# Bitcoin ETFs as Browser Moment and AI-Driven Finance

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-02

## Transcript

There can just be like real cracks in the fiat system at some point at a time when enough people understand that Bitcoin is the best solution to their problem.
And they pile in at the same time.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG D Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that made April Fool's jokes across every show yesterday.
And now we're all out of ammo and back to the stark reality of the world.
Today is April 2nd, 2026.
We are recording this on April 1st, but it's the afternoon, so almost the afternoon, so the jokes are done.
Here's a take that we haven't heard on the show that the ETF is Bitcoin's browser moment, as in the 1995 moment where everybody could use a browser and finally have very streamlined access to the internet.
That's what the ETF is.
And I'm apologies to the analog crowd.
A huge part of that analogy is based in AI and how a lot of companies, including the one that we're going to discuss today as well, are building far more advanced financial products than what's currently available.
The author of that take is with us, as well as many more takes to come as we welcome Corey Clipston, CEO of Swan Bitcoin on the Milk Road Show.
Today's episode is brought to you by Midnight, bringing rational privacy to blockchain and some turned crypto tax chaos into confidence.
Corey, what's going on, man?
I'm I'm here to bring some hot takes, some cold takes.
Uh I I know my my colleague John, I think uh paved the way and did this show a few weeks ago and loved it.
So uh glad to be here.
We John also had some hot takes, uh, both both on air and off air as well.
Uh a great chat with him.
Um, but let's talk about this thing that I that I led with, because you're telling us that this the ETFs of the last couple of years is basically like the intranet explorer moment of of Bitcoin.
Tell me more about that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I I I just see it kind of 1993 was when Netscape came out, and that's that feels to me very much like January of 2024 for Bitcoin when it just became, you know, the internet became available to pretty much everybody and and just being able to buy Bitcoin, you know, a version of Bitcoin, a wrapped Bitcoin in a in a paper product, but you know, it's right there in your brokerage account from your FA on interactive brokers.
It's just so easy to get that Bitcoin price exposure in NETF ever since January of 24.
So it seems to map pretty well.
It also works pretty well with the timeline going backwards.
So if you kind of look at, you know, 17 years before the invention and launch of Bitcoin, you know, 17 years before today, you know, that kind of maps as well.
So that would put you in the late 70s.
That's you know, homebrew computer club.
It's it's hard to have a computer, it's expensive, it's really kind of still hobbyist.
And obviously that's where Bitcoin was in 2009, 10, 11.
So I think that timeline kind of matches uh fairly well.
You know, it's it it it felt like we were on a pretty clean path to calling Bitcoin a technological revolution.
And I still think that it fits that.
It's something that's big that affects all industries.
I mean, it's half of every transaction if we end up on a Bitcoin standard and people use it as store value medium of exchange and unit of account, which I think is eventually the end state of where we'll be.
Um, but yeah, it has been absolutely fascinating uh uh to see the rise of useful AI uh in particular accelerating and seemingly just charging up the vertical part of the S curve, really starting kind of in December.
So I think that's affecting all industries and and is either kind of the the late stage of the information revolution that started in 1971 with the first chip falling off of a an Intel fab in in the Bay Area, or this is something just totally new that's going to take you know another 50 to 80 years to roll out across everything.
I could see it either way.
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I've got I've got one hole for your analogy, though.
You made it your timeline wise, it's great and monumental wise, it is.
You reference Netscape.
Nobody uses Netscape today.
So don't I saw you know what I'm saying?
Bitcoin can't be the Netscape of crypto.
Well, Bitcoin's Bitcoin's not a product, right?
It's uh it's like a technological revolution.
Uh so it doesn't have the same kind of adoption curve as you know, like uh and obviously that was something that we used in altcoin marketing for six or seven years, trying to claim that hey, you don't want to be uh I think it was usually Fremster and some shit coin was supposed to be Facebook or something like that.
Uh it's not like that.
It's Bitcoin, Bitcoin obviously dominates uh all the other cryptos.
We'll never be able to come close to it as actual money.
Um, I don't think it really matters that much anymore.
That's kind of the the last battle.
I think that uh, you know, we basically had six years of 100 billion dollars of altcoin VC money trying to market better Bitcoins.
They failed because it's just impossible to usurp that role with a centralized shitcoin launch.
And uh we don't really have to fight that fight anymore.
