# Bitcoin Valuation and the Next Monetary Crisis

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-18

## Transcript

So I see this a lot.
People say we have a debt-based monetary system.
Deflation is bad for a debt-based monetary system.
AI and robotics is going to cause deflation.
Therefore, it's going to cause a catastrophe for this monetary system we have.
And therefore the government's going to have to print.
And I think there's like elements of that that are accurate, but I think the whole thing is not quite accurate.
So what I mean by that is What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show, where we try to figure out if Bitcoin is just another asset or the thing that breaks the entire financial system.
Today is March 18th, 2026.
We were recording this late on March 17th.
Bitcoin is cheatering around 74, 75k.
And I think this is good.
In our lifetime, we've had two giant events that have caused the government to print tons of money the great financial crisis and COVID.
But our guest today tells me that we're on the verge of another one.
And it's less of a question of if, but rather a question of when.
And yes, he is very bullish on Bitcoin in the event that this happens.
John Hard, managing director at Swan Private, a firm that has converted over five billion dollars into Bitcoin in the last few years, is here with us today.
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John, what's up, man?
Welcome to Milk Road.
Hey, LG, great to be here, man.
I'm excited to get into it.
Okay, let's get into it.
But first, you are a converted person, believer from gold to Bitcoin.
You used to work at Goldman Sachs on like the gold bonds desk or something like that.
Dude, tell me about that moment where I guess you got orange pilled.
I don't know if people still say that.
Yeah.
So basically, I went from uh salty gold bug to optimistic Bitcoin guy over the course of a bunch of years.
But um, so for me, it actually traces back to the financial crisis.
So I was a college kid as that was happening.
I was ending college, and that was a crazy time to end college because you're like, all these companies are going out of business, the economy's tanking, and you're like, wait, I'm supposed to try to get a job now.
What the hell?
And also I I was I knew enough to see that the people on TV, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Jamie Diamond, talking heads on financial media.
The financial crisis caught all these people by surprise.
You have to remember that.
Um, and they are the experts tasked at managing and monitoring the system, right?
And I'll never forget just being a kid saying, wow, this economic catastrophe just hit, and all these people didn't really see it coming.
So I'm not claiming I saw it coming, but I I knew enough to see that they didn't see it coming.
And that led me to look in other places for economic answers, economic theory.
And I basically found the gold standard and this school of economics called Austrian economics, and it started making a ton of sense.
I said, okay, gold standard, sound money makes a lot of sense.
And this is like 2009, 10.
I start working at Goldman around that time.
You can't really do anything with that information about it's like a foundation of the system type of question.
And you can't be a 22-year-old kid being like, hey guys, I think we should go back to the gold standard.
So, you know, completely it was just like a hobby for me.
It was just like, oh, I think this economic system makes sense.
I have no ability to make that come into existence, but I'll read up on it.
I'm interested in it, etc.
So I'm just doing my job at Goldman.
A friend tells me about Bitcoin in 2013.
And uh I immediately, because I have the economics background, I say, Oh, they're trying to do gold, but uh over the internet.
And you might think, oh, John immediately understood Bitcoin and he bought a ton of Bitcoin in 2013 and now he's massively wealthy.
Unfortunately, that's not true.
Um, like many people, I dismissed Bitcoin for years, even with the economics background.
And my thought was nobody even cares about gold, really.
So how are you gonna get them to care about the internet version of gold?
So I thought, nice idea, it'll never catch on.
Fast forward another, you know, four or five years.
The 2017, late 2017 cycle is happening.
I say, oh, maybe this is gonna be a real thing.
I get involved in a small way, then the price crashes.
I say, Oh my gosh, is it dead?
You know, the typical cycle that Bitcoiners go through.
But I would say at least 2017 clued me in to say, hey, maybe this thing's not gonna die.
Because that I think that was the first mainstream cycle.
It was talked about on TV, Bloomberg, CNBC, even people on my team at Goldman were talking about Bitcoin in 2017.
And then importantly, the price crashed from roughly, you know, 19 to you know, six, and then it went down in 2018.
I think it hit a low of 3K.
