# Ethereum: The Evolution Toward Productive Global Money

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-21

## Transcript

Ethereum is better money than gold for all the reasons Bitcoin is better money than gold.
But then it's better than Bitcoin because it's more secure.
And then it has this productive yield component to it.
actually compounds, right?
And like compounding is like the eighth miracle of the world, right?
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Ducet here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show where we firmly believe our grandchildren will ask us what it was like to sit and watch ETH at 2K and not unload the biggest clip possible into the asset.
Today is April 21st, 2026.
We are recording late on April 20th.
Listen, Warren Buffett has spent decades warding investors away from gold.
and also from crypto.
But today's guests have written a deep report arguing that Buffett's own logic, his exact words from his 2011 letter to shareholders, makes the case for owning Ethereum.
The argument isn't that crypto is a good trade, it's that ETH is fundamentally better money and that the trillions sitting in gold and Bitcoin are slowly waking up to that fact.
If they're right, we're looking at 100x from current prices.
I'm not kidding, 100x.
If they're wrong, well...
that's what we're here to find out we're gonna i gotta pepper them with questions typical milk road style we're joined today by vivek and michael from etherealize to take us through the report on ethereum on the age of productive money today's episode is brought to you by ferros the layer one built for real fly consensus miami where the next cycle starts and nexo earn interest borrow and trade crypto gentlemen welcome back to milk road thanks so much for having us good to see you okay so We have a lot to unpack here.
It's always great in the bear market to talk Ethereum.
I think we have a lot of Ethereum bulls at Milk Road and in our audience.
So I think they're gonna be really excited to hear what you guys have to say.
Vivek, as a co-founder of Etherealize, I want to understand from you before we kind of get to Michael, what is kind of the TLDR of this report?
Because you guys have put out 22 fantastic pages making this really huge bull case for ETH.
But I want to know, like, if I was just reading the 30-second Coles notes, what are you guys saying here?
So let me zoom out first.
Ethereum is primed to have its moment.
I almost call it an NVIDIA-like moment where it becomes the universal backbone for the global financial system.
All the stars have finally aligned, all the headwinds we've had for the last several years from a regulatory standpoint, from a technology not being ready standpoint, those are all tailwinds now.
And so, Etherealize, we have a dual mandate.
And the first mandate is to say, let's bring as many assets and institutions and players onto Ethereum as possible because it's the most positive sum.
network and platform where we can upgrade the financial system.
But the second part of the mandate is saying it's important for Ethereum to be understood.
We think it's almost like the new internet.
And so we always will do institutional education, broader retail education, sort of highlight what Ethereum is, what the L2s are, what tokenization is, but also importantly, why ETH the asset is one of the most convex plays in the end.
We believe that I believe in the entire ecosystem.
So we think that since Ethereum is about to have its moment of shine, we think ETH, the asset, is one of the most interesting opportunities.
And we thought that putting forth the thesis that ETH is the productive money that is ultimately going to be the superset of Bitcoin, the superset of gold, is important for people to start to understand.
So we're excited about this rapport.
We think it's time.
We think it's time for ETH to reach its final form and become the productive money for the entire global economy.
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Michael, listen, I've been an ETH holder for a long time.
Okay.
And I feel like there's other things I could have done with my money in the last five years.
How is it?
I mean, we're gonna, I gotta hear from you a lot today.
But how is it to like dive into a report like this, knowing that it's like, listen.
there's a million reasons to be bullish, but the modern day price action just still somehow does not reflect that.
Is this like, do you just get giddy writing this or is it like a little precarious or like, I don't, am I right?
Yeah.
I mean, Well, the core problem is kind of like ETH wasn't really good money until the merge, right?
It didn't have the monetary attributes that it had today.
And I think the core problem is that ETH is just, it can do so many things, right?
So it's the world computer, right?
It's digital oil.
There's like all these different use cases for it.
It's the leading play for tokenization and stable coins.
There's all these competing narratives.
And as a result, people haven't really had a good idea of how they should value this asset.
And most people are just...
valuing it as like a discounted cash flow analysis on the projected fees, which I think should really be viewed as like the floor, like an intrinsic value floor for the asset.