That that's the other thing that was put to rest with the launch of the ETFs, because you could actually see the demand uh obviously for the Bitcoin ETFs have been the biggest launches ever in the history of ETFs.
And you know, the shitcoin ETFs that have launched are just dwindled and you know don't matter.
Why, why, why are the ETFs so important?
Because people aren't are like these institutions aren't actually owning any Bitcoin when they're buying the ETF, right?
So why would they settle for something like that when a lot of the core fundamentals of of crypto and of Bitcoin are like the actual self-custodial ownership of the asset, right?
That it's something that that you own and you can't really be manipulated the same way.
And yet a lot of the money that's coming in is like, I'm fine, somebody else owns it, but I just own a piece of that.
Like why why are they okay with that?
So if you're thinking about institutional buyers and frankly, a lot of retail buyers in the US, you know, their their threat model, if you think of two threats to their ownership.
One is, you know, is the government gonna come and take my coins or you know, my my exposure to Bitcoin price through this paper product, whether it's microstrategy or iBit or whatever.
And then if the other threat model is like, am I gonna lose my keys?
You know, and so I think a lot of people are like, Well, I'm not gonna be, I'm I'm I'm not there yet, thinking that we're gonna very quickly move toward, you know, full autocracy and 6102 style theft of everybody's Bitcoin or something like that.
So they just they don't have that as as high in their threat model.
And so they're comfortable just with the convenience of leaving it.
A lot of them use, I mean, if you're if you're talking about institutions, they have uh, you know, financial managers, a CFO office, a treasurer, uh asset managers that go to work for them, and you know, for them to get paid, it's just easier for them to have it in the same dashboard, et cetera.
So that's just a big part of it.
What is interesting is that the it works both ways.
The legitimacy that Uncle Abby, or say like uh sorry, Uncle Larry and Auntie Abby.
So, you know, Larry Fink and Abby Johnson from Fidelity, like always talking about Bitcoin, and you know, they're putting their massive marketing machines behind these products, it's really legitimized Bitcoin.
And so what we have is just this much larger top of funnel where a lot more people own Bitcoin price exposure than ever did before.
And that means even if you're competing on a percentage basis where maybe a higher percentage before are in a paper product than were before, the number of people that are going into real Bitcoin is still extremely large and is larger than it was before.
And so a company like Swan, and I'm sure others have seen it as well.
I started calling it in anticipation of it working out this way, and it did the ETF multiplier effect, where uh because there's so many more people coming into the top of funnel, a lot more people uh get to you know, half a percent or one percent of their liquid net worth in Bitcoin.
They start paying attention to it more.
They have selective perception or attention for Bitcoin-related content.
They watch your show, they read Lens Book, they see me on CNBC, like whatever it is, and a lot of those people come to a company like Swan to get the real thing.
Do you think like what what is the ultimate goal?
Like uh, is there anything outside of just exposure to this kind of store of value asset that people are looking for?
Because I feel like a lot of crypto fundamentalists, a lot of Bitcoin OGs or whoever they are, are saying, like, well, this is kind of anti anti-thesis to what we wanted, right?
There's a Wall Street's coming in to kind of control all this stuff.
And the whole point of Bitcoin was the opposite.
So, how do you how do you kind of reconcile those as somebody I feel like you've got a lot of the fundamentals as well?
Um, but they don't get control.
So that often that again is is more of a shit coiner narrative.
And it is in proof of stake that is control, right?
So they do have that problem.
Uh, you don't have that problem in Bitcoin because owning Bitcoin doesn't give you control over the network, which is uh a smart architecture by Satoshi, whoever he or she or they were.
Um, and then the other thing is it was always inevitable that there was going to be financialization of Bitcoin to some degree.
This is something that uh Half Annie and Satoshi wrote about on message boards back in 2009, 2010, and you know, theorizing that there would be 10,000 Bitcoin banks with various, some would be full reserve and some would be fractional reserve.
But at the end of the day, tomfoolery or shenanigans, uh, if we want to pull old words, uh, just you know, basically like messing around with the money and and doing dirty things, it's just so easy to demand that you take your Bitcoin, take possession of your Bitcoin.
And so it basically being a bearer asset and being something where you can audit the supply yourself, uh, you know, on a cheap laptop, uh, makes it much, much harder to play those kind of paper Ponzi games that you usually see in the fiat banking system and have seen with gold over the centuries as well.
Right, of course.
You mentioned um actually, I don't know I want to I want to ask you about that.