And I just kept one eye on it.
I I was honestly wondering, I was like, is this thing dead forever?
Maybe.
But it it it took, I took note that it crashed to 5K or 3K, and I was like, well, it didn't crash to zero.
Isn't that interesting, right?
If it if it really is nothing, if it really is a Ponzi scheme like Jamie Diamond says it is, then why did it not crash to just zero and go away?
And then you start to see it, you know, we get closer to 2020, it's running up again.
Then you get the COVID.
We'll we'll get into that more.
But it was basically 2017 when I said, okay, maybe Bitcoin's a real thing.
The price falls out, and I say, wait, but it didn't crash to zero.
And then between 2018 and 2020, the amount of content I consumed about Bitcoin just was like going vertical.
Um, and then I joined Swan in uh early 2022.
So I've been with Swan actually working in Bitcoin for almost exactly four years now.
So I just want to do a quick pause to tell you guys about what's going on at Milk Road right now.
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So hold on, wait, wait.
You you skipped like the most important part of the timeline, man.
Hold on.
You went right on.
You said 2018, 2019.
I'm reading everything about Bitcoin.
Yeah, what's what's the line from Seinfeld?
Yada yada yada.
And then I joined Swan in 2022.
You missed like the most crucial part, pandemic, like all that stuff, man.
Like there must have been a transformation in that time that then.
How did you end up at Swan?
Did where you were like a Bitcoin max that you're writing about it or something like that?
Like, how did you go from Goldman to Swan?
Because Swan is like a crypto place.
Yeah, yeah, that's worth elaborating on.
Fair point.
Fair point.
So basically, 2018, 20, like I said, 17, 18.
I'm interested in Bitcoin.
I bought a tie a little bit like everyone.
I wish I bought a ton more back then, but hindsight, right?
And uh, so I'm looking at it.
I'm I'm interested.
Also, if you think back to that era, there wasn't as much content in like 2017, 2018.
It wasn't as easy to just fire up your podcast feed and get, you know, 10 new episodes of these incredible shows that have good guests with good content, and it's just on your phone in your pocket when you walk out the door.
That just was not a thing in 2017, 2018.
So there was a few articles I read, and it it had a big impact on me, but it was kind of slow moving.
As you got closer to 2020, there was more content, more accessible.
So I'm I'm consuming more Bitcoin content, and then COVID happens.
And the fiscal and monetary response to COVID was to me was like the most obvious sign for Bitcoin that there could be.
And I think there's even, you know, millions of people who previously didn't care about the monetary system that COVID clued them in to, oh my gosh, that this is how money works.
They can just, you know, spend an additional three trillion dollars this year.
They can just tell people to stay home and not go to work and write them a stimulus check.
You know, the Fed can just expand their balance sheet by three trillion dollars in three months.
I think that's actually the pace that they did it.
So again, even your like kind of quote unquote normie guy was like, wait a minute, what's going on here?
So for me, it was more like I understood I believe that there's value to Bitcoin, and COVID just made it so much more obvious.
Um, but there was never a point previous to that where I would say, oh, that's a company I could go work for.
I I was a fixed income portfolio manager.
That means you manage a portfolio of bonds, and we did it for institutional investors.
It's not the sexiest part of finance by any means.
And it wasn't until maybe like the second half of 2020 that I came across some companies like Swan, um, NyDig was another one.
They they're still around.
Um, seems to be a great company, and that I looked at those two in particular, and that was the first time it hit me, and I said, maybe I could I could go work at one of these companies.
Because prior to like 2017, it was like Coinbase was around and not much more.
And I never had a thought of I'm gonna go work at Coinbase.
My background wasn't fit for it.
I don't think the company made sense for it.
So 21 basically 2021 comes around.
I get in touch with some people at Swan and NyDig.
I'm kind of feeling around the industry and uh was impressed with people that I met at Swan.
And then you fast forward after like you know, nine months of talking to them.
I said, you know what?
I think it makes sense to leave the world of TradFi and get into the world of Bitcoin.
And my thought was I I think it'll be a good experience no matter what.