But the core argument here is like since the merge, and if you look at ETH's core monetary attributes, going all the way back to Carl Menger, who's like the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, right?
On all the qualities he outlines, which are often the qualities that Bitcoiners point to for why Bitcoin is better than gold, ETH is actually a superior, monetary commodity then bitcoin and gold and then it has this additional magical property that it compounds and it's a productive asset so this was always warren buffett's the thing he hated about gold people would ask why he doesn't own gold and he's like one it's not productive there's no utility to it outside of like some use uh some industrial uses and jewelry um but two like if you hold one ounce of gold today a thousand years from now you'll still have one ounce of gold whereas if you own farmland or the example he gives is like 10x on mobiles, those assets will compound, they'll return capital, and they'll have a higher return on capital.
So that's the core thing here.
So I think the core problem is like, Ethereum's narrative is too complicated.
And we're just trying to simplify it based on just monetary properties alone, if that makes sense.
No, I mean, you're painting a great bull case.
And one I think that we all believe in.
One thing that stands out to me in this report.
and i feel like you guys led with this pretty on purpose uh is you lay out a path to 250 ke which would be more than a 100x from today right yeah it would be yeah we're not even no we're not even at that would be a hundred and like 10x or 20x um so i'd love to i mean either i don't know who the right person is or you guys can kind of bounce off each other but like how do you how do you frame that and and also like what kind of timeline is that on Yeah, so I wouldn't say it's like a price target.
I would say it's basically, this is kind of how people value Bitcoin.
They look at the total market cap of gold.
They're like, gold is a $30 trillion asset.
Bitcoin's market cap is $1.5 trillion.
Therefore, it's a 20x from here upside.
And then you'll usually hear some type of argument that like the market could be much larger because like the digital form of some type of.
total addressable market is usually like 10x larger than the analog form, right?
Like in the example people point to is something like Uber versus taxis.
So that's how people argue Bitcoin.
And they look at the monetary premium and gold is the most straightforward one.
You could look at monetary premiums and other asset classes, right?
Like real estate has some embedded monetary premium in it.
You could look at like the broader money supply.
So like M2 is like $22 trillion.
That's kind of like how Bitcoiners.
value bitcoin and they have a very clear narrative narrative that this is that bitcoin is digital gold and here's uh what the total adjustable market is and here's the price per bitcoin if it achieves that and we basically just took that same exact framework and applied it to eth and instead of digital gold it's productive money which can competes against bitcoin on its home turf on all of its attributes it talks about plus the productivity aspect which bitcoin and gold both don't compound but it does and that's like this one defining attribute that makes it 10x better money than Bitcoin or gold.
Vivek, what are your thoughts?
Are you concurred?
Michael's given us the bull case and what distinguishes it, but is it realistic to think that it will ever have parity with gold or that gold and Bitcoin combined, which is what you guys are painting here?
I think it is because I think it's worth highlighting how big the blockchain opportunity is.
Everyone now universally thinks AI is going to be the biggest infrastructure.
Everyone's investing in it.
The valuations are crazy.
That took a long time.
AI went sideways for a long time.
There's been a lot of money sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to reprice, and it did.
Blockchains are coming at the exact same time.
And so the risk that I see is people undersell and undervalue the upside opportunity that blockchains actually will create.
Again, if the global financial system is running on public blockchains, we think Ethereum is going to be...
by far the biggest winner.
That's a lot of assets.
It's a lot of volume.
It's a lot of transactions.
It's just, it's as ubiquitous as the internet.
And so part of the reason why I think this is an asymmetric bet is people have just been evaluating blockchains wrong for the last, since inception, with the exception of Bitcoin.
Like Bitcoin, ironically, because it can't do anything, people had to value it on comps to gold and said, okay, this is digital gold.
eth is like bitcoin but again bitcoin plus plus and it has it's productive it has yield which financial people love but it also is a store of value and it's used as collateral it's basically uses the money across the economy it is an asymmetric bet to say that ethereum will reprice from being just valued on as a technology company like mike said and transition to becoming a money and when that happens just it there is a potential hundred accident as that starts to happen and so people It's one of the best risk reward things to look at, I think, as we think blockchains become universal.
And the timing, again, it might not be immediate to get to 100x.