Were you um you you said paper ponsies in reference to gold?
Have you been surprised at all in the last six months about the kind of divergence between gold and Bitcoin that's happened?
And I guess it's still part of the narrative, even though gold had its kind of crater or its big pullback recently, um, but still has outperformed Bitcoin in a time that we thought Bitcoin was really going to thrive.
Is this something you kind of expected, or usually there's more paper Ponzi?
How do you view that as a as a crypto person?
Uh, so I'm not a crypto person, I only like Bitcoin.
So I really don't like crypto in general.
Very, very distinct in different industries.
But uh yeah, I mean, I I don't follow gold all that much.
Uh I have friends that are into gold, so I'm like happy for them that it finally went from, you know, 10 years at 1800 or whatever it was and got above 4K or something.
And I think it I think you're talking about it had a bad week last week.
I think it was its worst week in four or three years or something was the headline I saw.
Um, it's still it's still been a nice performing asset.
It's a hard asset.
I think you know land, land does well, anything that's scarce does well in this age of uh you know continued fiat printing.
So you know I I think gold will continue to do well.
I think Bitcoin will continue to do well.
I think Bitcoin is the faster horse uh in that race and has proven to be so over the long haul.
Uh and I would just you know caution people of uh extrapolating too much from something that might happen in like a given year.
Uh I think Bitcoin kind of front ran a lot of its bull market in 2024 and obviously it was actually down for the year in 2025, which no you know that in these cycles that we've seen over the last 15 years that had never happened before, right?
There was a big bull run in 13, 17, 21 and and you didn't see it in 2025.
So uh so we'll see.
I I think that we uh like we have we have like relatively equal chances of a new all time high this year and seeing a forehandle.
Like it's it's so it's so weird.
I I mean I I'm optimistic and I think that maybe we bottomed out at 60K and a penny.
I think was the the wick down month ago or whatever.
So I'm I'm hoping that was the bottom.
But you know, we've seen a lot in this space over the years even even me being, you know, I don't consider myself an OG.
I got in in like 2017, but I've seen a lot.
I've seen some I've seen some brutal drew drawdowns.
So I'm always kind of stealed for it and ready for it and and aware that it could happen.
And I'm also uh hopeful for uh uh a zoom to the upside.
Do you do you believe in this the not just the four-year cycle, but even that that there was that post that went around a few days before the top that was like there's here's been X, it's like an old 4chan forum post that was like there's been X amount of days between the highs and the lows, and the next high will be October 6th, and the next low will be October 6th the following year.
Does that is it that simple for you?
You know what I mean?
Because it feels like that's the kind of thing where it's like that's true until it's proven wrong here.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh no nobody knows what's gonna happen in the future.
That's uh that's always been the case.
And you know, I frankly, people that are drawing lines on charts are actually uh have a better shot at being right than people that are trying to forecast based on models.
It's the modelers that get really convinced that they have something scientific and have figured it out, you know, economics somehow when no one ever has or ever will, because we're all just humans and massive exogenous factors hit hit things like why would you be able to predict Bitcoin price when you don't know what's gonna happen in a war?
You know, it's it's so dumb.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And you also something that you also pointed out to me uh before the show um was uh if people zoom out, that uh Bitcoin's volatility while we're talking about it is actually less than a leading mag seven stock like Tesla, right?
So is that is that something that for you guys at Swan that you do you use that as kind of like part of a sales pitch, or is that something you use as like a reinforcing factor for your beliefs in Bitcoin?
I think we probably put out the information.
I wouldn't say that we would like call that a sales pitch.
Our approach has always been to just uh inform.
I think just uh as a rule, I think Bitcoin sells itself, and so the more you know, the more you buy.
So our our job really is to just try to figure out the truth as much as possible and and help people understand it.
Um, so yeah, and I I don't I don't know that there's like I'm not a big fan of like, oh, it's safe now, so you can load up.
Like you don't you don't want that responsibility because they should make their own decision.
We we try to guide people and help them make their own decisions about Bitcoin.
How do you handle this this kind of quant quantum news that's come out the last couple of days, right?
We talked about it a few times on the show, people will be listening to this.
How do you manage that?
Because that seems pretty significant.
I mean, there's obviously there's some people worried about quantum, they should be worried about it for this the same reasons that you worry about any new technology.
Uh it's easy-ish to be quantum proof, and there's thousands of people working on it around the world, including dozens of people in the Bitcoin space that have already proposed, you know, pretty easy fixes.