And if if for some reason it doesn't work out, I could go back to TradFi.
Uh I'll be honest with you, the thought of managing a portfolio of bonds again sounds like you know a form of torture.
So I'm I'm not looking to get back to that any anytime soon.
But so now now it's been four years actually working in Bitcoin.
How could you how could you go back to that when now you're into an asset that just fluctuates 50% once in a while?
How could you how could you possibly go back to bonds?
Um, okay, so so let's let's talk about the prediction we we threw at the top of the show that you're kind of you were telling me before the show as well that we've had you've given us the round trip story, right?
Gfc to COVID, and now you know, we've been in a time warp ban.
It's been six years since COVID started.
It's been already six years since that Black Friday, all the stocks, crypto, everything crashed.
Um it feels longer and short and too short at the same time.
John, what what are the conditions?
I think a lot of people already know what the conditions are.
But in your view, what are the conditions that we're heading towards that would cause the another mass printing event?
And and how would that happen?
Yeah, for sure.
So I think like you said, two big prints kind of in most people's adults like adult lifetime.
Um, and the most recent one being COVID.
And I can just say I saw firsthand my myself, uh how many people how that affected people to say, whoa, that you know, as all those things I said, they can just print money, stimulus checks, et cetera, et cetera.
But I also, this is not just a theory because I've seen it firsthand.
Hundreds of clients at Swan who I've talked to.
What's the first thing I ask when I talk to a new client?
It's like, what's your Bitcoin story?
And I love hearing people's Bitcoin story because they're always going to be a little different with some similarities.
And there's just so many people who came into Bitcoin because of what they saw, the response to COVID, the monetary response and the fiscal response.
So all of that happened.
I I would call that a big print.
There's a guy named Larry Lepard, Lawrence Lapard, who literally wrote a book called The Big Print.
And it's kind of uh hinting at this idea that our monetary system has these big prints that it goes through with some frequency.
It's it's not every year, but with some frequency.
And I do believe, as you hinted at, it's only a matter of time before the next big print.
I'm not one of these people who's saying it's gonna happen next month.
Um, that's usually too premature.
You should typically fade those calls.
But I do think it is a matter of time.
And uh what actually, before I go into potential next catalysts, let me just say this.
I think there's an interesting dynamic where as you get removed from COVID in time, as more years go by.
This is just human nature.
We go from remembering how crazy that monetary response was to kind of being like the frog in boiling water again.
And we're like, oh, we kind of forget that at any point they can just you know print trillions and the Fed can expand its balance sheet like crazy and stimulus checks and corporate bailouts, yada yada yada.
And uh, but that doesn't change the fact that uh another big print is on the horizon, in my opinion.
So I will list off some potential big print catalysts, and and this is not a completely exhaustive list by by any means, but I think it it's something that people should uh keep in mind.
And there's probably there's gonna be at least a few things you you'll probably want to dive in more here, but I'll just tick through them.
So, some sort of large-scale geopolitical war or military mobilization.
I uh even what we're seeing now, I don't think classifies as a big print.
It would have to escalate a lot further.
But what we're seeing now can kind of give you an idea of how that could happen.
AI-driven labor displacement could trigger some sort of big new spending bill.
Uh, there could be state budget collapses requiring uh some sort of federal bailout.
There could be a pension system insolvency, um, which is kind of related to that state budget collapse.
Um, but the but the pensions kind of have their own dynamics because they've made certain investments, and if if those don't do well, plus the budget has problems, that could be uh an issue.
There could be some sort of crisis in regional banking.
We kind of saw that in 2023 with the Silicon Valley and and those other banks.
Um there could be something in private credit that requires some sort of bailout.
There could be um, you never know, there could be a structural entitlement expansion of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, uh, student loan forgiveness.
Um, and then lastly, this has kind of been on the list for all of human history.
But if there's some sort of like major climate disaster or natural disaster, something like that could cause a big print.
So I know I just threw a lot out there in the list, but I believe that one of those things or more multiple of those things will happen at some point in the next, you know, three to twenty-four months is kind of the time frame I would have in mind.
We need a polymarket for that.
