look at Turkey and a bread is $2.50, and the next day it's $65 or $45 because they have a 50% inflation rate year over year, whatever it is.
Like those people really understand Bitcoin.
Like until you start to get like a little bit of that sour taste in your mouth for what doesn't work about the monetary system, Bitcoin's value is a little bit lost on you.
And it just becomes like words on a piece of paper.
And that even goes for me, you know.
Like I don't really feel inflation in the way that somebody like Turkey or a place like another country that has crazy inflation.
It's the same with like having like a political regime that's unfriendly.
There was a story originally about a girl, I don't know, she's in the Middle East, she put all her money into Bitcoin, and because the banks was taking everybody's cash.
This happens, I believe, in Africa as well, where the banks will languish and take your wages.
And if you can just take your wages, stick them into Bitcoin, memorize a 24 C character, and then move over to another country, you can take your wealth with you, which you could never do.
You can't even do that in the United States.
And Michael Saylor talks about this, you know, 10,000 times, and obviously this is like the key statement around Bitcoin.
But until you have a feeling and actually experience that, that.
That's why I say it takes a little bit of a doomer perspective to see the value in Bitcoin.
Because if you have a zero percent doomer perspective, you think of it as just like a an adjacent gold that's better than gold, yada yada, yada.
It's an asset that can go up in value, but there's a lot of safety mechanisms for having an a negative person, a negative leadership over you in whatever it might, whatever way it may be, whether it's political, whether it's you know the regime, whether it's yada yada yada, like all that stuff is a major benefit because Bitcoin was really made out of the 2008 housing crash.
I don't I'm sure you guys have talked about this on the show a bunch, but um whole yeah, the whole idea is that he was like, hey, we can no longer trust the United States monetary system because now they are bailing out the banks, yet they failed.
And at that point he created Bitcoin, you know, cryptography meets monetary system and you know, exofacto.
Are you a gold holder?
I would be.
I would be.
I don't hold any gold candidly.
For me, I'm a I'm a one trick pony.
So I was buying gold maybe 2200, 1800.
I sold most of it and I bought all Bitcoin.
For me, I think it's an ease thing, and there's more safety in Bitcoin.
Like, you know, I can put I can basically make like an iTunes song where I put 24 characters into the song and I can upload that to iTunes, and my little my little seed phrase can go anywhere at any point in time, and I'll go play some random music from some random guy that I uploaded.
Gold is hard to travel with, and I've got like five percent of a doomer in me.
So at that point, like if I'm broken into gold can be taken, you know, all that stuff.
And Bitcoin is literally just safer than gold when I'm thinking from uh uh uh uh my five percent doomer, which I mean to say five percent again.
You haven't buried some gold bars in the in the woods behind your house?
No, no, I I don't know.
I I may I would rather hold guns than hold gold candidly.
Do you um do you look at I I okay, you already said you're one trick pony, so I know the answer to this, but what do you think about things that are Bitcoin adjacent?
Um something like like iron, right?
Which is you know, is no longer really a Bitcoin thing, it's no longer a Bitcoin stock, but it was a Bitcoin mining mining company, now is kind of pivoted to uh AI.
Is that something that you even pay attention to when something like that happens?
And I'm not saying do you invest there, but do you does that factor in for you at all?
Yeah, they're yellow bellies.
Uh it makes me sick to my stomach.
I hate them.
No, I'm joking.
No, no, no, no, no, I'm joking.
Um, iron's a great choice.
Like, yeah, yeah.
You're such a Midwest American guy with an expression like yellow bellies, man.
That's a great expression.
I love that.
I mean that in a very nice way.
That's an awesome expression.
No, dude, iron's a great choice.
Look at AI.
Yeah, I mean, what are you trying to do?
Do you uh do you find here's the thing?
I have a little bit of a doomer in me.
So fundamentally, I don't really like enjoying holding stocks.
Why?
I can't take stocks with me anywhere.
If things don't go well for whatever agency, like look at the stock market from uh if you can only take, I think it's a seven to an eight percent downturn before they will pause the market.