And you know, a lot of this just comes down to, you know, you're basically safe if you have your Bitcoin at an address that's where the public key is not uh online anywhere where you've never exposed the public key.
So that's kind of the easiest thing to do.
And then all you're left with is basically the coins that haven't moved.
And you know, that's that's really the owner's problem.
You know, if there's if there's a bounty out there to try to go get some old Satoshi mind coins or something like that, then great.
But you know where they're at, you know, I I don't I don't pay it much mind because you're still so so so far away from being able to do, you know, to go get somebody's coins, and again, they're safe if they're at a non-exposed address anyway, because all of all of the theorized future quantum hacking is having a public key and then being able to uh basically back calculate and get to the private key and be able to move the coins.
But I think it's something like you need like 500,000 stable qubits, and we have like 1200 unstable qubits or something like that.
Like it's it's really, really far away.
So, you know, worst case, some things might be able to get hacked in some kinds of infrastructure, you know, toward the end of the decade.
That's that would be enough time to change and you know, use a quantum quantum proof um algorithm or security, whatever for Bitcoin.
Uh, more likely it's decades away.
And so it's even more time.
Is that is that something go ahead.
I wanted to ask you, do you ever worry about Satoshi's coins?
Is this a huge stockpile there?
And even we had our guests yesterday from Orc, and they were saying that it's like, well, you don't know what's going on with that wallet.
We don't know where the key is stored, so it could be at risk as well.
Is that something as a Bitcoiner that you ever think about?
Like what it would the Satoshi wallet started moving things, even outside of the quantum thread.
Is that something you you consider?
I literally never think about it at all for any reason unless somebody asks me on a show.
And I still don't and I still don't care.
I mean, like who cares?
It would just get snapped up and you know, and yeah, somebody would if somebody gets access to them somehow someday, like they'd probably sit on a lot of it, maybe sell some people sell all the time.
You know, it's just not a big deal.
Corey, let's let's talk about something that you probably do think about a lot because you guys at Swan are getting pretty heavily invested in AI.
And I'd love to just kind of give you a blank slate to kind of explain to me that what how you're using AI to develop these financial products, especially for people that uh clearly want to be pretty passive, hopefully, or maybe with their with their Bitcoin holdings or their paper holdings, or how you'd classify that.
So please tell us more about that.
Yeah, so there's there's some things that I can't talk about that will be announced soon, but uh there are some things that I can talk about.
So what I would say is, you know, we're we're in edge tech company in general.
If you think about the profile of the people that are, you know, that want to dedicate their careers to building financial services and tools around Bitcoin.
And you know, we've we've built deep tech around collaborative custody and you know, ways to extract addresses from an X pub without exposing your X pub, things like that.
Um, you know, that had never been done before.
So we we do have a lot of people with that profile that like to build awesome things, which means you've always had people kind of at the edge of useful AI.
And so we've been all across every function of the company using whatever the best tools were available for the past few years.
And I think what we've seen in the last you know, six months, and then in particular, I'd say with just kind of the rise in the usefulness of tools like uh Cloud Code and Codecs in um really probably December was kind of the big acceleration, and then you know, late January was uh CloudBot slash Moltbot slash open claw.
Uh and then I think Feb Five with the launch of Opus 4.6 and uh and just codecs 5.3, like the the most useful models we've ever had.
And it's just it's been unbelievable how much there's there's two ways to look at this.
One is kind of I'd say for a tech company, it's table stakes to build faster and better and cheaper using AI to deliver what you already have been delivering.
And we've been doing that in spades for a long, long time.
Uh I think the new the new vector is really any new products that we create, other than a couple that were already in our pipeline, uh, require AI in the product to deliver the user experience.
And I can't say much more than that, uh, because I'm under I'm under embargo.
Um come on, I can I can tell you, I could I can give you a little bit of um I can tell you one product that you've actually seen in public quite a lot, uh, which is actually just a utility, but this is just an example of how fast things can get done.
So it's it's January.
I'm you know driving back from uh a meeting with some investors down in Orange County, and I have this idea for this.
It was actually something that I'd been percolating in my mind for years, actually, but I realized with AI I could just like sit down and and do it.
Um, so I ended up calling it speakeasy.
And it was this idea that I I wanted to be able to go from a link on the internet, something that I post on Twitter, X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, like whatever, and it can spread, people can text to each other, whatever.