I need I need a polymarket for the ones you just said.
I want to know what the what what people think.
So natural disaster is so random, but could also happen any time, you know.
You know, like that's a that's a that's a good one, though.
But that's uh definitely a lot of scary potential scenarios.
If you let's obviously put the current conflict out of uh out of the options, because that's a you know, that's a clear like escalation into kind of what you're describing.
Of the other ones you mentioned, what what do you think is most likely?
I could see there being some sort of uh public works pro, you know, the the politicians will always come up with a very nice sounding euphemistic name name for these things.
So some sort of public works program to help the people that have been displaced and disrupted by AI and robotics.
I I think that should be high up on the list.
And then probably right below that, I could see um state budgets.
I I think I use the word collapse.
It doesn't even have to be a collapse, it could just be state budgets getting in a really precarious position.
Um, I think California's probably the poster child for this.
Um, they just continue to spend, spend, spend.
And uh they also had this dynamic where wealthy people have they've been leaving for years, but then they have left even more recently because California was proposing this idea of uh an outright wealth tax, or you could call it an asset seizure.
It didn't even pass into law, but they lost a bunch of billionaires because just at the prospect of it becoming law.
So they're literally losing revenue, increasing spending.
It's not a great situation.
So I I would put something like that high on the list.
And just remember the states don't have what the federal government has, which is a central bank that can print money and buy your debt if things get a little dicey.
So I could see the state budgets becoming a problem.
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Right.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And then how does I I mean, obviously the AI one is something that's really top of mind for people as they, you know, we you scroll the timeline every day and you see a new Claude has eliminated this workforce from the future, you know.
Uh, you see that, you see that regularly.
So obviously, I think, you know, some form of uh universal basic income or something like that is is definitely top of mind for people if there is major job loss and job displacement.
How does this kind of affect um, and we will get back to crypto for people listening?
I promise we this is gonna all this all filters down to to John giving this big juicy Bitcoin thesis very soon, okay?
We're just we're just setting the stage.
Um, how does this relate back to the the mass deflation scenario that we hear about a lot?
And we talk about on the AI show as well, about people saying that no, hold on, AI is supposed to cause massive, have a massive deflationary effect.
What what how does that play into that scenario that you painted for us?
Yeah, so this is a bit, this is yeah, hottest topic.
Agree.
Everyone's talking about this, and and it's an interesting topic.
And I think nobody It probably won't happen because that's a consensus.
It probably won't happen.
That's it is gonna be something not as exciting like you said private credit or something, but please go on.
Right.
Yeah, it's the uh the unknown unknowns, right?
They're the ones that typically get you.
So I would say that most people tend to agree that let's call it AI plus robotics.
Most people just say AI is as like a catch-all.
Um, it's going to allow us to be a lot more productive.
I think some people are seeing that just from using Chat GPT or Claude or Grok as in in a very basic way.
People can see, wow, I just asked it to, you know, analyze this document, and that would have taken me three hours and it it took you know a three minute session with Grok or whatever, and and it's done now.
And people can kind of the wheels get turning and they say, Whoa, you know, I didn't, I I might not need to pay a lawyer or you know, some some consultant firm thousands of dollars and weeks for them to do this, and that goes a lot of different places.
Is there going to be staff cuts at those types of firms?
Is it gonna be harder for college kids to get jobs?
And I think the answer is yes to all of that, but I also tend to think that it's not going to be like a widespread unemployment.
Oh my gosh, you know, all these corporate companies are laying off tens of thousands of people at the same time.
I don't think it's gonna get to that point.
Now, the counterpoint is it doesn't need to get that bad to have a big economic impact.
Like, like if you look at what unemployment got up to as COVID started or during the great financial crisis, it didn't get up to like 60, 70%, right?
Like just like 10, 15, 20% unemployment is enough that people kind of start running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and politicians start saying, I've got to come in and fix this.
So it doesn't need to be mass unemployment for it to have a big impact, is is the first point.
Then the second point that I think I want to make is there's this big debate of how are how what is what is the transition going to look like?
You know, how messy is it going to be, what what's on the other side of it?