That would be a little bit wishful.
But the timing is the repricing could start pretty soon because people now know what Bitcoin is.
People obviously know what gold is.
There is a need for a digital asset store value or multiple of them.
And ETH is emerging more and more as that.
second pristine store-to-value asset, and we think it'll become the primary one.
BlackRock just launched their staked ETF, and so they're calling ETH a productive asset that's earning yield in the staked ETF.
Harvard just rotated some of their Bitcoin holdings into ETH.
So you're seeing the institutional allocations diversify.
So it's starting now, and this is the thesis for it to really catch hold.
What could derail this?
You guys are giving us all the great reasons why uh eth is valuable but what's like what would prevent this from happening like what would drive a lot of this either to another asset or just kind of break the thesis that you guys have in here sure uh i can uh i'll start uh my my you can cover technical i'll cover i'll cover regulatory i mean like a lot of the reason that we have been focused on ethereum uh generously but also started etherealize just a year and a half ago is because you need a regulatory tailwind for a blockchain ecosystem with smart contracts that's public and global so basically ethereum to reach its full potential so ethereum only had its catalyst a year ago i would argue when the genius act went into law because that allows for the the current biggest stable product market fit stable coins to to be issued on public blockchains and so and so the regulatory environment is right now a big tailwind where everyone wants to tokenize assets Stable coins are going vertical.
Use cases for stable coins are going vertical.
And this is a global movement.
And you're seeing laws being written.
If that reverses, it could just delay this.
Because this is predicated on ETH being a productive asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Again, the Ethereum ecosystem has to keep growing.
I think it will keep growing a lot.
But if there's regulatory things that go the other way, then that could just delay the thesis.
I don't think it derails it.
I think blockchains are inevitable.
It's as inevitable as AI.
That's one big risk is sort of like a regulatory chill or a slowing of the regulatory adoption.
I would say the other risk is just changes to the protocol, right?
So this has kind of always been the trade-off Bitcoin has made going back.
Really, this happens started in the block size war of 2017, right?
Where Bitcoin decided they're no longer going to try to be peer-to-peer electronic cash.
They're not going to try to scale throughput of the L1.
And then...
they they're going to try to be digital gold and they're not going to change the protocol at all and let it ossify and ethereum took a different approach and they're like we will sacrifice that near-term stability that makes that you desire in a monetary asset for long-term viability so right so ethereum migrated to proof of stake um that was a huge technical change they currently have the post-quantum roadmap right so they're executing on that by 2029 they're moving to the zk evm so there's a lot of changes to the protocol that are being made, right?
Like they're supporting L2 so that you could kind of scale throughput to the millions of transactions per second that would be required to onboard the global financial system.
So that's kind of been the biggest weakness so far.
And the reason I think it hasn't been priced as money yet, because if you're going to store your money is essentially a savings technology, right?
So if you want a technology that's going to make your savings today available tomorrow, you're going to want a protocol that doesn't change much.
So I think that's why this opportunity exists at all is because Ethereum has been changing so much.
But my bet is that once you get through post-quantum, once you get through the ZKEVM, you scale the L1 to 10,000 of transactions per second.
You have L2 scaling to millions of transactions per second.
Then I think the protocol will start to ossify and it'll start more closely to resemble Bitcoin where the monetary properties don't really change and it starts to be valued.
And then it becomes clear that it's more, it's better money than Bitcoin.
And I would go even further.
Like I actually used to be a Bitcoiner.
And this is, yeah, so this is the use case I care about the most.
Like, can we fix the money?
All the core Bitcoiner arguments resonated with me a lot.
And then I kind of came to the conclusion that like Bitcoin is not going to solve these problems.
They're not going to build peer-to-peer electronic cash or what Satoshi originally outlined in the white paper.
And I thought that Ethereum was the best chance to do that so that's why i migrated over to the ethereum community man i didn't know you were uh uh a converted believer or whatever you call that what's the term for there's got to be a term for that there's got to be like an eth term or like a big i'm sure the bitcoiners have a term for you like some kind of weird trader or something like that or uh uh he drank that wrong kool-aid so i i think a lot of really smart people and they're like justin drake i know used to be like a bitcoiner and then he switched as well i think it's actually quite common um a lot of people who really like embracing new technology believe in the peer-to-peer electronic cash vision and kind of what satoshi originally embedded in the genesis block of kind of like preventing bank ballot ballots and these trusted intermediaries uh right ethereum's the opportunity to re-architect the whole global financial system and the money um on top of it and i think it's our best chance to do that Trillions of dollars in real world assets are stuck off chain.