The fact that they can pause the market in the first place tells you that there's serious central controls.
So I wouldn't love holding stocks candidly, because I, you know, I already said this, I'm kind of hedging my bets.
Um, but if you're trying to create wealth and you're looking at these companies thinking like, oh, these are the data center plays that were in Bitcoin, and now they're pivoting to AI because we're gonna have literally the next five to ten years of the most AGI-centric tech boom that's ever existed in the history of mankind.
I think you're making a pretty smart bet.
You know, I'm not huge on the contracts themselves.
I've got good buddies that follow all the contracts from um all the AI companies, who they're contracting through, how much they're worth, where they're building, who actually has the real estate.
And I did an interview with the CEO of Clean Spark and he talked about how the real estate is a lot more valuable, um, not the real estate, but the land is a lot more valuable than you'd think.
It's not about just putting a data center anywhere.
The data centers for inference have to be really, really close to the place that you're actually gonna do the inference.
So he's like, if you if you keep power highly separate, um, you have key issues.
And so they're land focused and have been land focused for 15 to 20 years.
And so yeah, uh, you know, if you're gonna invest in companies like Iron, like deeply understand those companies and what they're doing, look at all the contracts, make sure you can actually follow the assets themselves.
Don't just, you know, invest in the narrative.
If you invest in the narrative alone, like imagine you'll take the L's, dude, like you know, you you don't actually fundamentally understand.
What about anything?
What about like micro strategy or Coinbase?
Like I know again, those are not they're not as bullish as as your Bitcoin thesis.
I'm just thinking that those are things that as over 20 years could also appreciate in in price.
What what is your reason for not for sticking only to Bitcoin instead of other stuff like that?
So there's a lot of benefit around MSTR and some of the treasury companies that you're not going to get in Bitcoin.
Um you have all the options tools.
You can short, you can long, like you're gonna get a lot more financial tools around MSTR than you would ever get in Bitcoin.
Things I do like about having Bitcoin is that I can take loans against it.
So if I want to like I'll double expose at a low.
So like Bitcoin's at 62, I'll loan against all of my Bitcoin.
I'll double expose to the upside because we're probably bottoming out or close to, and then at the very top end, I'll sell the Bitcoin and then pay the loan off and have double exposure to the top end.
You can't do that with MSTR, but you can pull out an option where you're leaping one to two years if you think it's gonna do well and it will do well.
And what is the three point 3.62% of the market?
Like even if you did the math and Bitcoin goes to half a million or a million, like he's gonna be the most infinitely wealthy person that's ever existed.
So I think MSTR is a is a good play.
I don't know if you've talked about on the show the fundamentals of treasury and how it works.
Um, but the general idea is that they can ATM, which is basically issuing shares, anything if they're at a positive um nav to Bitcoin holdings, I think it's if they're positive.
I have to look at this again, but basically, if it's if the stock price or the market cap is 1.2 to the Bitcoin holdings underneath, they can ATM the shares all the way down to where the market cap and the Bitcoin holdings are absolutely equal.
So right now I think MSCR is on sale.
I'd have to look at the nav.
Um, but I think they're like 0.99.
So anytime you dip below into the 0.8s or 0.7s, meaning that the market cap is 30% cheaper than the holdings of Bitcoin that are actually inside the company.
You're buying your Bitcoin at 70% of the value.
You are trusting a centralized actor to hold your Bitcoin for you, which is a huge consideration.
But candidly, like we talk and do Bitcoin content all the time.
Most people don't even understand self-cost self-custody.
Like we work on the traditional finance side.
I think for spaces, we have one of the biggest shows, and we tried to market some of the self-custody companies into the traditional finance.
And even people that held Bitcoin fundamentally cannot understand why they would hold it themselves.
It's actually a risk to them.
They're like, why wouldn't I put this into an ETF so that somebody who's bigger has more money, more safety, would hold it for me in comparison to me trying to hold it myself when I have a chance to just send it off in some random place.