And it is just saying, hey, I'm gonna do a uh video round table with 10 people.
I'm curating the topic, and I'm curating who's gonna be in the room.
And you can apply for a spot.
And when you apply, you have to verify your phone number, you have to verify your email with you know six-digit codes.
Ideally, you're in in applying for a spot in this speakeasy, you're posting your X handle and your LinkedIn handle, and optionally a note.
And then I'm getting like 15 or 20 or 25 requests to join the speakeasy with Chatham House rules, cameras on, and the quality of people that you get when you, you know, first of all, it's restricted to US.
Sorry for my international homies, but restricted to US, they're verifying their phone, they're verifying their email.
Like the quality is a thousand times better than what you get on Spaces.
And you get to have these great conversations.
Experts show up.
So you want to talk about, you know, useful AI, or you want to talk about, you know, you know, is China uh the next global hegemon or a paper tiger, that kind of stuff, or you want to talk about some aspect of Bitcoin, like, you know, what will change about your life if Bitcoin, if there actually is hyper Bitcoinization, and there's like a you know a moment where it really does just skyrocket and you know, things falter with the dollar.
So we made this available to our whole team to host these speakeasies, and of course the sales guys, you know, went nuts with it.
So they're just co they're they're hosting speakeasies, you know, all the time, three or four a week and meeting, you know, 10 10 clients in each one of them, you know, it's usually like three or four uh people from their existing book, and then a bunch of people that just see it on on you know Twitter or LinkedIn.
Um and the fact that I was able to have the idea, and then I got home and I used Claude code.
I hadn't coded since I haven't coded since 99 until I started messing around with Claude code.
I used to still code a little bit when I was at Microsoft, like after my undergrad.
And um in three hours from 10:30 to 1:30 that night after driving back and having the idea, it was done.
I've put it on a URL and I posted it on Tuesday on Twitter and LinkedIn, and it worked.
And I had 10 people in a curated video round table on Thursday.
And I was like, okay, it works.
And then of course, like I hand it over and the team like redoes it completely.
But you know, I was able to prototype it.
I was able to take uh a new product that we're launching, one of the ones that's under embargo that I can't talk about.
You know, that also I was able to go completely by myself from idea to prototype.
Uh a much, it's a much more complicated product than what I just described that I would call kind of a utility.
Um, this one is like a full-blown product, it's like a subscription SaaS software product.
Um, but I was able to have Cloud Code deliver the actual website.
It's shit, and it's gonna have a ton of PII, so it has to be completely redone from the ground up by people that actually understand security, but it showed exactly what I wanted and how I wanted it to look and what I wanted to be in it and everything.
And that's just so dramatically different than you know, six months of meetings.
You know, I I think about speakeasy.
First off, that would have been an entire company in 2018, you know, before I started Swan.
If I think about starting that, it would have been a whole company, it would have been me and a team of four or five, probably a PM and a bunch of engineers.
Uh, we would have spent probably the first year and the first like 1.5 million of our seed round to do what I did in three hours.
Just make the prototype.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so it's just everything now, you know, every painful process in the company, every dashboard, every admin tool, like everything can just be, you know, coded quickly.
And now we're getting way better at you know, creating the agent harnesses.
We have we have two fully agentic companies that actually have like operate inside of Swan, where they're actually staffed by agents with different roles and are running 24-7, and you know, basically have to report, you know, ask permission for big things to their board.
But that's essentially our you know, product and engineering leadership are the board members for agentic companies now.
So yeah, the the speed with which things are moving if you're actually playing the game is um is pretty spectacular.
It's and it's so fun, and it's by far the most fun that I've ever had working by far.
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Wow.
Wow, cool.
It's very it sounds very empowering as well.
We had a similar podcast earlier on our channel where I was uh discussing with our our uh owner as well, uh Kyle Reedhead, where similar thing where he's like, I'm able to just, especially as a CEO, especially as entrepreneurs, right?
Where it's like you're able to take these kind of small ideas you've been tinkering on.
That's not really worth deploying a whole team to go and get at least the prototype going, and you're able to get it from uh zero to one.
That's something that's like, listen, this is exactly what I want, and then you guys can take, and it already works, and you guys can go and take it and rebuild it and just make it better.
But I've already built kind of the MVP that I want to see.
I'm just gonna hand it to my team to refine it, right?
And to do all the the other nitty-gritty stuff, but you can actually make the prototype yourself.