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Michael, you said in your last kind of answer there that once we are post-quantum, what does that actually look like for Ethereum?
And we've talked about this a few times on Milk Row in the last couple of months, and especially since Google put out that research, I think a couple of weeks ago, kind of giving a warning, you know, at least to the Bitcoin community, kind of advising them or not so directly, but saying like, listen, you got to get your OGs and your devs and everybody back together because you have to...
prepare for this because we might be able to crack it soon.
And Ethereum clearly trying to get their ducks in a row as well.
What does that actually mean to tackle this quantum problem?
And what does post-quantum look like?
How do they know that they've done that?
Maybe give it to us in a technical way that we can understand.
Yeah.
So I'm not a quantum expert.
I'm mostly relying here on analysis from people like Justin Drake or Nick Carter.
But the basic issue is that the security model of all blockchains today, they rely on elliptic curve.
cryptography, right?
And quantum computers will eventually be able to break that.
And Justin Drake's estimate is that a 10% probability by 2032, you'll be able to break it, right?
So 90% chance it doesn't happen by 2032, but the Ethereum community wants to be prepared.
And right now, the widely accepted way of becoming post-quantum is moving from elliptic curve-based signatures to hash-based signatures.
And the plan is to kind of rip out, to replace those signatures throughout.
ethereum by 2029 and then um so this requires rewriting all um large aspects of the like the consensus layer and all the layers that go into ethereum and the plan is to have it live by 2029 and then a quantum computer won't be able to kind of like attack the network got it okay okay that's that's anything you'd like to add i feel like yeah i feel like there's yeah the part i want to sort of zoom out for is what mike said Ethereum's ability to change is probably what kept it from becoming as hard of money as Bitcoin in the short term.
But we're in a paradigm shift.
And this is mostly because of AI, but now every single aspect of technological development is being questioned.
People are questioning what companies are, what software is, what everything is.
So you need to have some ability to future-proof technologically.
AI will probably advance quantum faster than we think.
And so I feel like Bitcoin has spent a long time kicking the can down the road on a lot of issues.
I mean, one issue is always the security budget, which we can talk about.
But the second is quantum and the need to upgrade.
And so if we think technology is going to accelerate in a pretty big way, then we probably have to future-proof from quantum and switch out of elliptic curve sooner rather than later.
And so then you come down to, Who is the best position to switch?
Well, you would argue that most blockchains should have a developer set that can do that.
But the only blockchain ecosystem that has the Venn diagram of being decentralized and global and just has never had downtime and has always been...
globally coordinated in a very very distributed manner and also has the functionality that you need to future for is ethereum everything else i kind of view as a company so like you'll have companies or foundations sort of try to centralize upgrades but there's more central points of failure there's fewer validators there's more so you have this like beautiful venn diagram saying ethereum is the best future-proof technology that can also become close post-quantum so what's the best money that comes out of it um the best post-quantum money is very likely eat the asset so it's just another this is another catalyst to throw in for why this becomes productive money because it's not just uh usable and has and compounds as a yield but it's also the most likely to future proof more so than bitcoin i would say i think a few people definitely like and including you guys have kind of pointed to the constant upgrades and changes as also being something that's held it back right and it's i think there's a few different ways to look at that but i do like kind of this chart that you guys put in here sort of the same a good way to kind of look at it um where you're comparing gold bitcoin and ethereum across multiple different uh i guess way evaluate evaluators uh if you will like in terms of scarcity fungibility divisibility portability but one that stands out the one area that that ethereum is weak on i guess or does not check the box is in that established history not really fair to compare it to gold uh but i guess we've done that a lot for crypto in the last like six months is you know precious metals have have uh really outperformed us but i think that that's kind of what you guys are alluding to here is that listen this is still a very new asset there's still a lot to figure out and that these changes are good before I guess it stabilizes, right?