Like there's right now traditional finance is having a Bitcoin ETH moment, but they haven't experienced an FTX moment, like the crypto natives have.
And so like they don't understand honey pots.
They don't understand that like if you steal money on a traditional rail, they're just gonna freeze it.
If you steal it on Bitcoin, there's nothing to freeze.
There's nothing to roll back.
You if you do it on ETH, you might get Vitalic, you might tilt his head a little bit and be like, do we roll back?
Obviously not, but um you know, we've had those those those those tweets.
But there's nothing to roll back.
And so right now, like fundamentally, uh, I think a lot of this money is gonna pour into all of these traditional and MSTR.
You know, I'm sure you've talked about this at length.
There's a ton of international benefits to MSTR.
Like right now, you can't invest in, I can't remember the country, so I'm gonna say something.
If people in the comments are like this guy's an idiot, like, yes, I can't remember the country specifically.
But Brazil has issues around investing directly in cryptocurrency.
And so a lot of the public traded, publicly traded entities actually give capacity for you to benefit.
I think Japan is the same way.
You can't invest in cryptocurrencies directly, which is why MetaPanet went so crazy, because the tax benefits around investing in the stock in comparison to crypto is like uh in it's insanely different.
I th I I'd have to go back and do all the research for the numbers exactly, but I'm I think the spread is like a 20% tax difference.
Do you know what what it was?
No.
Okay.
Yeah.
It it it's a big spread.
There's huge tax advantages to investing in local companies that are local tickers.
Because cryptocurrency, when you look at it, a lot of times to a foreign regime, they look at crypto and they actually think that it's um a gr an aggressor to the local currency in some ways.
And so when the local companies buy that thing, well, the country is incentivized for their companies to do well.
And so they'll actually give benefits to those companies in in comparison to cryptocurrencies.
And so a lot of times this is just the vehicle in which way people are investing into these assets.
It has nothing to do with the companies themselves.
It's because locals can't invest directly into crypto because it's a hostile environment in that country.
So there's uh I mean, it depends on what where you're at in life, what part of the country you're in, and and why you would invest in those things.
And candidly, how much trust you have for Michael Saylor?
He seems like he's off the rails around Bitcoin.
So I mean, he's probably gonna do you pretty well.
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Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I guess I guess maybe one of my last questions for you, Charles, is what would there ever be anything that invalidates your thesis, right?
You've given us a lot of great reasons that quantum worries.
Quantum worries me a little bit.
Yeah.
Especially as a tech person.
Tell me more.
I mean, so there's two algorithms that um govern Bitcoin right now.
One is SHA 256, which is fairly safe.
The other one is the algorithm around the wallets.
I think it's basically uh elliptical curve cryptography.
ECC is the one around the wallets.
So basically, they it imagine that you take the algorithm that you're scrambling and you you put it on more of like a geographic plane and you start plotting.
That's how ECC works.
ECC is not that safe in comparison to SHA-256.
SHAT 256, the difficulty for it to be hacked infinitely scales.
So even if you put a bunch of compute onto the chain, the safety mechanisms around the central chain are high.
Now the safety mechanisms around the original wallets are not ECC is is relatively unsafe.
So I mean, I have issues around this.
Candidly, I don't know enough about quantum.
And I'm looking at like this is where I'm like borrowing theses from other people.
You know, like people will post on it, they're like Bitcoin screwed quantum.
And I I like I I have no idea.
Like that that's the truth.
I I don't know enough.
And the problem is is for me to really, really dig down, some stuff with when I've started dug dug down into quantum, quantum doesn't multimodal well.
Like it doesn't change functions the way a computer would well, but it can do one function very well.
And they've talked about it doing ECC or SHA-256 in that one function very, very well.
So and there's even people, if you look at like Martin Screlly, Martin Screlly is actively spending money through quantum uh companies to see if he can break SHA-256 and ECC all the time.
So he's even testing the waters and being like, hey, can I can I mess with this thing?
So and I feel like every cryptographer, whatever it may be, there's the honeypot of the century, which is Satoshi's wallet, which is the original wallet, has not been changed over.