And I think that that's such a wonderful thing, whether whether you're in Bitcoin or or any other industry, really, is the ability to do that.
Um, I think it's cool.
And then, like you're saying, you guys have so many other products uh you can't talk about that you're you're working on that that are maybe even following something similar, right?
Where you've been able to just deliver this quick little vision of what you have in your mind and and your company can roll with it, right?
Whereas in the past, it would have taken years, would it?
You had to build you would have built Clubhouse or some other app that would have had to compete with with something else or whatever that that came and went.
Um and now you can just use it as you please.
So that's wonderful, man.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, and it it really scratches an itch for me because I'm thinking about speakeasy in particular, because what I what I love about early social networks is like the the level of quality early on.
And this goes for in-person social networks.
And I was an early member of uh might be before your time, I can't tell how old you are, but uh in the in the like early to mid-aughts, there was something called uh ASW, a small world, and uh it was amazing, you know, when it was you know, 10 or 20,000 people.
I think it started with like European private schools or something like that.
And like you could travel to like any city in the world and have like a welcome dinner and just kind of launch straight to the top of the heap, just being able to go around the city and have fun with good people, but inevitably they degrade as they let more people in.
And at some point there's a tipping point, and it's like, oh, I won't be part of a club that would let me be in it in the first place.
Right.
So, you know, and Clubhouse was kind of like that too.
Like it was really cool at first but inevitably it, you know, it happened to just get killed because spaces launched, but inevitably it was going to degrade and you started to see it, you know, elements of it started to really suck by Q2 of 21, you know, after they opened the roles in December of 2020, I think is when they kind of just let it started letting people in.
And you could see people are just turning it into like you know you know Ponzi MLM sales rooms and stuff like that.
And it was just starting to get really shitty and you know I won't I won't these people are very these fake these fake billionaires that have come into Bitcoin were on were on Clubhouse back then too and they're very litigious.
So I I won't actually name the the last name of the famous brothers that uh run MLM schemes.
But um they were they were doing it on Clubhouse back then and now that of course they do it on Spaces.
You know so it just degrades.
So just having that utility that just fits you know what I wanted to to be able to have a curated conversation like I don't want to have to be the subject or the interviewer most of the time I like to throw the party and there's never been something where I can just get, you know, because I am good at selecting a topic and I'm good at moderating a conversation and I'm good at choosing who should be around, just like building a company or you know, hosting an event or hosting a dinner or whatever.
Like I've always been kind of a a party planner, an event planner, and people enjoy, you know, not not for everybody, but a lot of people seem to enjoy my taste in people and take advantage of it.
And they, they, they make friends through my gatherings over the years for decades now, and they build businesses with people they meet through me and things like that.
And being able to create a utility that's like the tech embodiment of how I already do things that's useful to me.
Even if it's never useful to anybody else, it doesn't matter if it's useful to me.
And I think there are people building software for themselves to do shit that they've wanted for themselves all over the place.
And that's like the next million products are things that people build for themselves that other people also want.
That other people need or want.
They didn't realize they wanted or whatever that is.
So everything in our pipeline right now are things that we want that our clients want, whether or not it is like right down the middle, and like in some of them don't even involve Bitcoin.
But they're things that have just come up, you know, because we have high net worth Bitcoin owners that are kind of contrarian and they're always thinking about their downside and they're thinking about family, they're thinking about legacy, they're thinking, you know, intergenerationally, you know, they actually give a shit about their their families and their future.
Whereas most of this world is just kind of nihilist and it's all prediction markets and shit coin gambling and whatever else.
Like we have a very serious, thoughtful cohort of clients that actually give a shit.
Hey, Corey, I didn't I didn't, I didn't think this is where this podcast was going, man.
This turned into like a deep deep dive of like the philosophy behind using AI and the empowerment and like purpose from the world.
I like that.
Also, I do have a I do want to bring it back to Bitcoin.
Um, but thank you for for thinking that I'm uh drastically younger than I am.
Uh, I appreciate that.
I'm glad that my I'm glad I've set up my lighting to give that illusion.
Snow sports keeps people young.
I've noticed that over the years.
Oh, yeah, it's true.
Yeah, I don't know.
If you were sunscreen, man, getting that double reflection on on the bluebird bases.
One of my one of my friends out here, by the way, that I've known I don't know, probably 10 years at this point and reconnected recently because he's uh he's a dad at the school, is uh Sean Neff, uh Neff Headware.
I know he's a big snowboard brand.