And what I would share as a note of optimism is it was it's roughly 60% of society was once in some form of agriculture farming.
And uh the industrial revolution happens, and you know, now I think it's like one or two percent of society is doing something in the world of agriculture and farming.
And I bet if you told people back when it was 60%, and they said, hey, we're gonna have so much technology that only one percent of society is gonna be farming, their response would be, well, what the hell else, what's the other you know, 59% gonna do?
Like, there's gonna be mass unemployment, no one, no one's gonna be able to work.
That that's surely what they would have said.
And and what happened, the new technology created new industries and new jobs that you literally could not have imagined, even you know, 50 years prior.
Like what we're doing right now.
Yeah, like what we're doing, like the idea of a corporate office job when 60% of society worked on the farm was you couldn't even have communicated that to somebody.
So I'm optimistic in that sense.
If if humanity could go from 60% of people on the farm to 1% of people on the farm and figure out all these new jobs, I think AI and robotics will allow us to figure out a lot of new jobs and be more productive.
Will it be a little messy?
Will will some college kids have a tough time getting a job?
Will some people get laid off and have to figure something out?
Sure.
I'm not saying it's all gonna be rainbows and cotton candy along the way.
So I think those are a couple of big points I wanted to make.
Do you want to get into the AI and deflation aspect of things too?
Well, I feel like you have a good take on like there's two different types of deflation that we want to talk about, right?
Because I think that it gets a little bit muddled for people where they're talking where they think like, okay, but you're you're telling me that fiat will inflate, but that labor will deflate.
So maybe give us a bit of a sense of like what that what how you see either of those, uh, I guess not playing out, but what the effect on the economy would be and kind of explain each of those to us.
Yeah.
So I think there is a mostly consensus take out there that I will disagree with, and I'll try to explain what I mean by that.
So I see this a lot.
People say we have a debt-based monetary system, deflation is bad for a debt-based monetary system.
AI and robotics is going to cause deflation, therefore it's going to cause a catastrophe for this monetary system we have, and therefore the government's going to have to print.
And I think there's like elements of that that are accurate, but I think the whole thing is not quite accurate.
So what I mean by that is though when those people go through that line of reasoning, I think the flaw is they're not highlighting different types of deflation.
There is deflation like credit crisis deflation, or sometimes known as monetary deflation or or debt deflation.
That means literally a shrinking of the money supply.
Means people either paying back their loans and not taking out a new loan or defaulting on their loans, like money literally going bad, and the whole money supply starts to contract.
That's a form of deflation.
And that is very bad for a debt-based monetary system.
For that's bad for banks, that's bad for indebted governments, etc.
etc.
Anyone who's in debt, it's bad for that.
Um, but there's a totally different type of deflation, and it's almost a problem in English.
Like if we had two different words for this, it would make things so much better.
There is productivity-driven deflation.
And that means humans and businesses and company companies getting better at producing things.
There's like great charts about how much it costs to produce a certain amount of electricity as time goes on.
And that's like one very clear example that you could just see it was like the cost was was astronomical at one point.
Or or uh electronics is another great example.
There was a point in time where like, I was a kid and a flat screen TV might have been like $10,000.
The only families who had them were like these Uber rich families.
And it, of course, wasn't even that flat.
It was like this bulky thing, right?
You you probably remember this era in like the early 90s or something.
I couldn't wait to go to that friend's house, man.
Yeah.
So, like, you know, that's what a flat screen TV was.
And now I'm pretty sure you can walk into a Costco in the US and get like a $300 flat screen TV, and it's a hundred times better than what it can't get.
They can't even give them away.
Yeah some of those, you know, Black Friday or promotions.
They can't even give those away.
So you that's what you get with $200 of groceries, you get one of those TVs for free.
They just give it away.
Yeah.
So that's productivity-driven deflation.
And I think it's such a great example because did that cause, or if electricity got cheaper to produce as it did throughout like the 1900s, did that through most of the 1900s?
Um did that cause some like big cascading debt crisis?
No, no, it didn't.
It's humans getting better at producing things.