Is that what you guys envision here for ETH?
Is it like, do you think that this road to 250 and this road to kind of being all the things you guys are saying, it can be in terms of how much it'll be adopted?
Does it need to find a stable ground or are the constant changes a feature?
Is this something that will forever be part of Ethereum as something that needs to be upgraded regularly?
And even Vivek, as you were saying, as like we're redefining these days what a company is as well.
Is that what makes something like Ethereum really well positioned?
Vivek, we'll start with you and then we'll go to Michael.
No, I think it absolutely needs to have a path to ossification.
I just think you have to be able to change enough to be able to ossify.
also have enough robustness that you can still innovate on top of it.
And I always come back to Ethereum, like Mike, we both came from Wall Street.
I first actually got into Bitcoin for a very short amount of time before getting into Ethereum because I was like, wait, Ethereum actually has the smart contract platform and it can actually be the settlement leader for the financial system and Bitcoin is an asset.
So like with the pragmatic take, you need to be able to have an architecture.
that supports innovation, supports max modularity, supports all different types of institutional adoption, retail adoption, different geographic adoption.
That's what L2s let you do.
That's what the app layer lets you do.
But ultimately, the underlying foundational layer does have to ossify at some point.
So there's some set of just certainty.
And I think Ethereum has thread that needle very, very well.
If Ethereum stayed proof of work, for example, as Mike said, it just wouldn't have been as good money.
You would have run the same security budget issues.
It just had crazy inflation then.
So Ethereum needed to move to proof of stake.
And then Ethereum also needed to solve for both a Roloff-centric roadmap.
And then as ZK got better, say, OK, we actually need to embed ZKVM into the L1.
So you can have a scalable L1 and scalable L2s.
It needed to do what it's doing.
I need to increase gas limits.
But there's a roadmap.
And after that roadmap, especially after Justin Drake's...
lean Ethereum post-quantum vision, which will again happen in a global distributed way.
It'll happen in a safe way.
There's a lot of Ethereum clients.
They also adopt it.
There's a lot of redundancies and failovers.
Like you can't shut Ethereum down just so you can't shut the internet down.
So like it will happen in a very, very methodical way.
But after that, then you're kind of at the end game for the L1 roadmap.
And then all the next changes and innovations can happen at the app layer and the L2 layer.
So yes, it does need to ossify.
I think there's a path that only anyone wants to keep something that just has infinite change in it.
But you need to change enough to be future-proofed.
I'm not sure Bitcoin has or will.
I think Ethereum will.
Wow.
Wow.
Just admonishing Bitcoin saying they won't be able to change.
I guess it's a lot harder to change Bitcoin too.
I feel like that's kind of what I've learned as well is that it's not as simple.
There's no Bitcoin foundation that kind of manages it.
Not that I want to make this all about Bitcoin.
Michael, did you have a take kind of on what Vivek was just saying about the, I guess, adaptability of Ethereum and that being like a product or a feature or a bug?
Yeah, I agree with Vivek.
I think the protocol will like ossify over time.
Right.
But I also don't think like Satoshi's implementation of Bitcoin is like the perfect.
end state either, right?
Like he's a human, right, as well.
And there's since been like almost 20 years of like blockchain research of like new consensus models, like proof of stake that are like more secure and they scale with the value of the network, like ZK technology, which allows you to increase the throughput of the network without sacrificing decentralization, right?
Like post-quantum architectures as well, right?
Like all these things, I think you...
should embrace those technologies.
And then over time as the protocol, like kind of like your iPhone, right?
Like the iPhone changed a lot in the beginning.
And then over time, it's like my iPhone today looks the same as it did a year ago.
So I think you'll start to see kind of the changes like asymptote over time as you get closer to like theoretical perfection.
Yep, that makes sense.
One thing I wanted to ask you guys about is silver.
And you guys make a very interesting analogy about silver in here.
And I guess, Maybe you guys can kind of explain this to me because I guess you make a comparison to, I think it was China's trying to transition from silver to gold and how that didn't work.
And I feel like you guys were making kind of like an interesting case for something, but it was unclear to me exactly what.
Michael, what is this lesson of silver that we can apply to Ethereum today?