He's a snowboarder, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
Yeah, I think I'm yeah, well, I don't know how big a snowboarder he is, but that's like he it's Neff Headware, they all wear this hats, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know that stuff.
Yeah, I feel like I've seen it all over the place, it's everywhere.
Let's uh we we have to we have to end on Bitcoin though.
We have to come back around to Bitcoin before we wrap this out, Corey.
You said Bitcoin hyper nice hyperization, hypernization.
I think what is that hyper bitcoinization, hyper Bitcoinization.
What does that mean to you?
Yeah.
Well, honestly, at this point, I think it's just if there's gonna be one more kind of meteoric run along the lines.
I I think it it wouldn't have to be as crazy as the run-up in like 2013.
I don't think that's gonna happen.
But if at some point you saw it just zoom up like 20x in a year or something, that's kind of what I think it is.
It also can happen, you think.
You think that can happen?
I still think that can happen because I think that uh there can just be like real cracks in the fiat system at some point, at a time when enough people understand that Bitcoin is the best solution to their problem and they pile in at the same time and it gets competitive.
And I think that still is I still think that's actually likely at some point.
I don't think you'll just like trundle up forever.
We have animal spirits in the market, and at some point I think it just goes.
Uh, I mean, another way to look at it is like it's always been hyper bitcoinization, and someday it will be millions of dollars a coin, but like you just kind of won't notice because it just you know it went to 250 and then it went to 150 and then it went to 400 and then it went to 250, and then you know, maybe it just does that.
Um, but I I just think that I think it's more likely that at some point a lot of people just uh just exit fiat at the same time, and it flows into you know Bitcoin, probably gold too.
And you know, we've we've obviously every fiat system has collapsed historically, so why would we think that this one would last forever?
It sure is showing like lots of cracks right now.
Um, so we'll see.
Yeah, yeah.
We've had a lot of guests recently predict some big prints coming.
Um, and uh that that that would be a further kind of push that that timeline that you're discussing.
Um, I have to ask you, and I feel like when I said you were a crypto person, you got deeply offended.
So I'm sorry for offending you.
What you have zero interest in anything outside Bitcoin, why?
Um, as a store of value, as like as money, they're not what I think is kind of interesting with kind of the the clear divergence over the past few years, and it was just kind of like crypto scams running their course from the ICOs through the FTX collapse, and then just kind of seeing, you know, the empirical evidence of of what people actually want to buy once they're in trad fi.
And Bitcoin just continues to kind of run away from a narrative standpoint and uh and a value standpoint from all these altcoins and meme coins and everything else.
I just don't think there's like even that many people interested in altcoins anymore.
Um, all the brain trust seems to have gone to stable coins and you know, tokenized stocks and tokenized real world assets and use essentially like it's just the next stage of TradFi IT development is kind of the the bull case for all of crypto blockchain is incremental improvements to financial IT.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Like I I don't think that that's freaking cool.
Like, do I want to wait for a wire to clear, or would I rather send a stable coin?
Like, yeah, I want it to show up immediately.
I think that's great.
And if it's decentralized enough, then it's fine.
But it is TradFi and it is under the you know, five eyes and NSA and KYC AML and all of that.
Like there's nothing, nothing new here.
We've had digital dollars forever.
I mean, no, everybody's using digital dollars and have been, so it's just uh uh, you know, a faster and better settlement layer on some of these crypto networks.
But you know, that they are uh it was kind of an own goal.
I think it was the Ethereans that wanted to call it digital oil.
Like that's such an own goal because I don't I don't have VATs of oil in my backyard.
Like I buy gas when I need gas, you know.
Like, of course, you don't hoard oil, but there's millennia, there's millennia of experience hoarding gold.
Of course, people want to store gold.
And so, you know, even at its basic level, uh, the analogy of digital gold versus you know, utility coins, it's like you don't need to save these things.
Um, if you want to see the the original dunk on the utility coin thesis, it's uh John Pfeffer back in 2017 just kind of destroyed the utility coin thesis from the get-go.
Uh it was it was instrumental in me reading that.
I didn't get to it until early 2018.
So I actually spent the first 11 months in all of crypto.
So I got into Bitcoin and shit coins because I was coming out of Silicon Valley, you know, angel investing, you know, tech tech tech.
And spread it out.
Yeah, yeah.
I spent a bunch of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It wasn't until April of 18 that I, you know, really realized that Bitcoin was completely different from all these other ones, and that there was like a Bitcoin community that wanted nothing to do with altcoins.