That's what we're all showing up at work to do every day is to do more with less effectively.
So what I think that line of reasoning that I laid out has incorrect is they're mislabeling the deflation.
And uh the AI-driven productivity deflation is actually good because it means we're producing more.
That means that things like GDP should go up, the output of our entire economy.
And remember what metric uh that most people look at to determine if a country's debt is unsustainable.
What do they look at?
They look at debt to GDP.
So GDP is the denominator.
All the countries want GDP to go up.
That that's a sign that they can service their debt better.
What is AI and robotics likely to do?
It's likely to cause GDP to go up.
It actually makes their their debt more easily serviceable because people are producing more.
Um, so that hopefully I unpack that enough.
I I would say the kind of tagline that's out there on Twitter a lot is oh my gosh, AI is going to cause deflation and deflation is bad for indebted governments.
And I would tweak it to say AI is going to cause productivity driven deflation, and governments want that.
And just one last way to summarize it, you actually see people make the point I'm making when they say you grow out of a debt crisis.
That's what they're talking about.
You grow GDP, you grow your economy faster than your debt burden, and you can grow out of your debt crisis.
So all this AI and robotics productivity gains is us growing out of our debt crisis.
And this is a good thing, I would say.
You're really good, you're actually a really good speaker.
I'm sure you know that, but I'm just I mean that in a good way.
How does Bitcoin but how's Bitcoin play into any of this?
This is this is all great.
I think you're making people feel better about the oncoming AI crisis.
This is a crypto show, man.
And we said we told them we would give them a good bull case.
And you're not you're working at Swan.
You're not working at NVIDIA or uh OpenAI or something like that.
So, like, what how does how does crypto actually benefit from this?
Totally.
Or Bitcoin.
You can be specific to Bitcoin.
I'll let you do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's look at the other asset classes that are out there because it's kind of a question of like why would I want to hold Bitcoin?
And that implicit in that question, I think is there's all these other things I could hold.
Why should I hold Bitcoin?
And uh, you know, just the big ones are like real estate is an investment.
And I'm not telling people to be a hundred percent in Bitcoin.
I think there's very few people who can actually pull that off.
Once you're older and have a family and a kid, kids and things like that, it's hard to be, you know, 90%, 100% Bitcoin.
But um, obviously, I do think a healthy allocation to Bitcoin is warranted, and and here's why.
So real estate, it it's illiquid, uh, huge bid offer spreads.
Anytime you want to sell it, it takes a long time.
You pay agents, you pay uh lawyers' fees, etc.
etc.
And then while you're holding it, you're just bleeding out cash from maintenance and taxes.
Uh, and then you also have to worry: is there going to be some sort of price correction in real estate?
That you know, the GFC was not that long ago, it could happen.
So I'd say there's there's downsides to holding real estate.
You can hold some gold, but I mean, there's a reason gold was money in the past and it no longer is money.
Also, illiquid, nearly impossible to trade it efficiently in the actual asset.
Mostly people are just gonna trade in in paper gold.
And then if you try to trade in the actual thing, oh my gosh, it's a nightmare between transportation, uh, you know, smelting it, verifying it, broker's fees.
It's like I I often laugh when when gold and silver went on a run last year.
I was like, imagine if you wanted you thought that was the peak and you wanted to sell some.
And um, I'm in the New York area.
And it's like you would have to take a day off work if you wanted to sell some physical gold or silver and you know, go into like uh, you know, what part of find out what part of town that they that they will buy it off of you, and you're probably gonna take a huge risk uh to transport it there.
So it's it's just there's a reason that precious metals are not suited to keep up with uh the economy we have today, that the world we have today.
I think equities kind of a crapshoot.
If you find good managers and things like that, then then maybe you can you know pick some some good equities.
But remember, there can be years like 2022 where equities get crushed, and there's also been kind of lost decades in equities in the past too.
And and valuations are super stretched right now.
It doesn't really feel great to be plowing a bunch of money into equities.
If you buy an index fund like the SP, you probably get, I think you maintain with the rate of currency debasement.
I I don't think you really outperform that.
So that's some some tough things about equities.