Yeah, so I think that's just like a very clear example of...
why these monetary attributes that like Carl Manger lists out are important, right?
Because if you're deficient in any of them, the people who store their wealth in the superior monetary good will win over time, right?
So for most of history, right, gold was more scarce, right?
So that's kind of like why out of all the base metals, gold was humans settled on gold as money was because it's more scarce than any other metal.
So like the inflation rate of gold is about like one and a half percent a year.
And that's like held true.
It hasn't changed much for most of it for like the last 3000 years.
And then silver is like the next closest with like a inflation rate of like 10 to 20%.
So as a result, gold was kind of like the money of kings, right?
Like it had a very high value to weight ratio, which made it impractical for use in like daily commerce, right?
Because like a shaving of gold would be worth too much.
So that's where silver came in.
Because gold was deficient in like this divisibility and portability.
property that created this avenue for silver to be used for smaller transactions.
So silver accumulated its own monetary premium.
And then eventually, like countries moved to kind of more of like a fiat standard that's backed by gold, right, which solved the divisibility problem with gold.
So as a result, there's like less of a need for silver.
So like, it's not scarce, it's not as divisible as gold anymore.
And like you start to see some of the and then also the supply started increasing a lot.
So you started to see everybody just migrated.
And then there's a lot of exogenous kind of factors.
But that was like kind of like a big one that people who study monetary history like to point to is that as soon as it lost its divisibility advantage over gold, you started to see it demonetize and then gold capture that monetary premium.
So it's kind of more of just like an example of like why these monetary attributes are important and how they lead to like competitive dynamics in the marketplace for a monetary good.
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right okay and is that i guess i guess what i'm trying to understand here too and this is something you guys had mentioned as well i guess there's so many components ethereum and the the compounding one is very interesting to me because i think a lot of people and i guess having historical examples is is helpful but i don't know if it really applies to modern day investors let's say who maybe are listening to this and they understand what you guys are saying they're interested in this you know, it may be buying more here, but they're trying to decide which of the majors really that they want to hold kind of going back into the upswing and they want to build a good case.
I think that the compounding part to me is very interesting because yes, it does compound and it does, you know, you guys said, you know, you hold one eighth today or a hundred eighth today and in a year you'll have 103 roughly.
And, but that, that, you know, in a time like these days where we are at a very elevated economic.
climate let's say that that kind of return may pale uh compared to what maybe some other sectors uh promise let's put it what and and obviously you guys make a lot of other cases where the actual asset itself would appreciate and even we've already kind of made that case but what would you guys say to someone who's looking at it that way um you know maybe a traditional investor who hasn't really done too much crypto or is holding some majors and maybe wants to reallocate um but maybe can't get past that part where there's just going to be more short-term opportunities almost in this like insanely volatile market vivek i want to hear from you on this one yeah that's the repricing of an asset digital assets are new blockchains are fairly new but um they're starting to become a part of every portfolio right i mean like charles 12 just launched bitcoin meet the spot for their entire set of customers like it's becoming institutional portfolio allocations um i think i just read yesterday that japan said that Like some large percentage of institutional investors want some sort of crypto exposure.
So it's here.
If you are evaluating which crypto assets to have in a portfolio, assuming it's a part of every portfolio, there's really two pristine assets so far.
It's Bitcoin and ETH.
And so Bitcoin has no yield and Bitcoin, they view as digital gold.
ETH has the yield.
So like it's categorically better because you categorically have a yield.
So I mean, if it were a five or 6% yield, then I don't think that's as important of a factor as it has a yield.
And so it's a productive asset that you can just store passively and it'll go over time.
But I would argue that the embedded upside comes from this repricing of digital assets from tech companies or tech valuations to store value assets.
And so that's what we're saying.
We need the reprices and it will at some point.
And then we know that there's so many assets, even NVIDIA was one that just went sideways for decades.
And then when it inflected, it really inflected.
Like that moment's going to happen to ETH when it reprices from the wrong technology type framework to becoming productive money.
And people start looking at what the TAM of money is.
And so to bring it all back home, that's what we're playing for is it's when it reprices, you need a strong Ethereum, which is going to happen.
You need the growth of stable coins and L2s and tokenization, which is going to happen.
But you also need, like you said, we're in a weird economic world.