Um, but you know, you also have to understand like you throw that much money and that many engineers at you know, at anything, they're gonna end up coming up with some interesting things.
It's just the value doesn't accrue to the tokens.
Right.
Got it.
I got it.
I mean, I the only the only counter take again.
I feel like I feel like you have great analogies, and then I always have this funny countertake.
They're not there, there's no straight in the world that's closed right now restricting gold gold flow.
There is there is a versus oil is the the handcuff of the world currently.
So uh I don't know if that would ever happen for Ethereum.
I don't know if it's the same thing, but just pointing that out.
I think that's great to hear.
And I think I think kind of hearing you your background in Silicon Valley and kind of getting exposed to the shit coin area was was uh and kind of gave you that education and that that that on the street kind of experience is helpful.
The only one I want to ask you about, Corey is something like hyperliquid that is definitely seems like the front runner in terms of kind of uh eating some of the TradFi stuff um and being able to basically change a lot of how trading gets done with their 24-7 perps and all that kind of stuff.
Did you have any thoughts there?
Because they're also one where they're like they're a leading revenue generator, they they they use a lot of the money to accrue it back to the token, so they're actively trying to support token holders by doing that.
Is that something you ever get interested in?
I don't, I'm not an active trader, and I don't I don't really care.
I didn't come from trading beforehand.
You know, it seems like a company, and it seems like they're kind of, you know, it's obviously run like a company.
It's it doesn't compete with Bitcoin in any way.
I think where you might be headed in there are there are good and bad things about tokenized real world assets trading on kind of offshore exchanges and being, you know, lightly regulated, obviously.
And I think that's that's probably where we're headed.
Uh, unless there's some kind of severe clampdown, that's probably where we're headed, is like, you know, KYC at on-ramp and off-ramp, and otherwise these things can be traded and leveraged and manipulated in lots of different ways, um, kind of outside of the outside of the regulatory regime for securities.
So that's probably that's probably where you head eventually.
I think that uh all of the crypto liquidity venues, I'd just call you know, Coinbase and Robin Hood and Kraken and Binance, these are like retail liquidity venues, and they are trying to just warehouse anything you can trade, anything you can gamble on from cryptos to meme coins to you know, sports gambling slash prediction markets, same thing.
And uh obviously it's going to be tokenized stocks on leverage and all kinds of other things too.
So, you know, I think that's that's one game is trying to get people to trade as much as possible, as many things as much as possible all the time using dark patterns and push notifications to try to get you to place bets and spend your life's energy gambling, basically.
But again, it's not like there aren't positives, and you have to be aware that you know, financial access is a good thing, letting people have access to to different financial assets is broadly a good thing.
You just it's just uh the scammers are always there, you know.
It's just like that entire industry right now is basically just like a few hundred thousand people like Matthew McConaughey and Wolf of Wall Street.
They're like the goal, the goal is to take the money out of your client's pocket and put it into your pocket, and like that is literally that is the goal of like you know, a Coinbase and a Binance and all the prediction market guys, like it's just their goal, their reason for being is to take that rake, and you know, basically and it and it's just it's so bad.
It requires it requires like a new word, which is why I created the word scambling, because the people think they're gambling, but they're actually being scammed.
And how they're being scammed is the game is opaque and you don't understand what the rake is.
And that's always been the problem with crypto and meme coins and all of this is the insiders are taking way more of it.
Most of them are Ponzi pump and dump schemes.
And so you think that you're gambling and you think that maybe it's positive sum or at least zero sum.
So if you're better than the other guys, but actually the insiders are taking 50%, maybe 80%, maybe 99% before you're even in the game.
And so you're like your pie of a hundred people, 100% of people putting the money in, you're actually chasing 50% or 20% or 1%.
And so you're actually the the casino itself is the scam.
You think you're a gambler, but you're not, you're getting scammed.
Oh, there it is.
Corey gives Corey tells it like it is, man.
He comes out, calls it the world's greatest casino, which is what I've always said, anyways.
And I like playing the casino sometimes, but it's a good take and one that we appreciate.
One of many on the show.
Corey, it's been a pleasure, man.
Thank you for coming on.
I'd love to have you back sometime soon to keep chatting about this stuff.
And especially once you guys have your products, I want to hear about it.
So um hopefully we can have you back this year.
Uh, and best of luck with the launches, man.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
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