Bonds have been terrible from a nominal return perspective the last six years, and they've been atrocious from a real return perspective.
So I think that's unlikely to get better given political incentives, social incentives, and that all the appetite there is for deficit spending, entitlement spending, um, all those big print catalysts that I listed off earlier in the show, that's all very bad for bonds.
Um, because remember, bonds is just kind of like cash plus a coupon.
That's what it is.
You know, give me cash, you get your cash back some years from now, and you get a coupon along the way.
But that coupon is never it historically, it's not enough to compensate for the purchasing power loss of the actual unit.
And then I don't know, you could say like private investments or venture investing, but I think you generally have to be lucky or very well connected to do well in those um in those in those spaces.
And the average person, I think is it's just gonna have a hard time really building wealth through venture or private investing.
And that brings you to Bitcoin.
And I think in a world where I think we're gonna have perpetual inflation, deficit spending, debt accumulation, inflate, I said inflation, uh bailouts, and potentially capital controls.
We we don't really see that in the West yet, but we could see that.
If that's the world we're heading down, and then marry that with the fact that Bitcoin is five percent of gold's market cap, it's roughly, it's actually a little bit less now.
Gold is like 34 trillion, and Bitcoin is like 1.5 trillion or something like that.
So if if we were having this show and Bitcoin was the same market cap as gold, that would be a harder case to make.
But but it's five percent the market cap of gold.
So I you have all these fundamental positives, and then valuation.
This is like a typical way you would invest, right?
You say, what is the fundamental story telling me?
And then what's the valuation?
Because you might have a good fundamental story and a bad valuation.
That then that you know, that's not good.
I think Bitcoin is a great fundamental story and an attractive valuation.
So that's kind of my overarching pitch for Bitcoin.
Uh I could get into some noteworthy adoption events that happened in 2025, but you tell me if you want to go there.
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I like this.
No, I like where you're going.
It's funny, it's funny in the last couple days, in the last week or so of the show, we've had a lot of conversations specifically about Bitcoin.
It's so funny, it keeps coming up, and about gold.
Last week, one of our recurring guests is Matt Hogan from Bitwise, and he gave a case, he wrote a memo about how Bitcoin could go to a million.
And his main comparison was like, listen, here's what happened at gold uh since 2002.
You know what I mean?
Like gold is like nothing.
Nobody cared about it.
Uh, you there were gold bugs, right?
And that's how that's how much people who were into gold were treated.
They they had a name for them.
And that for Bitcoin to really rise, it really doesn't even need to capture that much more of its ratio against gold, right?
Is that like the same thing could happen to Bitcoin, but it wouldn't even need to do that to significantly pop off, right?
And I feel like that's kind of what you're telling me as well.
I also like what you said.
I like that I don't think we've had anybody come on the show and give a Bitcoin thesis by process of elimination.
It's very different.
I think it's a little different.
Monday we had a we had um we had a guest that was talking more the technical stand, you know, what what he likes on the technical side from Bitcoin.
But I like you you were like, here's all the traditional finance assets that you can invest in that should give you good returns, and why those returns pale to what the potential is for Bitcoin.
John, my last question for you.
Price action in the last couple months has been challenging.
Enough to shake a lot of people's conviction because we really thought Q4 2025 was going to be big.
We've gone over this many times on the show.
From here, you you said that your timeline for the next uh big print was three to twenty-four months.
What is the timeline like for Bitcoin in the next three to twenty four three to twenty-four months, regardless of a big print event or not?
Yeah.
So I will preface this by saying I'm a believer in the the thesis of it's easier to predict or the idea of um it's easier to predict five years from now than it is to predict five months from now or five years from now.
So that's my caveat.
Short-term predictions are a little bit harder.
But uh with that said, you can give me five years, but I still want to hear I want I want to I will still want to hear how we get through that.
Okay.
Yeah, I I do believe we see a million dollar Bitcoin at some point between the years 2030 and 2035.
I know that's a bit of a range, but I I I think that's that's when we'll hit a million dollar Bitcoin.
And and to your point, just to underscore it, that you know, wouldn't even be um uh matching gold at that point.