I think it's original E ECC.
Like it's susceptible.
And so I'm sure people over years have been trying to break it.
And it's it's technology, you know, it's cryptography.
Like it's it's it's a compute issue.
So if one computer can you know compute 50% of the hash rate like fairly quickly because it's you know a million times X faster than whatever the original hash was, there's risks.
So for me, that's the only thing.
And I'm I'm looking at Bitcoin and I'm like, man, sometimes sometimes gold would feel good.
Sometimes it would feel good.
And I think maybe a 50-50 portfolio gold and Bitcoin in that in that world probably makes sense.
You'd hedge your bets a little bit.
Gold's not gonna get cracked.
There's an inflation rate to gold.
I think it's one point 1.25 to 1.35%, which is the gold they mine out of the ground.
Bitcoin's now at 0.8% inflation rate.
Next year after the having, it'll go to 0.4.
So you do have to deal with a little bit of inflation around gold, and as gold gains more value, they will mine more of it.
So the inflation rate will go up with gold as it keeps gaining value, maybe up to 2.5%.
But outside of that, like um, I feel really good about Bitcoin.
It's it's non-nation dependent.
Whatever happens in any case, I can stick a mnemonic in my head and I can go to whatever country and retain my wealth, which is more than you can say about just about anything.
Well, I hope that doesn't come to pass what you said about the quantum part, but I feel like that's a developing story and it's something that people like.
It's really hard to just know what that would happen.
But I didn't know that about the Satoshi wallet, so that is interesting.
It makes it more susceptible.
So it's definitely something concerning.
How much how much Bitcoin is in there?
Uh a million Bitcoin.
I think it's a hundred billion dollars-ish, maybe less, maybe 70 billion.
Casual hundred billions.
It's a pretty it's a it's a it's it's a good honeypot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a good thing to target for sure.
I didn't know that about Skrelly either.
The constant, the recurring villain.
Uh I didn't know that at all.
So that's hilarious.
Uh okay, Charles, we're at the end of the show.
Um where can people find you, man?
And tell us a little bit more about what's going on at Wolf.
Yeah, absolutely.
You can find my personal X is Charles One.
Um, just literally the number.
Uh I don't post much.
It's not gonna be a I think it just changed the handle.
Yeah, there wasn't Charles.
And then I'm obviously you can find Wolf Financial everywhere.
It's just uh at X, it's Wolf underscore financial.
We have probably 10 in-house assets.
We just purchased stock market news.
And um, right now there's not really a B2C play, but tune into any of the finance shows.
We'll talk about futures, uh swing trading, day trading, uh futures trading, uh FX.
Like if there's a financial market that you invest in, we probably create content around that.
And if you go on the Wolf Financial page on X, if you scroll down to the first pin post, you can see all of our show schedule.
We do 40 hours of shows across X or across Wolf Financial, Wolf Bitcoin, Wolf Trading, Wolf Crypto, Wolf Crypto is probably the the newest to power up, so I wouldn't expect huge things out of there right now.
But you guys can find us.
Tune into the shows.
If you guys are interested in being a part as well, you guys can message us.
We're always looking for talent and people who are excited to grow on social media.
Charles, great to talk to you, man.
Thank you for all that.
And uh what a pleasure.
Honestly, this is a refreshing episode.
We don't get we don't get this angle very much.
Um so I I appreciate that.
Uh and the the ETH Maxis and the audience will be will be in shambles a little bit.
But I don't I don't think your I think that even what you said about ETH to them will be uh wait, what was the term you said that I that I like?
Uh your downstream downstream conviction, I guess downstream FUD as well.
They're not gonna they're not gonna let that infect them.
I feel like they'll stay bullish uh for the reasons that they have, which is also what you recommended.
Have your own conviction, right?
So yes, uh, you know, people don't don't take it too seriously.
What Charles said, unless you really like what he said, then message him and ask him some more.
Uh Charles, good to see you, man.
You got it.
Thank you so much.
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