I feel like we're always in a weird economic world though, but we want alternative assets.
eth is a very very attractive alternative asset as a money so uh volatility might not be i mean historically it's it's been very correlated but at some point it'll break out and decouple and so that's that's sort of the asymmetric upside you're playing for with but not that much downside relative to other things because again eth is blockchains are here to stay tokenization is here to stay so i mean it's gonna have a place alongside um bitcoin forever we just think it'll you haven't the upside comes from the asset repricing to become a monitor just not just from the yield but the yield is right yeah it's nice that it has a yield and on top of the eventual repricing of the asset basically yeah i think that's exactly the point is right like this is the tam for money is like the biggest tam ever right um for money i love that um the product asset is kind of like really weird speaking to like institutional investors and like Wall Street people who want to own product who like productive assets.
The core thing that won me from Bitcoin was I just think Ethereum is like more secure, which is like the most important property for money.
Right.
So so I was a little worried about Bitcoin's declining block subsidy.
So I think like.
0.6% of all revenue through miners comes from transaction fees.
And kind of like with the block size war, the bet was that what Satoshi originally envisioned was as the block subsidy declined, those would be replaced by transaction fees.
And that's not really happening since the block size war, since they decided they were going to be digital gold and not peer-to-peer electronic cash.
So right now, I think we just did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of if you bought the number of ASICs that...
bitcoin miners have like how much would it cost you to like 51 attack the network it'd be something like around like six billion dollars around that area which there's a host of like assumptions based in there but like in that ballpark right like hyperscalers are spending that like every quarter right so um whereas ethereum the proof of stake model scales with bitcoins scales with the market cap which is really what you want for the security of a network right if you think about how countries allocate money to defense, right?
It's a percentage of GDP usually, because as something becomes more valuable, there's more of an incentive to attack it.
And then your security budget should increase in proportion with that.
And proof of stake does that.
So proof of stake is way more efficient of a mechanism as well, right?
Rather than paying miners to solve really hard math problems, you're kind of paying transaction fees and issuance out to holders of the token who are securing the network as well.
eth caught right so with proof of stake if it costs like 10 of the market cap to it to attack the network so if ethereum's market cap right now is 300 billion 10 of that is 30 billion if it goes to 3 trillion it'll be 300 billion dollars to attack the network and so on whereas bitcoin it doesn't really increase as the pricing bitcoin has like a 20 trillion dollar market cap and fees to mine revenues to miners are still like 10 billion or 20 billion dollars a year that's very disproportionate to how value that valuable that is if the whole world is using that as a global reserve asset so that was kind of like the main thing is i didn't see how bitcoin would solve this i think they have two options like they either have to migrate to proof of stake or they have to add tail issuance right where uh they don't let the block subsidy decline which would remove the 21 million hard cap um and then like which i think is critical to like the bitcoin narrative or you'd have to um by my when you migrate to proof of stake you remove you lose that ossification aspect which has been bitcoin's core advantage so that's ultimately the core thing right like so the the point i really want to get across in this report is that ethereum is better money than gold for all the reasons bitcoin's better money than gold but then it's better than bitcoin because it's more secure and then it has this productive uh yield component to it that actually compounds right and like compounding is like the eighth miracle of the world right so and then you're going after this massive TAM, that's tens of trillions of dollars, right?
In global, the TAM for money.
So that's how I think about it.
I actually think it's like the most asymmetric risk reward of our lifetimes.
Man, that's going to clip that.
That's going in the clip bin right there, man.
What a great way to say it.
Great way to end it.
Guys, where can people find this report if they want to read more?
Sure, it's on ProductiveMoney.org.
There's a PDF there.
There's charts that will kind of like show you how close we are to...
capturing the TAM for money.
So yeah, check Productive Money Network.
Man, the TAM for money is such a great term.
That's such a great way to, I love that.
You're going to use that.
And then etherealize.com is where you can find us.
beauty awesome thank you guys it's been very insightful and thank you for sharing the report thanks for giving us a little exclusive too because the report just came out today when you guys were listening to this so uh go check it out um and give both these guys a follow we'll link everything in the description down below good to see you guys thanks for coming on want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event subscribe to our channel Join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
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