And presumably gold is gonna, you know, kind of inch along higher, so it's a moving target.
But I don't I don't start to get worried about Bitcoin's valuation until it's like neck and neck with gold.
And then you have to make the case for why it goes beyond gold, which I think there is a case for that, but now it's just so screaming cheap, in my opinion, to see it at 5% of gold's market cap.
So in the next couple of years here, or or yeah, month, let's say months, months to a year or two, I think it's important to remember that there wasn't necessarily some incredible catalyst in the year 2023 after Bitcoin dropped a lot in 2022.
And maybe you could say people were forecasting an ETF approval, maybe.
But um other than that, there wasn't like some, there wasn't a big print.
Let's, you know, that we'll just be clear about that.
And Bitcoin was up over 100% in 2023 and then up 100% over 100% in 2024.
So I think that's important to keep in mind that sometimes Bitcoin can go up by, you know, 20, 30, 40% without some sort of clear catalyst.
And I think the adoption will be more gradual, uh, whether it's like micro strategy, Harvard, Middle East Sovereign Wealth Funds, Vanguard capitulated and said, okay, clients, you can finally buy the ETFs.
B of A Merrill Lynch said we will support a one to four percent allocation to Bitcoin and crypto.
You also have US states uh moving towards like more friendly bit uh Bitcoin.
Uh some of them are doing a Bitcoin reserve for the state.
The custody and legal frameworks are more positive.
And then one last thing I'll say, which is huge, and it kind of points to where I think Bitcoin allocations are going, is Morgan Stanley in the first week of this year, they announced that they're going to launch their own spot Bitcoin ETF.
And I think this is just massive because you have to remember what what the environment is here.
There's I think there's 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs that already exist and have existed for over two years now.
So why?
And one of them is BlackRock and one's Fidelity.
Those are one and two.
So why would Morgan Stanley come in and say we're going to launch another ETF?
It's not to compete with BlackRock.
They don't think they're going to be bigger and more liquid and have options on it like iBit.
Um they're doing it, in my opinion, I think this is pretty clear because they believe we're heading to a world where it's not going to be the 6040 portfolio.
It's going to be maybe the, you know, 60, 10, you know, pick whatever else is in there, but one of the allocations is going to be, let's say, 5% Bitcoin.
And if they see that as a persistent allocation for their private wealth clients, I think they said, why are we just going to send BlackRock a quarter of a percent every single year?
Because that's BlackRock's management fee.
If they think their clients are going to hold a healthy percentage of Bitcoin in perpetuity, they want it to be in the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF.
So they wouldn't do this if they thought Bitcoin was a fad and it's going away in a couple of years.
I truly believe Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest wealth managers in the world, sees Bitcoin as a persistent allocation going forward.
And that alone is a reason to be incredibly bullish and to think that just that type of allocation could support the price in the next, you know, three to twelve months.
I feel like people kind of see that with disbelief.
You know, that's been a big theme for us in the bear market here is that it you see all this institutional news, and we kind of like what you're describing, and you're just like, okay, well, it doesn't move the price, so why does it matter?
And I think people just really struggle to zoom out.
But you just, I think you just gave us a really great case for it.
Yeah.
And I on that point, I think there is this phenomenon in markets where you can have long-term positive fundamental things happening, but markets are not only about that.
There are short-term things like believers in the four-year cycle, OG whales taking some profits, leverage traders getting flushed out, whatever the hell happened on October 10th with Binance.
Like there's all these other market structure things that can cause the price to move in the near term, but that doesn't change the long-term positive fundamental developments that are happening.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Just got a zoom out, I guess.
It's just that's it.
That we should have just said, should have just said zoom out.
We didn't even have to do this whole show.
Who needed 40 minutes?
Just zoom out, man.
That's all you need.
No, but this has been a fantastic show, man.
I like you brought, I think a lot of unique kind of points of view of how we can see something that we talk about every day.
So I think it's really valuable.
John Hart, great to have you, man.
Thank you for coming on the show.
Uh, and I'm sure we'll see you again.
Thanks for having me, LG.
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